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Decter and Podhoretz

the breakfast table
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from: Norman Podhoretz

Re: "Liberated" Sex

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 10, 1999, at 10:28 AM ET

Exposing myself as an unregenerate partisan in the eternal war of the sexes, I have to admit that I blame this situation on women. A million years ago, when I was a teenager and on the prowl, I would have considered the readiness with which girls were later willing to "put out" the very definition of paradise. But I have gradually come to understand that the female of the human species is entrusted with the job of forcing a male to earn her "favors," as they were once quaintly called, by changing himself from an indiscriminately promiscuous predator to a protector and defender. When females refuse to follow the deep instinct behind this responsibility, which is what the sexual revolution and the feminist movement encouraged them to do, they grow sour. In response, the males become either uncontrollably aggressive or pathetically passive.

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960
from: Norman Podhoretz

Re: "Liberated" Sex

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 10, 1999, at 10:28 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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