Contemplating the Laundry on "Playboy feminism"

Jordan of Contemplating the Laundry sheds light under a rock and watches the critters beneath run for cover. Or rather, she links to Weny Shalit, who shines the light for her! Take a look:

It was all supposed to be so liberating. But it wasn't, as Ms. Levy argues forcefully in "Female Chauvinist Pigs." It was merely the academic groundwork for what she calls "raunch culture," now so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Young women wear shirts emblazoned with "Porn Star" across the chest. Teen stores sell "Cat in the Hat" thong underwear. Parents treat their daughters' friends to "cardio striptease" classes for birthday parties. This is liberation?

Ms. Levy is baffled. "Why," she wondered, "is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering?" Why did female Olympic athletes pose for Playboy before the summer 2004 Games? Why did Katie Couric feel the need to point to her cleavage and gush "these are actually real!" when she guest-hosted "The Tonight Show" a couple of years ago?

Some sort of pervasive pressure, apparently, requires "everyone who is sexually liberated . . . to be imitating strippers and porn stars." Ms. Levy describes the perfect distillation of this impulse--a social group called CAKE that hosts steamy, hooking-up parties in New York and London. CAKE makes big bucks advertising "feminism in action"--it claims to be the place where "sexual equality and feminism finally meet"--but its events are indistinguishable from those held at the Playboy Mansion.

The surface logic of such conduct is fairly simple, notes Ms. Levy. "Women had come so far," or so the thinking went, that "we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny." If male chauvinist pigs "regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves."

Well, Ms. Levy is having none of it, and she is not the only one. Even Erica Jong seems to feel that something has gone wrong. Known for popularizing the idea that a woman may want consequence-free sex, Ms. Jong today declares: "Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don't love . . . that is not liberation." It isn't? Someone should tell this to Annie, a blue-eyed 29-year-old who admits to Ms. Levy that she "used to get so hurt" after a night of sex that didn't yield an emotional bond. Now she has gotten over it, or tried to: "I'm like a guy," she brags.

Ms. Shalit admirably demonstrates the twisted fruit of the sexual revolution. Ironically, the feminist movement has enslaved their very constituency in the bondage of sexual libertinism. The sad results speak for themselves.

When sex is divorced from love, and love is divorced from the gospel, it becomes just another pleasure track. Sex is meant for so much more. When a married couple has sex, they participate in the fullness of communion. When their sexual act is truly love-giving and life-giving, they truly give themselves to each other in imitation of Christ's self-giving to his Church, us! The awe, joy and wonder of such sexual relations defies all of the gross charactertures that the pornography industry sells. Sex between a married man and woman, when practiced in full fidelity to its purpose, becomes a sacramental of their marital union and transforms them into living icons of God's own self-giving love. They truly become one with God and each other in a unique way in that experience.

How sad that the world would twist such a wonder into a mere appetite. How tragic that mouth-foamers demand pursuit of the One Thing that matters, when their very zeal to do whatever they want with it assures them a bed of ashes. How very, very Reasonable!