Andrea Dworkin: fucking per se is freedom per se*

Chapter 1: Sex must be taken seriously. I.e., It's not just a thrill, fun&games. Perry opens with Hefner vs Monroe, Britney Spears, and the countless other Monroe/ Spears destroyed by a handful of Hefners, child abuse, foster care, and domestic violence as adults. Hopping round dressed as bunnies. Some revolution. More like a counter-revolution.

The sex revolution began in the collective West, fresh from the horrors of WWII and enjoying an affluence literally out of this world. Technology was the revolution, which deconstructed modern man and promised us techno paradise. But 'Man' was still the same old hunter gatherer.

Sexual norms had loosened in the past: the Roman empire, Georgian Britain, the Roaring Twenties, but the loosening was limited by lack of contraception, so mostly prostitutes took the load. Nice detail: you could tell the 'house of pleasure' in Pompeii by the pile of tiny foetal bones. In the 1950s, teeny boppers took the lumps, with many tears, many illegitimate children and many botched abortions. Technology to the rescue. The pill, and another decade on, Roe vs Wade, so even more sex and no more tears.

By the end of the 1960s, an entirely new creature had arrived in the world: the apparently fertile young woman whose fertility had in fact been put on hold. She changed everything. Tagging along were her Friar Tuck, her boy Robin, her man Friday, also a new creature: the apparently fertile young man whose fertility had been permanently 'put on hold'. Down with breeders!

He changed everything (that the new woman hadn't). Or rather s/he, as the logical culmination of freeing man from all physical constraints, the transhuman. 

A conservative is just a liberal mugged by reality

Reading Perry, I was mugged. She, as a straight female, focuses on women and the pill, the late 1960s being revolution time. But you can't leave out Stonewall, the heralding of the new sexual paradise for everybody: women and men doing whatever they want with whomever. Hey, becoming whatever they want. And not just changing sexes, but becoming … say an elf.

Oh, for the good old days

Perry critiques the various feminisms, to which she variously subscribed, more and more reluctantly as the revolution progressed and its fall-out hit. Sex and the City's Charlotte York yelping 'I choose my choice, I choose my choice!' but what if our bodies and minds aren't as malleable as we might like to thing? It's not 'how can we all be free?' but 'how can we promote the well being of men and women, given the two groups have very different interests and needs?'

The problem is the trivializing of sex, making it just another sport, leisure activity. It started with the disenchantment of the world with the 16th century Enlightenment, the ascent of rationality, the death of religion, the secularization of everything, including man. It produced Marquis of Sade, his heir Guyon in Roaring Twenties France, and his heir Kinsey in the Fraught Fifties, coming to a climax in Year Zero 1969.

Though newly atheist, we are all still unwitting disciples of Progress, the belief that things get better, that we all are becoming more truly ourselves. C.S. Lewis coined the phrase chronological snobbery to describe the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.

So what is the future scenario? In Huxley's Brave New World (1931), written in the wake of the frenzied '20s, people lack privacy, so there is no crime. They lack family, so no in-group preferences. They lack monogamy, so no jealousy. I.e., they must live under a totalitarian regime that suppresses discontent with the pleasure drug soma. Their 'freedom' is freedom to fuck. Freedom per se. The citizens of New London can visit the Savage Lands theme park to see the antediluvian primitives (i.e., us). It's not Orwell's 1984 we've arrived at but Huxley's 2023.

Perry's manifest calls for an alternative form of sexual culture – one that recognizes other human beings as real people, with real value and dignity. Time for a counter-revolution.

Nurture, nature and bell curves

The feminism Perry deconstructs begins with the socialization theory that there are no innate psychological differences between men and women, it's all down to nurture. Not. Feminists try to ignore dimorphism, the physical difference between sexes. In humans, it's middling compared to elephant seals, where males are 3x bigger than females. We're halfway between the elephant and the harbour seal, where males are only slight beefier. For humans, the difference is about 25%, still huge.

Adult women are half as strong as men in upper body, and two-thirds as strong in lower body. In hand grip 90% of females produce less force than 95% of males. Women do a bit better in endurance sports but not much. In Olympic swimming and track events, women's performance is about 90% of men's the 'golden ratio' of athletics. The women's national football team in 2017 were beaten by the Dallas under-15 boys' team.

But all this strength comes at a cost, especially the upper body muscles. It is women that control evolution, so it's actually their fault. The muscles look … sexy to females, a sign of health and protection for the weaker female mate. They are also a sign that fighting is central to the male mind-body.

