To make the case for this world order, Millett selected four writers to study as “cultural agents,” writers who “reflected and actually shaped attitudes.” D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer were eviscerated for their misogyny and sexual mysticism, while Jean Genet was lauded for exploring the psychology of sexual oppression. Lawrence, she argued, defined love as “dominating another person.” Miller was the voice of “contempt and disgust,” a writer whose works are marked by “neurotic hostility” and “virulent sexism.” Mailer, still a literary celebrity at the time of Millett’s writing, she saw as “a prisoner of the virility cult,” who presents “masculinity as a precarious spiritual capital in need of endless replenishment and threatened on every side.” Millett closely analyzed the scene of anal rape from Mailer’s 1965 novel An American Dream, and described it as a “rallying cry for a sexual politics in which diplomacy has failed and war is the last political resort of a ruling caste that feels its position in deadly peril.”
.. To make the case for this world order, Millett selected four writers to study as “cultural agents,” writers who “reflected and actually shaped attitudes.” D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer were eviscerated for their misogyny and sexual mysticism, while Jean Genet was lauded for exploring the psychology of sexual oppression. Lawrence, she argued, defined love as “dominating another person.” Miller was the voice of “contempt and disgust,” a writer whose works are marked by “neurotic hostility” and “virulent sexism.” Mailer, still a literary celebrity at the time of Millett’s writing, she saw as “a prisoner of the virility cult,” who presents “masculinity as a precarious spiritual capital in need of endless replenishment and threatened on every side.” Millett closely analyzed the scene of anal rape from Mailer’s 1965 novel An American Dream, and described it as a “rallying cry for a sexual politics in which diplomacy has failed and war is the last political resort of a ruling caste that feels its position in deadly peril.”
.. These women were Millett’s collaborators and friends. Like Millett, they advocated for the abolishment of monogamy, marriage, and the nuclear family. Firestone described a “sexual class system” in terms that much resembled Millett’s. She called pregnancy “barbaric,” lauded artificial reproduction, and imagined a utopia in which, children, like Eros, would move freely through the world.
.. What seems remarkable now is how seriously the cultural mainstream engaged with these revolutionary ideas—which isn’t to say approved of them. These women were reviewed widely, and often well.
.. Time ran five articles on the goals and organizing practices of the radical feminists.
.. Her application of Marxist theory to relations between the sexes particularly rankled for Howe, who saw his chance to remind Millett and her compatriots that true inequality took the form of class-based oppression. “Are the ladies of the Upper East Side of Manhattan simply ‘chattel’ in the way the wives of California grape pickers are,” he asked, “and if so, are they ‘chattels’ held by the same kinds of masters?”
.. “In some ways,” she writes, “it seems that we got the cultural change that feminism promised, without the concomitant political transformation.”
.. Still, it’s hard to imagine any work of literary scholarship—let alone a Ph.D. dissertation—landing its author on the cover of Time today.
Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?
.. when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news.
.. even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child.”
.. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
..Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical.
..But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews.
..More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners.
.. if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost.
.. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren’t deeply observant.
.. “the paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing.”
.. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it.
.. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong.”
.. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, “Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.”
.. “Abstinence works,” Knox said at the hearing. “Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not.”
.. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren’t originally about values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is a more stable family system.
.. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it’s pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they’re not yet ready.
Draft-Dodger Trump Said Sleeping Around Was My ‘Personal Vietnam’
Draft-dodger Donald Trump once said that the danger he faced from getting sexually transmitted diseases was his own “personal Vietnam.”
In a 1997 interview with shock jock Howard Stern, Trump talked about how he had been “lucky” not to have contracted diseases when he was sleeping around.
“I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era,” Trump said in a video that resurfaced Tuesday on Buzzfeed, “It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
Cruz, Rubio, and the Moral Bankruptcy of Progressive Identity Politics
Because white progressives have engineered a cultural system where black and Latino politicians deserve respect only if they get with the progressive program — the entire progressive program.
.. Just ask formerly pro-life Jesse Jackson. Not even marching with Martin Luther King Jr. could protect him from the intolerant demands of progressive sexual revolutionaries. He had to switch sides.