The College Fix

Emily Esfahani Smith has some insightful things to say about Donna Freitas’s new book, “THE END OF SEX.”

For decades now, young women have been taught by popular culture that casual sex is supposed to be liberating. Shows like Sex and the City sent the message that promiscuity was no big deal and empowering. But stories like those on Girls, which I’ve written about before, and those in Donna Freitas’s new book, The End of Sex, suggest that for many young women it proves instead to be dehumanizing.

I reviewed Freitas’ book for the Wall Street Journal today. Freitas explodes the myth of the “harmless hookup.” She also paints a picture of campus life in which sex and eroticism are completely decoupled:

One college woman describes juggling three men at once; a male student admits that a hookup is just a “trial run” for a date; a third student explains that oral sex is “almost expected” in a hookup: “People have these urges and they are trying to satisfy them.” Sex on campus, writes the author, has been reduced to a solitary and selfish act—basically, onanism “with another person present.”

Read the full article here.

Why do secular feminists support the hook-up culture and promote loose sexual morals as part of their “pro woman” platform? Part of the answer is that sexual liberation is a spiritual project, meant to cement the moral self-sovereignty of individuals in a post-Christian society. The fact that a loose sexual culture may not be all that good for women’s equality and women’s happiness won’t stop secular feminists, along with all other kinds of secularists, from pursuing an end to sexual restraint in our society.

This is a point Rod Dreher made this week (more articulately than I’ve done here) in his thought provoking essay, “Sex After Christianity.”

[Phillip] Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.

You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise…

Dreher has written an important essay, and I recommend giving it a full read over at The American Conservative.

Many of us look at the bizarre post-feminist culture we are now living in–with woman-degrading hard core porn prominently screened in elite college classrooms, a hook-up culture that places pressure on young women to service men on campus whom they barely know with oral sex without so much as a first date, 50 Shades of Gray‘s flagrantly misogynist erotica trash lighting up the bestseller lists–and we wonder, why are women, and particularly feminists, embracing such humiliation?

The answer, I think, is that for modern secularists, the spiritual importance of fleeing our culture’s Christian past outweighs the importance of women’s rights, or even women’s happiness. It’s not simply about casting off sexual restraint. Sexual revolution is a weapon intended, above all, to overturn a spiritual order.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of SEX & GOD AT YALE: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.

Like The College Fix on Facebook  /  Follow Nathan on Twitter @NathanHarden