Subject: Men, Women, and Sex ---- By Irving Kristol
Date: Published: 5/12/92 (185 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    Board of Contributors:
    Men, Women, and Sex
    ----
    By Irving Kristol

    When one's ideological certitudes give birth to a world
 that is different from what one anticipated, this is normal
 and consistent with the natural order of things.  For the
 world is always recalcitrant about our certitudes, and our
 ability to shape the future is never as powerful as we think.
 Even Madison and Jefferson, at the very end of their lives,
 had cause to worry whether the nation they had helped create
 four decades earlier had not wandered from its original
 destiny.  But the Americans of the 1830s had few such doubts.
 The American republic was a popular success, even if it
 wasn't quite the republic Jefferson and Madison had dreamed
 of.  If an ideology is robust and realistic enough, the
 eventual imperfections in its realization are no cause for
 disillusionment.
    But what happens when one's ideological certitudes give
 birth to a world that is the opposite of what was
 anticipated?  That is what happened to 20th-century communism,
 with results we are now familiar with.  And that is what is
 happening to our liberal certitudes about sex -- about the
 proper relations between the sexes, and the role of sex in a
 civilized community.
    Who would have thought, back in 1950, that we would today
 be handing out condoms to high school students in a desperate
 (and surely doomed) attempt to stem the astounding increase
 in teen-age pregnancies?  Is that what "sex education" has
 come to?  Who would have thought we would be witnessing an
 alarming increase in venereal disease (including a fatal
 venereal disease, AIDS)?  Who anticipated an incredible
 upsurge in male homosexuality and lesbianism?  Who could have
 imagined that our sexually liberated popular culture would be
 featuring movies of sexual aggression, with men engaged in
 serial murders of women and women killing men to protest
 sexual oppression?  This is entertainment?  
    If one goes back and reads the "progressive" literature on
 sex from 1900 on, none of this was anticipated and all of it
 would have been regarded as impossible.  Moving closer to our
 own time, if one goes back and consults the extensive
 literature on "sexual liberation" that emerged in the 1950s
 and 1960s, one can say flatly that this set of ideological
 certitudes has produced an absolutely contrary reality.
 "Repressions" and "taboos" are gone, and free sex seems to be
 generating anxiety and anger and misery without end.  A
 century of liberal social thought about men, women, and sex
 lies in ruins about us.
    One can understand and even sympathize with the fervor of
 this "progressive" movement when it is seen against the
 background of Victorian repressiveness of sexuality, and
 especially of women's sexuality.  But if one limits oneself to
 this perspective, one fails to understand that Victorian
 morality, which actually antedated Victoria's inauguration by
 several decades, was in its own way a phenomenon of "women's
 liberation" -- which is why Victorian women were so much more
 insistent on this morality than were the men.  There were
 rebels, of course -- modern feminism was born in the
 Victorian era.  But this feminism was focused on a demand for
 equality of legal and political rights.  When it came to sex,
 most Victorian feminists -- always a minority -- were just as
 "prudish" as their non-feminist sisters.
    Victorian women were close enough to the pre-Victorian age
 to see, as we cannot, the clear benefits the Victorian ethos
 bestowed on women generally.  True, this ethos idealized women
 in an absurdly unrealistic way -- put them, in theory at
 least, on a pedestal.  And living on a pedestal is the kind of
 life sentence that real women can find intolerable.  On the
 other hand, it has its advantages over living in the gutter,
 which is where most women struggled to survive prior to the
 Victorian elevation.
    From the plays of Shakespeare to the novels of Fielding,
 the distinction between a tiny minority of aristocratic
 "ladies" and a vast majority of "women" -- if young enough,
 "wenches" -- was accepted as a matter of course.  "Ladies"
 were never beaten by their husbands.  "Women" commonly were.
 What the Victorians did was extend the category of "lady" so
 that all women could potentially enter it, and so that all
 middle-class and lower-middleclass women were in fact
 automatically enrolled.  That all women could be "ladies" was
 a bold Victorian invention.  So, indeed, was the parallel
 notion that you didn't have to be born a gentleman to be one.
 You could become one by education and self-improvement.  And
 one of the marks of a gentleman was to treat ladies with
 respect.
