Society goes off the rails

The internet ripped apart again recently over the “Cornell Seven,” a group of fraternity brothers formerly of the Chi Phi house at Cornell University now accused of sexually assaulting a young woman in October 2024. Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit alleging Cornell and others failed to properly investigate or penalize those involved.

I’ll spare you the lurid details but suffice to say the story involved drugs and group sex, a debate over consent, late reporting, and morally depraved texts among the men in question.

Many have already condemned the brothers and the university—a la #MeToo. They decry, rightly, that many sexual assaults go unreported and unprosecuted. Others point out the Duke University lacrosse players, exonerated of false rape charges in 2007. Seventeen years later, their accuser admitted she fabricated the story for validation.

We don’t know what really happened at Chi Phi house yet, but we’re swamped with outrage and unanswered questions. Was Jane Doe’s drug use voluntary, peer pressured, or coerced? Did she withdraw consent or not? Does this incident involve institutional coverup, human error, or delayed regret over a sexual encounter?

For the sake of justice, those questions need answers. For the sake of society, we need to learn to ask different questions.

So, how did we get to a cultural split over group sex, confused over the moral and legal lines? The 1960s sexual revolution promised us magic and butterflies should we greenlight all sex between consenting adults. But it has turned out to be a poor moral guide.

Consent—a usually verbal assent to sex—provides no protection from peer pressure, manipulation, an overriding need to please, or pressure to compete with more willing women. Consent’s inadequacy leads to a tug of war in the gray zone where men protest, “but she said okay,” and women respond, “but I didn’t feel okay.”

Thanks a lot, sexual revolution.

According to research analyzed by the Institute for Family Studies, 78% of women who had hookup sex experienced feelings of regret afterward, and almost 78% of unwanted sex occurred during hookups. After one-night stands, men more often report regret over feelings of using someone, and women over feeling used.

Consent is necessary, but far from enough.

As Louise Perry documents in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, the introduction of reliable birth control and consent as the only apparent moral line “liberated” us from the very guardrails that kept us safe: most importantly, marriage.

Sex, though pleasurable, is most safely expressed in a committed relationship, not in one-night stands. As an institution, marriage also offers the best protection to an act biologically oriented towards creating children and forming intense emotional and physical bonds between partners.

Uncommitted, unmarried sexual encounters intentionally bend and break that bond, overriding the natural purpose of sex and destroying trust. Disassociated sex—deliberately trying to sever the body/mind connection and turn off emotional attachment—has become a norm that promises freedom but delivers deep emotional and often physical harm.

The lines between casual and abusive sex have blurred. We’ve torn down the fences that kept the wolves at bay. We danced to the hypnotic tunes piped by Rousseau, Freud, and Foucault. We’ve chosen pleasure over purpose in sex.

In doing so, we lost meaningful pleasure altogether. A 2010 study on skyrocketing hookup culture on college campuses found that both men and women greatly overestimated what behaviors their sexual partner was comfortable with during sex. In a culture that tells adults to do whatever they want, most aren’t. They’re doing what they think the other person wants.

We’ve been sold a variation of the Great Lie: “You shall become like God.” We tried to create our own sexual design by throwing out the Creator’s. Our culture now images the Greek pantheons—full of infighting, sexual perversion, and power struggles. Men and women who prioritize libido demean each other and put themselves at risk.

Because males are on average stronger than females, women almost always lose when the guardrails come off sex. Sexual assault, sex trafficking, abortion, STDs, and intimate partner violence all disproportionately affect women for this reason.

We need a framework that accurately describes sexual dynamics and prescribes how to navigate sexual relationships. The sexual revolution cannot provide this, but the biblical metanarrative—creation, fall, redemption, and restoration—can. It diagnoses sexual brokenness and shows us how to live.

God’s design for marriage between male-female couples best supports sexual happiness and prevents abuse. Research by sociologist Brad Wilcox, recently covered in The Atlantic, indicates married couples who regularly attend church have more sex and more satisfying sex than their secular counterparts. As Christian philosopher Nancy Pearcey examines in her book The Toxic War on Masculinity, Christian men who regularly attend church and practice their faith are less likely to engage in domestic abuse. Nominal Christian men ranked most likely, secular men in the middle.

While devout Christian marriages certainly aren’t flawless, they are measurably better and safer than alternatives.

Christians cannot remain timid about defending God’s design for sex at home and in the public square. God’s design for sex is good for the world. His redemption is available to anyone harmed by departing from it.

That’s good news for Jane Doe, the Cornell Seven, and all of us.