There is something odd happening to feminism these days, a stark split between its older and its younger practitioners. Daphne Merkin hinted at it in her recent New York Times op-ed on women’s misgivings about the #MeToo movement.
Caitlin Flanagan came right out and said it after the comic actor Aziz Ansari was the subject of a humiliating tell-all about a recent date: “Sexual mores in the West have changed so rapidly over the past 100 years that by the time you reach 50, intimate accounts of commonplace sexual events of the young seem like science fiction.”
I have now had dozens of conversations about #MeToo with women my age or older, all of which are some variant on “What the hey?” It’s not that we’re opposed to #MeToo; we are overjoyed to see slime like Harvey Weinstein flushed out. But we see sharp distinctions between Weinstein and guys who press aggressively for sex. To women in their 20s, it seems that distinction is invisible.
There’s something else we notice: These women express a feeling of overwhelming powerlessness, even though they are not being threatened. How has the most empowered generation of women in history come to feel less control over their bodies than their grandmothers did?
Let me propose a possible answer, suggested by a very smart social scientist of my acquaintance: They feel this way because we no longer have any moral language for talking about sex except consent. So when men do things they feel are wrong, we’re left flailing for some way to describe this as non-consensual, even when she agreed to the sex.
Under the old code, we had ample condemnatory terms for men who slept with women carelessly, without much regard for their feelings: cads and rakes, bounders and boors. Those words have now decayed into archaism.
My generation of women was not exactly unfamiliar with casual sex, or aggressive come-ons. But we didn’t feel so traumatized by them or so outraged. If we went to a man’s apartment, we might be annoyed that he wouldn’t stop asking, but we weren’t offended, nor did we feel it was impossible for us to refuse, or leave.
But then, I came of age in the liminal moment after AIDS complicated the sexual revolution, and before the Internet turbocharged it. In part because casual sex was so risky, there was still a robust dating culture, which gave women alternatives to the nightly chase. Most of us chose those alternatives, which in turn limited the ability of heterosexual men to choose the nightly chase over dating.
This does seem to be different now. AIDS is no longer invariably fatal; apps like Tinder have made it easy for men to pursue frictionless hookups; colleges have shifted from majority-men to majority-women, which plausibly would lead the college culture to revolve more and more around the casual sex that the scarce men seem to prefer.
If there are enough women willing to accommodate men who approach romance like a deranged mink, then other women will feel they have to go along. It is no more realistic to tell an individual woman to opt out of this dynamic than it would be to encourage her to bring down capitalism by quitting her job.
But if this is indeed the difference between my generation and theirs, then what do we do with our new moral language? How do we get to a place where today’s young women have adequate alternatives to dispiriting sex modeled on ubiquitous porn?
If you cast an eye back over history, you’ll see that what most societies have actually come up with is the social equivalent of a cartel: If you want the sex, you’re going to first have to invest in some sort of relationship, because it’s not (readily) available any other way. Which suggests an uncomfortable possibility: a decision by women to force better behavior from the men who offend them, and even to browbeat other women into going along.
If women started leaving the apartments of men who pressured them for sex after 30 seconds, I’m willing to bet the men would adopt a more courtly approach. If they convinced each other that no sex before the third date was an ironclad rule, guys would have to wait until the third date, and maybe, I don’t know, find out her last name.
Women are the ones most unhappy with the current state of affairs; they are the ones most likely to be willing to make the initial sacrifice in order to alter it.
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