    There are still remnants of this Victorian ethos
 occasionally to be seen today, though mainly among those
 beyond a certain age.  When men stand up when a lady enters
 the room, when they offer their seats on a bus or train to a
 standing lady, when they hold the door for a lady to precede
 them -- all those little acts of deference define a
 relationship between a "lady" and a "gentleman."  It is a
 relationship that our younger, more "liberated" generations
 find close to incomprehensible, even indefensible.  Women
 today are keenly interested in "equal" rather than
 deferential treatment.  As for men -- well, let a college
 president announce what used to be a cliche, that one of the
 purposes of a university is to produce "gentlemen," and he
 will be laughed out of his profession.
    But what has replaced the ladies-gentlemen relationship as
 a norm for relations between the sexes?  Freedom, confusion
 and disorientation, all embellished with a veneer of
 "equality."  Sex is indeed natural, as our progressives keep
 telling our young.  But the equation, natural = innocent, is a
 modern fantasy.  In reality, sex is the least innocent of
 human transactions.  That is why it needs to be guided by
 rules that circumscribe this relationship in a civilized way.
    It is a fact of our human nature that casual sex is likely
 to be demeaning to women -- at least to most women, most of
 the time.  The "dating game" as it is now played is rigged in
 favor of men.  For men, the sexual act can represent a neat
 combination of power and pleasure, with the woman an
 agreeable "sex object."  For women, it tends to be suffused
 with more generalized human emotions, and there are not many
 women who want to go to bed with sex objects -- though, if
 they feel they have no choice, they will.
    Our media, trapped in a progressive mode of thinking about
 sex, keep desperately trying to pretend that this difference
 does not exist.  So do our universities, as they blithely
 crowd their students into mixed dorms, even mixed shower
 rooms.  In both cases, we are presented with the myth of
 modern, liberated women, usually pursuing a professional
 career, who can "handle" sex as easily, as calmly, as
 confidently as their male counterparts are presumed to do.  It
 is a myth that has ruined countless lives.
    It is the unreality of this myth that fuels the energy of
 a radical feminism -- i.e., anti-male feminism -- so that the
 sexual act itself appears as a form of sexual oppression.  It
 also helps inspire the lesbian movement, about which there is
 little that is gay.  Both are reactions against the ideology
 of "sexual liberation" -- but, still imprisoned as they are
 within this ideology, they dare not say so.
    Take the current fuss about "sexual harassment."  Those of
 us who have memories of an earlier time have no trouble
 understanding that women are insisting that men should behave
 more like gentlemen, less like predatory boors.  But our
 modern women can't say this, because it suggests that they
 might wish to be treated like "ladies," and they have been
 taught that there is something invidious in the categories of
 "ladies" and "gentlemen."  Instead, they fall back on their
 "right" as individuals not to be subject to sexual
 aggressiveness.
    "Rights" seems to be the only acceptable language today.
 The trouble with this rhetoric is that it creates confusion.
 It tells men that they are to treat women with respect and
 circumspection -- but without explaining why women's sexual
 identity merits such treatment.
    Or take the issue of pornography, which has split the
 feminist movement wide open precisely because no one can
 figure out what "rights" are being violated by it, while the
 apologists for pornography can point to their rights under
 the First Amendment.  Now, no one can doubt that pornography
 is degrading to women.  It does not, however, violate their
 "rights."  What it does is debase the womanhood of women.  But
 within the dominant ideology this too is unsayable.
    The history of the ideology of "sexual liberation" remains
 to be written.  But there is no question that the
 popularization and vulgarization of the writings of the early
 Freud played a major role.  It is he who taught us that our
 sexual discontents were distortions inflicted upon us by our
 older inhibitions and taboos.  Most Americans, and certainly
 all "enlightened" Americans, still seem to believe that.  It
 is too bad that they have never consulted the writings of the
 later Freud -- notably "Civilization and Its Discontents."
    Freud reversed himself as he came to the realization that
 a degree of sexual repression was the very source of
 civilization itself.  He still distinguished, to be sure,
 between neurotic repression and rational social repression.
 But our culture seems to have lost the intellectual and moral
 capacity to make (and live with) such fine distinctions.
    ---
    Mr. Kristol, an American Enterprise Institute fellow,
 co-edits The Public Interest and publishes The National
 Interest.
    (See related letters:  "Letters to the Editor:  Who Are You
 Calling a Lady?  "  -- WSJ June 3, 1992)

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