Do liberated women really love casual, meaningless sex?
That is the question Mona Charen (who is also moderating the IWF-Heritage Breadwinner Moms panel this morning—see homepage) addresses in a column this morning. It begins:
Noting the comeback campaigns of Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner in New York, feminist author Hanna Rosin wonders why “50 years into the sexual revolution” women politicians lag so far behind men in the sex-scandal tally. She notes biological and evolutionary explanations only to reject them in favor of the idea that women are just too unused to power to abuse it in that way. She’s cheered, though, by surveys showing that younger women are cheating on their spouses almost as much as men, and confidently looks forward to the not-too-distant day when we’ll “find ourselves willing to look past the indiscretions” of women philanderers too.
Welcome to the feminist paradise, where the ideal is for women to model themselves not just on men, but on the worst men.
The feminist revolution got underway fifty years ago when Betty Friedan, “a restless Marxist,” published The Feminine Mystique, which urged women to escape the “concentration camp” of what was then normal family life. Friedan and like-minded women didn’t just want equal opportunity for women, but many sought to destroy the family and traditional sexual mores.
Hooking up and the belief that the only fulfillment for a woman is in a career are the products of this kind of feminism. Bear in mind that we at IWF think career women are great—if we didn’t, we’d be self-hating women. Which we decidedly aren’t. But we do believe in an array of choices for women, which is one way we differ from Friedan & Co.
And we don’t see any good in the hook-up culture. Nor does our friend Mona:
Cheerleading articles like Hanna Rosin’s 2012 Atlantic piece “Boys on the Side” argue that, far from enduring the “hookup culture,” women are enjoying their promiscuous freedom….
…Here is one student’s account of a typical freshman fraternity party:
“You go in, and they take you down to a dark basement,” Haley, a blond, pink-cheeked senior, recalled of her first frat parties in freshman year. “There’s girls dancing in the middle, and there’s guys lurking on the sides and then coming and basically pressing their genitals up against you and trying to dance.”
Charming. Another girl explained why her encounters in her first two years of college “usually ended with fellatio.” Early in the evening, she’d get very drunk.
“By the time she got back to a guy’s room, she was starting to sober up and didn’t want to be there anymore, and giving the guy oral sex was an easy way to wrap things up and leave.”
It takes a lot of spin to call that liberation.
Read the entire article.