Power … Freedom … Sex … Consciousness

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/opinion/sex-women-feminism-rules.html

Reading that is poignant for me … because I was a big fan of her parents.

They were about a half-generation older than me. I used to go see Stanley religiously every year keynoting the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York.

Nona’s mother, Ellen Willis, died young at 64. She was a writer and a feminist pioneer. Richard Goldstein said that “Ellen, Emma Goldman, and Abbie Hoffman were part of a lost tradition — radicals of desire.”

Nona’s article shows what seemed to take us a lifetime to understand: Adult relationships and human sexuality are very complex, far from straightforward or tractable.

It took us a lifetime to understand because as we came of age during the sixties and seventies there seemed to be Answers to age-old questions and issues. That mindset threw off Ellen Willis, Stanley Aronowitz, and then, again, their daughter.

* * * *

We did have significant insights. And we had a sense of context: the insights were based on advances in consciousness from the fog of religious obscurantism.

We read books: Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein. Theodore Roszak. Simone de Beauvoir.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism

Critical insights. We had a sense that they led in an Enlightened direction … a higher level of sophistication about many issues: sexuality, psychic repression, social oppression, gender roles, enculturation, the human condition. We had aspirations toward Figuring It All Out. We were excited about a generational movement that would do it all differently, better.

But the complexities of the issues went deeper than we could imagine. The human condition is thornier.

Now we are (or should be) chastened. It’s disappointing to see the malaise of Nona’s generation. Not to mention our own.

What happened to feminism is indicative of what happened to our generation.

* * * *

Much, much still to be learned from the Great Chastening.

This doesn’t constitute a reason to become cynical. Just to appreciate the complexity.