Losers of the sexual revolutionSydney Morning herald22 February, 2007By Miranda DevineNewly bald Britney Spears has checked herself back into rehab after a weekend of excessive partying and unsavoury exhibitionism, just another young woman self-destructing in front of our eyes.
There has been no sign of the 25-year-old singer's two young sons amid the crotch-flashing, mascara-smeared, vomit-specked nightclubbing that preceded her impulsive head-shave at a Los Angeles salon - an act psychologists have interpreted as an existential cry for help.
But Spears's meltdown is more than just her personal tragedy. Sexualised almost since her days as a Disney child star, she is the canary in the coalmine of troubled young womanhood.
As other celebrity car crashes - Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith - pile up, it is clear something is terribly wrong with the fairer sex.
Lohan, who has also flashed her shaven crotch at the paparazzi during partying binges, was last week spotted leaving an Los Angeles rehab clinic to go straight to a nightclub. Yet, like the sad minxes in Sex and the City, she has declared she just wants to get married and have a child.
As for Smith, who spent the last few years of her life in a substance-addled stupor before dying two weeks ago, aged 39, she had become a cartoon sex object, used and abused by everyone who came in contact with her. We watched helplessly, if we cared at all, as she committed slow suicide in public.
Spears inhabits the same space, her increasingly desperate exhibitionism, non-stop inebriation and casual couplings with numerous forgettable men chronicled in lascivious detail by gossip websites and magazines. We have so normalised self-destructive slutty behaviour that Spears's antics were considered the natural reaction of a young woman letting down her hair after a marriage breakdown.
Until it all got too much. One witness to the shearing scene claimed Spears said she was shaving her hair off because she was "sick of people touching her". One psychologist said the act was an attempt to repel male attention.
In a world saturated with pornography, when women treat themselves like sluts, why would men treat them any differently? Mutual respect between the sexes, romance and a legacy of chivalry by men entranced by the feminine mystique have been trashed in the name of female equality and sexual liberation.
Now Valentine's Day, once a time for love hearts, flowers and romantic cards, has been hijacked by radical feminists in the United States as V-Day - either a day to celebrate vaginas or to raise awareness of violence against women.
And judging by Cleo magazine, a one-night stand is almost elaborate courtship. Next month's Cleo catalogues a new sex trend: "The curiosity shag: dying to know what he's like in bed? This could be the way to find out. No strings attached." But the problem is, with women, there invariably are emotional strings attached to sexual encounters.
Evolutionary psychology is providing confirmation of what most people instinctively know - men are hard-wired to want more sex than women, more casual sex, more often, and with more partners, because there is an evolutionary advantage to spreading their sperm far and wide and fathering lots of children.
Women, who need nine months to produce a child, have no such biological imperative, goes the theory. Instead they are hard-wired to form emotional attachments with a male who will protect them and their children.
Launching straight into sex before even the first date was a hallmark of the sexual revolution, a way women could emulate men and jettison the emotional baggage of romantic love that had supposedly held them back for generations.
But no matter how hard they try to live up to the old feminist ideal of "zipless f---s", invariably women get hurt.
Take the celebrated "mile high club" scandal on Qantas. A flight attendant, Lisa Robertson, has told how she initiated sex with the actor Ralph Fiennes on a flight from Darwin to Mumbai, leading him into a toilet cubicle for a quickie.
"I'm going to have to kick you out now," Fiennes said suavely after a later rendezvous in his hotel room, according to the account of events she sold to the Daily Mail newspaper. "See you on the next Qantas flight." But for a woman who seems to embody the liberated female's attitude to casual sex, Robertson seemed overly concerned with feelings.
She said she had hoped the relationship would continue and was "hurt and disappointed" that Fiennes wouldn't support her when she was sacked. To Robertson "the experience was a lot more than just about sex". But men are wired differently. No amount of brainwashing and SNAG-ification will change that.
A study released this week by the American Psychological Association warned of the psychological harm being done to women by the increasing sexualisation of society.
"Sexualisation of girls is a broad and increasing problem," said the study, and it could cause psychological and physical harm to young women and girls as young as four. Imagery of "sexed-up" little girls and women posing as adolescents could lead to depression, eating disorders and poor academic performance.
If you ever needed proof that women were the losers in the sexual revolution here it is. It is time women seized back their inner prude.
Media articles are posted for the purpose of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under "fair use" provisions and may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owners, except for "fair use."
