Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 01:2 (Fall 2019)
Article: "Primal Screams": How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics
Author: Scott Corbin

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Eikon 1:2 (Fall 2019) p. 116

Primal Screams:
How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics

Reviewed by

Scott Corbin

Scott Corbin lives in Fort Worth, TX with his wife and three children.

One of the lessons young writers are taught is that one of the keys to good writing is to repeatedly emphasize your thesis. This is typically taught in some variation of “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” The idea is that through repetition, reminder, and the marshaling of evidence, the writer is able to clearly communicate what it is they want to communicate to the reader. This leaves the reader with no doubts as to the central argument. While the idea is simple enough in theory, it is much more difficult to implement in practice (as this review endeavors not to demonstrate).

Whatever literary faults Mary Eberstadt may exhibit, a lack of clarity around her central thesis is not one of them.

Eberstadt, a past research fellow at the Hoover Institution and current senior fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., has spent the better part of her career displaying the folly and malignant wake of the sexual revolution. Her Adam & Eve After the Pill explores how the pill functions as a quasi-sacrament of the sexual revolution, ushering in the “already-but-not-yet” of sexual liberation. And in How The West Really Lost God, she explores unexamined aspects of secularization theories in the West, highlighting the ways in which the decline of family formation has led to a decline in church attendance. Highlighting the cyclical nature of family and religion, she charts how the decline of mediating institutions, especially churches, leads to the rise of social dislocation — and thus the rise of loneliness, depression, vice (be it substance abuse, internet addiction, etc.), and ultimately meaninglessness.

It makes sense, then, that Eberstadt’s new book, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, would focus on the question that animates human existence: who am I?

Eikon 1:2 (Fall 2019) p. 117

In Primal Screams, Eberstadt makes an a fortiori case, using the recent research exploring the social environment of animals, that the rise of identity politics goes part and parcel with the increasing dislocation of the family. As the family goes, so goes the rise of the identitarians. Whether it’s overly aggressive young elephants, maladjusted monkeys, or treed house cats, zoologists have concluded that things once thought to be innate to animals are acquired through social learning. It turns out animals are quite social. If this is the case for...

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