On a long drive home from visiting friends one recent sunny day, my partner and I listened to a progression of sugary pop songs. She drove as I pulled them up on YouTube, cranking the volume as loud as the car's Bluetooth speakers would allow. She chose
I think you’re spot on about this being a major factor in girls transitioning. My daughter started high school and I think was exposed to a culture where being sexually active was expected, and not just vanilla. Some kids in her group were in throuples and that was normalized. She was a late bloomer who wasn’t even through puberty yet so I think this was terrifying. A few months later she’d decided she was an asexual trans boy. It was the only identity she could adopt to protect her from those kids. Who can blame her?
The idea that the "sexual revolution" of the late 20thC actually gave women more freedom and equality with men has been revealed 50 years into the post modernist project as a sad and hollow delusion. Nothing much has changed from the historic profile of oppression; women are still as exploited and predated upon by male humans as they ever been, just within the paradigm of new ideologies pretending something changed.
I dont wish the "Pill" hadnt been invented. It has great utillity. I just regret its availability coincided with an era when women were led to believe that having multiple sexual partners was evidence of being freed from our historical oppression as the female sex class of homo sapiens
So hows the sexual revolution going? Generations since the baby boomers have less sex, higher rates of mental illness and plummeting birthrates. Would you describe that as evidence of a confident and flourishing culture?
WOW—my first reaction to your comment is strong disagreement, Pearl.
Are you not including modern forms of birth control in your assessment??
Much *has* changed for so many, thanks to greater reproductive freedom.
That said, I very much share Shannon’s dismay about the problem she’s identifying here, and would love to hear any solutions that fellow liberals are proposing…
I don't believe access to birth control intervention has led to more "freedom" for women.
In my observation, "birth control" has led to more freedom for men to demand women take responsibility for medical interventions subverting the biological reality of how womens bodies work. Consequently, women are expected to take a "pill" rendering them infertile so they are available for sex at any time without what would have been the natural consequences.
How do you define "reproductive freedom" ? and please elaborate how has that freed women?
I think you have to separate birth control, which has undeniably given women (and men) the freedom to limit their family size and wait to start a family or even choose not to have children at all, from the attitude that sex is just meaningless recreation, which I believe has harmed women. Yes, birth control made those attitudes possible, but those attitudes weren’t a necessary outcome.
Women had to decide for themselves how to utilize (or not) birth control. Some of us feel that the ability to choose sex free from pregnancy ("meaningless recreation" is a morally-laden term) helped rather than harmed us. Others may have gone with the flow because they failed to achieve the financial, sexual or general independence required to pursue their own interests instead of deferring to men and/or whatever they thought was popular. It was women's continued submission to others that posed the problem, not the pill or even the culture.
I truly didn't mean for it to be morally-laden. Let me try to better explain what I mean. I certainly want the right to choose sex free from pregnancy, and have greatly benefitted from that in my life! What I don't want, and I think the majority of (but not all) women don't want, is a choice between having sex with no relationship or commitment (to me, that's meaningless), or not having sex at all. And what the majority of men (but not all) want is to have sex with many women, but have relationships with only a few. I think there's a pretty clear evolutionary biology explanation for this - since women can have only a limited number of children in their lifetimes and men can have many more, we've evolved to have very different strategies for maximizing the number of offspring who successfully pass on our genes. Most women seek a man who will stay around and give protection and resources to any resulting offspring, while men seek as many partners as possible. A man will only be willing to invest resources in an extremely evolutionarily fit partner who wouldn't otherwise have sex with him. As soon as some reasonably large percentage of women are willing to have sex with no commitment, most men will take that opportunity and the women who are not willing to have sex without a relationship are left without partners. They eventually may give up and start having sex without a relationship because they find it preferable to no sex at all, making it even worse for the remaining holdouts. So the end result is that the situation that most women are evolutionarily hardwired to want, they can't get. The situation that most men are evolutionarily hardwired to want, they get. And while an individual woman can choose whether to have sex outside a committed relationship, the culture may determine what choices are available to her.
So in this sense I think that birth control has benefitted women, but the changing of the social norms against casual sex have not. I also make a big distinction between sex that you don't wish to result in pregnancy but that helps to create a bond within a relationship, which I think most women want, and a one-night stand with someone you'll never see again, which I think is rare for women to prefer.
I've seen this in real life - I grew up in a fairly conservative church that didn't believe in sex outside of marriage. At some point I left that behind (which in hindsight was a subconscious decision to optimize my chances of finding a partner), but I know of women I grew up with who stayed in the church and never ended up marrying or having any relationship, even though they wanted one. Even within their religious community they couldn't find men who were willing to commit to them before sex because none of the guys their age actually stuck to that rule.
I don't know what the answer is (I'm certainly not suggesting we should go back to the days when women's sexuality was tightly controlled!) but I can understand the point of view that the removal of taboos against casual sex have not benefitted most women.
