After purge of philanderers, mating rituals still need help
When Bill Clinton survived impeachment, there was a sense among his advocates that they weren’t just defending one philanderer; they were defending sex itself. To be against a president’s dalliances was to be a Comstock, a Babbitt, a pleasure-hating heartland prude. To be for Clinton, as Tara Isabella Burton noted recently in a retrospective piece for Vox, was to be for a dream of sexual sophistication, a Europe-envying vision of perfect zipless adult bliss.
Little of that attitude has survived to our own era of grim sexual revelations. Nobody is defending Harvey Weinstein for being “debonair” or John Conyers for having “heat,” as Tina Brown once did with Clinton. Some politician-gropers may outlast the outrage, but the idea that sexual sophistication requires defending pigs from prudes has largely fallen out of fashion.
But a slightly different fear — that we’re on a path to criminalizing normal relations between the sexes — has surfaced here and there.
My general response to these fears is similar to one offered by Christine Emba of The Washington Post, who argued that stricter boundaries on how you chase a co-worker are a salutary corrective to the pervasive idea that maximal sexual experience is essential to the good life.
Still, I paused over one line from Emba’s brief: “We won’t die of having less sex . ... Somehow, people will still find ways to meet, mate and propagate the species.”
It’s true. But as a society, we are actually in some serious trouble on the mating-and-propagation front.
Part of the problem is economic: Everything from student debt to wage stagnation to child-rearing costs has eroded the substructure of the family. Last week’s struggle to get the allegedly pro-family Republican Party to include help for parents in its tax reform is a frustrating illustration of the larger problem.
But there is also strong resistance to seeing a failure to unite the sexes and continue the species as a problem. If women are having fewer children, it must be because they want fewer children. (In fact, most women want more children than they have.) If there are fewer marriages, they must at least be happier ones. (In fact, they aren’t.) If the young are delaying parenthood, it must be that they are pursuing new opportunities and pleasures. (In fact, the young seem increasingly medicated and miserable.) If men prefer video games and pornography to relationships, de gustibus non est disputandum.
A useful counterpoint to these assumptions was provided last week by my colleague Norimitsu Onishi, who wrote about the extraordinary loneliness of old age in Japan. Japan’s aging, dying, atomized present is one version of our future — and a not-so-distant one.
I don’t know what newold mix of mating rituals and expectations and supports could arrest Japanification. I don’t think either feminism or social conservatism at present have the answer.
And I’m sure there is nothing worth saving in the predatory sexual culture currently being put to the torch by victims and journalists.
But any moral progress will be limited, any sexual and romantic future darkened, until we can figure out