"The culture’s attitude is Hefnerism, basically, if less baldly chauvinistic than the original Playboy philosophy."

"Sexual fulfillment is treated as the source and summit of a life well lived, the thing without which nobody (from a carefree college student to a Cialis-taking senior) can be truly happy, enviable or free."

From Ross Douthat's meditation on the motives of the Santa Barbara murderer.

This tension between sexual expectations and social reality is a potential problem for both sexes, but for a variety of reasons — social, cultural and biological — it’s more likely to produce toxic reactions in the male of the species....

Contemporary feminism is very good — better than my fellow conservatives often acknowledge — at critiquing these pathologies. But feminism, too, is often a prisoner of Hefnerism, in the sense that it tends to prescribe more and more “sex positivity,” insisting that the only problem with contemporary sexual culture is that it’s imperfectly egalitarian, insufficiently celebratory of female agency and desire.

This means that the feminist prescription doesn’t supply what men slipping down into the darkness of misogyny most immediately need: not lectures on how they need to respect women as sexual beings, but reasons, despite their lack of sexual experience, to first respect themselves as men.

Should sex-positive feminism be equated with Hefnerism? Pre-Clinton Era feminism had indulged quite deeply in the critique of sex, but that got submerged in what may have been a realistic accommodation to the desire most people have for sexual relationships. The feminists who critiqued sex back in the 80s and early 90s thought that sex-positive feminists were enemies of feminism. (Here, read "Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism" (1990) if you don't believe me.)  These "sex-negative" feminists hated the Playboy philosophy, so it's... interesting to dump the sex-positive feminists in with Hugh Hefner.

A commenter over at Douthat's column says: "Good God, how did you manage to turn liberal attitudes towards sex into the motivations of a murdering lunatic? That is truly an act of ideological desperation."

But what ideology is Douthat pushing? I think he's saying that in our society a lot of people are going to miss out on the ideal of plentiful sex and we need some positive ways to think about that so we don't suffer excessively. It's not so much that an occasional crazed person commits murder as it is that millions of others feel bad that they are not living what seems to be the good life. In that view, whether or not it's good to be "sex positive," we need a way to find good in the absence of sex. What would the "celibacy positive" vision look like?

I assume there are many intelligent, happy individuals in America who are celibate and could express themselves in a positive way, but you have to invade your own privacy to tell others why you're not having sex, and it's a difficult writing assignment, with critics waiting to explain that you're only bullshitting defensiveness of your own failure and repression.