The thing is, sex positivity was never meant to be a consistent sexual ethic. It was meant to be a permission structure to get rid of guilt for defying Christian or Christendom's sexual ethic, and now that those are more or less gone, it's also conveniently a hammer to hit all the nails of people we don't like.
It turns out that consensual pre marital sex often doesn’t make people happy. Either individually and/or because of the sexual market dynamics it creates. Sexual freedom was supposed to be cool and we were all supposed to get laid. Instead we got less sex, fewer marriages, fewer children, etc.
Feminisms answer is that we didn’t do consent hard enough. Just gotta try harder. Maybe it’s the flow chart above but more honestly it seems to mean “I can punish anyone I want whenever I want based on how I feel and change my mind whenever I want”.
Religions answer is that if you want good sex (or family or community or whatever) chastity is the best bet. No shortcuts. You give up short term nutting for better long term equilibriums. Based on the data this assessment is correct.
I fully believe that you can have a consistent sexual ethic that's sex-positive. I would consider my own sexual ethics to be sex-positive and consistent. It's just that feminism as a movement has no internal selective pressure to keep its ideas coherent, so as Caplan says, they're completely open to regarding sex as suspect when it's convenient to the movement.
Feminists don't gain clout when they stand up for sex positivity in the face of another feminist's tenuous rape accusation. That's a major problem for the movement.
Hey, at least the Medievals were sex-positive in the context of marriage!
"It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so) been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children. It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink." -Chesterton
Medievals were procreation-positive, I think that's about it. They basically viewed sex as a means of procreation. Even within marriage, the Catholic Church held (still holds) a very stringent view of what's acceptable.
Many of my religious friends practiced chastity and married young and they are obviously having lots of sex because they all have three or four kids in pretty quick order.
Data seems to indicate that the vast majority of sex happens in long term relationships, especially marriages. Self assessment of sexual satisfaction seems to show that people with fewer lifetime partners are more satisfied. In fact those that have only slept with one person are particularly satisfied and have lots of other good life outcomes.
Hookup culture is good for increasing partner count, but not for increasing sex in the aggregate.
Basically, consent culture gave up hookup culture and hookup culture is an inferior equilibrium to chastity. Feminism seeks to solve this by drastically increases female power but I see no reason this would fix the underlying problem.
One possible alternative angle here. Is the long-term relationship advantage about sexual behavior per se, or is it contingent on its utility of providing support for the woman in case of baby?
Our modern family-farm/urban/commercial situation leaves us somewhat isolated as individuals in the absence of strict marital bonds, but not all societies have been this way. The earlier style was probably more communal, in which people lived in extended kinship groups that were flexibly collective because work rather than property was the primary economic value. In this type of situation, a woman with children would always be supported within her own family, because her work and her children's loyalty would make them an advantage to that family rather than a burden.
In a more primitive situation like this, wouldn't hookup culture and serial monogamy be quite satisfactory for both sex and reproduction? The woman and her children would lose neither status nor support from her having her children from who-knows-where, because her social and economic support base is always in her extended family, to which she contributes by having children that join it. A long-term husband would not be necessary to her, and both she and the local rakes could have sex without economic anxiety however they wished. This might be more satisfying to both than our current situation in which a responsible husband is a critically important asset to the woman.
Pre-contact societies in the Americas, Oceania, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in pre-literate societies in Eurasia and the Middle East some thousands of years ago, would be where to look for this sort of situation. The fact that we have to fight so hard to defend marriage from looser sorts of sexuality suggests that permanent monogamy is not humanity's basic and original mode.
"suggests that permanent monogamy is not humanity's basic and original mode"
"Basic and original" does a lot of work here. A lot of basic and original human instincts aren't what we would consider "good" or "adaptive to modern environments."
It's precisely in those societies that promoted monogamy and the nuclear family that developed modern WIERD society and its immense increase in human welfare. It is perhaps possible that such institutions conflict with what we might see in different contexts across time and place, but those different contexts didn't give us indoor plumbing, antibiotics, and a millennia long decrease in overall rates violence. I have no doubt sexuality in Africa is more free today, but they also can't keep the lights on!
