Moira Weigel opens with the man she was seeing when she began her investigation into courtship: “For weeks he had been trying to break off our thing in order to commit to another, longer-standing thing with an ex-ex he had started to call his girlfriend again, and then changing his mind. He wanted to keep us both apprised of his thought process.” Fans of Sex and the City will recognize this tone and milieu. We are in the knowing, hyper, neurotic, self-mocking New York celebrated by that old hit’s protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw.
Weigel grew up in Brooklyn, and her book is very New York. There is the “girl on the train complaining to her friend about her one-night stand with a man who started playing Limp Bizkit on his laptop in the morning. Though the sex had been good, there was no way she was giving him her number.” There is Weigel’s friend who searches OkCupid for Alice Munro fans. “I like David Foster Wallace,” he added. “But if you type David Foster Wallace into OkCupid, it’s a s—tshow.” There is the gym teacher at Weigel’s elementary school who embodies the unintended consequences of our new frankness about sex. She administers sexual vocabulary quizzes to Weigel and her classmates. “ ’Boner?’ the gym teacher would ask. ‘Wet dream?’ She had one lazy eye.” Weigel humiliates herself by guessing that “oral sex” means “talking about sex, maybe using a tape recorder.”
But Weigel, unlike Carrie Bradshaw, is a feminist Marxist. So behind the comedy is a nightmare. Marx described the alienated laborer who “in his work . . . does not affirm himself but denies himself.” His work is “not the satisfaction of a need” but “merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.” Dating, Weigel thinks, is like that: Women as daters are like the flight attendants studied by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild. They perform “emotional labor,” fake warmth and jollity to set their customers at ease, and repress their actual feelings.
Similarly, “self-help books” tell women interested in getting a man to “repress their emotions in order to avoid making their partners think that they expect something.” Men must, above all, be set at ease. Weigel argues that repressing one’s feelings and pretending not to care can lead to confusion about one’s own desires and to incapacity for love: “The surest way to make it seem like you do not care is to actually not care.”
Apparently, this very thing happened to Weigel. “I had no idea who I was. And as long as I kept impersonating all the women I thought I should be, I could not receive love, much less give it.” I can’t deny Weigel’s story. But apart from that story, Weigel offers a history of courtship in America that ties her lot to the lot of American women altogether. And that account is so distorted by Weigel’s Marxist feminist lens as to undermine Weigel’s credibility.
Weigel follows Beth Bailey’s excellent 1988 book, From Front Porch to Back Seat, in beginning with the middle-class convention of “calling,” still practiced early in the 20th century, in which unmarried men visited the homes of women they wished to court. Looking backstage, Weigel finds patriarchy cuing the players: Calling “made men into agents in pursuit. It made women the objects of desire.” These objects of desire were found at home because the “Calling Class had a lot at stake in the idea that women cherished being confined at home, providing attention and affection to . . . men.”
Much rides on this description of calling because when, with the rise of dating, courtship moves out of the home, Weigel thinks that the Calling Class’s insistence on female passivity moves along with it. The “age of dating . . . held on to the idea that women were essentially passive.” The accompanying suppression of female desire is at the root of Weigel’s own troubles with desire.
But Bailey’s treatment of calling (as Weigel occasionally acknowledges) is quite different. Calling, Bailey says, “was primarily a woman’s activity, for women largely controlled social life.” In the calling system, “[women] took the initiative” by issuing an invitation. It was “highly improper for the man to take the initiative.” Only when, amidst the constraints and possibilities afforded by urban life, private calling makes way for public dating are men, on whose money dating relies and in whose sphere dating takes place, expected to take the initiative. That expectation, Bailey says, entails an “absolute reversal of roles.”
Of course, the calling system was not women’s liberation, nor did the women of early-20th-century America speak frankly about their desires. But Bailey’s complex account of calling gives the lie to Weigel’s simplistic one. It also undermines Weigel’s account of the present: If calling did not make women passive, and was not primarily under the control of men, then Weigel and her contemporaries can’t be struggling to shake off the dead hand of the Calling Class.
Patriarchy’s partner in crime is capitalism. Consider Weigel’s discussion of going steady, a way of dating that took off after the Second World War. Weigel ties the growing importance of going steady to the postwar economic boom and the “new culture of consumerism,” even to “cyclical consumption. . . . You fell in love with purchases, spent time with them, and parted ways.” Our relationships with our steadies, intense relationships with people we will eventually drop, is like our relationship to purchases.
To be sure, going steady, along with the related trend of early marriage, had something to do with a sense of insecurity that followed the war. But Weigel still sees young people going steady as parallel to families “afraid of being nuked [walling] their houses with consumer goods.”
Bailey also discusses the postwar boom. However, she sees young steadies as not marketing victims but active initiators of a transition from prewar youth culture, which had put conspicuous consumption and popularity at its center, to a postwar culture more attentive to “security and human closeness.”
For Weigel, in contrast, it’s pretty nearly all commerce all the time, and that reductive tendency makes her a suspect guide to both past and present. Indeed, when called upon to discuss contemporary “hooking up,” Weigel opines that no-strings-attached sexual intimacy spreads “the idea that working all the time and using others indifferently is desirable and glamorous” and that “hooking up teaches us the flexibility that the contemporary economy requires.” Weigel has the rise of hooking up following the first tech boom and “sharing the ebullience” of the economy of that period. Apparently, hooking up entered college slang in the mid-1980s, but I doubt this observation would confound Weigel. Why not tie hooking up to the greed of the Reagan era?
See how easy this is?
Like some conservatives, for whom she has only ridicule and indignation, Weigel thinks the sexual revolution has left us lonely. The “Fun Fearless Feminism” of Helen Gurley Brown and Cosmopolitan sought not “actual companionship but desirability.” Moreover, women have to (in Brown’s words) “work like a son of a bitch” to be that combination of executive and porn star that modern women are supposed to aspire to be. As for the more radical revolutionaries, they focused “on what they wanted to destroy rather than what they wanted to build” and asked women to embrace a model of “free love” according to which it was imperative not to have “hang-ups”—that is, strong feelings—about sex. This “free love could start to look a lot like freedom from love.” Even the sixties, Weigel thinks, were a marketing bonanza, and what we have been sold is loneliness. Emblematic of our predicament is Weigel’s Los Angeles friend who uses the dating app Tinder “on the pot.” That’s all of us, “sitting alone, pants bunched around our ankles . . . creating free money for the tech industry.”
Such a passage could have been written by Allan Bloom, who, in his Closing of the American Mind, depicted a young man who, through his Walkman, enjoys a “commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.” But Bloom, in his last book, Love and Friendship, draws on a tradition extending from Plato to Shakespeare to Austen, to revivify our sense of love’s possibilities. Weigel, in contrast, has only a Marxian recourse to love as free rather than alienated labor, the point of which is “to be changed by, and to witness change in, one another” and thereby to transform “the world.” Weigel, who has dodged the running dogs of capital long enough to make a happy marriage, has come to “feel desire as a movement in me that [reaches] outward, yearning to act upon the world.”
This love, which seems to culminate in a species of community organizing, certainly puts the “revolution” back in “sexual revolution.” But in its emphasis on change—into what? for what?—Weigel’s vision of love is no less abstract and remote from human need than the visions it disdains.
Jonathan Marks is professor of politics at Ursinus College.
