Hookup Culture: Fact or Myth?

To promote her new book American Hookup sociologist Lisa Wade has taken to the pages of the Guardian to shine some light on the hookup culture.  The book will not appear until January, 2017, but Wade’s thinking is a welcome addition to the debate about the hookup culture.

In particular, Wade debunks the notion, recently promoted, that since only a smallish percentage of students actually hook up-- that is, actually engage in random, anonymous sexual encounters-- the hookup culture is a myth.

She begins by describing a midafternoon hookup in an American dorm room. A student named Cassidy decides to have sex with some man in her room. She shows no consideration for the fact that her roommate is still in the room, within a few feet of the action. She is following a new precept: When the spirit moves you, you take action. Cassidy is an inconsiderate wretch. She thinks that she is cool. In truth, she has made herself a slave to the yearnings in her loins.

She is emulating the behavior of porn stars. She is disrespectful and shameless, but she believes that she is showing off. She does not just want to get off; she wants to set an example of amorally superior behavior.

It’s one thing to do it; it’s quite another to be indiscreet. And it's yet another problem to be proud of one’s indiscretion. With that gesture we are scraping the bottom of the moral barrel.

Wade analyzes:

Students like Cassidy have been hypervisible in news coverage of hookup culture, giving the impression that most college students are sexually adventurous. For years we’ve debated whether this is good or bad, only to discover, much to our surprise, that students aren’t having as much sex as we thought. In fact, they report the same number of sexual partners as their parents did at their age and are even more likely than previous generations to be what one set of scholars grimly refers to as “sexually inactive”.

One conclusion is to think that campus hookup culture is a myth, a tantalizing, panic-inducing, ultimately untrue story. But to think this is to fundamentally misunderstand what hookup culture really is. It can’t be measured in sexual activity – whether high or low – because it’s not a behavior, it’s an ethos, an atmosphere, a milieu. A hookup culture is an environment that idealizes and promotes casual sexual encounters over other kinds, regardless of what students actually want or are doing. And it isn’t a myth at all.

Indeed, Wade is entirely correct. It doesn’t matter how many students are hooking up how often. The hookup culture, in its raw shamelessness, is an ethos within which students are obliged to function. Or not. The unhappy few who hook up maintain the highest status. Everyone else suffers because in the hookup culture dating and courtship and relationships are considered to be an outcast, not part of the in-crowd.

You can refuse to hookup, but you still live in its culture.

In Wade’s words:

These numbers show that students can opt out of hooking up, and many do. But my research makes clear that they can’t opt out of hookup culture. Whatever choice they make, it’s made meaningful in relationship to the culture. To participate gleefully, for example, is to be its standard bearer, even while being a numerical minority. To voluntarily abstain or commit to a monogamous relationship is to accept marginalization, to be seen as socially irrelevant and possibly sexually repressed. And to dabble is a way for students to bargain with hookup culture, accepting its terms in the hopes that it will deliver something they want.

Hookup culture makes dating more difficult. Even if you are involved in something like a relationship, the hookup culture makes you feel inferior. And besides, since no one respects commitments, the chances for cheating abound.

Again, students who hook up have the most prestige on campus. They are the wealthiest and come from families with the most status. They maintain their position, not only by hooking up, but by being especially shameless about it—as though theirs must be the standard for good behavior. If it is going to set the standard, everyone must know about it.

Wade writes:

Hookup culture prevails, even though it serves only a minority of students, because cultures don’t reflect what is, but a specific group’s vision of what should be. The students who are most likely to qualify as enthusiasts are also more likely than other kinds of students to be affluent, able-bodied, white, conventionally attractive, heterosexual and male. These students know – whether consciously or not – that they can afford to take risks, protected by everything from social status to their parents’ pocketbooks.

Hookup culture, then, isn’t what the majority of students want, it’s the privileging of the sexual lifestyle most strongly endorsed by those with the most power on campus, the same people we see privileged in every other part of American life. These students, as one Latina observed, “exude dominance”. On the quad, they’re boisterous and engage in loud greetings. They sunbathe and play catch on the green at the first sign of spring. At games, they paint their faces and sing fight songs. They use the campus as their playground. Their bodies – most often slim, athletic and well-dressed – convey an assured calm; they move among their peers with confidence and authority. Online, social media is saturated with their chatter and late night snapshots.

