Gen Z seeks meaning amid rubble of the sexual revolution

Some images you can’t get out of your head, no matter how hard you try. One is a photo of Bryon Noem, the husband of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, as a cross-dresser with obscenely large fake bosoms.

The fetish is called “bimbofication,” and it’s only one of the 1,001 perversions unleashed by the sexual revolution. Civilization is built on self-control. The sexual revolution is based on self-indulgence. Weirdness is no obstacle.

According to news reports, Mr. Noem was heavily into this perversion – excuse me, lifestyle choice. He sent photos of himself in drag, sporting enormous prosthetic breasts, to what are described as “online fetish models.”

Rumor has it that the former homeland security secretary herself is hardly a model of propriety. It’s said to be an open secret in Washington that she has had a long-standing affair with one of her advisers. Apparently, the family pet is normal, but only because he is dead.

Liberals would condemn us for even using the word normal. It’s a fundamental premise of the sexual revolution that there is no normal, hence no aberrant.

That most men don’t want to dress in drag and pretend they are Dolly Parton doesn’t make those who do deviants, we are told. That most women don’t want to have double mastectomies to imitate a man’s body says nothing about the mental health of self-mutilators, they insist.

The sexual revolution has been incredibly successful at indoctrination, aided by its control of education and the media. A 2021 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 26% of high school students identify as LGBTQ, up from 11% in 2015.

In a 2024 Gallup poll, 46% said attempting to change one’s gender is “morally acceptable.”

In a Pew Center survey, 51% said “transgenders” should be allowed to use the bathroom of their choice regardless of the privacy rights or personal safety of women who actually are women. In a number of instances, girls have been raped in school restrooms by boys in skirts.

Still, revolutions have consequences. Heads get lopped off, and firing squads get busy. The victims of the sexual revolution are all around us. Roughly 20% of the U.S. population has had a sexually transmitted infection, and there are 26 million new cases each year.

A study of 500 freshmen college women found a strong correlation between casual sex and clinically significant depression. The sexual revolution also brought rising levels of cohabitation, the decline of marriage and fertility, fatherless families as the norm in some communities, sexual harassment, the mutilation of minors and a pornographic culture.

The sexual revolution didn’t just happen. It was engineered by Marxists such as psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (who coined the term “sexual revolution”) and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, an idol of the 1960s New Left.

In his 1959 book, “Eros and Civilization,” Marcuse explained that through the coming erotic upheaval: “The body in its entirety would become … a thing to be enjoyed – an instrument of pleasure. This change in value and scope in libidinal relationships would lead to a disintegration of institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family.”

We’ll be walking in a sexual wonderland.

Western civilization is based on restraint. Men work harder knowing their families depend on their earnings. A father in the home is the best way to avoid social pathologies and raise responsible adults. Men and women who support each other are the best antidote to loneliness as well as the ultimate economic safety net.

Besides indoctrination, the sexual revolution relies heavily on repression. Those who refuse to go along with the travesty of same-sex marriage or gender identity politics are punished for their disobedience to the new order. Punishments include ostracism, heavy fines and loss of employment.

On March 26, the Finnish Supreme Court convicted a member of the parliament of “hate speech” for a pamphlet she wrote 20 years ago expressing a biblical view of marriage. She was fined more than $2,000, and the pamphlet was ordered destroyed. Got a book? Got a match?

Yet a quiet counterrevolution is underway. Gen Z men are flocking to traditional religion. The impetus is a hunger for meaning.

Perhaps there also has been a disenchantment with contemporary culture and a desire to meet marriageable women who believe in monogamy and aren’t looking for men who are into bimbofication.

This column was first published at the Washington Times.