Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense
If you follow my postings over on my personal Facebook page, or if you read the conservative news outlet National Review, or if you were following the news back in February when she was booed at the CPAC convention for daring to say that it was perhaps a bit hypocritical for conservatives to excoriate Bill Clinton for his sexual misbehavior but to give Donald Trump a free pass, then you know the name of Mona Charen. (Read her NYT editorial about her CPAC experience here.) Honestly, she’s a national treasure—bright, funny, formidably informed and intelligent, fearless, and principled. I’m always pleased to see her podcast “Need to Know” that she hosts with Jay Nordlinger pop up in my feed. Now she’s written an important book, indeed a vital book, that everyone needs to read, on whatever side of the political spectrum they may happen to fall. So has everyone read Jonah Goldberg’s book Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy
Mona (I hope it’s okay to call her that—I tend to think that authors I like and follow are somehow my friends) has taken on a vast subject: how so-called “second wave feminism” has resulted in a totally, really, awfully bad deal for women. And men. All of us, in other words. (Even those who think they don’t belong to one of those two categories.) I went ahead and used one of my Audible.com credits to get the audiobook (which she reads herself), as I did with Jonah’s book, because I want them both to get credit for a sale.
When I first started listening to the book I found myself thinking, ‘I already know all of this history of feminism.’ And it’s quite true that I’m tolerably well-informed in this area, but even if you think the same about yourself I’d say that her overview is excellent, well-reasoned, and will probably contain information you didn’t know. As she moves further into the present she becomes more detailed, with tons of statistics and personal interviews to back up her positions. Some parts are a little hard to read, as she doesn’t shrink from describing some pretty disturbing behavior (quite a bit of it on college campuses). But I wouldn’t say that any of her fairly explicit material is gratuitous, and I’m sure she could have put in a lot more in the way of gruesome details. As you read the book as a whole, but particularly her chapters on the sexual revolution’s devastating effects, your heart breaks for a whole generation of young people who’ve been sold a bill of goods. Not enjoyable, as I say in my title, but necessary.
I was reminded of something C. S. Lewis said in his classic Mere Christianity
They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess.
Lewis wrote the above in the 1950’s; I’d say his statement is about 10 times more true today.
Just to be clear here: there are usually considered to be two distinct “waves” of feminism. The so-called “first wave” starting in around the mid-1800’s, was about the equality of women under the law, with the same protection and dignity as men, and the right of women to vote. These early feminists were very interested in the health of the family and the protection of children. Most if not all of them were very much anti-abortion. (Mona has an excellent, excellent chapter on the abortion issue.) Many also became involved with the temperance movement, a school of thought that is sometimes ridiculed today but which took on the very real concern of excessive drinking as a factor in familial chaos, abandonment, and violence. Actually, if you were to look at some of those early temperance pamphlets and speeches and substitute the word “drugs” for “alcohol” you’d have something that sounds pretty modern. A number of these early feminists were also involved in the abolitionist movement.
The “second wave” of feminism is usually said to have begun with the publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan in 1963, in which the author took a very limited sample of college-educated white women who weren’t happy or fulfilled with their roles as stay-at-home housewives and extrapolated their experience to apply to women as a whole. She recanted some of her ideas much later, but by then the damage had been done. Mona’s evisceration of the quality of research and reasoning in Mystique is alone worth the price of the book. Friedan’s ideas signaled the start of an avalanche that, like many avalanches, has ended up with a lot of dead bodies underneath the snow. Sure, second-wave feminism occurred at the same time as some good advances for women, such as being able to get credit in their own names and to enter formerly male-dominated professions. Mona makes the point, though, that many if not most of these changes were already in the works. The second wave claims credit for advances that aren’t necessarily due to it and refuses to claim responsibility for some real disasters.
What are those disasters? Well, I guess you’ll have to read the book. I could go on and on here with my own observations, but I haven’t put in the time and effort that Mona has. It would be just great if her book were to be an Oprah pick! Or if it were to be discussed on “The View”! Well, stranger things have happened. In the meantime, get this book and devour it. I promise you that you’ll come out the other end with a better understanding of what’s really going on these days in the war between the sexes.
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