The morning after, college cafeterias ring with a ritual retelling of the night before. Students who have nothing to contribute to these conversations are excluded just by virtue of having nothing to say. They perhaps eat at other tables, but the raised voices that come with excitement carry. At the gym, in classes, and at the library, flirtations lay the groundwork for the coming weekend. Hookup culture reaches into every corner of campus.

Note well that if the conversation revolves around last night’s hookup, those who have abstained are excluded from the conversation. They are treated like pariahs. Their views and their experience are not respected. They have come to think that any kind of relationship commitment labels them as outsiders, hopelessly retrograde.

Obviously, this does not date from yesterday. It helps us to understand why the millennial generation is so widely reputed to be so utterly lacking in good character. Would you trust someone who is willing to have sex in front of her roommate, without even asking permission?

Who Is Huma Abedin?

Since the election season is upon us Democrats are out there accusing the Republican candidate of being Hitler and the Republican Party of being a bunch of Nazis.

It happens every four years. It does not matter who the candidate is. It does not even matter that the current candidate has a Jewish daughter, a Jewish son-in-law and three Jewish grandchildren. Nothing matters but the art of the smear.

In the meantime, people are doing their best to ignore Hillary’s connection with Huma Abedin. Some have said that Huma will be the next White House Chief of Staff. Others have noted that Hillary and Huma seem to be joined at the hip… whatever that suggests.

Everyone should know by now that Abedin’s mother works as a propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood. And that the Brotherhood is a virulently anti-Semitic and anti-American organization, one of whose branches is the terrorist organization Hamas.

The Clinton campaign and many voices in the media have downplayed the influence of the Brotherhood on Hillary’s right hand woman. CNN reported the other night that the Journal edited by Huma’s mother is innocuous. And besides, even if Huma’s name was listed as an editor she was not really an editor.

Regardless of whether Huma’s name was listed, it is a fact that Secretary of State Clinton travelled to Saudi Arabia and appeared in public with Huma’s mother. This lends credibility to someone who publishes terrorist propaganda.

And it is also a fact that, after Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate for president of Egypt, won his election the first foreign leader to grace his presence and to lend legitimacy to his position was none other than the American Secretary of State.

And, lest we forget, immediately prior to the Egyptian election the Muslim Brotherhood was doing neighborhood outreach by sending mobile surgical vans into the poor neighbors of Cairo in order to allow parents to have their daughters genitally mutilated without having to suffer the inconvenience of bringing them to a clinic or a hospital.

War against women, anyone?

Now, there’s something that deserves recognition from the American Secretary of State. I promise that the feminist supporters of Hillary and Huma will never say a word about any of this.

These facts are not in dispute. Arguing about how much work Huma did or did not do for her mother’s journal is beside the point.

What is more to the point is Huma’s mother’s journal has happily been trafficking in anti-Semitism. The Daily Mail has the story:

An Islamic journal where Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's top aide, was assistant editor published an article accusing Jews of 'working the American political system' – and being aided by the 'memory of the Holocaust'.

Abedin, who is vice-chair of Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, spent 12 years as an assistant editor for Journal of Minority Muslim Affairs.

Her mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, is the journal's editor-in-chief and has been accused of espousing the views of the Muslim Brotherhood through the publication. 

It continues:

One article, published during Huma Abedin's tenure, claimed that many Americans have a 'distorted and negative view' of Islam, Muslims and Arabs - ranging from perceptions of 'poverty, filth, the desert' to ideas that 'their 'sport' (other than sex, of course) is to destabilize Western economies and ruin the world in order to master it'.

The piece from 1999 also alleges that there are deep ties between the upper echelons of U.S. politics and pro-Israeli, Jewish-Americans, suggesting that Jewish people have been able to 'work the system' and are 'greatly aided by the American memory of the Holocaust' and Israel serving as America's ally in the Middle East.

