The Sexual Renaissance
Featured Author February Commences
It’s “Featured Author February,” and we’re excited to introduce our newest Featured Author: Spencer A. Klavan.
Spencer A. Klavan is a classicist, associate editor of The Claremont Review of Books, host of the Young Heretics podcast, and author, most recently, of Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science through Faith.
He’s written for us before on what to expect After Chivalry, as well as the significance of The Fap/NoFap Election. Here’s what Spencer has to say about Fairer Disputations:
Spencer’s first piece for us as a Featured Author looks back to the Puritans—and ahead to the future—in dreaming of a new sexual renaissance.
The Sexual Renaissance
Spencer Klavan
Bundling and whisper tubes would be absurd in the age of the smartphone, but the problem the Puritans were trying to solve remains: romantic love is at once the most powerfully creative and catastrophically destructive social force known to man. How are we to support and honor it without allowing it to wash civilization away in a bacchic flood?
The answer does not seem to be to tear the levees down. All this does is produce tidal waves of ruination, confusion, and sexual misery more acute than the manifold discomforts of tradition. As far as women are concerned, sweeping away the sex-differentiated rules of chivalry seems to have produced a wilderness of ambiguity where every traveler is freshly vulnerable to grotesquely predatory behavior.
This Week in Sex-Realist Feminism: Slippery Slopes, Kanye's Power Fantasy, and the Power of Images
This week: Helen Joyce on slippery slopes, Mary Harrington on Kanye's twisted power fantasy, and Nina Power and Louise Perry on images. Plus: maternal mortality, radicalization problems, purity culture, OnlyFans exploitation, our Flowers of Fire book club—and more!
Flowers of Fire Book Club
Our book club is off to a great start. You should have received the initial post via email on Monday, a dialogue between Patrick T. Brown and Leah Libresco Sargeant: "Flowers of Fire" Book Club, Week I: #MeToo, #WithYou.
Leah also posted on Other Feminisms about South Korea’s Rape Culture.
Today, on our substack, we’re highlighting some of the most thought-provoking contributions to this week’s discussion.
Don’t forget! On Tuesday, March 11, at 1pm EST, we will be hosting a live Zoom discussion of the entire book, with Featured Authors Leah Libresco Sargeant, Patrick Brown, Eliza Mondegreen, Spencer Klavan, Rachel Lu, Nadya Williams, and Editor Serena Sigillito. All are welcome, even if you haven't read the book! Register now.
From the Archives:
ICYMI: Featured Author Spencer Klavan argues that post-Christian relationships between the sexes could be disastrous for both men and women.
After Chivalry
Spencer Klavan
“The old arrangement, under Christian chivalry, gave women a unique position of respect in exchange for deference to men, who likewise occupied a sphere of their own. The new proposed arrangement, which would use technology to level the playing field, might set women free from men at the cost of having to become like them.”