society's disastrous sexual predicament

In trying to get through piles of work emails (late on a Sat night), I ran across an article full of stunning quotes, like this one:

No one seems to have noticed, however, that a loss of a sense of shame means a loss of privacy; a loss of privacy means a loss of intimacy; and a loss of intimacy means a loss of depth. There is, in fact, no better way to produce shallow and superficial people than to let them live their lives entirely in the open, without concealment of anything.

And a little later:

Only someone completely lacking in knowledge of the human heart—someone, in fact, a little like Margaret Mead—would have failed to predict the consequences [of adolescent sexual activity]: gross precocity followed by permanent adolescence and a premature world-weariness.

Finally:

Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough.

The blog title also comes from the article, all of which is well worth reading:

All Sex, All the Time (Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, 2000)