And, of course, Abedin’s mother herself wrote an editorial explaining that America was responsible for the 9/11 attacks:

In the wake of 9/11, Abedin's mother wrote an editorial suggesting that the U.S. bore responsibility for al-Qaeda's attack.

In 2001, Saleha Mahmood Abedin wrote: 'As incomprehensible as it may seem to the common observer, something catastrophic seemed to loom on the horizon for the watchers of the world scene. 

'The spiral of violence having continued unabated worldwide, and widely seen to be allowed to continue, was building up intense anger and hostility within the pressure cooker that was kept on a vigorous flame while the lid was weighted down with various kinds of injustices and sanctions. 

'This was further intensified by the demographic and socio-economic pressures that came with their own set of factors promoting social and political instability and, at the individual level, anger, frustration and a sense of deprivation. 

'It was a time bomb that had to explode and explode it did on September 11, changing in its wake the life and times of the very community and the people it aimed to serve. Muslims everywhere are now singled out as 'one of those'.'

As always, Muslim radicals accept no responsibility. They blame America first. Electing Hillary Clinton is empowering a woman whose mother wrote that. Has Huma ever denounced her mother's views? Has anyone ever asked her whether she denounces her mother's views?And has Hillary Clinton ever denounced a woman who refuses to denounce her mother's hate-mongering?

The Cost of American Retreat

When they write the history of the war in Syria they will find a way to blame it on Republicans. That’s why we should welcome Roger Cohen’s consistency. He has declared Syria to be the greatest foreign policy catastrophe of the Obama administration. He has laid the blame entirely at the foot of the Obama administration. He has done it before and he did it again, yesterday.

As we make our way through a moral miasma, a little clarity is always welcome.

Cohen wrote:

Obama has said the Libyan intervention was his worst mistake. He has said he is “very proud of this moment” in 2013 when he decided to resist “immediate pressures” and not uphold with military force his own “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

No, Syria has been Obama’s worst mistake, a disaster that cannot provoke any trace of pride; and within that overall blunder the worst error was the last-minute “red line” wobble that undermined America’s word, emboldened Putin and empowered Assad.

As Obama said on Aug. 31, 2013, in announcing his decision to delay military action and seek authorization for the use of force from Congress: “What is the point of the international system” if the chemical weapons ban can be flouted? He also said, “What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?”

It could not, Cohen continued, have been any worse:

No outcome in Syria could be worse than the current one. Assad’s bomb-spewing jets and his airfields should have been taken out early in the war, before ISIS. The red line should have stood. The consequences for the European allies of Obama’s let-Syria-fester policy have been overwhelming.

For now it comes down to the situation in Aleppo. Cohen remarked that, effectively, no one cares what is happening in Aleppo. Everyone is consumed by the task of defeating Donald Trump. When Sarajevo happened the world was attuned, attentive and alert to the horrors. People spoke about it all the time. Finally, Bill Clinton did something.

We are living in a new age. We are not allowed to speak about Aleppo because it will make Obama look bad. For many people, especially those in the media, the goal is to make Obama look good. It doesn’t matter if you have to lie and to cheat, if you have to ignore reality. Make Obama look good. If Hillary becomes the next president the media will take up the challenge of making her look great. It is already warming up for the challenge.

Under Obama and Clinton America retreated from the world. America declared victory and brought the troops home. We are now reaping the whirlwind in Syria.

Cohen concludes:

Aleppo, symbol of failure, symbol of indifference, symbol of American retreat, should not have been left to bleed.

Kristi Coulter on the Twenty-Four Hour Woman

For reasons that escape me the femosphere is up in arms about Kristi Coulter’s article about modern First World women, or better, the Twenty-Four Hour woman.

Women have objected strenuously to the fact that Coulter seems to be blaming it all on the patriarchy, because, after all, who does that anymore?

