Wrestling male-female relationships back from joyless, misanthropic, neo-puritanical feminism

Emma SulkowiczAs I’ve noted before, we cannot afford to back down an inch in the culture wars lest the fanatics take over, brutally squashing all dissent — and as is always the case with fanatics, all the joy in life. One of the most ferocious battles in this war involves relationships between men and women (or, maybe more accurately, boys and girls) at the university level. Robert Stacy McCain accurately notes the malevolent misanthropy driving these battles:

People think I’m joking or exaggerating when I refer to “Feminists Against Heterosexuality,” but it is becoming difficult to ignore how the anti-male ideology of feminist gender theory is reflected in “rape culture” discourse. Consider what one web site calls “101 stuff about consent”:

  • Sexual consent is an active ongoing process that involves free, non-coerced choice and shared responsibility about when, whether, and what to do sex-wise.
  • Consent has to be clear, explicit, communicated well and checked in on a lot.
  • Enthusiastic consent is mandatory before engaging in anything of even a mildly sexual nature.

[snip]

In the 21st century, where elite universities are hives of LGBT activism, we would be shocked to learn that any student at Cornell was interested in normal sex. Cornell students are highly intelligent, and only an extremely stupid student would attempt to engage in normal sex on an elite campus in the current climate of “rape culture” hysteria. A heterosexual male can expect to be expelled from Cornell if a partner claims rape two monthsafter their drunken hookup, on the basis of an administrative tribunal in which he is deliberately deprived of the due-process rights that the Constitution guarantees any common criminal.

Ah, but he is not a common criminal! He is a heterosexual male on a university campus, where heterosexuality is seen as inherently oppressive to women, and males are denounced as oppressors.

I had three thoughts when I read McCain’s article.  First, this manic demand for explicit consent every step of the way, something that utterly fails to accommodate human dynamics, creates a bizarre neo-puritanical atmosphere.  The only way a young man can safely get sex is to marry the girl first.  Although she can still cry rape, marriage does give the protection of implied consent.

Second, because campuses across America have more in common with sharia fanaticism than 1950s values, I fear that the answer won’t be old-fashioned abstinence and marriage.  Instead, the campus kooks are going to come up with some crackpot equivalent to the “temporary marriages” in Iran, which turn shatter the difference between bride and prostitute for the few minutes it takes for a man to have sex with the poor woman.

Third, back in the 1920s/1930s, Americans had a much better grasp of human nature, of the dance between women and men, and of the need for clear rules based, not on hatred for either gender, but on the protection of both.  A perfect example is this Jerome Kern/Otto Harbach song written for 1931 Broadway review:

Nowadays, in place of flirtatious romance, the combination of modern decadence and neo-puritanical misanthropic feminism leaves us with this kind of “music”: