Wise Caution or Revived Puritanism? Russ Douthat on our Cultural Tensions over Sex

I found Russ Douthat's recent insights about changing attitudes towards human sexuality to be quite perceptive. I have in mind his response to an essay by Katie Roiphe in the New York Times Book Review in which Roiphe "defends the Great Male Novelists of yore — the Roths and Updikes, Mailers and Bellows — against their more stringent feminist critics, while contrasting them favorably with their less overtly chauvinist, narcissistic, and sex obsessed male heirs...." In the excerpts below, I have emphasized a few lines from Douthat that I find quite interesting and relevant to our theological reflection on contemporary culture.

I wonder, though, if what she describes as the “puritanical” streak in contemporary fiction — an artifact of what Roiphe describes, elsewhere in the essay, as our “more conservative time” — has more to do with the exhaustion of the transgressive impulse than with any real return to the kind of moral-aesthetic strictures that a Roth or an Updike helped to overthrow. A jaded and self-conscious caution about the transformative possibilities of sex, after all, isn’t really the same thing as a revived puritanism....

In their wild quest to overturn every conceivable taboo, in other words, the Great Male Authors of mid-century may have succeeded a little bit too well. By tearing down every possible stricture on fictional representations of sex, they abandoned their successors to the vicissitudes of a world where anything could be written, but nothing could really shock. Great art depends on walls as well as open doors, on constraints as well as cultural blank checks. And anyone who’s nostalgic for the exhilarating transgressiveness that once animated American literature should probably be at least a little bit nostalgic for the taboos that made transgression possible.

via douthat.blogs.nytimes.com