For the culture warriors, the results have been a kind of Malthusian triumph. For many others, an atomized, and now technologically commodified, sexual dynamic has brought despair, anger, and sociological desolation.

To succeed, progressivism must present itself as an inevitability—an irreversible march of history. Yet these ideas were choices, their success anything but inevitable. And the sexual revolution does, in fact, have an identifiable beginning, which can be traced to a Karl Marx of the libido, whose influence far exceeds his name recognition: Wilhelm Reich. A follower of Sigmund Freud, Reich matched the methods of psychoanalysis with the liberationist worldview of the Communist Left. In the 1920s, he coined the term “sexual revolution,” just as he wrote about the activation of sexual politics for revolutionary ends—what he called “sex-pol.” Though Reich’s thinking, even at its best, is of dubious value, and the man himself descended into madness, his ideas on rescuing “infantile and pubertal genital functioning” from the “ruinous sexual regulation of our society” have been incredibly influential. They lead directly to the gender politics and social disruptions of today.