The Other McCain

Charlotte Shane (@CharoShane) is a slut who writes about sex. There are a lot of these around lately. I blame Sex and the City, or maybe let’s go back further and blame Helen Gurley Brown. At any rate, the ambition of every young female English major nowadays is (a) to have sex with dozens of men and (b) get paid to write about it. It’s journalistic prostitution, really — exhibitionism justified by the excuse that the Let-Me-Tell-You-About-My-Sex-Life racket is about feminist empowerment.

There is an interesting 21st-century double-standard about the sexual memoir genre, namely that men aren’t allowed to engage in it. A man who boasts about his sexual exploits is condemned as a misogynist, as Daryush “Roosh V” Valizadeh could testify. Everything we are allowed to know about sex, it seems, must be filtered through a feminist lens, and men’s perspective on sex are therefore unwelcome. Feminism is the belief that men are always wrong about everything, especially sex. And so the question of what guys enjoy sexually is never asked, let alone answered, because feminism is not about making men happy.

So Charlotte Shane is eager to share how she “blazed through my twenties” in promiscuous splendor but — plot twist! — now she’s met Mister Right and decided monogamy is what she wants:

I didn’t expect to become monogamous — I thought I’d be comfortably faithless forever — but I grow more and more grateful for this development by the day, in no small part because it saved me from adding to the grim parade of temporary partners who had come before. The problem with “only f–king” isn’t that sex is dangerous or wrong outside the confines of certain social containers like the boyfriend label or an engagement ring. It’s that in 2015 and before, casual sex, as practiced by straight Americans, was routinely bereft of physical pleasure, mutual respect, and interpersonal maturity. Hook ups were supposed to be fun but they… well, weren’t. And straight women, who bore the bulk of this failure, were finally fed up.
Why did casual sex suck so much? Because very few straight cis men were as libidinous, skilled, or nice as they needed to be to make the enterprise worthwhile. When arranging my “casual encounters,” I hoped for low level warmth and good naturedness to accompany fun sex, but this modest combination was exceedingly rare. And in 2015, I watched friend after friend suffer the same relentless indignities I’d endured in 2014, before [her current boyfriend] entered the scene. “Being straight is a constant exercise in degradation,” I found myself telling them because it was the most sincere validation I could summon. We’d been told that men were insatiable, that they’d be thrilled by our appetites and eagerness and carefully cultivated hotness, yet we kept bumping up against potheads and sluggards who seemed severally sexually under-motivated in spite of having signed up for a site designed to get them laid. Then there were the erectile problems courtesy of bad diets, prescription or recreational drugs, and performance anxiety. Those who could get it up, inexcusably, often mimicked porn moves with an alarming degree of sincerity. I daresay even the rare vaginal orgasm-er among us is shocked by the ignorance behind such cartoonish penetrative encounters.

Notice she blames (a) heterosexuality and (b) men, not necessarily in that order, for her failure to find happiness in hedonism. The LGBT community has a monopoly on “physical pleasure, mutual respect, and interpersonal maturity,” she seems to believe. No one is allowed to ask if maybe Charlotte Shane’s problem was . . . Charlotte Shane.

Bad judgment and bad morals are generally not a formula for success in life, and the fact that the men with whom Charlotte Shane hooked up via Tinder were all inadequate, disrespectful and/or immature should not surprise us. As I have explained elsewhere, the dating market is full of bad guys because all of the good guys already have girlfriends and good guys don’t cheat. Past a certain age — maybe as early as 25 — the singles scene is nothing but culls and rejects. The keepers are already taken, and if you’re still in the dating scene when you’re 30, you’re rummaging through piles of damaged goods and leftovers in the discount bin.

The one thing Charlotte Shane cannot do is consider that she could ever be at fault. Exactly how “mature” and “respectful” is she? Not very. Promiscuity is inherently immature, and it’s not respectful, either.

All the men she ever had sex with were ignorant and incompetent, she would have her readers believe, because that’s just how heterosexual men are. There are apparently no exceptions to this categorical denunciation (except, of course, the guy she’s dating now) and she issues a sweeping condemnation of males:

After that came the inevitable emotional abuse, either through casual cruelty or empathetic laxity. Ok, we get it: masculinity doesn’t indoctrinate its conscripts in thoughtfulness, kindness, or basic manners. But too many otherwise intelligent grown men wallowed in their narcissism and sexism, gaslighting one-time partners into believing that an expectation of decency was evidence of simpering clinginess rather than indicative of healthy self-respect. If a woman initiated a repeat physical encounter, she was regarded as desperate to date. If she stood up for herself after being treated rudely, she was “crazy.” Whenever a woman was something other than merely sexually pliable and passive, her presence suddenly became onerous. Straight men, in turns out, largely had no idea how to actually be friends with the women they would have once called “f–k buddies.”

You can read the rest. The feminist echo chamber permits no man to speak a word of correction to fools like Charlotte Shane, and so the only thing young women know about sex is what such fools tell them.

The only advice feminists ever accept is bad advice from bad women. Feminists never listen to good women and, because feminists believe men are always wrong about everything, we are not even allowed to say a word in our own defense. The reason feminists think all men are stupid is because no smart man would ever talk to a feminist.