Saturday, January 21, 2006
(10:05 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Weird Pattern
I can't remember the last time that The Atlantic Monthly published an article by a woman that wasn't a review. I also can't remember the last time they published a long book review by a woman that wasn't explicitly anti-feminist (some of the shorter reviews don't provide a plausible occasion to shoehorn in a reference to how maybe those June Cleavers didn't have it so bad after all). The most recent example is perhaps the most egregious: those damn feminists created a situation in which all our young girls are begging to suck cock! The patriarchy had its bad points, but at least it protected femaleThe things that feminism is trying to do are hard, not least because the end result isn't given in advance, at least not in detail. So yes, sometimes people who identify themselves with that multivalent and fractious movement called "feminism" are going to advocate things that, when implemented, seem to have bad consequences. But it's not as if any feminist held a gun to women's heads and made them, for example, go to work (now the market has, but that came after). A counter-cultural movement such as feminism can only succeed if the people it addresses find it broadly convincing. Feminism did admittedly ask for changes, many of which were supported by a large number of women and a not inconsiderable number of men as well -- yet it seems more than a little unfair to pin all the failings of the current situation on the people who asked for changes and to grant presumptive innocence to the status quo ante.
I of course think that it's the capitalist system's fault, not the feminist movement's, that every teenage girl in this country is now a cum-craving slut. I would make a joke about how it's a shame I was born too late to cash in on this trend, but I probably would have been one of the boys -- I'm sure they exist -- who turned down the unreciprocated oral sex and resented, on a lot of different and not always admirable levels, the guys who accepted. I'm sure a lot of it would have been moralism and general religious upbringing, but a lot of it would also have been that I would want it to mean something, that I wouldn't want it to be a throwaway thing. Of course, that goes against traditional stereotypes of young boys as reckless sexual adventurers, able to move on from one experience to the next with little or no emotional investment, and so one would not be likely to find such sentiments expressed in The Atlantic Monthly -- because, come on, you have to admit that broad-brush sexual stereotypes have a point! Right?