But a dominant feminist narrative is that male/female behaviour is culturally programmed, that there are no innate male characteristics vs female. Perry unapologetically talks about masculine and feminine stereotypes in terms of interests and behaviour. I have some stereotypically feminine traits and some masculine, and I'm sure you do too. Yes. There really are men and women and they're different by nature. How bizarrely simplistic that sounds, though it bucks prevailing feminist narrative.

Bell curves explain just about everything. On the physical side, women's bell curves are shifted down, and the extremes are not so extreme on the sex drive bell curve, i.e., men have an extreme cluster at the upper end, for sex-crazed males. The IQ bell curves for women are more or less the same for men, but again, at the extremes, the men show the same horny cluster: there are more men at the extremes of performance, more among the mind-blowingly brilliant handful that you meet in a lifetime, and also more among the truly intellectually challenged handful. Within the extreme tails of the distribution, however, performance is generally equal between the sexes.

Which explains why there are Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Jack the Ripper, Hitler, Jeffry Dahmer. Yes, there are Clara Schumanns (wife of Robert Schumann), Fanny Mendelssohns (sister of Felix), and Amy Beaches, but you get my point. And don't forget that Johann Sebastian, Clara etc only existed because they had mothers who gave them birth and nurture their geniuses, both male and female. And there aren't any women mass murderers that I know of.

Nature's monkey wrench

Perry's life work is fighting rape and helping the victims. Stats are only vaguely accurate but alarming as most rape goes unreported. Almost all rape is by men against women but is not just a women's problem. 10% of rape victims are male. The victims are mostly girls and women ages 12 to 30, i.e., when they are most sexually attractive. The offenders almost all young men at their peak of sex drive. And yet most feminists insist it's about power not sex. I.e., down with patriarchy! Get the power into women's hands. Break through the glass ceiling and everything will be just fine.

But if we look at nature, famously ducks, we see lots of rape, male on female or male. It's the sex, stupid!' A (nasty) natural selection advantage. Spread your seed. A quarter of men in a survey said they would force sex on a woman if there was no chance of getting caught. That's awful, but the good news is at least 3/4 of men are not potential rapists. #NotAllMen. 10% admitted actually forcing an unwilling partner into sex. The only thing standing between that 10% and the woman out alone on the street at night is the man's self-control.

Anything that walks (or clucks)

What is moral in sex? A man buys a chicken, takes it home, has sex with it, then cooks and serves it. Is that immoral? Queer theory would not bat an eyelash. As Guyon articulated the new morality in 1920s, anything can be a legitimate object of sexual arousal. Fetishes are perfectly normal and should be celebrated. Freud held much the same view, and Foucault added a postmodern frisson with his History of sexuality, showing sex as culturally determined, that we are all victims of repressive society.

This reveals Perry's weakness. She assumes that we are all atheists, that religion is dead, so there is no mention of sin anywhere in her otherwise fine and brave work. Just as 'rape is natural' doesn't make it moral or acceptable, ditto promiscuity and homosexuality, the pillars of the sex revolution. It's what a hunter-gatherer would call a SIN. Without religion, we are operating on the level of Guyon, anything that gets your rocks off. It took roughly a century for the death of religion/ sin to reach fruition in legalizing homosexuality, making it an honoured norm of society's sexuality.

But it's not so easy to overturn a millennia old moral code. You don't just force an unwilling pastry chef to put two husbands holding hands on a wedding cake and, presto!, new designer morality. Marriage was/is a sacred institution, based on procreation and male-female sexual union within a sacrament. I.e., no sex outside marriage, so no illegitimate children, the husband guarantees the inviolability of his family. Still, there is a good argument for gay marriage. See below.

Thoughtlessly stripping away ancient customs is easy, but leaves women in a perilous market where promiscuity reigns, forcing you to go along. If the goal for a young teen is to find a good mate, where are the guarantees that one of these many men pushing her to have sex would actually make a good father, someone to rely on for the hardest, most important decades of your life?

High school sex education teacher Mary Whitehouse began a one-woman campaign against moral degeneracy in 1950s Britain, advising on how to inhibit homosexuality in your sons,** railing against child abuse. Her motivation derived from her Christian beliefs, her aversion to the rapid social and political changes in British society of the 1960s.

She was the butt of BBC humour, inspiring a sitcom in her name The Mary Whitehouse Experience, and a porn star changing her name to Mary Whitehouse by deed poll (she later committed suicide). Meanwhile TV presenter Jimmy Savile was busy raping a thousand little TV contestants, and untold others during his visits to hospitals, schools, wherever else he could seek them out. The era of the metrosexual had begun, complete with 24/7 free porno, legal soma, sexual surgery, and soon-to-be transhumanism. Who can doubt that loosening morals, delinking sex from spirituality, has led to such monstrosities as Savile?

