Fascinating Camille Paglia riff...

In the 1950s, female “frigidity” was attributed to social conformism and religious puritanism. But since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, American society has become increasingly secular, with a media environment drenched in sex.

The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety. As respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and repression became the norm. Victorian prudery ended the humorous sexual candor of both men and women during the agrarian era, a ribaldry chronicled from Shakespeare’s plays to the 18th-century novel. The priggish 1950s, which erased the liberated flappers of the Jazz Age from cultural memory, were simply a return to the norm.

Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution. But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells.

Read the whole thing.

I've been fascinated to watch the transformation of my youngest son from notorious layabout to gung ho striver--willing to embrace the discipline of personal sacrifice for the goals of a reliable mid-sized sedan, a four bedroom house and a yearly vacation in Matzalan. Whereas our ancestors risked life and limb for a chance to mate, sex in the modern world made by effective birth control and feminism, is merely a fringe benefit of a decent job and an hour of daily exercise.

Its not a middle-class thing, its a western civilization thing. The agrarian ideal Paglia cites is alive and well in many parts of the world, where the measure of a man, and by extension, a woman--are the number of children he's produced. Yes, its a sexy society in Afghanistan, but I doubt to many young Europeans and Americans are going to be tempted to embrace the lifestyle of ignorance, brutality and short lives for a little more sexual obsession.

Female Viagra will succeed in the market, contrary to Paglia's conclusion, because of one of our middle-class dynamics illustrated best by Madonna. The poor woman--her body tortured into a hyper-athletic tauntness, is over fifty and faced with competition from women less than half her age. Madonna must stay sexually relevant or disappear into oblivion, and that is why female Viagra will be huge money for the pharmaceuticals. Every fifty year old woman, having raised her children, contributed financially to the household and supported her husband's career, faces the very real prospect that her mate can be stolen out from under her by some women 15-20 years her junior. There is no respected Elder status for the modern woman of a certain age--the best that can be hoped for is a hefty divorce settlement.

Betcha they didn't tell you that in your feminist studies classes, now did they?