Summary: This post is about the objectively stupid claim that feminism makes Sweden a really bad place to be an even modestly considerate sexually active heterosexual man. Sweden!

Question: Which of the following three items is not like the other ones?

Item #1: According to this Time Magazine archive article from 1964!:

Sweden, which generally plays it lightly, last week was in an uproar about sex. The cause was a petition of protest to King Gustav VI Adolf signed by 140 eminent Swedish physicians, including the King's own doctor. Their plea to the monarch and to the government: take swift steps to stop sexual laxity, which "is a menace to the vitality and health of the nation."

For years, in Sweden, premarital intercourse has been widely condoned, and the government provides legal abortions when deemed "in the mother's interest." The result, warned the doctors, has been a tide of extramarital pregnancies and mounting venereal disease—with most of the victims young people. Sweden's gonorrhea rate has jumped 75% in five years, and of last year's new cases, 52% were among teenagers.

Reform Talk. The physicians placed the blame squarely on Sweden's schools, where sex education starts in the first grade, pointing out that young minds —unless taught differently—can confuse instruction with encouragement. Arguing that "chastity in no way is harmful to health," the doctors declared that "monogamous marriage [with] common responsibility for the children, is the natural order of life." In sum, the doctors urged schools to teach "what is right and wrong."

Source: Time Magazine: March 06, 1964

And item #2: And in early 2009 Kommissarie F. Curiosa of Sweden's English-language The Local said

With one of the highest birth rates in Europe, the Swedes seem to be pretty prolific when it comes to making babies, but even after six plus years of living in Stockholm, I'm still not sure how Swedish relationships actually happen.

The only obvious explanation seems to be massive quantities of alcohol. In other words, Swedish babies wouldn't exist without Finnish booze cruises and Systembolaget.

In recent months, The Local has reported that Swedes are much less inclined than their European counterparts to spend vast sums of cash in their efforts to find a mate. This didn't surprise me at all. That's because they spend it all on alcohol trying to get themselves drunk enough to talk to a member of the opposite sex.

I know that it will seem ungrateful to be accusing my host country of being a nation of stingy alcoholics, and I'll be the first to admit that a few drinks can be a fantastic social lubricant. It's probably also a case of “it's not the Swedes, it's me,” but Swedish mating and dating rituals (and usually in that order) appear to be a very slow process that go nowhere (except the bedroom) fast.

In a nutshell, it goes something like this:

A) Meet at a mutual friend's party.

B) Get really, really drunk.

C) Make out. Sex is optional.

D) If you're lucky, you are sober enough to save the other person's telephone number in your mobile, AND to put it under the correct name.

E) Send a text message along the lines of "last night was nice. Shall we have a coffee sometime?"

F) Spend hours analyzing the various ways in which aforementioned text message could be misinterpreted. Get your friends involved.

Source: The Local

Item #3: Via of Echidne of the Snakes

Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism. I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism. -- Julian Assange

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

Yeah, Sweden's such a "feminist Saudi Arabia" that Assange was easily able to hook up for casual sex with two separate, consenting Swedish women in less than 24 hours.

My understanding, actually, is that it's approximately as easy to have heterosexual sex in Sweden as it is to have gay male sex in San Francisco. I.e. pretty bloody easy. And for approximately the same reasons: however many class or income barriers might exist in San Francisco, since everybody having gay male sex is... well... male. And so on a gender level they're pretty much going to treat each other as sexual equals.

The intent of all those ferocious Swedish feminists is to... create an environment where sexual equality between heterosexuals there is as routine as is equality between homosexuals here.

M'kay. Now. Let's posit a little scenario. One that takes the San Francisco analogy a little further. Let's say Julian Assange is gay instead of straight. And let's say Assange had dropped into San Francisco instead of Stockholm last year. And let's say Assange hooked up with an anally topped two men in 24 hours. And let's say that in one case he "accidentally" neglected to use a condom, and in the other case he didn't use a condom when, after properly condomed sex he penetrated his partner a second time without a condom while the partner was asleep.

In those circumstances would a hypothetically gay Assange's male partners have any cause for complaint? Fucking right they would! In fact I believe in quite a few states they could file criminal charges, and in a few others prosecutors might file charges even if the partners themselves said it was no big deal.

Here's the even bigger trick, though. If these hypothetical partners of a condom-tossing Assange kicked up a fuss would we say "oh boy, are those gay guys politically correct?" Would we call them militant homosexualist? Would we call California, or New York, or... Illinois, Missouri, or Oklahoma(!) militantly homosexualist for their "knowing transmission" laws? Why that would be no.

With that little thought experiment out of the way, what do Assange's antics look like now? A charismatic if somewhat narcissistic young man kites into Sweden, easily arranges consensual sex with two women (at least! remember only two women complained!) And due to their intensely egalitarian upbringing the young women felt as comfortable hooking up for sex with a man as a gay man in San Francisco would. But also like San Francisco men those women expected to be treated with equal consideration.

