“The Clash of the Female Titans” & the Disenchantments of the Sexual Revolution

by guest contributor A.J. Fezza

It is fitting that the “Clash of the Female Titans” took place in the Gothic glamor of Los Angeles’s Ace Hotel, just a few blocks from the squalor of Skid Row. There could not have been a better location for a gathering of microcelebrities who lie on the border of being respected and reviled.

The theater which held the Sept. 13th debate on the question “Has the Sexual Revolution Failed?” was a full house. Journalist Bari Weiss hosted the sold-out event, with Louise Perry and Anna Khachiyan arguing that the Sexual Revolution had failed, and Sarah Haider and Grimes arguing that it had not. Perry and Haider were the “serious voices” for their respective sides. Khachiyan and Grimes were the eccentrics.

The night was a gala for the Twitterati, attended by Khachiyan’s Red Scare podcast co-host Dasha Nekrasova, the internet’s favorite sex-worker Aella, and the internet’s favorite ghoul Richard Hanania, in addition to a vast array of Red Scare fans, e-girls, priests, journalists, artists, and intellectuals. 

The night was geared for success. There was just one issue: the debate topic was tediously incoherent.

It was never made clear what the Sexual Revolution exactly was, or what it would mean for it to have succeeded or failed. 

Was the point of the Revolution to subvert nature and achieve total mastery over it? Or was it to simply widen the range of acceptable sexual behaviors to achieve gender parity? Does the Sexual Revolution fight for “No gods, no masters,” or “New gods, new masters (this time with gender equality!)” These questions were never explicitly asked, though Haider, the official winner of the debate, seemed to believe the latter.

Haider was a formidable debater. She tore through the naïve narrative of an innocent past when sex was polite (spoiler: it wasn’t) and women were not commodified (spoiler: they were). 

Unfortunately, she still has a naïve view of the present. 

Regarding abortion, divorce, and sex in general, Haider argued for choice. She is part of a slowly-dying breed known as the true liberal. Her anthropological assumptions are the same as those that undergird modern economics: that people are rational utility-maximizers. Given enough time, the freedom of choice will yield a just and prosperous society—especially for women, who too-often have been deprived of the choices men were allowed.

But in a deracinated and porn-sick society, this emphasis on progress and choice is short-sighted. Khachiyan rightly noted that a world with limitless choice results in “analysis paralysis.” And so befuddled masses of both genders find themselves opting out of sex and relationships entirely.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward masturbating alone in your one-bedroom apartment at age 40 because the dating world is broken and has reverted back to primitive hypergamy, with real guidance offered to neither the sexually-active nor the celibate. And all of this is good and necessary because of feminism…or something!

Perry offered the most direct response to Haider and Grimes. (The unprepared Grimes, to my disappointment, made roughly the same choice-centric arguments as Haider). She argued that freedom is only a worthwhile goal insofar as we have the ability to choose an objective good (in this case: stable, monogamous relationships).

Perry acted as the voice of reason of the night. Or it may have just seemed that way because of her graceful British accent. She framed her call as a moderate one: “I’m not advocating for theocracy, I just want us to be a bit more normal.” Basically, we just need to go to horny jail and/or touch some grass.

She wore banality as a badge of honor. Toward the end of the debate, she called for the masses to be the boring people they were meant to be and retreat to suburbia for married family life. 

Perry was correct to assert that most people are probably meant to get married and have kids. Yet the valorization of being “boring” and the retreat to suburbia were what raised red flags for me. 

Herein lies the problem with Perry. The stifling vision of life promoted here, that our aspirations ought to be to “settle” into bourgeois society, may have partially triggered the Sexual Revolution in the first place. Modern suburbia — at least its American form — squelches life and raises a generation of stunted children that inevitably become frustrated adults. It is no wonder that they feel the need to reclaim life through ultimately-futile sexual experiences in the denser, more real city. This is a spiritual malady that cannot be cured by pointing to statistics of our decline (as true as the statistics may be) or moralizing. 

Khachiyan made up for Perry’s faux pas when she argued that we can’t just scold people into not having sex. 

I’d imagine that people are probably more likely to reject the Sexual Revolution because it has proved lame and hollow, as Khachiyan’s sardonic, disaffected tone suggests, than because it is imprudent and immoral. Harping on imprudence or immorality only breathes life into our lifeless, secular humanist sex bureaucracy.

Haider and Grimes both said that we have exciting things ahead of us regarding the Sexual Revolution.

Really? Pray tell…like what? 

The Revolution’s limitlessness is its lameness. Khachiyan says she thinks sex is “actually cool and fun.” This is true. In fact, the Sexual Revolution failed because the top-down enforced normalization of all sexual behavior zapped the powerful and taboo energy of sexual expression. It is not nearly as cool or fun any longer. Hence people having far less of it.

Sociologist Max Weber wrote in the early 20th century about the “disenchantment of the world.” While the pre-modern world was seen as imbued with mystery and spiritual significance, the post-Enlightenment world is seen as neutral material from which we extract resources and make rational observations. 

Of course sex would eventually become disenchanted—all other areas of life already had been. 

Today, the last vestiges of enchantment occasionally animate the rotting corpse of sexual discourse. Sex in the twenty-first century is considered a mechanical act—a meaningless, stubborn holdout of our evolutionary monkey brain. Yet it is also somehow central to our identity, authenticity, and self-expression. This is a form of cognitive dissonance that we are expected to make peace with.

For all the debate’s talk of Camille Paglia (she appeared in the intro video and was named as an icon by Weiss, Khachiyan, and Haider), no one overtly articulated Paglia’s pre-modern, enchanted view of sex: that sex is inherently tied to beauty, power, and conflict. For Paglia, sex is not an end-in-itself; it is an expression of primeval emotional and spiritual yearnings that creep out from deep within the soul. 

Nothing that is enchanted can truly be taken lightly. Sex can be rebellious, but it can never be casual.

Pardon my subtly pious sympathies. But I should stress that Paglia is a sexual anarchist. Though she is a “pagan Italian Catholic atheist animist,” in the realm of politics she gives allegiance to “no gods, no masters.” She acknowledges an intrinsic order within nature and the broader cosmos. But she supports the Sexual Revolution’s legal ramifications because it permits “deviants” like herself the chance to risk subverting and mastering nature. She wants to foster a world in which some brave souls throw themselves into the danger of sexual chaos with modern technology at their disposal, while still recognizing that most people rightly lack the stomach for it. 

And for all people, sexually-adventurous or not, Paglia rejects Perry’s advice of barricading in suburbia. Paglia writes, “The urban child sees the harshness of the street; the rural child witnesses the frightening operations of nature. Both have contact with an eternal reality denied the suburban middle-class child, who is cushioned from risk and fear and who is expected to conform to a code of genteel good manners and repressed body language that has changed startlingly little since the Victorian era.” Paglia’s worldview is enchanted all the way down. 

Only Khachiyan came close to channeling the spirit of Paglia. In a circuitous way, the seemingly-exhausted Khachiyan was the panelist who brought the most enchantment back to sex on the stage. Her deep irony horseshoes itself back around into playfulness and wonder. Disappointment about the contemporary sexual landscape suggests a high aspiration for it, upon which reality has fallen short. 

The Sexual Revolution has failed, contrary to the audience’s 51%-to-49% end-of-debate ruling that it had not. It delivered neither the prosperity nor the excitement that it promised. Perhaps when pondering the debate’s central question, the audience mistook the Sexual Revolution for sex, which the Sexual Revolution is actually hostile to.

Nonchalantly hitting her vape in between bouts of roasting Weiss, her fellow panelists, and liberals in general, Khachiyan brought more scintillating albeit subdued sexual energy to the stage than most post-Sexual Revolution vulgarity could ever hope to achieve. 

All audience polling aside, the real winner of the debate was Khachiyan.

A.J. Fezza is a recent Communication and Humanities graduate from Villanova University. An award-winning writer and filmmaker, A.J. is a former editor of the student newspaper The Villanovan, co-editor and cinematographer of the documentary “NINA” about the Nina Special School for the Deaf in Siaya, Kenya, and author of the undergraduate thesis “Should We Just ‘Let People Enjoy Things’?” The thesis is a defense of artistic criticism that traces (and denounces) relativism’s instantiation in contemporary mass entertainment and meme culture. Substack:

A.J. Fezza

Instagram: @ajfezz Twitter: @ajf_jf

For more on related topics, check out the articles Red Scare and Postmodern Politics, Paglia’s Second Wave, and Getting Back to Our Bodies: Feminism and Metaphysics; and the pod episodes PagliaWave, #PagliaPilled, the Final Bourgeois Revolution, and Puritan Signaling.

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photo taken in Rome.