{"id":8066,"date":"2014-12-05T08:06:59","date_gmt":"2014-12-05T16:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8066"},"modified":"2014-12-05T08:06:59","modified_gmt":"2014-12-05T16:06:59","slug":"the-end-of-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-feminism\/","title":{"rendered":"The End of Feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image credit: Duke University<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ Defining Ideas<\/a><\/p>\n

California recently passed a law requiring that sexual encounters between students in universities and colleges can proceed only on the basis of \u201caffirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement.\u201d Failure to resist or to ask the partner to stop the encounter can no longer be taken as consent. Institutions that wish to receive state funds or financial aid must adhere to this standard when investigating charges of \u201csexual assault,\u201d a phrase redefined to include behaviors once considered boorish or insensitive, but not legally actionable. The California law follows on the 2011 Department of Education\u2019s Office of Civil Rights\u2019s \u201cdear colleague\u201dletter<\/a> that instructed schools investigating sexual assault complaints to use the \u201cmore likely than not\u201d or \u201cpreponderance of the evidence\u201d standard of evidence rather than the \u201cclear and convincing\u201d one.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The dangers to individual privacy and accountability that follow such regulatory intrusions into sexual intimacy between legal adults have been well documented, not the least being the violation of the rights of the accused, who now enter a hearing with a presumption of guilt rather than of innocence. Also problematic is the double standard inherent in such rules, particularly when both accuser and accused are drunk or otherwise incapacitated.<\/p>\n

But the main problem with the California law is the corruption of feminism that it represents. When it comes to sex, the old feminist claim to equal treatment based on a woman\u2019s equal capacity to control her sexual choices has been transformed into an old-fashioned Victorian notion of women as weak creatures who need to be protected from sexually feral males, and who lack agency and thus should not be held accountable for their choices.<\/p>\n

The feminists\u2019 championing of sexual autonomy for women reached a head in the 1960s. Before the modern age, sex was seen as a necessary but dangerous force that, if left uncontrolled, not just impaired the mind, but also destroyed whole civilizations. It was the illicit sexual passion of Paris and Helen that \u201cburnt the topless towers\u201d of Troy, as Christopher Marlow wrote. As such, sex had to be contained and channeled by social practices and cultural institutions. Virtues, taboos, and especially marriage all attempted to direct sexual energy to its most socially important goal, procreation and the family. Christianity inherited these assumptions and put them in the context of the theology of man\u2019s fallen nature and the need for the soul to be redeemed from the passions of the transient body.<\/p>\n

By the late nineteenth century, many social and cultural developments had undermined this traditional sexual realism. Over the following decades, in the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and numerous others, sex was removed from the context of religion, custom, and taboo, and made a natural phenomenon that science could understand and hence make more enjoyable and less damaging. The destructive effects of sex, in this view, were not inherent, but the consequence of repressive social institutions and religious superstition perpetuated by the ignorant and narrow-minded. In the sixties, Cultural Marxism interpreted traditional limits on sexual behavior as the instruments of oppression and conformity, reinforcing the \u201cfalse consciousness\u201d that perpetuated the ruling class and its power. Breaking sexual taboos and experiencing sexual pleasure thus became acts of liberation, leading to self-fulfillment and personal freedom.<\/p>\n

Feminism embraced this notion of sexual liberation. The autonomy of women depended on their casting off the shackles of patriarchal misogyny most evident in male control of women\u2019s sexuality\u2013\u2013\u201cour bodies, ourselves\u201d became the battle cry. Women should have the equal power to choose sexual experiences and pleasure, and the unjust double standards that gave men but not women sexual autonomy should be discarded. The biological differences between men and women, especially nature\u2019s subjection of women\u2019s bodies to the relentless imperatives of procreation, were now discarded as arbitrary, unjust impediments to women\u2019s freedom and autonomy. This process was moved along by the new technologies of reliable birth control and accessible and safe abortion.<\/p>\n

In the ensuing decades, however, the malign consequences of sexual liberation became increasingly manifest\u2013\u2013the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases, the wider access to demeaning pornography, and the explosion of out-of-wedlock childbirth and the attendant social dysfunctions that follow from children being raised without fathers. Even for more privileged women, there were psychological costs to be paid for contending with male sexual predators and absolving them of responsibility for their behavior, given that now men and women were equally in control of their sexual choices, and that the traditional mores once enshrining male responsibility, such as chivalry, had been dismissed as patronizing and sexist.<\/p>\n

But as the years passed, many women began to discover that there are indeed differences between men and women and their experiences of sex. Liberation did not lead to the sexual utopia of carefree and cost-free pleasure, but to the guilt, regret, and humiliation that follow being used as an object for somebody else\u2019s transient enjoyment.<\/p>\n

The response to these ill effects was to create rules and codes designed to eliminate the negative consequences of sexual freedom. But contrary to the assumptions of lawmakers who want to regulate sexual behavior, sex is not a game like tennis that can be pleasurable for the players provided the rules are followed. As Camille Paglia has pointed out, when it comes to sex, the more appropriate metaphor is to the old Roman arena, where there was no law. An act that is so physically and psychologically complicated, and that exposes our most intimate longings and hidden selves, cannot be rationalized and made cost-free, or its unpleasant effects neutralized, by reducing it to a \u201cvoluntary agreement\u201d in which the terms and conditions are spelled out and followed as in a contract. Shakespeare\u2019s Prospero is wiser: \u201cThe strongest oaths are but straw to the fire in the blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Faced with the costs of sexual liberation, contemporary feminism has betrayed its devotion to personal freedom and equality, choosing instead to demand that the state use its coercive power to protect women not just from insensitive men, but from the consequences of their own choices. Sexual harassment law is the most widespread expression of this impulse to use the tutelary state to defend women from a \u201chostile and intimidating\u201d environment. The vulgar joke or boorish innuendo is now not just a violation of social decorum, but a crime subject to law and punishment.<\/p>\n

