According to her, while young women may possess considerable charms, men's desire for them always vastly outstrips supply. The reverse is simply not the case: men are both less attractive to women, and markedly less desired by them, especially as those women grow older. What Hakim terms "the male sex-deficit" underlies both the ubiquity of female sexual imagery – as pornography, as marketing adjunct – and the persistent unwillingness of society at large to "valorise" women's good looks. It is, quite simply, not in the interests of all those priapic patriarchs to allow women to actualise their erotic capital, for to do so would seismically alter the balance of power between the sexes.Ah, but feminism is precisely about valorizing women's good looks. The balance of power between the sexes is already seismically altered because women now have (or soon will have) equality in every way and then all their sexual power on top of that. To make things worse, Norwegian men are even criminalized for purchasing sex while women can legally sell.
That the religiously dogmatic and the merely male chauvinist should have both demonised – and, paradoxically, diminished – the impact of female sexuality from time out of mind, is, following Hakim, only to be expected. In Anglo Saxon societies, such as our own, the net result is, she avers, that we have less sex overall than they do in steamier, less puritanical climes, while our sexual relations are mediated by a tiresome push-me, pull-you interaction: men wanting sex, women refusing it. According to Hakim, Christian monogamy is, quite simply, a "political strategy" devised by the patriarchy in order to ensure that even the least attractive/wealthy/powerful men gain at least one sexual partner.Indeed, to ensure that most men get a partner is exactly why I believe we should return to Christian monogamy. Whether there is more sex overall in "steamier, less puritanical climes" is beside the point, because it isn't evenly distributed. When women get more freedom to choose, they reject more men, and these men will tend to act as a destabilizing force against civilization, as I know from personal experience.
I may not agree with Hakim's conclusion, which apparently is a call for further female empowerment through prostitution, but it looks like this book is a good resource for debunking the feminist lie that there are no essential sex differences in sexual motivation, as it is said to be "complete with rather leaden prose, extensive annotation, reams of statistical evidence, appendices and tedious repetitions" all pointing to the fact that sexuality is a resource that belongs to women.
Hakim's view is that the myth of "equality of desire" is endorsed by feminists, and that this leads to what she terms the "medicalisation of low desire", whereby therapists and counsellors try to convince women that their lack of sex-drive is a function of psychopathology rather than hormones. She anticipates being criticised by feminists as an "essentialist", who defines men and women by biological characteristic, but rejoins – I think fairly – that the feminist position is equally so.Yes, the feminist denial of sex differences also harms women in some ways. But these are just minor inconveniences compared to the huge benefit women reap from denying human nature. Because only by denying female erotic capital can feminists credibly sustain the illusion that women have been oppressed and thus justify all their coercive "equality."