performs the public service of wondering aloud whether everything done by "consenting adults" is by definition ducky. To the contrary, myopic focus on "consent," as the author observes, overlooks the sulfurous realities of today’s mating market.Emba recounts numerous tales of rather awful sexual maltreatment of women at the hands of young men who, she says, are otherwise "great guys":
Once, noncriminal but still noxious sexual misdeeds would have resulted in social ostracism, or frontier justice meted out by male relatives—or both.
Now, thanks to the slithering of pornography into young pockets everywhere, such acts have not only been normalized.
Judging by an eye-opening number of the book’s anonymous stories, they have in some cases become the sine qua non of male company itself.
"She really didn’t like the choking, Kirsten explained, but she really liked him."The book evidently flouts the current orthodoxy that holds that no sexual behavior is deviant:
This sentence, which ought to have been the book’s subtitle, captures the awfulness afoot in one swoop. Several recent studies cited by the author prove the nauseating point: More and more women consent to sex only to endure unexpected violence after saying yes.
The example of choking is just for starters .... Suffice it to say that among some subset of today’s men, verbal and physical abuse have apparently become the new candy and flowers.
Emba performs another civic mitzvah in saying aloud that there is something wrong with this picture, thus giving permission to other women (and men) who think the same. The crux, as she writes, is that "consent" can be misused to justify anything, including nonconsensual sadism—because in the new order of things, "abuse can be hidden or left uninterrogated as someone’s private ‘kink.’"I urge readers to peruse the rest of Eberstadt's column at the link.
Assuming the book’s accounts are representative—and there is no reason to think otherwise—today’s mating scene makes Hugh Hefner & Co. look vanilla.
"We’re Liberated, and We’re Miserable," as the title of one chapter summarizes. Author Emba also transgresses by suggesting that right and wrong might apply even in the time of Tinder; in the words of another chapter title, "Some Desires are Worse than Others."
Not surprisingly, the message has received pushback in the New York Times, and elsewhere, for menacing the holy bovine of "sex positivity"—as if "sex positivity" amounts to anything more than putting up with your guy watching porn and trying gross things out on you while you pretend not to care.
Our culture is saturated in pornography and pornography is corrosive to romance. It heightens male expectations while simultaneously cheapening women. Toward the end of her column Eberstadt writes:
Once, the price of living with men included doing their dishes and raising their children. As part of that deal, what might be called "spouses with benefits" became a thing.Certainly there are still lots of men out there who are not sexual deviants (a word frowned upon by the mavens of today's sexual fashion), but the pornification of our culture has shifted the spectrum of male sexual expectations and desires quite decidedly toward the perverse.
Many thereby managed to ease into death and old age together, surrounded by loving faces. Today, by contrast, with sex "always on the table," as the author observes, the joys of motherhood and fatherhood and lifelong companionship have become luxury goods that few young adults seem to know how to buy; amazingly, in this book that is all about sex, hardly anyone mentions marriage or children.
Outside certain vibrant religious subcultures, mass confusion reigns, and stone-cold abuse becomes rationalized as mere collateral damage. As the author puts it, paraphrasing the thoughts of the choked interviewee, "it was the bargain one made in order to leap off the dating app carousel into the arms of an otherwise great guy."
A note to female readers of VP: If your boyfriend is into pornography you can be assured that it will eventually lead your relationship to no place that's good.
