It's rigged in ways that go well beyond consent. Students I spoke to talked about “male sexual entitlement,” the expectation that male sexual needs take priority, with men presumed to take sex and women presumed to give it to them. They spoke of how men set the terms, host the parties, provide the alcohol, exert the influence. Male attention and approval remain the validating metric of female worth, and women are still (perhaps increasingly) expected to look [like] porn stars…
[T]hen there are the double standards that continue to redound negatively to women: A woman in pursuit is loose or hard up; a man in pursuit is healthy and horny. A woman who says no is a prude… a man who says no is rejecting the woman in question.
Traister bemoans these "sexual judgements" and the way they position women to either leave unsatisfied or shamed. Even if consent and safety are present, women in today's sexual marketplace too frequently disappear into the desires and dictates of men, leading to what one writer that Traister cites calls "Sex where we don't matter."
To which I say: Yes! Traister is exactly correct. The Sexual Revolution's marketplace is indeed brazenly anti-women. When sex is a public commodity, women and children always have the worst, least valuable shares. This isn't a wrinkle of sexual revolutionism; it's a feature.
But Traister doesn't want to challenge the reigning sexual nihilism of her time. In fact, she wants to make clear to anyone who might misinterpret her that casual sex and hookup culture are by all means beautiful and good. "This is not pearl-clutching over the moral or emotional hazards of “hookup culture," she quickly clarifies. "This is not an objection to promiscuity or to the casual nature of some sexual encounters…Having humiliating sex with a man who treats you terribly at a frat party is bad but not inherently worse than being publicly shunned for having had sex with him, or being unable to obtain an abortion after getting pregnant by him, or being doomed to have disappointing sex with him for the next 50 years."
If that isn't a perfect summary of the self-deluded state of the modern secular self, I don't know what is. You can see Traister's thought process working towards the obvious truth: That maybe a culture of casual and irrelevant sex lends itself to an erotic Darwinism where the powerful and energetic will subdue others. You can hear the beginnings of a profound dissatisfaction with the terms of the Sexual Revolution. But in the end it is all stamped out by the glitz of modern accessories to our individual autonomy. Having humiliating sex becomes better than not having enough sex. Being taken advantage of is not as bad as carrying a child. Evil is bad, but at least it's not boring.
But Traister's honesty betrays her worldview. Her observations of the inequalities of casual sex are more durable than her rote progressivism. Traister begins the piece, after all, quoting a fellow feminist's story about a drunken, unsatisfying sexual experience she once had with a group of frat boys. The fellow writer consented and everything happened seemingly according to the rules. The problems start when she wakes up. "But in the morning, she wrote, 'I feel weird about what went down.'" There you go. When the alcohol stops coursing and the bodies stop moving, all that's left is the throbbing of the soul, even if through cultural re-education and indulgence all that the mind can muster is, "That was weird."
Rebecca Traister writes from the front lines of the Sexual Revolution's civil war. It's a civil war between nature and rhetoric. The rhetoric says, "We're all equal and entitled!" The nature says, "I am stronger and more important than you." Sex in which women "don't matter" isn't a rotting leftover from the Puritans; it's the fresh du jour of the Darwinian world outside the world of transcendence, meaning, love, beauty, devotion, and God. The chains of marriage and monogamy are loathed by the same culture that excels in sex trafficking, campus rape, and human consumerism.
Listen to Allan Bloom:
In all this, the sexual revolution was precisely what it said it was–a liberation. But some of the harshness of nature asserted itself beneath the shattered conventions: the young were more apt to profit from the revolution than the old, the beautiful more than the ugly. The old veil of discretion had had the effect of making these raw and ill-distributed natural advantages less important in life and marriage.
But now there was little attempt to apply egalitarian justice in these matters…The undemocratic aspects of free sex were compensated for in our harmless and mildly ridiculous way: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" was preached more vigorously than formerly; the cosmetics industry had a big boom; and education and therapy in the style of Masters and Johnson, promising great orgasms to every subscriber, became common…These were the days when pornography slipped its leash. (The Closing of the American Mind, p. 99)
Welcome to the Sexual Revolution, where the sex is free because the women foot the bill.