Ross Douthat, The New York Times, Sept. 29, 2018
The Kavanaugh nightmare shows how the competing moralisms of conservatism and feminism are tearing us apart. [JB emphasis]
Image from article, with caption: In the early 1980s hard-core pornography in Times
The Year of Our Lord 1982, upon whose disputed summertime events a Supreme Court nomination now hinges, was part of the Reagan era but not a particularly conservative year.
The ’70s were officially over, but their spirit still lived on. The American divorce rate had peaked the previous year, after a steep climb across the previous two decades. The abortion rate was near its post-Roe v. Wade apex. Rape and sexual assault were much more common than today. The shadow of AIDS hadn’t yet fallen on the sexual revolution, the era’s teen movies offered unapologetic raunch, and real-world teenagers were more likely to drink and have premarital sex than in either the Eisenhower era or our own age of helicopter parenting.
Most contemporary discourse about the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s imagines a consistent “left” that created those revolutions and a consistent “right” that opposed them. But glancing back to the debauched world of 1982 suggests a rather different take, one that clarifies what happened to American politics in the age of Bill Clinton and what’s happening now in the age of Donald Trump.
The world of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford’s youth, the world that's given us this fall's nightmarish escalation of the culture war, was not a traditionalist world as yet unreformed by an enlightened liberalism. It also wasn’t a post-revolutionary world ruled by social liberalism as we know it today. Rather it was a world where a social revolution had ripped through American culture and radically de-moralized society, tearing down the old structures of suburban bourgeois Christian morality, replacing them with libertinism. With "if it feels good, do it" and the Playboy philosophy. With “Fear of Flying” for women and “Risky Business” and “Porky’s” for the boys. With drunken teenage parties in the suburbs and hard-core pornography in Times Square.
Which means that the culture war as we’ve known it since has not been a simple clash of conservatives who want to repress and liberals who want to emancipate. Rather it’s been an ongoing argument between two forces — feminists and religious conservatives — that both want to remoralize American society, albeit in very different ways.
The irreducible core of their dispute is the question of legal abortion — whether it represents progress or regress, a necessary human right or a grave evil. But then in addition to that division, there is a more complicated contrast in their sexual ethics. Religious conservatives generally want to restore the sexual order of a more Christian past, restoring ideals of chastity and monogamy that the ’60s and ’70s dissolved. But feminists believe those older rules were just a means for men to subjugate women, so it’s better to maintain or further sexual emancipation while imposing the most stringent moral norms around consent. Instead of fruitlessly trying to tame lust, the theory goes, we can remoralize sexual culture by taming misogyny, extirpating toxic masculinity, and re-educating men.
To put this disagreement in terms familiar from 1980s movies, the feminist perspective wants to purge “Revenge of the Nerds” or “Sixteen Candles” of their elements of “rape culture” — like the idea that it’s okay to have sex with a girl while she’s blacked-out drunk — but keep the basic sexual freedom on display in “Fast Times At Ridgemont High.” The religious-conservative perspective wants, if not a dramatic re-Christianization of society, at least a teen culture that looks more like the restrained and courtly one desired by the nostalgic kids in Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan.”
There is enough overlap between these perspectives (the villain in “Metropolitan” is a predator whom feminists can hate as well) that it’s possible for them to find some common ground. Indeed in the 1980s and again in the 1990s you would find moralistic feminists — of all different sorts, from Andrea Dworkin to Tipper Gore — allying with social conservatives over pornography, misogynistic song lyrics, and other cultural effluvia that violated both of their ideals.
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But two groups’ deep differences means that neither can abide the possibility of the other’s final victory. Thus in the late 1990s, when evangelical Christianity seemed to be growing and Republican power with it, feminists who had once railed against sexual harassment suddenly found reasons to make their peace with the piggery — sorry, European cultural sophistication — of a liberal president, and to dismiss even credible rape allegations as a neo-puritanism that needed to be defeated at all costs.
It wasn’t that those feminists had ceased to believe in the principle that powerful men shouldn’t prey on weaker women. It was that they felt compelled to shelve that principle, temporarily, because they feared its application by Republicans would allow conservative-Christian moralism rather than their own to dominate the culture.
Now we’re living through a similar period of tactical compromise with libertinism, but this time it’s religious conservatives who are compromising. Fearful of secularization and feeling culturally besieged, they have thrown in with a president who embodies that old early-1980s debauch. And in the battles of the Trump era, some are embracing the idea that the #meToo moment — which, like the anti-porn battles of yore, offers potential feminist-conservative common ground — is a puritanical danger to the liberties of men.
As a conservative who appreciates feminism precisely because of its puritanical streak, it’s important to concede that sometimes fears of puritanism are justified. The feminists of the 1990s were deeply wrong about Bill Clinton but they were right that many of the men investigating him were fearful hypocrites. Likewise, while the #meToo movement has generally punished the guilty, some campus rape regimes have been genuinely unfair to men, and in our present derangement the reasonable concerns about Judge Kavanaugh coexist with a slightly fevered eagerness to make him a bad-guy preppy scapegoat.
But my general sense is that the way for religious conservatism and feminism to correct these excesses would be to learn from the other a little bit. Obviously the stumbling block of abortion would always be there. Still, the inevitability of that battle doesn't require embracing strategic libertinism at every turn and hardening your battles lines at every front.
Thus the puritanism of conservatism would be more admirable, more fully moral, if religious conservatives had a stronger appreciation for the reality of sexism, the value of female leadership, the need to seriously correct for the way ideals of chastity often punished women more than men.
The puritanism of feminism, meanwhile, would be more realistic if it could acknowledge that crucial differences between men and women aren’t just an artifact of sexism, and that the costs that promiscuity imposes and the unhappiness it breeds might actually be woven into the deeper natures of how both sexes love and mate and reproduce.
Instead of such a tempering of both worldviews, though, we seem to be headed in the opposite direction — toward a world where the parties are polarized by gender and the two moralistic programs, feminist and conservative, are therefore seen as just the expression of each sex’s interests as pitted against the other.
That means that #meToo zeal will be seen by too many men (and their sympathetic wives and friends and mothers) as a means of punishing only guys for a sex-and-booze culture in which both sexes are complicit … while any Christianity-influenced sexual moralism will be seen by too many women (and their male allies and partners) as just the royal road to the Commander’s bedroom in Gilead.
In which case the war between competing moralisms will also become a war between the sexes, making a fuller re-moralization impossible while sacrificing the human future to permanent resentment, misunderstanding and distrust.
The half-understood fear of just this scenario, I think, is part of what has made the Kavanaugh hearings even more nightmarish than the stakes for abortion law made me originally expect. Everyone, feminist and conservative and otherwise, has a different view of what they’re seeing happen.
But we all sense that in this political disaster, we’re seeing a glimpse into a cultural abyss.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, “To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.
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