What’s wrong with lingerie? A progressive rebrand at Victoria’s Secret forgets one thing: sex.

This piece is much better than I expected.

But the contemptuous dismissal of men, and their tastes and opinions and desires, is as trendy in our present moment as the lace bralettes that have replaced the underwire bra as the lingerie du jour (and like those bralettes, it doesn’t suit everyone.) The broader tendency is to treat any desire for men like a character flaw, a burden, an embarrassment. The writer Indiana Seresin invented the term “heteropessimism” to describe this phenomenon — an excellent coinage that’s nevertheless overbroad in its implied gender neutrality, when the sense of heterosexuality as something in between a cursed affliction and a personal failing is almost exclusively held by women. To be horrified by one’s own sexual orientation, and every possible expression thereof, is the side effect of a culture that flattens everything from personal relationships to aesthetic taste into a political framing: if you like men (as most women do), but men are trash (as every good progressive feminist must surely agree is true), then what’s a girl to do?

Agreed. I like women. I like them as friends. And I like having sex with women. Sometimes, I’ve had sex with my friends. Sometimes not. Regardless, though, of how any one man treats women or thinks of them, all male desire is seen as automatically creepy and suspect, no matter its origin or even how welcome it is by the woman or women in question.

As much as the Savage x Fenty runway show might read as subversive to fashion insiders, it is still, at the end of the day, a bunch of beautiful women walking around in complicated, gorgeous lingerie; to imagine that straight men would not enjoy this is frankly ridiculous. They’re not that picky.

Haha. Exactly. I don’t even like lingerie, really (prefer nudity or fully clothed), but in reality most “male” beauty standards are really female beauty standards self-enforced and self-enforcing. Trust me, women, we really, really aren’t that picky. It’s mostly all your girlfriends policing you, not men (generally, there are exceptions).

The article is quite good and goes a long way to explaining why I reject liberalism. But, alas, with no real replacement. That’s the work in progress, though, isn’t it? At least in my own mind and eventually in all of society.