Whitehouse warned about illusory pleasures                         e.g. Australian Jewel beetle fetish

Efforts to normalize pedophilia peaked in the 1980s, the neoliberal era of Reagan and Thatcher. NAMBLA (North American boy love association) was founded in the 1970s. Whitehouse's ranting produced the Protection of Children Act in 1978 and eventually, Whitehouse was joined by progressives in her condemnation of child sexual abuse. Children can't consent. They are totally dependent on adults. Meanwhile, pedophilia has continued to build over the decades, as sex trafficking and sex tourism have reached epidemic proportions.

Minnows, pikes

Perry has a subheading 'the virtue of repression'. Just as liberalism, in its quest for freedom, forgets about individual responsibility, the desire to free the (sexual) minnows is a good one, but reckless action can result in freedom for the pikes as well. 'Free the male sex drive!' has been a disaster. Restrain the male sex drive! is more like it. Wollstonecraft's battle cry was: votes for women, chastity for men! 

Lesbians have very stable relations, arguably more so than straights.*** Most have only one sexual partner, most knew their sexual partners for months or years before sex. Most get married.

Gays are the opposite. 1/4 have the stable, lesbian lifestyle, 1/4 have 13+ partners per year, and about 5% have hundredS through their lifetime (which is 20+ years less than straights).

Yes, AIDS and STDs but also alcoholism, drugs, suicide, murder …The mean number of lifetime sexual partners is 8x higher among gays and bisexual men compared to straight men.

This is what results when the female is taken out of the sexual equation, when the male sexual drive is given full rein. The female is the natural stabilizer in sex. To a fault, lesbians joke about themselves. That the more lethal gay lifestyle should be celebrated is shocking.

Hooking up or trapped?

Straight men are constrained by the pickiness of women. In surveys repeated decades apart, the great majority of men were willing to have a sexual liaison with the survey women who approached them randomly on the street. Not one woman agreed to a sexual liaison with a male surveyor. I.e., the sexual disgust threshold for women is almost infinitely higher than for men. That unnamable emotion that all woman have felt, that men don't even recognize, the bone-deep, nauseating feeling of being trapped in proximity to a horny many who repulses you. Being groped in a crowd or leered at while travelling along, or propositioned a little too forcefully in a bar.

It's men who love sex with strangers, who will pay for it, travel around the world and risk a lifetime in prison for it. Male and female sexuality are poles apart. So the hook-up culture is supposed to be a solution to the sexuality mismatch, but it still benefits some men (pikes) at the expense of most women, and leans towards to orgy. Perry rejects it altogether, proposing a different solution: unwanted sex is worse than sexual frustration. Women should not be pressured, directly or indirectly by peer-pressure into having unwanted sex.

Social media works great for horny boy-men. But most guys are not so obsessed with sex. Virginity used to be for both boys and girls, then just for girls, now for nobody. Virginity is for losers. Teens are now expected to have sex with multiple partners as kind of a new initiation to adulthood. Not the trousseau for the bride-to-be and the Abraham-Isaac initiation where the boy must overcome his fear of death to be a man, a warrior, a protector of tribe and family. What is the end result of this default initiation today? Less sex, more porn, erectile dysfunction, anxiety.

Female pleasure is rare during casual sex. 10% claim an orgasm compared to 2/3 of women in long-term relationships. Along with this, anal sex and fellatio (not cunnilingus) have risen among young adults, which do not lead to orgasm for the female. Which is just supply and demand, as there are now many more women in university, fewer men, meaning a bias to male desire. Women are nicer, more agreeable than men, i.e., more easier cowed. At the same time, women's lib means 'we should have same rights as men.' So women literally prostitute themselves to have 'equal rights', to be cool.

All this playing around is fun, and if pregnancy results, it's abortion or Dave Chappelle feminism: if you refuse an abortion, it's your (i.e., the state's) problem. So it turns out 'pro-choice' and the pill have left women in the same pre-Stonewall limbo, but now minus any sense of virtue by either party.

As for marriage and family, both have suffered. No-fault divorce has taken all incentive out of making a marriage work, so divorce went from 25% in 1950 to 50% in 1983, declining since only because fewer people bother marrying at all.

Porn

There is a darkness within human sexuality, mostly men, that once was kept inside a fantasist's skull but is now spread around the world, and is even supported by some feminists. European men watch an hour of porn per week. 2% watch more than 7 hrs, i.e., a minority accounting for the vast majority of consumption. Sexual attraction disables our natural disinclination towards intimacy with strangers. The disgust response is closely linked with moral intuition. i.e., we're not good at moral decision making when we're horny. Especially men, whose tolerance for disgust is much higher than for women.

