The Other McCain

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

Conclusions in Search of Evidence: Sex and the Modern Female Journalist

Posted on | May 26, 2025 | Comments Off on Conclusions in Search of Evidence: Sex and the Modern Female Journalist

The Guardian’s ‘reproductive health and justice reporter’

My two daughters are named Kennedy and Reagan, and one of my sons is named Jefferson, so I’m not against the trend of presidential names, but probably you shouldn’t name your daughter “Carter.” That was my first thought when I encountered the name Carter Sherman, who writes for the U.S. edition of the Guardian. Knowing my readership, I’m sure the commenters will engage in a spree of ad hominem remarks about Miss Sherman’s appearance, but while y’all will be slagging her looks, my concern is about the nature of her work. Mark Judge has a very interesting article about Miss Sherman and her forthcoming book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future.

There’s a certain hall-of-mirrors factor involved here: When Miss Sherman was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, she and her sorority sisters were interviewed by Peggy Orenstein of the New York Times, who was working on a book about young women’s sex lives. Orenstein, then in her 50s, was focused on the theme of “hookup culture,” and Miss Sherman says she and her Northwestern sorority sisters disappointed Orenstein’s expectations: “Frankly, we weren’t slutty enough.” So now Miss Sherman has written her own book, with its own preconceived conclusion, i.e., that “sexual conservatism” is the real danger to women, and I suppose her work is about as reliable as Orenstein’s, which is to say, not reliable at all.

“Never Take Advice From Feminists,” I warned in 2016:

The influence of feminism tends to steer individual women, and even entire societies, toward “The Darwinian Dead End,” as I’ve called it. The rhetoric of “choice” and “empowerment” is so strongly associated with declining fertility that, nearly a half-century after the eruption of the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1960s, you might suppose this ideology would have perished along with its proponents. . . .
The road to feminism’s utopia of “gender equality” is paved with dead babies. Yet these Death Cult fanatics still expect to be taken seriously when they offer parenting advice to those of us who consider our children a blessing from God.

That 2016 blog post specifically mentioned Peggy Orenstein and her then-new book, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. My point was that Orenstein could scarcely be trusted, given her background and ideological commitments, and I will take Miss Sherman’s testimony as proof that I was correct in that judgment.

Peggy Orenstein

If the commenters could be relied upon to make harsh comments about Carter Sherman’s looks, they’ll have a field day with Peggy Orensteiin, but of course that’s not my point. We may be approaching the event horizon of feminism’s solipsistic tendency, when we have feminist authors writing books about sex, based on critiques of other feminist authors’ books about sex. All of these authors are smugly certain that they possess the Feminist Truth About Sex, and none of them consider the possibility that, perhaps, the truth about sex is not feminist. What I mean to suggest is that because feminism is a radical egalitarian project, the fundamental premise of Equality (with a capital “E” denoting its quasi-religious status among feminists) will make any discussion of sexual behavior tendentious, biased toward a particular political objective.

Could I elaborate on that theme at length? Yes, I wrote a whole book about radical feminism, so writing at length on this topic is easy for me, if perhaps somewhat redundant at this point. I have long since become weary of pointing out the delusions involved in Equality — a condition which has never existed anywhere at any time in human history — and am disappointed that so many people continue to mindlessly worship at the idolatrous altar of Equality. What is particularly disappointing about Carter Sherman’s take on the subject is that, having seen through Peggy Orenstein’s façade of journalistic truth-telling, she seems to think the appropriate response to previous feminist failures is to double-down on Equality and declare war on “sexual conservatism”:

Specifically, sexual conservatism aims to implement policies that make it difficult and dangerous to have any kind of sex that is not heterosexual, married, and—as it seeks to limit access to abortion and birth control—potentially procreative. In addition to elevating heterosexual and married sex, American sexual conservatism tries to enforce specific ideas about gender, about what makes a man and what makes a woman. It wants to turn the United States back to a pre-internet age—to, say, the 1950s, before the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism of the 1960s and ’70s, a time when a (white) man was expected to have a (white) wife, 2.5 (white) kids, and a suburban home on a single salary. This is not a short-term plot. It is a slow-drip corrosion of community and state-level attacks that normalizes the loss of freedoms and ultimately clears the path for national action.

Mark Judge has more of that. Here’s a question that Carter Sherman might want to consider: What’s so wrong about sex being “heterosexual, married, and . . . procreative”? Or what is so precious about other kinds of sex that the threatened “loss of freedoms” is a societal crisis? While we’re asking questions that feminists never bother to ask, was life really so awful for women in “the 1950s, before the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism of the 1960s and ’70s”? Are women happier now that many of them have no hope of achieving that kind of suburban life?

One important difference between Peggy Orenstein and Carter Sherman is that Orenstein, born in 1961, at least has some direct knowledge of what life was like for her parents “before the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism,” whereas for Sherman, born in 1993, this is all ancient history. And, because she is a feminist, certainly Sherman believes that the 1950s were a Dark Night of Fascist Oppression — Leave It to Beaver was Nazi propaganda directed by Leni Riefenstahl, with Ward Cleaver as Hitler, and his wife June in the role of Eva Braun. Carter Sherman expects young women to share her existential fear — what a dreadful thing it would be to “turn back the clock” to those days!

*   *   *   *   *   *

Unlike feminists, I’m not an ideological ax-grinder madly pursuing a utopian idée fixe. As explained Saturday, my motive is an honest one, which Samuel Johnson once described: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Pretty sure Harper-Collins isn’t going to offer me a six-figure advance to write a book (Carter Sherman Is a Skank and Other Facts About Feminism) which is why I’m rattling the tip jar this Memorial Day weekend — just $5 or $10 would help — and reminding readers that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

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Category: Feminism, Journalism

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