Some Like It Grim
On Slate, Meghan O'Rourke spanks the old white guys playing out their midlife crises by pontificating on the sad, pathetic sex lives of young women:

The need to tell young women how to behave often comes over middle-aged men—it's an itch right up there with buying a flashy new car. And Mansfield's case for modesty is merely a new version of, say, Leon Kass' argument in "The End of Courtship," a 1997 article currently posted on the Public Interest Web site, which I happened to stumble across after reading Mansfield's remarks. One similarity between them is particularly worth note. Mansfield and Kass don't suggest that female sexual activity is immoral or wrong. They suggest that it makes women unhappy: "Young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused," Kass writes, voicing an avuncular worry about our "grim" lives. Like Mansfield, he goes on to express concern that contemporary sexuality isn't morally but erotically bankrupt. The best sex, he argues, is stimulated by reading poets like Shelley, and, "if properly sublimated, is transformable into genuine and lofty longings—not only for love and romance but for all the other higher human yearnings." Reading these two pieces back to back, one finds oneself envisioning conservative elders gathered over brunch with teary-eyed twentysomethings, Sex and the City-style, nodding and patting hands: I feel your pain, honey, they soothe. And I'll tell you how to really get your groove on. First, go get a ring.

Forty years after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the terms of the debate over sexuality have irrevocably changed, and it 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, couching their critique in the fuzzy language of gratification and personal gain that we Oprah-raised kids can relate to. Beneath Kass' pronouncements on what is erotic is a struggle not to come off as a prude; beneath Mansfield's, a quest to establish his credentials as not anti-sex. By adopting a soft stance of empathy, they conveniently skirt the need to supply any facts and figures about just what is going on in the hearts and bedrooms of America's youth.

In a way, this shift in rhetoric (from morality to gratification) makes it look like the argument about the criteria Americans should use to shape our ideas about relationships and marriage has already been settled. But it's more complicated than this. 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 offered in the name of an open-mindedness that is something of a pretense: Professor Mansfield does not exactly wish that sexual freedom had panned out for us—or recognize the extent to which it has. He presumes, for example, that all women have similar experiences and want the same things: love and marriage, the baby in the baby carriage, and so forth. Finally, this position holds women responsible for the supposed unwillingness of American young people to get with the marriage program and settle down. But what evidence is there that women are deeply unhappy in their sexual relationships with men? And if women really are, why is it up to them to "fix" what's broken by insisting on early marriage rather than on, say, serial monogamy followed by marriage later? If things are so bad, how do we explain the fact that social indicators are, for the most part, on an uptick over the past decade?

I've been having "sad, lonely, and confused" premarital sex for a whole lot of years, and I have to say, I highly recommend it.