Tyrannosaurus Sex

Shaker Angelos forwards this article from Slate, which reports more middle-aged male hand-wringing at the woeful state of modern women…from Harvard, no less.

Last week, Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield told students that the sexual revolution may not have served the best interests of young women. Instead, it had merely "lower[ed]" us to the crass level of men, who pursue sex thoughtlessly and without hopes of marriage. In a talk titled "Feminism and the Autonomy of Women," he suggested that men who grow used to "free samples" in the bedroom are going to leave women high-and-dry when it comes to committed relationships. And then he revealed his insights into the erotic: "[Today's] women play the men's game, which they are bound to lose. Without modesty, there is no romance—it isn't so attractive or so erotic," said the professor. The solution to the problem, clearly, was for women to start saying no a little more often.

[…]

[I]t is curious to watch middle-aged male traditionalists trying to keep up. If they have not quite absorbed the notion that women need to have a voice in shaping their own sexual identity, they acknowledge that it is no longer permissible, or at any rate very popular, simply to pronounce that premarital sex is wrong. Thus they cast the sexual revolution as something that makes women unhappy…

There's something slippery about the "sex will make you unhappy" position. It relies on a retrograde notion of female vulnerability while pretending to take women's side.

It’s patriarchal, in it’s most literal definition—fatherly counsel, bestowed upon a generation of younger women, whose own fathers, presumably, were so scarred by the feminist movement that they’ve been rendered incapable of advising their daughters themselves. Lucky for those poor, pathetic wretches, we’ve got men like Professor Mansfield, a qualified women’s expert by nature of his expertise in government, to intervene in their stead.

Ahem.

The article itself does a fine job of explaining exactly why the professor’s recommendations are bunk, from both a philosophical and evidentiary perspective, so I won’t rehash that here. It strikes me, however, that women seem to be getting all kinds of advice lately from “the experts” on How to Get a Man. Don’t be funny; don’t be sexy. But, as has been well established in the comments threads here, smart, funny, sexy men prefer smart, funny, sexy women, so if a woman who is all those things indeed wants to “get a man,” she’s probably not going to have to fundamentally alter herself to do it. And not only that—she’s going to choose a man who loves and values her specifically for those reasons. Not a man, say, like Professor Mansfield.

Could it be that these middle-aged experts are just a dying breed who see issuing dictates to young women from their bully pulpits as the only glimmer of hope to stave off their being rendered extinct through natural selection? Hmm. Maybe this is evidence of intelligent design after all.