In which I talk about sex and try not to sound stupid

At National Review today, a pair of writers argue that contraception is bad for women—and what would be good for women is a return to "natural" family planning. That is: If you don't want to get pregnant, don't have sex when you're at you're most fertile.

The authors try to offer a "feminist" reason for doing so:

Authentic sexual equality requires that men understand with their bodies (as women do) the procreative potential of the sexual act. And this is exactly what natural methods of family planning do. By frequenting sex only during infertile times when a child is unwanted, men learn to coordinate their desires for intimacy with the natural rhythms of the female body. Feminist scholar and theologian Angela Franks notes that “[this] is unheard of in a society in which male desire appears to set the guidelines — especially in the ‘hook-up’ culture. Indeed, such a reorientation ofdesire is more revolutionary than any secular feminist project.” Those who practice this approach to family planning report that its use tends to make husbands more sensitive to the sexual and emotional needs of their wives — a sensitivity that many women have long found wanting.

I'm going to admit here that my sexual experience isn't widespread: My bachelor years weren't all that swingin'. So maybe I'm going to sound stupid here. I'll risk it.

But my limited experience tells me that a woman's desire for sex often (but not always) peaks around that time of month that they're most fertile. (Evolutionarily, this makes sense, no?) And my limited experience also suggests to me that desire for sex and enjoyment of sex are somewhat related. If you're not in the mood, you're not in the mood.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying: National Review's writers apparently believe that men can best practice birth control and respect women by having sex during those periods in which women will desire and enjoy it least. "Be attentive to the sexual and emotional needs of your wife, men: And then do the opposite!"

Put aside the questions of whether the rhythm method is all that effective. A big problem here is that National Review's authors essentially remove a woman's sex drive from this equation. No surprise there, I guess. If you believe that a big problem with contraception is that it enables women to act on their own sexual desires (and the authors clearly do) this proposed solution makes a lot of sense.

Forgiveness for Newt

I remember in the late 1990s when a conservative friend of mine made a strenuously felt case that Bill Clinton didn't deserve to be president because of Clinton's well-known philandering. "How can I trust him to keep his oath to the country when he can't even keep his vow to his wife?" my friend said, and indeed that seemed to be the rationale for a lot of evangelical Christians who weren't content to simply oppose the president, but expressed a great deal of contempt for him.

I was reminded of my friend tonight by Dave Weigel's Slate story about how Iowa evangelicals are trying, very delicately but unmistakably, to give their flock permission to vote for thrice-married (and multiple philanderer) Newt Gingrich. To be fair, those leaders acknowledge the problem. Says one pastor: “Do you vote for a Mormon who's had one wife, a Catholic who's had three wives, or an Evangelical who may have had an entire harem?”

There's a lot of talk about "forgiveness" in Weigel's piece—talk that, to my memory, was pretty well absent when it came to Clinton's transgressions a decade ago. What to make of this? A couple of options:

• That evangelicals were sincere in the late 1990s about their contempt for Clinton, but have been so beaten down by GOP sex scandals since then that they're bending and bowing to the larger culture's sexual mores—or at least, deciding those strict rules don't matter so much in the political realm anymore. I'd actually kind of hate to see that, bizarrely enough: I don't really share evangelicals' sexual morality, but I'd hate for holders of that morality to shrug and give into the culture out of weariness rather than conversion.

• Or maybe it's straight hypocrisy.

The truth, I suspect, is a little bit of both: A mixture of defeat and cynicism when it comes to our sexed-up culture. In any case, I'd love to hear some of these guys talk more about forgiving Clinton. They kind of have to, right?

A brief thought about Al Gore's alleged sex assault

Byron York prints plenty of disturbing details from the police complaint against Al Gore, but this is the one I find most infuriating:

Finally she got away. Later, she talked to friends, liberals like herself, who advised against telling police. One asked her "to just suck it up; otherwise, the world's going to be destroyed from global warming."

To that "friend" let me offer up a piece of advice: Go to hell.

Snarky folks at The Corner are treating this revelation as being run-of-the-mill Democratic politics, but honestly the problem here -- as is often the case -- is of power generally. You can see an almost carbon-copy dynamic at play when people angrily defend the Catholic Church against accusations of widespread child molestation. Victims are urged to hush up, to go away, because their truth threatens The Mission of whichever person or movement or institution is involved.

And while it's often true that sacrifices must be made in order to advance a worthy cause, you can easily tell the difference in the worthiness of those sacrifices by asking one simple question: Is the dignity of the individual who made the sacrifice enhanced by that sacrifice? Or is it diminished?

If the answer is the latter -- if a woman is obliged to be silent about a sexual assault -- than the person, or movement, or institution is almost certainly unworthy of the sacrifice. I don't want the allegations against Al Gore to be true -- but that's mostly because I don't want the woman in question to have been victimized. Shame on her supposed friends for valuing her dignity so cheaply.