John Lennon was not exactly the world’s deepest thinker. Most of his pronouncements were mere slogans: more to parrotting the Current Thing than really thinking. With more than a touch of hypocrisy: the guy who wrote “imagine no possessions” was a multimillionaire married to a canny wheeler-and-dealer who famously sold a single cow for a quarter of a million in 1980 dollars (a cool million, today).
Still, he occasionally said something actually interesting. One puzzled me for a long was his 1980 declaration that ‘a lot this feminist stuff was for men, anyway’. Eventually, I figured it out: he was noting yet another instance of Western women finding new and interesting ways to punch themselves in the face.
Rather than freeing women from something oppressive, feminism freed immoral men from the sexual boundaries that once kept the fairer sex safe from objectification and exploitation.
The penny dropped for me, some time in the ’80s, when, in a rather forgettable TV mini-series about Australia in the ’60s, a predatory ‘male feminist’ character hectors a reluctant female into his bed. ‘When your kids say, What did you do in the Sexual Revolution, Mummy? what are you going to tell them?’ That’s what it was all about: not liberating women, but liberating men.
Specifically freeing men from the societal rules that kept their natural impulse to sow their wild oats hither and yon, with no consideration for the consequence. Much like the character ‘Dean Moriarty’ in On the Road, based on real-life Neal Cassady. Cassady, like his fictional counterpart, fathered a brood on long-suffering women whom he promptly deserted in his endless quest to impregnate more.
You may be shocked to learn that, long before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, men were advocating for freedom from sexual convention and pursuing “free love” to satisfy their own appetites, leaving a string of heartbroken women in their wake.
One tragic example is English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the husband of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley and son-in-law to the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who was advocating for the dissolution of marriage and “free love” in the early 19th century.
Shelley wrote that marriage was a “system hostile to human happiness” (Queen Mab, 1813) and argued that sexual unions should be dissolved as soon as “mutual love” ended. It was a convenient belief for a man who abandoned his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, to elope with 16-year-old Mary Godwin, Wollstonecraft’s daughter.
The heartbroken Harriet later drowned herself while pregnant with their child, and Shelley was deemed by a court unfit to raise their surviving children. He would go on to be unfaithful to his second wife, possibly even with her half-sister, Claire Clairmont, completing a pattern of infidelity that left emotional wreckage in its wake.
Thus establishing a grim pattern for the next two centuries of ‘progressive’ heroes, “who publicly challenged traditional sexual norms while privately mistreating the women who loved them”. Or, worse, collaborated in their sins. Simone de Beauvoir played the Ghislaine Maxwell to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Jeffrey Epstein, procuring an endless bevy of starry-eyed nymphets for the toad-like frog to misuse – after she was done with them first. Unsurprisingly, de Beauvoir is also cited as a pioneer of ‘transgender’ ideology. The Fred and Rosemary West of French philosophy also signed a notorious open letter demanding to decriminalise paedophilia. Go figure.
The idea that societal expectations of male responsibility and marriage served to reign in feckless men is exactly the point. When the Pill finally exorcised the spectre of responsibility from sex, feminists were elated.
How’s that all worked out for women?
Feminism has always drifted toward a vision of sexuality that disguises male indulgence as “female empowerment,” and countless women have paid the price.
By promising to free women from the “burden” of childbirth, the birth control pill and the normalization of abortion made escape from male responsibility that much easier. And here we are today.
This is not mere starched-collar wowserism. That hookup culture is bad for women in almost every way is well backed up by scientific and psychological data.
According to research from the University of Florida, men who engage in college hookups orgasm about 91 per cent of the time, while that figure is only 32 per cent for women. During first-time hookups, it’s worse: women climax just 10 per cent of the time compared to 68 per cent of men.
Men might get a quick dopamine rush from the blow-and-go but, long-term, the lack of commitment hurts them, too. Even Neal Cassady, reduced to little more than a booze-and-drug-addled performing monkey for the proto-hippies of Ken Kesey’s ‘Merry Pranksters’ and soon to die a pathetic death from exposure as he lay passed out on a railway track, lamented, “20 years of fast living – there’s just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don’t do what I have done.”
Committed marriage is, in fact, good for both sexes.
A study in the Journal of Sex Research found that young adults who engaged in casual sex had higher rates of depression and suicidal ideation, even after adjusting for prior mental health.
Another multi-campus study of nearly 4,000 students found that casual sex was negatively correlated with well-being and positively correlated with psychological distress […]
The Institute for Family Studies reported that 82 per cent of college students described emotional regret after hookups, ranging from embarrassment and loss of self-respect to difficulty forming real relationships. Seventy-eight per cent of women and 72 per cent of men said they regretted casual sex altogether.
Contrary to Germaine Greer’s assertion that feminine happiness necessitated putting out for any dirty, smelly hippy who came along, feminism and the ‘sexual revolution’ have left modern feminist women miserable as sin.
Decades after its triumph, women report record levels of depression, anxiety, and sexual dissatisfaction. The promises of empowerment have yielded exhaustion and objectification instead.
Well, congratulations, feminists: you finally figured out what wicked, old ‘patriarchal’ society figured out millennia ago: men will do the wombat act* as soon as you let them. And feminism let them a lot.
Now we’re all paying the price.
*The wombat: eats, roots and leaves.
