In her 2017 op/ed “Let’s rethink sex,” The Washington Post’s Christine Emba warned men that in the MeToo era, they should stop thinking they had any right to pursue sex (not to have it, mind you, but even to pursue it). Some men, she acknowledged, would have to get used to “less sex.” She went out of her way to say that nobody, including men, would die without it.

Emba focused on the opportunity offered by MeToo “to reintroduce virtues such as prudence, temperance, respect and even love.” She exhorted her readers to consider “that sex possibly has a deeper significance than just recreation and that ‘consent’—that thin and gameable boundary—might not be the only moral sensibility we need respect.”

I’m sure many men as well as women, uneasy about modern hookup culture, agreed with Emba’s sentiments. But what was most notable was that her peroration was directed solely at men, as if they were the only ones who needed to hear it. Women, Emba seemed to assume, were the more prudent and wholesome sex.

Emba in 2017 was not appreciably different from British suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst [pictured above], who had sounded a similar note of exhortation a century earlier in her 1913 tract about prostitution and venereal disease, The Great Scourge and How to End It. It is a classic text of First Wave feminism, unapologetic in its self-righteousness. Pankhurst believed that in a more enlightened future, men would have to exercise sexual self-control, both to prevent the spread of disease and for their own moral and social good. “When women acquire the necessary influence, political and social, they will have it in their power,” she exulted, “to convince men that to live cleanly or to be cast out from the society of decent women are the alternatives open to them” (p. 86).

Women were nothing like men sexually, according to Pankhurst. “There can be no mating between the spiritually developed women of this new day and men who in thought or conduct with regard to sex matters are their inferiors,” she asserted. Responding to those who claimed that women were chaste only because they had been forced to be so by the sexual double standard of their time, she admitted that such might be the case, but saw chastity as a virtue women would never relinquish:

“It is very often said to women that their ideas of chastity are the result of past subjection. Supposing that were so, then women have the satisfaction of knowing that their subjection has brought them at least one great gain, a gain they will not surrender when the days of their subjection are over. The mastery of self and sex, which either by nature or training women have, they will not yield up” (p. 132).

Here was the common wisdom that, with some feminist adjustments, remained current. Men want sensation, and they’ll selfishly use any attractive woman (or even an unattractive one, in a pinch) to achieve it. Women, on the other hand, want loving relationship and intimacy.

This remained the fallback assumption even when women’s behavior was more like men’s than Pankhurst would have predicted. When it was noted, for example, that women were increasingly paying for sex from prostitutes, just as some men do, some feminist pundits developed a more sympathetic analysis of prostitution. They opined that the women paying for sex had particular needs that could best be met through “sex work” (“Sex worker clients are increasingly women—and they’re seeking more than pleasure”).

Academic researcher Hillary Caldwell was quoted that “sex work” offered women “a greater sense of safety” to learn about sex and their bodies. She noted women’s “worries about dating,” which included concerns for “emotional safety—will you be rejected, or will you be laughed at or belittled.” Men, it seems, didn’t worry about being rejected or laughed at.

Similarly, when it turned out that women, like some men, were known to travel to poor countries for sexy adventures with locals—a practice commonly known as sex tourism—the women’s actions were not seen as equivalent to men’s. Men who travelled to find sexual partners, even (or especially) when they were looking to marry, were seen as exploitative and abusive. But when feminist journalist Julie Bindel wrote about female sex tourists (“Meet the middle-aged women who are Britain’s female sex tourists”), she was adamant that “it is not just sex the women are seeking” for “they usually believe the men they meet on holiday are in love with them.”

While admitting that the women’s relationships often involved “a racist and colonialist view of black male sexuality,” Bindel was still keen to report from the women’s point of view, emphasizing that “Middle-aged and older women with low self-esteem and a history of failed relationships are more likely to fall for the delusion [that they have found love].” She also noted that many of the women traveling for sex had been abused by men back home. No such empathy or nuance would ever be given to white men in search of a wife in Thailand or the Philippines.

Most experts still have trouble accepting that women’s sexuality can be straight-up unloving or selfish; most, likewise, have trouble accepting that men’s sexuality is ever anything but.

That’s why the sentimental bafflegab has gone into high gear over a new 8-part FX mini-series, Dying For Sex, streaming on Disney +, in which the main character, a woman, engages in precisely the type of hedonistic, impersonal and uncaring sexual behavior that feminists and moralists spent centuries condemning—but which is now presented (in a lengthy review article in The Daily Mail) not only without any negative judgement, but with gushing adulation. A review in The Guardian called the series “revolutionary TV” and a “feminist endeavor to its core” that “leaves you longing for more.”

I am not going to review the series, which I’ve watched only in bits. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the whole thing. I’m confining myself to the story behind the series.

