Accepting our monstrosity?

Below is a controversial tweet from the New York Times:

It is advertising an opinion piece by a Canadian writer, Stephen Marche. Most of the reactions to his piece have been along the lines of "this is liberal craziness." I actually believe it is worth reading, not because I agree with Marche, but because Marche is somewhat courageously highlighting a fault line within his own liberal belief system. It's worth trying to understand the point he is making.

Marche makes it clear that he has an extraordinarily negative view of male sexuality:

For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality... 

The masculine libido and its accompanying forces and pathologies drive so much of culture and politics and the economy, while remaining more or less unexamined, both in intellectual circles and in private life...

He goes on to add:

Women are calling for their pain to be recognized. Many men are quite willing to offer this recognition; it means they don’t have to talk about who they are, which means they don’t have to think about what they are.

So this is no surface issue. For Marche this is about something deeply troubling about who and what men are. He goes on to explain why he is so distressed about the nature of men:

Sex is an impediment to any idealism...What if there is no possible reconciliation between the bright clean ideals of gender equality and the mechanisms of human desire? 

So here is the crux of it. Marche is worried that sex does not fit in with liberal ideals of gender equality. And, of course, he is right to be worried, as the two are at odds. I'll deal with the contradiction a little further on. But here's something else that Marche gets right:

Meanwhile, sexual morality, so long resisted by liberals, has returned with a vengeance, albeit under progressive terms. The sensation of righteousness, which social media doles out in ever-diminishing dopamine hits, drives the discussion, but also limits it. Unable to find justice, or even to imagine it, we are returning to shame as our primary social form of sexual control.

This is interesting. Liberals have prided themselves on undermining the older restraints once placed on sexuality. But Marche himself feels ashamed of his own sexuality - and, in fact, if he wants to be a good liberal, then he should feel ashamed, because his own sexuality is inevitably at odds with liberal beliefs about sexual equality.

(I like, too, Marche's admission that liberals thrive on the "sensation of righteousness" doled out by social media, which gives a temporary dopamine hit.)

Marche finishes with this:

The crisis we are approaching is fundamental: How can healthy sexuality ever occur in conditions in which men and women are not equal? How are we supposed to create an equal world when male mechanisms of desire are inherently brutal? We cannot answer these questions unless we face them.

If you want to be a civilized man, you have to consider what you are. Pretending to be something else, some fiction you would prefer to be, cannot help. It is not morality but culture — accepting our monstrosity, reckoning with it — that can save us. If anything can.

He once again squarely faces the issue: male desire is inherently too brutal to fit in with liberal notions of sexual equality. He is not sure if anything can save us from this situation, but he thinks that morality won't do, only men "accepting our monstrosity, reckoning with it" is a tough enough response to the problem.

So what is this "monstrosity" that men have to reckon with? In the liberal ideal, there is no significant difference between men and women apart from the plumbing. Our sex, a predetermined quality, can be made not to matter. Men would simply see women as their "equals"in the sense of treating women the same that they would other men.

But sex is highly sexed. There are moments in sex when the connection to the opposite sex is felt profoundly and meaningfully. We respond to a woman in sex as the desired "other" - we become keenly aware of women as distinct from our own selves, to the point that we can feel that we are participating in a union, physical, emotional and spiritual, of two different expressions of life.

And it gets worse than this for liberals. There is an element in sex of men as the active and aggressive part and women as the responsive and receptive part. And there is an element in sex of men wanting to possess and to be potent.

And when it comes to desire and attraction, we think in terms of men who are commanding - of men who are muscular, self-confident, achieving, strong - with women being drawn to masculine power and status. Men, though, desire women for their softer feminine qualities and their beauty.

If you are a liberal wanting to make our biological sex not matter, how can this not be a problem? Stephen Marche is so upset by it all that he thinks of his own sexuality as monstrous and shameful. He is at war with himself for ruining the prospects of his own political idealism.

Marche could, of course, resolve his dilemma by reconsidering his political ideals in the light of the created nature of men and women. If it is not in the deepest nature of men and women to relate to each other under the terms demanded by liberalism, then perhaps it is liberalism which needs to be re-examined rather than declaring male nature to be monstrous.

Another step in the descent of liberal culture

There have been a couple of images doing the rounds lately on social media. The first is of a satanic-style drag queen reading books to young children in a public library in the U.S.:

The second is of a poster being displayed at train stations in Toronto, Canada, with the campaign title "The sex you want" and showing a picture of a homosexual threesome:

The instinctive reaction most people will have is that exposing children to these images is an attack on their childhood. And yet public authorities clearly believe the opposite - that it is either a good thing, or at least harmless, for the images to be displayed to children.

I understand the position of the public authorities, even if I think it is wrong. The liberal idea, dominant in our society, is that the individual autonomously determines his own goods and identity. But, as all desires are equally desires, they all have to be acknowledged as equally valid, as long as they don't claim primacy over others (which, for liberals, is the sin of "supremacy" or discrimination, intolerance, bigotry etc.) So the public authorities, following this liberal credo, don't really have a principled way to object to the imagery, without exposing themselves to charges of hypocrisy or inconsistency or lack of principle.

It seems we are witnessing another step down in liberal culture. Liberal culture had previously compromised by rating materials for their sexual content and allowing parents some control over what their children were exposed to. Apparently the aim of being inclusive toward transsexual and homosexual culture (making it normative) is now overriding the older compromise - it is now thought progressive to habituate children to these things.

And yet there is damage being done. The message being given to children is that sexuality is to be freely pursued in any direction and that there are no sexual impulses to be restrained or held in check. They are being exposed to forms of sexuality that are at the end point of what happens when restraints or modesty or checks give way.

This is especially problematic for those children who will later seek to form heterosexual relationships. Within homosexual culture, it does not matter so much if the emphasis is on fleeting sexual encounters for their own sake. But a heterosexual culture can't work this way. A heterosexual culture has the more difficult aim of bringing together men and women for stable, monogamous pairing, with the aim of raising children successfully and carrying on an intergenerational family tradition. This requires both men and women to integrate the sexual aspects of their relationship with other purposes relating to the good of children, family and society.

In short, sexuality has to be ordered toward higher purposes. A man cannot just follow his libido if he is to commit to a lifelong role of husband and father within a family and secure the material well-being of his wife and children and help to socialise his children toward a successful adulthood of their own. Similarly, a promiscuous woman damages her ability to pair bond with a man and to form a respectful and loving emotional relationship with a future husband.

If children are allowed to mature without being precociously sexualised, and within a culture that orients them toward marriage and family, then they are likely to reach early adulthood without having lost the innate qualities that might allow them to successfully pair bond with a person of the opposite sex.

And that's the sense in which we instinctively believe that it is possible for children to be corrupted, and that children need to be protected from certain types of sexualised content. We don't want our children to lose what is supposed to be intact within them, emotionally and psychologically, that allows them to successfully marry. It is our job to at least get them to independent adulthood, and the age of marriage, without this having been lost.

This requires not only good parenting, but also agreed upon social norms and standards within public life. And this is where liberalism is increasingly undermining the role of parents in the raising of their children.

It's the state ideology

Via Laura Wood a story about how moral issues are decided in Germany. A German man who married his biological sister and had children with her has been punished under existing incest laws. However, a government committee (the German Ethics Council) has decided that incest should be permitted. On what grounds? The expected ones:

Incest between siblings appears to be very rare in Western societies according to the available data but those affected describe how difficult their situation is in light of the threat of punishment. They feel their fundamental freedoms have been violated and are forced into secrecy or to deny their love. The majority of the German Ethics Council is of the opinion that it is not appropriate for a criminal law to preserve a social taboo. In the case of consensual incest among adult siblings, neither the fear of negative consequences for the family, nor the possibility of the birth of children from such incestuous relationships can justify a criminal prohibition. The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination has more weight in such cases than the abstract protection of the family.

So incest is now considered to be a "fundamental freedom" - the language of freedom is being invoked once again. And what is meant by freedom? It is the "fundamental right" to "self-determination" - and it is this right to self-determination which is thought to trump all other considerations, such as negative consequences for the family or the problems that arise for the children born to such relationships.

Here again we have a problem doing great harm to Western societies. Freedom is held to be the sole, overriding good and freedom is understood in a limited way as individual autonomy. Other goods in society are sacrificed to this one reductive understanding of morality - which means inevitably that people don't even end up feeling free or autonomous.

The better option is for a community of people to try to get as close as possible to an understanding of an "order of being" - in which a range of goods are harmonised as far as possible. That is not only the best way to uphold more than one good, it's also the best way to maximise freedom and to make freedom meaningful. (Is it really a meaningful understanding of freedom when incest starts to be considered a "fundamental freedom"? What's next?)

Getting Girls wrong

National Review Online is supposed to represent the conservative opposition in the U.S. But I hardly ever read it and when I do visit I'm inevitably disappointed.

