Nona Willis-Aronowitz at The Nation takes on Wendy Shalit’s new modesty book, Girls Gone Mild — and damn she is good. A taste:
Shalit’s so-called “rebels” amid our “pornified” culture may be technically raging against the mainstream, but they are surely just repackaging age-old ideas as defiance. They appear in the form of 16-year-old rappers preaching abstinence, Orthodox Jewish women getting married before even touching their husbands and a teenager getting her knickers in a twist over reading the word “titties” in her assigned reading. Most retro about the call for modesty is that it once again implies that women’s actions are somehow responsible for men’s. Since men simply cannot control themselves, poor things, women should shroud their bodies in cloth and desperately guard their virginity so as to quash men’s dishonorable intentions. These are the strong, “empowered” women who will quell the supposedly adverse effects of our sex-saturated culture.
You have to be living under a rock not to notice that casual sex, once an expression of a subversive impulse, is now certifiably pop culture. Since the 1960s, sex–like everything from rock music to the psychedelic aesthetic–has been mainstreamed. But it’s a dubious claim that these images and ideals are really breeding mindless sex machines. “If we have to choose between emotional repression and sexual repression…then a better trade-off seems to be fewer partners and more intimacy,” concludes Shalit. But the idea that a woman who has lots of sexual partners forgoes her chance of finding “intimacy” and a “soul mate” is not only sanctimonious–it’s just not true. Ninety-five percent of Americans have sex before marriage, so chances are a good number of the bikini-clad women making out with strangers at Cancun foam parties will be married with kiddies at the age of 30. The hookup culture isn’t a sign of a loveless, commitment-free society–it doesn’t even provide an alternative to matrimony.
Go read the whole thing — it’s one of the best, more succinct takes I’ve read in a while on balancing disdain for the regressive modesty movement with a thorough skepticism towards the hyper-sexualization of girls and women.
Another favorite part:
The culture has not yet carved out a space for women to indulge their own fantasies rather than to fulfill those of men. Feminism has not finished its job; a version of nonmushy, nonmarital sex that makes women feel good about themselves is still hard to achieve.
I think I just added a new favorite writer to my list.
(That would be Nona, not Wendy).
Nona is (the late) Ellen Willis’ daughter. Not surprising she’d also be a great feminist critic!
If Wendy Shalit ever had the pleasure of walking down a street in Kyiv, Ukraine, we’d have to pump her full of Thorazine.
Ha!
On the one hand, I think she did a good job critiquing some of Shalit’s apparent arguments (I haven’t read or heard much else about this book). I’m especially glad to see her rebutting the claim that we phallus-bearers are all raging man-beasts who can only respond to the sight of a bared female ankle with a vigorous humping of everything that isn’t nailed down.
On the other hand, I’m not sure what the 95% figure is supposed to prove. Sure, I suppose it puts paid to the really crude abstinence-only hypocrisy, but beyond that, it seems to imply that we can’t criticize widespread practices, that the way things are is the way they ought to be, and I definitely don’t agree with that. The percentage of people committing adultery is probably higher than many of us would think; that does mean we can’t criticize them, or that we’re somehow obliged to pretend adultery isn’t destructive, even though common sense, most spiritual traditions, and, I don’t know, 95% of the people who have seen a marriage end (or just suffer) because of adultery say otherwise? Likewise, I would expect that at least 95% of us have at some point or another committed an act of violence against another human being. Does that mean that the next time someone criticizes our society for being too violent, or for promoting or glamorizing violence, we should just tell them to wisen up? (And, from my point of view, the way young girls are taught, and older girls and women are expected, to repress their aggressive instincts is at least as bad as the way they’re taught/expected to repress their sexual instincts.)
Moreover, many marriages end in divorce; it doesn’t seem like it would take that brilliant a social conservative to use this figure as support for her argument. So many marriages fail because so many of us are taught that sex is some meaningless, ephemeral interlude of atomized pleasure, like getting high or taking a nap. (Willis-Aronowitz’s claim that products of the “hook-up culture”–which, in her version, involves making out, not serial sexual partners–will one day be married strikes me as dishonest; presumably no one’s denying that people are still marryin’, but lamenting the decline in the quality and durability of marriages.)
