NO REASON TO PUT WOMEN ON A PEDESTAL.

When writers for the at-the-time conservative Badger Herald makes that argument, maybe the self-styled progressives will roll their eyes and consider the source.

The demands of feminism required certain concessions on the part of men. Men had to be willing -- or forced -- to open their career ladders to the likes of women. They also had to cease to understand fidelity and commitment as prerequisites to sexual relationships. Needless to say, the second "concession" made the first much easier to swallow. It quickly dawned on men that there was now no reason to put women on the proverbial pedestal.

What will their reaction be when a self-styled feminist, Louise Perry, makes a similar argument?

It’s precisely because I’m a feminist that I’ve changed my mind on sexual liberalism. It’s an ideology premised on the false belief that the physical and psychological differences between men and women are trivial, and that any restrictions placed on sexual behavior must therefore have been motivated by malice, stupidity or ignorance.

The problem is the differences aren’t trivial. Sexual asymmetry is profoundly important: One half of the population is smaller and weaker than the other half, making it much more vulnerable to violence. This half of the population also carries all of the risks associated with pregnancy. It is also much less interested in enjoying all of the delights now on offer in the post-sexual revolution era.

Reality was leading by two runs thirty years ago.

Remove the progressive goggles, and the history of the last 60 years looks different. The sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood. It is also a story about the triumph of the playboy.

The new sexual culture isn’t so much about the liberation of women, as so many feminists would have us believe, but the adaptation of women to the expectations of a familiar character: Don Juan, Casanova, or, more recently, Hugh Hefner.

It gets better. Here's more from that Herald article.  Prescient, nicht wahr?

One has to wonder how different things would have been if feminism had demanded economic freedom for women and denounced the sexual revolution in the interest of preserving womens' traditional roles as the guardians of chastity. This would have gained for women the equal pay and opportunity they deserved while at the same time ensuring that women who wanted to raise families would find willing husbands-to-be.

Such a situation would also have spread the gains from feminism. Today the only victors in the sexual revolution are those men and women who are good-looking and clever enough to enjoy multiple partners with a minimum of emotional and financial commitment. The dowdy and the not-so-clever (or not-so-unscrupulous) are used by the well-endowed and find loneliness and frustration where, in a previous generation, they would probably have been able to start families.

Here's Ms Perry.

If we are to challenge the social costs of the sexual revolution effectively, then we can’t redesign society on the back of an envelope. We have to look at social structures that have already proven to be successful and compare them against one another, rather than against some imagined alternative that has never existed and is never likely to exist. The technology shock of the Pill led many liberals to the hubristic assumption that our society could be uniquely free from the oppression of sexual norms and function just fine.

The last 60 years have proved that assumption to be wrong. We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stating the obvious: Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different. Some desires are bad. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love. Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not products. Marriage is good.

And, above all, listen to your mother.

Reality is socially conservative, and evolutionary stability is real.

I'll give her the final word.

Feminism needs to rediscover the mother, in every sense.

Until we do, each individual woman will have to learn on her own the lie of the promise of sexual liberation—the lie that tells us, as Andrea Dworkin phrased it, that “fucking per se is freedom per se.”

It was a lie all along. It’s time, at last, to say so.

Put another way, contemporary mating practices might not be evolutionarily stable.