Perry feels sorry for the Australian jewel beetle, which prefers stubbies to a potential mate. Similarly, video games and social media undermine native psychological mechanisms that make us work to achieve a goal. They supply more immediate rewards and take far less effort. Sex robots are only going to make that worse, especially for young men.

The 2% who watch more than 7 hrs per week are not a healthy and happy group. The NoFap movement, founded in 2011 by an American web developer, to discourage both porn and masturbation (lol), is testimony to the lethal effect of porn. Which is not just lost time and money, but a third of young men experience erectile dysfunction vs 3% as recently as the 1990s.

The 'death grip syndrome' describes the loss of sensation resulting from masturbating too aggressively, making orgasm both physical and psychological impossible. Compulsive porn users expose themselves to so much sexual stimulation that they literally become impotent. People become objects, body parts, things to be used. The porn generation are having less sex, and worse sex, less intimate, less satisfying, less meaningful.

As for porn in action, consider 1880s India. The British occupiers rounded up peasant children for prostitutes to meet colonial officers' needs. i.e., a small minority of women were treated as sex slaves. Horrible, inhuman, now condemned. But what did we replace it with? In terms of empire's needs, in Korea 5,000 Filipinas and even more Russians make up a colourful mosaic for horny US soldiers, following their British forebears. Generalized to us all, our modern solution to meeting men's needs is to encourage all women, from every class, to meet the male demand for casual sex.

Feminism would blame patriarchy, heteronormative (as if there is a homonormative). Some feminists don't mind porn or prostitution, sex work. COYOTE (call off your old tired ethics) was founded in San Francisco in 1973. Member sex workers even have the quaint tradition of 'coming out' stories associated with gays, underlining their commonality. We should listen to sex workers, respect them as workers. But that ignores why women would want to degrade themselves. It's the economy, stupid! And which prostitutes should you defer to? The $20 crack addicts or the $200 ones? 'Ask the sex workers' assumes sex is a skillset refined through practice across different partners. Not intimacy but good technique. Sorry, no revolutionary thinking in prostitution.

Divorce was made hard for a reason

The high divorce rate and waning marriage rate have had devastating effects. In US, it is mostly the poor, so there is little or no alimony and the children live in poverty. 64% are married in top third income, 24% in lowest third. More women remain single after divorce than men, and with the children.

Half of divorced people in the UK report they regret their decision. The collapse was not just the easy laws, but the easy, secular attitude towards marriage, the loss of the vital religious moral compass. Perry bemoans this 'marriage vows no longer truly binding', but can't get to the point where she advocates spirituality as the basis for marriage. Reforms wanted to cut off the bell curve upper extreme horniness, allowing women to chuck randy husbands, tame the gay men with marriage, but the butterfly effect of the reforms led to collapse of the whole institution. (perestroika, anyone?)

Now everyone is equally free to be horny, divorce, whatever. And bastard children? The pill led to more out-of-wedlock births. It's only 91% effective for most women. And don't forget the Dave Chappelle feminism: abort or if you want the kid, welfare. Before the gutting of marriage, only the most flagrant scoundrel would refuse to acknowlege and provide support to his children. Now, deadbeat dads are commonplace. In the US less than half help out.

And one-parent families lead to boys arrested, girls pregnant, lots of drugs, lousy grades, a poor quality life for the mother and children. Not to mention child abuse by step-fathers (100x more likely to kill a child). And not just sexual and physical abuse, but more accidents, even shorter average height than their peers of the same age. All this holds across cultures. The generation of sex revolution has been a generation of crippled children, physically and emotionally.

A baby and someone

Dworkin/ Greer feminists diss marriage, but they don't have children and offer nothing to replace it. Communes come and go and kids are left in limbo, with a moral code warped and fluid depending on what's the latest fad. A young child cannot be understood as an autonomous individual. None of us can, but children are most dependent. Dependence is our default state, and self-sufficiency the aberration.

The pill allowed us to stretch out the young adult stage of independence artificially, giving the illusion that independence is our permanent state. Not. It's just a blip. Along with the 'self-expressive marriage' in which self-discover, self-esteem and personal growth became the key markers of a marriage's success. Perry applauds gay marriage, as denying same-sex couples the right to marry is both cruel and nonsensical. Of course, Perry is assuming that religion is dead, so marriage is secular, profane, vows are no longer truly binding, and the new age of casual sex and no fault divorce should of course include gays. But what kind of control is the already discredited marriage sacrament?