I had a look at it this morning and read a review by Betsy Woodruff of a new HBO TV series called Girls. Betsy doesn't mince words when reviewing the show:

it’s impossible to tell whether Girls is reflecting or shaping culture. But given how popular the show is and how much scrutiny it has drawn, it’s worth speculating as to which is the case. And for the sake of Western civilization, let’s hope it’s the former. That’s because if Dunham’s vision is prophetic — if it’s helping to forward a larger cultural shift, rather than just depicting a self-contained subgroup — then I think it’s safe to say it’s all over for us.

So there's something in the show that is simply incompatible with civilisation - it's that bad. But what?

At first it seems as if Betsy is going to make a conservative criticism of the show. She notes that the characters are uninterested in morality and devoid of responsibility. And the characters really are living morally bleak lives. In an early episode one of the characters finds out she is pregnant, her friends gather at the abortion clinic but she misses the appointment because she's hooking up with a man at a bar. In another scene from the show the lead character is told she has HPV but a friend reassures her by noting that "all adventurous women have HPV".

But it turns out that Betsy is quite happy with the modern girl lifestyle. What worries her is not what the girls are doing but that they're not proud enough to finance it for themselves. It's that right-liberal versus left-liberal argument again. Both accept that the goal is to be an autonomous agent. For right-liberals like Betsy this means being self-reliant and not depending on the state. For left-liberals it means the state empowering people to live autonomously. Betsy seems to believe that civilisation depends on people taking the right-liberal option and financing their own abortions and contraception rather than expecting the government to subsidise the cost.

Let me give some examples, starting with the worst of the lot. Here is Betsy criticising Girls by comparing its "new vision of women" unfavourably with the vision pursued by second wave feminists:

Second-wave feminists lionized the independent woman who paid her own rent and busted through glass ceilings and ran for Congress. Being totally self-sufficient was the goal. The idea was that women didn’t need men, whether those men were their fathers or husbands or boyfriends or presidents. By contrast, Dunham’s new vision of women as lady parts with ballots is infantilizing and regressive.

What does that paragraph tell you about National Review Online? To me that's a radically liberal view of the world. The aim is to be totally self-sufficient (autonomous) even to the point of not needing fathers or husbands or boyfriends. Betsy thinks that this is an adult and progressive approach to life, because it makes women self-reliant and independent. A left-liberal would simply reply that if justice means women not needing men, then the state can promote justice by increasing the number of women not needing men. Otherwise some privileged women will live a fully human life (independent of men) and others will miss out - an offence against human equality.

And here is Betsy complaining that Girls is not feminist enough:

You’d think the feminist elevation of agency would result in women who take pride in being responsible for their own bodies. You’d hope that telling women that they can do whatever they want would imply that they’re responsible for what they do. You’d think serious feminists would argue that true empowerment is something you lay claim to, not something the federal government dispenses in all its benevolence. But for Dunham, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Again, there is no in principle disagreement with the philosophy of modernity here. Betsy is just upset with the idea that the left wants women to rely on the state in pursuit of their modern girl lifestyles. If they paid for it themselves, she'd be happy with it.

She makes the same criticism here:

In fact, for all practical purposes, the patriarchy no longer decides whom American women can sleep with and when. That’s great. But if you don’t want men in Washington telling you how to use your sexuality, you shouldn’t expect them to subsidize it. But Dunham seems to actually believe they should. Dunham makes tons of money, and I’m quite confident she can afford to pay for her own birth control. But she doesn’t seem to take pride in that...

Again, she has no problems with the decline of traditional morality - she thinks it's "great" that women can be promiscuous and can use their sexuality for whatever purpose they want. Betsy seems to be unconscious of the possibility that not all choices are the same when it comes to sexuality: that some choices might be elevating and others degrading; that some choices might prioritise love and a commitment to family whilst others might impair the ability to pair bond; and that some choices present risks to health and well-being.

The show itself is possibly a little wiser than Betsy in this regard. Girls does at least portray the more negative consequences of the sexual revolution. It doesn't pretend that if only people paid for their own contraception all would be well.

The thing is, I don't think we need to fear Girls. The lifestyle depicted in the show is so far gone that anyone who adopts it is simply lost to us. Girls portrays left-liberalism in such deep decay that it presents us with the opportunity to demonstrate something much better.

Which is why I fear Betsy a lot more. We are not showing the better alternative if the most right-wing criticism we permit ourselves is to complain about people not self-funding their modernist lifestyles. The opposition to left-liberal decay is, at the moment, a sham and that is what is really holding back a necessary response to it.

A strange homage to policewomen

A Melbourne artist has paid homage to policewomen by creating three sculptures depicting them as prostitutes.

Frank Malerba claimed he was inspired by the,

"contemporary identity of women, emanating the strong, cool, authoritarian characteristics empowering women of today"

And then, inevitably, he argued that provoking the public is what art is really for:

"I wanted something that was different and edgy, something that will make people react. That's exactly what art is supposed to do," Mr Fagan said.

That's not exactly a profound reason for the existence of art: making people react. Communicating the more difficult and higher truths of being would be a deeper and more challenging mission for the high arts.

Anyway, Frank Malerba got his wish and provoked a reaction - a strong enough reaction for his artwork to be shelved. But it's interesting how moderns choose to express their moral opposition. The culture and leisure officer of the local council said that public feedback was opposed to the sculpture for being:

demeaning to women, including policewomen and sex workers

I found that funny - we're supposed to accept that a sculpture of women dressed as prostitutes is objectionable because it is demeaning to prostitutes.

The Chief Police Commissioner also expressed disapproval:

"I believe the proposed sculptures are disrespectful to all women, not just policewomen," he said.

You do still hear liberal moderns talk about the need for respect. And I don't disagree that the statues are disrespectful. But I'd love to hear the Chief Police Commissioner explain exactly why they are disrespectful. Because that then begins to reveal more about the real moral reasoning involved.

And some did try to explain:

Cyber expert Susan McLean said the council should not have got to the stage of asking for opinions.

“As a former policewoman I am offended because it reinforces all the stereotypes of women,” Ms McLean said.

“It’s male fantasy stuff and it’s from the porn shops. It’s not empowering females.

So the dispute then hinges on whether women are empowered by the sculptures: the artist says they are, Susan Mclean says they're not. Why doesn't she see women as being empowered by the sculptures? Because she believes what is being depicted is coming not from women, but from outside forces: from men or from social stereotypes.

But what if some women are happy with more brazen expressions of female sexuality? Ruth Parkinson wrote into the paper to support the sculptures on the grounds that:

Some people will always see forms of nudity as denigrating but there are many of us who see these images as empowering.

And that's what the moral debate seems to have come to. Something is moral if it empowers women; immoral if it doesn't. And empowerment depends on it being something self-chosen or self-asserted rather than imposed from without.

It all seems to me to be a weak basis for holding to moral standards. If we really followed through it would mean that whatever women thought empowered themselves would be morally justified. If that's what women are told, and if women then really do sincerely want to act up, then good luck trying to convince them otherwise.

Amanda Vanstone: holding a thin line

The Labor Party has changed its platform to support homosexual marriage, so that issue is in the news in Australia right now.

One public figure who has weighed into the debate is Amanda Vanstone, who was a minister in John Howard's Liberal Government.

It's another chance to look at the political beliefs of  a high profile member of the right-wing party here in Australia.

Amanda Vanstone is known as a more socially liberal member of the party. So it's no surprise that she supports homosexual marriage. What is more surprising is the grounds on which she supports it. She argues:

Perhaps we need a reality check on what we think marriage really means. Opponents of gay marriage often argue that marriage is ''a union between a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others, for life''.

It is not convincing. It is a triumph of hope over reality. Marriage long ago stopped being to the exclusion of all others and for life. If we don't care about those two elements being disregarded by so many, why should we care about the ''between a man and a woman'' part?

The idea that marriage has already lost its real meaning and that therefore there is nothing to lose in accepting homosexual marriage is not unusual. It was made by three columnists in the Melbourne papers today: Amanda Vanstone, Wendy Tuohy and Dennis Altman.

Tuohy's column is particularly interesting, as it basically says that there is nothing sacred left in the world-weary West and therefore marriage has become so watered down in meaning that it no longer makes sense to exclude gays.

I don't disagree that the meaning of marriage has been watered down. But there are two things to note about this argument. First, it's not a very good way to justify homosexual marriage. What is being suggested is that homosexual marriage would be incompatible in meaning with the original, intact, traditional meaning of marriage. But it is compatible, the argument goes, with the meaning that is left to a broken form of modern marriage. Isn't that really an acknowledgement that homosexual marriage does affect the meaning of marriage?

Second, it's a radical position for Amanda Vanstone to take. She doesn't find the idea that marriage is exclusive and for life to be "convincing". She has moved on to a model of marriage that is not exclusive and not for life. She describes this as a "reality check" on what marriage really means. So the meaning of marriage for her is radically open - except for one remaining, restraining principle.

