As I showed here, radical feminists in the 1970s began describing heterosexual sex as an exercise of power by men over women. Writers like Andrea Dworkin said, and others like Susan Brownmiller assumed, that men were so dominant in all aspects of life that, when it came to sex, women were powerless. That meant that all heterosexual sex was, in their eyes, rape, or something very close to it. The ensuing years saw feminism mostly abandon that claim in favor of whittling away at due process of law in order to shorten the distance from an allegation of rape to prison. Movements like #MeToo/#BelieveWomen took the idea outside the strict confines of the law and into areas not directly subject to due process.
The question is “why?”
The answer might be that feminism has always been about increasing women’s power over, and at the expense of, men. But why did they wait until the 1970s and why was it all about sex? After all, for centuries both men and women had understood women’s sexual power. Throughout the animal and bird kingdoms, the individual that produces fewer, larger gametes all but invariably chooses whether, when and with whom to mate. In humans that individual is the female. Women have always been the ones to say “yes” or “no” to sex, while men’s answer is pretty much always “yes.”
Consider women’s attitudes toward sex just a few decades ago. In 1962, a Roper poll found a whopping 86% of women saying that premarital sex with the man you were going to marry was per se wrong. Note the wording. Roper didn’t ask about sex with a dating partner or even with a man she loves, but sex with a man she knows she’s going to marry. That widespread withholding of sex was women’s exercise of power.
But soon thereafter, a drastic change began to occur. Women no longer withheld sex at nearly the rates indicated by the Roper poll. At the time, that was called the Sexual Revolution. By the 2010s, 52% of women said that premarital sex was “not wrong at all” and 73% said it was either not wrong or only wrong sometimes. Women had taken a sledgehammer to perhaps the greatest power they wielded over men.
What happened? “The Pill” happened. The advent of a largely safe, very effective and inexpensive oral contraceptive for women was a revolution. Never before had women been able to have sexual intercourse without a significant concern about pregnancy. In a single stroke, the Pill did away with those worries and many of the inhibitions that went with them. The result was an unleashing of the female libido as never before in history.
The Pill wasn’t the only cause of the Sexual Revolution. Increasing representation of women in the workforce and on college campuses played a role too, as did no-fault divorce that made splitting up easy, quick and cheap. And post-WWII prosperity lent a sense of freedom to many people, particularly the young. All that made women more likely than ever to have casual sex.
But the sine qua non of the change was the Pill and one of its unintended consequences was a sharp reduction in women’s power.
As social psychologist Roy Baumeister has pointed out, it’s useful to view this in the economic terms of supply and demand. Prior to the Pill, women rationed the supply of sex. (They still do, but to a much lesser extent.) Given a roughly constant demand by men, the “price” (i.e. men’s perception of its value) remained high. In fact, for men, that price was usually marriage. But when the Pill made the female supply of sex skyrocket and male demand remained roughly constant, the price could only plummet. All of a sudden, men knew that sex was fairly readily available, so its perceived value declined. By definition, plentiful sex without marriage meant that marriage was no longer its price.
That brings us back to the early 70s and radical feminists’ complaints about men having too much power in sex. The simple truth was twofold. First, women had tossed aside much of the power they’d always enjoyed and second, men’s power had increased. All of a sudden, a man could say to a hesitant woman, “I’ll look elsewhere,” and she would know that his chances of success were good.
The Pill led women to exchange power for freedom, a tradeoff that enraged anti-sex feminists like Dworkin. They wanted to increase women’s power over men, but the Pill, and the freedom that went with it, were here to stay. Women weren’t about to go back to the old days that restricted men’s sexual opportunities, but denied sex to women as well.
So began the 50-year feminist campaign to make up for the power women had given away. Their aim was to replace it with the power to more easily put men in prison and destroy their lives, livelihoods and reputations while transferring huge sums of money from men to women via civil suits. Anti-sex feminists couldn’t take back women’s newly-gained freedom, but they could make men pay dearly for the power women had handed them. Their campaign was one to expand the definition of rape and sexual assault, remove procedural safeguards for the accused, tar all men as “potential rapists,” and diminish due process of law and evidentiary standards in court. #BelieveWomen encourages us to assume the guilt of any man accused by any woman. It’s an ongoing process that threatens every man’s wallet and well-being.
In short, today’s astonishing diminution of the legal (and extra-legal) protections for men accused of sexual misbehavior came about due to women’s historically great increase in sexual freedom.
Changes in family law paralleled those in sex. No-fault divorce was always supported by feminists as a way for wives to easily leave their husbands. But sauce for the gander proved sauce for the goose; husbands too could walk away from their marriages. So gender feminists advocated for laws that, while facially gender-neutral, would make leaving a marriage much more costly for men than for women.
Feminists like Lenore Weitzman confected “data” claiming that women’s standard of living dropped three times as much as men’s following divorce. It wasn’t true, as Weitzman herself admitted a decade later, but by then the damage had been done. Based in no small part on her false claims, child support laws were specifically amended to ensure that the child’s standard of living wouldn’t change when his/her parents divorced. And if the child’s standard of living remained the same, so did Mom’s as long as she got custody, which she did, over 80% of the time. Dad of course paid the freight.
Alimony does much the same. No serious person argues that U.S. women today aren’t as capable of self-support as men, but even the most modest alimony reform bills receive strident opposition from feminist organizations, for which the flow of wealth from men to women trumps the notion of women’s independence.
In a nutshell, radical feminists viewed with alarm the loss of women’s power via the Pill and went about increasing it again. With the full cooperation of male hierarchies of power, they’ve succeeded very well.
