Stats for nerds
2recommend
8mentions
3people
2018–2022years
63% recommend38% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Because the sexual revolution was driven by self serving liberal men. Read Dworkin’s “Right Wing Women.” https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010...
- If you literally can’t think of any reasons, it may be the case you’ve only been exposed to sex-positive feminism. It’s worth reading some of Dworkin’s work to get the other side of the story on sex work and pornography: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/andrea-dworkin-last-days-at-h.... Maybe start with “Right Wing Women” for a primer on how men hijacked the sexual revolution, before getting into the material that describes the brutality and dehumanization in the sex work industry.
You don’t have to agree with her take, but it’s worth engaging with it. She’s a brilliant, if deeply pessimistic, thinker.
- Just to elaborate on the above: https://thebridgehead.ca/2018/11/26/noam-chomsky-and-the-ant...
> The fact that people agree to it and are paid,” Chomsky replied, “is about as convincing as the fact that we should be in favor of sweat-shops in China where women are locked into a factory and work fifteen hours a day and the factory burns down and they all die. Yeah, they were paid and they consented, but that doesn’t make me in favor of it.
Is there a theoretical abstraction in which pornography and the pornography industry isn’t degrading and abusive to women? Maybe. But the amount of degradation and abuse in the real pornography industry is pretty good evidence that theory and practice aren’t syncing up.
As a formerly sex-positive liberal man, reading Andrea Dworkin’s “Right Wing Women” was revelatory.
- I wouldn't call it feminism, but the lingering effects of the sexual revolution, which was dominated heavily by male interest. (Read Dworkin's "Right Wing Women." TLDR version, the sexual revolution was heavily influenced by male desire to make women more sexually available: https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010... (pp. 94-95)) Iliza Shlesinger has a great point about this in one of her routines.
> You’ve also been holding in… your intentions. We have this really nasty habit in our society of labeling women very cruel and unfair things when they express their desire for very normal things. Monogamy, exclusivity, a relationship, a family, babies. Right? We like to call them desperate, sad, psychos, baby crazy. “We’ve been married for six years. She already wants a kid! I’m a fuck man! They can’t get me.” It’s very normal to want these things.
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2018/07/30/iliza-shlesinger-el...
- > I wouldn't call it feminism, but the lingering effects of the sexual revolution, which was dominated heavily by male interest. (Read Dworkin's "Right Wing Women." TLDR version, the sexual revolution was heavily influenced by male desire to make women more sexually available: https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010.... (pp. 94-95)) Iliza Shlesinger has a great point about this in one of her routines.
That.
- > It should be hard to cause political change. Most new ideas in politics are truly awful and failures at that level affect society gravely.
Part of the problem is that the left has erased all evidence of the failures of progressive politics (and in many cases the right has let them do so). When you just hear about the civil rights movement and marriage equality, it’s easy to assume that conservatives are just there to hold everyone back.
I’d offer three examples. First, “socialism.” Socialism failed dismally. One of the most colossal failures of a political idea in modern history. So progressives endeavored to replace “socialism” with “social democracy.” But “social democracy” as practiced in Europe approaches the problem from the complete opposite end. It abandons the socialist economic model and builds on a capitalist one. Put differently, it’s not “socialism with more democracy” it’s “capitalism with more democracy.” So progressives have turned social democracy—which is more than anything an affirmation of the success of capitalism, and an utter retreat from what progressives were pushing before—into a win for progressivism.
The second is the sexual revolution. At least in the United States, we have retrenched significantly on that front. Millennials start having sex later, and have fewer partners. “Affirmative consent” has replaced “free love.” The boundary-pushing on things like age have been pulled back hard. The #MeToo movement reaffirmed conservative truths: men cannot be trusted and society has a role to play helping women stave off unwanted and inappropriate advances. (Andrea Dworkin addresses this at length in Right Wing Women, though obviously long before #MeToo. In explaining why many women continue to support patriarchal systems, she notes that the sexual revolution stripped women of a lot of protections that those systems used to provide, with nothing to replace them. While Dworkin was obviously no conservative, she astutely recognized that the progressive tendency to throw out rules can easily end up overreaching. Many have lamented that the #MeToo movement is a return to a more Puritanical approach. There is a lot of truth to that.)
Third, eugenics. The history of support for eugenics in this country has been pretty much erased, even though the evils of Jim Crow get plenty of attention. That’s likely because many progressives backed eugenics. Woodrow Wilson, progressive champion, was a former New Jersey Governor and eugenicist who segregated the federal work force for the first time. He fired existing black federal employees (proving he wasn’t just a product of his time). Meanwhile, one of the strongest opponents of eugenics was the Catholic Church. In 1930, the Pope released an encyclical in which he condemned birth control, abortion, and eugenics as all being incompatible with the traditional Christian view of reproduction.
