Margaret Wente: Why Are Young Feminists so Clueless About Sex? 

They’ve been sold a lie – that sexual and behavioural differences between men and women are matters of preference.

Margaret Wente writes: A few months ago, a Harvard senior named Reina Gattuso wrote a column in the school newspaper. It described her crummy night of drunken sex with a couple of men she didn’t know. “I have so much to drink my memory becomes dark water,” she wrote. She freely admitted that she consented. Enthusiastically. And that was the problem. She thought she would enjoy it, but instead she just felt rotten!

“They’ve been told they are supposed to be having a super-positive sex life – unconflicted, joyous, casual and abundant.”

Most people might conclude from this experience that random sex with drunken strangers is a poor idea, and Ms. Gattuso really should not try that again. Old-fashioned moralists might even call such behaviour tawdry, degrading and sluttish. Not Ms. Gattuso. And not Rebecca Traister, the New York Magazine writer who wrote about it. To them, the moral of the story is that the world is awash in bad consensual sex. This is due to the persistent power imbalances between women and men. Until we fix this, women cannot be sexually happy. As Ms. Traister argues, “The game is rigged.

“They’ve been told they should be able to have as many partners and initiate sex just as often as men do. And they’ve tried that. And it hasn’t worked out very well.”

Ironically, today’s feminists are serious about consent but casual about sex. And to their shock, they’ve discovered that there’s an awful lot of bad sex out there. They did not expect this. They’ve been told they are supposed to be having a super-positive sex life – unconflicted, joyous, casual and abundant. They’ve been told they should be able to have as many partners and initiate sex just as often as men do. And they’ve tried that. And it hasn’t worked out very well. Instead of feeling super-positive, they feel sexually dissatisfied, emotionally disconnected and more than a little used.

The surprise is that so many young women are surprised by this. Haven’t they watched Girls?

“Ironically, today’s feminists are serious about consent but casual about sex. And to their shock, they’ve discovered that there’s an awful lot of bad sex out there.”

The trouble isn’t men, of course. Nor is it the culture. The trouble is that these women have been sold a lie. They’ve been told that the profound sexual and behavioural differences between men and women are merely matters of individual preference, which would largely dissolve if we ever managed to shed our noxious cultural baggage.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. These differences are to a great extent hard-wired….(read more)

Source: The Globe and Mail