To adapt Maxim Biller: Nothing is as boring as sexual liberation, at least for women.
What’s sexual liberation? Women’s rights to Planned Parenthood, abortion and contraception are under threat. "Smart" and "progressive" men’s rights to women aren’t.
It’s a poli-sci student lecturing me that it’s illogical not to sleep with him. It’s him, before he cheats with me, saying it’s illogical to moralize; it’s him, after he cheats with me, saying, "I would never date you."
It’s a Chavista banker (um?) in a musty Miami apartment who does a few pushups before he rolls off me and texts my best friend. It’s a tattered couch where he sips a Malta and asks me to set him up with her and rolls his eyes: "What, do you want a boyfriend or something?"
It’s the Students for a Democratic Society organizer who got kicked out for breaking up with her hierarchically superior boyfriend. Per a former SDS member: "The more radical they are, the less open they are to women with opinions that contradict theirs, and all of the leadership is men."
It’s playing umpteenth side chick for a grande école Ph.D. student who says love is a lie and I’m being irrational.
It’s an exchange with a summa Ivy history grad: "Do you want to kiss me?" "I have a boyfriend." "That’s a stupid answer."
It’s a summa film studies "friend" tossing Butterfingers on my lawn and then asking me, when I wasn’t down, "Why am I even here?"
It’s people I’ve barely met asking me my bra size.
It’s a friend’s boyfriend messaging girls on OKCupid — "But just for sex, so it’s OK."
It’s a girlfriend telling me she wants to be a born-again virgin. It’s her Tinder non-boyfriend refusing to use a condom. It’s a girl describing sucking off a guy from OKCupid who came, zipped his fly and left.
It’s a chunky, gay roommate collapsing in tears over his sexual humiliations before running back to the bar.
The message is: Want a boyfriend? Well, f--- you; it’s not a buyer’s market.
This isn’t sexual liberation. It’s asking us to f--- like men and shut up. It is enforcement of a new sexual code and in the girlfriend/slam-piece divide, it recreates the Madonna/whore complex it pretends is prehistory.
A woman recounted to Libération: "A man, a future leader of ’68, asked me one day: ‘You’re for sexual liberation? Yes. Well, we’re sleeping together.’ Men used this ‘liberation’ to pressure women. To guilt us." I suppose it’s Victorian to imagine some relationship between sex and love. Girls are warm, damp holes to ejaculate into. Men are protobiont bang-sticks. "Mutual pleasure" is type on the Trojans box. We’re walking resumes and genitals.
Hedonism pretends to fill the post-Enlightenment vacuum. But in acting like sexual reticence = prudishness = the whole damn problem, we elide a whole history of sexual power. Women are raised to seek male approval. So even if we don’t want to screw a guy, we still want him to want to screw us. The market is rigged: What does "want" even mean? Progressive men want a "yes," but they don’t care where it comes from.
A friend once told me Western men treated women like toilets: "They do their business, and flush." That’s why she wore the hijab. If not for God, why deny men anything?
In Houellebecq’s "Whatever," a priest argues "we need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ourselves repeat that life is marvelous and exciting; and it’s abundantly clear that we rather doubt this."
But sex qua-iterative penetration, 69, etc. is boring. Read Ferrante, Munro and Mann. There, sex is alternately disappointing, troubling, consuming and life-affirming. Our boilerplate sex-talk strips life to the marrow bones.
I don’t want to cum with strangers. I don’t want my feminism-atheism-nihilism-materialism to translate into that impersonal, inevitable "Well, I guess it’s time to undress."
How mercenary, how instrumentalizing, how capitalist is that?
Ann Manov is a UF French, English and Spanish senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