Anyways, I feel like I’ve already gone on too long. It’s not that I agree with Shalit, if the review is any indication of what she thinks; if she really believes that making out with someone in your early twenties makes you unfit for the marriage bed, she’s pretty wacky. But the main problem I have with what appears to be her argument is that it isn’t nearly as rootin’, tootin’, rebelutin’ as she seems to believe. It’s still women as the sex class, as commodity, as existing solely as appendages to men, either as valuable property or as skanky sex-toy (aka the virgin-whore thang). We’re still at the stage where, as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out, women’s “objective” reality is described solely in terms of how they appear to male subjectivity.
At the same time, and at the risk of instantiating the phenomenon I just described, it does seem to me, from my admittedly prudish, male perspective (i.e., the perspective of someone not especially well-placed to illuminate the experiences of young women), it does seem to me that there’s far more pressure on young women to be teh sexxay than there is on them to wear long skirts and save it for your wedding night (unless you’re from one of these horrifying and stomach-turning purity ball fams). It seems to me that young women are far more aggressively dehumanized by the porning of America than they are by chastity rappers. And I tend to sympathize with anyone I see pushing back against that, however misguided I think they may be in other respects.
I have a hard time understanding why “hookup culture” is regarded as something new. The cultural phenomenon actually at work here – it seems to me – is that we talk about it more, not the fact that people have recreational sex.
My library hasn’t gotten the new Shalit yet, but I checked out her first one on modesty a few years back. Seemed to me she was migthy short on alternatives to the sexy look, in clothes–no mention of dressing butch/asexual to turn off all those slavering men (not that this can always be counted on to work.) And, of course, I don’t think there was much about teaching (some) men to just cool it, instead of putting all the burden on women. Nor was there much on such practical matters as self-defense, a more reliable protection than the “right” clothes. It all sounded kind of half-cooked. Naturally the right-wing reviewers just lapped it up.
One final thing that almost made me laugh was she made in passing a reference to a nudist camp and the asexual atmosphere therein; she seemed horrified at this, though it to me seemed a good topping for all that modesty, and then I realized she might be just as sexual as the rest of us, just not entirely comfortable with it…
Aaaaand this is why fanfiction is da bomb. Granted, we still need something mainstream and not questionably legal as a place for women to express their own desires and acknowledge the fact that healthy women own their sexuality…just as men can. I am looking forward to seeing how we come up with this solution. All this, and people still ask me why I’m a feminist. Humph.
And I’m not sure that we’re actually witnessing a decline in the quality of marriages. Regardless of the social acceptability of divorce, marriages can still be happy or miserable. Also, out of curiosity, does anyone know where to find data about the average length of marriages over time (either terminated by divorce or death?)
True, but I don’t think the answer to that is Shalit’s brand of “Embrace the Madonna!” as opposed to the “Embrace the whore!” you get from much of popular culture. Shalit claims to be subversive, but really, she’s only succeeded in exacerbating the problem by maintaining the dichotomy she purports to undermine.
jeffaclitus, I’m a little uncomfortable with the tone of your comment. Maybe I am misunderstanding you, if so, please set me straight.
I think that what we need to do is stop pressuring women in any way, shape, or form, to dress / present / act in any particular way, and start pressuring men to use their fucking brains and rein themselves in, because men do have brains and are not beasts enslaved to their hormones or their genes. Because whether society pressures women to be “sexxaayy” or to be “modest”, it’s pressuring women to satisfy a patriarchal system.
Your approach feels like Shalit-lite. Ok, maybe you’re not demanding that women wear ankle-length skirts, but I still sense an undercurrent of woman-shaming when you decry those oh-so-horrible divorce rates – which I see as evidence that women are increasingly freeing themselves from relationships that are abusive, manipulative, or are just not working.