If a woman can receive support without a husband she will often choose not to have a husband. Women in the bottom 1/2 or so of our society can benefit as much from marrying the state and marrying a husband, and husbands earnings in the lower middle class are often taxed at 100% marginal rates. As such marriage has completely broken down in the lower classes. However, far from leading to some sexual commune utopia, its basically turned people into animals. The women engage in a series of short term relationships with whoever catches their fancy, and the men usually end up leaving and sometimes beating the women and her children. Turns out no strings support from far away bureaucracies simply unleashes the worst instincts in people.
The upper classes avoided this by delaying marriage until the women is old enough she feels forced to settle down with what she could get and not later seek divorce, but by then there is not much fertility left and so they have well below replacement fertility. At least those on the left (that traditionally support sexual freedom).
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, except with extending the argument to a truism governing the matter through all time and space. I think what you say is valid, in general, for family-farm/urban/commercial societies such as those that most of us on a computer live in today.
In such a non-communal, property-based society, a woman is terribly dependent upon her husband for supporting her children, and he is reciprocally dependent upon her chastity and loyalty to keep him from investing his work and bit of property in support of children that aren't his.
A strict marriage ethic, plus love and capacity, can keep both partners' respective prime directives met. But absent love or capacity, it can become a miserable cage in which the failure or default of one member means failure for the other one as well. Requiring the potential partners to delay marriage until sufficient property and position is obtained can also preclude fertility, as you point out.
Marriage has its problems. Strict, institutional monogamy is probably fairly new for our species, and some of us apparently haven't got there yet. I'm not arguing against it though, because it is likely the only sustainable sexual strategy for a society that is comprehensively dependent upon property. Societies that are still dependent on communal kinship cooperatives in which resources are fairly open to all, are probably fine with more sexual freedom without the problems that come with strict monogamy.
I think a communal society such as you speculate about would be less productive. Most men would have little incentive to work absent wife and children.
Animals have instinctual survival knowledge and motivations. Without an ideal, man is more destructive than animals. However, we need ideals from the focused, not unfocused, mind.
TFR (Total Fertility Rate) in the US is down to about 1.6 and dropping. I suspect that men’s legitimate fear of being accused of sexual coercion is a significant contributor.
Everyone blames falling birth rates on the thing they already hate. I think it's one of those issues where it would do everyone an immense amount of good to discard their priors and look at the data.
In this post, Bryan Caplan, says two of the my favorite things I've ever heard him say:
1) Stepwise affirmative consent is the "chastity belt version of Zeno's paradox." (Philosophy teachers should teach Zeno that way.)
2) The idea that the "Power Levels should be balanced" is nonsensical because A) They are never balanced, and B) It's the inequality itself which is erotic. Egalitarianism is not erotic.
On 2, I've never understood this apparently super common view, assumed to be totally self-evident so often. Power imbalances *can* be erotic but eroticism need not involve them, or involve their predominance in the consciousness of the participants. The existence and recent clear prevalence of kink is not dispositive to the contrary.
The biological truth might be distracted by political ideology, but here's the argument: In hetero sex, the males and females are attracted by their opposites. Usually the male is bigger/stronger/aggressive. The female is smaller/weaker/submissive. Males are attracted to Females whom are "very female." Females are attracted to males who are "very male."
You mention "kink." A kinky version of this is where the woman is bigger/stronger/more aggressive, maybe richer, and the man is "weaker" in some, or all of those qualities. The woman's greater power is actually arousing to the man. And to the woman, her feeling of being stronger, and more in control than the male, is actually arousing to her. This is called "Femdom" (Female Dominant). This erotic interplay of power, dominance, and submission is part of "S & M."
That can be true, but there are plenty of other options as well. And while some people take that position to be a part of their identity, which might stand in a power relation to the other identity, there are plenty that don’t.
Like most contemporary people, usually when I’m interested in sex, it’s for mutual enjoyment with the person I’m with, and the perpetuation of the species isn’t particularly relevant for what I’m doing. It’s a nice benefit that the perpetuation of the species happens as a byproduct of this activity from many people, but very unfortunate that thinking about mutual benefit seems to be having this negative effect on the perpetuation of the species role it’s playing.
I've read Paglia. I don't think her argument is dispositive proof that this is how it's necessarily experienced by sexual partners, or that there's some other "existential aspect" short of experience that defines these things to be this way in some important objective sense.
