Saturday 26 October 2019

The American disease. Part seven (feminism)



American women are amongst the freest, wealthiest and healthiest in history. They live longer on average than anyone else in the world including American men. There is hardly a job they are not allowed to do. American women have reached the top in almost every profession and it is 100% certain that in the next twenty years or so there will be a woman president.

In Western Europe there is the same story of women gaining rights and responsibilities that our grandmothers could not have dreamed of. More women study at university than men. Girls most frequently do better at school than boys. It is possible, though sometimes difficult, for women to both have children and a career. While women can take a year off work to have a child, men cannot take a year off to do what they want or need to do. Women still frequently retire earlier and live longer than men do. Divorce laws tend to favour wives rather than husbands. Medicine tends to focus on women’s health even though we live longer. Yet still we complain. Try living anywhere else.


 Feminists complain about a patriarchy that barely exists in the West, while ignoring the fact that women who live in parts of Africa and the Middle East have far fewer rights than we do. The real battle for women’s rights is not in America, Britain and New Zealand. It’s in Saudi Arabia and Chad. Women in the West in general can wear what we want. We can walk around in public wearing almost nothing or alternatively we can cover ourselves from head to toe in black. We can do almost any job we please, we can have sex with who we want and if we become pregnant, we can with some limitations decide not to have the baby. We can vote and we can demonstrate. There are important women writers and journalists. Universities are absolutely full of feminists who argue continually for ever more rights for women. These things exist nowhere except in the West.

When I first went to Russia it felt like I had entered a time machine. It was like going back to Britain in the forties or fifties. Men and women had clearly defined roles. The way the sexes interacted was like something out of Jane Austen. There had been no sixties sexual revolution and feminism barely existed. Women ran the home, while men did absolutely nothing inside, but were expected to fix everything outside. Much of Eastern Europe still follows this model. Yet feminists in America and Britain complain about our lot. Have they travelled anywhere?

Women in Russia have fewer rights than American women. They are expected to fit into certain roles. Sexism is commonplace. Many men still think that it is legitimate to use their strength to subdue the women in their lives. Yet men and women get on far better in Russia than in America.

Having achieved equality of opportunity and to a large extent equality of outcome, American feminists continued the battle, but the battleground changed from the public to the private. Mistrust entered into the relationship between American men and women. This was the endpoint of the sexual revolution.

Until 1960 women had to be careful about sex. To have a baby without a husband was dangerous. This is a story that goes back to when time began. The nature of human beings is such that women spend a long time being pregnant and have to devote a long time to child care. A human infant is helpless for years.

It is for this reason that human beings developed ideas such as marriage. There was a deal between most men and most women. If you want to have sex with me you first have to make a commitment that you will stay with me and look after me. Male desire was regulated by a social contract enforced by society. If a man got a woman pregnant, he was frequently expected to marry her. Society disapproved of women who got pregnant outside marriage because the burden of looking after the children fell on society rather than a husband. For thousands of years this social contract existed. It did so in the West until around the mid-1960s. It still exists everywhere else that hasn’t yet been infected by the American disease.

If we look at courtship in American films and fiction prior to the 1960s it is most commonly assumed that sex takes place inside marriage. There are exceptions, but popular culture discouraged sexual relations prior to marriage.

A woman prior to 1960 would very rarely indeed go back to a man’s room at university and certainly not having just met him and having got drunk.  There was no such thing as date rape prior to 1960, because people on dates and certainly not on first dates, didn’t go back to each other’s rooms and didn’t usually sleep with each other.

Throughout human history rape has been a crime of violence. A man broke the social contract by instead of having sex with a woman who had consented to be his wife, having it with someone he simply desired without her consent. It was assumed that this crime took place by means of a man using his strength to force a woman to have sex against her will. There was nearly always evidence that a crime had taken place simply because of this force.

Prior to the 1960s if a woman had said I went willingly to a man’s bedroom, got into bed with him, took off all my clothes and engaged in foreplay, but then he raped me, there would rarely if ever have been a conviction. Firstly, because there would have rarely been evidence of a crime and secondly because both the man and the woman would have been acting outside the social contract.

