(10 of 11)
During the derided '50s, any American past the age of 13 was not automatically thought to be "sexually active." A version of what have now become the Antioch rules was at that time a part of the adolescent's mental software. In the Pleistocene before the Pill and legal abortion (an era that most young feminists have been taught to consider barbaric), both boys and girls felt a terror that a mistake would lead to pregnancy, hence to unwanted, premature marriage or to an abortion nightmare. That terror enforced a certain discipline and formality. Everyone knew -- as human beings understood from the dawn of time until the '60s -- that sex was powerful and that it had implications beyond the moment. The Antioch rules, which repeat that lesson, should be adopted on campuses throughout the country.
The only fault of the Antioch rules is they do not give first priority to the subject of alcohol. If a considerable amount of the current anger at men, especially on campus, arises from the high incidence of date rape, it is clear that an overwhelming proportion of date rapes occur when the couple have been drinking. Collegiate date rape could probably be reduced by 80% if alcohol could be removed from the picture. Camille Paglia, an intellectual gunslinger who frequently infuriates feminists, proposes common sense for young women on the subject of date rape: Don't get drunk; don't accompany boys to their rooms; realize that sexual freedom entails sexual risks; and take some responsibility for your behavior. Paglia blames male-bashing on what she calls the sincere but misguided path of current feminism. "I made all these errors about men when I was 12 or 14. I was confrontational with men, but I moved on. Feminism is stuck at that adolescent stage of resentment and blaming men." She believes, correctly, "white bourgeois yuppie women" -- one of her phrases for feminists -- are out of touch with the real world.
We must take into consideration the Virginia Woolf Effect.
In A Room of One's Own, Woolf wrote, "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Because women would adoringly (or pseudo adoringly) mirror men to themselves at twice their real stature and worth (thinks Woolf), the men, thus encouraged, felt wonderful and set forth to build empires. The inclination of American women today is not to mirror men at all, but to judge them at their true size at best -- and sometimes to evaluate them at half-size or quarter-size. Perhaps women have always done that, but they kept their real opinions to themselves, or discussed them only with other women. Now women speak with aggressive, retaliatory candor.
The result is that men feel devastatingly diminished. They feel bashed. They feel unappreciated. Wuzza, wuzza.
But the Virginia Woolf Effect has a twin. Men were similarly encouraged to overvalue and romanticize women. Women now profess to find that sort of idealization stultifying and ultimately imprisoning. Would so much be lost if each sex mirrored the other at twice the real size and stature?