Social Conservatives Were Right About Sex, New York Times Columnist Admits

 

By Nathanael Blake - Posted at The Federalist:

After decades of tearing down manners and norms, self-proclaimed social progressives are now frantically trying to reconstitute some sense of public decency.

Social conservatives are always losing, yet never quite defeated. In politics and the culture wars, it feels like we have fought a long rearguard action, with counterattacks only covering for a general retreat. But we should not despair, for human nature ensures that our insights will remain relevant and our principles will be unexpectedly revived.

Just ask Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, who reports that “sex-positive feminism” is on the outs. Goldberg’s column is an exercise in admitting that social conservatives were right without saying that social conservatives were right. Thus, she presents this as a debate between sex-positive feminism (“the idea that feminism should privilege sexual pleasure and fight sexual repression”) and anti-porn feminists, whose warnings are finding new resonance among young women who “feel brutalized by the expectation that they’ll be open to anything.”

It is now undeniable that for many women the sexual revolution brought exploitation and immiseration, not freedom and fulfillment. Sexual liberation unshackled a multitude of evil, so Goldberg confesses that, “Somehow, as sex positivity went mainstream and fused with a culture shaped by pornography… Sex-positive feminism became a cause of some of the same suffering it was meant to remedy.”

“Somehow” indeed. If only there had been warnings from some sort of extensive cultural and political movement with deep religious and philosophical roots. But Goldberg presumably finds it more palatable to focus on a few dissident feminists than to credit the foresight of the likes of Focus on the Family.

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