The Sexual Revolution’s Great Lie: You’ll Always Be Young

This column was first published at The European Conservative

On June 29, the New York Times published a disturbing report titled “Your Boss Will Freeze Your Eggs Now.” The subtitle posed the question: “Mine is the first generation that has corporate benefits for a technology with the potential to slow the biological clock. Is it feminist dream or Silicon Valley fantasy?” The report by Emma Goldberg detailed the spike in women across the United States getting their eggs frozen in the hopes of having biological children via reproductive technology later in life while getting ahead in the corporate world during their child-bearing years.

‘Egg-freezing’ involves ‘harvesting’ a woman’s eggs and then freezing them for future use via IVF. The eggs are stored in a cryobank, which charges rental fees (in the U.S., usually more than $1,000 a year), and the process of thawing and implantation usually costs about $11,500. The idea is that women can put family plans on ice and come back to them when childbearing is difficult, technologically complicated, and extremely expensive. Corporate bosses, it must be noted, are not particularly invested in whether this process actually works—only that women are working longer.

Goldberg observed that women are now opting to have their eggs harvested and frozen at much younger ages. The average age used to be around 38; now, it is increasingly common for women in their late twenties and early thirties. Initially, it was the Big Tech companies offering—or encouraging—their employees to consider it. Now, Goldberg notes, it is swiftly becoming the norm. “So, it’s not just Big Tech,” she told an interviewer. “It’s law firms, it’s finance, it’s media, like the New York Times, my employer … it’s around 19% of large employers, up from around 5% just a few years ago.”

Despite the growing popularity of the practice, it usually fails. The New York Times has published multiple reports over the past several years detailing the grim statistics, including the results of a 2023 study that showed few women successfully gave birth to a child after freezing their eggs. As Evie Magazine noted, “Women under 38 have between a 2% and 12% chance that a healthy frozen egg will result in a baby.” The corporations, of course, are chuffed by this outcome. Childlessness is the point. This has given rise to an even viler industry in which wealthy women pay young women—often university-aged, cash-strapped girls—for their eggs.  

The Sexual Revolution has always depended on a concurrent rise in technology to make its false promises appear attainable. First it was the Pill, which produced staggeringly high abortion rates and a pandemic of sexually transmitted diseases; now, it is reproductive technology that promises young women they can delay trying to have children until they are on the verge of menopause after decades on birth control. In 2022, then-53-year-old actress Jennifer Aniston, a prominent sex symbol during her days as “Rachel” on the 1990s sitcom Friends, told Allure magazine that, after two marriages and years of failed attempts at IVF, she carries many regrets—but they’re not what you might think.

“I was throwing everything at it,” she said of her attempts to become a mother. “I would have given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.’ You just don’t think about it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed.” It is a reflection on the fundamental sickness of our culture that a 53-year-old woman, looking back on her life and career and speaking about how desperately she wanted children, would not conclude that she should have tried to have children when she was young—but would instead say she wished someone had told her to “freeze her eggs” so she’d have a slightly better shot once she was done playing a mother on a TV sitcom and had time for real children.

One of the great implicit lies of the Sexual Revolution is that you will always be young. Marriage and family are long-term propositions. Forgoing decades of clubbing, promiscuity, and serial monogamy in favour of a husband or wife is, one hopes, investing in a future with someone who will still love you when you are old and gray and your looks are not what they once were. Those who choose to ‘play the field’ will realize, at one point or another, that there is an imperceptible line that everyone must cross in the sexual hunger games played by the porn-fueled youth—a line that divides the players and the pathetic, the charming from the creepy. If you are fortunate, you will grow old.

