Feminism Rewarded Effeminate Men And Screwed Good Women

The idea that casual sex was harmless, empowering, and fun was strongly emphasized and reinforced by media portrayals of “liberated” women on shows like Sex and the City, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Friends, and in movies like Cruel Intentions, American Pie, and Van Wilder.

Sadly, although many women today believe that feminism was simply about the pursuit of equal civil rights, and that the sexual revolution merely “went off the rails,” the idea that sex should be divorced from commitment has always been baked into the cake of so-called “women’s liberation.”

Rather than freeing women from something oppressive, feminism freed immoral men from the sexual boundaries that once kept the fairer sex safe from objectification and exploitation.

The Original “Free Love” Movement

You may be shocked to learn that, long before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, men were advocating for freedom from sexual convention and pursuing “free love” to satisfy their own appetites, leaving a string of heartbroken women in their wake.

One tragic example is English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the husband of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley and son-in-law to the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who was advocating for the dissolution of marriage and “free love” in the early nineteenth century.

Long before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, men were advocating for freedom from sexual convention and pursuing “free love” to satisfy their own appetites, leaving a string of heartbroken women in their wake.

Shelley wrote that marriage was a “system hostile to human happiness” (Queen Mab, 1813) and argued that sexual unions should be dissolved as soon as “mutual love” ended. It was a convenient belief for a man who abandoned his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, to elope with sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin, Wollstonecraft’s daughter.

The heartbroken Harriet later drowned herself while pregnant with their child, and Shelley was deemed by a court unfit to raise their surviving children. He would go on to be unfaithful to his second wife, possibly even with her half-sister, Claire Clairmont, completing a pattern of infidelity that left emotional wreckage in its wake.

The Men Who Shaped “Liberation”

Yet he is lauded today as an inspired visionary and a romantic idealist, just like other progressive heroes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertrand Russell, who publicly challenged traditional sexual norms while privately mistreating the women who loved them.

When the idea that women were oppressed by the patriarchy was still novel, Shelley was already complaining that traditional sexual norms were oppressive for men. His ideology became the prototype for modern sexual liberation: a utopian dream where female virtue is outdated, male restraint is optional, and “freedom” means doing whatever you please, regardless of who it harms.

These ideas were later galvanized by Sigmund Freud’s theories of sexual repression and expression, fused with Margaret Sanger’s vision for “family planning,” and inflamed by Alfred Kinsey’s twisted “research” on sexual behavior.

Feminism’s Long March Toward Sexual “Freedom”

The 1960s didn’t appear out of nowhere to taint an otherwise innocent feminist movement. While it’s true that many First-Wave feminists maintained a strong belief in feminine virtue and fought sexual exploitation, the seeds of the sexual revolution were planted long before the suffragettes ever held their first rally.

The seeds of the sexual revolution were planted long before the suffragettes ever held their first rally.

Feminism has always drifted toward a vision of sexuality that disguises male indulgence as “female empowerment,” and countless women have paid the price.

By promising to free women from the “burden” of childbirth, the birth control pill and the normalization of abortion made escape from male responsibility that much easier. And here we are today.

Hookup Culture: Liberation or Loneliness?

The result of these ideas is today’s morally apocalyptic hookup culture, where supposed freedom from “judgment” masks profound female disadvantage. Young women are told they can engage in casual encounters as easily as men, but only at the cost of their fertility, health, and mental well-being as they chemically suppress their hormones and pretend it doesn’t hurt to have hookup after hookup.

And I’m not making assumptions about whether women enjoy hookup culture; I’ve got the receipts to back it up.

According to research from the University of Florida, men who engage in college hookups orgasm about 91 percent of the time, while that figure is only 32 percent for women. During first-time hookups, it’s worse: women climax just 10 percent of the time compared to 68 percent of men.

Considering how emotional the act of sex is for women, it’s clear that casual hookups are deeply uncomfortable, no matter how normalized or supposedly “empowering.”

The Mental Toll of Casual Sex

This is true for everyone, not just women. Shelley’s vision of the sexually liberated man was just as faulty as the sexual revolution’s promise of female liberation.

A study in the Journal of Sex Research found that young adults who engaged in casual sex had higher rates of depression and suicidal ideation, even after adjusting for prior mental health.

Another multi-campus study of nearly 4,000 students found that casual sex was negatively correlated with well-being and positively correlated with psychological distress.

The data is clear, and I’m sure many readers could add anecdotal evidence: the more casually one treats sex, the more likely they are to feel anxious, empty, and alone.

Regret, Risk, and Rising STDs

The Institute for Family Studies reported that 82 percent of college students described emotional regret after hookups, ranging from embarrassment and loss of self-respect to difficulty forming real relationships. Seventy-eight percent of women and seventy-two percent of men said they regretted casual sex altogether.

A separate longitudinal study found that depressive symptoms in adolescence often predicted later casual-sex participation, and that casual sex, in turn, predicted higher suicidal ideation.

82% of college students described emotional regret after hookups.

Meanwhile, the biological consequences are impossible to ignore. The CDC’s 2024 STD Surveillance Report recorded more than 2.2 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis in the United States, and congenital syphilis (transmitted from mother to baby) has risen nearly 700 percent in a decade. Infection rates remain 13 percent higher than ten years ago.

These aren’t the byproducts of “sexual freedom.” They’re the natural fruits of detaching sex from covenant, fertility, and fidelity. Sex was designed for a covenantal union between one man and one woman, and distorting that design inevitably bears bitter fruit.

Freedom Without Virtue Isn’t Freedom

Even in purely secular terms, the data demolishes the myth that the sexual revolution made women happier. Decades after its triumph, women report record levels of depression, anxiety, and sexual dissatisfaction. The promises of empowerment have yielded exhaustion and objectification instead.

The truth is simple: when society dismantled the male duties of chastity, protection, and provision, it didn’t liberate women. It unleashed male vice.

The feminist claim that virtue was oppression allowed too many immoral men to cast off accountability entirely. Women are now expected to self-protect in a sexual marketplace designed around men’s desires: contraception, abortion, casual sex, and emotional detachment are treated as “equality.”

The Industry of Exploitation

The sexual revolution turned what was once clearly recognized as female exploitation into an industry. Pornography, prostitution, and trafficking now thrive under the same logic Shelley once romanticized; that “consent” is the only moral measure, even when that consent is coerced, numbed, or bought.

Freedom, stripped of virtue, becomes slavery for both men and women.

While the modern woman is expected to care for herself, provide for herself, and empower herself, the modern man faces no expectation to marry, no cultural pressure to provide, no social stigma for abandonment, and no spiritual framework calling him to self-control.

Freedom, stripped of virtue, becomes slavery for both men and women.

The Great Deception

When Percy Shelley called marriage oppressive, he wasn’t freeing women. He was freeing himself from the burden of fidelity, fatherhood, and consequence. Modern feminism has simply refined his rebellion into policy, pedagogy, and pop culture. It gave women permission to play his game without warning that it was rigged against them.

Feminism didn’t liberate women; it deregulated male vice. It rebranded their sin as “equality,” and now we’re living in the rubble of that catastrophic belief system.