Still having promiscuous sex with in a consequence-free environment…
An article from The American Culture website, touching a theme I have more than once addressed:
Espying a sinister pattern behind these events, Grose bemoans what she characterizes as a horrid resurgence of puritanism that has become a common attitude among young females and is somehow perverting even once-sensible feminists such as Ms. Klausner:
Domestic bliss is now the cultural ideal for young women, which is why Lori Gottlieb haranguing women to settle for Mr. Good Enough in her new book Marry Him hit such a raw nerve. Cue the “spinster panic” articles, like this one from the New York Times in January, which talks about how successful beautiful women are “victims of a role reversal” that will leave them single because men aren’t making as much money as they are anymore.
At the start of this decade, we have thoroughly internalized these recent conservative cultural messages about the importance of marriage: “73 percent of women born between 1977 and 1989 place a high priority on marriage,” writes Hannah Seligson in theWall Street Journal. If what Gen Y wants is marriage, then it follows that feelings about sex would be more complicated—and in some cases, deeply judgmental. A Princeton freshman wrote an op-ed last week about why her friend should not be allowed to claim rape after a night of highly inebriated sex, the implicit message being that she should not have been having inebriated sex in the first place. A poll taken last month in London showed that women were less likely to forgive a rape victim than men were.
Isn’t that just awful? Women want to get married, think it’s not rape if a friend gets drunk, has sex, and then regrets it, and find they can’t attract many men who earn less money than they do. Gee, whatever happened to liberty?
[…] But the grotesque crassness of the past decade may well have brought about at least one very good consequence: the tawdry reality behind the ideals of orgasm-obsessed feminists such as Grose has been laid bare for all to see and judge …
You may read the whole thing here.
My Comment: There may be some drawbacks to having women pressured into living up to the standard of civilized moral norms, including repressive norms such as chastity, being a good wife and mother, loving, supportive, and absolute mistress and queen in her own household, and all those antiquated notions from the 1950’s and from A.D. 50. But the promise of having women not under pressure has proven false. The only other real option is to have women pressured into living down to the nonstandard of uncivilized moral abnorms, including acting like a playboy bunny, rock starlet, power-tie-wearing she-Capitalist, unborn-baby-killing Lamia, temple prostitute, angry narcissist, hag, termagant, and harridan.
In other words, if you abandon the Christian notion of acting like a Roman saint, and the pagan notion of acting like a Roman Vestal Virgin, you are left not with no expectations, but with the rather forceful expectations that you shall and must act like a Babylonian harlot in service to Ishtar (or, worse, a Carthegenian servant of Moloch) and pressure your girlfriends to do likewise. It reduces all male-female relations to a naked power struggle rather than a complimentary cooperation, and the power women have over the souls of men, if marriage is not an option, and if the men are acculutrated to be shallow consumers of the services of harlots, declines rapidly after age 30.
There may be men you can use and abuse, love them and leave them without regret or backward glance out there in the wild wilderness of sexual anarchy, O thou liberated postmodern and postmoral lady, but I assure you, I solemnly assure you, that there are many more men with many more centuries of practice of acting like pitiless bastards and fathering bastards than you have, and who have both the neurochemical programming in their brains and centuries of masculine ruthlessness, boldness and violence driving them which few ladies can match in the long run.
I knew men in college who climbed roofs and broke into women’s dorm rooms at night to get at them; I have not known the reverse. I have heard otherwise decent men longing to throw a woman out of his bed once he has had his pleasure from her; I have almost never heard the reverse. Perhaps I merely happen to know evil men and hapless women, but my experiences are what they are, and I can only judge by what I experience.
The two options are a culture of chastity or a culture of sexual predation. In the culture of sexual predation, the two options are allow the men to exploit the women (which they will do in greater numbers, over a longer period of time, and with more devestating effect, than cases where women exploit men) or to demasculinize the men so as to decrease the danger of exploitation (which has drawbacks of its own, including, as one small clue of a larger social uneasiness, a change in the reading taste of women, so that vampires and other dead men are more popular than living men in the romance section of the bookstore).
Even putting the abstract moral question aside, it would seem to be in the self-interest of the fairer sex to acculturalize men into Christian notions of chivilry, chastity and honor, to as to internalize a set of rules protecting women from stalkers and mashers.
My attitude toward feminism can be summed quickly in two equations: right to vote = good; misogynistic misanthropy = bad. I admire suffragettes and eschew feminists, because I think the lady crusaders stopped being in favor of legal female equality long ago, and started being in favor of the culture of death and its vices instead.
I have lost all faith in feminism. When given a choice between supporting vice and supporting the rights and dignity of women, the National Organization of Women famously and unambiguously came out in favor of vice. When President Clinton was lustily betraying his wife with a White House intern young enough to be his daughter, the NOW did not seek the good of either women that powerful and pitiless man was victimizing. My conclusion: in this case, and in other cases like this, many feminists (perhaps most?) seek to promote the interest of evil rather than to promote the interests of women.
I hope it is not too old fashioned of me to speak of adultery and marriage-breaking and treating women like disposable hankies as evil. I am sure there is some mealy-mouthed politically correct non-word that can be substituted that will not grate on sleepy postmodern ears, and will not bring order or clarity to slovenly and slattern postmodern brains. But if the acts of pumping one’s seed into the face of a kneeling young employee, then publicly reviling her (she who trusted and perhaps loved you) as a liar, bimbo, and whore, commanding friends and followers to pile on with like revilements, betraying your wife, shaming your daughter, breaking your marriage oath, and smirking about the whole thing later, if all this cannot be called evil, then the word ‘evil’ had lost its denotation.
A man like that treats the women around him like mannakins. They are not real people to him, merely instruments, either convenient, indifferent, or inconvenient to his purposes. It is not in the self-interest of the feminist to see the numbers and powers of such men increase; and yet this seems to be the outcome of her crusade.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
