Sex Gone Very Wrong
Why young women aren’t saying no, even when they want to
By now everyone paying any attention to cultural news knows about “Grace” and her date with Hollywood star Aziz Ansari. He only wanted sex. She didn’t feel comfortable refusing him and some unenthusiastic oral sex followed. She later published the story, anonymously, with the help of an editor named Katie Way, in the supposedly ironically-titled feminist magazine, Babe.
The whole affair has inadvertently led to a national discussion on the proper boundaries of sexual license, on the possible overreach of the #MeToo movement, on the ethics of various kiss-and-tell tactics, and, after a follow-up episode involving the Babe editor’s incendiary response to criticism, a discussion about professional arrogance of a distinctly youthful variety.
Only a few sources, however, have bothered to show us how we got to this point. Reading most of the commentary, one is left with the impression that this unfortunate turn of events for women — being carelessly to callously used and discarded by men and not seeing an option to change the state of play — is a new phenomenon. In fact, warning women that this would happen has been a popular and reliable way to get thrown out of the feminist power structure for a few decades.
Camille Paglia is the most notorious of the outcasts. In 1991, she wrote an article on the subject for New York Newsday—an article that, according to Paglia herself, remains the most controversial thing she’s ever written. It should be noted that for Paglia, that’s saying something!
The date-rape controversy shows feminism hitting the wall of its own broken promises. The women of my Sixties generation were the first respectable girls in history to swear like sailors, get drunk, stay out all night — in short, to act like men. We sought total sexual freedom and equality. But as time passed, we all woke up to cold reality. The old double standard protected women. When anything goes, it’s women who lose.
Today’s young women don’t know what they want. They see that feminism has not brought sexual happiness. The theatrics of public rage over date rape are their way of restoring the old sexual rules that were shattered by my generation. …
The date-rape debate is already smothering in propaganda churned out by the expensive of Northeastern colleges and universities, with their overconcentration of boring, uptight academic feminists and spoiled, affluent students. Beware of the deep manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don’t look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.
In several follow-up interviews on this point, Paglia is at pains to explain how feminists sell young women a sanitized view of sex — an enjoyable biological function between equals in every sense of the word — and how that ridiculously naive view leaves women vulnerable to being used by men. Without recourse to the old cultural standards, which feminists gleefully swept away, women turn to parental replacements and the law.
History unfolded as Paglia foresaw. Refusing to level with women about sex and biology because they insisted that gender and all its differences were social constructs and reproduction was merely a biological function, feminists threw out the societal rules that sought to protect women before assault and sought different rules, legal ones, that gave women recourse after an assault.
This is one of the reasons Paglia commands respect among conservatives: even though Paglia prioritizes a woman’s freedom to risk danger and conservatives prefer a recovery of social pressures and rules to protect women from danger, both agree that the feminist abhorrence of pre-assault buffers coupled with an over-reliance on post-assault legal recourses was a terrible idea.
Paglia was not alone. In 1995 Christina Hoff Sommers joined her on PBS to discuss these themes in,“Has Feminism Gone Too Far?” They reprised that interview in 2016, finding that everything they warned about in 1995 was truer today than it was then. “We won the argument, but our opponents won the assistant professorships. Thus, nothing got solved.”
One did not need to be a professor to see the problem, either. In 2000 Danielle Crittenden, a female writer and observer of culture, published What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us. The chapters “About Sex” and “About Love” both cover the general point:
Pretending that we are the same as men — with similar needs and desires — has only lead many of us to find out, brutally, how different we really are. In demanding a radical independence — from men, from our families — we also abandoned certain bargains and institutions that didn’t always work perfectly but until very recently were civilization’s best ways of taming the feckless human heart.
There are a great many women unhappy because they acted up on the wisdom passed along to them by the people they most trusted. These women thought they did everything right — only to have it turn out all wrong.
It wasn’t just women who noticed. Tom Wolfe’s 2000 book of essays, Hooking Up, opens with the essay about the titular act, with a subtitle that reads: “What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American World.” It was a man’s world in which men traded in old wives for “trophy wives” and:
From age thirteen, American girls were under pressure to maintain a façade of sexual experience and sophistication. … The continuing in vogue of feminism made sexual life easier, even insouciant for men. Women have been persuaded that they should be just as active as men when it came to sexual advances. And men were only too happy to accede to the new order, since it absolved them of all sense of responsibility, let alone chivalry.
Yet this new order would obviously go on to generate new behaviors. Caitlin Flanagan’s 2005 essay, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica,” explored how it was that “nice girls got so casual about oral sex.” (Many contemporary readers are discovering Flanagan’s writing through her recent article about the website, Babe, which published the anonymous tell-all about the Anzari incident. This work is making the rounds for noting that Babe could serve as Exhibit A for the litany of complaints men’s rights websites make about women.) In her 2005 piece, Flanagan discussed the supposed blowjob craze among young girls, first concluding that it was not the epidemic the media hype made it seem (some things don’t change), but that it was a trend.
Why were teen-age girls of the aughts — the first girls raised by mothers who had been raised in the feminist Second Wave — choosing to engage in a sex act that had nothing to do with their own sexual pleasure? Flanagan too arrived at the conclusion common among clear thinkers: When feminist revolutionaries threw out the old societal rules that once protected women, they did not prepare a replacement. While activists hastily threw together some laws for college-age and working women, young girls were left with no defenses. They went with diversion. Get the guys off with blowjobs and handjobs to retain some semblance of bodily control.
Evidence over time has vindicated Flanagan’s worry. These young, supposedly empowered women are afraid to say what they want, or don’t want. They are appeasing. It’s not just Grace. There’s the woman who didn’t want dirty pictures taken. Or anecdotal stories around casual sex studies. Or entire plot lines in that ‘voice of my generation’ show — so empowering even Saturday Night Live got the joke.
Yet Flanagan was ridiculed for such a conclusion. Bitch Media awarded Flanagan their first Douchebag All-Star award for, among other things, claiming that young women were just going along with boys’ requests for oral gratification. Similarly, Elle magazine called Paglia and Sommers Serena Joys, after the female villain in The Handmaid’s Tale. Alas, these women are used to it. They have been Cassandras for a very long time.
An alternate version of this article appeared in the Iron Ladies Sunday collection of conservative women’s commentary, available here.
