Miranda Devine: Generation of girls at risk
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The Sunday Telegraph
April 07, 2013 12:00AM
There is one domain in which woman have always reigned supreme, and that is the business of coupling, procreating and child rearing.
Therefore, if you influence women, you influence the fabric of society. Which is why feminism has been such an important weapon in the armament of the left.
But feminism has now gone well beyond redressing genuine inequality to advocating behaviours and attitudes that damage women, and threaten the health of society.
The evidence is there to be seen for anyone who cares to look, in the annals of psychological disorders that afflict so many young women today.
The zipless f ... eulogised by yesterday's feminists has become the norm for Gen Y in the form of a too-often joyless, mechanical and regret-filled hook-up culture.
Sex and human connection, let alone love and compassion, have effectively been decoupled in the hook-up culture, in which dating has given way to no-strings-attached physical encounters.
The term "hook-up" is exactly as dehumanising it sounds, and a fascinating study by the American Psychological Association last month shows how disconnected are the sexual behaviours and private internal desires of young men, and especially young women.
Yet the establishment's concern and outrage is marshalled against the rare piece of advice from elders that might offer an antidote to despair.
For instance, last week, worldwide mockery and condemnation fell upon Susan Patton, a 1977 graduate of America's Ivy League Princeton university, and a mother of two sons.
Her crime was to write a letter to the college newspaper exhorting women to marry young, and preferably a Princeton man, before they graduate.
"For most of you, the cornerstone of your future and happiness will be inextricably linked to the man you marry, and you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you," she wrote.
She is right.
The fact is that no matter how much we change the social script by which we all live our lives, the mathematics of fertility don't change and IVF is no solution for ageing eggs if you want your own genetic offspring.
Rather than angrily denying the existence of this inconvenient fact, young women are better advised, during that extended period of singledom between early puberty and late marriage, to work out what they really want out of life. And older women owe it to them to speak the unfashionable truth.
To her credit, Patton has stood her ground, pointing out that work-life balance is not just about work.
The other piece of rare courageous advice rejected by the establishment comes from Tony Abbott.
Opposition leader Tony Abbott and his daughters.
Three years ago he said that his three daughters should consider virginity a "gift" that should not be given away lightly.
For this he was pilloried by the usual scolding fem set, led enthusiastically by Julia Gillard, who said the Opposition Leader's comments confirmed women's worst fears about him.
"Australian women want to make their own choices and they don't want to be lectured to by Mr Abbott," she said at the time.
Well, last week, in this newspaper, Abbott's daughters Frances, 21, and Bridget, 20, confirmed their father's comment had been "misconstrued," and that it was not about controlling women but respecting them.
Yet in this month's Madison Magazine panel, in which Abbott took part with Sarah Murdoch, me, and feminist academic Kate Gleeson, Gleeson sneeringly asked what his advice would have been to his sons, if he had them.
"Don't use people," was his reply, the corollary to his earlier advice to his daughters, which was "Don't be used".
This irritated feminists, too, because it implied that men are the users, whereas the theory is that women equally are capable of using people for their own sexual ends.
Somehow this perverse aspiration has become morally desirable.
The Sexualisation of our Children
This is the sensibility that underpins the hook-up culture that is the defining sexual norm of our time.
In a new book, The End of Sex - How Hook-up Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled and Confused About Intimacy, Donna Freitas has compiled eight years of research into a revealing exposition of Gen Y life.
"Amid the seemingly endless partying ... lies a thick layer of melancholy, insecurity and isolation that no one can seem to shake. College students have perfected an air of bravado about hook-up culture though a great many of them wish for a world of romance and dating."
Among her most striking findings from American college campuses is that 41 per cent of students "expressed sadness or even despair" about hooking up.
These students suspected it robbed them of healthy, fulfilling sex lives, positive dating experiences and loving relationships.
At its very worst, hooking up made them feel ''miserable'' and ''abused''.
Another revealing aspect of Freitas' book is the extent to which feminist writers claim hook-up culture is "empowering" for women, despite evidence of the opposite.
She quotes Hanna Rosin's book The End of Men which claimed "the perfunctory nature of sex in a hookup is essential to support a wider landscape of sexual empowerment among today's young women".
Ambivalent sex is useful, according to this theory, because it does not tie a young woman down.
Meantime, the article Sexual Hook-up Culture in The American Psychological Association's review, Monitor, shows the disturbing psychological consequences, for both men and women.
They include unwanted sex (mostly alongside alcohol and substance abuse), profound regret and feelings of shame and depression.
Saddest of all is that while most men and women did not expect a romantic relationship as the outcome of a hook-up, fully one third of men and almost half of women "ideally wanted" such an outcome.
Anyone who has much to do with young people will have observed a sadness beneath the polished, perfected surface of Gen Y's smiling girls.
As the mother of boys I have had only glimpses of the existential pain of young women but it is enough to make my female heart ache.
