"In our sexual culture," Douthat argues, "the male preference gets treated as normative even by women who don’t share it, and whose own comfort level with sex outside a committed relationship is actually substantially lower." In response, he calls for "a somewhat more conservative sexual culture," and in another spot, for "a romantic culture in which more is required of young men before the women in their lives will sleep with them." That is where I stop understanding his argument. How would bringing about a more conservative sexual culture work?

Let's situate ourselves on the campus of a residential college—still assuming, for the sake of argument, that Douthat is accurately diagnosing one problem: a culture where the preferences of many, especially women, are misperceived and thwarted. A social conservative like Douthat, one of his feminist critics, and an individualist like me might all agree that certain responses are desirable. Students could be educated about the fact that they overestimate the speed at which their peers engage in sexual activity and could receive accurate information. They could be exposed to the perspectives of men and women who prefer relatively high degrees of intimacy or commitment before sexual intercourse, and encouraged to take care not to pressure anyone to go faster than they want. Better information alone could change the campus culture in salutary ways.

Speaking more broadly, efforts could be made to eliminate any stigma students feel due to a failure to hook up at the perceived or actual pace of their peers, on the theory that diverse choices in this realm are expected, normal, and not at all shameful. "Many college students are more sexually conservative than they prefer to let on," Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker write. "They’re afraid to appear prudish, which strikes many as a social kiss of death." If inculcating a more conservative sexual culture is a matter of making sexually conservative young people feel more comfortable and less stigmatized, what reason would there be to object? Stigmas, real or perceived, can hurt the individuals who run afoul of them.

But I can imagine another, more traditionalist approach to making sexual culture more conservative. Rather than working to reduce instances when sexual conservatives feel a stigma against prudery, social conservatives could try to resurrect stigmas against people who engage in sex "too quickly," however that is defined.

Which role would stigma play in the more conservative sexual culture that Douthat imagines? If I'm reading him correctly, he assumes stigma is inevitably going to exist:

I actually have no idea what kind of romantic landscape would result from perfectly “liberated decision-making,” because—much like the anarcho-capitalist utopia of certain libertarian imaginings—no such perfect personal liberation is possible. To be human in society is to live with conventions, patterns, expectations; if you do away with one set on the grounds that it’s too “rigid,” as Tracy puts it, you can expect that whatever social system emerges after the revolution will have its own set of pressures, assumptions, and constraints.

There is truth to that. And I have no desire to decrease the stigma associated with sexual behaviors like bestiality, date rape, and emotional manipulation. My disagreement with social conservatives concerns the utility and morality of stigmatizing consensual intercourse or "hook-ups" between young adults who do their best to treat one another as they would want to be treated (and diligently guard against STDs and unwanted pregnancy).