#METOO FEMINISTS MAY NOT REALIZE IT, BUT THEIR OTHER TARGET IS SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL:
Last fall, as the first #MeToo scandals scrolled across the cable news chyron, I happened to be reading “Sticky Fingers,” Joe Horgan’s [sic – Ed] biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. As Horgan describes the magazine’s early years in the 1960s, just about everyone on the staff was having sex with everyone else.
Did the women of Rolling Stone consent to the goings-on at what today would be regarded as an illegal den of harassment? It seems they did. In the ladies’ room, they scribbled graffiti ranking male staffers for their sexual performance — not, as girls do on college campuses today, the names of rapists in their midst. Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, was known to judge job seekers by “whether a candidate was attracted to her” and, in some cases, to test the depth of their ardor personally. Photographer Annie Leibovitz, who made her name at Rolling Stone, routinely slept with her subjects.
Different as those days seem, there’s a direct line between then and now. Today’s clear-cut protest against workplace harassment is mutating into a far-reaching counterrevolution against the combustible contradictions set in motion 50-odd years ago. But as in the 1960s, this sexual rebellion is utopian and deeply naïve about the tangled knot of human motivation. Don’t expect the young women who are building the #MeToo barricades to succeed.
It’s fair to say ’60s-style liberation endorsed the value of female sexual desire, autonomy and consent. This was a genuine moral achievement, and we can be thankful it is a settled part of modern life. But the sexual revolution also helped midwife the soaring number of single-parent families and the related ills of inequality, poverty, achievement gaps, and men MIA from family life. And all these many years later, younger feminists are exposing new flaws in the sexual deregulation bequeathed to them by their elders.
First and foremost is the revolution’s blindness to la difference.
Read the whole thing; I wonder how Kay Hymowitz’s column in the L.A. Times is playing amongst its core readers, given the chief industries of that company town.
Flashback to some related links in a post I wrote back in October, at the height of Weinstein-mania:
THE SEXUAL PREDATORS EVERYONE STILL WORSHIPS:” “What do we do about predators we actually think are cool?…What is the point at which it becomes necessary for us to channel our inner Savonarolas and just start burning? Is one confirmed incident enough? How many Station to Stations or Physical Graffitis are worth the assault of a single woman or child? Are we affirming or materially contributing to their crimes when we watch films or listen to music made by abusers?”
Earlier: Hugh Hefner, Gangsta Rap & the Emerging Moral Majority: “Slowly, however, the elite of our culture seem to be drifting toward a new, far-more jaundiced and suspicious view of popular culture from the 1960s to the 1990s.”
And for my own thoughts on Joe Hagan’s biography of Wenner, click here: Sticky Fingers: A New Biography Explores the Seedier Side of Jann Wenner.