There seems to be a confusion here between some facts about biology and evolution and evolutionary psychology to do with mating and protection and roles women and men therefore play, and the experience of sex itself and other interactive experiential things that are connected to that, which may or may not reflect the evolutionary facts and recognition of them, to varying degrees or ways, and may also reflect other aspects. The interpretation is up to the parties involved, bound by the proclivities of the individuals in question to some extent.
It's a more involved and compelling reification exercise than something that Judith Butler or whoever would engage in, but it's still a reification exercise.
I would argue that here you are conflating egalitarianism with sameness. Sure, sexual dimorphism is hot, but you can have sexual dimorphism within a relationship built on mutual respect (or even - deeply unfashionable though the notion is - love) between two partners who see each others as equals.
Sexual relations are ultra-subtle and instantly changable. I woke up at 5am with a woman I loved . She wanted to be driven home instantly. I told her that I was sleepy and would drive her home a little later. She left instantly. And later we were together again. What rules should have guided me here?! Feminism is more than wrong. Its bizarrely unrealistic, more fit for a dystopian movie or Monty Python, maybe Benny Hill.
I think the meaningful delta between radfems (the position Caplan outlines here) and the mainstream is where a culturally influential version of sex positivity exists (i.e. acceptance of casual sex and hookup culture among adults). This discussion kind of sets that whole thing to the side, missing Perry's point.
Most sex (and most other good things) happen in committed long term relationships, especially marraige. Hookup cultures increase partner count, but not the amount of sex in total. It’s essentially sex negative compared to the alternative of chastity + marraige.
Trying to disentangle sex from committed relationships is a fools errand doomed to fail, but we are supposed to pretend otherwise as long as we invoke “consent”.
I think your view of "most sex" is representative of the median experience of people. It is certainly true that a majority of sexual activity occurs in monogamous settings. This is potentially more a function of logistics rather than preference though. There are things that cut against this picture of things: 40% of births occur outside of marriage, non-paternity rate between 2-10%, an unknown level of infidelity, and no-fault divorce/serial monogamy common practices. The other issue here is that the distribution of casual or NSA sex is power-law distributed so for a certain group of men the sexual liberation does mean regular access to casual sex (sometimes or often while they're in relationships, i.e. facultative polygyny). Plenty of women are swept into the high status male's ambit so though it may be an infrequent experience for these women, they're still psychologically and culturally affected by this dynamic (i.e. intra-sexual competition more or less compels their consent to this).
Just wondered - the two final examples of power imbalance referenced 'a worker & her boss and a rich old guy & younger college student'... the implication is obvious - male dominance over females, not saying it doesn't happen but a better choice of examples might have been more respectful...
I have met a few women who practiced this approach almost verbatim.
I noticed the common thread for them was either having some sort of sexual trauma in their past OR being on the spectrum. The sexual trauma connection seems obvious, but as for those on the spectrum, they benefited because they don’t / can’t read their partners subtle cues as to whether they’re consenting or not, so they need explicit verbal confirmations at every step of the way.
I would point out that the majority of sex happens in marriage. Back in the day, regular access to sex was one of the benefits of marriage, as was the cost savings of living together. In that context, active consent was not so necessary.
In today’s dating environment, sex ceases to be a reason for marriage and neither is living together. In this world marriage isn’t really discussed until couples already married in the common law sense consider making it official because they are ready to settle down and perhaps have a sensible number of children.
60-70 years ago that wasn’t how it was done. Then you married into order to live together and have regular sex and the children came along when they did. This worked because American economic policy was designed to make America a place when young couples could financially manage to grow a family like this. Policy changed in the 1960’s and 1970’s and especially in the 1980’s to make the American economy no longer conducive to family formation and we have progressively had less of it.
The four questions are very useful in the way you put them and at a meta level. So we shouldn't just be asking each of those questions but also making sure there's mutual understanding of each consenting party's mental model of each question and the degree of importance they put on each one. I don't think you need to be a robot for this to work properly, just need clear communication (often non-verbal).
Also, this is well written but I think it's worth distinguishing between commenting on the motivations of feminist groups and general thoughts on how society or gender relations should ideally function. The overall point of this post isn't fully clear. If your point is simply that feminism is sex-negative, it feels incomplete. There's a lot of persuasive low hanging fruit going unsaid, unless that wasn't the point.
