The NYT Has A ‘Gender Editor.’ And I’m Going To Need To Make Fun Of That.

If you’ve never read Heather MacDonald’s work before, you’re missing out on some seriously awesome stuff, y’all. We referenced one of her pieces for an Indy Star column we wrote a couple years ago about feminism and sex, and you can read that right here. In a nutshell, the sexual liberation that feminists fought so hard to achieve years ago – the equality to men on the “sexual battlefield” and the sexual freedom feminists pursued so vigorously – has now become something that feminists are demanding protections from. Because feminists of today cannot rest unless they’re victims of something, even when, in this case, they’re victims of their own doing.

At the very center of the #metoo and #timesup movements is an idea that no one wants to really talk about – and that is that a culture of sexual modesty could actually drastically reduce the occurrences of women being on the receiving end of unwelcome sexual advances.

In MacDonald’s latest, she expands on that idea. In her piece, she writes that the New York Times now has a whole “gender team” with a “gender editor” at the helm, the purpose of which is ostensibly to “infuse feminist sensibility” throughout the NYT. The gender editor is a chick by the name of Jessica Bennett, who wrote an op-ed for the NYT, telling her story about having consensual sex with a 30 year old dude when she was 19. She didn’t particularly want to sleep with the guy, apparently, but agreed to because it was “easier to say yes than to say no,” and also because she was in the throes of self-inflicted psychological turmoil. She says she felt a “combination of fear (that I wasn’t as mature as he thought), shame (that I had let it get this far), and guilt (would I hurt his feelings?).”

If you read that and believe Bennett is a victim, then congrats – you’ve bought into the absurdity of the “patriarchy,” which of course Bennett blames for her willingness to sleep with the 30 year-old. Patriarchy makes sex decisions waaaaay too complex, according to Bennett.

But as MacDonald points out:

Actually, it is not the patriarchy that makes sexual decisions “utterly complex”; it is sex itself. Sex is the realm of the inarticulate and irrational, inherently fraught with “fear,” “shame,” and “guilt.” Sexual seduction is carried on through ambiguity and indirection; exposing that ambiguity to light, naming what may or may not be going on, is uncomfortable and risks denial and rejection. “Dangerously outdated gender norms” are not what make it difficult to say no to sexual advances; contemporary gender norms have confused these already fraught situations. Traditional mores set the default for premarital sex at “no,” at least for females. This default recognized the different sexual drives of males and females and the difficulties of bargaining with the male libido. The default “no” to premarital sex meant that a female did not have to negotiate the refusal with every opportuning male; it was simply assumed. She could, of course, cast aside the default assumption; that was her power and prerogative. But she did not have to provide reasons for shutting down a sexual advance.

Sexual liberation reversed those default settings. The default is now “yes” to premarital sex; it is a “no” that has to be extricated in media res. No cultural taboos remain around premarital sex; those represented a repressive version of female sexuality, declared the liberationists. Males and females are now assumed to pursue sexual conquest with equal zeal. A contributor to the website Total Sorority Move described an instance of drunken college coitus several years ago that she, like the Times’ Bennett, allowed to happen simply because stopping it would have involved providing reasons. “We have sex with guys, because sometimes it’s just easier to do it than to have the argument about not doing it,” observed Veronica Ruckh. Ruckh quotes other females who have been defeated by the “yes” default for sex: “To be honest, it would have been awkward to say no, so I just did it.” “Sometimes you have to have lunch with girls you don’t want to have lunch with, and sometimes you have to have sex with boys you don’t want to have sex with.”

I’m not a millennial, so that isn’t the culture I grew up in. And it’s definitely not the culture my parents grew up in. Back in the day, it was considered a Huge Deal to have sex with a boy, and the general assumption was that you wouldn’t until you were married. Obviously, that didn’t stop every woman from having sex with boys before marriage, but it certainly allowed women to have the power of the assumption of NO.  When the default assumption (by boys) was that girls would NOT have sex with them, pushing them into it was a much riskier and bigger proposition than it is now.  NOW, the assumption is that girls will readily have sex and lots of it. Because empowerment! Back in the day, men were taught to be gentlemen, and women were taught to be modest and pure. Plenty of guys weren’t gentlemen, and plenty of girls weren’t modest and pure, but that was the traditional cultural expectation. In other words, the default was No.

That’s no longer the case. Now, women want sexual freedom and liberation and equality. But they also want protections from universities and government so that they don’t feel patriarchal pressure to submit to sex that they don’t want. Talk about mixed messages!

The result? Feminists are now scrambling to revert the default answer to premarital sex back to No. That’s why you’re seeing universities bending over backwards to create consent rules and bureaucracy around student sexual encounters.  Women can claim that this is all about simple consent, but there’s nothing simple about it.  Sex has never been simple. Like MacDonald said, “Sex is the realm of the inarticulate and irrational, inherently fraught with “fear,” “shame,” and “guilt.” Sexual seduction is carried on through ambiguity and indirection.”

Bennett’s insistence on playing victim completely diminishes any ounce of credibility she could ever hope to have that she’s a strong, empowered woman.  She blames the patriarchy for “making females want to attract male desire.”  Seriously?  How ridiculously weak-minded of a person are you?

As MacDonald points out:

Western culture is in fact the least patriarchal society in human history; rather than being forced to veil, females can parade themselves in as scantily clad a manner as they choose; pop culture stars flaunt their promiscuity. There is not a single mainstream institution that is not trying to hire and promote as many females as possible. And yet females are apparently still so beaten down by sexism that the Times’s gender editor Bennett asks rhetorically if females should even be deemed able to consent to sex, since “cultural expectations” make it awkward to say no. How long will it be before feminists demand the return of chaperones?

You’re hurting women, Jessica Bennett.  You’re hurting them by assuming they’re all as weak as you are.  And you’re hurting them by even holding a title as ridiculous as “Gender Editor.”

GAWD.