There are no harder rivers to navigate than those waters with which one is unfamiliar. Men who attempt to dictate female behavior, especially to an audience of women, risk drowning in an ocean of baseless authority.
By defining, legislating or pitying the plight of female behavior, public male figures do little more for their agendas than alienate the women they are trying to reach out to.
Recently, some (male) academics have contended that the sexual revolution may not have been as helpful to women's causes as originally slated. (Based in their own painful and personal experiences, no doubt).
Women, according to Harvard University professor Harvey Mansfield, are unequivocally more dissatisfied with their personal lives and public roles today than they were prior to the sexual revolution of the 1960s-a revolution which "lowered" women to the "crass" level of men by encouraging them to pursue sex selfishly, insensitively and without the ultimate aspiration of marriage.
Because everyone knows that marriage is the ultimate goal.
The theory goes so far as to suggest that women who hand out "free samples" to men-I'm assuming that this is a cute way of referring to sex-might in fact be decreasing their partners' desire to enter into committed, monogamous relationships. Which, of course, invariably increases the devastating odds that these liberated women will wind up alone and lonely for the rest of their natural, miserable lives.
Oh. Sweet. God.
Is this really another "why-buy-the-cow-when-you-can-get-the-milk-for-free" argument?
And why, pray tell, are elitist male academics lecturing me on this?
And more importantly, does this mean that Mother was right?
This new school of thought echoes the opinions of Leon Kass, a University of Chicago professor who once wrote that liberated female sexuality makes women unhappy.
"Most young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused; hoping for something more. They are not enjoying their hard-won sexual liberation as much as liberation theory says they should," Kass wrote.
The always-empathetic Kass further suggests: "For the first time in human history, mature women by the tens of thousands live the entire decade of their twenties-their most fertile years-neither in the homes of their fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely and out of sync with their inborn nature.
Some women positively welcome this state of affairs, but most do not; resenting the personal price they pay for their worldly independence, they nevertheless try to put a good face on things and take refuge in work or feminist ideology."
I had no idea that I was "living out of sync with my inborn nature" by spending my twenties independent of my father and/or a stand-in male figure. But then again, I may have been couching my personal dissatisfaction with my private life in all that crazy feminist jazz.
Well, at least now when elitist middle-aged men pontificate about their personal theories on women's liberation, they're going heavy on the empathy instead of heavy on the morality-laden language of decades past-when unconventional women were wicked deviants and their female sexuality was "sinful."
And by using emotive, paternalistic language steeped in presumably compassionate and sympathetic rhetoric, the traditionalist men of academia can pity women and deride the sexual revolution that failed women, all while avoiding the use of fancy-dancy statistics to support their claims about the sad, sad state of American womanhood today.
But in the end, don't women deserve a more salient and proactive role in defining the terms of their own happiness and successes than the one given to them by their male contemporaries?
Ultimately, allowing conservative men to define and delineate the legal, social and moral appropriateness of female roles and rights denies women an influential voice in the active (re)definition of their own personal, public and sexual identities.
Letting men define the limits of female happiness and liberation didn't do women any good before, why then would it do women any good now?
Boston Cote is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every Friday.
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