Recently, Sophia Mason wrote an interesting post here (“Woman, Lovely Woman”) in which she discussed the masculine responses to feminism. The post drew several comments. This topic always does; it seems people never tire of talking about sex, to which—let’s face it—feminism is as directly related as contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. It’s all about sex.
I made the comment that I’d watched things change by watching the change in the young adults whom I taught for several decades. Below is a paraphrased discussion from a freshman English classroom in response to a feminist essay:
Boy A: “It’s all about sex, anyway.”
(faint general tittering)
Girl A: “Men always think that.”
Girl B: “No—not just men. It never was just men. That’s the whole point. Women have a right to enjoy sex, too, you know. Women used to be taught that enjoying sex was not feminine, but that’s not true.”
Instructor: What is femininity?
(silence)
“Any ideas about that?”
Girl C (hesitantly): “Well, there used to be the idea that girls had to behave modestly. And they had to not care about anything except the house and children. They weren’t allowed to speak up about anything—to have opinions about things that mattered.”
Instructor: “Is that what ‘femininity’ is?”
Girl C: “No, but ….”
(silence again)
Instructor: “Well, let’s compare ‘liberations.’ You’re not old enough to remember first-hand the liberation of African-Americans—the Civil Rights movement—but you see now in this mixture in the classroom, the good fruits of that historic event. Now, interracial marriage is common; the lines between the races are becoming blurred, right? The ‘average American’ is now racially ambiguous—do you agree?”
(general positive agreement)
Instructor: “Can you say that about women’s liberation? Would you say that human beings are becoming androgynous?”
Boy B (a homosexual): “Yes. Now we know that love is not a product of gender differentiation.”
Instructor: “What kind of ‘love’? Be specific.”
Boy B: “Well, I mean romantic love—erotic, I guess. Okay—sex.”
(general agreement that this love doesn’t depend on gender)
Girl C: “So it is all about sex.”
Girl D: “Well, that’s because sex is life—I mean you have to have sex, literally, to have life.”
Boy B: “Not any more, you don’t.”
(general acknowledgement of the truth of that)
Girl C: “That’s why it’s not important any more. It doesn’t matter.”
Girl D: “And that’s why it’s boring.”
(Murmuring)
Boy C: “It’s nothing really but a dirty joke. Or a corny ‘love story’—which you know isn’t true.”
Girl D: “I still like the romance stories even though I know they’re fantasies. But dirty jokes aren’t funny any more. They’re just boring.”
Instructor: “How many of you think sex is boring?”
(All except Boy A and Boy B slowly raise their hands.
Boy A (reluctantly): “It does seem like, uh, like it takes more now to, uh, to get aroused.”
In my comment, I mentioned that we don’t know what something costs until after we’ve paid the price. Conservatives lament incessantly the destruction of The Family, but that entire social construct is based on the natural act of sex. And I’m afraid that the price we’ve paid for sexual liberation goes beyond the family to its very base—sex itself. And yes, the media shows us that Boy A was right: Titillation does seem to require ever more deviance and perversion. Sex has become boring now. We’re not just androgynous creatures now—we’re also becoming asexual. A heavy price?
“Titillation does seem to require ever more deviance and perversion. Sex has become boring now.”
Having been married for 22 years with 5 kids and 2 grandkids, I’d say of course young carnal gourmets find sex boring.
When physical sex is pried away from children and lifelong committed love, it loses virtually all its meaning, and becomes the genital equivalent of getting one’s back scratched. It’s simply not “sex” anymore; unfortunately many people don’t know that because they constantly hear the opposite .
Even in my 6th-grade Catechism class I try to shape the kids’ imaginations around the idea of marriage and babies being normative for “grownup love.”
Nowadays we can’t wait ’til highschool to start forming them.
Christian-
I suppose it became susceptible to boredom when it became recreation instead of procreation (when meaning was removed and it became only “fun”.) It also became susceptible to other social elements of recreation; e.g., “fads” or “fashions” (perversions), fans (pornography buffs)–even the sex clubs that proliferate now, etc.–in other words, all those things that surround any other form of recreation. It’s almost impossible now to attach (or re-attach) any real “meaning” to it–such as marriage.
But personally, I think the phenomenon falls under the heading of Abuse it, Lose it. Whatever people abuse, they lose. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that drugs like Viagara are the biggest profit source that pharmaceutical companies have now–even bigger than pain-killers. (Anti-depressants are running as a close second.) It could be that “liberation” is arriving at the dead end of impotence. Maybe we really are becoming asexual. And while The Family is the most obvious casualty of so-called liberation, the less obvious loss may indeed be sex itself. Anyway, you know something is going on when 18-year-olds call sex boring.
Christian,
I’ll try this again. I made a rather lengthy comment earlier, but evidently it was lost in cyberspace.
You’re quite right, of course. But turning procreation into recreation is not the end of the matter–now sex has all the other peripheral issues of any other form of recreation, one of which is boredom.
This rings so true! Just this weekend I went to a wedding for two of my friends and, being unlucky enough to be stuck in a hotel room by myself for several hours, made the mistake of turning on the TV. Of the four or five movies/shows playing, every single one had something to do with sex. And every single one was–well–boring! They weren’t even funny, much less exiting.
The next day I stood in church and watched my two friends recite their vows. They’d waited four years for this–to finish college, so that he could get a job. They hadn’t even kissed before. Were they excited? I should say so! We all got goosebumps just watching. But we were all convinced, along with St. Paul, that “this is a great mystery I speak of, relating to Christ and the Church.”
Sophia,
C.S. Lewis said that one thing (among a few others) common to all cultures throughout history is the dirty joke.
It seems we are witnessing the passing of the dirty joke in our time. It isn’t dirty any more. One of the major tenets of The Revolution declared that dirt is not dirty. Without the dirtyness, there is no funnyness, and there is no joke.
Benny Hill (British tv), et al, couldn’t make a living now.
Ho Hum. It’s all just childishness and silliness. And embarrassingly naive and dumb, like the stumbling, crude imagination of pre-pubescents.
Meanwhile, commercial pornographers run out of ideas, having scraped the dregs of concupiscience down to predation of children, and other such images of disgust and horror.
(Loveless) Sex (with a capital S) has gorged itself out of existence and into impotence.