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.