I grew up in the 1950s, when we laughed at the Victorians and emulated their prudery. At Thanksgiving, we ate “white meat” and “second joints” rather than breast and thigh. Freud’s theoretically explosive insights were put in the service (by Freud himself) of a nice Jewish boy morality that exalted family and career. Pre-marital or extra-marital sex was evidence of narcissism, neurosis, immaturity, and unconscious self-hatred. Grow up already and get married!
It was also the time, of course, of the Great American Breast, inaugurated by Jane Russell, smoldering in the straw in Howard Hughes’ bizarre wet dream, The Outlaw. Poor Jane was soon one-upped by Marilyn Monroe, the Ultimate Bosom, who then found herself surrounded by a court of imitators, including Jayne Mansfield, Diana Dors, Sheree North, and Mamie Van Doren. And in the real world, things were a lot rowdier than that. Today’s politicians can only dream of the bad-boy bacchanals enjoyed by JFK and his pals, outright orgies that were studious concealed by the press. Even worse was the massive sexual harassment to which vulnerable women were subjected. Economic subservience was often expected to translate into sexual subservience.
Today, of course, all’s changed. Young people today learn about sex from Miley Cyrus videos (I guess) and listen to rap lyrics that would have been considered the very outpourings of Hell itself back in the day. Except that, when young women go off to college, it’s Victorianism all over again, re-invented and brought up to date by modern feminism, and, thanks to the heavy, politically correct hand of the Obama Administration, the law of the land.
Cathy Young (here) and Heather MacDonald (here and here) are my go-to gals in combatting Obama nonsense, including the claim that close to 20 percent of college women suffer sexual assaults as students, along with the grotesque administrative tribunals the administration is pushing that deny the accused the right to cross-examine their accusers while allowing disciplinary action on the basis of “preponderance of evidence.”
These massive violations of due process are “necessary” because 1) women shouldn’t have to answer questions they find embarrassing and 2) evidence shouldn’t be necessary. If a young woman wants a young man kicked out of his dorm, or suspended from school, or expelled, on her unsupported word, well, that should happen, right? I mean, he’s a guy! He’s already guilty!
The fifties could be caricatured as prudery masking lechery. Have we just reversed the pair? I like to think we’ve made a milimeter or two of progress. But passion still refuses to submit to reason. And we humans can never get used to that defiance.
Afterwords
In the old days, sexual encounters were bad because sex was bad. Today, sexual encounters are bad because, well, women are weak. They are easily manipulated and vulnerable to “social pressure” and “subtle coercion.” They simply have no will of their own! And, even though they can easily be manipulated into having sex, they never, or almost never, actually want to have sex. When they do have it, they almost invariably feel horrible afterward. For an excellent taste of this reasoning, which closely tracks “conservative” “thought” on the subject of sex among young people (basically, trying to wish it away) and which allows the classification of virtually any sexual encounter as “rape,” see this article in the New Republic by Nora Caplan-Bricker, which assumes rather than argues that sexual intercourse due to “social pressure” and “subtle coercion” is “acquaintance rape” and then cites studies “proving” that women feel just as bad (or worse!) after “acquaintance rape” as they do after “stranger rape”—which, in turn, implies that the two should be punished with equal severity!