This comes uncomfortably close to “save sex for marriage, sex outside of marriage is empty and uses you up” line that we hear from the abstinence folks. And if some folks have sex on a “meaningless, ephemeral interlude of atomized pleasure” basis, so what? Does everything have to have some kind of deep, relational meaning? Can we not do something just for the sheer pleasure of it, as long as all participants are willing and eager to do it on that basis and are honest that that’s what they want?
jeffaclitus, I think you’re going to find that “preserving/elevating marriage” as a goal in itself, is subject to criticism, and should be. Marriage is not an unambiguous good; it’s good for some, not for others, and focusing on it as the reason why men and women should or shouldn’t structure their lives a certain way is limiting.
How women dress, or have sex or not, or who they have it with (consensually) is no-one’s business but theirs. Period. If it fucks up their future relationships…well, that’s their lookout. What’s weird about Shalit and the culture at large is how much time we spend fretting over women’s sexual choices…as though we, as a culture, felt that we had the right to have an opinion on them, as though there were some societal imperative to judge every woman’s choice to keep them in line. I mean, do we wring our hands over men in the same way? Hardly.
I blame the patriarchy!
“…a vigorous humping of everything that isn’t nailed down…” But wouldn’t it be better to have that increased stability? And why limit yourself? Sorry, just kidding. Couldn’t help myself. (Uh, pun sorta intended) On a more serious note, I was arguing that point w/ a coworker. Hopefully, more men will take issue w/ the party line of ” I just can’t control myself when…”
Complaining about high divorce rates is rather akin to complaining about high rates of cardiac bypass operations, and suggesting that maybe if people just didn’t put so much blind trust in doctors, maybe there wouldn’t be so many cardiac bypass operations, without any acknowledgement that the real problem is too many people with heart disease.
Divorce is surgery on a broken marriage. The marriage doesn’t stop being broken because the treatment wasn’t applied, and the people in it don’t stop being crippled by being chained together against their will.
High divorce rates, to me, are a symptom of too many inappropriate *marriages.* We can plainly see that in areas of the country where tremendous emphasis is placed on chastity and abstinence outside marriage and the sanctification marriage magically performs on dirty, dirty sex, the divorce rate is much higher. People who need to get married as a license to fuck will marry the wrong people and then need to divorce them more often than people who fuck whenever they want but see deep love, respect and emotional compatibility as requirements for marriage.
A return to modesty does not help this. Women who are sexually inexperienced are still going to marry the wrong guy because he’s hot… in fact they’re more likely to. Women who are sexually experienced might at least screw the hot guy without “oh my god! I’m not married to him!” guilt coming into it and feeling compelled to marry him first or immediately afterward. (And the same is true for men as for women. Men are more likely to marry the wrong woman if they think that it is disrespectful to a woman to have sex with her without marrying her; they may still have casual sex with people they have no respect for, but if they find a friend hot, they’ll feel they have to marry her before they can have sex with her regardless of the fact that her life ambition is to travel the world and they’re desperately afraid of travel, or she wants kids and they don’t, or they want kids and she doesn’t, or whatever other incompatibilities there may be. if they just had sex with the hot friend without feeling that by doing so they are degrading her — something you don’t do to your friends — they wouldn’t have to divorce her acrimoniously to the tune of their friendship’s destruction years later.)
I mean, I personally am unwilling to have sex with a man I don’t completely trust… in part because many men do consider sex with a woman to degrade her and because they see women they sleep with as notches on their belt and I need to know for certain a man is not like this before I’d sleep with him. But I find few men attractive and I am comfortable being celibate. For most women, making sure you are willing to marry a guy before you’d have sex with him just ensures that you pick a guy to marry on the basis of how much you’d like to have sex, not how your relationship is actually going to work out. So I strongly oppose any philosophy that says women *should* save sex for marriage. I prefer to say “women *can* save sex for marriage if they want and should not be looked down on for it, and the same is true for men, but neither *must* do it.” *That* will help with the divorce rate. Treat the heart disease — the marriages to the wrong people — not the treatments — the bypass operations, the divorces.
