I’m definitely not the first person to notice this but I keep returning to the way that Philip Roth—and Updike and Mailer—conceptualized misogyny as a life-affirming stance, and cast women who wanted dignity and respect as scolds and killers of joy. That’s an idea that had legs.

So many women’s attitudes towards gender were also shaped by this idea that to want dignity was to be against fun. The dichotomy—feminism vs. pleasure—is one that I think a lot of people still believe in.

Thinking about this more it feels like positioning women’s rights as antithetical to men’s pleasure was a uniquely good strategy for anti-feminists looking to weaken feminism’s appeal among women—who, after all, are socialized to prioritize men’s needs above their own.