Drive to destroy Kavanaugh is the worst of feminism.

HEATHER MAC DONALD:

 Drive to destroy Kavanaugh is the worst of feminism.

The most salient fact about this alleged episode will never register on elite consciousness: the sexual free-for-all environment, which may or may not have given rise to an assault by Kavanaugh. The sexual revolution declared that the traditional restraints on the male libido — norms of male chivalry and gentlemanliness and of female modesty and prudence — were patriarchal and oppressive. Men should stop protecting women and putting them on a pedestal. Males and females were assumed to desire easy sex with equal fervor, and to be able to walk away from a one-night stand with equal complacency.

With regard to students, adults should remain nonjudgmental and as far out of the picture as possible. Chaperones were relegated to the relic pile, as fusty as a mothballed corset. Starting in the 1970s, affluent parents often absented themselves from their teenagers’ parties, leaving the house liquor cabinet unattended. Popular culture became hyper-sexualized.

The results were not pretty: the male libido, free to act as boorishly as it wanted; females getting drunk to reduce their innate sexual inhibitions, unprotected by any default assumptions against casual premarital sex. Whether a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh took advantage of this putative sexual liberation, many other teenagers have, and in so doing, merely followed the new script for sexual relations.

Those derided Victorian values of chivalric paternalism are now being reimported covertly on college campuses, however, where male students are deemed responsible for female well-being during drunken hook-ups, even if the male and female student are both equally inebriated.

The old system restrained both men and women, but the developing system places all the responsibilities on men — because apparently third-wave feminists must be protected like children.

128Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green