Wendy Shalit is such a disappointment. I read (most of) her first book, and the beginning got my hopes so up, and then she happily crapped all over my burgeoning happy-dance. She started out saying that women shouldn’t allow anyone to make them feel ashamed of wanting what they want and feeling what they feel, but then she decided that that only applied to wanting ‘old-fashioned romance’ and that the proper way to not let anyone make you ashamed of your feelings was to veil yourself and ignore any urges to bone that came your way. Reading it was like that scene in Austin Powers – ‘yes… yes.. NO! NO!”
philosophizer – that’s exactly how I felt about Shalit’s first book when my mother gave it to me (in college). It was so almost good it was excruciating.
Oh please.
What is so rebellious about conforming to a counter cultural movement?
One of these days, I hope that young women can choose to have sex before marriage or abstain before marriage without social pressure to do either.
Sadly, I fear that’s a complete pipe dream.
Jessica: I don’t think any of these comments are pressuring women to have sex before marriage, although I agree it would be nice if women didn’t feel pressure from either end.
I think most people here are just pointing out how some critics, in the guise of concern for women, try to push more conservative social values which have stifled women’s emotional and mental health for ages.
Wendy Shalit and the people who frequent Fox News aren’t the only offenders. I recently saw Leora Tannebaum, author of Slut!, give a talk — strangely, she seemed to veer toward the “don’t be promiscuous line,” too! Basically, she said, have sex and don’t feel like a slut for it . . but only within the confines of a committed, healthy relationship.
Kinda defeats the point of the book, hmm? Can’t qualify a “don’t feel like a slut” statement with “if you’re in a committed relationship.”
It was interesting to read that article as well as all of your comments. Thank you all very much.
Now, straight out, I believe the way our culture is headed when it comes to sex may be hurting us and it is the responsibility of all of us–not just women and not just men–to put as halt to the pornification of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m hardly an advocate for saving sex until marriage, but the way sex is sought after now seems wrong to me. Do not think for a moment I blame women for being too promiscuous or some nonsense like that, either.
I am a firm believer that sex should be something intimate and special, not simply sensual. To resort solely to our senses is to reduce ourselves to the state of animals who are not capable of higher thought. I do not support people having sex for one wild night with a complete stranger. Not only does this leave them susceptible to numerous diseases, but to realize that sex is something you can go out and get whenever you want cheapens it. And while I have no statistics to support it, casual sex with strangers would, logically, contribute towards unexpected pregnancies and the number of single mothers–I don’t think it’s a wild assertion to claim most of the men looking for a piece of meat to fuck in your local club are going to stick around for a baby.
Nevertheless, I believe I got my point about casual sex (with strangers) across. I have to decide on my own how I feel about it between friends, although if it’s more than both parties simply wanting to get off, I don’t think I see anything wrong with it.
But, I digress. There are many of you who will disagree with me. No matter your view, however, it is wrong to place the pressure on women to change. I am hesitant to believe we will ever live in such a world, however, when the media undoubtedly plays an enormous role in telling women–and men–how to act, especially when it comes to sex.
I could write a whole long bit on this, I’m sure, but I need to stop for now. I hope I got the right ideas across and nothing is unclear. I leave you to dissect my comment.
This Wendy Shalit seems to have made this “modesty” stuff into an entire cottage industry.
I hope I got the right ideas across and nothing is unclear.
Yes. The idea you got across is that anyone who has less stringent standards than you for having sex is not only inviting disaster, but is subhuman. You don’t personally want to wait until you’re married to have sex, though, so you’re A-OK with casual sex as long as it’s not too casual–for example, between people who know each well as other as you and your own sexual partners do.
mythago,
I wish the hostility weren’t there. It’s comments like these that lead me away from certain blogs. I was simply offering my view that sex is something special, not something to be shared with whomever comes one’s way. I realize there are those who would disagree like yourself. Some people just don’t think sex is all that special.
Yes, I believe much of casual sex is inviting disaster, but not all the time. It really depends on the responsibility of those involved. I’m not going to get into that any more as I’m sure you can surmise for yourself the circumstances I’m referring to.
As for being subhuman, I’m afraid you’re exaggerating what I’m saying. I mean to say that people who rely solely on their senses are not utilizing their full capacities as human beings. I suppose I probably got the idea a long time ago from Aristotle, who writes, “…there are, we may say, three conspicuous types of life, the sensual, the political, and, thirdly, the life of thought. Now the mass of men present an absolutely slavish appearance, choosing the life of brute beasts, but they have grounds for so doing because so many persons in authority share the tastes of Sardanapalus.”