For my part, never having bought into the women-can-have-it-all silliness, I was more interested in the quality of the writing and the great story that Coulter tells. As it happens, she writes exceptionally well and much of the time seems to be, as I would put it, “in character.” If you were reading a cri de coeur by Holden Caulfield, you would not be thinking that J. D. Salinger was speaking his heart. You would understand that he has created a character that has a specific way of seeing the world and of making his way through it. Why should we not afford Coulter the same consideration?

For my part I have the greatest appreciation for great writing. I do not really care whether Coulter agrees with me or echoes my thoughts. There is not enough really good writing out there and those who produce it deserve our respect and praise. Laurels for Kristi Coulter.

Coulter is describing a young woman who has stopped drinking and who has gained a measure of sobriety. Naturally, she sees alcohol everywhere. She sees temptation everywhere. She sees Sirens inviting her to take a drink. And she sees that far too many other women are more than happy to drown their lives in booze.

When you are a recovering alcoholic and when everyone around you seems to be drinking, the world does not look very friendly and inviting. And besides, you feel like an outsider, a misfit, a traitor to your gender.

And you are likely to feel some considerable anger. At the patriarchy, of course, because you have been taught—I wonder where?—to blame the patriarchy for everything that has gone wrong in your life. But you are also, fairly obviously, blaming yourself for having bought the story about today’s modern liberated woman.

You are likely to be angry because, however much you would like to blame the patriarchy, today’s modern women do not, as a point of pride, take advice from any member of the male sex. At which point it becomes increasingly difficult to blame it on men.

True enough, Coulter rails against the patriarchy. She is learning how to be sober in a world where women drink themselves into oblivion because they have set unrealistic goals for themselves, and where they tend to blame others when they cannot ply the world to their will. Or better where they believe that the only options they have are either to be everything or to be nothing. That way madness or alcoholism lies.

The notion that women can be everything and can have everything does not come down to us from the patriarchy. Not at all. It comes down from second-wave feminists who set up an unrealistic expectation in order to seduce young women into joining the cause. Join the cause and you will have everything.

It did not work out that way, of course.

Coulter writes:

Is it really that hard, being a First World woman? Is it really so tough to have the career and the spouse and the pets and the herb garden and the core strengthening and the oh-I-just-woke-up-like-this makeup and the face injections and the Uber driver who might possibly be a rapist? Is it so hard to work ten hours for your rightful 77% of a salary, walk home past a drunk who invites you to suck his cock, and turn on the TV to hear the men who run this country talk about protecting you from abortion regret by forcing you to grow children inside your body?

Evidently, Coulter does not have warm feelings toward men. One might say that, to some extent, the feeling is reciprocated. We live in a world where the cultural environment is hostile, even toxic. And it is not just hostile toward women.

Rather than say anything about second-wave feminism, Coulter blames it on a pefume… one that I do not recall. The perfume commercial promised women that they could be everything, that they could have everything. It was addressed to women who were breathing in the fumes of the new feminist revival. To blame it on the perfume maker is really to miss the point.

Coulter writes:

Do you remember the Enjoli perfume commercial from the 1970s? The chick who could bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re a man?

I blame that bitch for a lot. For spreading the notion that women should have a career, keep house, and f**k their husbands, when the only sane thing to do is pick two and outsource the third. For making it seem glamorous. For suggesting it was going to be fun. And for the tagline she dragged around: “The 8-Hour Perfume for the 24-Hour Woman.” Just in case you thought you could get one fucking hour off the clock.

The passage shows the damage done by unrealistic expectations, by the notion that a woman can have it all. For my part I agree with Coulter that a woman should choose two and outsource the third. It’s brilliant antidote to the have-it-all mentality.

Coulter continues that these unrealistic expectations have caused women to lose touch with their natures by marinating their bodies in alcohol. It’s not the same as liking your body. If that is their strategy that suggests that they are simply not very happy to be women. Call this yet another a consequence of the feminist revolution.

In Coulter’s words:

But knives and booze, yoga and booze, 13 mile runs and booze? What’s next to be liquored up: CPR training? Puppy ballet class? (Not really a thing, but someone should get on it.) Is there nothing so inherently absorbing or high-stakes or pleasurable that we won’t try to alter our natural response to it? Maybe women are so busy faking it — to be more like a man at work, more like a porn star in bed, more like 30 at 50 — that we don’t trust our natural responses anymore. Maybe all that wine is an Instagram filter for our own lives, so we don’t see how sallow and cracked they’ve become.