(6/21 edit: I just realized I partially misunderstood the flowchart. I didn't realize that answering 'no' to any question meant every other question was suspect. I suppose that is a fair way to characterize certain feminists or feminist leaning types. If the point of this article was commentary on that type of thinking, fair enough.)
The non-verbal part is the entire issue. Thats how the vast, VAST majority of sexual encounters happen. But to a lot of these folks, even if she lays down and literally pulls you on top of her, if she didn't say "yes, I want to have sex", it's still suspect.
Some even take it further and have some bizarre logic where you need to keep asking DURING sex, like thats not going to absolutely kill basically an real life encounter
Incidentally this is why hookups are so bad. People who have never had sex with each other before are generally *really bad* at reading each others' body language, which is why so many people (particularly women) feel used after a hookup.
Normalise monogamy - not only does it lead to more sex, but also *better* sex.
I would say normalize monogamist lifestyle. I've had many American born friends who from a young age were afraid of not only being with one woman forever but also sharing finances, having children, long term planning, career entrenchment etc. Other immigrants like myself feared some of these things too but friends born and raised in the US had an irrational vision of how vastly different their lives would be once they started doing those things and it scared them.
Still a common phrase: "once you have kids your life is over". My response: "Life is always changing, that's a change that's bigger than others but on its own still not very big in the grand scheme of things." I base this on the many couples that I've known before and after they had children and their lives are not over.
I don't think anyone is being serious when they say the thing about kids meaning your life over. Surely it's a joke that nobody believes is literally true?
This relates to motivation in my original comment. If you have a personal agenda then you're going to frame sexual encounters in a way that serves your agenda regardless of what steps were taken to ensure consent. If, however, we're detachedly discussing social norms I think mutual agreement on the standard of consent (whether asking during sex, through text message or a wink) is important.
Women are afraid that if they ask for commitment before sex the man might move on to another women who will put out more easily. So they have sex with men hoping they can turn that sex into a long term pair bond.
Sometimes that doesn’t happen and they are upset about it. Some would like the punish the man they are upset with.
Maybe punishing the man will reduces cads, but that seems speculative at best.
The equilibrium of “some other girl will put out if you don’t” puts pressure on women to have sex more freely than they would like, because they are competing with other women and there is uncertainty whether sex will lead to commitment.
“Consent” does little to alleviate this tension. The woman “consented” to sex in the hope of commitment and didn’t get it. She (sort of) knew the risk but it still stings.
The only way to prevent people from having sex for commitment reasons that doesn’t end in commitment is to have a formal path to commitment that both people agree to before sex (like marriage).
If you think the value of non commital sex is low, this isn’t a big sacrifice. If you think it’s high then it is.
A lot of assumptions there. People are different and at different places and points in time.
The best I can hope for is people are able to mingle freely and with mutually beneficial outcomes. I'll make one assumption, personal beliefs will inform preferred degree of intimacy so my advice would be something like: have an understanding of the personal beliefs of your chosen companions whether it's sexual partner, best friend or online discussion groups.
I don't think a person is morally deficient just because they can't follow a "flow chart, Venn diagram, or any other measuring stick." That doesn't mean they "don't care what others think, believe that rules are for others" etc.. They may just have a learning disability, or have way below after intelligence.
Which brings us to another interesting question. Is there a minimum intelligence level for humans to have sex? I got news for you . . . On historical and evolutionary levels, that minimum intelligence level is low. But one might need a graduate degree intelligence to properly check off all the consent levels in the flow chart above . . . which is why it's unnatural, and inhuman.
The thing is, sex positivity was never meant to be a consistent sexual ethic. It was meant to be a permission structure to get rid of guilt for defying Christian or Christendom's sexual ethic, and now that those are more or less gone, it's also conveniently a hammer to hit all the nails of people we don't like.
+1
It turns out that consensual pre marital sex often doesn’t make people happy. Either individually and/or because of the sexual market dynamics it creates. Sexual freedom was supposed to be cool and we were all supposed to get laid. Instead we got less sex, fewer marriages, fewer children, etc.
Feminisms answer is that we didn’t do consent hard enough. Just gotta try harder. Maybe it’s the flow chart above but more honestly it seems to mean “I can punish anyone I want whenever I want based on how I feel and change my mind whenever I want”.
