Belle Waring mocks those who argue that feminism gives men what they want and makes women miserable. Because men are ruled by their organs and because feminism is really all about free sex. Fun post.
18 thoughts on “Why Pay For the Cow When the Milk’s For Free?”
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Apt. 11d 
Amanda Marcotte has said such things in the past, and ace.mu.nu had a very funny and profane post on the subject. I’ll see if I can post the details later.
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The post is “Weird-Ass Feminist Nonsense” from Feb. 17, 2007 at ace.mu.nu. Basically, Ace is identifying a new meme in pop feminist thought: the patriarchy isn’t interested in sex and women, just procreation, so resistance to the patriarchy is best expressed by having lots of sex but no babies. So it’s not really a strawfeminist. There are people out there making that argument.
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Ross D. has a response up at theamericanscene.com.
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A link to Ross D.’s post. Interesting comments at Crooked Timber. I’m enjoying the debate.
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I’ve keep going back to the CT thread (and the LGM thread too), and starting a comment, and then never finishing it. I think I’ve done that four times now. I honestly can’t think of any place to begin that wouldn’t involve a dozen assumptions or more that have already been intelligently criticized or dismissed by different people on the thread. I hate falling back on “well, I just believe things ought to be this way”; I’d like to think I should be able to make an argument. But I think I’m just going to have to sit this round out.
Harry B. is doing good work over there though.
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Go ahead and post here, RAB. There’s no established debate yet, so it’s a clean slate.
Despite being part of a campus community, I don’t ask college students a lot of nosy questions, but here are a few points to get started:
1. There’s a lot of depression among college students.
2. I went to USC from 1991-1995 and there was no dating. There were a few couples who had seemingly been together forever (some with long distance high school boyfriends), and a much larger pool of unattached students. I never had a college boyfriend from campus and few people I knew did.
The same is still true in the elite college community where I live. There are very few couples, but the ones that exist are well-established. Conventional wisdom is that students “don’t have time” for actual relationships, and that hook-ups are a time saver for the busy and ambitious. Undermining that view is the fact that hook-up culture is prevalent in much less demanding and competitive environments.
3. I had a lot of close opposite-sex friendships as a student, something that I know would have been rare in the age of dating.
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4. As I’ve probably mentioned before on this website, my husband teaches a philosophy course on “Love and Sex.” He periodically gives his students an anonymous survey to elicit their own attitudes. There are problems of selection bias and imperfect self-knowledge, but nonetheless, the survey shows these students believe that while sex means nothing to their peers, they themselves want love and commitment. Hence, a lot of students are going to feel (at least at times) trapped in a cultural system that they find profoundly alienating.
See point #1.
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Thanks for the encouragement, Amy, but I don’t know. I tried again to say something this morning, but I just couldn’t put it together. The dominant voices on that thread don’t seem at all cognizant that people like myself are not questioning that feminism was an advance; we’re just questioning the presumption that one ought not criticize the commodified sexual mores of today in any way which makes reference to the social transformations which feminism both contributed to and was carried along by. (That building a criticism of sexual behavior today by way of such a reference is at least plausible is, I think, perfectly obvious though strangely denied by some people; Mary Catherine Moran’s most recent comment, here, points out how the connection was implicitly acknowledged from the way Belle framed her post right from the beginning.) Are we so determined to hold onto our sexual emancipation that such a point cannot even be acknowledged?
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Yeah, I liked MCM’s last comment also.
My biggest problem with the debate so far is the assumption that kids today are sex-crazed boobs. I think that only a small percentage of college aged girls are appearing on those Girls Gone Wild videos. Only a small percentage are jumping in and out of beds like rabbits. They might not date in the traditional sense, but we didn’t either. We discussed this last year in response to a Caitlin Flanagan article.
Why make a big deal about the behavior of small percentage of college aged students? Why question an entire movement based on the actions of a few? On the flip side, I don’t think we should try to defend the actions of a few, because we fear roll backs of a entire movement.
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How about saying that there are many different kinds of feminism, and they intersect in often surprising ways? I’m an evil conservative feminist (like Kathy Shaidle, Florence King, Andrea Harris, et al) and I think my tribe is actually rather large, although most women in it are unaware of their membership, and quite a few wouldn’t call themselves feminists. Furthermore, how about envisioning a spectrum of oppression: on the one end of oppression is Afghanistan, while on the other end there’s a stripper pole. I would argue that a workable feminism means finding a place for oneself in the middle of the spectrum, as far from both ends as possible, some place where one can live with freedom, dignity, and self-respect, without being either an invisible nonentity or a piece of meat.
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OK, here’s a question for the group then.
If feminism is responsible for GGW, is the gay rights movement responsible for recent high rates of anorexia among gay men?
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Do you want an honest answer or the PC version? (Not that I know enough about the subject to offer either, but it does seem like a potentially touchy area.)
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AmyP, I’m going to claim that stripper on her pole and burka wearer are not that different: both are stances which see women
sexually only. Neither the invisible nonentity nor the meat-girl is in very good shape to write a software program or do accounting.
It seems to me there have been several themes in the responses here and elsewhere: one is the question of how accurate the stories of hookup culture are, one is whether it helps young men and women grow towards wholesome lives, one is whether it makes women feel used.
My guesses are: pretty accurate, don’t know, and yes, often.