She lost her father as a young child and she knows someone who has struggled with not knowing his biological father. So she seems to draw the line at creating families that do not have both a male and a female parent:

It is, in my view, in the best interest of every child that they have on a day-to-day basis both male and female parent role models and both male and female adult role models.

I agree with her and won't criticise her for holding this view. But it seems to be inconsistent with the earlier part of her argument. If we are going with a new meaning of marriage which is neither exclusive nor life-long, then families won't be as stable as previously. So more children, not less, will end up living without male and female parental role models.

How exactly does she expect children to have both male and female parental role models on a day-to-day basis in her new family order? If we have accepted, as a principle, that marriage is no longer to be faithful and no longer to be for life, then surely that will lead to more children living without one of their parents. And if the state endorses the idea of homosexual marriage, then surely that will lead to more children living with parents of just one sex.

If you want to try and hold the line somewhere in a liberal society, then it had better be a mighty strong line you are holding onto. But Vanstone's is weak. She has cut most of the way through it herself.

And I suppose this illustrates the difficulty of wanting to be socially liberal, whilst still believing in some kind of traditional standard in society. It's difficult to unleash the forces of "do whatever you will" and then add on "except for this".  Standards can't be defended that way. They have to make sense within a larger framework of society. If you want children to be raised by parents of both sexes, then you ought to be defending marriage having the meaning of a faithful, lifetime commitment between a man and a woman.

But this is what Amanda Vanstone believes ought to be abandoned, or at least relegated to a few hold-out churches.

Gaita & the ground of philosophy

Raimond Gaita has written a column for The Age in favour of homosexual marriage. It's a more thoughtful argument than is usual for this debate.

Gaita believes that there are people who oppose homosexual marriage because they find gay sex disgusting or immoral or because they believe it will have damaging social consequences. But he sees these objections as being relatively superficial.

The most radical source of opposition to homosexual marriage, he argues, is that many people don't believe that there is depth in homosexuality: that it is not deep enough to be integrated into the meaning of marriage. That leaves the term "homosexual marriage" as an oxymoron and, if true, it would mean that if homosexual marriage were legalised the concept of marriage would be degraded:

From this perspective, even if the law were to permit gay marriages, these would be marriages in inverted commas only. The state cannot do what is, so to speak, conceptually impossible. If it were to try, this thought continues, it would degrade the concept of marriage. After a time, even heterosexual married couples would no longer understand what it means to be married.

But Gaita is strongly opposed to this view of homosexuality; he believes that society should recognise the "depth and dignity" of the "sexual being" of homosexuals as,

Our sense of a common humanity is premised on seeing in all human beings their capacity to make meaning that we respect of the big facts that define the human condition - our mortality, our vulnerability to misfortune and, of course, our sexuality. To be blind to that in others is to be partially blind to their humanity.

That's a significant quote. He is arguing that our common humanity rests on our capacity to make our own meaning of who we are. Therefore, runs the argument, if we don't respect how others make meaning we are denying them human status. Homosexuals are just doing the human thing, claims Gaita, of defining their own being in ways that are meaningful to them, so not to recognise what they decide to be would be a denial of their full humanity:

Laws premised on blindness to the full humanity of our fellow citizens wrong them more profoundly than can be conveyed by the complaint that they deny them access to goods and opportunities.

Gaita's position is not original. It's another way of putting the orthodox liberal view. And it is not obviously true. Why should we accept that it is our capacity to self-define our place in the world and our being which is the measure of our humanity?

There was an older view in Western philosophy that our being flowed from our essence, which in turn then provided our "telos" (the end toward which we are rightly oriented).

I'm not sure the ancients adequately defined this essence, but even so it strikes me as a more promising philosophical framework than the modernist liberal one.

A core problem with the modern view is that we are supposed to accept that meaning is something we make for ourselves - which leaves meaning as something subjective and therefore not very meaningful. It doesn't really seem to matter in the liberal view what specifically men choose to do or be, as there is not thought to be a masculine essence which helps to define our ideal being and the fulfilment of who we are.

And so liberal moderns have no basis for preferring one concept of being and self to another, as their concept of being doesn't connect to anything beyond the individual self. It doesn't matter, in this view, whether I choose to be a self-sacrificing father, a juggalo or a brony. These are all the same, and must be treated the same, as they are all instances of individuals defining their own being in ways that are meaningful to them. If anything, it is the fatherhood option which might be ranked lower by liberal moderns, as it might be thought to have been accepted for reasons of tradition rather than as something individually self-defined.

If it's true, as liberal moderns claim, that what matters (what makes us fully human) is our capacity to make meaning for ourselves of our own being, then value will shift away from what we specifically choose to do or be, and flow instead to the idea that we must accept as equal each individual's self-made being - as to judge differently would mean denying to some individuals what makes them human.

And so value for liberal moderns resides in "equality", "tolerance", "respect", "non-judgementalism", "diversity" "non-discrimination" and so on. But these values circle round an emptiness - they exist to uphold the idea that there is no being except the one we make for ourselves, that there are no real standards of what we choose to do to be, that there are no given qualities to who we are which place us naturally within families or communities or larger human traditions, and that meaning is ultimately subjective and, therefore, not very meaningful.

Is feminism killing the left?

Bob Ellis was one of the kings of Australian leftism back in the 1980s. He's in the news again, having claimed that "wowser" (i.e. puritanical) feminists are bringing down left-wing men:

Is there a pattern here? Is sexual complaint being used to bring down left-leaning and Liberal-reformist artists and politicians?

Looks like it. For the tactic works very well ... It is all very unjust; and a question arises from it: Is feminism killing the Left, and why does it seem so keen to do so?

...The Strauss-Kahn Moment has arrived, and the question must be asked: has wowser-feminism gone too far?

He's got a point. The feminism that left-wing men supported to a man back in the 1980s is now being directed at leading figures of the left such as Julian Assange and Strauss-Kahn.

Here's another example of feminism at work. A conference of lefty type atheists in Dublin has led to online bickering after one of the female speakers was politely asked by a man if she'd like to return to his room for a coffee. Admittedly he did ask her in a lift at 4am, which understandably made her feel uncomfortable. But some of the feminist supporters are treating it as if it were a rape scenario which damns all of male-kind, whilst others think that it's a case of feminist overreaction.

The speaker was a woman called Rebecca Watson, who was asked by the unidentified man, "Don't take this the wrong way, but I find you really interesting and I'd like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?" She declined and he took it no further. But Watson complained that she had been "sexualised" and the lefty atheist leader PZ Myers then used the incident for a spot of male bashing:

There is an odd attitude in our culture that it's acceptable for men to proposition women in curious ways — Rebecca Watson recently experienced this in an elevator in Dublin, and I think this encounter Ophelia Benson had reflects the same attitude: women are lower status persons, and we men, as superior beings, get to ask things of them. Also as liberal, enlightened people, of course, we will graciously accede to their desires, and if they ask us to stop hassling them, we will back off, politely. Isn't that nice of us?

It's not enough. Maybe we should also recognize that applying unwanted pressure, no matter how politely phrased, is inappropriate behavior. Maybe we should recognize that when we interact with equals there are different, expected patterns of behavior that many men casually disregard when meeting with women, and it is those subtle signs that let them know what you think of them that really righteously pisses feminist women off.

Richards Dawkins, another leading figure in this group, then took the opposite view, that being politely asked for a coffee wasn't a serious form of oppression compared to what some women go through overseas. And from there the fight was on.

I've noticed for some time now that left-wing men are starting to turn against feminism. You can see it even in the men's rights movement, where left-wing men continue to support all the old causes but draw the line at feminism which they treat with unyielding hostility.

And I do understand why. After all, why be a left-wing man in the first place? You get treated as being part of an oppressor class and therefore as lacking moral status. The only reason to put up with this is that left-wing politics was supposed to a) free you of traditional responsibilities whilst b) creating a sexual utopia of casual sex.

In the 1960s the Australian left was sexually libertarian. At the time, the theories of the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich were very influential. Reich believed that problems in society were a consequence of the neuroses brought about by sexual repression. Therefore, it was a politically progressive act to cast off "bourgeois" morality. The generation that included Germaine Greer made a serious attempt to practise unrestrained sexuality as a means of changing the world (Greer later admitted it was a failure).

So for a time left-wing men did inhabit a world in which their female counterparts were readily accessible. That's what Bob Ellis is looking back to. But then along came feminism with it's theory of patriarchy in which men supposedly use rape and domestic violence to uphold an unearned privilege. Suddenly casual sex was no longer a way to create a brand new world, but was instead an instrument of control by which men oppressed women. Feminists began to focus on ways in which men might potentially commit acts of date rape. Interacting with such women became a minefield for men.

