You’ve Come a Long Way Down, Baby: The Dignity of Degradation
Part of an ongoing conversation:
Joe Cools writes and says he has a second-wave feminist friend who is open to the ideas of chastity. But he could not show her words like mine “The sacred view of sex is sane, for sanctity is sanity, which is to say, it reflects reality: any deviation from that is insane,” because to call her insane will halt the argument. He says I speak too forcefully (and rudely) to be persuasive.
He makes a good point. Let me mention a point on the other hand.
I quoted this quote by a second-wave feminist appearing in this article:
Rachel Kramer Bussel, a sex writer and leader in the sex-positive movement, believes that casual sex is “under attack”:
“There’s a world of difference between being branded a sex object and choosing to be one…I may like to get spanked until I scream, but I still deserve to be treated as an intelligent human being… Feminists are just like any other women, and it’d be a shame for us to hold back in a misguided attempt to live up to the legacies of Susan B. Anthony and Gloria Steinem.”
The article goes on to list other “sex positive” feminist kinks that the postrational postmodern postchristian ladies demand be treated as liberating choices for women: Rape fantasies, BDSM (sadomasochism), Swinging, Polyamory, Fisting, Bukkake, Careers in prostitution and stripping and porn, both acting and creating.
(Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I now know what the various perversions referred to as fisting and bukkake mean, and I wish I had access to the the memory-eraser helmet.)
My reaction to this was to say
The irony, if not the logical paradox, of a young lady of good upbringing being spanked until she screams, infantilized in heady sexual humiliation and total submission to the brutal passions of her lover, at the same time asking, nay, demanding to be treated with the honor and respect granted to chaste, pure, and non-revolting women who who display some self control and common sense in the area of the sexual appetite — this is not a paradox that I, for one, believe is suitable for being addressed in detached and temperate language.
Rolf Andreassen writes and questions what in the world is wrong with “playfulness” in sexual relations, and by “playfulness” he refers to BDSM practices such as spanking.
This is one and the same Rolf Andreassen who wrote in complaining that the following picture (see below) was deleterious to the equality and dignity of women, on the grounds that portraying women doing housework as a normal thing hearkened back to the dark days when women were discouraged from entering the professions.
So, just so we are clear, pictures like this (see below) according to the sex-positive feminist worldview, are not demeaning toward women, provided only the woman consents to the demeaning.
No the position of the curved get manly sword covering Tarl Cabot’s manly parts. No Freudian Subtext here.
Now, with all due respect to Joe Cool, I have no other word to use, when referring to a world view that calls the first picture above disrespectful to women, hurting the cause of feminine equality, but the second one liberating and helpful to the cause of feminine equality — there is no word but insane. The values are exactly opposite of reality.
Dear reader, if you look at the image of the slave-girl of Gor, and compare this to the picture of Marvel Girl getting her chores done with her way cool mind powers, and you decide that the slavegirl image is flattering and ennobling to the distaff sex, but the superheroine image is demeaning, then you are simply and starkly insane. Your thoughts have no relationship to reality.
I leave it to the less choleric and more patient of my brethren to go through the logical steps to show why doing women’s work making a home is less demeaning than BDSM.
But, before we conclude this conversation, let us pause to note the mental and moral law involved.
The modern notion of freedom is an assertion of nothingness. Freedom is the lack of impediment to the willpower.
The modern notion is that we, as absolute and godlike sovereigns of our own souls, we alone have the right to define true and false, good and bad, right and wrong, and that whatever we call right in our own eyes is right. The ancient notion of freedom was that a creature is free the more and more he grows into his own nature: a man cannot be happy living as a dog, nor a saint living as a sinner. The ancient notion held that addicting yourself to vice decreased rather than increased your freedom, even if the addiction were freely chosen.
The ancient notion of freedom was an assertion of a positive good. Freedom is a lack of impediment to one’s own true nature and the lack of impediment to one’s right reason.