Feminists have to recognize that prohibition of premarital sex, and traditional monogamous marriage were actually serving female, not male interests. Men want a harem. Monogamy protects the family from unwanted children and the impossible task of a single mother having to rear children alone, forced to descend into prostitution or infanticide. It also deters women from making an irreparable mistake for the sake of a worthless man. So how to deter men from being cads? Monogamous marriage discourages short-termism in males, protects economic interests of mothers, creates a stable environment for raising children.

Interestingly, monogamy is the exception in nature, and where it is found in birds and mammals, there is often lots of hanky-panky during the short mating season, though partners look the other way and live happily together till the next breeding season. In humans, it's got to be less promiscuous since the breeding season is 24/7. There's no rest. Even in humans only 15% of societies practice it. Most at least till recently are polygamous, with wealthy males having a harem. Only small-scale groups under serious environment privation, or large urban complex civilizations manage, as it very much constrains horny males.

According to feminists, monogamy is a prison dreamed up by patriarchal men. Who would have thought this odious heteronormative patriarchy is actually very feminist in its essentials? It lowers rates of both child abuse and domestic violence, since conflict between co-wives is the source of both. Birth rates and crime rates fall, economic development and education proceed as rich men no longer splurge on wives and children but contribute to the nation building.

It's best for child rearing, putting the mother at the heart of society, honouring motherhood and the care of the next generation. It's at the heart of Islam. Sadly, feminism denigrates motherhood, some even arguing that there is no freedom for women until birthing is done in the science lab.

Smart feminists, like Julia Ioffe, suggested that the conservative restriction on abortion rights in Texas should also mean that men ought to be compelled to provide financial support to their sexual partners if they become pregnant. Our culture no long incentivizes perseverance in marriage, but rather promotes the washed-out definition of marriage offered up to gays, and gives them the right to have and/or adopt children, despite no evidence that that is a good thing for children. Is '2 daddies' really as good as mom and pop?

Perry is not just writing this for fun. Things can change very quickly when people realize that there are others who secretly feel the same way. Katherine Dee: I believe the pendulum is going to swing, big time. The pot is about to boil over. Perry's manifest includes:

*Men and women are different. Vive la difference!

*Some desires are bad.

*Distrust any person or ideology that pressures you to ignore your moral intuition.

*Chivalry is good.

*Sometimes you can spot the sexually aggressive men. Steer clear.

*All girls and women especially 12-30 should never be alone with men they don't know.

*Only drink with female friends in private.

*Forget dating apps

*Hold off on sex. Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not commodities.

*Get married and mean it.

 

xxx

Back to the future

While Perry's manifest is powerful and eloquent, I was disappointed that she didn't even consider Islam when she was dismissing all religion as passe in our secular age of the machine. But then feminism has build a fortress to keep out all 'heteronormative patriarchal' swill, and Islam and its polygamy and veil just must be oppressive to women. That's what our media tells us daily.

In Islam, sexual relations are clearly laid out. Only in marriage, no fooling around. It takes sex seriously. It is a sacred joining, a balancing of male and female as a reflection of God's perfect oneness. Birth control and divorce are sanctioned. Women can divorce insufferable husbands, husbands must provide for wife and children even after divorce. Orphans are ensured adoption within the community. Women are recognized as physically weaker so they are protected by their family, then by their husbands.

Like most societies, wealthy men can have up to four wives, although that custom is rarely practiced, remaining the fantasy of many muslim men. But then horny men everywhere find relief in cuckolding and prostitution. So polygamy, if practiced fairly to all wives (a stipulation in the Quran), is arguably less socially disruptive.

While Islamic practice often leaves much to be desired, Islam answers all Perry's criticisms of western sexual mores, both pre and post-Stonewall. People are not things for your enjoyment. We are part of the ummah, society, with marriage uniting male and female as a family with mutual obligations, where the father-husband ensures the integrity of the family, making sure it has enough sustenance, and is free from danger.

A person came to Messenger of Allah (blessings and peace be upon him) and asked, “Who among people is most deserving of my fine treatment?” He (blessings and peace be upon him) said, “Your mother.” He again asked, “Who next?” “Your mother,” the Prophet (blessings and peace be upon him) replied again. He asked, “Who next?” He (the Prophet (blessings and peace be upon him)) said again, “Your mother.” “Then who?” Thereupon he (blessings and peace be upon him) said, “Then your father” (Bukhari).

xxx

*Andrea Dworkin, Right-wing Women, 1983

**how a mother might "best avoid inadvertently pressuring her sons towards that particular orientation"

***Perry, The case against the sexual revolution, 76-78. I use italics in place of quotation marks throughout.