In such a culture what really is the point of being a left-wing man? You lose moral status for being a white, heterosexual oppressor. And the women you consort with are not only at war with their own femininity, and not only convinced that they are oppressed by men, but they might also unpredictably throw out an accusation that you have assaulted or raped or otherwise oppressed them.

So I understand why left-wing men are starting to abandon their support for feminism. What these men need to consider, though, is whether they are being realistic. They seem to want a society in which they have no binding duties, in which they have easy access to casual sex and which continues to be prosperous and secure. I don't think that's ever going to happen - even if feminism were to be discredited.

A society doesn't prosper by accident and it certainly won't prosper if the average man retreats to a position of no responsibility. That's why left-wing men ought not to have accepted the idea of white men, as a class, being oppressors with no moral standing. That amounts to an abandonment of society, whilst still expecting all the good things of society to continue along as before.

What does a hippie father want for his daughters?

Promiscuity is in the news again with the slutwalks. I thought it was timely, therefore, that the Australian Women's Weekly (May 2011) should run an interview with Richard Neville. Neville was one of the Australians most influential in bringing about the 1960s:

certain essential aspects of the Sixties, even overseas, were in part the creation of two late hangers-on of the Push, Richard Neville and Germaine Greer.

Neville and Greer both believed in the therapeutic effects of "free love". They did so for very specific reasons, which I'll cover in a future post. What I want to point out now is that Richard Neville went on to have two very attractive daughters. On having his daughters, he suddenly gave up on the 60s mantra of free love and drugs, becoming instead a strict dad:

Lucy Neville, his 28-year-old daughter, still chafes at the memory of her teenage years. "Dad became a colonel when I was a teenager...We used to call him Colonel Neville...I wasn't allowed to do stuff that everyone else was allowed to do...I was always screaming at them [my parents] and telling them they were hypocrites"

Julie and Richard had strict rules about boyfriends. They had to come home first to meet them, say hello, shake hands (a firm handshake was compulsory) and look them straight in the eye...

According to Lucy her parents went into a "state of hysteria" when they overheard her talking about drugs on the telephone. "Mum used to pick up the phone on the other end and listen," she says. "They were full on. They threatened to send me to a boarding school in the desert. The fact that my father had written glowingly in the 1970s about recreational drugs was irrelevant."

It shows, I think, that the hopes that Richard Neville had for his daughters involved something more than casual sex and drug use. His 1960s hippie philosophy just didn't cut it when it came to those closest to him. His protective paternal instincts kicked in.

While we're on this topic, Dalrock has penned an interesting piece on the slutwalks. His theory is that women respond to male validation more than most men realise. Hence the wounded response of feminist women to criticisms of slutty behaviour and the attempt by feminists to make such criticisms socially unacceptable.

Also interesting is a comment following Dalrock's piece on feminist Jaclyn Friedman. She admits that she doesn't find her feminist male allies sexually appealing because they are too deferential and therefore come across as unmasculine:

Interviewer: So do you meet guys who pass the feminist test but then turn out to be disappointments for other reasons?

Friedman: Oh God. There is a type of feminist guy who is so eager to fall over himself to be deferential to women and to prove his feminist bona fides and flagellate himself in front of you, to the point that it really turns me off. And it makes me sad, because politically, these are the guys that I should be sleeping with! You know what I’m talking about?

Interviewer: YES.

Friedman: Everyone knows what I’m talking about. And some of them are even really cute! I want to say to them, “If you could be a person, like a whole, complicated person, who I feel like I could crack jokes around, then I would really like you.” But they’re so serious about their feminism at every moment that I don’t feel like a person to them. I feel like I’m on a pedestal, almost. I know that they’re not going to disagree with anything I say under any circumstances. . . I hate to be critical of our allies in any way, because we need them, but there’s something about that certain kind of hyperfeminist guy that makes them unappealing to date, to me. I suspect it has something to do with our internal conceptions of masculinity, which is terrible on my part.

Here, again, feminism is like a "beta test" for men: a left-wing girlfriend might want you to say the politically correct things, but how she really wants you to act is something else again.

How do we explain the slutwalks?

Slutwalk happened in Melbourne on the weekend. Supposedly 3000 took part, though from the video clips it looked more like a few hundred. The Melbourne rally was much like those overseas, though it was distinct in featuring a transgender person who spoke about having been raped both as a man and as a woman.

Why the slutwalks? I've read a few different theories. Laura Wood believes that many of the women protesting are genuinely fearful of rape but are seeking protection from it in a counterproductive way:

what are these women protesting? As I said, they are frightened. There is such a thing as rape, and they cannot process that reality. They have no way of understanding or making sense of it – and so they protest against it, hoping that outrage alone will make it go away. They want a world in which rape does not occur. Such a thing is not possible. However, there is a way to gain some measure of safety. A woman can protect herself against rape not by participating in protests, especially protests defending sluttiness, but by earning the protection of good men. Men protect women against men. The sensible path for a woman in a dangerous world – and the sensible path for women collectively – is to earn the protection of good men. Protection is not a right, but a privilege.

Women earn the protection of good men by dressing modestly, by recognizing the nature of masculinity, and by remaining faithful. Then their safety increases.

Grerp at The Lost Art of Self-Preservation (for Women) looks on it as an assertion of female sexual empowerment. She argues that it's unreasonable for women to dress to get the maximum sexual attention from men and then object when the predictable reaction can't be controlled as tightly as they want it to be:

Women apparently feel that the new frontier of empowerment hinges on their ability to dress like brothel workers and demand others respect them for their bad taste and attention whoring. For this women are marching: to look like the best lay a gold-mining saloon could offer; as in, not obviously diseased.

Uh huh.

Look, let's be honest with ourselves as women. Can we all agree that we don't go out in a pink halter tops and satin hot pants because of the comfort factor? We don't dress that way to impress our girlfriends with our sense of style either. Women dress in miniscule, tight, sexy clothing to get the attention of men. And it is effective. Unfortunately, women can't always control how that attention channels itself. And instead of acknowledging that limitation - that this is a built-in trade-off for guaranteed male attention - they throw a group tantrum, wag a bunch of fingers, and attempt to control the reaction they provoke through chanting, and shaming, and what have you.

Wouldn't it just be easier to wear figure flattering clothing that manages to cover up the essentials? Women looked gorgeous in Edwardian clothing. The success of Mad Men has to hinge in no small part on wardrobe envy - women and men staring at how fantastic people used to look in tailored, buttoned up clothes. Most of the time, with clothes, more is more. Dress decently, and you spare yourself the possibility of trouble.

Bonald at Throne and Altar is sceptical that the issue is really about rape. He thinks the slutwalks are about legitimising female sexual promiscuity:

The rape issue is a red herring. It has nothing to do with the real issue, which is the social legitimation of female promiscuity. These marches are not meant to intimidate potential rapists; they’re meant to intimidate social conservatives. The sluts are only tying together the issues of social disapproval and sexual violence as a rhetorical trick to cast themselves as victims even as they go on the attack...

The sluts are not victims; they are aggressors. Their victim is society itself. Their goal is social approval for female sexual promiscuity. The MRM and “game” advocates (who I have elsewhere criticized) have painted a disturbing but very plausible picture of where widespread female promiscuity will ultimately lead. A few of the most desirable men monopolize women during their young, attractive years. Then after getting old and being discarded by these “alphas” from their harems, women “settle down” and allow themselves to be supported by a “beta provider” husband.

I don't think Bonald's point should be discounted. At the Melbourne rally, a lot of the emphasis was on the idea that there was nothing wrong with being a slut. There were placards reading "Stop slut shaming" and speakers made comments such as "reclaiming the word slut is going to disempower it" and "enough of the judgements about our sexualities".

At Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat developed my own arguments in an interesting way. I had noted in a post about Ita Buttrose that in the early 1970s in Australia a group of feminist women accepted the idea of autonomy (of being self-defined rather than defined as women), but that they rejected the radical idea of giving up on heterosexual relationships with men. This was the birth of a "sex positive" feminism in Australia.

Kidist Paulos Asrat believes that this leads to a kind of schizophrenia, in which women don't want to reject feminism by appearing too feminine but in which they still feel a natural need to express their female selves:

I think what is going on is that women secretly yearn for femininity (although I think this is an actual biological reaction and need, rather than an "autonomous desire"). But they cannot succumb to this need for fear of appearing to reject feminism, as Richardson shows above. Imagine the schizophrenic back and forth that must be going on in their minds!

As I wrote above, one way young women can avoid this schizophrenia is by sporadically, and in a limited way, adding feminine touches - such as having children, but avoiding caring for their children, or wearing lipstick, but pursuing high profile, and highly demanding, careers...

One thing I've noticed here is that young women are wearing extremely short skirts, and now in spring, they're donning very short cut-out shorts, often (as though this will help) with dark tights. These skirts are dark, dreary, and ugly. At least the sixties brought color and pizazz with mini-skirt fashion.

