Mary Eberstadt: The Dark Side of the Sexual Revolution

Socrates in the City

Society & Culture

4.7 • 537 Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2026

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How has the West drifted from its grounding in God, and what has been lost along the way? In this Socrates in the Studio conversation, author and scholar Mary Eberstadt joins Eric Metaxas to examine one of the most pressing cultural and spiritual questions of our time.

Drawing on her influential works, including Adam and Eve After the Pill, How the West Lost God, and others, Eberstadt unpacks the far-reaching consequences of the sexual revolution, particularly its impact on relationships between men and women and on the broader redefinition of intimacy, identity, and family. She challenges prevailing assumptions by asking who has truly benefited from these cultural shifts, and the answers may surprise you. They present a compelling case for embracing challenge and struggle, not as obstacles to avoid, but as essential forces that shape us into deeper, more fully realized human beings.

The conversation ultimately turns to the question of womanhood, exploring which vision of religion most authentically uplifts and supports women, and how competing cultural narratives continue to shape—or sometimes distort—our understanding of what it means to flourish.

The post Mary Eberstadt: The Dark Side of the Sexual Revolution first appeared on Socrates in the City.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It is interesting to wonder how many people have profited from poisoning relations between the sexes.
0:08.0	In this matter of the legacy of the sexual revolution and what it's really done to people,
0:14.0	there are commercial actors who have profited immensely by purveying lies about what has happened since the 1960s. And I find that that message
0:23.6	gets through, especially to younger people. Are we better off for all of this? That's the question
0:30.2	that wasn't getting asked. What the evidence shows is that living without God is not liberating
0:37.2	people. It is making them isolated and miserable.
0:41.4	Nobody who's ever been in love believes that we're just a collection of atoms. Nobody who's ever
0:47.3	loved anybody believes that this is just some random coincidence brought about by factorial multiplication or whatever.
0:56.9	I mean, nobody really believes that.
0:59.6	And there again, I think there's room for hope.
1:04.8	Welcome to Socrates in the city, the city in which we find ourselves today.
1:09.2	I like to call New York City. It's located
1:13.8	in the state of New York. I live here, and I'm very excited today for Socrates in the studio to have
1:20.4	as my guest, Mary Eberstadt. Now, in case you're unfamiliar with the extraordinary Mary
1:26.7	Eberstadt, let me tell you a few things about her.
1:30.0	She is, for example, someone who holds the Panula chair in Christian culture at the Catholic
1:34.7	Information Center in Washington, D.C. She's a senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute.
1:39.7	She is a writer of many, many important books, some of which we will discuss today, among the most recent,
1:49.3	how the West really lost God, a new theory of secularization.
1:55.1	Adam and Eve after the pill, paradoxes of the sexual revolution.
2:01.6	Her books and essays have been translated into many languages.
2:06.6	Usually things, if they're translated, are translated into languages.
	...

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