But nothing infantilizes women more than the sexual codes promulgated by numerous universities. Obviously, sexual assault properly defined is a crime that should be investigated and the guilty punished. But getting drunk and then sleeping with an equally intoxicated partner is not a crime. It\u2019s a learning experience about taking responsibility for one\u2019s actions, and practicing the virtues of prudence and self-control.<\/p>\n

By criminalizing young adults\u2019 complicated sexual experiences, feminism is betraying its original call for sexual equality and autonomy by making women perpetual victims too weak to be held responsible for their choices, and too incapable of painfully learning from their mistakes and thus developing their characters. At the same time that feminists still call for unlimited sexual freedom, they treat women as Victorian maidens who lack agency and resources of character, and thus must be defended against sexual cads and bounders. As the Manhattan Institute\u2019s Heather MacDonald puts it, this \u201cnew order is a bizarre hybrid of liberationist and traditionalist values. It carefully preserves the prerogative of no-strings-attached sex while cabining it with legalistic caveats that allow females to revert at will to a stance of offended virtue.\u201d<\/p>\n

This strange demand for absolute freedom without responsibility for one\u2019s choices is not just a symptom of feminism. It reaches into our broader culture. It has become the enabler of the entitlement state, which justifies its growing size and regulatory power over people\u2019s lives by promising to protect them not just from the vicissitudes of life, but from the consequences of their own choices, even as they enjoy more freedom to make even more choices. Thus the feminist demand for government-subsidized birth control and abortion is of a piece with government bailouts for homeowners who over-borrowed on the equity of their homes or lied on their mortgage applications.<\/p>\n

The demand for personal freedom without accountability contradicts the foundational philosophy of our republic. The right to liberty is not the right be absolved from the consequences of one\u2019s actions. Taking that responsibility is what makes one worthy of freedom and equal to others who likewise must be accountable for their actions.<\/p>\n

Democratic freedom and equality are both compromised without responsibility and accountability. As Alexis de Tocqueville said about the necessity of self-reliance for democratic freedom, \u201cIt profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.\u201d Many Americans, including the feminists, have accepted the loss of freedom as the trade-off for shedding the burden of responsibility for their own lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ Defining Ideas California recently passed a law requiring that sexual encounters between students in universities and colleges can proceed only on the basis of \u201caffirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement.\u201d Failure to resist or to ask the partner to stop the encounter can no longer be taken as consent. Institutions that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[978,842,22,92,120,145,11,86],"tags":[557,594],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-266","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5811,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/margaret-thatcher-and-the-death-of-feminism\/","url_meta":{"origin":8066,"position":0},"title":"Margaret Thatcher and the Death of Feminism","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 20, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage\u00a0 The death of Margaret Thatcher will no doubt generate much deserved recognition and discussion of her historical significance. She was, after all, the most consequential British Prime Minister in the post-war period, eclipsed only by Winston Churchill as the greatest British leader of the 20th\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Women"","block_context":{"text":"Women","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/women\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5334,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/elastic-definitions-of-sexual-harassment\/","url_meta":{"origin":8066,"position":1},"title":"Elastic Definitions of Sexual Harassment","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 23, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"The high costs to free speech of vague legal terms and frivolous cases. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Even as the civil liberties fundamentalists continue to fret over the Patriot Act and the treatment of terrorists in our custody, a more insidious and dangerous assault on our freedom, one\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9482,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trump-politics-and-our-sexual-schizophrenia\/","url_meta":{"origin":8066,"position":2},"title":"Trump, Politics, and Our Sexual Schizophrenia","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0Conservatives should know better than to so quickly validate a dishonest narrative that benefits the other side. By Bruce Thornton \/\/ Front Page Magazine Online \u00a0 A few minutes into Sunday\u2019s debate Donald Trump\u2019s decade-old crude sexual banter with a reporter from an entertainment show was mentioned by the CNN\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8475,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/progressive-academics-shocked-that-their-creatures-turn-on-them\/","url_meta":{"origin":8066,"position":3},"title":"Progressive Academics Shocked That Their Creatures Turn on Them","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 12, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"When the cult of sensitivity begins to eat its children. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Recently several progressive professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the p.c. orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Our Contributors"","block_context":{"text":"Our Contributors","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5177,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/sexual-harassment-or-censorship\/","url_meta":{"origin":8066,"position":4},"title":"Sexual Harassment or Censorship?","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 16, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Vague language in Executive Order 927 leaves one to wonder who might harass whom. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Even as the ACLU frets over the privacy of people chatting with Al Qaeda on their cell phones or googling bomb-making instructions on public library computers, a more serious threat\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1637,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-true-significance-of-herman-cains-sexual-harassment-troubles\/","url_meta":{"origin":8066,"position":5},"title":"The True Significance of Herman Cain’s Sexual Harassment Troubles","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 12, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine We can\u2019t say much about the veracity of the sexual harassment complaints leveled against Herman Cain 15 years ago, given the lack of specific detail or even the names of the accusers. But this mini-scandal provides an opportunity to revisit one of the most\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8066"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8066"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8068,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8066\/revisions\/8068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}