Butchering quotations or taking things out of context quotes is unfair, but when the the butchered text is then ridiculed further, the unfairness tends to be compounded. So it was with great interest that I followed Glenn Reynolds' "ridicule and ellipsis" link to Eugene Volokh's take on a WaPo book review which butchered the author's words until they looked ridiculous enough to ridicule, then ridiculed them for looking ridiculous!

The book in question is Laura Sessions Stepp's Unhooked, and as Volokh makes clear, the butchery of the quote renders her thought almost incoherent.

Here's the mangled (and subsequently ridiculed) WaPo quote:

Your body is your property.... Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?

Your body is your property. No one has a right to enter unless you welcome them in. Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you? Is your body worth less than a house?

The second sentence (the omission of which the Post noted with the ellipses) explains why we're talking about nonconsensual rock-throwing. In this paragraph, the author seems not to be faulting fully consensual, enthusiastic casual sex, but rather casual sex of the sort that is at least not entirely welcome (a characteristic that I take it the author thinks is not uncommon in casual sex). Many young women, the author is suggesting, let men have sex with them even though they do not fully "welcome them in," perhaps because they feel pressured by the man or by social expectations. Not-fully-welcome sex is not the same as rock-throwing, but at least the analogy is closer than it is between presumably enthusiastic "hooking up" and rock-throwing.

The fourth sentence (which is also omitted in the Post review, though conventions of quotation allow the omission not to be marked with ellipses) then tries to tie the body with the house: They aren't the same (for instance, in the sense that they're both great places to have a party), but rather they're both valuable, and your body is if anything even more valuable. Again, not a terribly convincing metaphor, but not as zany or worthy of derision as some might think. Among other things, try the lampoon quoted above on the whole paragraph:

The broken window analogy (to a woman's loss of virginity) is hardly new. Ask anyone who studied art history.

There's Bouguereau's Broken Pitcher, Greuze's Broken Pitcher, and I even found a cute little narrative about the subject coming up in an art history class:

She is actually relieved to be in Art History discussing Greuze's Broken Pitcher, even if there are idiots in her class. The girl with the jewel-encrusted crucifix obscuring all her other features insistently claims the girl in the painting signifies the masses, and the broken pitcher is their broken relationship with Christ. The cocky guy who has missed half the classes since joining his frat, is spinning the class all off on a tangent somehow connecting the broken pitcher to unemployment rates during the Great Depression. Stupid.

Sighing, she is patient, sighing again and again as she digests her so-called peers' comments and systematically discards their worth. The class wallows in a pit of circular reasoning. Just as she is about to reach her limit and set them all straight, the teacher says, "What if it's about sex? What if the pitcher is her virginity?"

Silence blooms. Her classmates look at each other, some giggling.

It's tough to unwrite Art History, but I'm sure they're working on it.

Although times have changed (along with, fortunately, the consequences of lost virginity), this is not complicated stuff. To understand it does not involve social conservatism, nor is it necessarily about morality. (I think it's more about mechanics, laws of physics, coupled with basic self awareness.) It's just that on this one key point, there is a huge difference between men and women. A Basic. Biological. Difference. (Sorry if I plagiarized your technique, Rachel Lucas, wherever you are.) Mechanically and from a mental perspective, sex is just very different for the two sexes. It's inherently more special for women than for men, and that's reflected in the nature of the way the gametes are both presented and delivered. One egg released per month versus hundreds of millions of sperm cells released for every male ejaculation. The rare and precious versus the common; the internal versus the external.

Because of the mechanics involved in sexual penetration, the loss of virginity in women is accomplished by the breaking of something which can never be restored as it once was. The "loss" of virginity in men, on the other hand, is not a loss, but a gain. A man's first sexual experience involves a physical venturing out and a penetration into a hitherto unknown area, into which an invading army of tiny millions is released. The accomplishment of this act for the first time is a demonstration to the man that his reproductive system is functional and working properly. In this regard, it makes no sense to speak in terms of a "loss" of male "virginity"; it is actually a gain of a new skill, one which is required if he is to do it again. Thus, what has been "broken" for the woman has, for the man, been "fixed."

I don't think it's complicated at all. I just don't think most people are comfortable recognizing any reality which goes to the difference between the sexes.

As to what is going on in the mind in the mental or moral sense, that's more complicated. The WaPo reviewer touches on a favorite subject of Classical Values, and that is sexual shame:

In the final chapter, Stepp writes a letter to mothers and daughters, in which she warns the girls: "Your body is your property. . . . Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?" And: "Pornographic is grinding on the dance floor like a dog in heat. It leaves nothing to the imagination." The ugliness of these images seems meant to instill sexual shame.

But I have one question for the WaPo writer. Since when is a dog in heat (actually, it should be "bitch in heat") an ugly image? The reason I'm asking is because I'm harboring a bitch in heat right now, and Coco does not take kindly to being called ugly by the MSM! She's not ugly, and she leaves plenty to the imagination. Well, maybe not when she's waving her little vagina around and her tail curls and the coat of hair on her butt gets all wrinkly and slitherers forward in anticipation of a tie-up. But even that is not without it's charm, at least for a shameless relativist like me. The bottom line is that Coco is not ugly, and I don't consider any of this shameful. (Although I suspect the WaPo might be trying to shame Ms. Stepp.)