And when all he did was skip condoms when he, and they, knew he was sperm-positive and could knowingly transmit pregnancy they went all "feminist Saudi Arabia" on him?

Dudes! Do you have any idea what kind of heterosexual casual-sex paradise America, England, or, say, Germany would be with the kind of "feminist Saudi Arabia" values Assange was carping about?

Seriously?

Sweden?

Still not convinced? Let's put it another way then, hmm. Let's say you're a sex-loving heterosexual in a culture where casual heterosexual liaisons between social equals are as easy as arranging casual gay ones because by both custom and law all parties, women and men, have equivalent or equal degrees of faith and trust in the system. Then along comes some coarse Aussie dork who's used to the idea of sex as something that has to be purchased, extorted or otherwise "scored" off of women... and he thinks that's a good thing because any sheila who didn't have to be extorted into sex is either a slut or a whore. Oh yeah, and he thinks it's of zero consequence to him if he gives a sex partner a STI or an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy and when he gets to your town instead of picking up on the handful of social rules and basic hygiene that keep your very-mutually-beneficial sex lives humming smoothly he basically goes out of his way to avoid using condoms even when his partners expect him to use them.

Even if for some reason you didn't think this was unacceptable behavior on strictly egalitarian grounds would you be happy with this guy peeing in the community water supply like that? No. You'd want him called out on the carpet so fast his comb-over toupee would still be hanging in midair like Wylie Coyote.

Now. Does this have any bearing on whether the charges against Assange are trumped up? No, not really. If Sweden's applying it's laws unevenly that's a nuisance. But is there a problem with the laws themselves? I'd argue, forcefully, that for sex-loving heterosexuals, particularly for sex-loving male heterosexuals the answer has to be no. Because, seriously, Sweden? We're talking about a country where (according to the aforementioned post from The Local) it's far more common to fret about asking for a romantic date after the third time you've had sex than vice versa! And you know one of the biggest reasons it's so easy to have that kind of casual sex in Sweden? Because feminism won! Assange just didn't get the memo and thought he could treat Swedish women like the 2nd-class pieces of shit Australians grow up getting away with. And he got busted for it. (I'll ask the question once again: what possible incentive would even deeply anti-feminist Swedes have for letting foreigners screw up their sexual gravy trains? None? Right in one.)

Kasheesh! Like we should all have those problems Swedish men have!

In a perfectly lovely, long post on complications of our casual understanding of the term “casual sex” Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones shines a bright spotlight on what’s got to be the biggest source of wariness about it (italic emphasis mine, bold emphasis hers.)

But before I get to sex, I need to talk about not-sex, because that has a lot to do with my visceral reactions to what people call, variously, “casual sex,” “one-night stands,” “hookups,” “flings,” “no strings attached,” etc. In particular, I’m thinking of a particular kind of not-sex: the stream of not particularly welcome overtures, from people not particularly willing to care about my response, that started with the obscene phone call from an apparently adult man when I was just a kid, including the guy who tried to grab me on the street when I was still not quite legal, the shouts in the street from groups of men, the drunk at the swimming pool whose wife kept apologizing for him, etc. Because the thing about these unwelcome, uninvited, boundary pushing approaches is that, though the men making them were very much a minority among the men I met in general, they were a much larger set of the men who were approaching me for no strings sex.

You’d probably enjoy reading the whole thing, here.

Mild-reflex reservations aside (reflex says it sounds like she’s stereotyping, reflection says not) I think this is the $64,000 problem. There really are at least two types of people interested in “casual sex” and one of those two types is very different from the other one.

Fairly or unfairly, it’s very, very easy to see how involvement, even glancing involvement, with individuals from one group could make you wary about the whole approach.

Lynn really crystalized the difference.

The flip and/or “sex positive” solution is to say stuff like “well, it’s unfair to judge my intentions by the actions of of others.” This is perfectly true — thus my mention of reflex reservations, above.

It’s also, unfortunately, 100% victim-blaming.

So it occurs to me that if you enjoy the idea of casual sex then it’s your responsibility to challenge, aggressively and consistently, the actions and intentions not of the victims but of the perpetrators.

You see a guy cat-calling someone from a window? Hear a guy in a dorm, frat, office, or party talking about spiking the punch with odorless/tasteless PGA, let alone roofies? You hear someone saying “cash, grass, or ass, nobody rides for free?” You see someone with a “shut up and suck” t-shirt? You see someone not taking no for an answer whether out of cluelessness, drunkenness, eagerness, privilege, arrogance, impatience, or barely-suppressed rage at the entire class of people they’re sexually oriented towards? You hear someone running someone else down for their weight, or for their body parts, or their (real or hypothesized) sexual behaviors or proclivities, someone referencing another strictly in terms of their sexual utility instead of their humanity? You see or hear any of that you’re not just seeing the oppression of their intended victim. You’re seeing your own oppression.