Religions answer is that if you want good sex (or family or community or whatever) chastity is the best bet. No shortcuts. You give up short term nutting for better long term equilibriums. Based on the data this assessment is correct.
I fully believe that you can have a consistent sexual ethic that's sex-positive. I would consider my own sexual ethics to be sex-positive and consistent. It's just that feminism as a movement has no internal selective pressure to keep its ideas coherent, so as Caplan says, they're completely open to regarding sex as suspect when it's convenient to the movement.
Feminists don't gain clout when they stand up for sex positivity in the face of another feminist's tenuous rape accusation. That's a major problem for the movement.
I think you could attempt to create such an ethic. I have not experienced such that I am aware of.
Hey, at least the Medievals were sex-positive in the context of marriage!
"It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so) been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children. It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink." -Chesterton
Medievals were procreation-positive, I think that's about it. They basically viewed sex as a means of procreation. Even within marriage, the Catholic Church held (still holds) a very stringent view of what's acceptable.
Where does encouraged celibacy and discouraging procreation outside of marriage fit into your “I think that’s about it” view of the medievals?
Many of my religious friends practiced chastity and married young and they are obviously having lots of sex because they all have three or four kids in pretty quick order.
Data seems to indicate that the vast majority of sex happens in long term relationships, especially marriages. Self assessment of sexual satisfaction seems to show that people with fewer lifetime partners are more satisfied. In fact those that have only slept with one person are particularly satisfied and have lots of other good life outcomes.
Hookup culture is good for increasing partner count, but not for increasing sex in the aggregate.
Basically, consent culture gave up hookup culture and hookup culture is an inferior equilibrium to chastity. Feminism seeks to solve this by drastically increases female power but I see no reason this would fix the underlying problem.
One possible alternative angle here. Is the long-term relationship advantage about sexual behavior per se, or is it contingent on its utility of providing support for the woman in case of baby?
Our modern family-farm/urban/commercial situation leaves us somewhat isolated as individuals in the absence of strict marital bonds, but not all societies have been this way. The earlier style was probably more communal, in which people lived in extended kinship groups that were flexibly collective because work rather than property was the primary economic value. In this type of situation, a woman with children would always be supported within her own family, because her work and her children's loyalty would make them an advantage to that family rather than a burden.
In a more primitive situation like this, wouldn't hookup culture and serial monogamy be quite satisfactory for both sex and reproduction? The woman and her children would lose neither status nor support from her having her children from who-knows-where, because her social and economic support base is always in her extended family, to which she contributes by having children that join it. A long-term husband would not be necessary to her, and both she and the local rakes could have sex without economic anxiety however they wished. This might be more satisfying to both than our current situation in which a responsible husband is a critically important asset to the woman.
Pre-contact societies in the Americas, Oceania, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in pre-literate societies in Eurasia and the Middle East some thousands of years ago, would be where to look for this sort of situation. The fact that we have to fight so hard to defend marriage from looser sorts of sexuality suggests that permanent monogamy is not humanity's basic and original mode.
"suggests that permanent monogamy is not humanity's basic and original mode"
"Basic and original" does a lot of work here. A lot of basic and original human instincts aren't what we would consider "good" or "adaptive to modern environments."
It's precisely in those societies that promoted monogamy and the nuclear family that developed modern WIERD society and its immense increase in human welfare. It is perhaps possible that such institutions conflict with what we might see in different contexts across time and place, but those different contexts didn't give us indoor plumbing, antibiotics, and a millennia long decrease in overall rates violence. I have no doubt sexuality in Africa is more free today, but they also can't keep the lights on!
If a woman can receive support without a husband she will often choose not to have a husband. Women in the bottom 1/2 or so of our society can benefit as much from marrying the state and marrying a husband, and husbands earnings in the lower middle class are often taxed at 100% marginal rates. As such marriage has completely broken down in the lower classes. However, far from leading to some sexual commune utopia, its basically turned people into animals. The women engage in a series of short term relationships with whoever catches their fancy, and the men usually end up leaving and sometimes beating the women and her children. Turns out no strings support from far away bureaucracies simply unleashes the worst instincts in people.
