Note to Jeffrey Bell: Premarital sex predates the 1960s

Spare me from conservative analysis of feminism. Because when you let most conservatives yammer away on the topic, you get a great, heaping, stupid load of sexist bullshit purporting to be an analysis of feminism. Note to Weekly Standard: You’re embarrassing yourselves.

For the post-1960s, post-socialist left, the single most important breakthrough has been the alliance between modern feminism and the sexual revolution. This was far from inevitable. Up until around 1960, attempts at sexual liberation were resisted by most educated women. In the wake of the success of Playboy and other mass-circulation pornographic magazines in the 1950s, men were depicted as the initiators and main beneficiaries of sexual liberation, women as intolerant of promiscuity as well as potential victims of predatory “liberated” men.

With the introduction of the Pill around 1960, things abruptly began to change. Fears of overpopulation legitimated a contraceptive ethic throughout middle-class society in North America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet bloc.

[…] The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social and psychological resistance to premarital sex. “No fault” divorce, a term borrowed from the field of auto insurance, in reality amounted to unilateral divorce and began to undermine the idea of marriage as a binding mutual contract oriented toward the procreation and nurturing of children. Contrary to nearly every prediction, the ubiquity of far more reliable methods of contraception and the growing ideological separation of sex from reproduction, coincided with a huge increase in unwed pregnancies.

So let’s see. Jeffrey Bell says that prior to the 1960s, women were prim, proper, and properly in fear of repercussions of sex outside “proper” channels, a.k.a., the marriage bed. Prior to the 1960s, the fear of overpopulation stopped educated women (note the elitism of the thought that uneducated women are too stupid to care about the earth having too many people on it) from having premarital sex. Prior to the 1960s, women didn’t do things like, say, have affairs with married men, have sex with their fiancé before marriage (or six-month-after-the-honeymoon babies, no, that never occurred before the 1960s), sex in high school (shyeah, right), sex with unmarried men, or, well, I guess “educated” women simply didn’t have sex until the clock struck twelve on the wedding night. At least, in Jeffrey Bell’s world, that’s what happened.

Then along came The Pill, that awful, awful object that suddenly turned educated women from virtuous, moral, guardians of chastity (or frigid bitches, depending on the point of view of the disappointed suitor) into wanton whores, just like those uneducated masses who never gave a thought to the consequences of having sex. It destroyed the idea of marriage, because let’s face it, prior to 1960, no one ever had sex outside of marriage. And it gave people an excuse to have children out of wedlock. It’s almost as if the devil himself took hold of those virtuous, educated women, forced The Pill down their throats, and then waited for the aphrodisiac effect of being to have sex without pregnancy.

The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social and psychological resistance to premarital sex.

Spare me from the sexist, condescending ignorance of men like Bell. It isn’t the fact that the Pill is taken only by women that gives women a “feeling” of control over their sexual activity. Taking the Pill does give women control—over their reproductive ability. It does give women control over their sexual activity. It allows women to decide how many children they want, and when they’d like to have them. It eroded our “social and psychological resistance to premarital sex”? Really? It didn’t become popular because men and women are at the height of their sexual activity in their teens and twenties, and women didn’t necessarily wanted to start families that young anymore if they didn’t have to? Are you sure about that?

The thing that bothers me the most about conservative analysis of feminism is how they put all the blame for sexuality on the women’s shoulders, and utterly ignore that part of the formula which requires a male partner in order to achieve potential childbirth. If society’s mores are so important, why aren’t men refusing to have sex with the wicked women who ingest the Pill and want to go for it?

Funny how that never seems to come up in these discussions. Men refusing to have premarital sex because they don’t want to have children, or because it’s socially unacceptable. But it’s not socially unacceptable for men, really. Only for women. Is anyone blaming the boy that got Bristol Palin pregnant, or are they all, as always, thinking it was her fault for having unprotected sex with him?

Put the blame for the changing of social mores square on the shoulders where it belongs: On both genders, right and left. The right is no more moral than the left. How many times have you heard conservative men utter a variant of this: “I loved going to protests in the sixties/seventies/eighties. You could always get laid if you told chicks you were against the war/Reagan/nukes.”

These same men are now blaming the “moral breakdown of society” on the women they had sex with, while not taking any responsibility for their part in that partnership. The hypocrisy factor is so high here, I can’t even quantify it. This is why I will always be a feminist. And I will never consider that word an insult.

Sarah Palin is a feminist, too, and a conservative. How much you want to bet that she and Todd didn’t wait until the wedding night? But let’s blame that on Sarah’s eroded social and psychological resistance to premarital sex due to women taking the Pill starting in the 1960s. Because Jeffrey Bell says so, that’s why.