And what the Hell do I know about accurate? I’m 25 years out of any connection to university life, my kids are in elementary school. Still, the reports I get from my friends who have kids in college suggest that the kids, at least a lot of them, are having a whole lot of sex with people to whom they have no ongoing emotional connection.
Grow towards wholesome lives? I have assumptions here: I am married, and monogamous. My wife and I like to talk with each other. Our sexual connection is really not that big a component of what makes it work – it’s a good thing, but our shared enterprise with the children, enjoying talking, ongoing friendship on many levels – these things are the greatest part of the glue which keeps us stuck together. And I think this is the best kind of adult love. So then my opinion about kids’ practices and whether they are positive tends to be based on whether I think it gets them on the road to that sort of connection for themselves.
And what does hook-up culture move kids towards? I just don’t know. I have certainly seen the wheels come off the marriages of some of my friends whose marriages were, I think, largely based on sex in the first place. And if the kids have been having limitless sex in college/early 20s will they be smarter about not marrying just because of desire, wanting to find someone they can at least talk with? It makes me squeamish: I’d like to see sex connected with caring and love. But I really don’t have any confidence that I can guess the likely emotional consequences of this.
As far as health consequences, I will certainly look to get my kids vaccinated with Gardasil! And the history of AIDS makes me very nervous – even though AIDS seems to transmit relatively poorly through het sex when the participants don’t have lesions from other STDs it’s still possible to catch it, and there’s no obvious reason that some other organism won’t take advantage of all that mucus membrane contact to spread through the population.
Last, are young women going to feel particularly bad about it, wake up with regret in their junior years and feel that they have been used? My guess is that some will, some will not, and a lot will depend on what their friends think and say about their experiences. I will likely try to sell the idea, to both my sons and my daughter, as they get through high school and head to college, that sex can have both emotional and health consequences if heedlessly engaged, and that drinking to drunkenness is almost always a bad idea. Will they listen? Damned if I know.
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dave s,
If it’s any comfort, I suspect that the kids themselves may have an exaggerated sense of how much of this is going on. The problem is perhaps not the hook-up culture itself, but the absence of a real alternative. When love is not available, it’s easy to settle for the next best thing. And as you point out, there is no straight road from the hook-up culture to responsible and happy adulthood. Grownups aren’t very helpful, beyond offering a lot of don’ts (don’t rape, etc). There’s no positive vision.
On a slightly different subject, a number of colleges have started an interesting campaign to fight binge-drinking. The idea is that students are mistaken about the prevalence of heavy drinking among their peers. It seems like everyone is doing it all the time, whereas they’re not. So on campuses, you will often see posters saying things like (I’m just approximating the numbers here): “2/3 of students at X University eat before going out drinking” or “97% of XU students would not let a seriously inebriated friend go home alone” or “Only 20% of XU students have ever missed class because of drinking.” Some of the stats are pretty feeble (like the last one), but the idea is to denormalize alcoholic-style drinking and to cut down on emergency room visits by people who’ve gone too far. The kids at my school have coined a verb from the name of the campus ambulanced service–to be -ERMed (I’m skipping a letter here) means to be overdo it and get taken to the hospital.
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“Grownups aren’t very helpful, beyond offering a lot of don’ts (don’t rape, etc). There’s no positive vision.”
I have to contest this, or at least complain about it, if true. Do we really offer “no positive vision” to our children? Dave S., it sounds to me like you have a fine and vibrant relationship with your spouse; don’t you think that your elementary school-age children are picking up on clues to your and your wife’s happy status, even if they can’t articulate exactly what those clues are? Or, on the other hand, if you are doubtful as to whether or not they will pick up on or agree with such clues…well, why be? Shouldn’t we take it upon ourselves as parents, as people who have lived and learned, to affirmatively communicate the benefits of our learning to our children through example? I have always assumed that I need to treat my spouse in a certain way so that my children will understand that they should look for a spouse that will treat them in that same way. That sounds like a positive vision to me.
My apologies, Amy, if I read more into your comment than you meant. I really don’t mean this to sound like a challenge–it’s a general rant, not pointing at anyone in particular. But it’s just that when I see adults talking about how the next generation doesn’t necessarily have any positive models, only warning signs, and that they have to figure it out for themselves, some part of me wants to cry out that it is exactly such thinking which makes the observation self-fulfilling. We are the positive models, the sources of religious and personal and moral instruction and example, that our children need. We took on the role when we became parents; to say that, as a grown-up, we still don’t know where the positive models are to come from is to, I think, be confused as to what “growing up” means.
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RAB,
What I mean is that a college-age kid often doesn’t really have a model for how you get from where he or she is now, to where mom and dad are today. Don’t you remember how foreign (and old!) married adults seemed when you were in your late teens, or how long it took for you to feel that you were living the same sort of life as your parents and were the same sort of person? And consider how parents tend to feel about their kids dating or having a girlfriend or boyfriend–traditionally in the US we want to put that day off as long as possible. I would argue that the hook-up culture changes the terrain, and that parents may not have adjusted to the fact yet that the absence of a relationship does not mean that their daughter or son is sitting home and knitting sweaters for orphans or training a seeing eye puppy. Under these new conditions, the appearance of a girlfriend or boyfriend is (all things being equal) a real stroke of luck.
One more thing–I’ve been struck by the fact that every few years, I hear a college student talking wistfully about arranged marriage and how much easier that would make things.
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RAF,
Sorry for screwing up your initials!
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Fine information. Thanks so much, have a good day!
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