But two groups’ deep differences means that neither can abide the possibility of the other’s final victory. Thus in the late 1990s, when evangelical Christianity seemed to be growing and Republican power with it, feminists who had once railed against sexual harassment suddenly found reasons to make their peace with the piggery — sorry, European cultural sophistication — of a liberal president, and to dismiss even credible rape allegations as a neo-puritanism that needed to be defeated at all costs.

It wasn’t that those feminists had ceased to believe in the principle that powerful men shouldn’t prey on weaker women. It was that they felt compelled to shelve that principle, temporarily, because they feared its application by Republicans would allow conservative-Christian moralism rather than their own to dominate the culture.

Now we’re living through a similar period of tactical compromise with libertinism, but this time it’s religious conservatives who are compromising. Fearful of secularization and feeling culturally besieged, they have thrown in with a president who embodies that old early-1980s debauch. And in the battles of the Trump era, some are embracing the idea that the #meToo moment — which, like the anti-porn battles of yore, offers potential feminist-conservative common ground — is a puritanical danger to the liberties of men.

As a conservative who appreciates feminism precisely because of its puritanical streak, it’s important to concede that sometimes fears of puritanism are justified. The feminists of the 1990s were deeply wrong about Bill Clinton but they were right that many of the men investigating him were fearful hypocrites. Likewise, while the #meToo movement has generally punished the guilty, some campus rape regimes have been genuinely unfair to men, and in our present derangement the reasonable concerns about Judge Kavanaugh coexist with a slightly fevered eagerness to make him a bad-guy preppy scapegoat.

But my general sense is that the way for religious conservatism and feminism to correct these excesses would be to learn from the other a little bit. Obviously the stumbling block of abortion would always be there. Still, the inevitability of that battle doesn't require embracing strategic libertinism at every turn and hardening your battles lines at every front.

Thus the puritanism of conservatism would be more admirable, more fully moral, if religious conservatives had a stronger appreciation for the reality of sexism, the value of female leadership, the need to seriously correct for the way ideals of chastity often punished women more than men.

The puritanism of feminism, meanwhile, would be more realistic if it could acknowledge that crucial differences between men and women aren’t just an artifact of sexism, and that the costs that promiscuity imposes and the unhappiness it breeds might actually be woven into the deeper natures of how both sexes love and mate and reproduce.