My assessment of this depressingly ugly trend (many of the girls are over-weight, so we are forced to look at bulging body parts as well) is that it's that schizophrenic attempt at reconciling femininity with autonomy: I will dress how I want, but I will also look like a girl. It is the "sex positive" (to use Ricahrdson's coinage) compensation of reconciling femininity with autonomy. But all they end up looking is like prostitutes, which is the last thing - consciously, at least - they're after.

One major point of evidence for this argument is the tendency for female fashions over the past 40 years to swing back and forth between grunge and the overtly sexual. There hasn't been a consistent fashion trend for women to relax into a feminine dress style which emphasises elegance or beauty.

I'll finish by going back to Bonald's argument that the slutwalks are really about legitimising female promiscuity. Why would feminist women want to do this?

I can think of a number of reasons, but I'd like to focus on two. The first is that women are at a peak of their sexual power in their 20s. Some women might, therefore, resent moral restraints on their sexuality at this time. In particular, they might conceive that they are using their sexuality to "trade up" amongst men as much as they are able.

What these women need to understand is that a sexual free-for-all will ultimately be harmful to them. Their window of sexual power is relatively short-lived. If there are to be no moral restraints, then men, on finding that they have the advantage of sexual power in their 30s and 40s, will be in a position to "trade in" or "double up" when it comes to women.

There is, in other words, a purpose to the traditional restraints on sexuality. They are not there simply as a patriarchal imposition on women.

A second reason "progressive" women might have to advocate promiscuity is that the new, trendy life script is for women to defer marriage and family until their 30s. If family formation is delayed for this long, then people are not likely to be chaste in the meantime. The 20s will be thought of as a time for more casual sexual relationships.

The odd thing about this is that many of the women deferring marriage and family, effectively leaving it last and to the last minute, still see it as an important fulfilment in life, something they don't want to miss out on. And yet they are risking never getting there by leaving it for so long.

It's not just that they are leaving motherhood till the dying moments of their fertility. They are also undermining a culture of family life amongst men. Men face a choice early in life. They can enjoy the company of their mates whilst pursuing erotic sexual encounters with women - and this is not an unappealing lifestyle for many men. Or they can set aside the urge toward promiscuity in favour of the higher goods of a loving and secure relationship with a wife, experiencing love and respect as a husband and father, making an adult contribution to society and their own tradition by raising a family and so on.

But what happens if the higher goods are withdrawn as an option because women want to leave family formation until something close to middle-age? What if women seem to mostly be offering casual relationships, with sex being the main thing on offer? It shouldn't then be surprising if fewer men in society develop into reliable family men. The family man culture will gradually decline.

Can a marriage be all about the woman?

I shook my head when I read this. A woman wrote the following letter to sex therapist Tracey Cox:

Do you believe you should have sex with your husband just because they want to? I’m going through a period where I’ve just gone off sex.

It’s only been six months and I’m sure I’ll come out of it soon but I resent my husband hassling me. I don’t think it’s right to have sex unless I really feel like it.

It's only been six months, she says. She clearly either doesn't know, or won't admit, just how crushing this must be to her husband and her marriage. She is almost entirely self-focused on the value of her own feelings and desires, rather than showing loving concern for her husband or having a realistic view of what might make a marriage work.

Tracey Cox wrote back the following sensible reply:

I totally disagree with you – and so do a fair majority of reputable sex therapists. Two people will never have the same desire or timing, even if their sex drives are reasonably matched. But when you said ‘I do’ you said ‘I do’ to sex as well. Sex is part of the bargain if you expect your partner to remain married to you and faithful to you. Six months is a long time without sex without a good reason not to do it.

Which brought upon her a feminist rebuke:

According to “sex therapist” Tracey Cox, the minute a woman gets that ring on her finger her rights to bodily autonomy go flying out the window.

...my response to the original letter writer would be:

“If your husband is hassling you for sex when you’ve made it quite clear that you don’t want it, he obviously has no respect whatsoever for your feelings. He does not have a right to expect sex from you, and no right to demand it of you against your own wishes and desires. And if he’s unable to wait until you’re ready for it, or to respect your rights as an individual to have sex on your own terms, then I’d question his suitability to be your life partner. Seriously, you deserve better than this”

The argument is that we should look at marriage in terms of the right to autonomy (rather than, say, in terms of love or stable family relationships). If it's all about my right to self-determine, then I should focus on acting from my own wants and desires rather than anyone else's. Other people are duty bound to respect this exercise of my autonomy.

It's an immensely ideological approach to intimate personal relationships. Reality gets lost along the way. Consider the following remark from one of the feminist commenters, Chloe:

the problem is the onus is ALL on the woman to do something she doesn’t want to, no one is even daring to suggest the man goes without to ‘save the relationship’. There’s no advice to the bloke going ‘maybe you could distract yourself by reading a book, or getting a new hobby...

In fact, it's the other way around. It's the wife who has shown an unwillingness to compromise. She's let the husband go without for six months. And there's an extraordinary level of cluelessness about men to suggest that the husband could solve the problem by "distracting" himself with a book or a new hobby. Realistically he's more likely to end up distracting himself with another woman.

Chloe goes on to add (apologies for her blunt language):

...is going without sex for 6 months or whatever really such a hideous thing? sex isn’t a RIGHT, even within a relationship, sure it’s great if you both want it but if you don’t no one has any grounds to demand it, it’s not an entitlement, which is what this ‘advice’ is implying.

That whole ‘without a good reason’, thus implying that a woman’s desires and consent aren’t ‘a good reason’ which is quite frankly terrifying and horrendously insulting.

I’d much rather have a life of celibacy than end up in a relationship with someone who assumes they have a right over MY body and pays no heed to my feelings.

‘Duty shag’ what about a ‘duty stop moaning and just have a wank for gods sake, you’re not entitled to anything and if you have to go without for a bit then boo hoo it’s hardly the end of the world is it?

Just remember this whenever you read one of those articles about how sex in feminist relationships is better. According to Chloe, her right to self-determine is what matters and is what has to be respected; she therefore is focused on this right rather than on understanding what might make a relationship work and what might matter to men in a relationship, and she's stated clearly that men are not entitled to a physical relationship within marriage.

Nor are women who take the liberal modern idea seriously likely to want to compromise much. At the heart of liberalism is the idea that autonomy is the primary, overriding good. As Senator George Brandis, the leader of the so-called liberal "moderates," put it:

the sovereign idea which inspires our side of politics has always been the same: our belief that the paramount public value is the freedom of the individual ...

the most important single thing we must do is renew our commitment to the freedom of the individual, and restore that commitment to the very centre of our political value system: not one among several competing values, but the core value, from which our world view ultimately derives...

Liberalism ... has such a central guiding principle - respect for the freedom of the individual, his dignity and his autonomy; his right ... to be the architect of his own life...

Every one of those reforms extended the bounds of human freedom, gave individual men and women greater autonomy ...

Liberals believe there to be a "sovereign idea," a "paramount public value," a "core value" (rather than competing values) - and this is the "freedom of the individual to be autonomous," i.e. the freedom to self-determine.

If you really believed this - if you thought that the paramount value is the right to self-determine - then you would want to decide on your own terms what you would do. Compromise would mean violating this sovereign idea, as it would mean no longer deciding entirely on your own terms.

So feminists who take the liberal idea seriously aren't going to be good at compromising. They look at a woman's wishes and desires as fundamental, so much so that the husband is simply duty bound to respect them. There's little interest in how this might realistically play out in a marriage, as they see it as a question of basic rights. If it makes life difficult for the husband, then too bad. The husband simply has to acquiesce or he is, in terms of the theory, a bad person.

Women who aren't as ideologically committed to liberal modernism, and who think in terms of other goods, such as the value of their marriage, are much more likely to accept the compromises which make a marriage work.

Sexual history, marital stability & empirical reality: posts from the pathologist

The Social Pathologist and I have some differences on a few issues but he does write some very interesting posts.

For instance, he has been discussing the connection between female sexual history and later success in marriage. It turns out that the later a young woman becomes sexually active and the fewer sexual partners she has before marriage the better her chances of marital stability (see here, here and here).

There are several interesting graphs showing the statistics, including the one below.

What's notable is how steadily the first five bars rise. For each two year period that a girl delays sexual activity, there is a significant improvement in her chances of marrying successfully, with the effect lasting up to the age of nineteen.

There's a message to parents here not to give in to the advice that "she's going to start some time anyway." It does make a difference if the girl holds off when she is in her mid-teens.

The Social Pathologist has also written an interesting and very accessible post on empiricism. To briefly summarise: it was traditionally held that the mind was able to grasp elements of both empirical and non-empirical reality (empirical being defined as directly accessible to the senses).

However, the scientific revolution demanded that knowledge be tested through sense experience. This yielded success in the physical sciences, which seemed to confirm the approach.

