Michelle Goldberg: A manifesto against sex positivity

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ^ | March 22, 2022 | Michelle Goldberg, New York Times

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Almost exactly a year ago, writer Katherine Dee, who blogs about internet culture and trend forecasting, predicted what she called a “coming wave of sex negativity.” Sex positivity, she suggested, had created new stigmas, including around discussing the harms of sex work and self-commodification. “People do not want to be atomized,” she wrote, adding, “Nobody wants this dystopia.”

Not everything Ms. Dee foresaw — like a shift toward earlier childbearing among the upper-middle class — has come to pass, at least so far. But she nailed an emerging movement, one that now has a manifesto in “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation” by Washington Post columnist Christine Emba, which I found bold and compelling even when I disagreed with it. Ms. Emba’s argument is that sexual liberation, as currently conceived, has made people, and especially women, miserable. It has created, ironically, new strictures and secret shames, at least in certain elite milieus, around “catching feelings,” hating casual sex and having vanilla sexual tastes.

One anecdote from the book illustrates the perversity, so to speak, of the current moment. Ms. Emba describes meeting a woman at a Washington party who tells her about the man she has been dating. In most ways, he’s great. “But he chokes me during sex?” the woman confides. She had consented, but she didn’t like it. She was so unsure about whether her feelings were reasonable that she turned to Ms. Emba, a stranger, for advice. “The taboo on questioning someone else’s sexual preference was that strong,” writes Ms. Emba. Her book is aimed, in part, at breaking that taboo.

[Jeff Chandler]

Wait until the social Left figures out that the concept of “consent” is a Western Christian patriarchal construct.

[Jeff Chandler]

I like the Three Stooges.

Especially the scene where Curly attempts to eat clam chowder. That's a hoot!

[Gay State Conservative]

For 25 years I worked at a major big city hospital. My first job was in administration and occasionally a Doctor Fine would come in for something. Whenever we’d see him a co worker and I would look at each other and softy say “Doctor Howard,Doctor Fine,Doctor Howard!”