Roger and Me

Yesterday Matt Yglesias scolded Roger Kimball for boldly mischaracterizing the trajectory of contemporary philosophy vis-à-vis the epistemology of truth. The nut of Yglesias's complaint is that Kimball snips from conjectures to fuel large, body-of-work judgments on theories; rhetorically conflates arguments; and cherrypicks theorists as it suits him.

Yesterday Kimball similarly annoyed me with a post on the perils of sexual liberation. His argument runs like a criticism of the Democratic Party that starts with Eugene Debs and ends at Lyndon LaRouche.

After a bumpy start in which he compares the widely accepted and observably successful sexual revolution of the 1960s to the excesses of mystical Anabaptists of yester millenia, Kimball identifies as bedrock and gospel to the sexual revolution the Herbert Marcuse text, Eros and Civilization (written in 1955, as it were). To the extent that one Marxist-Freudian-aesthetic analysis of sexual utopianism seeded the sexual revolution is somewhat irrelevant to Kimball's point—it can't be said that the Marxist-Freudian-aesthetic camp continued to win advents during the 1960–70s, Marcuse's personal cache with leftist students notwithstanding. Tracing a legacy between Marcuse's work and the intellectual tradition today is a considerable task given the large number of works that remain untranslated for lack of interest, but it's not unfeasible that there is a tradition today whose roots lie in Marcuse's work.

Getting from that narrow ledge back to a substantive observation on the dubious sexual liberation policies of today (the intolerable terms of which Kimball assumes the reader already knows) would require some gymnastics. Kimball might have made a leap from Marcuse's Marxist-Freudian aesthetics to someone working today in, say, the psychoanalytic tradition (Jane Flax?). Better yet would be to outline first the parameters of the complaint at which he wants to arrive. There's nothing Marcusian about it, but Kimball suggests:

By the mid-Seventies, though, the prophets were grumbling. The sexual utopia they had envisioned was--as the etymology of the word suggests--no place. Nature itself was part of the problem. A battery of new sexually transmitted ailments, from herpes to AIDS, arrived in quick succession to make casual sex a dangerous, potentially a deadly affair. But disease was not the whole story. For one thing, most people found the pursuit of sexual gratification for its own sake ultimately ungratifying. They were looking for sex without strings. It turned out that "the strings"--the emotional and spiritual nourishment that longstanding relationships offer--were essential: sever them and the pleasure chills.

So much was a salutary corrective to the excesses of the Sixties and Seventies. But true to form, the demand for sexual liberation has also spawned a counter-movement, an ideologically motivated demand for sexual orthodoxy. This shows itself above all in what we might call the sexual-harassment industry: the fantastical reinterpretation of everyday life such that every human exchange is potentially open to the charge of sexual malfeasance.

To ignore in his diagnosis that over this period women entered the workforce is an astounding error of omission and analysis. Caitlin Flanagan's interesting brand of feminism has a great deal to say on the subject, and in comparison Kimball is inobservant if not retrograde.

But where does Kimball take his argument, such as it is? Straight to the desk of one Catherine MacKinnon, favored stalking horse of the right. MacKinnon is without question members of the extreme left—along with her colleague and co-theorist Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon considers the protection of pornography under freedom of speech to be a legal protection of rape. MacKinnon and Dworkin are radical readers who believe that the distinction between art and reality is negligible, that men understand women (reality) as much through mediation (photography) as through experience. I believe Dworkin has even gone so far as to say that until circumstances change, i.e., until pornography in all its forms is outlawed, all heterosexual intercourse is rape.

Wild stuff! But the thing is that MacKinnon and Kimball agree about the sexual revolution. It is certainly the weirdest spot in feminist criticism, the one at which both Catherine MacKinnon and Roger Kimball stand together to say that the sexual revolution ought never have gone as far as it did. Far left, far right, far out?

It should be obvious enough that MacKinnon represents no point of consensus in contemporary criticism. I'd call it a stretch to say that she's even played her marginal role relevantly since the early 1990s. Where's Adrienne Rich? Judith Butler? bell hooks? Portentous though the threat of a MacKinnon-led "feminist tyranny" may be, it would probably be more useful to address the performative and economic models that substantive critics are advancing today.

Posted by Kriston at January 27, 2005 9:55 AM