Educated Women Doubting the Sexual Revolution

it's just beginning

Everybody knows that ever since time began, women have been oppressed by the patriarchy. But now, following the example of plucky women in the 18th and 19th century — women like Mary Wollstonecraft and George Sand — women have been liberated in the 20th century to become what Simone de Beauvoir called the “independent woman.”

But now there are clouds on the horizon, as suggested by Alexandra DeSanctis in “The Revolt Against the Sexual Revolution,” reviewing Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex and Louise Perry’s The Case against the Sexual Revolution.

But neither goes far enough in recognizing exactly how deep the rot of this ideology goes. Both authors are reluctant to jettison or even criticize essential aspects of this worldview, which significantly limits their imagination when it comes to developing solutions beyond the obvious.

I would say that even “imagination” or “developing solutions” misses the point.

But why are we even talking about this? I think it is obviously because our modern era has profoundly transformed human life, and we humans have changed and adapted in all kinds of ways in response to the facts on the ground in the modern era.

And the people most affected by this are men. Now I am reading right now The Dawn of Everything by lefties David Graeber and David Wengrow. As lefties, their agenda is to ridicule everything they consider bourgeois narrative and show that it ain’t so. In particular, they want us to know, the men of the pre-agricultural age were not simple-minded hunter-gatherers. They developed all kinds of different societies, from the slave-holding Americans of the Pacific-Northwest to the intelligent native tribes of what is now Eastern Canada. The two Davids don’t talk too much about women of the pre-agricultural age. There is a reason for that: the lives of women are mostly invisible to men. Almost the entire life of a woman is among other women, a life lived in the community of women. This was true back at the Dawn of Everything and it is my belief that it is still true when I eavesdrop upon women walking around Green Lake in Seattle in their two-by-twos.

Shall we merely say that human males have a much more complex life than male chimpanzees? They could be slave-holding potlatchers feasting on the slave-prepared salmon harvest. Or they could be collecting nuts and trimming themselves down in sweat lodges. Shall we say that the great challenge for human culture is to tame the men from being aggressive warriors, and get them to direct their magnificent natural aggression into more peaceable pursuits.

In the agricultural age they tamed men into being plowmen, and for the hoity-toity there were the possibilities of priesthood, marcher lord, and courtier.

Today we tame men into jobs for the ordinary and careers for the educated.

But what about women? My ground zero on this is the view of German sociologist Georg Simmel who wrote about women entering the “public square” at the turn of the 20th century. He said that the public square had been created by men for men, but that women would adapt it to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

Now there’s a problem with that, because the male public square is really a cockpit of insult, a domestication of the male culture of conflict into a less violent culture of insult. But women don’t have a culture of conflict; they have a culture of “I’m not going to talk to her any more.” Women don’t have a culture of insult; they have a culture of complaint: “I can’t believe she said that.” Thus, when women get jobs in the male public square they basically shut it down, because they just don’t interact with other humans in that way: it’s in the genes.

So I would say that women in the public square just doesn’t work.

Then there is the bigger question of women in the work place, particularly for educated women, where the work is a “career.” As I like to say, “career” comes from the French carrière, or racetrack. Just between you and me, women don’t really do the notion of the workplace as a racetrack. See, Simone Biles and her partial withdrawal from competition at the Olympics.

In my view, the progression of culture on women in the public square and the workplace has proceeded on the basis of some women saying “I want that, because reasons.” So we are all pressured — especially other women — into changing the culture for everyone. But it ends up destroying a nice, successful culture that domesticates the natural instinct in men for combat.

Now let’s talk about sex. It’s all about the survival of the race — human race, that is. It means me having children and my children having children. That’s why I say that the meaning of “life, the universe, everything” is grandchildren.

So the whole question of sexual mores, traditions, relations between the sexes, courtship, marriage, monogamy, polygamy comes down to one thing: does it get grandchildren on the ground and to adulthood?

And that comes down to one thing: are women protected enough so they can get children on the ground and raise them to adulthood?

Let’s look at a limit case. A Woman in Berlin in May 1945 by Anonymous. In order to stop getting raped, Anonymous decided to get her a Russian officer as her lover, the higher rank the better. But the women in her apartment house hid the teenaged girls in the attic.

Obviously, to our sensibility, such a thing is Not Good, although women of a conquered tribe have been taken over by the conquerors since time immemorial.

Whatabout women having several sex partners? It was all such a good thing, so liberating, in the Sixties. But now, scientists say, that women are particularly vulnerable to STDs if they have multiple sex partners.

Whatabout sex before marriage? It was all so liberating, but I must say that my experience is that women expect to live with and love their sex partner forever.

Whatabout partner selection by parents and relatives? Does it produce better results than selection by the young people? Does anyone know?

Whatabout contraception and abortion? Alexandra DeSanctis had a problem with Louise Perry on this.

I found myself disappointed that she didn’t make more of an effort to grapple with these technologies that are so obviously dedicated to making women sexually available, over and against what’s best for their own bodies and souls.

Or for the survival of the race.

My bottom line on all this is that women are beginning the process of returning to a culture that centers around lifetime marriage, no nookie, very little abortion, courtship rather than dating, and women rebuilding the community of women in our neighborhoods. But it will not really happen politically. It will happen organically and instinctively, women feeling themselves towards a better life and a better world for themselves and their children — and grandchildren.

Whatabout us guys? Just go with the program, sports fans, and all will be well.