Perhaps, women are busy faking it. But, the question is: who told them that they had to be all these things? For the record, it was not I.

And Coulter does not conclude that she should be angry with the patriarchy. She concludes by being angry at the women and with herself. She describes a moment where she overcomes her anger and begins to see things more clearly. She is recovering and regaining her bearings. As I said, she is writing in character:

I am very angry with women that summer and then I’m very, very angry with myself. And I stay that way for months, trudging through my first sober Christmas and job change and flu and birthday and using that anger at every turn as a reminder to pay attention and go slow and choose things I actually want to happen. By the time summer comes back around I realize I no longer smell like eight-hour perfume.

The story has a happy ending… and not in the way you are thinking. It shows Coulter sitting around a pool with her friend Mindy, watching a group of women on the other side of the pool having what they think is a great time drinking pomegranate mimosas. 

And, she is happy that she is not one of them. She prefers her side of the pool:

Then Mindy slides her Tom Ford sunglasses back over her eyes and says, “All I can say is it’s really nice on this side of the pool.” I laugh and my heart swells against my swimsuit and I pull my shades down too, to keep my suddenly watery eyes to myself. Because it is. It is so nice on this side of the pool, where the book I’m reading is a letdown and my legs look too white and the ice has long since melted in my glass and work is hard and there’s still no good way to be a girl and I don’t know what to do with my life and I have to actually deal with all of that. I never expected to make it to this side of the pool. I can’t believe I get to be here.

Another Reason to Quit Psychoanalysis

As everyone knows, Freudian psychoanalysis requires the patient to say whatever comes to mind, regardless of how obnoxious or how trivial it is. I have often pointed out that this manner of speaking is unnatural and abnormal. Thus, psychoanalytic treatment, among its other detriments, trains people to master the bad habit that it calls free association.

If psychoanalysis is conducted properly the patient will develop a habit that will make him dysfunctional. Some people feel good about being dysfunctional, but, as Jason Notte points out-- in an article that does not mention either Freud or psychoanalysis-- saying whatever comes to mind, running your mouth and being generally indiscreet will tend to impoverish and immiserate you. It will make it far more difficult to become wealthy, because… here is the important point… being wealthy and successful requires you to get along with other people and to do so you need to display a high standard of decorum and propriety.

One ought to ask how many therapists, Freudian or not, promote such values and teach people the best ways to get along with other people.

Anyway, Notte explains:

Amassing wealth and maintaining it requires building relationships and cultivating partnerships, which are difficult to accomplish when you're running your mouth about anything that comes to mind.

You will be happy to note that this can all be measured. And that it has been measured, by a financial advisory firm:

A recent survey by international financial advisory agency de Vere Group discovered that the wealthier classes covet civility as much as any luxury item. It recently asked 830 clients who have investable assets of more than $1.3 million which subject was the most difficult to discuss with family, friends and colleagues. According to responses from the United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and South Africa, there is a global consensus that prizes silence about certain topics for the sake of decorum, public perception and maintenance of personal relationships

Tact and discretion, there you have it. In an age of oversharing and overexposure you might not agree with the point, but people who care about getting along with other people, and whose livelihood depends on it, understand it well.

Notte writes:

With social media only amplifying discord once reserved for the loud guy at the restaurant or the less-tactful relatives at a family dinner, it's worth looking at the wealthy's taboo topics and determining if discussing them with anonymous strangers is any more fruitful than bringing them up in awkward face-to-face interactions:

No family relishes an aunt's retelling of her latest goiter operation, complete with disgusting detail. They tolerate it even less at a dinner table where they're ostensibly attempting to enjoy a meal without it being rendered unpalatable by each passing phrase.

Considering how important personal relationships are in cultivating and maintaining wealth, there's a reason why the wealthy avoid the topic altogether. 

