Writing in New York magazine, Rebecca Traister gives voice to the cutting-edge complaint of campus feminists: consensual sex is not enough; it had better be good, and bridge the “orgasm gap” — or else. Read on:

It may feel as though contemporary feminists are always talking about the power imbalances related to sex, thanks to the recently robust and radical campus campaigns against rape and sexual assault. But contemporary feminism’s shortcomings may lie in not its over­radicalization but rather its under­radicalization. Because, outside of sexual assault, there is little critique of sex. Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity. Which means a vast expanse of bad sex — joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish — has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fu**ed by fu**ing.

More:

In this line of thinking, sex after yes, sex without violence or coercion, is good. Sex is feminist. And empowered women are supposed to enjoy the hell out of it. In fact, Alexandra Brodsky, a Yale law student and founder of anti-rape organization Know Your IX, tells me that she has heard from women who feel that “not having a super-exciting, super-positive sex life is in some ways a political failure.”

Except that young women don’t always enjoy sex — and not because of any innately feminine psychological or physical condition. The hetero (and non-hetero, but, let’s face it, mostly hetero) sex on offer to young women is not of very high quality, for reasons having to do with youthful ineptitude and tenderness of hearts, sure, but also the fact that the game remains rigged.

Watch as young feminists discover that the world is round:

It’s rigged in ways that go well beyond consent. Students I spoke to talked about “male sexual entitlement,” the expectation that male sexual needs take priority, with men presumed to take sex and women presumed to give it to them. They spoke of how men set the terms, host the parties, provide the alcohol, exert the influence. Male attention and approval remain the validating metric of female worth, and women are still (perhaps increasingly) expected to look and f**k like porn stars — plucked, smooth, their pleasure performed persuasively. Meanwhile, male climax remains the accepted finish of hetero encounters; a woman’s orgasm is still the elusive, optional bonus round. Then there are the double standards that continue to redound negatively to women: A woman in pursuit is loose or hard up; a man in pursuit is healthy and horny. A woman who says no is a prude or a cock tease; a man who says no is rejecting the woman in question. And now these sexual judgments cut in two directions: Young women feel that they are being judged either for having too much sex, or for not having enough, or enough good, sex. Finally, young people often have very drunk sex, which in theory means subpar sex for both parties, but which in practice is often worse (like, physically worse) for women.

The editor of the website Feministing, Maya Dusenbery, reveals her tragic secret:

And it’s not as if that culture disappears upon graduation. Dusenbery, who is now 29, speaks of her “great feminist shame”: After a decade of sexual activity, she very often still doesn’t get off. “In one way that feels so superficial, but then, if I believe sexual pleasure is important, that’s terrible! Come on, Maya! Communicate!” She winds up feeling bad for not having done the work of telling her partners how to make her feel good. “What I want is not for me to have that burden. I want one of my male partners, who are wonderful men who care about me, to have just once been like, ‘No, this is unacceptable to me. I’m not going to continue to have sex with you when you’re not getting off!’ And I can’t imagine that happening.”

Read the whole thing.

Saints preserve me from either of my boys or my daughter participating in this degraded rutting culture. What is missing here is — wait for it — love. And commitment. And the mutual respect that comes from a culture where sex is an expression of committed love. What you have instead is young men who behave like barbarians, young women who adopt their barbaric ethic, and then are surprised when they are left feeling cold and used … and who, just you watch, are going to start figuring out ways to construe unfulfilling sex as somehow a violation of their rights.

There is a better way, a saner way, a more humane way, a way out of the dark wood mapped out by Rebecca Traister: the Love and Fidelity Network offers it.

UPDATE: Jones, who is a Muslim, writes:

My reaction is a mix of despair and anger. Despair, because these people are real to me – I look them in the eyes every day – and they are so deeply malformed and misguided, and there is so little hope of helping them. Anger because I am in the midst of this culture, without any choice in the matter. I shouldn’t have feelings about it at all; I should be ignorant of it. But I’m not, and it will be impossible for me to elevate myself very far above it while I’m in it.