I keep saying that what we call the Culture War is really a war over sex, because I think it is. At the heart of that, though, is a war over sexual shame. While I don't know whether Ms. Stepp is trying to instill feelings of sexual shame as the Post says, I do know that plenty of people are very frustrated by the absence of sexual shame in others.

The problem is, as I keep saying, you can't feel what you don't have, nor can you expect that if you're disgusted with something, that others will share your disgust. Sometimes, I think there's on one "side" a demand that others not be disgusted by things which disgust them, while on the other "side" there's an equally shrill demand that they be disgusted by things that don't disgust them.

Right now though, I'm feeling a little disgusted by the lack of honesty in the way this argument is being addressed, because it just isn't being addressed. People yell at each other's tastes or what they perceive as a lack thereof, and they don't even seem to realize that what they're doing is demanding not accommodation or tolerance of their tastes or disgusts, but a sharing of them. While this strikes me as an unreasonable argument, there's no way to discuss whether it's a reasonable argument if people aren't even aware that it is in fact an argument.

Take Leon Kass's wisdom of repugnance. Please!

No seriously, let's take it, because I've devoted time to it and gotten not very far. There is no question that sexual shame varies from person to person, as do sexual tastes. From a previous post, here's Martha Nussbaum, interviewed by Reason's Julian Sanchez:

Unlike anger, disgust does not provide the disgusted person with a set of reasons that can be used for the purposes of public argument and public persuasion. If my child has been murdered and I am angry at that, I can persuade you that you should share those reasons; if you do, you will come to share my outrage. But if someone happens to feel that gay men are disgusting, that person cannot offer any reasoning that will persuade someone to share that emotion; there is nothing that would make the dialogue a real piece of persuasion.

Reason: As a follow up, can you say something about how that cashes out into a critique of communitarian ideals?

Nussbaum: The prominent defenders of the appeal to disgust and shame in law have all been communitarians of one or another stripe ([Lord] Devlin, [Amitai] Etzioni, Kass), and this, I claim, is no accident. What their thought shares is the idea that society ought to have at its core a homogeneous group of people whose ways of living, of having sex, of looking and being, are defined as "normal." People who deviate from that norm may then be stigmatized, and penalized by law, even if their conduct causes no harm. That was the core of Lord Devlin's idea, and it is endorsed straightforwardly by Etzioni, and, in a rather different way, and in a narrower set of contexts, by Kass. My study of disgust and shame shows that these emotions threaten key values of a liberal society, especially equal respect for people and for their liberty. Disgust and shame are inherently hierarchical; they set up ranks and orders of human beings. They are also inherently connected with restrictions on liberty in areas of non-harmful conduct. For both of these reasons, I believe, anyone who cherishes the key democratic values of equality and liberty should be deeply suspicious of the appeal to those emotions in the context of law and public policy.

Denial of reality has a way of annoying me, but it's even more annoying when it's done in the name of reality.

But I think there's something more going on than denial. I think the attempt to tar Ms. Stepp with the accusation that she's fostering sexual shame obscures something else which Eugene Volokh mentioned, and that is the pressure of what he calls "social expectations."

From the Amazon book description:

In Unhooked, Stepp follows three groups of young women (one in high school, one each at Duke and George Washington universities). She sat with them in class, socialized with them, listened to them talk, and came away with some disturbing insights, including that hooking up carries with it no obligation on either side. Relationships and romance are seen as messy and time-consuming, and love is postponed-or worse, seen as impossible. Some young women can handle this, but many can't, and they're being battered-physically and emotionally-by the new dating landscape. The result is a generation of young people stymied by relationships and unsure where to turn for help.

Is it possible that not wanting to have sex might be considered shameful in some circles? Might there be a stigma attached to virginity?

Apparently, there is. And it didn't take me long to find it. Here's the (U Va) Cavalier Daily's Kate Durbin:

Having or abstaining from sex is a personal decision. Like drinking alcohol or eating meat, it is a choice that each person must make for him or herself, free from the pressures of peers and society in general. No reason need be given as to why someone chooses to abstain from sex, just as no reason need be given when someone chooses not to consume alcohol. Personal decisions are just that -- personal. They should be respected as such. Virgins, angered by the negativity surrounding their choices, should seek to change societal attitudes instead of spending time enumerating the reasons they chose to be a virgin.

[...]

....if society is really so open when it comes to sex, why is it that virginity remains such a curse for those college students choosing it? For whatever reason, abstaining from sex has somehow come to be a socially isolating factor, making virgins feel like their choices are somehow viewed as wrong.

As long as current attitudes about sexual choices persist, refraining from sex will continue to be seen as some kind of problem. Having sex or not having sex is a personal choice. This fact must be accepted and respected by our generation.

Oh the irony!

I don't know how typical the above complaint is (there's more, of course, and it seems to be a response to another column poking fun at virgins), but as someone who is against sexual shame, I try to at least be consistent about it, and it strikes me that shaming virginity is just as bad as shaming the loss of it. And why the refusal to acknowledge that it's a different thing for men and women?

I can't help but wonder whether the deliberate disregard of the differences between the sexes might be another form of sexual shame.