"}So, thoughts about this Caitlin Flanagan article:
First, it\u2019s kind of scattershot:
Hollywood is self-serving but at least Oprah lent this movement authentic legitimacy, but\u2026 post-Jezebel new media feminism has discredited it all by\u2026 posing women as vacuous drama-queen redpill stereotype flibbertigibbets\u2026 for example using the same breezy tone to discuss how terrible it is when men disregard your desires to use you as a sexual object and how sexy it is when men hold you down and use you as a sexual object\u2026 in the name of attention- and profit-seeking.
As such it REALLY resembles the common criticism that Caitlin Flanagan is more committed to the project of putting down #MeToo in the name of feminist principles than in any particular feminist principles themselves.
I was around and aware in the \u201890s for the last culture war, or at least the mopping-up operations, how part of that was coopt the appeal of \u201cfeminist\u201d as an identity by propping up a (good, libertarian individualist) \u201cequity feminism\u201d against a (bad, left-identitarian) \u201cgender feminism\u201d. Like, we\u2019re talking the exact same players from the old \u201cIndependent Women\u2019s Forum\u201d set, Caitlin Flanagan and Kaitie Roiphe and Christina Hoff Summers, don\u2019t think I don\u2019t notice that.
Second, if your goal WAS to squash the momentum of this \u201cmoment\u201d, and I and everyone else saw a counterattack coming from the get go, this is probably the right time and point to strike. A few days prior the bluecheck goodthinkers were openly trying to threaten Harper\u2019s over running a potentially critical piece on the media men list, clearly thought they still had command, but now moving on to the Ansari stuff, they\u2019re just huffing and puffing to explain how actually, it\u2019s not an issue, there\u2019s no problem here.
Now I\u2019m not going to say that \u201cif you\u2019re explaining, you\u2019re losing\u201d \u2013 as a descriptive statement I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s true, and as a normative one it\u2019s anti-intellectual and obnoxious \u2013 but it is a sign that you\u2019ve lost tempo, you\u2019re not setting the terms of battle anymore, you\u2019ll need a good push to get it back, and if they get one first you might have to retreat.
Third, you know what this reminds me of? The 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
A New York Times #1 bestseller made into a 1977 film with Diane Keaton and Richard Gere, it was quite the conversation-starter but largely forgotten now because its concerns were so of-the-moment. That moment being the immediate aftermath of the sexual and feminist revolutions, figuring out how to incorporate the new \u201cliberated woman\u201d into society. New \u201cfern\u201d, or \u201csingles\u201d bars flourished as new places for people to meet for sex or companionship.
(Or rather, new places where respectable women could seek them on their own terms as patrons, rather than provisional guests or employees somewhere on the sex work spectrum.)
The plot of the book is basically this: a kindergarten teacher in New York City falls into the habit of trolling singles bars for men to have one-off masochistic sex with. That\u2019s more or less it. I know I\u2019ve said that before pornography was an established genre of its own, mass-market novels came a lot closer to erotica, maybe thinly masked as some sort of moral lesson, but it\u2019s not stroke stuff. The sex isn\u2019t that sexy or all that frequent, most of the time in between she just worries about her life - are her confidence and assertiveness too much? Too little? Is this an okay way to live? Are what she wants in bed and what she wants in life compatible?
If it\u2019s any kind of exploitative pulp it\u2019s true crime, starting off as an article about a 1973 killing in the Upper West Side, because the moral lesson is she gets straight-up murdered at the end.
She brings some new random home, he isn\u2019t satisfying her so in the middle of things she just tells him to stop and leave. This is kind of presented as her finally, comfortably claiming agency. When he rolls off her and moves to finishing himself off she starts berating him, angry that he expects her to physically deal with his semen (and thematically, HIS sexual desire). Enraged, he chokes her to death with an electrical cord.
So yeah, that\u2019s what I\u2019m reminded of, the hit parable from the LAST time we went through this part of the cultural cycle:
\u201cAll this chase-your-desire sexual liberation is a way for women to degrade themselves as sex objects. And even if they do interpret it as empowering, they\u2019ll mistake themselves as toe-to-toe equals with the bestial aggression of male sexuality and just get themselves hurt.\u201d