"She acknowledges being the beneficiary of a previous generation’s progressivism... It’s the crazy activism she’s against — you know, the 'fringe' stuff."

"By fringe, she means trans. She’s peeved that some trans women are trying to redefine feminism in ways that seem to her to be anti-woman, resents that lesbians risk being erased by trendy all-purpose queerness and fears that as a married lesbian mother she will have her own rights swept away by anti-trans backlash.... I was, of course, eager to read good gossip about The Times. The best nugget: After Bowles started dating... Bari Weiss... she says an editor [exclaimed]... 'She’s a Nazi.'... Her most serious charge is that the editor thought her story ideas weren’t as good after that. The obvious question is whether her heterodox turn has conferred much benefit when it comes to ideas. The ones on display here seem pretty shopworn. I recall admiring a sharp-elbowed profile of the psychologist and anti-identity politics commentator Jordan Peterson that Bowles wrote early in her Times tenure. Nothing in this book hits that level.... [T]he book’s central fallacy is that idiocy on the left requires moving to the right. It doesn’t...."

Writes Laura Kipnis, in The New York Times. She's reviewing the new book by Nellie Bowles, "Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History" (commission earned).

Should I read this book? It's 7 hours by audiobook. I'll try. Kipnis warns me that Bowles is trying to be the new Tom Wolfe, but she's not as good as Wolfe (and neither is Kipnis): "where Wolfe was a precision-guided stiletto, Bowles is more of a dull blade, ridiculing her former colleagues by saddling them with laughably vacuous thoughts and dreams — their 'beautiful vision of the role of journalism for such a beautiful time,' for instance."

What about in that "sharp-elbowed profile" of Peterson? Was she closer to Wolfe back then? I blogged it at the time — here, in 2018. Bowles wrote:

"Once upon a time, explains Kipnis, female students celebrated their sexual freedom and agency."

"Today, students and faculty alike focus on their vulnerability. This, in her view, is a criminally retrograde story line, one that recasts women as pitiful creatures who cannot think and act for themselves — and it’s a story they seem to have internalized. Armed with Title IX and a new, academically fashionable definition of 'consent' — which insists that sex is never truly consensual between adults unless they both have equal power — women can now retroactively declare they never truly agreed to specific sexual acts, even whole relationships. 'We seem to be breeding a generation of students, mostly female students, deploying Title IX to remedy sexual ambivalences or awkward sexual experiences,' Kipnis writes, 'and to adjudicate relationship disputes post-breakup — and campus administrators are allowing it.'... 'There’s an excess of masculine power in the world,' Kipnis writes, “and women have to be educated to contest it in real time, instead of waiting around for men to reach some new stage of heightened consciousness — just in case that day never comes.'"

From a NYT review of "Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus" by Laura Kipnis.

What will sex education sound like when the government sees a need to encourage young women to get pregnant?

The NYT has an article titled "Sex Education in Europe Turns to Urging More Births," but there's precious little in it about how a society — having given sexual freedom and birth control to women — can foster a rebirth of birth.

The comments at the NYT are loaded with statements that we don't need more people on earth. Now, the article is mostly about the need to keep up the birthrate, so I understand why people are responding on that level, but it's interesting that so few accept the presentation of the problem.

My criticism of the article is that it didn't do what the headline made me think it would do and get into a topic I've been concerned with for years. What if, over time, with perfect reproductive freedom, the choice to avoid childbirth is far more popular than we'd ever imagined? One solution would be to back off from women's freedom and equality, and I don't like that. So the thought experiment is: Assume women will continue to have the power to avoid childbirth and complete freedom to exercise that power. Assume we agree that the birthrate must be increased. What can we do?

ADDED: I just happened to run into another NYT piece from a week ago, "No Kids for Me, Thanks":

Meghan Daum, the editor of the anthology ["Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids"]... said, “It’s undeniable that watching this culture play out — the helicopter parenting, the media fixation on baby bumps and celebrity childbearing and -rearing — is overwhelming, and it’s natural that people would react against it.”

"You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two..."

"... and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre. I suspect you can barely throw a stone on most campuses around the country without hitting a few of these neo-miscreants. Who knows what coercions they deployed back in the day to corral those students into submission; at least that’s the fear evinced by today’s new campus dating policies. And think how their kids must feel! A friend of mine is the offspring of such a coupling—does she look at her father a little differently now, I wonder. It’s been barely a year since the Great Prohibition took effect in my own workplace. Before that, students and professors could date whomever we wanted; the next day we were off-limits to one another—verboten, traife, dangerous (and perhaps, therefore, all the more alluring)."

So begins Laura Kipnis, in a piece titled "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe."

For the record, I do not think professors should have sexual relationships with students, and therefore I support that particular "Great Prohibition," but I think Kipnis's writing is interesting, and that paragraph hits on something that had been pretty obvious for a long time: It's hard to ban something that should be banned when to do so casts aspersions on the marriages of many prestigious professors.