Bridget Clones and middle-aged moralizers: Sex wars

Really, it's a wonder that we're able to reproduce. This chap recounts his dating misadventures, and he's bitter. Very bitter. But funny, too.

Then there was the colleague from work. We went out for a drink and the following day I had two e-mails and a phone message waiting for me at my desk. It was a bit much first thing in the morning, I have to say.

Nonetheless, I was just about to pick up the phone and call when it rang again. It was her, asking me to meet her at the lifts.

When I did so, she thrust an envelope in my hands, and then turned on her heel and flounced off. Inside was a poem she had written for me entitled "My Ego", in which she described me as her "second skin" and "man of her dreams".

I couldn't run away quick enough. This was more bunny-boiler than femme fatale.

Then there's Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield's attack on modern women's “polymorphous promiscuity.”

“Hook ups,” the perennially-dapper professor said, “will get you in a bad habit that is very hard to get rid of.”

“By the age of 30, you see men,” he cautioned, “who are used to getting free samples” and will not enter into loyal, reliable relationships. Citing evolutionary biology research, Mansfield said that “men are interested in quantity, and women are interested in quality.”

“Women play the men’s game, which they are bound to lose. Without modesty, there is no romance—it isn’t so attractive or so erotic,” said the professor.

This has earned him the wrath of feminists and the scorn of Meghan O'Rourke.

The need to tell young women how to behave often comes over middle-aged men—it's an itch right up there with buying a flashy new car. And Mansfield's case for modesty is merely a new version of, say, Leon Kass' argument in "The End of Courtship," a 1997 article currently posted on the Public Interest Web site, which I happened to stumble across after reading Mansfield's remarks. One similarity between them is particularly worth note. Mansfield and Kass don't suggest that female sexual activity is immoral or wrong. They suggest that it makes women unhappy: "Young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused," Kass writes, voicing an avuncular worry about our "grim" lives. Like Mansfield, he goes on to express concern that contemporary sexuality isn't morally but erotically bankrupt. The best sex, he argues, is stimulated by reading poets like Shelley, and, "if properly sublimated, is transformable into genuine and lofty longings—not only for love and romance but for all the other higher human yearnings." Reading these two pieces back to back, one finds oneself envisioning conservative elders gathered over brunch with teary-eyed twentysomethings, Sex and the City-style, nodding and patting hands: I feel your pain, honey, they soothe. And I'll tell you how to really get your groove on. First, go get a ring.

Judging by our dating friend's reactions to modern women, however, Mansfield may have a point. What do you think? Any dispatches from the sex wars you'd like to share?