The show, which had an earlier incarnation in an award-winning podcast of the same name, is allegedly based on the actual experiences of an American woman, Molly Kochan. After learning in 2015 that her breast cancer had metastasized and she would not survive it, Molly decided to end her marriage of 13 years in order to spend whatever time she had left pursuing sexual satisfaction. As her girlfriend Nikki Boyer phrases it, she “[got] out of a relationship that [wasn’t] romantically working for [her]” in order to “reclaim [her] life.”

The resulting sexual rampage lasted until just before her death in 2019, during which time she reportedly had sex with at least 188 men. The number may have been even higher because she and Nikki, counting the names listed in Molly’s phone, gave up at that point. Molly did not tell most of the men about her condition, not wanting anything “to get in the way of the experience.”

By traditional (or nearly any) standards, it’s a sordid tale that turns abandonment of one’s spouse and reckless self-indulgence into an occasion for maudlin celebration. It also pokes a large hole in previous pronouncements about women and intimacy.

Audience response is carefully managed by the glowing language of the article and the many affirmative remarks by Molly’s long-time friend Nikki, who produced Dying For Sex in tribute to Molly and their friendship. Nikki stressed that Molly’s “wild dating adventures” were what she needed to “‘make her feel alive’ in the face of death.” Molly was “determined to satisfy a sexual desire she felt had never been fulfilled.” Nikki was “enamored by her bravery” and “could see how good [the cancer-fueled romp] was for Molly.”

Quite late in the article, we learn that Molly had been sexually molested as a child by her mother’s boyfriend, and that her “sexcapades” were her way of “trying to reclaim her body” and “reassemble the pieces of her fractured life.” The significance of the added detail is never adequately explained. Was Molly’s wild behavior an expression of sexual wholeness, or of her brokenness? It can’t be both a symptom of her abuse and its cure, or can it?

Lest readers feel even a twinge of sympathy for the husband abandoned by Molly, left to face not only the loss of his wife but also the reality of her prodigious infidelity (and now advertised to the world as the man who failed to satisfy her), the article makes it clear that he was fully deserving of his lonely humiliation. He is depicted as the one who let Molly down, a “controlling” man who failed her in her hour of need:

“Though her husband of more than a decade (in the show he’s called Steve) had looked after her during her first bout of cancer, a sexual and emotional distance had already grown between them. Ironically, they were in the middle of a couples therapy session in August 2015 when Molly received the call telling her the cancer was now terminal, yet instead of offering support, he remarked ‘Can we now get back to why I’m so angry?’”

It’s impossible to believe it happened like that, but that’s what we’re given.

Not surprisingly, we also learn nothing about the humanity of any of Molly’s short-lived boyfriends. Some of Molly’s “trysts” lasted a few weeks; many were one-time encounters. A few of the men were “devastated” and “torn apart” to learn from Nikki that Molly had died. Did any of them feel used, or bothered by the realization that Molly had lied to them about who she was? These are questions we are not encouraged to pursue. It was Molly’s body, after all.

The article ends with Nikki’s pre-emptive dismissal of criticism. For anyone who fails to be impressed by Molly’s decision to fuck her way into eternity, “maybe [the series] is not for them.” Molly lived “beautifully […] up until the day she passed away.” Readers are assured that the series is a “brutally honest and emotional story” that is “funny, dark, and deeply moving.” As always with any story about a woman, it is also “seriously taboo-busting,” showing viewers that women with cancer still have sexual needs (whether men with or without cancer have sexual needs is another matter, of course; any such discussion leads to outraged denunciations of masculine entitlement). To increase our admiration, we can even look forward to a sexual encounter in Molly’s hospital bed while she was hooked up to an IV drip. The article makes clear that Dying for Sex is a raucous triumph throughout, never deviating from its girl-power theme.

Move over Terry Fox! He merely spent the last year of his life running across Canada on one leg to raise money for cancer research.

Incredulity is perhaps the most appropriate response to this completely inauthentic celebration of zipless sex. Dying for Sex, though allegedly based on a true story, is a fiction from first to last, and potentially a dangerous one for any woman who takes its prescription seriously. It cannot tell the truth about Molly’s sex mania because that wouldn’t be life-affirming or beautiful, just tawdry. As most women either know or suspect, one-night stands are rarely fun, and 188 or more of them, day after day and week after week for three or four years, definitely wouldn’t be. Whatever Molly got out of them—in addition to the risk of sexual disease, never mentioned in the article—it wasn’t human connection or self-knowledge or even, likely, sexual pleasure.

The fact is that having a lot of sex is no more admirable than gorging on chocolate chip cookies or playing the slot machines. But celebration of female sass has gone beyond the point of no return. If a man had spent his last few years in meaningless skirt-chasing, we wouldn’t be maundering on about how beautiful it was. The hoopla about Dying for Sex indicates that in matters of sexual morality—as in so many others—liberated women will not be leading us to Pankhurst’s “new day.”