Good interview up at NRO with Jennifer Roback Morse. Morse is the author of a book that has been in my TBR pile for awhile: Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World. Morse presents some interesting arguments because she comes at it from more of a libertarian economist perspective than a strictly moral or spiritual one. Seems like an appropriate topic for Valentines Day.
Here are some snippets I thought were interesting:
Lopez: What is your biggest beef with the women’s movement, vis-Ã -vis how it has hurt marriage?
Morse: That is a tough question, because the women’s movement is so deeply culpable. However, if I had to name one issue, it would be the truly perverse view of equality that so much of the women’s movement embraced. Like much of the modern Left, the women’s movement insisted on “sameness” as their definition of equality. The fact is that the human species is a gendered species. We come in two sexes, male and female, that can never be made fully equal. This is one of the most basic biological facts of our species. You’d think our modern scientific age could accept this.
Yet in its desire for equality, or maximizing the reach of government, the Left has put every individual at war with their own sexuality, our own nature as male and female beings. This causes unbelievable heartache in married life, especially around child-rearing.
Social scientists have repeatedly observed that couples committed to gender equality find the arrival of their first child to be very disruptive and upsetting. Why should that be? Because parenthood is not a gender-neutral activity. Men and women behave, feel and desire differently, where children are concerned. Heck, even the babies react differently to their mothers than to their fathers. When the babies arrive, all that gender-based hormonal stuff comes roaring out of our bodies. We feel cheated, angry and confused. Couples who can’t let go of a radical gender equality ideology are headed for trouble.
The Left hates sex. Do not be deluded by the fact that the Left is hyper-active about sexual activity. Far too many on the Left are profoundly uncomfortable by any evidence of sex differences between men and women. They won’t be happy until we all believe that gender is an irrelevant category, for marriage, child-rearing, and even sex itself. Of course, we will make ourselves miserable trying to achieve this wrong-headed ideal.
And:
Lopez: So what counts as Smart Sex?
Morse: I take my motto from Sherlock Holmes, who once told Watson, “after you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” After eliminating all the forms of dumb sex, hooking up, cohabiting, divorce, and remarriage, what is left? Life-long married love. Although it seems improbable to the modern mind, the truth is that married couples have more and better sex, and have a far better track record at dodging the dumb sex that has caused so much misery.
Married sex is smart sex.
