The actual outbreak of the sexual revolution occurred when significant numbers of young women began acting on the new utopian plan. This seems to have occurred on many college campuses in the nineteen-sixties. Women who took birth-control pills and committed fornication with any man who caught their fancy claimed they were liberating themselves from the slavery of marriage. The men, urged by their youthful hormones, frequently went along with this, but were not as happy about it as they are sometimes represented. Columnist Paul Craig Roberts recalls: I was a young professor when it all started and watched a campus turn into a brothel. The male students were perplexed, even the left-wing ones who had been taught to regard female chastity as oppression. I still remember the resident Marxist who, high on peyote, came to me to complain that “nice girls are ruining themselves.”  

This should not be surprising. Most men prefer a virgin bride; this is a genuine aspect of male erotic desire favoring monogamy, and hence in constant tension with the impulse to seek sexual variety.

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while both sexes were supposed to practice monogamy, it was considered especially important for women to do so. Why is this? 

In the first place, they tend to be better at it. This is not due to any moral superiority of the female, as many men are pleased to believe, but to their lower levels of testosterone and their slower sexual cycle: ovulation at the rate of one gamete per month. 

Secondly, if women are all monogamous, the men will perforce be monogamous anyway: it is arithmetically impossible for polygamy to be the norm for men throughout a society because of the human sex ratio at birth. 

Thirdly, the private nature of the sexual act and the nine month human gestation period mean that, while there is not normally doubt as to who the mother of a particular baby is, there may well be doubt regarding the father. Female fidelity is necessary to assure the husband that his wife’s children are also his. 

Fourthly, women are, next to children, the main beneficiaries of marriage. Most men work their lives away at jobs they do not much care for in order to support wife and family. For women, marriage coincides with economic rationality; for a man, going to a prostitute is a better deal.

Accordingly, chastity before marriage and fidelity within it are the very least a woman owes her husband. Indeed, on the traditional view, she owes him a great deal more. She is to make a home for him, return gratitude and loyalty for his support of her, and accept his position as head of the family.