Enemies of Eros

...Sex as a topic of clinical discussion is, of course, vulgarly omnipresent these days, taught in school to tiny tots and pushed by gerontologists onto the ENEMIES OF EROS: HOW THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION IS KILLING FAMILY, MARRIAGE, AND SEX AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT Maggie Gallagher/Bonus Books (Chicago, IL)/283 pp...

...It is also the sex of the late twentieth century, what remains after we have ripped away its mystery, its danger, its forbiddenness, its capacity to render us completely vulnerable to another, its invocation of the deepest kind of human love, and its connection—once deemed unbreakable—to that most important and sacred of all human activities, the making and nurturing of new life...

...But the different attitudes the two sexes bring to sex have not changed, which is why, the next morning, the woman wakes up asking herself, "Will he call me...

...The text led off with a detailed first-person account of a wife's efforts to supplement her husband's energetic conjugal endeavors via bathtub contortions that involved redirecting the water faucet...

...Indeed, for women, motherhood may be an even more "erotic" bond than romantic love...

...In our age, whose worst failing is its deliberate and systematic impoverishment of the imagination, we have managed to turn sex into a form of low-impact aerobics...

...America today is one of the most sexually repressed societies in history," she declares right off in a chapter titled "Totem and Taboo in Manhattan...

...T his is the theme of Maggie Galla- .1 gher's new book, Enemies ofEros...

...Miss Gallagher is flip, witty, and breezy, but she paints a gruesome picture...

...Liberals seem to say that love is unnecessary—that self-interest will suffice...

...Women today are being punished, and the most horrifying part is that we are being punished for our virtues, for supplying what everyone wants and what society in fact needs us to provide: a strong, dependable love, an emotional commitment that children can count on," Miss Gallagher writes...

...In short, we are our bodies, and they are us...

...Miss Gallagher, a former National Review editor who lives in Brooklyn with the 6-year-old son she bore out of wedlock right after graduating from Yale, is a friend of mine, and I ought to be embarrassed about touting her book so shamelessly...

...The article featured a Cosmo photographic staple: a meticulously groomed young couple feigning a carnal embrace...

...no-fault" divorce, which translates into involuntary divorce for one partner (in most cases the wife) because the other partner (in most cases the husband) needs to "grow" or "find happiness" with someone else...

...and the androgynizing of sex roles around the house, robbing men of their special status as fathers and breadwinners and destroying their incentive to stick around to raise their children...

...It extends to everything connected with the home—such as making a home—and to the bearing and raising of children...

...Behind sex lies gender, the crucial differences of body, mind, and temperament that make men not just male but masculine and women not just female but feminine...

...The "Baby M" case, wherein a court banned a baby girl from nursing at her mother's milk-swollen breasts, is a case in point...

...It goes without saying that the primary beneficiaries of this new attitude have been men, who are now able to per-suade nice girls to do what only girls from the other side of the tracks used to do...

...That ends, in fact, with love...

...I had a letdown myself recently when I could not resist—who could?—flipping to a Cosmo article titled "How Much Sex Is Enough...

...Masculinity and femininity are supposed to have generally disappeared in this, the age of Betty Friedan...

...Few of the CEOs whose second and third wives are the subject of current journalistic interest likely voted for Michael Dukakis...

...The classical liberalism to which both L-word liberals and freemarketeers are heirs relentlessly promotes the individual, possessed of many rights but free of all obligations except those taken on by choice...

...It extends to such "female" occupations as nurse, teacher, secretary, waitress, and nun...

...She cites a Roper poll in which 60 percent of women picked motherhood as the best thing about being a woman today (being a wife came in second, while "taking advantage of women's increased opportunities" rated only fourth...

...It extends most devastatingly to older women, who used to have the dignified roles of mother, grandmother, widow, and eccentric maiden aunt...

...It is in the sexual act itself, as Miss Gallagher points out, that gender differences are most vividly and satisfyingly dramatized...

...Miss Gallagher's book naturally castigates the liberal policymakers who wished sexual egalitarianism on the American family and are now calling on us to "finish the revolution" by having even more of the same in the form of "quality" day care, Mr...

...Woe to her who actually picks the copy of Cosmo out of the supermarket rack and opens it for a quick look...

...through uniting with the opposite sex, we confirm our own gender...

...That means to restore sex to the marriage bed and to the family...

...A s we veterans of checkout-line literary browsing know, the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine is its best feature: a streaming-haired goddess in glittery décolletage flanked by columns of teasing headlines...

...But tout it I will...

