‘Hooking Up’ Makes a Feminized World More Bound Than Ever by Men’s Rules

“I was just about to launch a drive to repeal the 19th Amendment,” a friend who is an historian and a conservative said to me last week. “But I’ve just read your new book and now I guess I won’t be able to get much support.”

He was joking, of course, about trying to deny women the right to vote, but he went on to argue seriously that modern society and culture have been “feminized” and that this process is undermining Western civilization.

One often hears such assessments these days, usually off the record, from conservative men. A new study produced by a conservative women’s group shows how mistaken this analysis is. “Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Mating and Dating Today,” a report commissioned by the Independent Women’s Forum, found that college women today are “hooking up”--having casual sex with no hint of commitment--more and enjoying it less.

This is a young man’s dream world. For many young women, it is something else. The study makes clear that most of the women in the study desire a continuing relationship but do not feel free to say so.

There is really nothing new about this finding. It is reminiscent of a troubling scene in the film “Woodstock” in which a young woman speaks of having sex with the male with whom she is traveling. “But it’s pretty good because we’re not going together or anything,” she says. “You know, there’s a lot of freedom and everything.”

The look on her face strongly suggests that she is enjoying this sort freedom much less than he is, yet she feels obligated to endorse it because “there’s a lot of freedom and everything” and who could be against that?

That many women could be against “free love” is rarely suggested, because women are equal with men and equality is mistakenly taken to be a synonym for congruence. This fallacy has created a Masculine Mystique: If it has long been a man’s world, whatever men have done is what everyone should do.

The Masculine Mystique in the sexual realm can be stated simply: If he does it, why shouldn’t she?

The extent to which the male view has won out is indicated by the fact that hardly anyone seems to consider the reverse of this question: If she doesn’t do it, why should he?

The sexual revolution has produced something that would be difficult to characterize as a feminized culture. In fact, what has been happening in the modern world is largely the opposite of what my friend thinks he detects.

The all-conquering Weltanschauung today is that of neo-classical economics: All the world is but a marketplace where every man (and woman) must play a part based solely on self-interest. This is a peculiarly masculine distortion of human nature, which mixes selfish and social motives.

What has over the centuries kept the centrifugal forces of the masculine civilization of the West from flying apart has been the “feminine” influence, embodied principally in religious strictures that seek to contain the ill effects of the pursuit of pure self-interest. The needs of the modern economy for ever-increasing consumption have now all but eliminated those restraints.

Seen in this light, the sexual revolution is but another manifestation of the modern marketplace worldview and the culture of consumption. Advertising constantly urges people to think only of themselves and their personal enjoyment. Other people are to be seen as objects to be manipulated to increase selfish pleasure.

Free love is an oxymoron. To be in love is to be connected, tied, bound to another. Totally free people can have sex, but never love, because to have love is to give up freedom.

Although the conservatives who released the IWF report probably do not realize it, what their study found on college campuses is free-market sex in which most of the consumers are males who see females as commodities.

Ours may no longer be a man’s world to quite the extent it has been for at least the last six millenniums, but it may be more a masculine world than ever before. Women may enter, as long as they play by the men’s rules.