From a guy’s point of view, the sexual revolution could not have turned out better. When the pill was invented by men and released in 1960, the promise was that women would be freed from the burden of unwanted reproduction. The more salient effect was that men would be freed from the burden of committing to women.
Three generations of plummeting marriage and childbearing rates later, men have successfully used feminism to brainwash millions of women into behaving like men, pursuing sexual variety heedless of commitment, especially the responsibilities of having children. The feminism industry, from Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine up to today’s “girlboss” memes, allied with Hugh Hefner’s acolytes by telling women they should spend their prime years focused 100 percent on educating themselves and pursuing careers instead of pressing their men into marrying them and raising children with them.
As in most revolutions, history had to be burned to the ground so that we could start again. Women had to be convinced that their grandmothers and great-grandmothers had everything all wrong, and that these forebears’ lives should be seen as ludicrous cautionary tales of what not to do. An epithet that is guaranteed to draw a scornful roll of the eyeballs among young women is “Fifties housewife.”
Because history is ruled useless, young women just assume that previous generations of women have no lessons to offer — and anyway they must have been constricted by the patriarchy from realizing their best selves. Certainly no previous generation behaved as though the goal were to spend their 20s sleeping with as many men as possible without ever settling down with one of them. Today’s young woman is probably not even aware that in the Seventies, before it became the norm for women to work outside the home, women were happier than men, whereas today the reverse is very obviously true to anyone with a pair of eyes.
Single American women famously lean left, even far left, so they exist in an intellectual bubble into which no conservative thoughts are ever allowed to gain access. But an exhausting BuzzFeed News piece about young women’s sexual exhaustion could, with a few stylistic adjustments, have been printed in National Review. The piece makes all of the points we horrible misogynist troglodyte conservatives have been making for 40 years, except they’re coming from the mouths of young liberal-sounding women who are feeling a bit like the kulaks of the sexual revolution. Lo and behold: This supposedly women-glorifying reversal of cultural norms turned out to be not so good for women.
The piece opens with a portrait of a 23-year-old girl called “Katie” who says she felt pressured by cultural signals into trying meaningless hookup sex (she felt doing so would make her a “cool girl”), got herself “blackout drunk” in order to obliterate her correct and natural instinct that this was a bad idea, then discovered that men she met on dating apps treated her like garbage. Some of them would choke her during sex. One raped her. Checking with friends, she discovered her experiences were common. “I’ve had friends who were choked until they passed out, friends who were filmed without their knowledge,” she continued. “It’s f***ed up and scary, and it makes you definitely wary of meeting people.”
You don’t say. The way that women have behaved virtually throughout human history — to be extremely sexually selective because of the potential costs, and because sex with strangers isn’t particularly fulfilling — is actually the most sensible way to behave? The way their grandmothers would have told today’s young women to behave, if anyone bothered to listen to grandmothers, would have left them happier.
“Being told that you should be having sex with people you don’t have any relationship with really put it in our minds that sex doesn’t matter,” Katie told BuzzFeed News. “I feel like we all just kinda got f***ed over.”
Meanwhile, the mass of the culture pushes women to do things that, to say the least, do not come naturally. A divorced woman writes in to Slate, home of the worst advice columnists on earth, to describe her bad sex life with men she barely knows and is told that “building a stable of sexual partners is a process, involving trial and some amount of error.” I’d say most women want stability rather than a stable.
Whenever grumpy old dudes write about this, of course, we’re guilty of “sex shaming,” as I discovered when I wrote a piece that went viral four years ago in which I observed that casual drunken hookup sex was not making young women happy. Approximately 42,852 young women wrote in to (a) mock me for building my essay around a fictional person in a short story even though the person was obviously not fictional, and even if she had been, her tale mirrored that of any number of young women; and (b) inform me that the blackout-drinking/Tinder culture that brought them a buffet of assignations with careless porn-obsessed dopes was working out just fine for them, thank you very much, and they weren’t upset at all with how things were going with their frisky and fun “sex-positive” lives. Yet for some reason my piece made them so angry with me that they tended to write hysterically, in ALL CAPS. Sometimes they further informed me indignantly that, in order to punish me for my ideas, they would not have sex with me, although I hadn’t asked.
Because the best way to jump-start your life between the sheets is to get married, and young people aren’t getting married, they’re actually in the peculiar position of conducting a hookup culture that is generating less sex than ever. Today’s young women have enough sex partners to make their grandmothers gasp, but their grandmothers actually got a lot more nooky. Moreover, since sex with someone you actually know and like tends to be the best kind, their grandmothers enjoyed higher-quality sex as well.
Thanks to the overwhelming success of 60 years of propaganda, you have to exit the mainstream media, travel for miles off the information interstate, and go far down the backroads of conservative thought to find the truth about women, which is that most of them do not want to focus 100 percent of their energy on their careers but prefer a balance between career and a home life that includes a committed partner and children. The other way means getting, as Katie puts it, “tricked into exploiting ourselves [and] tricked into thinking it was our idea.”
This article was originally published by National Review. Read the original article.
National Review is an American conservative editorial magazine, focusing on news and commentary pieces on political, social, and cultural affairs.