Your comments made me think about some things Louise Perry wrote in her book about the sexual revolution. What birth control did for many (and I am paraphrasing here) is almost push as another “gentle pressure” to have women have sex with some men when she would have chosen not to before after all it shouldn’t be a big deal right? Because you are on the pill. It’s just sex. I think of the many women I know who consented to sex because they either felt a peer pressure or pressure from the guy - whereas at least before the pill both parties recognized that the sex could have had much more difficult consequences.
Andrea Dworkin wrote in "A Woman Writer and Pornography" (Letters From a War Zone) that she wrote about pornography because she wanted "another generation of women to be able to reclaim the dreams of freedom that pornography had taken from me."
And, of course, the do whatever makes you feel good society will add a new component on August 1, when Biden’s changes to the Education Act’s Title IX take effect. On that day any boy/man can decide that he is a girl/woman and proceed to shower with high school and college girls with his (likely) erect penis. How anyone can vote for that addled old man and his vacuous, word salad spouting, DEI selected VP is simply beyond me.
As if it even matters which flavor of out-of-touch dinosaur you choose at this point. They both like to cater to the most extreme ends of their voter base and the rest of us just have to live with it.
Moving image is very powerful. So are the capitalists who exploit it. They will continue the click bate race to the bottom, because we are drawn the threatening imagery. Centralized power allows whatever can be sold and its wealth protects it from social legal intervention.
That’s where there is more slavery, people in bondage.
Tbh, I never believed the rise of the whole porn culture - the rise of modern pornography itself, the sexual "liberation" movement and following hook-up culture, as well as the general shift in the - now open - sexualized dehumanization of women through language, media/advertisement and general culture - to be happening (and picking up intensity) purely coincidental at the same points/times when women achieved some milestones in their liberation.
This is - in my opinion - a direct and concious form of backlash against it.
There are enough cases where such things were (are!) even funded, if not initiated, by governments - even going as far as it being done through intelligence services.
And that's not a vague thing or even a "conspiracy theory", as much as we all would wish it to be.
When the system lost a big enough bit of its grip and couldn't subjugate us openly and through brute force alone anymore, this new form of trying to control, weaken, scare and divide/isolate women suddenly reared is head, always suspiciously in sync with major changes for women in society...
I think you’re spot on about this being a major factor in girls transitioning. My daughter started high school and I think was exposed to a culture where being sexually active was expected, and not just vanilla. Some kids in her group were in throuples and that was normalized. She was a late bloomer who wasn’t even through puberty yet so I think this was terrifying. A few months later she’d decided she was an asexual trans boy. It was the only identity she could adopt to protect her from those kids. Who can blame her?
What a powerful essay! The beauty of your written word here brings the brutality of the subject matter into high relief.
I made the mistake of clicking on the link about anal prolapse, and felt sick to my stomach 🤢. How much worse can it get?
This makes me so sad. Yet another example of how broken our world is.
The idea that the "sexual revolution" of the late 20thC actually gave women more freedom and equality with men has been revealed 50 years into the post modernist project as a sad and hollow delusion. Nothing much has changed from the historic profile of oppression; women are still as exploited and predated upon by male humans as they ever been, just within the paradigm of new ideologies pretending something changed.
The claim that women should have been protected from "the sexual revolution" is akin to the claim that minorities need exam standards lowered.
No, women are capable human beings who must instead raise our standards for ourselves.
Do you wish the pill had not been invented? Or do you mean something else by "the sexual revolution "?
I dont wish the "Pill" hadnt been invented. It has great utillity. I just regret its availability coincided with an era when women were led to believe that having multiple sexual partners was evidence of being freed from our historical oppression as the female sex class of homo sapiens
So hows the sexual revolution going? Generations since the baby boomers have less sex, higher rates of mental illness and plummeting birthrates. Would you describe that as evidence of a confident and flourishing culture?
WOW—my first reaction to your comment is strong disagreement, Pearl.
Are you not including modern forms of birth control in your assessment??
Much *has* changed for so many, thanks to greater reproductive freedom.
That said, I very much share Shannon’s dismay about the problem she’s identifying here, and would love to hear any solutions that fellow liberals are proposing…
I don't believe access to birth control intervention has led to more "freedom" for women.
In my observation, "birth control" has led to more freedom for men to demand women take responsibility for medical interventions subverting the biological reality of how womens bodies work. Consequently, women are expected to take a "pill" rendering them infertile so they are available for sex at any time without what would have been the natural consequences.
How do you define "reproductive freedom" ? and please elaborate how has that freed women?
Having a choice = greater freedom, by definition.
If some women can't trust themselves with that freedom, that's a separate problem.
I think you have to separate birth control, which has undeniably given women (and men) the freedom to limit their family size and wait to start a family or even choose not to have children at all, from the attitude that sex is just meaningless recreation, which I believe has harmed women. Yes, birth control made those attitudes possible, but those attitudes weren’t a necessary outcome.
