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.
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
Continued
