Jessica Grose at Slate.com pens an interesting piece on the shame cycle women feel after pursuing a life of casual sex. Feminist authors Julie Klausner and Hephzibah Anderson are among her several examples.
“When you cry about things not working out,” Grose quotes Klausner in a new collection of essays, “you’re crying not only because a guy you slept with now doesn’t seem to care you’re alive, but also because you’re ashamed of yourself for crying.”
Grose also quotes Anderson’s confession (in a book to be released this summer) at having such deep regrets about casual sex that she gave up “penetrative sex” for a year:
A tiny bit of me can’t help judging myself, nor, presumably, can those women who consistently shave their own tallies in sex surveys.
This isn’t supposed to be happening to liberated women, laments Grose, who reminds readers:
Feminist Web sites advise that it is our “feminist duty to 1) seek pleasure and feel entitled to it and 2) to make the world a more orgasmic place for other women.”
And yet there seems to be something else at play in the culture that’s making Klausner and Anderson regretful, some new wave of anti-orgasmic sexual conservatism that makes you hate yourself for what you did last night.
Grose’s explanation is that sex regret comes in cycles, and this cycle of regret is simply a response to the “Girls Gone Wild archetype.”
But after a while, we did not really want to do any of those things anymore, as Tina Fey explained in an interview with Vogue earlier this year: We have been handed “a sort of Spice Girls’ version of feminism. We’re supposed to be wearing half-shirts and jumping around. And, you know, maybe that’s not panning out.” Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis was put in jail. Christina Aguilera married a nice Jewish boy and had a baby. She’s been replaced on the pop charts by 19-year-old virginal chanteuse Taylor Swift, who sings chaste love songs about Romeo and Juliet. Paris Hilton is rarely in the tabloids and we haven’t seen her nether regions in years. Finally, the fictional Carrie Bradshaw is wed and living a New York domestic fantasy.
[snip]
At the start of this decade, we have thoroughly internalized these recent conservative cultural messages about the importance of marriage: “73 percent of women born between 1977 and 1989 place a high priority on marriage,” writes Hannah Seligson in the Wall Street Journal.
Yet there’s a deeper explanation to the “shame cycle” that makes more sense to me: it simply isn’t in women’s nature to engage in meaningless sex for the sake of momentary pleasure.
In “Take Back Feminism,” Christina Hoff Sommers quotes Clare Boothe Luce, who captured this aspect of woman’s nature beautifully more than half a century ago:
It is time to leave the question of the role of women in society up to Mother Nature—a difficult lady to fool. You have only to give women the same opportunities as men, and you will soon find out what is or is not in their nature. What is in women’s nature to do they will do, and you won’t be able to stop them. But you will also find, and so will they, that what is not in their nature, even if they are given every opportunity, they will not do, and you won’t be able to make them do it.
Luce “is careful to say that women’s nature can only be made known in conditions of freedom and opportunity,” writes Sommers. “But, she does not expect that, with equal opportunity, women will turn out to be interchangeable with men.”
Liberated women have the opportunity and freedom to behave as casually about sex as men, but it leaves the vast majority of them—including feminist icons—empty, unfulfilled, and often depressed. It seems that some in each generation must learn this reality the hard way.
That, more than anything else, may explain Grose’s ‘shame cycle’.