Sex And The Liberal Woman - Rutting, Pillow Talk, And Other Irrelevancies In A Desperately Serious World

Bennington Pease (Bennie) grew up like every other well-heeled, privileged girl - cotillions, Christmas balls, country club dances, the occasional flirtation in class, and  summer vacations on the Vineyard with the likes of Parker Harrington and Cabot Phillips, boys from Groton and St. Paul's on their way to Yale. 

Sexual interest, desire, and promise was part of the package. Bennie would be married soon after Wellesley or perhaps after a year or two after Harvard, probably to one of the boys she grew up with on the North Shore.  They would move to New York, probably on the East Side, have three children, two homes, three cars, and the vibrant social life that only Manhattan can offer. 

'The best laid plans of mice and men'  the old saw that always seems right around the corner would never apply to Bennie, for such is the essence of privilege - there is little that can either shake its roots or move it from its assigned path. Yet, it did, and somewhere between Junior and Senior years her head was turned. The life she had taken for granted might not be all-inclusively right.  Her patrician forbears, as historically relevant as she knew them to be, came under harsh scrutiny from the emerging liberal Left in academia. 

The Putnams, her direct ancestors, had been among the first English settlers in the New World, went on to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and with John Davenport built the new conservative Puritan settlement of New Haven.   

   

The other side or the family, the Potters, were judges at the Salem trials, influential clerics, respected thinkers, and perhaps most importantly, investors in the burgeoning transatlantic trade.  As shipbuilders, owners, and investors, the Potters made a fortune and built Boston as a worthy competitor to New York. 

So Bennie was shocked when told by her liberal classmates that this all meant nothing and that these men were responsible for the concentration of wealth that distorted the very fundamental principles of the new Republic, were the patriarchal fathers of generations of insular, white privileged males, and their investments were instrumental in perpetuating slavery (The Three Cornered Trade, the slave routes from which the Putnams had profited), propagating an ethos of aristocratic Louis XVI - Marie Antoinette 'let them eat cake' royalty, and creating a cabal of wealthy subterfuge. 

Bennie's weakness - that was the only explanation offered by her family - led her astray and before she graduated she had turned against family, legacy, and tradition, and had become one of 'them', the pious, Left. 

One would have thought that her life of discipline, enforced rectitude, and an unshakeable code of honor would have made her strong.  On the contrary, her life was so predicted, so constructed, so inviolable that she was never was allowed to think on her own; so when she was forced to rely on her wits, her intelligence, and her logic, she could not and was easily and quickly subsumed within The Movement. 

Now, the liberal woman of today is not Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman of honor and patrician pride who espoused her husband's social liberalism and spoke out in favor of labor, the working man, and the irrevocable principles of popular democracy. 

 

She is a harridan, a succubus, a vixenish howler for revolutionary change.  No gentle, compromised, accommodating change, but absolute, immediate, and brutal reform.  The black man is no longer the subject of Uncle Tom Martin Luther King's righteous cause, but the new American, the inheritor of forest wisdom and environmental insight to be raised to the top of the pinnacle of society. The disappearance and death of the white race should be accelerated to make room for black power. 

Heterosexuality, a legacy of a medieval reproductive past should also be expunged from American society to be replaced by a myriad of genders, a cornucopia of sexual choices, and halcyon years of sexual liberation.  The capitalist system, responsible for racial oppression and climate Armageddon, must be dismantled and replaced by socialism, a generous, compassionate, inclusive form of government. 

Given this agenda and its existential importance, liberal women have no time for anything less than serious pursuits.  Moreover, the privileged white lifestyle of conservatives - blonde, vacuous, ignoramuses more interested in mousse and Potomac mansions than social justice - is itself anathema.  Not only do liberal women have no time for St. Tropez or Cannes, they see the vapid lifestyle as counter-revolutionary, signifying the hopeless emptiness of the bourgeoisie. 

Sex for the conservative is nothing but wanton pleasure, trysts amidst darkness, self-gratifying pleasure while others were struggling to survive.  Sexual orgasm is nothing more than the bourgeois sentiment, the sought -after Holy Grail of political turpitude.  Camaraderie, fellowship, comrades in arms, solidarity, communalism, and bonding are the only sensible, reasonable, and logical relationships in a troubled world. 

Not only that but the liberal woman is conflicted about her own sexuality, challenged as she was to rid herself of the outmoded, antediluvian heterosexuality, to be liberated, and invested in the new sexuality of the day.  

For heterosexual woman, this is truly a conundrum.  The whole idea of likker-licenses, S&M street fairs, dildo buggering, and pussy cum is revolting, yet these new liberal phalanxes are not deterred, and in basement apartments everywhere, they put up with clit-pierces and tongue studs, fingering, and faux orgasms in a show of political solidarity. 

Most demurred - better speak out in favor of the gender spectrum than wallow in it - so sex in liberal quarters was a bottom drawer issue. 

Bennie, however had always been a woman with a strong heterosexual desire. She never considered Biblical injunction, biological imperative, family values, or other such covers for her native instincts.  She simply wanted to be taken, penetrated, and released - and not by some plastic robotic insert held by a big-titted, overweight bull dyke.

And what was this political conflation all about ?  Who said that sexual inclusivity had to be the menu du jour?  Who ever came up with the idea in the first place?  How in God's name did a tiny, outlying demographic become the zeitgeist of the liberal movement?  It was one thing for two men to do unspeakable things in bathhouses, but to raise that level of peculiar satisfaction to the national agenda?

Ironically, this sexual abstemiousness must have been what it was like back in Salem - a Puritanical obsession with celibacy, necessary sexual ritual, and the co-existence of evil with female sexual desire. Of course there were women like Bennie then, demoiselles who had their pleasure in the bushes or the barn, but it was a censorious, brutally ascetic time. 

Bennie quickly saw the errors of her ways.  It turned out that she was not so much the wilting flower that her family had assumed, but a woman who only needed a wake-up call - the supreme arrogance of these ponderous, hoarse, ugly women to send her packing.  Liberalism might have some redeeming values, some raison d'etre, but the whole thing had gotten so baroque, so rococo in fact, that there was no aging in place.  It was time to go, and go she did back to her roots, her old Nantucket summer friends, Grandma Putnam and Grandfather Potter, and eyes on the prize - a handsome, successful Wall Street banker with charm and promise...or something like that. 

At this point leaving the big tent of social causes, the bloody sanctimony and sexual perversion was enough so that even Bob from Accounting looked good to her. 

Of course she reverted to form and married well, had the expected three children, and lived a happy, expansive, prurient (yes, she and her husband were not beneath that) life. 

Liberal women? In the rear view mirror where they belonged.