Womanly virtues Friday
Update: An important qualification. I think it is perfectly understandable that any individual might really want to have sex with a particular girl, provided the girl is old enough and the boy is not too much older than her. What's different now is that we have a powerful wave within our culture pushing girls to have sex with someone who isn't us. It's as if a huge segment of our culture have turned into prurient voyeurs encouraging girls to be more and more sexual.
Ann Althouse spots something fascinating about a New York Times story about the morning-after pill. The story quotes President Obama:
And note this quote from the NYT piece:
The term "unwanted pregnancy" has long been used to provide cover for a larger notion that sex should be without consequences. That it should be "just sex" the way, I suppose, cutting the lawn is just cutting the lawn. Except, of course, it isn't. Activists and governments intrude on cutting the lawn all the time. Cut it too often or with a gas-powered mower and issues of environmental responsibility will be raised.
Only sex with girls and young women is different. Greater and greater lengths are being gone to to make it easier and easier for sex with girls and young to happen and to be without consequences. A similar sort of thrust applies to sex with young gay men.
It's not hard to wonder if the real beneficiaries of this aren't men who want to have sex with young women or young men. Not just any man, you understand. No, the real beneficiaries seem to be men of a certain political class. Men who know certain rules and who fully understand how to navigate the thicket of laws about date rape and so forth. Even as government invades more and more of our lives such that very little remains that can be said to be really personal, it is loading the dice in favour of a certain subset of men sexually.
But what do girls and young women want? Some, no doubt, convince themselves that consequence free sex is exactly what they want. And most sexual fantasies involve consequence free sex for the simple reason that they are, after all, fantasies. But most young women go exactly the opposite direction when they imagine someone having actually sex with them. They picture something momentous and important. They picture the person doing it as having great care for them precisley because it is something of tremendous consequence for them.
Why are we trying so hard to undo this?
Update: An important qualification. I think it is perfectly understandable that any individual might really want to have sex with a particular girl, provided the girl is old enough and the boy is not too much older than her. What's different now is that we have a powerful wave within our culture pushing girls to have sex with someone who isn't us. It's as if a huge segment of our culture have turned into prurient voyeurs encouraging girls to be more and more sexual.
Ann Althouse spots something fascinating about a New York Times story about the morning-after pill. The story quotes President Obama:
“And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going into a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”As Althouse points out, that is a reasonable enough concern but what about the legal issues. What the hell is a ten or eleven year old doing having sex? And who is doing this too her? Yes, I write "doing this too her" for sex is something that happens to women and all the moral posturing in the world isn't going to change this. Even if we allow for a little hyperbole here and the girls in question are actually thirteen to sixteen years old, the question still remains.
And note this quote from the NYT piece:
“Where is an 11-year-old going to get the $50 to buy this product?” asked James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. “Why would they want to? It’s all nonsense.”Well, one possibility is that she might get the $50 from an older man who has had sex with her and is hoping to avoid the jail time that would follow if she got pregnant and revealed his involvement. If she is a little older, a man might give her the money simply so that he doesn't have to deal with the shame and other consequences of it coming out that he has been having sex with a girl who is so much younger than him.
The term "unwanted pregnancy" has long been used to provide cover for a larger notion that sex should be without consequences. That it should be "just sex" the way, I suppose, cutting the lawn is just cutting the lawn. Except, of course, it isn't. Activists and governments intrude on cutting the lawn all the time. Cut it too often or with a gas-powered mower and issues of environmental responsibility will be raised.
Only sex with girls and young women is different. Greater and greater lengths are being gone to to make it easier and easier for sex with girls and young to happen and to be without consequences. A similar sort of thrust applies to sex with young gay men.
It's not hard to wonder if the real beneficiaries of this aren't men who want to have sex with young women or young men. Not just any man, you understand. No, the real beneficiaries seem to be men of a certain political class. Men who know certain rules and who fully understand how to navigate the thicket of laws about date rape and so forth. Even as government invades more and more of our lives such that very little remains that can be said to be really personal, it is loading the dice in favour of a certain subset of men sexually.
But what do girls and young women want? Some, no doubt, convince themselves that consequence free sex is exactly what they want. And most sexual fantasies involve consequence free sex for the simple reason that they are, after all, fantasies. But most young women go exactly the opposite direction when they imagine someone having actually sex with them. They picture something momentous and important. They picture the person doing it as having great care for them precisley because it is something of tremendous consequence for them.
Why are we trying so hard to undo this?
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