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Decter and Podhoretz

the breakfast table
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from: Midge Decter

"Liberated" Sex

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 10, 1999, at 10:24 AM ET

When our four kids were still more or less living at home, during the '60s and '70s, I had a ringside seat for keeping an eye on the youth culture. People used to complain then that I was a blue-nosed prude for insisting that something was going awry between the sexes as a result of the famous sexual revolution. But I could see what I could see: The girls were far from happy with their new "right" to jump casually in and out of beds, and the boys were showing signs of suffering a diminution of sexual energy from being spared the experience of pursuit and conquest. Well, this very morning's papers brought the story of a new study, the largest since Kinsey, which found that about 40 percent of women and 30 percent of men have little or no interest in sex. To me, for one, this is no surprise. Sex in the age of "liberation" has become something between the pursuit of the Holy Grail and an Olympic contest. With ordinary mortals robbed of their naturally ordained roles--men to pursue and women to be pursued--disaster was bound to follow.

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960
from: Midge Decter

"Liberated" Sex

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 10, 1999, at 10:24 AM ET
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Midge Decter is an essayist and social critic who publishes in a variety of magazines and appears most frequently in Commentary. Norman Podhoretz is editor at large of Commentary magazine and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His latest book, Ex-Friends, was published this month.
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