As for your last point, I do not appreciate you distorting my words. I clearly stated that I don’t believe it would be wrong if the two involved were to appreciate the sex on an intimate basis, something that (despite my lack of experience) casual sex seems to lack. Admittedly, there may be cases of extremely intimate sex that isn’t entirely about having an orgasm, but my guess would be that it’s a bit more rare when the two people only met that very night. And I don’t define sex between two people in a loving relationship as “casual”. Look up “casual” in the dictionary; it hardly describes extremely intimate, caring sex between two people who truly have feelings for each other. Nevertheless, I go to Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative to show why I think having sex just to get off is wrong: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only…”
When it comes down to it, perhaps I’m simply not supportive of rampant casual sex because it’s a reflection of the basest form of pleasure (sensual pleasure) and from what I know about it (I admit I could be mistaken, although from what I know from acquaintances, I think not) many people are simply doing it for their own enjoyment, using the other person’s body as a means to their pleasure. But if I were to abandon basic principles of ethics, sure, I could get into it.
The phrase I believe you’re looking for here is false dichotomy. The options aren’t “Oh, Lancelot, let me look into your eyes!” followed by kissy noises versus “Me Tarzan, you Jane. Nice shoes; wanna fuck?” (Not to mention the fact that I missed the part where Tarzan and Jane turned into bonobos. Damn that Edgar Rice Burroughs!)
Now I’m just confused. If people can have sex whenever they want, what’s the deal with all the Nice Guys™?
I fear the right idea has been overpowered by Eau de Sanctimony.
No, you weren’t. You opined that anything less than your sanctified version of sex was subhuman. You can claim mythago is exaggerating all you like, but you’re the one who said that sex without intimacy was to reduce it solely to an animalistic level devoid of higher thought.
I see. So you have generalized you lack of experience into the paragon of human sexual behavior. Clever, that is.
Yes, that’s exactly what casual sex is. A complete abandonment of ethics. *snort*
Are you going to start quoting your Philosophy 101 text next?
Shorter wussyderder: “I’m not one of those fundamentalist types, so I’m going to wrap my moralizing and judgementalness in some nice pseudo-intellectual language and drop some (male) philosopher names around to show my moral superiority. Oh, and while I’m at it, I’m going to scream ‘hostility’ whenever I get a rebuttal.”
Guess what, wussyderder – I’ve been celibate for nearly four years…that doesn’t give me the right to impose that on anybody else. What is right for you does not necessarily work for other people, so please get off your high horse. And before making broad-brush statements like having casual sex “cheapens sex” and is the “basest sort of pleasure” (like pleasure is Teh Evil), why don’t you ask some people who have casual sex if they feel satisfied by same? Are you afraid that some will answer “Yes, I am satisfied by casual sex”?
Oh, and BTW, STI’s are spread by not following good safe sex practices. Whether or not the sex is casual or monogamous has nothing to do with it.
Your arguments sound exactly like those of the sex-before-marriage Xtianists, except for the lack of Biblical justification.
As far as humans supposedly not being animals, we are apes (like a few other animals are), primates (like a bunch more), mammals (like a whole bunch more) and vertebrates (like a whole lot of animals).
my entire life i’ve had nothing but holy, sanctified, relationship-y sex with men i’ve been in love with. and i *hate* that i’ve never had a cheap one-night stand or had a wild affair with a gorgeous stranger.
make of that what you will, wussyherder. read slowly if you need to so that you can understand: sex is simply sex and isn’t a grand statement about a person’s morality. each time is an individual experience that comes with its own emotional accompaniment to the person you’re doing it with. fucking the current significant other has nothing to do with the boyfriend before him and will have nothing to do with the men who come after him. how anyone can think otherwise is probably not mature enough to be having sex themselves.