Notte recounts some topics that are off limits and out of bounds in polite conversation. Obviously, they include the vulgar and the obscene, but they also include topics about which people have very strong feelings: like religion and politics. And, of course, you do well not to discuss how wealthy you are over the dinner table… or anywhere else.

The Politics of Pregnancy

Apparently, Avra Siegel missed the Women’s Studies class where they explained pregnancy. Or perhaps the subject never came up in her lean-in group.

For whatever reason, Siegel was surprised to discover how difficult it was to be pregnant. She was even more surprised to discover that pregnancy made it more difficult to do her job.

Being a card-carrying feminist Siegel likes to pretend that pregnancy is not a disability. At the same time she describes it as disabling.

One understands that for this ideologically committed woman reality is what you say it is. If you say it isn’t a ransom, it isn’t a ransom. If you say it isn’t Islamist terrorism, it isn’t Islamist terrorism. If you say that it isn’t a disability, it isn’t a disability.

Got it?

Even Siegel understands that she is not the first woman to get pregnant or to have morning sickness or to suffer the multiple indignities that accompany her condition. And yet, she acts as though she is.

She acts as though no one ever prepared her for this. Perhaps she does not read very much. Perhaps she never talks to other women about pregnancy. Or, perhaps she is suffering from the feminist bias against pregnancy. It is too obvious to have to say it, but feminism believes that women’s health issues are limited to contraception and abortion. What happens during pregnancy is not part of the Women’s Studies curriculum.

In any event, Siegel pretends that her experience is really, truly unique. It is so unique that it merits an article in Fortune, of all places. And it is so unique that she never mentions her husband, the father of her child. She does acknowledge that under normal conditions a man does contribute to the process, but she never mentions her husband.

One understands that politically correct thinking does not allow you to refer to your husband. Because if you do you are expressing your deep-seated bigotry against those women who are pregnant but do not have husbands. And it would express a deplorable bigotry against those women who conceived via parthenogenesis.

Allow Siegel to recount her tale of woe:

I had been up all night, stricken with nausea, frantically Googling “heartburn or heart attack?” because my epic chest pains were so bad that they were making me feel faint….

I was totally unprepared for how challenging pregnancy would be–and felt uncomfortable voicing this to anyone but someone else who was also pregnant….

I didn’t want to be seen as complaining or ungrateful — or even worse, not committed to my career. And I know I’m not alone. For the millions of American women who work outside the home, the career consequences that frequently accompany starting a family can begin during pregnancy, well before the baby arrives. The truth is, pretending pregnancy doesn’t sometimes suck isn’t doing anyone any good.

Stop and take a breath. We now know that pregnancy sucks. But, is this the kind of information that you expect to find in an august business publication like Fortune. And besides, being up all night Googling? Hopefully, her husband was there to comfort and console her. Besides, why not call her obstetrician? Isn't that better than frantically googling your symptoms?

We have also learned that, however uncomfortable Siegel feels taking about this with outsiders, she has chosen to expose it all to the world in a magazine article. So much for her sense of shame. If she wants to be respected for her professional achievements she should not be going out of her way to draw attention to her bodily functions.

Despite what she says, she is certainly complaining. Yet, she wants you to know that this minor inconvenience has not in any way compromised her commitment to her career.

She is a feminist, so career must come first. Any suggestion that a pregnant women, or a woman with an infant, might be less of an employee is anathema to her raised feminist consciousness.

And yet, Women’s Studies classes did not explain morning sickness. And they did not explain how inconvenient it was to feel like you want to throw up all the time.

Of course, Siegel takes it as a given that a pregnant woman and a woman who has just had a baby will naturally want to keep working. In many cases such women are forced to keep working, but why is it unthinkable—another lapse in her article—that women might want to take some time off from careerism in order to have and to nurture babies? Obviously, if you present yourself as husbandless, it’s the only option. But most women do have husbands, don’t they?

One ought to mention a point that does not seem to enter Siegel’s entirely self-centered narrative. Different women have different experiences of pregnancy. Some find themselves nearly incapacitated while others have a much easier time of it.