Women had to decide for themselves how to utilize (or not) birth control. Some of us feel that the ability to choose sex free from pregnancy ("meaningless recreation" is a morally-laden term) helped rather than harmed us. Others may have gone with the flow because they failed to achieve the financial, sexual or general independence required to pursue their own interests instead of deferring to men and/or whatever they thought was popular. It was women's continued submission to others that posed the problem, not the pill or even the culture.
I truly didn't mean for it to be morally-laden. Let me try to better explain what I mean. I certainly want the right to choose sex free from pregnancy, and have greatly benefitted from that in my life! What I don't want, and I think the majority of (but not all) women don't want, is a choice between having sex with no relationship or commitment (to me, that's meaningless), or not having sex at all. And what the majority of men (but not all) want is to have sex with many women, but have relationships with only a few. I think there's a pretty clear evolutionary biology explanation for this - since women can have only a limited number of children in their lifetimes and men can have many more, we've evolved to have very different strategies for maximizing the number of offspring who successfully pass on our genes. Most women seek a man who will stay around and give protection and resources to any resulting offspring, while men seek as many partners as possible. A man will only be willing to invest resources in an extremely evolutionarily fit partner who wouldn't otherwise have sex with him. As soon as some reasonably large percentage of women are willing to have sex with no commitment, most men will take that opportunity and the women who are not willing to have sex without a relationship are left without partners. They eventually may give up and start having sex without a relationship because they find it preferable to no sex at all, making it even worse for the remaining holdouts. So the end result is that the situation that most women are evolutionarily hardwired to want, they can't get. The situation that most men are evolutionarily hardwired to want, they get. And while an individual woman can choose whether to have sex outside a committed relationship, the culture may determine what choices are available to her.
So in this sense I think that birth control has benefitted women, but the changing of the social norms against casual sex have not. I also make a big distinction between sex that you don't wish to result in pregnancy but that helps to create a bond within a relationship, which I think most women want, and a one-night stand with someone you'll never see again, which I think is rare for women to prefer.
I've seen this in real life - I grew up in a fairly conservative church that didn't believe in sex outside of marriage. At some point I left that behind (which in hindsight was a subconscious decision to optimize my chances of finding a partner), but I know of women I grew up with who stayed in the church and never ended up marrying or having any relationship, even though they wanted one. Even within their religious community they couldn't find men who were willing to commit to them before sex because none of the guys their age actually stuck to that rule.
I don't know what the answer is (I'm certainly not suggesting we should go back to the days when women's sexuality was tightly controlled!) but I can understand the point of view that the removal of taboos against casual sex have not benefitted most women.
Your comments made me think about some things Louise Perry wrote in her book about the sexual revolution. What birth control did for many (and I am paraphrasing here) is almost push as another “gentle pressure” to have women have sex with some men when she would have chosen not to before after all it shouldn’t be a big deal right? Because you are on the pill. It’s just sex. I think of the many women I know who consented to sex because they either felt a peer pressure or pressure from the guy - whereas at least before the pill both parties recognized that the sex could have had much more difficult consequences.
For some exploration into how sex ratios affect domestic violence, Giulia La Mattina might be an interesting read :
"When all the Good Men are Gone: Sex Ratio and
Domestic Violence in Post-Genocide Rwanda"
Andrea Dworkin wrote in "A Woman Writer and Pornography" (Letters From a War Zone) that she wrote about pornography because she wanted "another generation of women to be able to reclaim the dreams of freedom that pornography had taken from me."
And, of course, the do whatever makes you feel good society will add a new component on August 1, when Biden’s changes to the Education Act’s Title IX take effect. On that day any boy/man can decide that he is a girl/woman and proceed to shower with high school and college girls with his (likely) erect penis. How anyone can vote for that addled old man and his vacuous, word salad spouting, DEI selected VP is simply beyond me.
As if it even matters which flavor of out-of-touch dinosaur you choose at this point. They both like to cater to the most extreme ends of their voter base and the rest of us just have to live with it.
And yet they will vote for him again
Moving image is very powerful. So are the capitalists who exploit it. They will continue the click bate race to the bottom, because we are drawn the threatening imagery. Centralized power allows whatever can be sold and its wealth protects it from social legal intervention.
That’s where there is more slavery, people in bondage.
Tbh, I never believed the rise of the whole porn culture - the rise of modern pornography itself, the sexual "liberation" movement and following hook-up culture, as well as the general shift in the - now open - sexualized dehumanization of women through language, media/advertisement and general culture - to be happening (and picking up intensity) purely coincidental at the same points/times when women achieved some milestones in their liberation.
This is - in my opinion - a direct and concious form of backlash against it.
There are enough cases where such things were (are!) even funded, if not initiated, by governments - even going as far as it being done through intelligence services.
And that's not a vague thing or even a "conspiracy theory", as much as we all would wish it to be.
When the system lost a big enough bit of its grip and couldn't subjugate us openly and through brute force alone anymore, this new form of trying to control, weaken, scare and divide/isolate women suddenly reared is head, always suspiciously in sync with major changes for women in society...