The upper classes avoided this by delaying marriage until the women is old enough she feels forced to settle down with what she could get and not later seek divorce, but by then there is not much fertility left and so they have well below replacement fertility. At least those on the left (that traditionally support sexual freedom).
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, except with extending the argument to a truism governing the matter through all time and space. I think what you say is valid, in general, for family-farm/urban/commercial societies such as those that most of us on a computer live in today.
In such a non-communal, property-based society, a woman is terribly dependent upon her husband for supporting her children, and he is reciprocally dependent upon her chastity and loyalty to keep him from investing his work and bit of property in support of children that aren't his.
A strict marriage ethic, plus love and capacity, can keep both partners' respective prime directives met. But absent love or capacity, it can become a miserable cage in which the failure or default of one member means failure for the other one as well. Requiring the potential partners to delay marriage until sufficient property and position is obtained can also preclude fertility, as you point out.
Marriage has its problems. Strict, institutional monogamy is probably fairly new for our species, and some of us apparently haven't got there yet. I'm not arguing against it though, because it is likely the only sustainable sexual strategy for a society that is comprehensively dependent upon property. Societies that are still dependent on communal kinship cooperatives in which resources are fairly open to all, are probably fine with more sexual freedom without the problems that come with strict monogamy.
I think a communal society such as you speculate about would be less productive. Most men would have little incentive to work absent wife and children.
Flowcharts don’t work for most people in real life.
Mystical values are unrealistic.
Without an ideal to strive towards, how are we different from animals? And if we aren't different from animals, why worry about things like ethics?
Animals have instinctual survival knowledge and motivations. Without an ideal, man is more destructive than animals. However, we need ideals from the focused, not unfocused, mind.
Virtue Of Selfishness-Ayn Rand
DIM Hypothesis-Leonard Peikoff.
TFR (Total Fertility Rate) in the US is down to about 1.6 and dropping. I suspect that men’s legitimate fear of being accused of sexual coercion is a significant contributor.
Everyone blames falling birth rates on the thing they already hate. I think it's one of those issues where it would do everyone an immense amount of good to discard their priors and look at the data.
My understanding is that it's even lower in Japan, which is less feminist.
In this post, Bryan Caplan, says two of the my favorite things I've ever heard him say:
1) Stepwise affirmative consent is the "chastity belt version of Zeno's paradox." (Philosophy teachers should teach Zeno that way.)
2) The idea that the "Power Levels should be balanced" is nonsensical because A) They are never balanced, and B) It's the inequality itself which is erotic. Egalitarianism is not erotic.
Agree on 1
On 2, I've never understood this apparently super common view, assumed to be totally self-evident so often. Power imbalances *can* be erotic but eroticism need not involve them, or involve their predominance in the consciousness of the participants. The existence and recent clear prevalence of kink is not dispositive to the contrary.
The biological truth might be distracted by political ideology, but here's the argument: In hetero sex, the males and females are attracted by their opposites. Usually the male is bigger/stronger/aggressive. The female is smaller/weaker/submissive. Males are attracted to Females whom are "very female." Females are attracted to males who are "very male."
You mention "kink." A kinky version of this is where the woman is bigger/stronger/more aggressive, maybe richer, and the man is "weaker" in some, or all of those qualities. The woman's greater power is actually arousing to the man. And to the woman, her feeling of being stronger, and more in control than the male, is actually arousing to her. This is called "Femdom" (Female Dominant). This erotic interplay of power, dominance, and submission is part of "S & M."
The sex historian, and social critic, Camille Paglia, covers this in detail in her opus, "Sexual Personae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Personae.
Bryan Caplan's buddy, Tyler Cowen, interviewed her on his podcast: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/camille-paglia/
Yes, straight sex always involves a power imbalance. It is much more convenient to be gay.
Even in gay sex, there's a top and a bottom.
That can be true, but there are plenty of other options as well. And while some people take that position to be a part of their identity, which might stand in a power relation to the other identity, there are plenty that don’t.
Convenient for invoking liberal progressive pieties. Not so convenient for the perpetuation of the species.
Like most contemporary people, usually when I’m interested in sex, it’s for mutual enjoyment with the person I’m with, and the perpetuation of the species isn’t particularly relevant for what I’m doing. It’s a nice benefit that the perpetuation of the species happens as a byproduct of this activity from many people, but very unfortunate that thinking about mutual benefit seems to be having this negative effect on the perpetuation of the species role it’s playing.
