"Has the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women?"

Mary Eberstadt says no:

Why do the pages of our tonier magazines brim with mournful titles like "The Case for Settling" and "The End of Men"? Why do websites run by and for women focus so much on men who won't grow up, and ooze such despair about relations between the sexes?

Why do so many accomplished women simply give up these days and decide to have children on their own, sometimes using anonymous sperm donors, thus creating the world's first purposely fatherless children? What of the fact, widely reported earlier this week, that 26% of American women are on some kind of mental-health medication for anxiety and depression and related problems?...

Ann Patchett says yes:

The sexual revolution, which rode into town on the backs of those pink plastic cases of birth-control pills, was, after all, not so much a matter of sleeping around as it was of having the ability to decide when you were going to have a child, and then deciding how many children you wanted to have....

[F]or those who remain bitter about the revolution and wish it had never happened, join hands with the likes of me, who see the rights and freedoms of women as the only possible outcome for a thinking society. Together, let's make a country into which any baby would be proud to be born.

First, we could swap out baby showers for a revitalized Head Start program....

Programs, programs.... I don't really get Patchett. Why equate the "sexual revolution" with access to birth control? But she ends by saying that people are unnecessarily "complicat[ing] things," and her idea of simplicity seems to be that sex is "one of the loveliest of human activities." It is when it is and it's not when it's not. If the question is What makes it good for women? then obviously birth control is key. But all those other attributes of this thing the Wall Street Journal is referring to as "the Sexual Revolution"? It's not so clear. It is complicated!