Maybe Radical Feminism Isn’t So Bad After All

I think I’ve finally found common ground with radical feminists.

They’re concerned about rape culture, the degradation of women into sex objects, the insecurity they face in relationships that start as hook-ups, and a slew of other factors. Traditionalists and neoreactionaries are also concerned about some of this stuff, though not in so many words. The voluntary degeneration of women into sex slaves, the wanton disregard for decency in public, and the near-abolition of the family all weigh heavily on our minds, but maybe the solutions to all these problems are right in plain sight.

So let’s attack these issues from two angles: how to assure that consent is present in every conjugal act between partners, and how to properly classify conjugal activities so we can properly identify sexual violence, rape, and that sort of thing. Addressing and solving these two related issues will go a long way in returning women’s role in society to one of respect rather than one of disgrace.

Prior to the #MeToo movement running roughshod over Hollywood and the rest of the media apparatus, there was this thing that began in California involving the identification of consent during sex. If you remember all the way back to 2014, it was called Yes Means Yes, and essentially amounted to the requirement of guys asking girls while they’re going at it “hey, this is okay, right?” In some cases, I’m sure a written contract was even necessary—though it really only was required for guys, since the girls could just say they didn’t really consent after the fact despite giving every indication that they did.

In any case, it was properly ridiculed as a preposterous remedy to what’s always seemed like a mostly nonexistent problem. But let’s take their word for it—maybe women do feel strong-armed into sex literally all the time, forced against their will to maintain millions of tinder profiles, and bitterly embracing contemporary fashion products that accentuate their sexual appeal. It’s not like they have any other options. Maybe they really don’t!

So what if instead of all of this, we actually had a legitimate social agreement, legally binding, enforceable through a contract, that would outline the explicit boundaries of a man and a woman’s relationship to one another? It wouldn’t outline the amount of time they’re together, obviously, since hey, sometimes benders last a few weeks, but it could, say, clearly distinguish the rights, roles, and responsibilities due to each other in the relationship. They could be personalized per couple, so there’d be no need to feel miscategorized into a relationship that doesn’t work out for the partners involved.

Now how else would this work? Let’s say you and your partner end up having a really great time with each other following all the regulations spelled out in this agreement, and you end up having a few kids! Suddenly, the newfound father is getting cold feet about this engagement, so what’s a poor girl to do? Well, no one wants to grow up without a dad (or a mom, let’s be fair), so part of the agreement’s stipulations is that daddy-o can’t just skip town if he decides he’s had enough fun for a few years. Obviously, a contract is just a piece of paper at the end of the day, but there’d be plenty of legal things thrown in there to ensure pop’s compliance to fulfill his fatherly duties.

And what else? No one likes the thought of splintered families, so we’ll make this agreement binding unto death. Yeah I get it, sometimes you end up in an abusive relationship, or maybe the sex wasn’t actually as good as you were expecting it to be when you started out, or maybe you just want to try newer pastures after you’ve been with a guy for a few days. But on the other hand, sex seems like kind of a big deal, so maybe this sort of agreement could encourage you to put some forethought into your choice of partner before you jump into bed. After all, how often have you regretted a one-night stand or heard stories about meeting creepers through Tinder?

But we do need a solution to the cases where guys just get horribly abusive over time. Fortunately, we have police stations for that sort of thing, and if push comes to shove, maybe we should encourage our neighbors to be more neighborly and men to be more manly.

So what about the other issue? For what cases would an agreement like this even be necessary?

Well, let’s look to radical feminists for the answer. We know from Susan Brownmiller that rape has nothing to do with sex, since it’s all about power. So we can determine that any sexual act based on the execution of power must therefore be some form of rape. But we don’t want to get too carried away, here; rape still has an obvious connotation that involves a distinct lack of consent. That’s why we looked at drawing up social agreements on that issue. But sometimes people are indoctrinated into being able and willing to consent to abuse, and they may not even be aware that they’re being abused. That might be defined as rape in an academic sense, but you can’t sell that idea to the public. Some other term will be necessary for that, and I have an idea, but I’ll save that for the end.

So these acts of sexual violence could be pretty variable, and historically, most were certainly considered obvious displays of power. Romans treated oral sex as a form of submission, and plenty of apparently less-civilized cultures around the world have always viewed a man penetrating someone in the rear end as a clear sign of exerting dominance. The sexual gratification is almost irrelevant at that point. This sort of culture continues on in prison, and it’s so rampant that it’s been part of our culture’s humor for decades. Consenting to such acts has very little to do with any of it—in fact, consenting to being demeaned makes a mockery of your personal human dignity to begin with, so obviously consent can’t be relied on as a barometer of acceptability here.

But does this mean that all forms of sex have to be rape? Well, no. The classic variety, if you will, has remarkably complex power dynamics involved. A man may be penetrating a woman during the act, but it leaves him in a vulnerable, physically exhausted state afterward. Meanwhile, though the man’s biology dictates that he gets to have a lot of fun, to the woman is given a biology with a much greater significance. Because of the nature of the act, her body becomes an ark that transforms to accommodate new life. That’s a pretty big deal. In fact, considered in this light, even preventing a pregnancy from occurring is an act of denial to the woman. That sounds an awful lot like an expression of dominance, so it looks like hook-ups and the use of contraception will have to be classified as sexual violence as well.

This does mean, of course, that the culture of sex-on-demand which some of us have been indulging in is going to have to go the way of the Dodo, but that’s not too bad. People in committed relationships tend to have more sex anyway, and a lot of this should alleviate the fears at the forefront of too many women’s minds: what’s going to happen when I’m forty, still single, and childless? I’m just kidding, strong women like yourselves never ask such a demeaning question.

Oh, one more thing.

We can call that social agreement I mentioned earlier “marriage”, and we can call those various acts of sexual violence “sodomy”. And we can outlaw sodomy (again) and make marriage a binding agreement for life (again).

This seems fine.

QNUW is back, though what kind of schedule my posts will have going forward is still conjecture.  I’ll have a more detailed update from the past three months in a few days.  Look forward to my Friday longposts returning, at the very least.

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