The Sexual Revolution’s Angry Children
Kay S. Hymowitz
Last fall, as the first #MeToo scandals scrolled across the cable news
chyron, I happened to be reading Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s superb new
biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. As Hagan describes the
magazine’s early years in the 1960s, just about everyone on the
staff—male and female—was having sex with everyone else, under and on
top of desks, on the boss’s sofa, wherever the mood struck them. Hagan
quotes one writer claiming that Wenner told him that “he had slept with
everyone who had worked for him.” Compared with Wenner and the early
Rolling Stone crowd, Harvey Weinstein was a wanker.
Did the women of Rolling Stone consent to the goings-on at what today
would be regarded as an illegal den of workplace harassment? They
appeared to. In the company’s bathroom, women employees scribbled
graffiti ranking male staffers for their sexual performance—not, as
they do on college campuses today, the names of rapists in their midst.
Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, was known to judge job seekers by “whether a
candidate was attracted to her” and, in some cases, to test the depth
of their ardor personally. Photographer Annie Leibovitz, who made her
name at Rolling Stone, routinely slept with her subjects and was
rumored to have had threesomes with the Wenners.
Different as they seem, there’s a direct line between that
revolutionary time and our own enraged, post-Weinstein moment. What
started out as a clear-cut protest against workplace harassment has
mutated into a far-reaching counterrevolution—a revolt against the
combustible contradictions that the sexual revolution set in motion
60-odd years ago.
Exhilarated by the sudden freedom from the restrictive sexual morals of
their mid-century childhoods and overflowing with youthful, and often
chemically enhanced, animal spirits, countercultural kids like those at
Rolling Stone gave little thought to the possible risks of their
momentous experiment in sexual liberation. History is filled with
social schemes, many cruel, some more lenient, designed to protect
women and girls from sexually predatory males, as well as from their
own risky but more discriminating desires: everything from codes of
chivalry to chaperones, from burkas to single-sex dorms, from courtship
rituals to romantic love.
In the quest for what Herbert Marcuse, one of the period’s guiding
philosophers, called the “liberation of instinctual needs and
satisfactions which have hitherto remained tabooed or repressed,”
revolutionaries rejected all forms of “social control” as both
oppressive and expendable. Sex was as beneficent and natural as pure
mountain spring water; it could be enjoyed with a long-term spouse, a
bar pickup, a boss or a flunky, or, for that matter, with a suite mate
in the co-ed dorms that soon became the norm on college campuses;
mutual consent was the only limiting rule. That this utopian dream had
never had a real-world test was part of its appeal.
Adding to the radicalism of the sexual revolution was its
egalitarianism. The moral imperative to break free of society’s
repressive rules would benefit everyone, male and female. But because
so many of the old rules had involved the second sex, women
revolutionaries assumed that they would be major beneficiaries of the
new permissiveness. The double standard and male dominance would wind
up in the dustbin of patriarchal history, leaving women free to roar.
“[A]ll the best scientific evidence today unmistakably tends toward the
conclusion that the female possesses, biologically and inherently, a
far greater capacity for sexuality than the male,” Kate Millet declared
in her brilliantly mad 1970 Sexual Politics.
At least, that was the hope. Soon, however, women began to notice a gap
between the promise and reality. It seemed that men were having all the
orgasms they could ask for, yet women, despite their putative erotic
superiority, were unsatisfied. In 1976, amateur researcher Shere Hite
published The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality,
announcing that 70 percent of U.S. women didn’t have orgasms during
intercourse. In their consciousness-raising groups, feminists admitted
that they had been “faking it.” They blamed their dissatisfaction on
the “myth of the vaginal orgasm,” as well as on men, who, they
believed, were too chauvinistic or ignorant to see that ancient myth as
the male-centered fantasy that it was.
