It is very easy to persuade people that ”slag” is not an acceptable insult to level at a woman. ”You wouldn’t say that to a man,” you could point out. Even though it is pretty much a cross-gender term these days, and one might often hear a man described as a right slapper, that still seems to hold. There ought to be a flipside to this — we ought, in the year 2007, to have stopped talking about chastity as a feminine virtue. We ought to have stopped holding women up as the gate- keepers of sex, who get to be in charge because they don’t enjoy it. We ought to have stopped perseverating on how men want it with anyone, any which way, where women only want it with ”kind, funny, generous men”.
Yet the curve is going in the opposite direction: in the United States, commentators (I suppose they’re called) have long been haranguing adult and teenage females about the boon of chastity. We are not without our own fuglewomen — Kate Taylor has just published Not Tonight, Mr Right, a book instructing adult women how to conduct themselves in the world of sex.
Taylor follows writers from Sylvia Ann Hewlett (academic and fervid campaigner against female emancipation) to Dawn Eden (one-time groupie, born-again virgin). They all used to ”buy the feminist line”; they used to ”believe that women could be free”, and now they’ve realised that true freedom is in keeping an aspirin between the knees. Ah, the wisdom of grandmas.
The tips are all the same. Here is one of Taylor’s: ”Believing women can have sex as light and breezily as men is rubbish, too. For one thing, men like to have more sexual partners than women.” And here, in the same vein, is one of Eden’s: ”Whatever Germaine Greer and her ilk may say, I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled.” They always drag Greer into it, as though she offered up a shoddy philosophy that didn’t hold water, and these ”make him beg” philosophers are actually offering something more solid.
It just needs to be dispatched really fast — there is no physiological evidence of women and men having different needs from congress (our kind, not the American kind), only circumstantial evidence, which is indivisible from the social conditioning that creates it. There is no evidence that women are ”more picky” — there is only evidence that, in some countries, they don’t drink as much booze. There is no evidence that women are left more vulnerable when sex doesn’t lead to a relationship. There is possibly evidence that they complain more about it, but no gender is immune from rejection.
Who knows, there might well be evidence that men are more likely to propose to women who withhold sex, but Greer’s original philosophy was never, I don’t think, ”do it like I do, and men will like you more”. The insult here is not against Greer herself, who can, still being alive, look after herself. It is in the fact that, when you take a crudely analysed ”life lesson” and you try to fit it to all womanhood, it is not just neutral chatter. It actively undermines one of the greatest fundamentals of feminism — that sex can be an act of equality, entered into with equal enthusiasm by people who enjoy it equally.
Without that, we would still be mired in the grim swamp where men are out to trick women into, oops!, accidentally giving them sex, or, failing that, bullying or bribing or blackmailing them into it, until finally, they are not worth the effort and can be swapped for body parts just the same, only younger and better. That was culture for pre-feminist women. That is the effectual enslavement that these mindless, ”just show him an ankle, until you’ve got that ring on your finger” chatterers would have us return to. — Â