Freddie DeBoer made a similar observation in a recent essay titled “I Regret to Inform You That We Will All Grow Old, Infirm, and Unattractive,” in which he noted that a recent novel by Miranda July is inspiring some middle-aged women to abandon their marriages in favour of the sort of glamourized sexual experimentation described by July (an author with a semi-estranged husband and ‘non-binary’ child). DeBoer writes that in practice, this sort of thing ends up being profoundly depressing:

It’s the sort of thing that sounds very romantic and empowering in your head, and then the next thing you know, you’re on a date with a guy named Chuck who’s too old for you and who you don’t find very attractive but he was the only guy you found on Bumble for drinks that night and you meet and go “oof” and he smells like fish but you really wanted to do this empowering Miranda July thing so you end up having sex with him anyway.

DeBoer observes that this much-vaunted lifestyle—a lifetime of sexual experiences sans commitment—and plummeting Western birth rates are obviously connected. For years, the mainstream press has silenced any discussion of Western demographic decline with assertions that this is a ‘far-right’ concern. The idea that it might be better for a country to produce more children rather than import immigrants from foreign cultures was one of many common-sense observations that have been labelled fascist-adjacent. That appears to be changing as children vanish from Western streets, and the real ‘Silent Spring’ we see looming is one in which the sound of playing children becomes rare. Last month, for example, even the leftist publication Vox asked, “Can we be actually normal about birth rates?”

It is curious that more people don’t want children out of pure self interest. “[The] cavalier dismissal of having kids betrays a failure to understand a key point: you are going to get old, someday, the kind of old where you’ll be physically infirm and need a lot of help just getting around, where you might have Alzheimer’s or dementia, where your social opportunities are much more constrained and you risk being very lonely,” DeBoer writes. “You can dismiss this as transactional if you want, but the durable societal script of ‘you take care of your children when they’re too young to take care of themselves, they’ll take care of you when you’re too old to take care of yourself’ has a lot going for it.”

Why don’t more people recognize this? DeBoer concurs with my own longstanding thesis that one of the Sexual Revolution’s key implicit lies is agelessness. His analysis is worth quoting in full:

I suspect that a lot of people don’t think that way because some deep part of them just genuinely doesn’t believe that they’ll ever grow old. Our culture has abandoned any pretense of not worshipping youth, at this stage; go on social media and you’ll find 50-somethings lobbing insults at each other about being old, OK Boomer. There’s a complete collapse in the notion that aging is a natural and dignified thing, and a sweaty insistence on celebrating the young and instilling in them all of our hopes for renewal and justice, despite the fact that our actually-existing young people are afraid to talk to the cashier at McDonald’s. We’ve instilled our whole cultural space with the idea that to be old is shameful. So I’m not surprised that so many wander through life never contemplating the fact that, someday, they’re going to need to be taken care of again. Someday they’re going to experience “second childishness.” And people who have kids, in general and on average, are going to have a better support network than those who don’t.

Likewise, those who hold that “romantic love is an antiquated concept” and that “we weren’t meant to be monogamous” have been ill-served by their cynicism. “I got news for you: as somebody once wrote, ‘on earth we are briefly gorgeous,’” DeBoer observes. “The notion that you’re gonna leave your marriage in your mid-40s and then pursue a life of endless sexual fulfillment depends on the assumption that people are always going to want to [have sex with] you. They aren’t … Again, I think modern culture has rendered a lot of people unable to process that idea. Remaining physically attractive has become an all-encompassing obsession, one that generates billions of dollars of economic activity.”

Growing older with a spouse or a family is a beautiful thing. Growing older in the sexual marketplace glorified by a generation of revolutionary TV sitcoms (Sex and the City, Friends) is not. Aniston said as much to Allure. “There is this pressure in Hollywood to be ageless,” she said. “I think what I have been witness to, is seeing women try to stay ageless with what they are doing to themselves.” Aniston herself spends tens of thousands of dollars every year to look younger, and there is something desperately sad about her decision to pose for a near-nude photo shoot in Allure. She is sending a message: I may have missed my chance for children. I may be single. But I’m still beautiful, she is telling us. I’m still young. 

The legions of young women taking her advice and freezing their eggs early should not see Aniston as an inspiration. They should see her as a cautionary tale.

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