The problem? The ultimate aims of human life, and the goods of human behaviour, are derived not through empirical investigation but from what the human mind grasps of a non-empirical reality:

Humans are interpersonal beings that relate to each other through behaviour, and behaviour implies imperatives. i.e. How to behave? Empirical observation does not give us a guide on this matter. Since empirical observation can show us how best to achieve our goals but it cannot give us those goals in the first place.

This could be part of the reason why liberalism has become so dominant. What happens if there is held to be no valid way of knowing about ultimate human aims or moral goods? Then claims about such aims or goods will be reduced to the category of subjective opinion (or, perhaps, of mere sentiment). As the Social Pathologist puts it:

The traditionalist view was that the knowledge of these goals came from the non-empirical realm something the empiricists rejected. They had to place the locus of these goals in the mind or self. Morality becomes self-generated or self-optimised. Here are the seeds of moral relativism.

And here too perhaps are (some of) the seeds of liberal autonomy theory. If human aims and goods are particular to my own mind or self, rather than something grasped as part of a non-empirical reality, then the world becomes a radically individualised place, a place of wandering individuals seeking to follow their own self-generated good, whatever that may be.

The one overarching "common good" remaining is to leave people unhindered to follow their personal, subjective, self-generated good or to give people equal resources to implement such goods.

It's interesting to note too that some of the Western thinkers most associated with empiricism are also closely associated with liberalism (e.g. Locke and Mill). So it does seem as if the connection between empiricism and liberalism is worth pursuing.

Was Bebel right?

I'm reading Against Liberalism by John Kekes. What is the first argument that Kekes makes against liberalism?

In short, it's this. The basic values of liberalism are designed to foster autonomy. However, human dispositions can be oriented toward both what is good and what is evil. So encouraging autonomy might just as much encourage acts of evil:

in human beings, morally good dispositions coexist with morally evil dispositions. If autonomy is fostered, then both good and evil dispositions are encouraged. (p.24)

Liberals, therefore, need to explain how fostering autonomy can be reconciled with diminishing the prevalence of evil. Kekes discusses a number of liberal strategies; I won't try to summarise these now, as I want to focus on one aspect alone, namely the Socratic option.

Why do humans commit evil actions? Kekes begins with the Socratic explanation:

The philosophically most influential explanation is embedded in the Socratic paradox that no one does evil knowingly. The thought behind the apparently obvious falsehood of this claim is that human agents are normally guided in their actions by what seems good to them. The explanation of evil actions must therefore be either that the agents are ignorant of the good and perform evil actions in the mistaken belief that they are good, or that if they know what the good is and they nevertheless do evil, then it is because accident, coercion, or some incapacity interferes with their pursuit of what seems good to them. (p.28)

Evil exists then because of a lack of knowledge or a lack of choice. This fits in well with the liberal emphasis on autonomy. It means that it is either ignorance which makes people act badly or some sort of external coercion. Therefore, more autonomy, including more "educated" choices, will overcome the problem of evil:

The Socratic explanation ... is most congenial to liberalism. It attributes evil actions to ignorance and proposes as a remedy the improvement of knowledge and the protection of choice from outside interference, which, in liberal language, is but the strengthening of autonomy.

Kekes has some specific criticisms of liberalism for adopting the Socratic explanation. But I want to leave Kekes for a while and turn instead to the writings of a nineteenth century German socialist, August Bebel.

Bebel wrote a feminist book in 1879 called Woman and Socialism. One chapter of this book was devoted to "Woman in the future." So what did Bebel's hopes for women in the future consist of?

He clung to the liberal modernist orthodoxy. He hoped that there would be a society based on individual autonomy - on self-determination and independence - particularly in the sexual sphere.

He wrote of his idealised future society:

Man shall dispose of his own person, provided that the gratification of his impulses is not harmful or detrimental to others. The satisfaction of the sexual impulse is as much the private concern of each individual, as the satisfaction of any other natural impulse. No one is accountable to any one else, and no third person has the right to interfere. What I eat and drink, how I sleep and dress is my private affair, and my private affair also is my intercourse with a person of the opposite sex.

Bebel was an advocate of what was called at the time "free love". It meant that people should sleep with whomever they wanted and that neither morality nor marriage vows ought to limit this. This was a common idea amongst early feminist writers.

One problem with this view is already suggested in Bebel's argument. In order to make sex so casual it has to be reduced in significance to a mere natural appetite like sleeping or eating. It's no longer connected in a special or significant way to love, or psychological bonding or moral feeling.

But that's not the point I wish to draw out. Bebel goes on to argue that only good will result from such autonomy, not evil, because people's intelligence will have been raised by education and because people will be more independent and less subject to compulsion in the new socialist society.

In other words, Bebel turns precisely to the Socratic paradox to explain why autonomy will expand the good and diminish the evil. If people are more independent and more educated then they will follow what is good:

Intelligence and culture, personal independence, – qualities that will become natural, owing to the education and conditions prevailing in the new society, – will prevent persons from committing actions that will prove detrimental to themselves. Men and women of future society will possess far more self-control and a better knowledge of their own natures, than men and women of to-day.

Has he been proven right? Women today are better educated and more independent than in Bebel's time. Has this led to the possession of greater self-control? To beneficial, rather than detrimental, forms of behaviour in human relationships?

There's reason to think not. There's reason to think that the Socratic paradox is wrong. There's reason to think that giving women more autonomy to act as they will has led, as Kekes suggests it would, to some women acting according to their more base dispositions.

It was reported recently, for instance, that the number of newlywed women in Toronto signing up for an adultery website is skyrocketing:

the number of Toronto-area female newlyweds on their site has skyrocketed in the past year. In March 2009, there were 3,184 women who had been married for three years or less actively using the service. A year later, there were 12,442.

The operators of the adultery website have found a "robust" demographic:

They soon realized they had overlooked a robust and active demographic: “These were young women who, from their self-description ... were only married a year or two and seemed to really be questioning the institution, their next step, entering into parenthood, staying with that partner,” Biderman says.

They called it their “newlywed marketplace.”

A relationships expert believes that it is a result of women being more self-determining and following their own path:

“I just think that women are stronger and coming into themselves and following their own path,” says Toronto relationship therapist Nancy Ross.

The website operator also attributes the trend to the growing independence of women:

Biderman thinks female newlyweds are looking for more than a fling — that many of them are sizing up their husbands and questioning whether they really want to start a family with him. And, in a pragmatic move not unlike job hunting, they might even want to line up a new partner before leaving their current one.

“As more and more people get married later and later in life, does it really surprise you that a 30-year-old woman who just got married a year or two ago, but has a very robust career and is very independent, is really going to tolerate the same kind of failed expectations that someone two generations removed from her (did)?” he asks.

One of the women using the site justifies herself as follows:

Susan, now 27, says she loves her husband and does not plan to leave him ... she’s made many friends who understand her, both male and female, and she’s now had four very satisfying affairs.

“I come home smiling after and I’m just fulfilled, which kind of cuts up my resentment toward my husband, because I just feel better — physically, emotionally, everything.”

So we have better educated and more autonomous women. Does this mean, though, that these women are genuinely acting for the good? Their autonomy has in some cases merely unleashed the worst aspects of female hypergamy: of attempting to trade up to higher status men regardless of wedding vows. In other cases it has led them to pursue selfish ends; despite being newly wed they want to continue to take lovers as well as keeping the advantages of having a husband. They are acting not, as Bebel predicted, with greater self-control, but according to the justification of how they feel at a particular moment.

Liberals cannot, therefore, claim that education or knowledge or independence will lead people to act for the good. It is not always coercion or ignorance that leads to detrimental forms of behaviour. The potential to act detrimentally exists within the disposition of individuals. Therefore, if individuals are given the autonomy to act according to their disposition, we can expect to see more of such behaviour, than if individuals are held in some way to a recognised standard.

The power to intimidate?

One of the big topics in Australian politics this week was a comment by Tony Abbott in a woman's magazine. The Leader of the Opposition was asked what advice he would give his daughters about sex before marriage. He answered:

I would say to my daughters, if they were to ask the question, I would say … it is the greatest gift that you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving and don’t give it to someone lightly, that is what I would say.

I would have thought most fathers would answer along the lines of "not too lightly". But Abbott's answer unleashed a furious response from the left. Jill Singer, for instance, wrote an outraged article in which she compared Abbott to Osama bin Laden, complained that his response was "pervy," "creepy" and "icky" and raised the spectre of chastity belts.

I was reminded by all this of the way that the left sometimes tries to shut down free discussion of an issue by using its prominence in the media to mock and ridicule opponents. The intent is to intimidate anyone from taking an opposing view.