By convention you don’t have to do or say anything when you see that kind of oppression. But don’t imagine it has nothing to do with you.

Sungold of Kittywampus has written an awesome analysis of the relationship of feminism and the “sexual revolution.” It’s part of a larger post trying to explain this persistent and knuckleheaded notion that “casual sex” and the entire hook-up culture is a direct result of feminism. Here’s the key part of her “Feminism, Sexual Revolution, and ‘Getting the Milk for Free’”

Where Amy and other anti-feminists blame feminism for bringing on the sexual revolution and leading directly to the shattering of young female psyches, the history is much more complicated, and most of it has little to do with feminism. Heartbreak goes back at least as far as Sir Lancelot and Lady Guinevere. The sexual revolution on the 1960s had its roots in youth culture, drugs, and rock and roll. The advent of the birth control pill in 1961 enabled young women to try out sex – whether in hippie communes, bars or with a committed boyfriend – without fear of pregnancy paralyzing their pleasure.

Second-wave feminism was generally chilly toward the sexual revolution, at least as most young heterosexuals were experiencing it in the 1960s and 1970s. Nowhere in The Feminist Mystique did Betty Friedan suggest that the path to women’s liberation required shagging anything that moves. By 1970, Anne Koedt was assailing men’s sexual incompetence in “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.“ The Redstockings saw men as well-nigh irredeemable; why would you want to sleep with the enemy? While the Redstockings Manifesto (1969) didn’t go so far as to repudiate all relations with men, within a few years political lesbianism and separatism became a major current within feminism. Needless to say, none of these women were advocating casual sex with men, either. Third-wave feminism has generally repudiated separatism and criticized slut-shaming, but that’s not the same as positively advocating hookups and casual sex for all women.

Where feminism made a difference was, of course, in opening up historically new educational and economic opportunities for women. These made it possible for women to defer marriage and to enjoy sex without bartering it for economic security. This, to my mind, was the real sexual revolution. It’s just not the one people mean when they blame feminism for the failings of the hookup scene.

So yes, in a materialist sense, feminism enabled casual sex. But more importantly in the long run, feminism has opened the possibility of for us (men and women alike) to have sex only when we want to, not under duress, and not for economic security or survival. In a perfectly feminist world, no one would stay married against their will, for example, or submit to a spouse’s unwanted advances. We don’t live in that world yet. Plenty of people stay married for economic reasons. (Some of them are men.)

For those of us who aren’t trapped by economics, feminism allows us to say no to the sex we don’t want, and an enthusiastic, lusty, happy yes to the sex we do want. That’s revolutionary, all right. It’s just not identical with “the sexual revolution.” It’s also antithetical to the idea that anyone needs to participate in hooking up.

Read the quote in context here.

It’s totally fine to stop right here. One of the peculiarities of reading text is that my reaction, which follows, can seem like an immediate reaction to what Sungold wrote. It’s not. I’ve been thinking about it, a lot, for several days. Nor is the following text likely to be my final reaction. If you want to read the rest of this post feel free to read it as a snapshot. And not necessarily any more relevant than a pundit’s color commentary on an original work.

—-

For the record, by all accounts “hook-up” culture predates the 1960. I’m sure people can chase the beginning as far back as they like.** Suffice to say, though, that since sociologists estimated that one in three first pregnancies in the decidedly non-feminist 1950s were conceived in the backs of cars I’m going to say the only “revolution” part of the sexual revolution was that men didn’t have to worry as much about getting their hook-ups pregnant. So nope, no particular feminism=casual-sex hookup connection there.

Sungold didn’t mention Andrea Dworkin but, yeah, from roughly 1968 (the Redstocking Manifesto) to 1986 (Dworkin and MacKinnon’s testimony before Ed Meese’s Attorney General’s Report on Pornography taskforce) mainstream feminism was more interested in curtailing men’s sense of innate entitlement to sex with women than encouraging hookups. So nope, no particular feminism=casual-sex hookup connection there either. (Yes, there was dissent in feminism let by 70s stalwarts like Erica Jong and 3rd-wave vanguards like Susie Bright, but note the implication of the standard definitions of “mainstream” and “dissent.”)

