This Just In: No-strings-attached Sex Will Not Make Men Marry You, or Make Them Responsible
May 18, 2012
Via Wintery Knight, another woman (observing women she has known personally) makes similar observations about feminism and the sexual revolution:
I’ve known many of these women — a great many — and it never ceases to confound me how smart women can be such ridiculous fools when it comes to choosing men.
. . .
These liberal women I’ve known, having given away their female V-card over and over and over again, all the while scour their host of intimate “trial runs” searching for that mythical, Hollywood-construct, Mr. Right. . . . Certain that one of the men with whom she has copulated without strings will suddenly morph into a faithfully monogamous creature the minute she can convince one of them to say “I do” in front of a few witnesses . . . .
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Enjoyment and Contemplation 
May 18, 2012 at 2:26 PM
Wasn’t Da Vinci an alleged sexual deviant?
May 18, 2012 at 3:59 PM
What is the point about Da Vinci? Just because he created great art does not mean he was a great example of morality. I agree with the post – if we as women believe the above, we are deluded.
May 18, 2012 at 4:04 PM
I’m not disagreeing, I’m just disagreeing with the narrow assertion that promiscuity precludes achievement in the arts and sciences, etc. I also find the article a tad bit on the paranoid side, but that’s just me.
May 18, 2012 at 4:17 PM
Where on earth are you getting that? I read this, and the linked full-length article. I’m sorry, but it appears you’re pulling that out of think air.
May 18, 2012 at 4:08 PM
I agree, I have no idea where Snoodickle is getting that from.
May 18, 2012 at 4:24 PM
Try reading it again.
“Morally, it would take a complete idiot not to know by now that societally-imposed monogamy produces true liberation from humankind’s constant quest for sexual satisfaction, thereby freeing men and women for building civilization — those higher forms of achievement, such as architecture, art, philosophy, medicine, compiling knowledge, and so forth.”
May 18, 2012 at 4:34 PM
It didn’t say immorality precluded achievement, but it does state that morality frees them up to do more productive things. If chasing tail takes up a lot of time, that is a lot of time NOT spent being more productive. It does follow, if you read it accurately.
May 18, 2012 at 5:15 PM
So are you amending your previous statement that I pulled my criticism out of thin air?
May 19, 2012 at 9:29 AM
Sure – I’ll amend it. I think your predisposition to be contrary to a theory that has some weight caused you to make a knee-jerk interpretation, one both shallow and narrow, just as you have accused this author of being. If you want the long answer, read Chillingworth’s comment below. :-)
May 19, 2012 at 6:07 PM
Yet I did not pull it out of thin air.
May 19, 2012 at 12:02 AM
What a goofy game of “gotcha”. Why didn’t you just quote the part of the article you were responding to in the first place? For the record, if you hadn’t eventually quoted it, I would have assumed you were responding to the first paragraph, not the one about civilization.
Now that we know what you’re talking about, I think you’re reading it wrong. The author of the piece, while she may overstate her case and try too hard with the colorful language, is not saying that no individual given to vice can ever achieve anything. She’s saying that being addicted to the vice tends to consume one’s time and energy, and so tends to leave less time and energy to build civilization. Thus, you haven’t “disproven” her case by finding a single person who both slept around and produced some art—that’s actually a step less sophisticated than some of the epistemologically inadequate two-variable empiricism you’ve used before (say, here, or here); the equivalent here would be to measure the levels of accomplishment and vice of many or all persons, maybe, and show that over that much larger sample, sleeping around did not tend to correlate with lack of accomplishment. Or you might have to look at whole civilizations, and show that the more sexually degenerate or sexually Hobbesian ones did not tend to produce less art, science, etc. (Arguably the evidence of American history is already against you there—we’ve stagnated artistically and in innovation in the last half century or so as we’ve become promiscuous and uninhibited.)
So I think her sub-thesis (that “narrow assertion”) about civilization is much like the larger thesis of the whole article: That promiscuity tends to lead to bad things, not that it always single-handedly makes everything as bad as it could possibly be. Would you have thought you had disproven the entire article if you had found a single example of a couple in which the woman slept with the man with no strings attached, but he eventually married her anyway?
May 19, 2012 at 9:58 AM
Here’s what I don’t understand. How does going out once a week for a couple hours searching for women consume one’s time and energy to the point where it makes him less productive?
May 20, 2012 at 10:51 AM
Also, wouldn’t her thesis also apply to a married man addicted to peaknuckle?
May 23, 2012 at 2:04 PM
“peaknuckle” has to be the dirtiest-sounding euphemism for female genitalia i’ve ever heard.