Revolution skeptics also argued that male aggression was preventing
women from achieving their sexual potential. A year before the Hite
report, Susan Brownmiller’s landmark Against Our Will described the
“conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a
state of fear.” Like most feminists, Brownmiller viewed male violence
against women as entirely the result of a misogynistic patriarchy,
dismissing a considerable anthropological and ethological record
pointing to a more nuanced conclusion. Ellen Willis, a “pro-sex”
feminist steeped in the rock-and-roll counterculture, had a more
Rousseauian vision. Liberation gave men permission to reject “false
gentility and euphemistic romanticism” and to act out their erotic
fantasies, she believed. Unfortunately, those fantasies had been imbued
with misogynistic notions of dominance and “separated sex from
relationship.” Patriarchy perverted the “affection and mutuality,”
which, Willis and others like her apparently presumed, were the sexes’
natural state.
Natural or not, many women continued to find affection and mutuality
elusive in their sexual adventures. In the 1980s, legal scholar
Catherine MacKinnon launched a battle against pornography, which was
spreading well beyond seedy adult-movie houses after the introduction
of the VCR. Porn led to rape, MacKinnon believed; her ally Andrea
Dworkin went beyond that, seeing in the very act of sexual intercourse
a means of “physiologically making a woman inferior.” It’s worth noting
that, in the 1990s, MacKinnon was engaged to celebrity psychiatrist
Jeffrey Masson, who had boasted in a New Yorker profile that he had
slept with 1,000 women. (In a later interview, he upped the number to
1,300.) Those relationships were presumably consensual, but the
incongruous MacKinnon-Masson partnership offered another hint that the
sexual revolution was based on some questionable hunches about the
nature of male versus female sexuality.
In 1991, Anita Hill’s accusations against her former boss and Supreme
Court nominee Clarence Thomas broadcast another area of postrevolution
female disappointment: workplace sexual harassment. Hill never accused
Thomas of violence, but she charged that he had asked her out
repeatedly, talked about threesomes and bestiality, and described his
private parts. If the revolution had spared women “false gentility and
euphemistic romanticism,” as Willis had put it, it seems to have left
in their place crude and unwanted male advances that the older system
had been designed, however inadequately, to tame.
Despite ardent feminist support for Hill, the episode failed to lead to
the #MeToo reckoning that we are witnessing today. On the contrary, for
various cultural, political, and technological reasons, the 1990s
breathed new life into the reign of sexual permissiveness. As baby
boomers aged and became Hollywood big shots and Washington
muckety-mucks, they brought their Woodstock memories with them. In his
recently published The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American
Libido, David Friend chronicles the many sexual innovators of the
decade: radio shock jock Howard Stern, Vagina Monologues creator Eve
Ensler, rock singer Courtney Love, hugely pregnant cover girl Demi
Moore, the creators of the cultural touchstone Sex and the City, and
the inventors and mass purveyors of the thong, the Brazilian wax,
vibrators, breast augmentation, Viagra, and of course, Internet porn.
Aside from a few college campuses where concepts like “rape culture”
and affirmative consent had the attention of a cadre of dissident
feminists, sexual boundary-pushing was the order of the decade.
With the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, Washington, of all places,
became the capital of this 1990s sexual revolution. “He’s one of us . .
. the first rock and roll president!” a jubilant Jann Wenner said after
the Arkansas governor was nominated. Liberal women loved Clinton
because he was married to an accomplished feminist and appointed more
women cabinet members and high-level staffers than any president before
him—sure proof, it was thought, that he fully respected women as
equals. Rumors of affairs, harassment, and even rape didn’t faze them;
on the contrary. America had a president who was “alive from the waist
down,” exulted novelist Erica Jong, mistress of the “zipless fuck” and
one of the sexual revolution’s most exuberant female acolytes. Jong was
thrilled at the sexualization of the nation’s highest workplace and the
president’s later adulterous affair with Monica Lewinsky: “Oh, imagine
swallowing the President’s come!” she squealed at a “supergal” lunch
arranged by the New York Observer to analyze the White House revels.