There are other ways, too, that the left seeks to prevent discussion of an issue from ever getting off the ground. Here, for instance, is Karen Brooks's preferred way of dealing with Tony Abbott's comment:

Seriously, Abbott is entitled to his views, he's entitled to raise his family as he wants and instill in them his faith ... but what he's not entitled to do is discuss "women's issues" (which in many instances are also men's issues - we live together in this society), as if they are homogenous, framed by a Catholic or Christian principle, and as if he, with his very narrow and privileged world-view and experiences, holds the answers.

She's suggesting that someone with a conservative stance on the issue is entitled to hold their views privately but not publicly; that it's more legitimate for a non-Christian than a Christian to express their views publicly; and that it's more legitimate for a worse off person than a better off person to express their views publicly.

It has to be said that these tactics have worked at times for the left. This was particularly the case in Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the left dominated politically. The tactics don't work as well now; there are some prominent right-liberal voices in the mainstream media and alternative sources of opinion on the internet and talk back radio.

Still, it's interesting to witness the left try it on.

In Sweden the man alone is guilty

A couple of news items from Sweden.

In the Swedish town of Kalmar three girls ran out of money on their night out. So they came up with a plan to replenish their purses. They would go to a local hotel, offer sex for money, but then run off with the cash. They knocked on one hotel room door, but the man refused them. The next time their offer was accepted. They got the cash, undressed, the man went to the bathroom, they attempted to dress and flee with the money but were too slow. The man demanded his money back before letting them go.

The upshot of all this? The man has been charged with attempting to buy sex. But as there is no law against attempting to sell sex, the women have been let off scot free.

Apart from how tawdry the whole scenario is, what's striking is the legal bias. It was not the man who sought out a prostitute - it was the three women who went knocking on hotel room doors looking for the man. And it was the women who attempted a deception for financial gain, with the man being the targeted victim of the deception. And yet it's the man alone who is considered guilty under Swedish laws.

Is this sex equality Swedish style? Can we really say here that men and women are being treated equally under the law?

The second item concerns the extent of lesbianism in Sweden. An online survey of 900 young Swedes has produced an interesting result. According to the survey, the extent of male homosexuality/bisexuality in Sweden is not so high. Only 3% of the men have ever engaged in any kind of same sex activity (a result which accords with other large-scale surveys from other countries).

But 13% of Swedish women claim to have had same sex experiences. That's way above what previous surveys in other countries have shown.

Of course, the survey itself could be flawed and misleading. But if it's accurate, then it raises the question of why a cutting-edge feminist society would produce a higher rate of lesbianism.

The researchers themselves give a standard liberal answer. Sven-Axel Mansson, a professor of sociology, explained that,

We are seeing a greater openness among young people, particularly among young women. There is an increasing interest in experimenting and pushing boundaries, and a growing resistance to defining oneself as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual ...

Many [women] no longer wish to be tied in to rigid sexual identities, they want to be open and free as people and as sexual beings. That is my interpretation ...

The assumption here is that we should be autonomous, self-determining beings, which means that we should not be limited or restricted by any particular sexuality, but should instead break norms, taboos and impediments and adopt fluid, open sexual identities. That's just orthodox liberal autonomy theory.

But what else could explain a high rate of lesbianism in Sweden? If individuals identify positively with their own sex, they usually go on to have a heterosexual orientation. In Sweden the female sex role has been cast in very negative terms as an oppressive and artificial construct. So perhaps if women can't identify positively with a feminine sex role, it then becomes more difficult to relate in heterosexual terms (after all, heterosexuality is the attraction between the masculine and the feminine).

That's all speculation on my part. I think the issue is worth considering, though, as Sweden is held up as a model of what the future should be like when it comes to relations between the sexes.

Women doing it for themselves?

How do liberal moderns decide moral issues? Consider the case of Clementine Ford, a feminist columnist for the Adelaide Sunday Mail. She recently discussed at her website the story of a young Romanian woman who auctioned her virginity on the internet, selling it to an Italian man for $20,000.

Clementine Ford declares at the start that "It's not the auctioning itself that I have a problem with." For Clementine Ford, the sale of a woman's virginity is moral if it is an act of female autonomy, i.e. if it's something the woman does herself without interference from others:

The value placed on female virginity through the ages has always been despicably high ... the idea that women need to somehow ‘save’ themselves for their husbands because their virginity is the most precious gift they can give them – virginity has ALWAYS been commodified.

It’s just that the sale of it was never controlled by the women who actually owned it.

In Alina's case, even her autonomy in selling her virginity ... was undermined along the way:

The auction was hit by controversy three weeks before its culmination when a teacher at Alina's former school claimed she was not a virgin.

Clementine Ford then considers the objection that auctioning your virginity is equivalent to prostitution. But this too is OK if it's an act of autonomy:

So what if it's, as some critics argue, 'nothing more than prostitution'? Is it the prostitution itself that offends them, or the idea that a woman might choose it for herself rather than having the socially sympathetic ease of being the victim of a pimp (or father) who forces her into it?

For that matter, is that why the auctioning of virginity is considered so offensive - because the person determining the situation, parameters and outcome of its loss is a woman who, while not necessarily required to be in command of her emotions regarding the situation, is at least in command of the financials?

Again, what matters here to Clementine Ford is not the act of prostitution itself. It's whether or not the prostitute is autonomous, i.e. whether she is "determining the situation". There's even a suggestion in the above quote that prostitution might be an act of liberation and feminist independence if it's self-determined.

Before anyone jumps in to write off Clementine Ford as mad, let me say that she is following orthodox liberalism in a perfectly logical way. If autonomy is the one intrinsic good, and if our Romanian woman is following her own autonomous will to achieve her independent life goals, then liberals must declare her actions to be moral.

Furthermore, if feminist patriarchy theory is right, and men have asserted an oppressive power over women, denying them autonomy, then it's not so bizarre for Clementine Ford to think that the issue is not prostitution itself, but a resistance in society to female autonomy.

But look where these theories lead us. They commit us to the view that there is nothing that is inherently right or wrong, that there is nothing in the expression of sexuality itself that is a moral good or that is morally degraded. A woman who sells her virginity online, according to these theories, is acting in a more moral way than a woman who saves her virginity for her husband.

This is a curiously empty and alienated world to inhabit. I find it hard to believe that Clementine Ford would really want to inhabit such a world. Has she never wanted a significant relationship with a man? One in which sexuality did express something meaningful?

Does she really want men to follow the principle of autonomy alone? Would she mind if men simply went and had sex, according to their own autonomous will, with whomever they wanted to, whenever they wanted to? Would this culture be conducive to good relations between men and women? To family life? To the ultimate happiness of both men and women?

Would Clementine Ford view her own daughter positively as an agent of liberation if she were to become a prostitute?

Even though Clementine Ford is willing to follow the logic of autonomy theory further than most, I doubt if even she would be willing to live by it consistently. Her mistake is not just her attitude to the one issue, but her acceptance of an overly abstract, formulaic, simplistic and reductionist approach to morality, in which autonomy is held to be the sole intrinsic moral good.

De Beauvoir's Disturbia

I've been looking at the politics of Simone de Beauvoir, the French feminist who wrote an influential book The Second Sex.

De Beauvoir was a follower of liberal autonomy theory. She believed that a person was not fully human if they were restricted in any way by "given conditions". The aim was to be independent, autonomous and self-determining and to follow a life path uninfluenced by convention, tradition or a biological destiny.

De Beauvoir believed that women had been denied this kind of autonomous "freedom" by men and that she was acting as a champion of women to bring them liberty and equality.

But before women rush out to become Beauvoirists, they might like to consider what autonomy really looked like in de Beauvoir's own life.

De Beauvoir took the ideal of autonomy seriously in her personal life. She quite logically rejected marriage and motherhood, as these were conventional life outcomes for women, rather than a uniquely chosen individual life path; as motherhood tied women too closely to a biological destiny; and as marriage and motherhood represented a formal commitment to others and therefore a restriction on what the individual woman might choose at any time.

So when de Beauvoir met the love of her life, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, they agreed to an open relationship, one which did not compromise their individual autonomy, their "freedom".

There are some who still praise de Beauvoir for her open relationship with Sartre. Hazel Rowley, author of a study of the Beauvoir-Sartre story, has said that,

If we're celebrating Simone de Beauvoir, it's because she had the enormous courage to live in a free, open relationship in 1929 ...

Similarly, a biographer of de Beauvoir, Daniele Sallenave, continues to admire de Beauvoir for her commitment to personal autonomy:

... she showed that women are free to choose their destiny, as much as men, and don't have to obey what is supposedly dictated to them by nature and convention.

Another champion of the relationship was de Beauvoir herself. Later in life she described her relationship with Sartre as her "greatest achievement".

When Sartre first met de Beauvoir, he was upfront in explaining to her his sexual philosophy. He wanted to sleep with many women, with his ideal in relationships being "polygamy, transparency". Sartre was keen to "assert" his "freedom against women".

There was no double standard. Sartre was happy for de Beauvoir to act likewise. She accepted these conditions.

