There is a naive celebration by many conservatives of California’s new Yes Means Yes law. The theory is that unleashing a feminist jihad of false rape punishment will somehow end the sexual revolution, bringing us back to either Victorian or Puritan sexual mores. Conn Carroll looks forward to an explosion in false rape accusations leading to a sudden boon of “committed relationships”. Heather Mac Donald entertains similar fantasies, explaining:
Mothers worried that their college-bound sons will be hauled before a biased campus sex tribunal by a vindictive female should tell them: “Wait. Find a girlfriend and smother her with affection and respect. Write her love letters in the middle of the night. Escort her home after a date and then go home yourself.”
These fantasies and those which will surely follow are the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of why we have the hookup culture in the first place. It wasn’t men who drove the creation of hookup culture, it was women. The sexual revolution asked young women to reshape our culture to best suit their desires, and hookup culture is what young women created. Giving women even more capricious power over men won’t suddenly make today’s campus sluts desire marriage, or even marriage lite. While the new rules will undoubtedly take some young men (perhaps a large number of them) out of the hookup market they won’t reduce young women’s desire or opportunity to fully indulge in promiscuity.
The law also won’t help the young women fighting against the hookup culture, those who are looking for marriage or at least a “serious relationship”. The law is designed to create mistrust between men and women, and to destabilize all heterosexual relationships on campus.
To the extent that the law drives (some) young men away from the hookup culture, what will fill the void is not a sudden resurgence in marriage or even a path to marriage, but some combination of men checking out (the dreaded peter pan manboys/grass eaters), turning to porn/VR sex, and homosexuality. If your favorite sexual marketplace player is represented in that lineup, then aside from the cruelty and injustice of the law you might have something to look forward to. But for those who want to see a return to marriage, this next wave of feminist sexual insanity will only take us farther from the end goal.
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