Name these basic principles of ethics towards which you so vaguely gesture, if you would.
i love this bullshit about “using another person’s body for one’s own pleasure”, too. the least satisfying sex i’d ever had was with my first boyfriend who did just that. we were together for 5 years. and my friends love to regale me of stories of hot one night stands where the guy simply did not give up …. being there for them.
a jerk is a jerk is a jerk. if he’s jerk, he’s going to be a jerk about sex. relationship status or slutting around. you make a couple mistakes, you set a few guidelines, and you *live*.
i love the last paragraph of the book review:
The question remains after all these years: Why should sex have an everlasting warranty of love attached to it? Sex is the ultimate risk, a risk that makes human relationships complicated, intoxicating and wonderful. It is a risk that women are finally allowed to take without being chastised for it.
I wish the hostility weren’t there.
I wish the hostility in your comment wasn’t there, either. But it is; hastily wrapping it in Oh It’s Just My Opinion and Why Oh Why Must You Be So Defensive? fools nobody. (And paging Aristotle or Kant isn’t gonna do it either.)
You admit that you really don’t know much about this whole “casual” sex thing, that you’re guessing, it seems to you, etc. etc. So, yes, you’re simply throwing out random slut-shaming. Is there any point other than congratulating yourself on your morally superior way of fucking?
This seems like a great time to focus on re-directing the debate away from regarding ‘raunch culture’ and ‘modesty’ as opposites (or worse, attitudes we must choose between), and towards acknowledging them as two sides of the same coin. Both treat a woman as a commodity, the function of which lies in being a man’s sexual receptacle, the only difference being that the former places the value on recreational, the latter on procreational sex.
In raunch/porn/hyper-sexualized culture the most valuable woman is the one the most men want to have sex with the most badly. A woman who is not desired, or who removes herself from the competition, is treated as valueless. In abstinence-glorifying/purity-ball-attending/burqua-wearing/genital-mutilating cultures a valuable woman is one who is likely to bear a man offspring that he will not doubt is his.
Both treat a woman’s own sexuality as at best inconsequential, at worst a threat. Both regard a woman as property to be valued according to her sexual usefulness. Our priority should be to insist that mainstream discourse recognise this, and stop trying to hoodwink us into treating the positions as either/or.
So, the logical thing to do would be to be opposed to impersonal sex, to sex that uses another person, to sex that is inherently dehumanizing, rather than to draw an arbitrary line in the sand as to the demographics of the situation.
As people pointed out, marriage (or a long term dating/living arrangement) does not automatically create either intimacy or concern for a partner, nor does the lack of a commitment automatically prevent caring, concern, or intimacy.
If you look carefully, you have a circular argument going. You start from the assumption that marriage or a similar commitment is the inherent good, then from that, cast “casual sex” as everything outside that, mischaracterize the two positions, and then, magically, arrive back where you started.
Yeah, what Peter H. said. And I’m a bit confused about what you’re doing with Kant there, wussyderder; the second formulation of the CI permits us treat people as means to our own ends so long as doing so doesn’t violate treating them as ends in themselves (hence the ‘only’). Paying the bus driver to take me from A to B is treating that driver as a means to an end. Making an appointment with the vet to give my dog her booster injections is treating both the vet and her secretary as a means to an end. Casual sex is treating someone as a means to an end, but if neither party is lying to the other about what they want and how they feel, it’s not any more immoral under those grounds than the previous examples.
Also, while I obviously can’t speak for every sexual encounter out there, I’d suggest that many, many one-night stands aren’t simply about ‘using the other person’s body as a means to [one's own] pleasure’. People are complicated.
[...] nus points for feeling bad for Paris Hilton. Feministe posts a critique of a new book about women and modesty. Iconia has a great take on the “burquini&# [...]
What do quality and durability have to do with each other?
It is a major logical flaw, I think, to start with the presumption that a long marriage is better than a short one. A long marriage can just as easily be a bad one where people can’t get out, rather than a good one where they choose to stay. On the other hand, a short marriage might be a very good one, cut short by the death of a spouse.
The question to determine the quality of marriage in society is not “how long do marriages last?” but “how happy are the people who are married?” A higher divorce rate can result in an increase in the average quality of marriages, since people are able to end bad marriages, and perhaps find better new relationships.