What happened? One biographer describes the results this way:

Yet in this lifelong relationship of supposed equals, he, it turned out, was far more equal than she was. It was he who engaged in countless affairs, to which she responded on only a few occasions with longer-lasting passions of her own ... it is also evident that De Beauvoir suffered deeply from jealousy. She wanted to keep the image of a model life intact. There were no children. They never shared a house and their sexual relations were more or less over by the end of the war ...

... What the letters express is not only De Beauvoir's overarching love for a man who is never sexually faithful to her, a man she addresses as her "dear little being" and whose work she loyally edits. They also underline the mundanity of De Beauvoir's early accommodation to his wishes ...

So the rejection of marriage in favour of autonomy did not bring de Beauvoir a greater degree of equality, but arguably the very opposite. She had to work much harder, and accept a lower position, in order to retain a place in his life.

And aspects of the relationship were more sordid than the above quote lets on. De Beauvoir began to act as a kind of procuress for Sartre, seducing her own school pupils and then handing them on to Sartre:

They hoped to devise new ways of living in a godless world, unrestricted by detested bourgeois institutions. But, in reality, Seymour-Jones demonstrates that their quest became a darker, more collusive joint enterprise through the 51 years of their partnership, with deeply unpleasant consequences ...

De Beauvoir became a glorified procuress, exploiting her profession as a teacher to seduce impressionable female pupils and then passing them on to Sartre ... One of them, Olga Kosakiewicz, was so unbalanced by the experience that she started to self-harm. In 1938, the 30-year-old de Beauvoir seduced her student Bianca Bienenfeld. A few months later, Sartre slept with the 16-year-old Bianca in a hotel room ...

In 1943 the parents of one of these girls brought charges against de Beauvoir for abducting a minor and she had her licence to teach anywhere in France revoked for the rest of her life.

(Isn't de Beauvoir here acting as an exploiter of young women rather than their saviour or liberator?)

After WWII, Sartre lost sexual interest in de Beauvoir, so her role was an unusual one of involving herself in Sartre's "family" of lovers:

From early on [de Beauvoir] organises the comings and goings of Sartre's "contingent" women; she encourages, consoles, manipulates, and continues to do so until the very end for that loose grouping of friends and exes they called their "family". With a few exceptions, she performs whatever Sartre at the Front asks of her, including finding money for him, or having an affair.

How did Sartre describe his relationship with de Beauvoir? He set out the consequence of having such an open, transparent relationship as follows:

"To have such freedom, we had to suppress or overcome any possessiveness, any tendency to be jealous," said Sartre. "In other words, passion. To be free, you cannot be passionate."

So here we have again a modernist rejection of the passions as being opposed to freedom. Little wonder that Sartre was often described as cold in his personality.

De Beauvoir seems to have found it harder to be dispassionate. She was a woman in love and stayed loyal to Sartre no matter how he treated her.

Her ability to love seems to have made it hard for her to think consistently in terms of autonomy. She preferred to see her relationship with Sartre as being ordained or fated rather than freely chosen:

It was as if everything had been preordained from the very beginning. My parents acted as if nothing in the universe could change the normal course of my life, which was to be a nice little bourgeois intellectual. Sartre’s grandfather, who raised him – you know his father died when he was still a baby – behaved the same way, absolutely convinced that Sartre would grow up to be a professor. And that’s the way it was.

... we were fundamentally in accord with our parents’ design for us. They wanted us to be intellectual, to read, to study, to teach, and we agreed and did so. Thus, when Sartre and I met not only did our backgrounds fuse, but also our solidity, our individual conviction that we were what we were made to be. In that framework we could not become rivals. Then, as the relationship between Sartre and me grew, I became convinced that I was irreplaceable in his life, and he in mine. In other words, we were totally secure in the knowledge that our relationship was also totally solid, again preordained, though, of course, we would have laughed at that word then.

So she accepts that her life was subject to fate, leading her to her great love. This doesn't gel with her political ideas - the commitment to autonomy - which so undermined her position as a woman in the relationship with Sartre.

The lesson is that freedom - defined in terms of personal autonomy - is inadequate as a sole, overriding good in society. Would you really wish to sacrifice love for autonomy? Passion? Children? Isn't it better, and more realistic, to define freedom in terms of our opportunity to enjoy and to live by a range of significant goods - rather than by an autonomous self-invention?

Four conceited stories

Here are the attitudes of four middle-class, English women to casual sex:

Jo Day: "It's a myth that women can't enjoy a brief encounter as much as a man ... I have slept with 30 men. The vast majority of those were one-night stands ..." Well-educated and intelligent ... she insists that her approach is reasoned and rational. That's as may be, but any talk of the long-term legacy in emotional or even physical terms is pushed to one side, or dismissed as irrelevant.

Jessica McConnell: "It's all about sexual confidence ... I think that women actually call the shots more than men now. Most of my friends are quite happy to approach a man and be upfront about sleeping with them. There's no hanging around waiting for them to call the next day. You can just have sex, and then move on ... We are perhaps the first generation of women to absolutely have our own financial independence, because we have good careers - and we work hard and like to have fun."

Jackie Robson: "Our icons were women who are sexually confident and free, such as Madonna, and I think Sex and the City had a big impact on my generation. For the first time it was OK to talk to your girlfriends openly about sex ... Women are just more honest about their sexuality now. If they want just sex without a relationship, why not? No one gets hurt as along as you are honest about what you want.

"Our parents were very quick to get married, but we don't have that pressure ... I may be 40 before I think about getting married and having kids. Women now have as much right as men to make sexual decisions ..."

Georgia B: "I think that being in long-term relationships with men often holds you back in life - so I am much happier at the moment to have short-term relationships or the odd one-night stand. At the moment, my career is more important to me than anything else. I don't want to get married and have children until I am in my mid-30s. Most of my friends are like me - quite headstrong - and we feel no one - especially men - can tell us what to do."

It's clear what these women want us to believe. They want us to believe that they are pioneers of female sexual liberation; that they suffer no loss from engaging in casual sex; that casual sex marks their freedom and independence; that they are proving themselves superior to men in their sexual confidence; and that marriage and motherhood should be deferred until some vague time in their mid to late 30s.

It's a conceit. They are not pioneers. The same attitude was adopted by "progressive" women from the early 1900s onward. I observed it personally amongst the university educated women of the mid 1980s to early 1990s.

Nor is it credible that these women suffer no emotional loss. It's more reasonable to expect that they will become jaded and hardened to some degree.

So why would our four well-educated women speak the way they do about casual sex? One reason is that they are following the political orthodoxy of their times - rather than truly asserting an independent mind of their own.

The political orthodoxy states that personal autonomy is the key good. Men are thought to be the privileged class in society who have taken autonomy for themselves at the expense of women. Therefore, a liberated woman is supposed to prove that she can assert autonomy and independence equal to, or even greater than, a man.

If a woman is taught to seek autonomy and independence, in competition with men, then it's not surprising that she would value career and casual relationships, rather than serious commitments like marriage and motherhood.

But there are all kinds of problems associated with doing so. It's not wise to deliberately defer marriage and motherhood to the very last moment. We've just had a generation of middle-class women who have struggled to successfully partner and have children late in life. You would think that younger women would learn the lesson - but it seems that the force of political orthodoxy is too strong for some.

Here's another major problem. Men respond well to feminine women who are on their side. The orthodoxy, though, encourages something like the opposite: women who believe that they ought to behave more like men, and that men have withheld the key goods in life from them, and that they are in competition with men to outperform men at their own game - a game you win by remaining separate, invulnerable, self-assertive and unfeeling.

It's not a recipe for happy relationships. I can still remember the atmosphere on campus in the early 1990s. The casual attitude to sex did not lead to some kind of sexual utopia. It was more like a big chill, with very few signs of romantic affection between the sexes.

There are other distortions. If numbers of women begin to defer marriage and motherhood to some distant point in the future, then it becomes more difficult for men to justify launching into a career and other adult responsibilities. When women begin to aim for merely casual relationships, then it makes sense for them to choose unsuitable men - which further discourages men from developing stronger, adult qualities.

It is likely, too, that men will respond to a female individualism with an individualism of their own. They might, for instance, choose a permanent bachelorhood, or learn to play the field.

So what happens when our four English women hit their 30s and begin to take marriage and motherhood more seriously? They are likely to find it much more difficult than they imagined to meet the right kind of guy, having discouraged such men all too successfully over the previous decade.

Finally, I don't mean to suggest that all Western women have been influenced to the same degree by a liberal orthodoxy. There are still large numbers of women who are oriented to love, and who do wish to marry and have children in their 20s. I do encourage men to remain active in looking for someone; to be a bit thick-skinned when they encounter modernist distortions; and to work in the longer-term to overturn the modernist politics which makes relationships and family formation much more difficult than is necessary.