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Notes -
The point is that MeToo represents an organic rebellion by a lot of women against the excesses of the sexual revolution, whether they consciously realise it or not (and most, as you suggest, do not). Is it often misguided, does it often harm innocents, does it broadly fail to present viable alternatives, is it still trapped inside liberal ideology? Of course - it represents a dynamic rage, it is largely impotent, those supporting it have little understanding of the real material causes of their suffering.
But, as @iprayiam3 says, that does not mean it is insincere. And so-called conservatives who spend their time defending lotharios and cads are essentially liberals on this issue, no different to those defending ‘drag queen story hour’ or teenage transition. No, some things are bad. Young women raised in a climate of total sexual liberalism are rebelling with the only words they have, in the only way they can. They’re not going to become “trad” overnight, they have no understanding of what that is, they were raised without religion, they are surrounded by a media environment that means they don’t have any real understanding of what reversing it would mean. Still, they know the present situation is untenable.
Just how deep does that lack of understanding run? Do these women actually still not realize that trying to outdo one another in pandering to the short-term sexual proclivities of the top 5% of men will never get them the one thing they really crave, which is the attention and devotion of a worthy man?
Have you met people of average intelligence, let alone the half who fall below the midpoint? The people we most often make fun of here are midwits already in the 90th+ percentile. Expecting average people, especially average young people, to accurately diagnose the complexities of the sexual marketplace is overambitious. They may be aware of their place relative to others, but their collective role in the machine isn’t going to be derived by the average 17 year old.
And in any case, there’s a defection issue here. The average 18 year old boy in modern secular France (for example) isn’t going to wait until marriage to have sex. A girl his age has no power over him, if she tells him she wants to wait, he’ll go fuck someone else who has not fully considered the reality of gender relations and concluded that promiscuity is counterproductive for women. She is left with two choices if she commits to this path. First, she could become a tradcath (or maybe Muslim), which presumably as say a secular Parisian (maybe not even of Catholic background) would involve abandoning the culture in which she was raised and wholesale LARPing to join a completely different largely rural subculture and belief system that will be suspicious of a young single person without a family history in the SSPX or whatever. Secondly, she could find a secular French boy so romantically unsuccessful or unconfident that he is willing to agree to the terms despite living in a promiscuous society. Of course, that young man is likely so shy that he’ll never even make a move, and may otherwise be extremely awkward, stunted or ugly (by which I don’t mean “not the top 5%”, but “in the bottom 10%”).
So in reality, the girl usually has to put out if she wants a relationship [that may lead to marriage] with an average young man in her league of class/education/looks.
I appreciate you always giving a rigorous defense of women when these sexual marketplace topics get brought up. I may not always agree, but it's a needed service! I rarely see these arguments being made anywhere, unfortunately.
Don't you think the argument that the average 18-yr-old girl in modern secular France has no power over the average boy his age is so obviously far-fetched that it basically belongs to fantasy land?
I'd say @2rafa was arguing that she doesn't have power over the situation. Yes a girl has some power over the average boy, but not enough power to get him to commit to her if she won't put out.
Not enough power to do that, yes, I agree. But this entire conversation, and the one before this, about Russell Brand, was about the perils of women engaging in hookup sex. I'd argue that young women engaging in premarital sex in monogamous relationships is not a product of the sexual revolution, but was more or less the social norm before that as well. As far as I know, research proves that even roughly half of the Puritans had premarital sex this way, for example.
Interesting, I haven't heard that before about premarital sex. Would be grateful if you had something to read on that.
There are research findings that half of all brides were pregnant at the time of the marriage in Puritan communities. I remember reading about this, but this was more than a decade ago.
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