I've read Paglia. I don't think her argument is dispositive proof that this is how it's necessarily experienced by sexual partners, or that there's some other "existential aspect" short of experience that defines these things to be this way in some important objective sense.
There seems to be a confusion here between some facts about biology and evolution and evolutionary psychology to do with mating and protection and roles women and men therefore play, and the experience of sex itself and other interactive experiential things that are connected to that, which may or may not reflect the evolutionary facts and recognition of them, to varying degrees or ways, and may also reflect other aspects. The interpretation is up to the parties involved, bound by the proclivities of the individuals in question to some extent.
It's a more involved and compelling reification exercise than something that Judith Butler or whoever would engage in, but it's still a reification exercise.
I would argue that here you are conflating egalitarianism with sameness. Sure, sexual dimorphism is hot, but you can have sexual dimorphism within a relationship built on mutual respect (or even - deeply unfashionable though the notion is - love) between two partners who see each others as equals.
Sexual relations are ultra-subtle and instantly changable. I woke up at 5am with a woman I loved . She wanted to be driven home instantly. I told her that I was sleepy and would drive her home a little later. She left instantly. And later we were together again. What rules should have guided me here?! Feminism is more than wrong. Its bizarrely unrealistic, more fit for a dystopian movie or Monty Python, maybe Benny Hill.
I think the meaningful delta between radfems (the position Caplan outlines here) and the mainstream is where a culturally influential version of sex positivity exists (i.e. acceptance of casual sex and hookup culture among adults). This discussion kind of sets that whole thing to the side, missing Perry's point.
Most sex (and most other good things) happen in committed long term relationships, especially marraige. Hookup cultures increase partner count, but not the amount of sex in total. It’s essentially sex negative compared to the alternative of chastity + marraige.
Trying to disentangle sex from committed relationships is a fools errand doomed to fail, but we are supposed to pretend otherwise as long as we invoke “consent”.
I think your view of "most sex" is representative of the median experience of people. It is certainly true that a majority of sexual activity occurs in monogamous settings. This is potentially more a function of logistics rather than preference though. There are things that cut against this picture of things: 40% of births occur outside of marriage, non-paternity rate between 2-10%, an unknown level of infidelity, and no-fault divorce/serial monogamy common practices. The other issue here is that the distribution of casual or NSA sex is power-law distributed so for a certain group of men the sexual liberation does mean regular access to casual sex (sometimes or often while they're in relationships, i.e. facultative polygyny). Plenty of women are swept into the high status male's ambit so though it may be an infrequent experience for these women, they're still psychologically and culturally affected by this dynamic (i.e. intra-sexual competition more or less compels their consent to this).
Just wondered - the two final examples of power imbalance referenced 'a worker & her boss and a rich old guy & younger college student'... the implication is obvious - male dominance over females, not saying it doesn't happen but a better choice of examples might have been more respectful...
I have met a few women who practiced this approach almost verbatim.
I noticed the common thread for them was either having some sort of sexual trauma in their past OR being on the spectrum. The sexual trauma connection seems obvious, but as for those on the spectrum, they benefited because they don’t / can’t read their partners subtle cues as to whether they’re consenting or not, so they need explicit verbal confirmations at every step of the way.
I would point out that the majority of sex happens in marriage. Back in the day, regular access to sex was one of the benefits of marriage, as was the cost savings of living together. In that context, active consent was not so necessary.
In today’s dating environment, sex ceases to be a reason for marriage and neither is living together. In this world marriage isn’t really discussed until couples already married in the common law sense consider making it official because they are ready to settle down and perhaps have a sensible number of children.
60-70 years ago that wasn’t how it was done. Then you married into order to live together and have regular sex and the children came along when they did. This worked because American economic policy was designed to make America a place when young couples could financially manage to grow a family like this. Policy changed in the 1960’s and 1970’s and especially in the 1980’s to make the American economy no longer conducive to family formation and we have progressively had less of it.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/two-visions-of-america-bedford-falls
An interesting article was written about 2004 titled The Australian Eunuch,
https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20050616103619/http://www.kittennews.com/kn_mag/2004mag/01_jan04mag/jamesh_07.htm
The four questions are very useful in the way you put them and at a meta level. So we shouldn't just be asking each of those questions but also making sure there's mutual understanding of each consenting party's mental model of each question and the degree of importance they put on each one. I don't think you need to be a robot for this to work properly, just need clear communication (often non-verbal).