Beyond telling us far more than we want to know about her pregnancy, Siegel also uses her pregnancy to promote a political agenda: paid family leave. What good is pregnancy if you cannot politicize it?

She wants pregnant women and new mothers to continue to do their jobs, even if their focus and concentration are elsewhere. If they cannot do their jobs, she wants them to be paid for it. But, repeat after Siegel: pregnancy might be disabling but it is not a disability.

Even though Siegel presents it as a win/win situation for companies, she has described a mental and physical condition that cannot allow most women to work as well as they did before. The notion that a woman undergoing what Siegel says she underwent is going to contribute as much  to the bottom line is simply a lie.

But, Siegel works at CARE, at a do-good organization that, I am guessing, has a considerable number of female employees. So, when she suggests that pregnant women should advertise how they feel, and especially tell their managers how they feel, she is assuming a company that is run like a charity. And also, a company that is run by and for women.

She writes:

All of us pregnant women who are in a position to do so can do our part to speak up at work. Because each and every time you tell your manager how you are feeling, you empower other women to do the same. This single action gives confidence and credence to those around you and helps to change the workplace culture from the ground up.

As for the male who has contributed to a woman’s misery while pregnant, Siegel does not mention her own situation or her own husband, but, she has come to the realization, that the male role in pregnancy is severely limited. There is only so much that even the most attentive male can do.

In her words:

Let’s be real: it’s not like women got pregnant on their own – there was another person 50% responsible for that pregnancy. But men just happen not to be the biological sex that bears the child, and so all the consequences of the pregnancy fall on women because of our physical role in childbearing and rearing. When our laws and workplace policies do not account for the reality of pregnancy and childbirth, it is the height of gender inequality. We must do better, not because pregnancy is a disability, but because it is actually a condition that should be honored, revered and celebrated.

It’s good to be real. Biology counts here. It does more than count; it is decisive. This, despite the fact that feminism has been telling us that gender differences are a social construct.

A woman who has been dining out on feminist pabulum will obviously have a difficult time dealing with pregnancy. If she spent her formative years learning all of the different ways to avoid pregnancy she will be unprepared for the changes that her body is enduring.

We all agree that pregnancy should be honored, revered and celebrated… but how well has feminism done its part, how well has it served women by associating women’s health with contraception and abortion?

The New Sleepwalkers

It’s probably too soon to break out the champagne, but statistically, the world has become a safer and less violent place. And yet, those of us who are old enough to remember the twentieth century know that violence is never really out of date.

Between wars, massacres, genocide, famine and pestilence, well over 200 million people were killed during the twentieth century. Communism alone is responsible for over 100 million deaths. It’s nice to be optimistic and it’s nice to trot out statistics about automobile accidents and muggings, but still, in the not too distant past, the world was a bloodbath.

It would not take very much for the same or worse to reoccur.

If you limit your perspective to last year’s traffic fatalities, and even homicides, you can find cause for optimism. You can even find out that the world has never been safer. And yet, if you look back into the past century you might believe that it’s just the calm before the storm. If you think that the civilizational clash between Islam and the West is not going to get a lot worse before it gets any better you have been smoking the wrong kind of cigarettes.

For the record those who are promoting the meliorist view are arguing that the advances of modern science and the decline of religion are causing peace and prosperity to bust out all over. Since many of these thinkers are atheists, and since many of the horrors in the twentieth century were produced by atheist cultures, they do well to ignore the past and paint pictures of a rosy future.

As for today’s America, Ross Douthat finds that youth are less prone to pathological behaviors but that adults are less prone to adult behaviors. It is puzzling.

It turns out that American youth culture has become less inclined toward criminal excesses while American young adults have become more infantile. America’s young people are less promiscuous, less drug-addled, less alcoholic and less criminal than their predecessors. At the same time, America’s young adults are more likely to be living with Mom and Dad, to have jobs that do not look like careers and to be delaying the moment when they will have to settle down and have families.

