Feminists howling at the moon

(See follow-up to this entry, “Wanting it all.”)

Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative continues his penetrating exploration of the feminist mind. In the past, relationships between men and women were about marriage. Then, in the 19th century, romantic love began to play a larger role. Then, starting in the 1970s, with sexual liberation, relationships were about sex alone. Men, who still thought that relationships were about romantic love, and looked for beauty and goodness in women, were at first thrown by the new, plainly dressed, liberated females who reduced relationships to utilitarian sex. Then the men got with the swing of things, and also pursued relationships for just sex. But in doing so, the men began rating women, not by beauty and goodness, but by hotness. This threw the feminists—who believed in sexual liberation for women, not for men—into a tizzy. And now, in the regime of hotness that they themselves have helped unleash, the feminists are bitterly complaining that they are being treated as objects. Richardson says about one such extremely angry feminist:

I wish she would understand that she wants contradictory things. She wants a culture in which relationships are pursued for sex, without regard for love or marriage, but in which the appeal of women is not based on their sexiness.

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

Richardson’s narrative of sexual revolutions seems to reverse Allan Bloom’s account in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Bloom famously said that the sexual liberation of the Sixties created sexual inequality, and that feminism, with its bureaucratic rules governing sexual relationships, was a reaction against that. Richardson, by contrast, places the grim faced feminism and first, and says that male sexual liberation was a reaction to that.

Philip M. writes from England:

Mark Richardson wrote:

“I wish she would understand that she wants contradictory things. She wants a culture in which relationships are pursued for sex, without regard for love or marriage, but in which the appeal of women is not based on their sexiness.”

But there is no contradiction if they also think that men should find all women equally sexy. If the left is at war with all inequality, then why fight against one of the great bastions of inequality and discrimination—our sense of attraction to the opposite sex? After all, male sexual attraction is based on selection for feminine traits that concern motherhood, fertility and good genes which should not be a factor in “progressive” societies. Such people (feminists) are constantly at war with human nature.

I suppose in a society that values non-discrimination, sluttishness and promiscuity (and perversion) is a virtue. “I will sleep with anybody” is truly a statement that you are liberated beyond primitive concerns of mere fertility, genes and other such atavistic impulses, and have “deconstructed” sex down to the pure act.

PS feminists don’t howl, they shriek. Wolves howl, and I like wolves. Plus howling is social. They aren’t doing it to wreck wolf-society.

LA replies:

But that’s the point. There is always a natural human hierarchy, and sexual selection is a part of that. But in traditional society, sexual relations are formed within networks of family and community, and are mediated thrugh many things aside from sex. But once there is sexual liberation, all of society becomes, as it were, a sexual marketplace, in which there are no mediating factors and people are judged purely by how “hot” they are. Thus sexual liberation greatly increased sexual inequality. And feminist egalitarianism can be seen as a response to that, seeking to protect females from the brutal sexual competition.

On a passing point, do men and women really select each other for “good genes”? They select each other for their good qualities. Normal human beings don’t reduce other human beings—especially human beings whom they care about, care for, and are attracted to—to their molecules. They don’t think in those terms.

And why would people even think about genes in a sexually liberated environment where they are not looking for prospective spouses whose genes will be passed on to children, but for someone to have an affair with?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 31, 2009 05:12 PM | Send