How liberal women so effortlessly shifted gears from “I believe Anita
Hill!” to sneering at the “trailer trash” making sexual accusations
against the president is easy to discern. They were far more invested
in fighting their antiabortion enemies on the right than in pondering
the continuing unintended consequences of the sexual revolution, now
personified by a callow 22-year-old intern. That battle required fealty
to sexual freedom, above all. Qualms about Oval Office oral sex between
the president of the United States and a young employee were written
off as the fussing of retrograde scolds. “When I look at the
crucifixion of Clinton I look at the crucifixion of my generation,”
poet-singer Patti Smith told Rolling Stone. “They are finally nailing
us for introducing new ideas about sexual mores, sexual freedom,
personal freedom.” The episode—and American society as a whole—became a
Scopes trial–type culture-war zone: the enlightened, sexual
sophisticates against the Bible-quoting, sex-hating squares.
And there things stood until the fall of 2017.
The sexual revolution endorsed the value of female sexual desire,
autonomy, and consent; this is a genuine moral achievement and,
thankfully, a settled part of modern life. But the revolution also
helped midwife a number of the nation’s most troubling domestic
problems: the soaring number of single-parent families, legions of
fatherless children, and the related ills of inequality, poverty,
achievement gaps, and men MIA from the workplace and family life.
Now, #MeToo’s counterrevolution is exposing other unintended
consequences to the triumph of sexual deregulation. In every human
society, powerful males take advantage of their positions to procure
sex partners—the younger and prettier, the better. The radically
laissez-faire sexual attitudes that Americans set in motion five
decades ago didn’t give permission to predators to have their way, but
it did help them convince themselves that they weren’t monsters. More
modest sinners—stealth kissers, gropers, and flashers—could well have
thought, hey, who wouldn’t want to have sex with a pretty young thing
and, after all, women are as hot for sex as any guy, aren’t they?
Television host Charlie Rose said that he felt “he was pursuing shared
feelings” when he strutted around naked under an open bathrobe while
his female assistants were in the room. Resistance to the reality that
men are more indiscriminate in their urges than women can’t excuse
delusions like these, but it can enable them.
The revolution’s blindness to la différence also created a
little-understood dilemma for young, single women now leading the
charge. By ignoring the truth that females across cultures and species
are “choosier” than males about sexual partners and by proclaiming
sexual self-expression as the primo value for all enlightened people,
it weakened social support for those women who weren’t in the mood. The
normative stance for any single woman outside evangelical precincts
swung wildly from prerevolutionary “I’m not that kind of girl” to
postrevolutionary “I’m on the pill and I’ve got a condom in my
backpack.” From the viewpoint of the postrevolution educated and
hormonal young, to be a feminist is to be a sexual adventurer. “Sex is
feminist. And empowered women are supposed to enjoy the hell out of
it,” as New York’s Rebecca Traister has described the mind-set.
The problem is that this powerfully seductive ideal confuses personal
choice and consent, especially for a young person still struggling to
figure out an adult identity. In mid-December, as #MeToo crowded the
headlines, Jessica Bennett, the “gender editor” of the New York Times,
wrote a piece with the striking title “When Saying Yes Is Easier than
Saying No.” Young women, she argued, aren’t always sure what their real
desires are. Bennett fails to note that generally men don’t suffer the
same uncertainty, at least not when their hormones are on alert. After
downing enough alcohol to block remaining doubts, many women acquiesce
to their partner’s agenda, one that happens to align with the ideal of
female empowerment that they hold dear. No surprise that anger and
confusion—and contentious accusations of assault—sometimes follow.
This background helps clarify the #MeToo generational divide, one that
offers insight into the course of the current counterrevolution. #MeToo
began as a defrocking of exploitative, powerful men like Weinstein,
Rose, Matt Lauer, and many others. The revelations shocked much of the
American public, but the morality driving them was not especially
controversial. In the early months, Second Wave feminists and
middle-aged Gen-X-ers were as outraged as their younger Third Wave
counterparts by the exposure of so many brutes. Many had their own past
traumas to report. More generally, the public largely agreed that these
men were swine.
