The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

From Happy Hippies to Angry Dykes

Posted on | May 15, 2017 | Comments Off on From Happy Hippies to Angry Dykes

 

“Does anybody remember laughter?”

Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant asks that question in the live version of “Stairway to Heaven” in the documentary The Song Remains the Same. By 1973, when that concert was recorded, much of the youthful exuberance of the hippie counterculture was gone. The utopian dreams of peaceful harmony — “All You Need Is Love” in the “Age of Aquarius” — had been destroyed by drug overdoses, sexually transmitted diseases and other sordid bummers. Much of this disillusionment was inevitable. The teenager who dropped out of college and went to San Francisco for the 1967 Summer of Love (“be sure to wear flowers in your hair”) was by 1973 a young adult who had to find some way to pay the bills. No more allowance from Mommy and Daddy? Bummer, man. Having to work for a living wasn’t something they’d taken into account when they “tuned in, turned on and dropped out.”

Perhaps even worse than having to go to work, however, the hippies discovered that all that talk of “free love” was a cruel deception. By the early 1970s, human debris from the wreckage of the Sexual Revolution was visible to anyone who paid attention to the rising tide of divorce, abortion and other evils. Radical feminism — what its founders called the Women’s Liberation Movement — was in large measure a reaction against the predatory hedonism of the Sexual Revolution, as Sheila Jeffreys argued in her 1990 book Anticlimax. Nothing could be more false than to believe that the 1960s were totally groovy for all those chicks getting passed around from one hairy hippie dude to the next, like a doobie at a Grateful Dead concert. Alas, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, as we have recently seen:

Liberal feminist rhetoric about women’s sexual “empowerment” — mimicking a predatory stereotype of male sexuality — has been repeatedly demonstrated to be flawed in practice, as women who pursue “liberated” sex suffer emotional and physical harm. The so-called “pro-sex” feminism of the Third Wave has predictably produced a radical feminist backlash, with a revival of anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideas first articulated in the 1970s by lesbian separatists like Charlotte Bunch and Marilyn Frye.
What is best for women is lifelong monogamous pair-bonding, and every decent and thoughtful woman understands this. No wise mother would raise her son to be a selfish hedonist, racking up “scores” as a pickup artist, nor would any wise father wish his daughter to be a pawn in such a game.
Feminists, however, reject the marriage-based family that is (or at least, should be) the safe harbor protecting women from insult and injury. The feminist movement’s War Against Human Nature, manifested in a hostility toward the “patriarchal institution” of marriage, has produced the very evils which today’s young feminists protest. . . .

Read the rest at Medium.

 

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