It is rightly observed in an American Thinker article last week that the left’s prescription for young women to embrace power through sexual promiscuity leads invariably to heartbreak, disappointment, and potentially worse, as we saw illustrated in the 1977 movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar. This observation is true and contains implicitly within itself two additional tacit features worth unpacking and dragging out into the light of day.

First, the ultimate issue is happiness, not power. In his 1929 book, Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud notes that humans universally demand happiness in life but typically confuse happiness with pleasure. Thus, people typically substitute sexual pleasure for sexual happiness. A society in sexual freefall is a society in happiness freefall.

Second, the prescription of sexual promiscuity is a failed formula, not just for women but also for men. Consider the 1966 movie, Alfie, in which the protagonist’s lifetime of promiscuity led to nothing but bitter regret.

Image: Grandmother by prostooleh.

When Serena Williams recently announced her retirement to allow increased focus on her family, she quipped that “If I were a guy I wouldn’t have to retire.” True, of course, because if she were a guy, she would not feel the call of motherhood nor would she experience the rewards of motherhood. That men and women differ is a fact of nature hidden from view by the left’s ideology.

These realizations tap gently at the door of a broader issue. We know that sexual promiscuity does not work as a ticket to happiness for either males or females. But what does work? Is there a formula for sexual happiness? The problem here is that it is nature that drives our sexual desire, but nature doesn’t care about our happiness. Hence if we are to find happiness in our sexuality it must derive from our humanity and can only be found in our human experience.

Consider that our society is replete with cultural institutions—we call them “churches” and “synagogues”—which light the way for our eternal happiness. But we have no analogous cultural institutions lighting the way for our temporal happiness. While the priest, pastor, or rabbi speaks about the afterlife, the teens and twenty-somethings in his congregation are fixated on the present life, the here and now, career and sex. For them, what may or may not happen eighty years hence seems hardly relevant to today and tomorrow. Temporal happiness is simply not on the pastor’s agenda. The institutions of our culture (K-12, church, college, career, etc.) simply leave us all—young and old alike—afloat in Neverland regarding this critical issue of temporal happiness.

But it hasn’t always been that way. Once upon a time—before the left hijacked the culture—the family was the cultural institution that taught the pathway to temporal happiness. Most specifically it was grandmothers—with support from parents, grandfathers, aunts, and uncles—who taught the young that the pathway to becoming as happy as possible in this life is to marry, create a family, and stay married for life, raising children and grandchildren.

The institution of Grandmother has apparently fallen into relative disuse in recent times but is still extant and just awaits an act of will and determination to restore its erstwhile cultural role. As a society, we need to hang out a sign reading: “Grandmothers Wanted!”