It turned out, however, that the younger set was not willing to end the
conversation with the demons in the workplace. With some exceptions,
like Bari Weiss at the New York Times, they had a broader agenda: they
wanted to dismantle “institutional, systemic sexism,” which they
believed explained not just predatory bosses but also self-centered men
and unsatisfying sex. Indeed, research by Paula England had shown that
the “orgasm gap” continued to haunt the bedroom. Even after vibrators,
girl power, protests against “slut shaming,” and Viagra, women were
still not getting satisfaction.
The generation gap between the older veterans of the revolution and
younger counterrevolutionaries cracked wide open in January, with the
publication of an article about a wretched sexual encounter between
comedian Aziz Ansari and a 23-year-old aspiring photographer
pseudonymously called “Grace.” As Grace described it, after taking her
to dinner, Ansari pressured her to have sex despite her “nonverbal”
attempts to communicate her discomfort. Few of the article’s many
commenters defined the uncomfortable incident as assault, much less
rape, but almost immediately it was added to the list of #MeToo
offenses. Older women were appalled at the idea that Grace’s “bad date”
had any connection with their struggle against workplace harassment.
“You have chiseled away at a movement that I along with all of my
sisters in the workplace have been dreaming of for decades,” journalist
Ashleigh Banfield (aged 50) lectured Grace and her supporters.
An even deeper point of generational disagreement was the question of
women’s autonomy. Banfield and her aging sisters saw Grace as party to
her own misery. Ansari clearly had one thing on his mind when he paid
for dinner and hustled her back to his apartment. Grace may have made
some ambiguous attempts to show him that she wasn’t fully on board as
he quickly took off her clothes and performed oral sex on her. But she
never said no, much less put on her clothes and left. On the contrary,
she reciprocated the oral pleasuring. Young women evidently don’t “know
how to call a cab,” Caitlin Flanagan wrote in The Atlantic, drolly.
Younger women blasted their older critics, like Flanagan, for
instigating a “backlash . . . the same old oppression asserting
itself,” in the words of Sarah Jones, a writer for The New Republic. In
their view, Ansari’s callous persistence was on a short continuum with
rape and assault. “A lot of men will read that post about Aziz Ansari
and see an everyday, reasonable sexual interaction,” Guardian columnist
Jessica Valenti tweeted. “But part of what women are saying right now
is that what the culture considers “normal’ sexual encounters are not
working for us, and oftentimes harmful,” she continued. These are
“gendered patterns of behavior that are incredibly common and deeply in
need of change,” another prominent young feminist, Anna North, wrote on
Vox.com. Women, she said, should not be placed in the role of “sexual
gatekeeper.” Like all #MeToo transgressors, Ansari was failing to see
women as human beings, or “objectifying” them. “You guys are all
f---ing the same,” Grace says when she finally closes the apartment
door on her evening with him.
The contours of the bad-date landscape alluded to here—sex that is
“drunk, brief, rough, debatably agreed upon, and not one bit
pleasurable,” in Traister’s words—may be hazy to older feminists. Like
every generation, they view the present through the lens of their own
youthful experience. They had successfully navigated the world of
sexual freedom and autonomy they had created. It may have had its
problems, but compared with the onerous regime preceding it, from their
view, it was the city upon a hill.
What they don’t factor into their judgment is that they benefited from
the lingering cultural capital of earlier, more mannerly generations.
Long-established courtship norms don’t disappear overnight, after all.
During those long-ago days, most middle-class men and women still
married by their mid-twenties, a fact that added an element of gravitas
to the social life of their postcollegiate years. Today, by contrast,
single life stretches a decade or more, marriage is entirely optional,
and pornography has taken its place as the primary text of young men’s
sentimental education. There has never been a time when women didn’t
have to fend off gropers and assaulters, but most of us of a certain
age were not limited to a dating pool heavily populated by males in the
throes of a porn- and hookup-infected postadolescence. The post-Ansari
avalanche of bad-date stories still piling up on the millennial
Internet, coming on top of the already-extensive literature about the
campus hookup scene, suggests that this is the weekend reality for many
younger women.
