Hey! Are you looking for someone to blame for this whole wacky Anthony Weiner/Carlos Danger/Sydney Leathers sexting kerfuffle? Are you pretty sure that it could not just be about a weird dude who e-cheats on his wife with a weird girl who wants to force us all to make her famous? Do you think that maybe the real blame here lies with feminists and women who enjoy sex?
Well then, you are probably Dr. Keith Ablow of the Fox News “Medical A-Team!” Hello! Lovely to meet you. I’m sorry you’re still bitter about your invitation to the Sexual Revolution getting lost in the mail, but I saw your little essay about Sydney Leathers and the Weiner scandal on the Fox News site and thought we could perhaps discuss!
I must say, your words truly inspired me. They were so compelling, in fact, that I feel the need to address each of your points and just take this apart, bit for bit. You know, for funsies!
Anthony Weiner obviously has problems that make him unfit to govern, but his addictive sexting behavior tells us at least as much about changes in gender roles—particularly the new eagerness of women to be overtly, graphically sexual—as it does about him.
No, it does not. It says one thing about one girl. Many women are perfectly capable of being overtly, graphically sexual without being idiots about it. Same thing with men.
Anthony Weiner assaulted no one; he had plenty of playmates happy to receive photographs of his private parts, flirt with Carlos Danger and gratify him and themselves, sexually. (Emphasis not mine, FYI)
Wait… what? Women being so utterly brazen as to gratify themselves sexually? WHAT IS NEXT? Will we be outfitting donkeys with trousers? Sure, we can understand silly women being so eager to please a man that they might debase themselves for their pleasure… but certainly, certainly we cannot have them actually enjoying any kind of sexual gratification themselves. Whatever happened to lying back and thinking of England?
Today’s women are, by the many millions, no different from men in their sexual appetites or lack of demureness. That’s why Nancy Pelosi’s statement that Anthony Weiner’s behavior was offensive to women actually exposes a fault line between women of her age and women younger than, say, 30: A very significant percentage of young women today are not offended by being sent overt, intensely erotic material and respond in kind.
Godforbid, that is what they happen to enjoy, right?
The sexual liberation of women has liberated them to be just like men—who, whether anyone likes it or not, often enjoy sex outside of emotionally-connected, longstanding relationships.
Boys will be boys, amirite? SIGH. Things were so much nicer when there was a clear distinction between the women you marry and the invisible women you cheat on the women you marry with! Everyone was good with this arrangement! Just look at Mad Men!
This was an actual goal of feminists, and they began achieving it by (for example) publishing headlines on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine urging women to share their best one-night stands, their bad-girl behavior and their techniques for achieving orgasm.
What? Techniques for achieving orgasms? But orgasms are for the menfolk! Dr. Keith Ablow knows this because he, for sure, has never witnessed a woman having one. Everyone knows the only reason a woman should have an orgasm is when it is administered by her doctor for the purposes of treating her hysteria. DUH.
The wide dissemination of oral contraceptives furthered it, too. So has the abortion movement. And so has the military—by moving to put women on the front lines, in combat roles.
THANKS, MILITARY. For turning all the women into sluts by allowing them the privilege of dying for their country!
Also, thanks Dr. Ablow, for being incredibly frank about what the right’s opposition to abortion and birth control is essentially about. It’s about bunch of old men being annoyed by women not knowing their place and just going around thinking they’re just as good as men are. Thinking they can just go around having jobs and enjoying sex like they have some kind of penis or something.
Women bought the feminist argument hook, line and sinker. The idea that they might actually want to preserve the role of resistor in the circuitry of sex, given the possibility that they might be more vulnerable emotionally and might be more vulnerable physically, was drummed out by those who argued, and continue to argue, that gender has no meaning—because males and females aren’t just equal; they’re no different from one another. (Emphasis totally mine.Because WTF?)
Sheesh! It is like these women do not even know how the sex works. How is Dr. Keith Ablow supposed to enjoy pile-driving your flower if you don’t tell him you don’t want him to do it? It’s the you saying “No!” part that makes it sexy. For Dr. Keith Ablow. You? You just need to lie back and think of England lady, and you better not say this was rape later, because you saying no is just part of the circuitry of sex.
The result is runaway sexual circuitry, fueled by the depersonalizing forces of the Internet, in general, and Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, in particular.
Runaway sexual circuitry? That sounds dangerous! Ladies, I beg of you! Stop going and enjoying sex things or else we may electrocute ourselves!
From my perch as a psychiatrist talking to thousands of people a year, I can tell you that the average young woman no longer balks at sexting, watching pornography or being the aggressor sexually in a relationship.
Yes. In fact, even more terrifying than that is the fact that they actually enjoy it. And also that sometimes their partners do as well. Clearly, these brazen hussies are just following in the footsteps of noted dangerous sluts like Queen Victoria, who was known to send her husband nude portraits of other women on holidays.
Millions of female teenagers have heard the phrase “friends with benefits” and aren’t reluctant to have sex as a pact of mutual physical fulfillment, with no strings attached.
But I will tell you that, from what I hear in my office, the girls actually feel a whole lot worse about it, in their hearts, than the boys. Because, you see, girls and boys, are not the same.
Gee, I sure wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that their shrink writes articles like this? Or because we live in a society and have a government that actively shames women for their sexuality on a regular basis. Men are still given high fives and fist bumps, and women are still given red letters. That is why boys and girls are not the same.
Some gender roles developed because of psychological facts, not in spite of them. And when feminists urged and urge that we throw out all of them, they do a disservice to females and to the truth.
So, don’t think for a minute that the women who welcomed Anthony Weiner’s sexual energy were being used by him, first or foremost. They were used by the Women’s Movement long before he ever hit “send.”
Way to bring it on home Dr. Keith Ablow! It is not at all disturbing that you clearly seem to be more comfortable with the idea of a woman being used and manipulated than with the idea of a woman being actively in control of her own sexuality. Or that you assume that women do not have sexual energy of their own.
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It’s kind of funny that Dr. Ablow think this is any kind of new thing– that female sexuality was somehow invented by the Women’s Movement. Or stranger still, that Sydney Leathers is the first of her kind. In 1928, Nan Britton wrote a tell-all about banging Warren G. Harding in the White House closet– long before Sydney Leathers was even born. Most Puritan women were pregnant before they got married. The old days were really not what you think they were.
I don’t think Sydney Leathers is any great shakes as a human being. As a feminist, I believe that women, as well as men, are perfectly capable of being assholes. But that is not the issue with Dr. Ablow’s essay. Sydney Leathers is essentially an afterthought in this essay– she is merely the means by which he can clutch his pearls over how the Women’s Movement ruined all the women and turned them into sluts unfit for Dr. Ablow’s consumption.
Dr. Ablow speaks of the Women’s Movement as some creature, as though it were not, in fact, made up of women. Dr. Ablow, a man, believes that he knows far better what is “right” for women than women do. As though women made some kind of dreadful mistake in reclaiming their sexuality from men, and now he, a man, must step in and do something to correct this.
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Oh, Dr. Ablow– I assure you– we evil, sexting, porn-watching, sex enjoying women of the dystopian future do not need or want your help. If you cannot get off if the woman you are with is enjoying it, then the only one we feel badly for is your wife. However, if you give us your address, we shall be happy to send her a new Hitachi Magic Wand and letter of condolence.
Image: Fox News
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