For the first time in human history the 1960s changed everything about human sexuality. Instead of being something that usually happened within marriage and which usually gave rise to children, sex became recreation. Prior to the 1960s both men and women knew that every time they had sex there might be a baby. There were methods of contraception, but they were either unpleasant or they were unreliable.

Suddenly with the sexual revolution both men and women could engage in what they thought was risk free sex. But while one risk (having a baby) had been eliminated or mitigated by effective contraception and easily obtained abortion another risk undreamt of in human history was waiting to be discovered.

Male desire was no longer regulated by a social contract. From the 1960s onwards men could relatively easily obtain sex. If they went on a few dates they would expect to sleep with their girlfriend. Gradually the situation developed to the extent that it became completely normal for men and women who had just met to go back to each other’s bedrooms. Sex before marriage became the norm. The percentage of husbands and wives who were both virgins on their wedding day became tiny, whereas it had been completely normal one hundred years earlier.

The sexual revolution went further and further. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s it was common for boyfriends and girlfriends to have sex, most people were not especially promiscuous. Few women would sleep with someone they had just met. Sex was still something that happened within a relationship. With the growth of the Internet and with the ease of meeting people for dates simply by using a mobile phone or dating site, it became more and more common for men and women to have multiple partners and to sleep with people they had just met.

Clearly there was a new social contract. A man and a woman could now swipe, meet and be in bed within the course of a few hours. No one disapproved and there was minimal risk of pregnancy.

But the risk was this. If next day the woman went to the police and said she had been raped, the man might go to jail for many years.

Women know that men desire sex. We have always been the gate keepers. Any reasonably attractive young woman can go to a bar and find a man willing to sleep with her immediately. In the modern world men have come to believe that they can do this without consequences. This after all was the whole point of the sexual revolution. Free love. But it turned out not to be free.

Feminism now demands that any woman can sleep with who she wants when she wants without any consequences for her, but that at any moment, even years later and without any other evidence, she can complain to the police that she was raped and that the courts will believe her.

But if this is the social contract that now obtains, it is an attack on men and the very nature of men. Men desire women, they want to have sex with young, beautiful women. Well a young beautiful woman can go into a bar and like a siren draw any man she chooses onto the reef. She can take revenge on any man she can attract into her bed and any ex-boyfriend or indeed any husband.

Whereas rape was once a crime of violence, with visible signs of the attack, feminists now think it is something that can happen in the bedroom in such a way that men don’t even know they have done something wrong until the police knock on the door next day.

If the woman was drunk the man may be accused of a crime of violence even though he used no violence. She may have been begging him for sex, but because she was drunk, she didn’t consent and the man goes to jail. But a sober woman who encourages a drunk man to have sex can’t be charged with rape, even if the man later cannot remember what he did and regrets that he slept with her. This is not a social contract, it’s one-way traffic.

The law cannot prove what goes on in the privacy of the bedroom. There is no evidence other than the testimony of the two people involved. But feminists don’t want to be equal any more, they want the testimony of woman to count for more than the testimony of men. They want to be superior. They want us to be beings who never lie and must always be believed.

We have reached a situation where every man risks going to jail every time he sleeps with a woman even with his wife. If a couple get drunk on their wedding night, the woman can say she was raped. The battle of the sexes has entered the bedroom and the private lives of all of us, but one side has tanks and the other side has spears.

The only rational thing for men to do is to go on a sex strike like in Aristophanes' Lysistrata. Men have become the pre 1960s woman. It is now men who face risk from having sex. Women face no risk at all. We are unlikely to get pregnant. Our reputation is safe now. What if men became the gatekeepers? What if men became reluctant to have sex and women had to court them so that we could have babies. But this would be to reverse human nature and the likely result would be that neither men nor women would have babies. The birth rate in the West is low enough a male sex strike would lower it even further. We need a new social contract for the bedroom, because feminism is quite barren.

Continued