One finds such statistics compelling. Yet, one suspects that they distort the reality. One’s suspicions increase when we read, from Douthat, that we can try to explain it all by showing how much time America’s children and young adults spend online. When push comes to shove, we can blame it on the internet. At least the internet is not going to take offense and accuse you of a microaggression.

It sounds like a good explanation, except that it tends to absolve all human beings of responsibility for their behavior. If we were serious about blaming it all on Facebook and internet porn, we would want to know about whether the same internet produces the same results for young people around the world. If the internet has turned Johnny in Portland into a slug, has it done the same for his peers in Singapore, Mumbai, Tokyo, Rome and Sao Paulo?

For all I know we are using the wrong standard to evaluate adolescent and young adult well-being. The absence of deviant and pathological behaviors does not necessarily translate into well-being. We would do better to take these statistics and balance them against achievement. Watching internet porn might very well cause there to be less sex crimes,  but are these young people establishing more durable relationships with other human beings.

It may be the case that sex crimes have diminished, but in our national conversation we are talking about nothing but sex crimes. As for achievement, America’s young are not doing very well in their academic achievement tests when compared to their peers around the world… peers who, again, have the same access to the internet and to social media.

I believe we should ask about whether or not these children and young adults have good or bad character. Are they trustworthy and reliable? Do they have a strong work ethic? Do they show up on time? Do they take initiatives? Do they feel loyal to their school or their company? Are they patriots?

There is so much more to well-being than not committing heinous crimes, that one barely knows where to start.

For the record, I report on Douthat’s observations:

First, youth culture has become less violent, less promiscuous and more responsible. American childhood is safer than ever before. Teenagersdrink and smoke less than previous generations. The millennial generation has fewer sexual partners than its parents, and the teen birthrate has traced a two-decade decline. Violent crime — a young person’s temptation — fell for 25 years before the recent post-Ferguson homicide spike. Young people are half as likely to have been in a fight than a generation ago. Teen suicides, binge drinking, hard drug use — all are down.

Of course, responsible people do not commit violent crimes.Sleepwalkers don't either. Yet, the fact that you forgo criminal and degenerate behaviors does not mean that I can count on you to do a good job or to show up on time for the meeting. For all anyone knows American adolescents have become a bunch of solitary wankers who have fallen into a hypnotic trance by overindulging in internet porn.

While we are mentioning hypnotic trances, I would add that in order to judge these statistics we should want to know how many of these children are taking psychiatric medication, whether anti-depressants, anti-anxiolytics or amphetamines. If young people are zoned out, perhaps it’s not the culture or the internet, but pills that are making them that way.

And how many of these children are taking pills because their parents either hover too much or are never around. One accepts that there are too many helicopter parents, but there are also probably too many latch-key children. If children come home from school to an empty house because both of their parents are away working during most of the day, they might very well have used the internet as a babysitter. In that case the fault will not lie with the internet but with delinquent parents.

Obviously, it’s much easier to blame the internet. The internet will not take offense. Parents will.

And also, for what it’s worth, this young generation has suffered the soporific effects of the self-esteem movement, the one that teaches them not to compete because everyone is just as good as everyone else. And they have also been brainwashed into believing that they should spend their waking hours fighting for social justice and demonstrating against microaggressions. If they have suffered a good upbringing they now believe that they should be whining about their privileges and trying to debilitate themselves in order not to enjoy any competitive advantage.

In any event, the absence of bad habits does not necessarily translate into good habits. It does not make for responsible adults. Douthat continues:

But over the same period, adulthood has become less responsible, less obviously adult. For the first time in over a century, more 20-somethingslive with their parents than in any other arrangement. The marriage rate is way down, and despite a high out-of-wedlock birthrate American fertility just hit an all-time low. More and more prime-age workers are dropping out of the work force — men especially, and younger men more so than older men, though female work force participation has dipped as well.

Regardless of which of my several explanations you prefer, the facts suggest that the absence of bad behavior in young people does not mean that they have developed the good behaviors or the good character that they need to conduct themselves as responsible adults.

Not doing irresponsible things does not mean that you are consistently behaving responsibly. The absence of the bad does not necessarily entail the presence of the good.