This is how far we've come: students at Australian National University plan to protest the appearance on campus of a controversial sex therapist who teaches views that are supposedly offensive to women.
Does this sex therapist teach that women shouldn't dress like sluts? That they should take precautions in hooking up that men don't have to take? That they shouldn't drink around men they don't know?
None of the above. Bettina Arndt, a self-described "card-carrying feminist," teaches that "women have a right to say no, but . . ." -- wait for it -- "men and women should think about the impact of rejection on their partners, and some may choose to say yes a little more often."
Horrors! Partners should actually make sacrifices for one another? Why it's heresy!
Bettina Arndt explains: ''My message is that some women can enjoy sex without desire and perhaps they should explore that as an option. This is an emerging area of research. Men should also make love to their partners if they are persistently rejecting them, which often happens when older men become nervous about performance.''
Until lately, to suggest that couples should practice selflessness and to make sacrifices for one another was perfectly rational to every thinking human being. Somewhere along the line, though, it became verboten to suggest that selflessness be practiced in the bedroom, unless it was just men who were being told to be selfless.
And, of course, the big student protest isn't driven some grassroots effort by disgruntled young people. It's being organized on Facebook by the ANU Women's Department. Who would have thought?
Women's officer Kate McMurtrie said Arndt's views were damaging to young people and her attitudes should not be invited or heralded at the ANU.
''The department does not believe sex should be an 'obligation' by either party in a relationship. The idea that it's a woman's responsibility to have sex with their partner is more akin to notions of proprietary interests or a chore like doing the dishes,'' she said.
Story here: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/anu-students-angry-over-arndt-sex-lecture/2179918.aspx
The real problem might be that Ms. Arndt thinks women have become self-centered. In an interview, Ms. Arndt bemoaned the fact that "women started thinking about 'me'. The Me Generation, I think, particularly applied to women, where women started looking at their lives as something other than, you know, someone's wife and someone's mother and started thinking about themselves, and that was disaster, I think, for marriage . . . ." http://www.abc.net.au/talkingheads/txt/s1951266.htm
Ms. Arndt's concern for fathers' rights is also something that doesn't play well among the powers-that-be, either: http://www.bettinaarndt.com.au/articles/i-want-my-daddy.htm.
So that's where we are. We've reached the point where a feminist can't suggest that men are human beings with interests worth considering without a Women's Studies department stirring up a student protest to quash that idea before it gains currency. Spin it any way you want, it's man-hating, pure and simple. It's the type of attitude that leads young women to believe that men are predatory pigs, and that an unfavorable sexual experience is rape. And it's the reason a hell of a lot of good men who believe in equality between the sexes simply can't and simply won't join hands to work with the angry women who preach such hatred.
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