The New Politics of Sex
By Stephen Baskerville
Angelico, 408pp, £18/$25
It turns out religious traditionalists aren’t the only ones finding fault with the sexual revolution nowadays. Thanks to the internet, different groups now enjoy the chance to express their dissent – some compatible with Catholic views, others not.
Among the longest living of these is the “fathers’ rights movement”, which has existed since the 1960s but found new life online. Like so many niche political views, it begins with a powerful insight but tends to stretch that beyond its usefulness, sometimes combining it with unsavoury claims.
Fathers’ rights advocates observe, quite rightly, that no-fault divorce brought many social ills, and conservative critics of the sexual revolution rarely fight divorce laws with the fervour they deserve.
These activists might call for the reform of family court practices and in the next breath claim domestic abuse is a fiction designed to slander men. Some consciously imitate feminism, calling for gender equality in parental rights and recognition of the challenges fathers face. Others denounce feminism as the source of every injustice.
Stephen Baskerville, professor of government at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia, systematises this hodgepodge of a worldview in The New Politics of Sex. The book presents itself as a standard conservative critique of the sexual revolution, but within a few dozen pages, Baskerville’s true purpose becomes clear: it is to survey what the author sees as an all-out war on innocent men.
The sexual revolution, he argues, was a coup by feminists seeking to eliminate masculinity out of a lust for power. Permissive divorce laws were only the first step. From there, feminists took over the entire machinery of government, courts, police and the military. All these institutions have been “feminised” and used to establish a welfare system that excludes men from the home and enriches women through payments to single mothers and court-ordered child support.
Baskerville identifies the courts as the scene of the greatest injustices to men – and it’s here that The New Politics becomes a particularly difficult read. Noting well-publicised campus show trials over sexual assault allegations, Baskerville claims that due process is similarly withheld from men in real courts. Feminist jurists eliminate constitutional protections for men and “sexualise” the justice system by inventing new crimes: “ ‘rape’, ‘sexual assault’, ‘sexual harassment’, ‘domestic violence’, ‘stalking’, ‘child abuse’’, ‘bullying’, ‘sex trafficking’, ‘aggressive driving’, and more” (the scare quotes are his). These constructed offences “criminalise males, masculine behaviour, and masculinity itself. They have no other reason to exist.” Feminists lay “honey traps”, seducing men only to accuse them of these “gender crimes”. For feminists, “convicting men of rape is a goal to be pursued for its own sake”, as well as for extortionary child-support payments.
A bleak picture. But bleaker still is what it implies about men, women and marriage. Men, in Baskerville’s world, are constantly victimised naïfs. They’re never promiscuous or abusive (such notions are feminist smear tactics) and even if they appear to be, it’s only because they fall for “feminist honey traps”. They have, he seems to imply, no moral agency for good or evil, no ability to rise above circumstance. This view, like the worst examples of victim politics, belittles the group it claims to defend.
Despite his apparent downplaying of allegations of rape and assault, Baskerville is careful to avoid making blanket statements about women. Unfortunately, that includes statements about how women might also be suffering under a liberationist sexual regime. The New Politics of Sex hasn’t a hint of the thesis advanced by the sociologist Mark Regnerus that the emergence of “cheap sex” enables certain men to prey on women without fear of consequence, or of the psychological and medical tolls of abortion and contraception (topics that barely appear in the book). It is too important for The New Politics that women should appear as oppressors.
Baskerville exemplifies the zero-sum approach to politics that so many “rights” movements take today. If men are only victims and women only oppressors, then marriage becomes a social benefit that men must hoard against female attack. “The purpose of marriage,” he says, “is not procreation but fatherhood.” It exists as a “social necessity” so that fathers can have a claim to their children. Baskerville is nihilistic about marriage – in the world he describes, it bears no intrinsic good.
We can draw broader lessons from this particular subculture of dissent from sexual liberation because it adopts a common tactic: it carves out a set of special rights and protections for a new victim class.
The problem with this approach is so clear that even Baskerville points it out, with reference to religious freedom. Instead of questioning the practices of victim politics, “Christian organisations seem more intent to legitimise it by compiling their own list of incidents of which they themselves are allegedly victims.” Christians obsessed with presenting themselves as victims and carving out a separate sphere of rights for themselves forget they could offer a different way of life that’s better for everyone.
Baskerville fails, sadly, to see how this might apply to his view of men. Reducing public life to claiming protected rights for one’s own group breeds nihilism with every political loss, and animosity towards every perceived oppressor. We forget that the Church offers, for instance through the sacrament of marriage, a true and better alternative to the dominant sexual culture for both men and women.
Religious conservatives have long fought an uphill battle on issues of marriage and family, generally unsupported and in the face of widespread derision. The discovery of new allies can be refreshing. But we have to be careful, even picky, always aware that no other group can offer what the Church does: a solution for “victims” and “oppressors” alike.
Philip Jeffery is an assistant editor at the Washington Free Beacon
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