Sex matters : how modern feminism lost touch with science, love, and common sense

320 Pages·2018·8.412 MB·English

by  Mona Charen

ALSO BY MONA CHAREN
Do-Gooders
Useful Idiots
SEX
MATTERS
How Modern Feminism
Lost Touch with Science, Love,
and Common Sense
MONA CHAREN
LIBRARY
CROWN
FORUM
NEW YORK
Copyright © 2018 by Mona Charen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
CROWN FORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of
Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Charen, Mona, author.
Title: Sex matters: how modern feminism lost touch with science, love, and
common sense / Mona Charen.
Description: New York : Crown Forum, [2018] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018012448 (print) | LCCN 2018013091 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780451498403 (e-book) | ISBN 9780451498397 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism. | Anti-feminism. | Sex differences (Psychology) |
Sex. | Women—Social conditions—21st century.
Classification: LCC HQ1155 (ebook) | LCC HQ1155 .C4186 2018 (print) |
DDC 306.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012448
ISBN 978-0-451-49839-7
Ebook ISBN 978-0-451-49840-3
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA '
Jacket design by Josh Smith
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
For Bob:
“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”
—Song of Solomon

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: AT WHAT PRICE? ix
CHAPTER 1: THE FEMINIST MISTAKE 1
The First Wave You’ve Never Heard Of 4
The Second Wave’s Historical Revisionism 8
The First Feminist Blockbuster 12
The Sexual Revolutionaries 28
Pre- and Extramarital Sex Goes Mainstream 30
The Dead Hands of Marx and Freud 32
Schisms 42
Regrets 51
chapter 2: VIVE LA DIFFERENCE 55
Sugar and Spice 69
Gender 77
CHAPTER 3: SEVERING BONDS 92
CHAPTER 4: HOOKUP CULTURE 106
Booze 115
Bring Back the Date 117
Viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER 5: THE CAMPUS RAPE MESS 126
The Campus Rape Industrial Complex 129
Star Chambers 134
Victim Blaming 137
The Elusive Numbers 142
Crimes 145
Sexual Assault Is Not a Myth 147
Believing Victims 151
Something Is Very Wrong: It Must Be Men 156
CHAPTER 6: FAMILY 161
Toxic Masculinity 164
A Nostalgia Trap? 173
The Ghost of the Moynihan Report ill
A Happiness Gap 179
Sex Wars 182
Baby Carriage Before Marriage 191
Lost Men 195
How Do You Know It’s Marriage? 202
About That Clock 203
CHAPTER 7: HAVING IT ALL 207
Motherhood Is Not Oppression 212
Social Engineers Strike Out 219
The Mommy Track 222
Human Flourishing 233
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 239
NOTES 241
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 277
INDEX 283
INTRODUCTION
AT WHAT PRICE?
Feminism has triumphed. No longer a movement or even a
controversy, feminism has become a piety. In many respects,
this is worth celebrating. Equality has borne abundant fruit and
enriched the lives of women, men, and children. But feminism has
carried costs too. Very high costs.
While women have dramatically increased their earning
power, educational attainment, and independence, many of the
crucial supports for a happy and balanced life are further out of
reach than in the past, and further out of reach than they need to
be. Feminism is thought to be synonymous with women’s interests
and women’s wishes, but that is far from the case.
Every year since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked a
representative sample of American adults how happy they are. In
1972, women, on average, reported being a bit happier than men.
Every year since, women’s reported happiness has declined, both
in absolute terms and when compared with men’s. Around 1990,
the sexes traded places, and since then, women have reported
being less happy than men, and less happy than their mothers and
grandmothers were at the same stage of life. A 2011 survey found
that women are two and a half times as likely to be taking antide­
pressant medication as men.1
Happiness, then, has not marched forward with feminism.
Women’s lives are more varied than they once were, but also far
x INTRODUCTION
less secure. Men and children are also unmoored in often damag­
ing ways.
Sheryl Sandberg, in her feminist blockbuster, Lean In, writes,
“A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our
countries and companies and men ran half our homes. I believe
that this would be a better world.”
I don’t, and it’s not because I object to women running coun­
tries or companies or men running homes. It’s because I don’t
think “equality” means “sameness.” It need not frighten or be­
wilder us that, on average, women tend to be more inclined to
choose children over work than men, and I have never understood
why feminists consistently disparage women’s preferences. The
Pew Research Center reports that in 2012, 67 percent of moth­
ers said their ideal was either part-time work or no work outside
the home. After declining for several decades, the percentage of
mothers with children under the age of eighteen who choose to be
full-time homemakers has been increasing. And less than a third
of mothers say their ideal working arrangement is full-time work.
Still, Sandberg speaks for millions, especially our opinion lead­
ers. The conventional wisdom spans the political spectrum. Con­
servatives as well as liberals, and Republicans almost as much as
Democrats, bow to the idea that equality must mean sameness.
Like totalitarians everywhere, they are determined not to under­
stand people but to regiment them.
Our society devotes tremendous resources, psychic as well as
actual, to the attempt to make women and men alike. Thousands
of women’s studies departments catechize college students to be­
lieve in perpetual female oppression. Children are instructed that
we expect them to play sports in equal measure. As they mature,
young people learn that they are expected to spend the same num­
ber of hours at work, to engage in sex in the same spirit, to study
the same subjects in the same numbers, to change the exact same
number of diapers, and to divide all jobs in the economy right
down the middle.
Women must be roofers and loggers, and men must teach kin-
INTRODUCTION xi
dergarten and do social work in the same proportions. (By the way,
the percentage of workers who are killed on the job tends to range
from 95 to 99 percent male. You rarely hear feminists decry this
inequity.)2 In our era, any story of a boy or girl doing something
usually associated with the other sex is guaranteed to be hailed as a
landmark in the long march toward an androgynous utopia: a girl
who wants to play on her high school’s football team;3 a boy who
wants to be homecoming queen.4
We’re told that “all sex differences are socially constructed.”
In our time, this has expanded to the notion that the male/female
binary is imaginary as well. There are not two but many genders.
Sexuality is a spectrum.
Yet resistance stubbornly persists. Most Americans reject the
label “feminist” for themselves. A 2016 YouGov poll found that
only 26 percent of Americans call themselves feminists. Only
32 percent of women and 19 percent of men were comfortable
with the term. Asked why they rejected the label, 47 percent of
women and 35 percent of men said that “feminists are too ex­
treme.”5 Twenty-seven percent of men also agreed that feminists
are “anti-men.” Other polls have found even fewer people accept­
ing the feminist designation. A 2015 Vox poll found that while
85 percent believe in “equality for women,” only 18 percent of
Americans said they would welcome the feminist label.6
Our society has devoted endless effort to freeing men and
women from traditional sex roles in family life. These roles are
outmoded and limiting, we’re told. Back in the 1970s, when
second-wave feminism was gearing up, Betty Friedan asked Sim­
one de Beauvoir whether women should have a choice between
being homemakers and working full-time. “No woman should
be authorized to stay at home to bring up her children,” declared
de Beauvoir. “Society should be totally different. Women should
not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too
many women will make that one.”
De Beauvoir may have been onto something. I made the choice
to put my family first, and as she might have put it, Je ne regrette rien.