Remember Katie Roiphe?

Katie Roiphe is a year younger than I, and I suspect our mothers grew up before some critical watershed. I identified with the kind of feminism she describes that she was raised with. My mother was a professional woman and expected to have the same opportunities as men, she didn't want to be a man and she didn't fear men. Reading Roiphe's 1994 book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism was both familiar to me and a moment in which I became aware of a change in my own thinking. Along with other books of the time I formed my opinions on the sexual comming of age of my generation. And here I am talking about something that happens at 27, not 17. Its the formulation of ideas about things. Reflections on observations, not impulses or the acting upon them. Wendy Shalit's book on the new modesty, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, in many ways was the completion of that journey. It will hardly surprise anyone to learn that we who abandoned our youth in the 90's concluded that our parents and the their world had left us with a pretty screwy sexual culture. For those of us a bit older, our parents seemed to have been at the beginings of that change, incompletly reflecting it, sympathizing with it, but lacking the characteristics of its excesses.

Those reading James Lileks' bleat on a regular basis will recogize his comments on the selling of sexuality to younger and younger people. Stuff like this:

"All I ask is that Old Navy not sell thongs for three year olds. If they want to put gigantic Calvin Klein underwear ads in Times Square, go right ahead - that’s what Times Square is for. But don’t put up big pictures of half-naked 13 year olds; that’s not what this culture is about. Yet. And don't make every square inch of America what Times Square used to be."

I also minored in anthropology and find evolutionart psychology or socio-biology persuasive. Helen Fisher or E.O.Wilson make sense to me. Men insure their fitness by spreading their genes as widely as possible. Women insure their fitness by insuring that their considerable investment in offspring bears its own. So male sexual culture has a bit more of the drive for promescuity. Women are more selective.

But fallout from women's liberation and the sexual revolution, two related but different social movements, has led some women to think that being equal to men means being like men, including in their approach to sex. As Barbara Kay put it in the Canadian newspaper the National Post, (link from Innocents Abroad):
"[The] lesson was that women, in order to be truly equal in value to men, must assimilate a man's sexual behaviours and instincts. Are men obsessed with sex? Great. We're there. Are men aggressive in pursuit of sex, promiscuous, and emotionally detached from their conquests?"

Advocates of the new modesty argued that this left women feeling empty. It also leads to raising the stakes to obtain the pursued goal. Kay's article concerns this embrace of a sexual culture long associated with adult males with young girls. For a good bit of history people have been torn between resignation and condemnation over male sexual culture. For the good of society it was best that man devote themselves to his children, and that was best accomplished by way of their mother, his mate. Now we find a creeping of this pattern of behavior, no longer confined to adult males, working its way to younger and younger girls. The precise consequences will take years to be seen in full, but I am certain that one prediction will bear fruit, and that is that some young girl today will go on to write a book as important as The Morning After in the next dozen years.