Also, this is well written but I think it's worth distinguishing between commenting on the motivations of feminist groups and general thoughts on how society or gender relations should ideally function. The overall point of this post isn't fully clear. If your point is simply that feminism is sex-negative, it feels incomplete. There's a lot of persuasive low hanging fruit going unsaid, unless that wasn't the point.
(6/21 edit: I just realized I partially misunderstood the flowchart. I didn't realize that answering 'no' to any question meant every other question was suspect. I suppose that is a fair way to characterize certain feminists or feminist leaning types. If the point of this article was commentary on that type of thinking, fair enough.)
The non-verbal part is the entire issue. Thats how the vast, VAST majority of sexual encounters happen. But to a lot of these folks, even if she lays down and literally pulls you on top of her, if she didn't say "yes, I want to have sex", it's still suspect.
Some even take it further and have some bizarre logic where you need to keep asking DURING sex, like thats not going to absolutely kill basically an real life encounter
Incidentally this is why hookups are so bad. People who have never had sex with each other before are generally *really bad* at reading each others' body language, which is why so many people (particularly women) feel used after a hookup.
Normalise monogamy - not only does it lead to more sex, but also *better* sex.
I would say normalize monogamist lifestyle. I've had many American born friends who from a young age were afraid of not only being with one woman forever but also sharing finances, having children, long term planning, career entrenchment etc. Other immigrants like myself feared some of these things too but friends born and raised in the US had an irrational vision of how vastly different their lives would be once they started doing those things and it scared them.
Still a common phrase: "once you have kids your life is over". My response: "Life is always changing, that's a change that's bigger than others but on its own still not very big in the grand scheme of things." I base this on the many couples that I've known before and after they had children and their lives are not over.
I don't think anyone is being serious when they say the thing about kids meaning your life over. Surely it's a joke that nobody believes is literally true?
This relates to motivation in my original comment. If you have a personal agenda then you're going to frame sexual encounters in a way that serves your agenda regardless of what steps were taken to ensure consent. If, however, we're detachedly discussing social norms I think mutual agreement on the standard of consent (whether asking during sex, through text message or a wink) is important.
Woman want sex to result in commitment.
Men don’t want that (sometimes).
Women are afraid that if they ask for commitment before sex the man might move on to another women who will put out more easily. So they have sex with men hoping they can turn that sex into a long term pair bond.
Sometimes that doesn’t happen and they are upset about it. Some would like the punish the man they are upset with.
Maybe punishing the man will reduces cads, but that seems speculative at best.
The equilibrium of “some other girl will put out if you don’t” puts pressure on women to have sex more freely than they would like, because they are competing with other women and there is uncertainty whether sex will lead to commitment.
“Consent” does little to alleviate this tension. The woman “consented” to sex in the hope of commitment and didn’t get it. She (sort of) knew the risk but it still stings.
The only way to prevent people from having sex for commitment reasons that doesn’t end in commitment is to have a formal path to commitment that both people agree to before sex (like marriage).
If you think the value of non commital sex is low, this isn’t a big sacrifice. If you think it’s high then it is.
A lot of assumptions there. People are different and at different places and points in time.
The best I can hope for is people are able to mingle freely and with mutually beneficial outcomes. I'll make one assumption, personal beliefs will inform preferred degree of intimacy so my advice would be something like: have an understanding of the personal beliefs of your chosen companions whether it's sexual partner, best friend or online discussion groups.
I don't think a person is morally deficient just because they can't follow a "flow chart, Venn diagram, or any other measuring stick." That doesn't mean they "don't care what others think, believe that rules are for others" etc.. They may just have a learning disability, or have way below after intelligence.
Which brings us to another interesting question. Is there a minimum intelligence level for humans to have sex? I got news for you . . . On historical and evolutionary levels, that minimum intelligence level is low. But one might need a graduate degree intelligence to properly check off all the consent levels in the flow chart above . . . which is why it's unnatural, and inhuman.