This is from the very beginning of the article:

“Gattuso is not against sex by any means. “I don’t say yes. I say oh, yes. I say yes, please,” she wrote. And she did say yes at a booze-soaked party hosted by a group of men she didn’t know. One of the men told her that because she was bisexual, he assumed she was “particularly down to f*ck.” He said she could make out with his girlfriend if she would hook up with another of the men.

““I have so much to drink my memory becomes dark water, brief flashes when I flicker up for air,” Gattuso wrote. “I’m being kissed. There’s a boy, then another boy. I keep asking if I’m pretty. I keep saying yes.” But in the morning, she wrote, “I feel weird about what went down” and was unsure how to express her feelings of dissatisfaction and confusion over “such a f*cked-up experience.””

This girl reports a profound sense of loss after letting herself be used in a disgusting way. But she has no vocabulary even to express that despair. That, to me, is morally horrifying. You can see through the banal, semi-literate veneer of ideological nonsense to the real moral tragedy underneath. But we have robbed this girl, and all the others in her situation, of a language to identify and express the damage being done to her. Whatever else you think about his work, Foucault did us the great service of showing that, sometimes, we ignore human suffering because we lack even the concepts we need to identify and describe it.

That inarticulacy means that, bizarrely, girls like this are volunteering themselves to be used. And that the harms they undergo are difficult for us, and even for them, to name, describe, understand, hence to avoid.

I haven’t even read anything else in the article yet, because I know what is coming. I wanted to get my thoughts out just on that bit, before the damage gets compounded by the interpreter.

Aaaand . . . on cue, the utterly confused misdiagnosis in the same-old, exhausted conceptual framework of sex-positive feminism.

Crucial to that framework is the Rousseauist/Marxist assumption that there are no problems inherent to human nature or experience, and that everything is the result of some sort of social distortion that can simply be excised by some sufficiently thorough Revolution — in this case, against “Patriarchy.”

So, the problem is that “the game is rigged.” And we need to “correct power imbalances.” Everything is rigged in favor of Men. Obviously, some sort of political, legal action needs to be taken to correct these power imbalances and break the vast male conspiracy against female orgasm. Why don’t we just keep redefining rape? “Orgasm means yes?” Not as serious a crime, so we’ll drop it to a misdemeanor charge.

50 years after the sexual revolution, we find out that even after all this liberation, the liberated women are not even enjoying the sex. Apparently, we’ve been radically destabilizing society, and girls have been offering themselves up, not because they’re enjoying it — by their own admission, they aren’t — but for the sheer political point of it. Or, the radically empowering ability to engage in anonymous, alcohol- and drug-fueled sex acts described above.

But, somehow, they (unconvincingly) claim to believe that some progress has been made nonetheless.

“Having humiliating sex with a man who treats you terribly at a frat party is bad but not inherently worse than being publicly shunned for having had sex with him, or being unable to obtain an abortion after getting pregnant by him, or being doomed to have disappointing sex with him for the next 50 years.”

You see! There is no alternative to offering yourself for semi-conscious group physical humiliation in a dank frat house basement. After all, there is no fate worse than being a housewife!

It’s hard to overstate the relief and the pride I feel when I turn back to my own culture. My whole family is involved in the process of finding someone suitable for marriage. I don’t do this lightly, but to make the point, I’m going to describe my sex life in graphic detail. Be warned.

My sister heard about a girl through one of her friends. When my sister tried to contact her directly, she was directed to the girl’s father. Eventually my sister and her met, and got along famously. The girl, a gorgeous young medical student, still asked that I meet with her brother before meeting me directly.

If it weren’t for what I know about the alternatives, I might be getting impatient. But instead, I feel a deep sense of gratitude at how protective this girl is of her modesty. And for all the norms and expectations that brought us to this wonderful point. And I feel very lucky to be courting her. I absolutely must preserve this way of life for my children.