And through all that the (frustratingly slow, multi-generational) accumulation of social, political, economic, and legal power led to an alteration of expectation of equal power in feminism (even if not yet exactly or always reality of equal power) resulted in members of newer generations feeling… well… entitled to make their own damn decisions about who, what, when, where, how, why and if they have sex. Or work, go to school, walk, worship, eat, drink, play, think, make mistakes or fail, vote, reproduce, spend, date, marry, volunteer, read…

Of course there really are people who think that entitlement make decisions a big mistake. And there are plenty of people who would dearly, dearly like to roll that back — either out of fear or cultural fundamentalism. And for them, surprise, women having Teh Sex would seem like the biggest affront…

But here’s the trick with that: the actual “sexual revolution” was about only one thing and that was, basically, attempting to eliminate as many obstacles to women granting “consent” as possible. And while it might have had some interesting and productive side effects that’s about it.*** So I’m going to say that contemporary anti-feminist objections to the “sexual revolution” are actually part and parcel of the culture that produced it.

Meanwhile feminism has indeed produced a revolution. But as Sungold so elegantly lays out, sexual activity is something closer to a side effect… and “as well,” rather than the main event. And for all the residual sexual-revolution echos about “obtaining consent,” or even “obtaining enthusiastic consent,” the real revolution of feminism is about being able to decide. Where the decision can include sex but isn’t limited to it.

Oh, another thing? As Sungold says, unlike the “sexual revolution” the feminist revolution is not limited to creating more consent… to sex initiated by men. Including “casual sex” and “hookups.” The feminist revolution is about women’s power to decide to participate. Or (the big threat to anti-feminists and an even bigger threat to the “sexual revolution”) not to.

Failure to distinguish the difference between the “sexual revolution” and the feminist revolution is not limited, by the way, to anti-feminists.

[** My vote for the beginning of the sexual revolution has always been the introduction not of the pill in the 1950s or 1960s but of penicillin in the 1940s. Remember that until herpes and then HIV reached critical mass in the 1980s antibiotics handily cured all significant STDs, reducing them from serious chronic and often life-threatening illnesses to minor nuisance. —fl]

[** Consider that “but you’re not going to get pregnant now that you’ve got the pill” happens to be a very good excuse to grant consent. And the benefits of being able to manage one’s fertility beyond one’s ability to more safely consent to sex are manifold. But if you read most of the popular literature about the pill in the 1950s and 1960s anything that wasn’t about “regulating periods” or “controlling acne” was about enabling sex. Now why would this seem more women-centric? One clue would be that men (at least, and even women) didn’t start “discovering” things like “foreplay” and women’s orgasms till nearly a decade into the “revolution.” And I’d like to argue that that even that wasn’t as much about feminism as that the next factor limiting consent after pregnancy fear of pregnancy was women beginning to ask “so what’s in this for me anyway?” And even then, soon after that, in men’s eyes anyway, conversation about one’s ability to “give” orgasms became another metric of male prowess. Rather than, say, women’s opportunity, or affirmative, self-motivated interest in enjoying it more. (And people wonder why I call myself a prudish libertine!) —fl]

Melissa Gira of Sexerati: Smart Sex. quotes Dr. Gilbert D. Bartell, Ph.D., author of a 1971 book called Group Sex.

The trouble is that swingers often find themselves too busy; the rule is to swing only once with the same couple (so that no intimate, marriage-destroying relationships develop). Thus the search for “beautiful” or “great” (contrasted with “moldy”) partners is never ending. Eventually hours of the swingers’ waking day are spent on the phone or writing letters to make new contacts—or driving hundreds of miles to meet them.

Gira’s quoting someone else. Follow the links to the source starting here.

To be honest the old 60’s and 70’s-era “swingers” were messed up for other reasons having a lot to do with the cultural climate that allowed “wife swapping” to be used, accurately, as a synonym. But I remember hearing about, but hadn’t previously registered, that bit about trying not to repeat contacts as a means for avoiding intimacy.

Look, can we just take it as a given that there’s something a little odd about this ongoing, evidently timeless obsession with not getting emotionally tied up with one’s “hookups?”

I mean, compare that with Hannah of down the rabbit hole… assesses potential partners she might have a MFM threesome with

My current criteria – or one of them – for judging someone worthy of sleeping with is what I call the Breakfast Test. Meaning, if I can’t see myself sitting across from you at breakfast the next morning without watching the clock and wondering when the hell you’re going to leave, I’m not fucking you (probably not, anyway – there are always exceptions to any rule, after all). Besides, I want cuddling and breakfast in bed and maybe an encore if things feel right, and it’s been my experience that those thing are generally borne out of attraction and affection, not one night stands.

She said it here.

It seems to me that it’s not that leave-immediately hookup sex is bad or wrong, it’s just… well, it’s just as squeamish as the other way ‘round. Me? Like Hannah if I was going to have sex with anyone else I’d really really like to have sex with my friends — with people who, if I don’t entirely spend the night with afterwards I nevertheless might reconnect with the following evening for platonic (or mostly platonic — I’m not talking about “compartmentalization” here) conversation with each other’s families or with other friends. Y’know… friends with benefits!

Am I just talking out of my hat here or does that idea work, at least in principle, for you?