Unfortunately, Zoe Strimpel has a great point in Good Slut. Why unfortunately? Because as much as I sympathise with her basic argument, I cannot see many people being persuaded by this scattershot polemic with its myriad errors and alarming glibness. Team slut deserves a better advocate.
Whether I want to count myself as one of team slut is a sensitive point. I’m 44: it feels embarrassing. I had my ‘reclaiming sexist slurs’ phase in the late 1990s when I was an aspiring Riot Grrrl and I realised pretty soon that wearing fishnets and calling myself names was not having the disruptive effect on misogyny that I’d hoped for.
Strimpel is 43 and, like me, she’s noted the recent turn to conservatism in sexual politics with some alarm. On the right, you have the rise of ‘reactionary feminists’ such as Louise Perry and Mary Harrington. These thinkers preach that casual sex is bad for women, contraception deadening and marriage and children a higher goal for most women than professional or public works.
Strimpel aligns them with what she nicknames the ‘chastity belt right’ and posits them as the intellectual wing of online ‘trad femme’ culture – a loose network of influencers who glamorise female subordination and domestic life, often via appeals to the ‘innate capacities’ of male and female. The paradox is that many of these women have built successful careers propagandising for other women to stick to the kitchen.
On the other side, you have the left-wing repugnance of the ‘girl boss’, and of entrepreneurialism more generally. Progressives often treat sexual inequality as a consequence of capitalism (absurdly, as Strimpel points out, given the treatment of women within planned economies). And from all quarters, writes Strimpel, women are ‘constantly being invited to feel afraid and angry, to see only the negatives in being a woman in the West today’.
Inasmuch as Good Slut is a rallying call for the benefits to women of the sexual revolution, I’m with Strimpel. ‘The sexual revolution did not shackle us; it bequeathed us, and it is up to us how we use that bequest.’ (What exactly the sexual revolution is supposed to have bequeathed in this sentence is one of the many mysteries thrown up by Strimpel’s prose style, but you get the gist.) She invites her readers to ‘grab life by the ovaries’. Women shouldn’t live in fear of male violence. We shouldn’t perceive our bodies only as sources of pain. And we should absolutely not fall prey to just-so stories about women’s ‘natural capacity’ which would push women into care and reproduction while men hoover up the fun and prestigious roles.
Again, I could get behind much of this – but in making the arguments, Strimpel resorts to outright denialism. For example, she struggles to believe that schoolgirls today suffer more sexual harassment than she did at Bedales in the 1990s, and decides that modern girls’ experiences must reflect
a fevered awareness, drummed into children now through sex education and other resources, of danger lurking in all sexual advances, especially the unexpected or unwanted.
Really? At a minimum, the existence of mobile phones has given rise to two whole new forms of harassment that Strimpel and I (at my non-Bedales school) never had to face: revenge porn, and boys watching actual porn in the classroom (material which will give some of them inspiration for abusing girls in real life). Girls’ anxieties cannot be waved away.
Strimpel can’t acknowledge that porn entails harm because a large part of her identity resides in being sex-positive. She’s not like those meanie feminists who’d get between a man and his orgasm. Her idea of a Thatcherite sexual heroine is the notorious porn performer Bonnie Blue: ‘She shows what a truly robust liberal society looks like.’ Regarding the men who queue up to abuse this paragon of the free market, Strimpel is silent.
There’s an endemic sloppiness to this book. Strimpel writes that no-fault divorce was introduced in 1969. Not exactly: until 2022, the law required one party to blame the other, or wait a minimum of two years. A section debunking the sexism of pop evolutionary biology seems astonishingly unaware that female evolutionary biologists exist, and have extensively challenged masculinist assumptions in the field. Several pages consist, lazily, of undiluted quotes from the sex advice columnist Dan Savage.
The worst comes last, with a chapter claiming that warnings of a fertility crisis are ‘overwrought’. Strimpel simply denies that falling birth rates have any ill effects. This is fatuous: population decline has drastic economic and social consequences. To pretend otherwise because you fear conceding a point to the natalists is both intellectually dishonest and politically unserious. If this is the best defence that the sexual revolution can muster, the future looks dry indeed.
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