Focusing on marriage length as the sole indicator of “quality” is a fallacy of those who want to restrict divorce, and keeping wives subordinate to and dependant on their husbands. It fits with the same agenda as restricting abortion and birth control – a woman is punished for sex by being stuck for life with whomever she chooses to first have sex with.
This is pretty close to the worst place to argue in favor of the sacramentization of sexual intercourse (which I happen to agree with). Most strains of Young Adult Feminism(tm) explicitly embrace the desacramentalization of sex, with the goal of making it as commonplace and lacking in gravitas as getting drunk (there’s not much respect for abstention from alcohol, either). Most adherents take that view as an article of faith not to be challenged, which is why you caught so much crap from the acolytes. Your sort of neoapostasy is the road less taken, but will be freely demonized by the true believers. Good luck.
Okay, there are a few things I’d like to say. I did so much thinking about this today and realized how complex of an issue this is. I will almost certainly have a post related to this in the (hopefully) near-future.
I also hadn’t intended to write this, but I am incredibly surprised at all the hatred. I’m a fellow feminist, people! I don’t promote hatred, but the anger in some of these posts is something I’d expect to see directed at a woman-hater, not someone who brought up a flawed argument against casual sex. It’s not like I came here and trolled or anything. It’s not like I wrote “Oh yeah, women should be allowed more casual sex so I can fuck more of them.” Please, everyone, there will always be different views within feminism, but sometimes we simply have to agree to disagree and focus on what really matters: the oppression of the patriarchy. And on that note, I’d like to apologize openly to mythago. The passive-aggressive tone in my second comment is inexcusable. But please, this is a call to everyone: stop putting fellow feminists in the same group as our enemies. This is the first time it’s happened to me, but not the first time I’ve seen it. We will always have disagreements, but we can’t let that destroy us.
I hope to address orlando and Peter properly, but I simply cannot right now. But, briefly, orlando, you actually brought up an issue I thought of today, and I’m glad you did. Peter, thank you for respectfully pointing out one flaw in my argument. There are many others which I definitely plan to address in the future post of mine I mentioned.
And your point? Does that somehow excuse you from all criticism? You show up on a blog (where you do not appear to be familiar at all with the culture), throw out poorly formed arguments, patronize a large portion of the readership, and then dismiss everyone else as hostile. And yet somehow calling yourself a feminist means we can forget all that because there’s still a patriarchy.
Also, I’d expect a fellow feminist to know when her arguments bear more than a passing resemblance to trolling.
Isn’t that an oxymoron?
Mostly, I lurk here. When I do put words down, sometimes I don’t agree with what other people say. They tell me why they don’t agree with me. When a poster makes assertions (that casual sex is risker than monogamy in terms of STI infections, that casual sex is somehow a base form of pleasure, devoid of meaning and ‘specialness’), people challenge the assertions.
I must say I was never taught that sex was meaningless or that causal sex was wonderful. In my years of exposure to popular culture (I’m in my mid twenties, in college, the type of person supposedly susceptible to ‘raunch culture’, or ‘hookup culture’), I never really got the message that casual sex was the expected social norm. I did get the message that monogamy was preferable to casual sex.
I’ve never had casual sex. I don’t think I’m missing out on anything. I could be. Maybe my monogamous lifestyle isn’t the end all and be all. I’ve never tried anything different. I don’t have any firsthand evidence that causal sex is less intimate than sex that occurs in a monogamous relationship. I do have a friend that had a casual sex in her younger years, and has not regretted it. She’s happily married, and now a mother. Thats secondhand, anecdotal evidence. Kind of like Shalit’s book, as far as I’m concerned.
I think a lot of hand wringing goes back to trust. People don’t trust women to make choices for themselves. From abortion, to sex before marriage, or casual sex, or having children, or daycare…the list goes on and on. They try to interject their own opinions into discussion as to what women should do with their lives. Sometimes these people are women, sometimes they are not. They tend to have lousy reasoning for their opinions, as if feminists can’t poke holes in their logic (or lack therof). I am as moral, as ethical and have just as much of a right to make decisions for myself as anyone else. Even if I have casual sex, never marry, the birth rate falls and (pick whichever fear mongering topic du jour that is blamed on women), the choices are mine to make.
