Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Mona Charen.

Much of the feminist project of the past half century, with its denial of sex differences and its insistence on stamping out sex roles, was misbegotten. Humans are not “assigned” sexes; we are male and female. Our differences are complementary, not superior or inferior. Decades of war between the sexes have led not to greater happiness but to unspooling ledgers of casualties.

INTRODUCTION

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I think our society has made a serious mistake. Men and women are not alike in all important respects. Sex differences are real and, in some realms, profound. Sex plays a large role not just in our reproductive lives, but also in our psyches. Rather than attempting the Sisyphean task of reforming society to meet an androgynous ideal, we are happier when we accept our natures and play to our strengths.
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The feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s did some good. It was unnecessarily difficult, for example, before feminism, for women to get credit on their own. Yet the movement took a disastrous wrong turn when it rejected the family as a prison for women. Family life is a key support to the happiness of men, women, and children. Thousands of studies show that married people are happier, healthier, wealthier, and longer lived than those who are single, widowed, or divorced. As for children, there is no debate in the literature. Everyone who studies child well-being agrees that children who grow up with their married biological parents are racing ahead of their contemporaries who grow up in less stable situations.
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CHAPTER 1 The Feminist Mistake

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In 1970, three furious feminist tracts dominated the best-seller lists: Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. When I arrived at college in the mid-1970s, Greer in particular was all the rage. Gloria Steinem, who described herself as a Marxist, was also in vogue, but she was better known for one-liners than for a worked-out philosophy.78 Greer wrote that “Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They’ve become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, that are castrated in farming in order to serve their master’s ulterior motives—to be fattened or made docile—women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It’s a process that sacrifices vigor for delicacy and succulence, and one that’s got to be changed.”79
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Freudian influence on the intellectual life of the twentieth century (from theater to literature to criminal justice to education) cannot be overstated. The critic Alfred Kazin summed up Freud’s influence: “In the same way that one associates the discovery of certain fundamentals with Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, so one identifies many of one’s deepest motivations with Freud. His name is no longer the name of a man; like ‘Darwin,’ it is now synonymous with a part of nature. This is the very greatest kind of influence that a man can have.”100

Or, as the poet W. H. Auden wrote, “To us he is no more a person / Now but a whole climate of opinion.” Feminists lived in that same climate. Shulamith Firestone, another best-selling feminist fire breather who burst onto the scene in 1970, argued that Freudianism and feminism had common roots because “Freud grasped the crucial problem of modern life: sexuality.”101 She acknowledged that some of Freud’s views were “absurd,” yet agreed that sexual repression was the root of all social ills. Firestone protested that Freud had not gone far enough. There could be no escape, she thought, from the pathologies that sexual repression and Oedipal conflicts create without the destruction of the incubus—the nuclear family.
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CHAPTER 2 The Campus Rape Mess

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The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience.”

The one-in-five number—some advocates use “one in four”—originated with a Ms. magazine survey from the 1980s that asked college women whether they had experienced sexual assault, coercion, or rape. Mary Koss, a researcher from the University of Arizona who designed and conducted the survey, included two questions that clouded the results. One asked: “Have you had a man attempt sexual intercourse (get on top of you, attempt to insert his penis) with you by giving you alcohol or drugs, but intercourse did not occur?” Another asked: “Have you given in to sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because you were overwhelmed by a man’s continual arguments and pressure?” A positive response to the first question was counted as “attempted rape,” and a positive response to the second was counted as “completed rape.”

CHAPTER 6 Family

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[Susan] Brownmiller’s much-hailed Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, went far beyond a reasonable critique of the judicial system’s handling of rape cases and argued that rape was the template for relations between all men and all women. “[Rape is] nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” In 1975, Time magazine called her book a “convincing and awesome portrait of men’s cruelty to women” and made Brownmiller one of twelve “Women of the Year.”22 Rapists, according to Brownmiller, were not rare criminals but “the boy next door.”23

CHAPTER 7 Having it All

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President Obama didn’t say it, but I will: acknowledging the importance of fathers, and of families, is part of reconciling ourselves to life’s realities and shedding the feminist illusions we’ve cultivated for decades. Much of the feminist project of the past half century, with its denial of sex differences and its insistence on stamping out sex roles, was misbegotten. Humans are not “assigned” sexes; we are male and female. Our differences are complementary, not superior or inferior. Decades of war between the sexes have led not to greater happiness but to unspooling ledgers of casualties.