...Both were obviously models, not actors, incapable of simulating the slightest passion for each other...

...B Miss Gallagher also makes clear 1. 0 that libertarian conservatives bear a good deal of the blame...

...We now take it for granted that pregnancy, unless carefully planned, is an unpleasant "accidental" by-product of intercourse, like syphilis...

...Strangely enough, concomitant with this view of human nature as fundamentally genderless is a thoroughgoing contempt—on the part of both men and women—for all that is feminine...

...High on the list of Miss Gallagher's "enemies" is obviously the feminist revolution...

...T he primary thrust of the cataclys- 1 mic social changes of the late twentieth century has been to sever for women this vital link between female sexuality and motherhood...

...For women, sex is tied up with love over the long term because, as Miss Gallagher points out, it is tied up with the bearing of children...

...Now, how can I get out of here...

...But Miss Gallagher catalogues numerous other ways in which our culture systematically penalizes, degrades, impoverishes, and endangers women who are or want to be mothers: the all-prevalent expectation that a young woman will spend most of her fertile years living with a man or series of men who have no intention of marrying her...

...Maggie Gallagher calls for the restoration of the powerful and proper place of sex as the "desire of one's body for the soul of another human being," the "longing to break the boundaries of the flesh altogether, to incarnate love...

...This was sex Cosmostyle: a medicinal text supplemented by a photo-illustration that could double as an ad for Victoria's Secret...

...All other differences between the sexes are said to be strictly cultural, the end product of millennia of dread patriarchal repression...

...while the man thinks, "That was great...

...The bonds of family are utterly involuntary...

...Nonetheless, we women secretly enjoy the sight of our Neanderthals sprawling brutishly on the couch of a Sunday afternoon cursing at the Super Bowl—they're so cute...

...Guess which sex has won hands down with each of these cultural changes...

...We live now in the lonely world they have made for us: hard on women, hard on children, and hard too, finally, on men...

...Without a social framework that frowns on women's easy dispensation of sexual favors outside of marriage, that expects marriage itself to last a lifetime, honors the homemaker and mother in the same way it honors the earner of a six-figure income, and severely censures the man who deserts his wife and children, the status of women will continue to fall and the consequences of family breakdown—"feminized" poverty, crime, juvenile delinquency, adolescent depression, and child abuse—will continue to rise...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 47...

...But these days, we are obliged to pretend something else: that what we really are is androgynous spirits who happen by chance to be poured into a body that comes in two models, male and female...

...Now they, like all other women young and old, must have "careers...

...18.95 Charlotte Low Allen 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 elderly...

...Charlotte Low Allen is a senior editor of Insight...

...But even more devastating has been the sexual revolution, which is based on the premise that the sexual appetites of men and women are identical and interchangeable...

...it is where, as Miss Gallagher paraphrases Robert Frost, "when you have to go there, they have to take you in...

...The fact that abortionequalizing" the consequences of conception by killing the offspring that has already bonded with its mother's body—is the only socially acceptable solution for a woman facing an "unwanted" pregnancy is the starkest, most overtly nihilistic manifestation of this trend...

...Moms, and so forth...

...Maggie Gallagher is talking about what she calls Eros—what makes sex sexy, that is, important and not trivial...

...And men themselves have been quite unamenable to re-education, their heads turning atavistically when a young thing strolls by, her sexual differences exaggerated by high heels, tumbling curls, and dangling earrings...

...sex that leads to babies is sexier than sterile sex" is Miss Gallagher's explanation for why contraceptives seem so often not to work...

...Romantic love, the erotic longing for union, these are pale reflections of the intimacy that a woman actually experiences holding her baby in her arms," writes Miss Gallagher...

...She was straddling him, but her real purpose seemed to be to show off the silky piece of lingerie she was wearing...

...Sex is a living pathway of connection," she writes, "an intricate web of desire thatends not with orgasm but with children, families, communities, and nations...

...the insistence that women with young children work outside the home, exhausting themselves and neglecting the little ones...

...Farther down in the piece, several psychologists opined how everyone has a different level of sexual fulfillment but all levels are equally healthy...

...Liberalism's chief boast is that it has transformed relationships that used to be based on status into relationships based strictly on contract, on bargain...

...As with the feminist revolution, what this really means is that women ought to behave sexually just as men do (or try to do when women let them get away with it...

...The family is, of course, the paradigm of the relationship that ,cannot and should not be contractualized...

...The female body is generally smaller and smoother, less fleet of foot and strong of arm, and it comes with breasts, but it lives longer...