June 22, 2014
BLUE LIGHT SPECIALS:
Feminism and Its Discontents (HARVEY MANSFIELD, 6/30/14, Weekly Standard)
The hook-up culture denounced by conservatives is the very same r*** culture denounced by feminists. Who wants it? Most college women do not; they ignore hookups and lament the loss of dating. Many men will not turn down the offer of an available woman, but what they really want is a girlfriend. The predatory males are a small minority among men who are the main beneficiaries of the feminist norm. It's not the fault of men that women want to join them in excess rather than calm them down, for men too are victims of the r*** culture. Nor is it the fault of women. Women are so far from wanting hook-ups that they must drink themselves into drunken consent--in order to overcome their natural modesty, one might suggest. Not having a sociable drink but getting blind drunk is today's preliminary to sex. Beautifully romantic, isn't it? The anonymous Harvard woman by getting drunk was unfortunately helping to pressure herself into consenting to a very bad experience. But she is right that the pressure comes with the encouragement of the culture. And the culture comes from the dogmas of feminism that made this mess for women and men too.
One of the manifestations of this confusion is that the incidents involved in this "crisis" occur in the comfortable campus bedrooms that the couples retired to, yet the campus is dotted with the glowing blue lights of the emergency phones which women are supposed to race to when in danger of being assaulted. They are being protected from something that does not exist.
Posted by Orrin Judd at June 22, 2014 7:55 AM
Tweet