Despite the Atlantic‘s recent tendency to publish triumphalist feminist tracts such as “The End of Men” and Sandra Tsing-Loh’s public airing of her own shameful, cruel behavior toward her husband, the magazine has nevertheless managed to come up with a piece that incorporates a great deal of the observations we have been making in our own little corner of the internet for a couple years now.
In Hard Core, Natasha Vargas-Cooper smashes the feminist orthodoxy of egalitarian sexuality, using pornography to provide a point-by-point refutation of utopian feminist fantasies.
Over time, I’ve noticed that women who are truly interested in male sexuality – and the male psyche in general – tend to look for clues in pornography. Some of us men may be a bit bemused by this, particularly the tendency to intellectualize the genre, because to us male sexuality simply is, and doesn’t need any more explanation than the fact that we get hungry or tired. However, we have to remind ourselves that when women envision a world that suits their sense of propriety, they tend to have little more than a dim awareness of what drives male desire, which results in ridiculous ideas about how men and women should relate to each other sexually. Of course, we men are guilty of the same kind of oversimplification of female sexuality, and our own projections of what’s right and proper probably played a large part in the sexual dissatisfaction that drove the sexual revolution.
Women like Vargas-Cooper are valuable in that they can tell it to the other side, so to speak. Perhaps we could consider them the female equivalents of Game disciples, who claim with some justification that they are teaching men how to be more accepting of and attractive to women in general. In browsing her blog, Natasha appears to be one of those women who, despite not having the typical visage or physique that characterizes the conventionally attractive American girl, possesses an allure and earthy sexuality of the continental variety, which is extraordinarily rare in Anglo women, and probably somewhat intimidating to the majority of Anglo men. In short, she reminds me of French women, and not in the least due to her functional grasp of intellectual discourse, which is also rare in Anglo women, who tend to write comically absurd treatises on sexuality, or “gender” as they might put it, in all seriousness.
Aside from the character of the writer, whose only fault may lie in revealing a little too much about herself, the piece itself is astonishing not only for the fact that it was actually published in The Atlantic, but for the carpet-bombing approach to feminist shibboleths, which she methodically reduces to smoldering cinders.
I can’t really do it justice myself, so here are a few quotes from the article, which you should all set aside some time to read and wonder at:
Over the years, different strategies have been offered so that women could avoid the more subjugating consequences of sex. Though methods of reversing the biological power dynamics between sexes date back to ancient Sparta, the premise had always been confined to the fringes of society until the sexual revolution of the 1960s, a period in which many feminists considered marriage the primary mechanism for women’s sexual conscription. The liberation on offer was sexual freedom for women—and their partners—through open marriages and sex communes. It’s worth noting that these polyamorous arrangements usually had at the center a male patriarch who reaped the perks of women’s newfound freedom.
In the above passage, Vargas-Cooper is clearly referring to what we call “hypergamy.” Roissy would be proud.
But the reactionary political correctness of the 1990s put forth a proposition even more disastrous to women than free love: sexual equality. With the rise of PC culture, the notion of men and women as sexual equals has found a home in the mainstream.
[...]
Armed with a “Take Back the Night” pamphlet, we were led to believe that, as long as we avoided the hordes of date rapists, sex was an egalitarian endeavor. The key to sexual harmony, so the thinking went, was social conditioning. Men who sexually took advantage of women were considered the storm troopers of patriarchy, but women could teach men to adopt a different ideology, through explicit communication of boundaries —“you can touch there” or “please don’t do that.” Thus was the dark drama of sex replaced with a verbal contract.
Above, she points out the breathtakingly simplistic social approach to sexuality, which, although she doesn’t mention it, has been a disaster for men, as we are forced into the binary of rapist or eunuch.
Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche.
Hard to believe this is actually a woman writing here. She must be exceptionally intelligent and objective, as she has a pretty clear understanding of what’s going on yet resists any attempt to pass judgment.
Finally, my favorite quote of all is a response to Gail Dines, a feminist porn critic who suggests that pornography turns men into sexual deviants:
First, I have yet to see a single credible study that links proliferation of pornography to an increase in abuse of women. More important, the sort of sex that Dines envisions—where respect, love, and civic connections are merged into erotically rewarding experience—is utopian (and not perhaps all that enticing). Dines ignores the fact that men behave differently than women. It wasn’t just Ward Cleaver–type stuffiness that prompted generations of dads to warn their daughters not to get into cars with boys. Dads are grown men, and they know that when it comes to sex, most men will take every inch a woman yields.
If the shadowy cabal of Internet pornographers posited by Dines were not able to use 30-second clips of porn as bread crumbs to entice men away from their true sexual personas, what sort of “authentic sexuality” would males possess? Dines seems to have in mind a Rousseauistic pygmy race of sexually neutered males; perhaps many feminists (and perhaps many fathers of daughters, and perhaps many sensible and civilized people, for that matter) would applaud this emasculated masculinity as progress—but we’re never going to achieve it.
Brilliant stuff. My hat’s off to you, Ms. Vargas-Cooper.
