New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg is in the midst of a re-think. Echoing what conservatives have long known, she has begun to question “the gap between the rhetoric of sexual liberation and women’s real-world experiences.”
In other words, sex positivity or “the idea that feminism should privilege sexual pleasure and fight sexual repression” is finally getting scrutinized by some of its mainstream adherents.
As the proud father of an 18-year-old daughter, it’s refreshing to see this leftist take on female sexual mores go full-on public. But I was also moved by Goldberg’s discussion for reasons that pertain to me personally and men in general.
“Simply” hooking up?
As I write this, I am finalizing a divorce and therefore soon to be single for the first time in 20 years. In Los Angeles, where I live, there will be no shortage of opportunities.
But see, even in my highly sociosexual late-teens and twenties I felt an unease (emptiness is more like it) around hookup culture, even as I took part in it. I remember early on heading into a room with a girl one year older but many years more mature and my friends smiling and wishing me luck. The girl and I lay on the bed for about an hour and talked awkwardly before I left the room feeling ashamed that I had no details to report back.[1]Incidentally one of my favorite books in the years following this incident was William T. Vollmann’s Whores for Gloria, about a Vietnam vet in the Tenderloin who pays prostitutes occasionally … Continue reading
I liked her but I didn’t like her and as such nothing beyond our talk ever happened.
In later years I learned how to “simply” hook up. But hooking up rarely felt simple. Things are rarely simple where two separate sets of expectation and interpretation are involved. [2]The trait of high sociosexuality is naturally distributed to a greater degree in men, resulting in men having more sex and with a larger overall number of partners, whereas most women prefer … Continue reading
But post-orgasm with a woman with whom I’d engaged like this felt confusing, alienating and tinged with guilt.
There was guilt, even though the sex was consensual, for having potentially led someone else on. But there was something worse still. No matter how much my friends and advertising and porn instructed me in the field of sexual values, getting laid this way left a hole in my heart. I can’t speak for the other person, but I felt by merely hooking up I’d violated a deeper part of myself.
That part of myself—which I kept hidden from peers at all costs—wanted ultimately to feel close and intimate, and also the emotional-physical pull of a pendulum swaying between safe and vulnerable.
That for me was erotic, and I discovered it tended to happen in committed relationships.
Questions before answers
I’m fortunate to live in a city that presents my hetero eyes with countless beautiful women on a daily basis. My libido is strong and indeed I fantasize about some of them. (It’s safe to say I’m not a demisexual.)
But my impending single life asks more of me.
I’m not here to advise anyone (beyond my three children) on sexual mores. (I trust that there are many men for whom hook-up culture is not only acceptable but healthy and desirable.) But I would advise that not only women but men too take a moment to discover what their own mores are.
After all both men and women have lost something via so-called “sexual liberation.”
In the pursuit of their right to have pleasure for its own sake—which grew out of eras of pronounced sexual oppression—women have too often lost the sense of joy and connection that research suggests may come more readily in committed relationships. And by endorsing casual sex culture women have also exacerbated an already floundering sense of obligation and commitment from men.
As for men, following the lead of each other and the culture at large, too many have lost consideration and compassion, and any understanding of sex that goes beyond their own physical pleasure.
It’s why my two boys and I need to have conversations about Trevor Bauer and Deshaun Watson and what a better version of manhood can and should look like.
This re-think of our mores, initiated also by people like Nona Willis Aronowitz, will soon seep into social media, where it runs the risk of deteriorating into a bastardized trend.
But a real re-think requires something different. It requires individual will and introspection. This isn’t about politics; it’s about self-understanding. That requires questions well before answers.
So as women like Goldberg and Aronowitz courageously take on the orthodoxies of feminist sexuality some of those questions are getting asked.
Perhaps it’s time for a few good men to ask them too.
Notes, etc.
| ↑1 | Incidentally one of my favorite books in the years following this incident was William T. Vollmann’s Whores for Gloria, about a Vietnam vet in the Tenderloin who pays prostitutes occasionally for sex but primarily to simply tell him their stories and share their memories. |
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| ↑2 | The trait of high sociosexuality is naturally distributed to a greater degree in men, resulting in men having more sex and with a larger overall number of partners, whereas most women prefer committed relationships over casual sex. Obviously there are exceptions, of which perhaps this writer is one. |