I don’t comment often here (and I may be overstepping my boundaries), but I will say this:
Wussy, I personally don’t care how you think people should behave in terms of casual sex.I don’t hate you, and I’m not angry with you. I think your reasoning and assumptions are lousy, and apparently some of the other people here did too. The comments for this post did a good job at pointing that out. If you read more than you comment, you may learn something.
[...] gtog July 24th, 2007 in sexuality. Great comment in a thread over at Feministe about yet [...]
Wussyderder, if you’re confused about why you’re getting so much hostility, take another look at this passage:
Consider a sensual experience that you enjoy — listening to music, say, or eating a well-cooked meal. How would you respond if someone told you that your enjoyment of that experience diminished you to the state of an animal?
Setting aside everything else you said, and all the reasons why people are justifiably more sensitive when you slam them for their sexual choices than for their musical taste, this was a tremendously obnoxious thing to say. And when you were called on it, you refused to apologize.
When you accuse people of behaving like animals “who are not capable of higher thought,” you shouldn’t be surprised when you get a less-than-friendly response.
I really don’t understand why you would want people to constantly regard sex as something sacred.
I’ve had sex in a committed, loving relationship, and yeah it was pretty damn special. I’ve also had casual sex. Was it as special? No. But the fact was, I wanted sex, I didn’t have anyone I was in love with, and frankly I was in no emotional state to be in love anyway–had I been in a relationship at the time, it would have been a seriously bad call for me, emotionally. So I had some fun. We were both respectful. We both had a better night for the experience.
Like… seriously. If you only ever want to have sex in a loving committed relationship, that is great for you. There was a time when I felt the same way, and this isn’t some “but I saw the light thing” because I suspect there will be another point in my life when I feel that way again. How we relate to sex doesn’t have to stay the same throughout our lives. Sex is, to me, what you make of it.
And again, sometimes, you don’t have a relationship, or you don’t want a relationship, and you still want sex. What is the big deal?
I think if something is pleasurable and fun, and doesn’t hurt anyone, I honestly can’t see any reason not to do it.
Brooklynite,
Thank you for pointing out the likely cause of why I probably pissed so many people off. This was actually an irrelevant statement to use, considering I meant it to pertain to people who solely live based on their senses, with no thought whatsoever. Just because a person engages in casual sex does not mean they do not pursue higher thought. It was a mistake to include this.
MJ,
I read all of the comments and found some great personal stories that refuted my (poor) argument. Rachel, for example, comparing sex with her boyfriend to a man she had casual sex with. My reasoning and assumptions were very lousy, and I certainly regret commenting here without putting proper thought into it first.
evil_fizz,
I don’t at all expect to be exempt from criticism! I love constructive criticism! I simply feel there were too many personal attacks to make me feel comfortable at all. Was I asking for it? Perhaps.
All-in-all, I regret making those comments (especially the second). They were rushed as I was ending a 12-hour shift and I was anxious to leave. Does this excuse it? No. I have learned, however, that rushing comments and thought is simply not the way to go about things. My argument was incredibly lousy and offensive. I’m not sure if I agree with casual sex just yet, but I’ve certainly come up with some new ideas today that I hadn’t thought of previously. I don’t expect a second chance from any of you. If you happen to come across my post pertaining to this in the future, great. I offer my apologies to those I have most obviously offended, even if I had no intention of ever doing so. This has experience alone has offered me much to learn.
But, in regards to the issue at hand, I don’t believe I made an error in deciding to use ethics to back my argument. The problem is with how I used them. There are most certainly ethical approaches that would support casual sex. In addition, I failed to acknowledge how complex an issue sex itself is. I would like to address my errors. Until then, I got off to a bad start with all of you and I would hope all can be (eventually) forgotten. Happy posting.
Aw, crap, I hate posting something I forgot.
September Blue,
Your post reflects exactly what I was talking about when I chose to leave certain things out of my ethical arguments. Good job for pointing it out.