Lili Loofbourow and the problem with 'third wave' Feminism.

 Lili Loofbourow is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley working on Milton. Yet she writes-

Back in the 17th century, the conventional wisdom was that women were the ones with the rampant, undisciplined sexual appetites.

Since Loofbourow is writing in English, obviously she means 'the conventional wisdom in England' was such and such. Is there a single English writer or other authority of the period who actually believed women, as a matter of empirical fact, were more lawless in their loves and egregious in their sexual appetites? The answer is no. Some people said that most women would, in a sly manner, seek sexual gratification. Some pointed at individual cases of prostitutes who boasted of enjoying several sexual encounters every hour. In the latter case, there was a mercenary angle to this. The prostitute in question was advertising her services. In the former case, there was nothing 'rampant' about female, as opposed to male sexual delinquency, precisely because it was sly.

Conventional wisdom, in the seventeenth century, was that women valued secure relationships and were prepared to show greater, not less, fidelity in order to achieve this. Why? This reflected the true condition of society. But why did society show an asymmetry between male and female promiscuity? The answer is that the costs of female promiscuity were much higher for both legal or cultural as well as purely biological reasons. Though males and females stood about the same chance of contracting a STD, it was women absorbed the entire risk associated with pregnancy. Many died in childbirth. Unwed mothers faced social and economic sanctions. Poor pregnant women were whipped out of parish after parish till they collapsed and gave birth on the road. Why? The cost of raising the babe would fall upon the parish in which the poor woman gave birth. Not unnaturally, women responded by becoming wary of sexual entanglements.

By contrast, it was known that, in lawless areas, a woman on her own was more likely to be receptive to an advance. However, the reason for this was obvious. Such a woman stood a better chance of survival if the man she encountered, who would otherwise have been her assailant, thought she might keep any resulting baby. The sexual behaviour of women in conquered countries in the 1940's shook up any 'conventional' ideas in this regard. The truth was too obvious to require spelling out. Incidentally, after the 'Rape of Berlin', there was no pi-jaw about 'Right to Life'. Abortions were on demand.

The 'sexual revolution' of the Sixties was associated with better birth control and a relaxing of sanctions against female promiscuity. Improved health care and fiscal and economic changes also played a part. At one time it was thought that 'Welfare Queens' in America were actually gaining through promiscuity and by rearing children of unknown fathers.

Since then, it has become apparent that even if absent fathers are identified and made to pay, still the cost of child rearing falls disproportionately on women.

Economic theory suggests that this is a good thing because everybody benefits if women are a little more choosy than men.

Biology too appears to have arrived at the same evolutionary conclusion. As Lili points out 'bad sex' for men means lack of pleasure; for women it means pain or even permanent or life threatening injury.

That things have changed doesn't mean they're necessarily better. These days, a man can walk out of his doctor's office with a prescription for Viagra based on little but a self-report, but it still takes a woman, on average, 9.28 years of suffering to be diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition caused by endometrial tissue growing outside the uterus. 

Lili has chosen a bad example. Endometriosis is a complicated matter and not easily self diagnosed. Failure to achieve or maintain an erection is something one remembers, or is frequently reminded of.

Lili's next point is predicated on the assumption that in America, money does not matter, culture does. Men will spend a lot of money to enhance pleasure. So will some women- they too buy and use Viagra. Poor women- who do exist in America, though perhaps not in Lily's social circles- often have to choose between paying for medical treatment and putting food on the table. This has nothing to do with culture. It's about money.

 Or, since sex is the subject here, what about how our society's scientific community has treated female dyspareunia — the severe physical pain some women experience during sex — vs. erectile dysfunction (which, while lamentable, is not painful)? PubMed has 393 clinical trials studying dyspareunia. Vaginismus? 10. Vulvodynia? 43.Erectile dysfunction? 1,954.
That's right: PubMed has almost five times as many clinical trials on male sexual pleasure as it has on female sexual pain. And why? Because we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right.

America's scientific community has been driven by money- not culture. Successful scientists and medical professionals buy sports cars and mansions, they don't form string quartets or poetry circles.

There's money in limp dicks because a lot of old men have a lot of money. By contrast, a lot of women who experience sexual pain are struggling to earn enough to pay the rent and put food on the table.
Most such women are completely invisible and unrelated to hegemonic 'culture'. Is this their fault? No. The leadership or hegemonic role of culture in America is related to the sort of article Lily is writing which mentions 'Seventeenth Century conventional wisdom' and is informed by the works of John Milton. It is wholly detached from political economy.
Lily is doing a PhD on a Dead White Male. She is pretending that this can change 'culture'. Perhaps it can. But that won't change the American Political Economy. It will merely make hegemonic culture a little more elitist and a little less accessible.

Does American hegemonic culture see 'female pain as normal'? No. It considers female sexual pleasure as something which enhances the experience for the male. That is why it opposes female genital mutilation. Indeed, in the classic Seventies film, 'Deep Throat', it even invests the epiglottis with the properties of the clitoris. More recently, there is a cult of anal sex- which I read about in glossy magazines in my Dentist's waiting room. What I don't read about in such magazines- and what is signally missing from Lily's article- is the plight of poor women under the American Health system.

Such poor women can compete with rich women in one area- providing sexual services to wealthy men. If poor women aren't treated for medical conditions which make sex painful for them then, at the margin, they erode less of the rent currently enjoyed by those within the charmed circle of the hegemonic culture- the sort of people who deconstruct John Milton rather than service johns at the truck stop.

Lili pretends that it is hegemonic culture which tells women to put up with sexual pain in return for some more or less likely benefit of a material or positional kind. If so, women should reject hegemonic culture and go in for Political Economy. They should not waste their time on John Milton but organise to use their voting power to improve Health outcomes and Economic opportunities for their entire gender. In other words, women should kick 'post modern' Feminism to the curb and go back to good old fashioned 'second wave' Feminism which focused on changing Laws and Institutions.

Lily ends her article thus-

But next time we're inclined to wonder why a woman didn't immediately register and fix her own discomfort, we might wonder why we spent the preceding decades instructing her to override the signals we now blame her for not recognizing.

Women everywhere can immediately understand economic and biological signals. The old feminism was about changing the Politico-Economic system so that these signals would change. This meant higher wages, better jobs, more quality medical treatment, better division of child care duties and domestic labour and so forth.
Sadly, that old fashioned feminism- which focused on changing the Law and the incentive structure- was abandoned in favour of 'deconstructing' culture- teachers have wasted decades talking that brand of tripe- as though culture mattered to any one- and pretending that it was 'culture' which told women to have painful or humiliating or unsatisfying sex.

I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies' pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman's pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman's discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man's pleasure short. 

Pain during sex correlates biologically with lower reproductive fitness which in turn can effect socio-economic outcomes. Since orgasm changes the vaginal environment in a manner favourable to sperm, it is entirely possible that there is a strategic reason for gender dimorphism in this respect. A culture based on science- not paranoid pomo nonsense- could certainly send public signals so that a superior correlated equilibrium is arrived at- i.e. everybody benefits if women do so disproportionately in this regard. As a matter of fact, this sort of scientific culture has greatly changed male behaviour even in developing countries with fundamentalist religious movements. By contrast, PhD's on ' Milton and seventeenth-century theories of eating and reading' are wholly worthless. They enfeeble the critical faculties and result in utterly foolish articles like this one.

Perhaps Lili will end up teaching rich kids at some fancy College in between writing articles for rich people. She will harm her students unless she learns to embrace a scientific culture that isn't stuck in the Racist, Elitist, Europe of some bygone Age.