"
IÂ’ve
written before, in the context of the abuse that female writers take online, about this poisoned stream’s potential origins. The Santa Barbara case hints at one such source — the tension between our culture’s official attitude toward sex on the one hand and our actual patterns of sexual and romantic life on the other.
The cultureÂ’s attitude is Hefnerism, basically, if less baldly chauvinistic than the original Playboy philosophy. Sexual fulfillment is treated as the source and summit of a life well lived, the thing without which nobody (from a carefree college student to a Cialis-taking senior) can be truly happy, enviable or free.
Meanwhile, social alternatives to sexual partnerships are disfavored or in decline: Virginity is for weirdos and losers, celibate life is either a form of unhealthy repression or a smoke screen for deviancy, the kind of intense friendships celebrated by past civilizations are associated with closeted homosexuality, and the steady shrinking of extended families has reduced many peopleÂ’s access to the familial forms of
platonic intimacy.
Yet as sex looms ever larger as an aspirational good, we also live in a society where
more people are single and likely to remain so than in any previous era. And since
single people have, on average, a lot less sex than the partnered and wedded, a growing number of Americans are statistically guaranteed to feel that theyÂ’re not living up to the cultureÂ’s standard of fulfillment, happiness and worth.
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This tension between sexual expectations and social reality is a potential problem for both sexes, but for a variety of reasons — social, cultural and biological — it’s more likely to produce toxic reactions in the male of the species. Such toxicity need not lead to murder (as it usually, mercifully, does not) to be a source of widespread misery, both for the men who wallow in it and the women unfortunate enough to be targets for their bile. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/douthat-prisoners-of-sex.html