Being Honest About Sex Differences, Not Passing Consent Laws, Is How You Empower Women
There's a new sexual consent law in New South Wales, Australia, and it basically involves very talky, dull, unsexy sex: asking permission every time you want to touch this/lick that, etc. Some say, "No, you don't have to exactly do that" -- but, in fact, unless you have proof you did (another major issue!) you may end up in the slammer. Of course, it's likely that only one sex -- male -- will end up doing any "he said/she said" jail time.

And to be perfectly clear in case someone has popped in here with the intelligence of a Pet Rock (remember those, or were you unborn at the time?), I am of course against non-consensual sex (aka rape), as any decent human being is.

Claire Lehmann has an excellent op-ed in The Australian that echoes some points I made in a big article I wrote for Penthouse Australia about how feminism disempowers and infantilizes women. (If feminists were honest, they would talk about women's higher "agreeableness," a personality trait that women tend to be on the high end of that manifest in being "pleasers," not wanting to make waves by saying no, etc.)

Claire's piece is on casual sex, consent, and women's accountability. An excerpt:

At the moment I see three false narratives being told about sex. They are being told in our media, by public figures, activists and politicians. Certain truths, because they are challenging and difficult to articulate, are being left unsaid.

The first falsity underpins what is known colloquially as "hook-up culture". Turbo-charged by dating apps such as Tinder, hook-up culture relies on the assumption that women, as a sex, are capable of experiencing casual sex the same way that men do.

The truth is that, for better or worse, women do not experience sex, especially casual sex, like men. Of course, there are outliers and exceptions to the rule.

But for many women - perhaps most women - sex outside committed relationships will be an anxiety-inducing and at times distressing experience. The reasons for this are debated. Sociologists argue that men and women experience sex differently because of cultural conditioning.

Evolutionary psychologists assert that our sexual psychologies have evolved over millions of years in order to solve very particular adaptive problems.

For women, the risks of pregnancy have been a heavy burden to bear for the entirety of human history. The fact that reliable contraception has been available for a couple of generations doesn't mean that our psychology has yet caught up.

...The second falsity is connected to the first, and it is the broad notion that when it comes to sexual encounters, consent is all that matters. As a society we need to accept that sexual experiences can be distressing even when they are consensual. Any woman who has had sex with a man expecting a romantic relationship to unfold, only to be treated icily in its aftermath, can tell you what a painful experience this can be. Such behaviour on behalf of men is not illegal (and I am not suggesting it should be) but it isn't necessarily ethical, either. For some reason, however, we talk about consent as if it can make all these bad experiences go away.

...A third falsehood being left unchallenged is the idea that women bear no responsibility for how sexual encounters unfold. Of course, rape is rape, and I am not suggesting that anybody other than a perpetrator be held culpable for the commission of a crime. But what I am suggesting is that women over the age of 18 should be seen as adults who have agency.

It does women no favours to imply that they do not have control over their own sexual lives. Yet it is becoming increasingly common within our media to portray women as passive sexual agents, as if adult women were equivalent to children.

Women are not passive sexual beings, nor are they sexless, and nor are they without predatory impulses themselves. The human condition is complicated, and sexuality in particular can be a Pandora's box of contradictions. (We have thousands of years of art and culture reflecting this fact.)

Yet the narratives I have broadly sketched are currently ossifying into dogma because we are too scared to challenge them. Falsehoods are going unchallenged because nobody wants to be seen as a prude, nobody wants to be seen as a "victim blamer" and nobody wants to be seen as anti-feminist.

But we are not doing women, and young women in particular, any favours if we fail to speak honestly about sex. The fact is that young people are more confused than ever. Clearly, the messages we are sending them are not providing them with much clarity, confidence, or empowerment.