Photo by Flickr user xinekite. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors, who as a law professor hangs around mainly with people who ought to know better, actually ran into an... um... highly non-distinguished gentleman.

"Who will buy a cow if the milk is free?" These are the words that a man (age 60+) spoke in my presence about the plans of a younger woman (age 20+) to live with her boyfriend without getting engaged or married. The words made me nauseous.

Women are not like cows. Sex is not like milk.

She said it here.

I'm actually not sure who to feel more sorry for, Prof. Crawford, who merely has to endure his continuing existence in passing, or her communicant who for his entire life will have to wonder about that strange guy who's always staring out of that shiny flat thing behind the bathroom sink and looks just like him.

Actually that persistent little cow meme drives me totally up the wall! And consequently I'm rarely able to explain the problem as well, or as patiently, as does Crawford.

Viewed in an historic context, marriage has been the legally- and socially-sanctioned means by which women exchange access to their bodies for physical and/or economic security. As the cow analogy goes, then, a man has no interest in protecting (i.e., marrying) a woman from whom he receives "free" (i.e., non-marital) sex.

Interestingly, Crawford cites two authors who claim to be feminists who consider the idea of sex as something women don't want that can, however, be bargained for something else they do want as a laudable development! until the snow melts in the Spring.

In Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex (1998), self-identified feminists Linda Hirschman and Jane Larson suggest that "by forcing the stronger player to bargain with the weaker for an explicit consent, we begin to ensure mutuality as a condition for all adult sexual exchanges." Viewed this way, sex is a commodity that may be more or less "mutual," depending on the relative strength of the parties' bargaining positions.

At this point do I even need to mention that kind of claim gone so far off-course into the dominant male paradigm of women as the "no-sex" class that the Civil Air Patrol and Coast Guard have both called off further searches for it till Spring? It's bad enough when men fall for that load of baloney. That any feminist, even a doctrinaire 2nd-waver, would still accept it, let alone applaud it, is... well... unacceptable!

And once again Crawford explains more gracefully than I

In my view, in relationships of near-as-possible economic and emotional parity, sex can fall on any point on a continuum from unilateral giving to unilateral taking. For some of us, our experiences cluster in the middle. For some of us, our experiences do not. But in the relationships I describe, sex occurs rarely at one extreme, the precise midpoint or even a fixed point at all. It is something we give. It is something we take.

Sex is not like milk. Women are not like cows.

In other words, between social and economic equals sex can be about, well, sex! Not an alienated exchange of one non-actually-a-commodity (an individual's body) for another non-a-commodity-either (a socially contrived economic or physical "security" that's appealing if and only if someone else is unable to achieve it on his or her own.)

And notice also that between equals sex doesn't have to be the precisely metered, balanced, and accounted for unisex sex envisioned by a very small subset of feminists in the 1970s (and squalled about ever since by legions of anti-feminists.) Because in the 1970s none but the most incredibly visionary feminists could see past the dire economic necessity that today we would call the glass floor where women earned 55 cents on the dollar and generally couldn't enter into any contract or obtain credit without the co-signature of a custodial male.

Instead, as Crawford puts it so nicely, " sex occurs rarely at one extreme, the precise midpoint or even a fixed point at all. It is something we give. It is something we take."

Sex is not like milk. Women are not like cows. In fact, 10th Commandment ("...nor his wife, nor his cattle...") notwithstanding, men are not like farmers either. And so sex is not something always bought! It is not something always sold.

Update: I just realized who I feel more sorry for... the guy's wife!