Women are compelled to sexual excess at the same time they are absolved of any responsibility for their safety. Birth control enabled widespread sexual license, which has in turn engendered crises for both masculinity and femininity, leaving women largely degenerate and miserable. Maybe it was inevitable feminism would seek to sever female agency from womens' romantic and sexual frustration.
Ansari has defenders and hasn't lost any work, and his significance might be that the inquisition stops short at least of anonymous revenge porn leveled on a prized diversity-celebrity. I'm actually rooting for intersectionality. For Ansari, the problem of where he goes to get his reputation back remains, and what's been done to him is a travesty. Imagine how bad it would be for him if his reputation wasn't already implicitly needle-dicked Indian weirdo.
Feminism tries, despite itself, to perform the traditional female role of protecting women by regulating sex. That feminism depends on sexual liberation, as feminists insist, is an obvious problem. Clearly sexual liberation harms women, vulnerable women the most. Feminism can't drop its commitment to liberation for various reasons, the most shameful of which is commerce, which is increasingly based on individual license and consumption.
So feminism makes lemonade, after a fashion. All that misery is fed back into the narrate-o-matic and comes out as toxic masculinity, which must be corrected, by ever more feminism.
We're liberated from biological responsibility but not from our biological psychology. We're a historical novelty with all this sex and so little reproduction, people indulging the physical and ritual aspects of thwarted reproduction to the point of boredom.
Sexual liberation has liberated women, no one more so, but liberation doesn't equal happiness. Women were promised something, something absurd and unrealistic, by the sexual revolution, just like men: they would have their cake and eat it too. They would be set loose from sexual morality and no harm would come to them. Keeping in mind a woman's idea of "harm" is broader than a man's. Feminism adopts this to politicize emotional harm. Feminism recognizes but won't admit that women are more vulnerable emotionally. It just keeps reinterpreting that vulnerability as oppression.
What to do with a movement that thrives on the fruit of its failure?
No comments:
Post a Comment