Still, if young feminists have a genuine beef with the dating culture
that they’ve inherited from their boomer and Gen-X mothers, the
combination of false assumptions, rage, and self-delusion that they
bring to their complaints promises more sorrow to come. Neither their
falling-out with Second Wavers nor their catalog of bad dates has made
a dent in the feminist certainty that male-female differences in sexual
behavior can be entirely chalked up to toxic social messaging.
Dismantle the patriarchy—whatever that means, exactly—and men and women
will stroll arm in arm back to the garden. There they will find
affection, mutuality, and orgasms with any stranger whom they find
tempting, just as the original revolutionaries promised.
Like the sexual revolution itself, then, the counterrevolution is
utopian and deeply naive about the tangled knot of human motivation.
The counterrevolutionaries are no less credulous about their own
motives. “[W]omen are so strongly socialized to put others’ comfort
ahead of our own that even when we are furiously uncomfortable, it
feels paralyzing to assert ourselves,” as Jill Filopovic, another
notable thirtysomething voice, wrote in the Guardian. “Women have been
taught, by every cultural force imaginable, that we must be ‘nice’ and
‘quiet’ and ‘polite,’ ” writes Rachel Simmons, a widely quoted expert
on girls and young women. “That we must protect others’ feelings before
our own. That we are there for others’ pleasure.”
Speaking as the mother of two thirtysomething daughters and as a close
observer of feminist social media, I feel confident in saying that this
is unsorted rubbish. The patriarchal culture provided young women a
media diet of “bad-ass” females, from Mulan to Lara Croft, from Buffy
to Sara Connor of The Terminator. There’s not a nice and quiet one in
the bunch. Educators, marketers, and parents paid daily homage to “girl
power,” and over the past months of #MeToo revelations, young women
have wielded it aggressively. The New York Times’s Jenna Wortham wants
“every single man to be put on notice” and “feel vulnerable,” just the
way women do. “Was I worried about the possibility of a man being
falsely accused? Not in the least,” Leah Finnegan, a former Gawker
editor, wrote in the hipster zine The Outline. “It’s unfortunate, sure,
that men who may have sent women ‘creepy DMs’ [direct messages] got
lumped in with a bunch of (alleged!) rapists, but I really can’t muster
the energy to care. . . . It’s good to make men feel fear.” Nice.
Powerless women suffering at the hands of dominant, abusive males: the
description may be apt for Weinstein’s and Lauer’s episodes, but
applied more generally to contemporary sexual relations, it is a fairy
tale. In press reports, #MeToo heroines frequently project themselves
as fragile innocents. NPR honcho Michael Oreskes forcibly kissed a
young woman looking for a job when he was working at the New York
Times. She wasn’t just angry at this objectionable encounter; she was
devastated. “He utterly destroyed my ambition,” she told the Washington
Post about the two-decade-old incident. The woman who accused Al
Franken of “grabbing a handful of flesh” around her waist during a
photo op was similarly ravaged. “Al Franken’s familiarity . . . shrunk
me. It’s like I was no longer a person.” “We spend our whole lives
afraid,” Jessica Valenti has written. This is sheer demagoguery. Its
main purpose is to evoke pity for women and rage at men.
But inflammatory exaggeration and self-dramatization are not the only
reasons to doubt that the young women’s reformation will succeed. Above
all, the movement lacks a realistic appraisal of our fallen nature—both
male and female. Women will always be gatekeepers; the biological
mechanics of sex and the facts of reproduction demand it. So does the
reality of female choosiness. As Nora Ephron once said, musing about
her ex-husband, a lot of men “would have sex with a Venetian blind.”
The sexual revolution stripped young women of the social support they
need to play gatekeeper, just as it deprived men of a positive vision,
or even a reason, for self-restraint. Recognizing those losses is where
any reformation has to start.
Kay S. Hymowitz
is a City Journal contributing editor, the William E. Simon Fellow at
the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Manning Up: How the Rise of
Women Has Turned Men into Boys.
Source:
https://www.city-journal.org/html/sexual-revolutions-angry-children-15827.html
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