Tracing the Sexual Revolutions

I n October 2022, a New York City judge decided that polyamorous relationships — that is, sexual-romantic relationships involving more than two persons — were entitled to the same legal protections as relationships of two persons.

Ruling that the live-in lover of a deceased man must be allowed spousal inheritance rights — despite the fact that at the time of his death, the dead man was also in a same-sex marriage with another man (whom he did not live with) — the judge held that the “problem” with previous rulings in favor of same-sex marriage and the legal recognition of same-sex relationships was that they “recognize only two-person relations.”

In a similar ruling earlier this year, a Quebec judge ruled that “multiparent” families must be granted the same legal rights over children as two-parent households. “No one should be treated differently because of their family status,” the lawyer for the plaintiffs in the case — including one man and two women desiring to raise four children in a “throuple” family, and a woman seeking to share motherhood with another woman whom she allowed her husband to impregnate — successfully argued.

How did we get here? After all, wasn’t it just a decade ago that same-sex marriage proponents — my friend Jonathan Rauch for example — were dismissing conservative arguments that expanding marriage’s definition would eliminate any possible principled ground for declining to extend the same rights and recognition to polyamorous and polygamous relationships?

In his powerful and timely book Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy, Conn Carroll makes a compelling case that our contemporary cultural woes in the realm of marriage, gender, and sexuality are ultimately the fruit of the same poisonous tree: the sexual revolution of the mid-to-late 20th century. While Carroll argues that what he describes as our “current” sexual revolution is actually the fourth such revolution to take place in our history, he maintains that ours is uniquely destructive — and harkens back to dark periods in human affairs.

Chronicling the evolution of marital and sexual norms over the course of human history, Carroll in chapter 1 casts the first sexual revolution as taking place prior to the rise of agriculture, when humans were still hunter-gatherers. Ungoverned sexual behavior and norms that saw human groupings consist of little more than “promiscuous horde[s], where males contributed nothing to the care of offspring and females were left to fend for themselves,” gave way — as a matter of environmental necessity and group survival — to the rise of “egalitarian pairs” of men and women “bound together in long-term projects of cooperative care for each other and their offspring.” This proto-marital arrangement, Carroll contends, was the relational model that “first gave humanity dominion over Earth.”

Chapter 2 examines the second sexual revolution, which, according to Carroll, coincided with the agricultural revolution and the transition of human societies around the world from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to geographically fixed communities. Here, as individual rulers amassed significant power, more entrenched social hierarchies formed that separated haves from have-nots, and new kingdoms went to war against each other; men who could do so “used their newfound monopoly on power to satiate their instinctual desire to sexually monopolize as many women as possible.” Societies of this period were more or less universally dependent upon an enslaved caste, where “male slaves did not reproduce and were often worked to death,” while “female slaves were used as breeders for the wealthy elite that could afford them.”

At bottom — from the ancient kingdoms of the Fertile Crescent to the Aztec Empire — the second sexual revolution’s destruction of monogamous man-woman pairings and the core family unit led to an “inherently unstable situation” for civil societies across the world.

Renewal came with the third sexual revolution, which had as its catalyst the birth and rapid spread of Christianity, along with Christianity’s associated moral teachings in the domains of marriage, family, and sexuality. Carroll describes in chapter 3 how “monogamy’s return” was precipitated by the “radical” ideas Christianity proposed to a largely pagan and violently libertine Mediterranean world: the novel idea that men and women possessed inherent and equal dignity, for example, and that the marital sexual embrace constituted a form of mutual self-gift that rejected any notion of husbands dominating their wives.

Other ideas associated with the Christian proclamation of marriage as a permanent, monogamous union of one man and one woman — a conjugal bond — included the denial that there existed any difference in sexual obligation and rights between slaves and non-slaves. As Carroll writes, “At least in theory, both the rich and the poor had equal sexual integrity for the first time in human history.”

Returning in chapter 4 to our own dire cultural situation, Carroll draws on a rich array of historical sources to illustrate the intimate link between the Christian conception of monogamous marriage and our Founders’ understanding of marriage and family as the “essential building block[s] of the republic.” From John Adams writing that “the foundations of national morality must be laid in private families” to Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story’s summary of the Founders’ vision of marriage as “an institution . . . which may properly be deemed to arise from the laws of nature,” Carroll makes a decisive argument that despite the incredible volatility of the American story — from all-consuming wars to devastating depressions — monogamous marriage and the core family unit of father, mother, and children always constituted the “cornerstone[s] of American civilization.” In short, the third sexual revolution, propelled by Christianity, provided the key building blocks upon which our national successes were based.

Now, however, we are in the throes of the fourth sexual revolution — which Carroll compellingly contends has had vastly negative consequences not just for our national culture, but also for our demography and the health of our civic institutions. In chapter 5, Carroll first recounts the philosophical roots and political history of the fourth sexual revolution. He directs particular — and substantively sound — criticism toward the U.S. Supreme Court, which over the past 60 years limited the state’s role in encouraging a healthy marriage culture while simultaneously extending constitutional protection to the fourth sexual revolution’s metaphorical sacraments, from contraception to pornography.

In chapters 6 and 7, Carroll devotes significant attention to research and data demonstrating the severe political and sociological repercussions that the fourth sexual revolution has left in its wake — citing, for example, Brad Wilcox’s brilliant research on the relationship between crime and incarceration rates and single-parent households. The theme of demographic decline is repeatedly stressed: Unless our marriage and family culture improves, Carroll persuasively argues, we will soon go the way of South Korea, whose population is on track to halve from 50 million to 25 million in just two decades.

Chapter 8 is centered on defending the viability and necessity of monogamous male-female marriage against the fourth sexual revolution’s attacks — why new ideas like “consensual non-monogamy” and cohabitation with no intention of marriage are bound to fail, and how they impose harm as they become more widely practiced. Then, in chapter 9, Carroll advocates specific policy proposals to encourage and incentivize marriage, and to discourage both personal vice and the fourth sexual revolution’s institutional alternatives to traditional marriage and family structures.

From expanding tax incentives for getting married and having children to limiting immigration, restricting access to some welfare programs, and loosening regulations on who can become a childcare provider, Carroll provides an overview of various concrete ideas for “mak[ing] marriage great again” and beginning to reverse the damage that has been inflicted on our society.

Carroll’s book represents a sweeping and high-level tour through the development of the institutions of marriage and family in human history — from concepts of marital relations that were relatively monogamous, to polygamous and libertine, to monogamous with a moral inflection, and now libertine once again. He capably connects our most recent sexual revolution with its predecessors, making an extraordinarily powerful case for monogamous marriage’s decisive role in any successful attempt to realize cultural, demographic, and political renewal.

While Carroll’s recommendations are debatable — and some readers will no doubt take issue with some of his policy proposals, or perhaps question the extent to which they will be helpful in the renewal project — this book will be of keen interest to anyone concerned about the debasement of our culture and family life and how it came to be. Furthermore, at least taken at a broad level, the conclusion that Carroll draws from the wealth of evidence he analyzes seems difficult for even progressives, if they are in the least fair-minded, to contest: Namely, that “the path to a more perfect national union goes through more monogamous unions for its citizens.”