Eberstadt compares the situation to the Cold War. That was another case, she explains, of intellectuals refusing to recognize what was right in front of their faces-in that instance, the devastating facts about Soviet communism. Those intellectuals had cultivated what she calls, quoting Jeane Kirkpatrick, "the will to disbelieve." Because the facts did not fit their view of the world, they simply chose not to see them.
Many intellectuals of our time have done exactly the same thing with the sexual revolution. They don't want to see that the fallout from that revolution has broken up families, ruined many lives, and flooded the country with sexually transmitted diseases old and new. They resolutely shut their eyes to the way it has coarsened our culture and cheapened our relationships.
As Eberstadt wryly points out in one of the best chapters in the book, many Americans now have a far stricter...