Free Love Is Neither

Liberation Fatigue & the New Sexual Renegades

by Terrell Clemmons

Dr. J. Budziszewski, now in his fourth decade of teaching, recently observed a noticeable difference between students today and those of a few decades past. "In the '80s, if I suggested in class that there might be any problem with sexual liberation, they said that everything was fine—what was I talking about?" the professor wrote. "Now if I raise questions, many of them speak differently. They still live like libertines . . . but it's getting old. They are beginning to sound like the children of third-generation Maoists."

Large numbers of them engage in hooking-up, but they hardly seem to enjoy it. Many of them get drunk first, just to be able to go through with it. "Not many of them look happy. Each year they have less sense of humor. They show all the signs of exhaustion," personifying, he notes sadly, the hedonistic paradox: A life lived in pursuit of pleasure ultimately ends in misery.

Read more at Salvo Magazine.