By modern thinking, a drunk whose life spins out of control into a wreck because he cannot stop drinking is “free” as long as no one is holding a gun to his head. To ancient thinking, a drunk who cannot stop drinking is not free, but is a slave to his vice, and cannot be free until he is set free by the truth.To the ancient, holding a bottle to your lips was much the same as holding a gun to your head, if you could not put the bottle down.
But modern thinking washes its hands of such questions, and says “What is truth?” and smiles and shrugs.
The sex-positive movement, if like other movements in modern thought, is being drawn by a law of nature into a position of paradox: by seeking the good of liberty and equality for women, they get instead the degradation of women to the status of unpaid whores, and pervert whores at that. Whatever is good and pure and noble is driven off: what is degrading and filthy and horrid (do I need to explain what bukkake is?) is set up in its place.
And, like a law of economics, the bad drives out the good. A normal and natural bit of adultery or harlotry as between two consenting adults of opposite sexes copulating no longer stimulates nor titillates. Either the consent must be bent (as in BDSM) or the adulthood (as in pederasty) or the opposition (as in homosexuality) or the copulation (as in any number of fetishes where the penis wanders into some other orifice). All too soon, the sight of a naked yet healthy young lady no longer stimulates the sexual response, unless she has artificial inflatable breasts, or tattoos, or wears fetish gear, or whathaveyou. The normal becomes despised; the despicable becomes the norm.
The law of nature involved is the law that ideas have consequences. The human soul, or, if you prefer, human psychology, operates by certain rules that can be for a time evaded, but cannot be for long escaped.
One of those rules is that one cannot elevate a lesser good, like equality, above a greater good, like virtue, without creating a logical paradox. Logical paradoxes do not exist in reality, only in thoughts and words, so that loyalty to such a paradox creates a breach or break between thought and reality: one departs from reality and enters cloudcuckooland, the land beyond the looking glass.
Nor can the breach exist in thought only, but must also be reflected and expressed in appetites and passions. Devotion to an unreal philosophy produces a craving for unreality in life, and a fear of truth, and a hatred of logic, and, at the same time, a pride in one’s own superiority of mind and soul, since one finds oneself apart from the sane majority.
Nor can the breach exist in the passions only, but must be reflected and expressed on one’s morals. A devotion to untruth leads eventually to a devotion to immorality. Morally sane behavior begins to look offensive, even repugnant: and the glamor of evil grows in its allure.
These lesser goods are what we call idols. They are never perfectly evil at first. Even Moloch and Ashtart were a rain god and a fertility goddess, whose offices were to the bring the rain and bless the crops. Only in civilized and overcivilized times, after the law of corruption had time to operate, did these become patrons of child sacrifice and temple prostitution.
Idolatry is bad not only because it is illogical, but also because it is harmful to the human soul: a distortion in the reason sooner or later expresses itself as a distortion in the morals. Anything can be turned into an idol, even a noble cause like that seeking equality for women.
What makes it an idol is not whether the idea, in isolation, is good or bad. What makes it an idol is elevating a good idea to the position of being the sole and sovereign idea of one’s whole life and philosophy: mistaking a lesser good for the Sum of All Good, the summum bonum. Elevating a lesser from its subordinate position is what causes the logical paradox, and the paradox is what causes the devotion to unreality, which causes the associated neurotic devotion to immorality.
No doubt at this point you are asking, dear reader, whether I think feminists should urge their buxom yet nubile and svelte smoldering-eyed daughters into careers as porn stars, or, better yet, enslaved temple prostitutes. All I can say is that there are plenty of men willing and eager to exploit your weaknesses, sexual and otherwise, but that the Creator that designed you designed you for much better things.
Feminists, you were told that the traditional morality was a trap, meant to force you into being chaste and doing housework, and that by working outside the home, you would be free. The freedom you sought by rejecting traditional morality, as is the way of such things, is also a trap: so while you are free to work outside the home, move in with a live-in lover, who no doubt, if he is a gentleman, is willing to spank you until you scream, you are still probably going to end up doing the housework anyway, because he is not going to clean, and he is not going to put a ring on your finger, and your work outside the house gives you the freedom to loan your live-in boyfriend money, because he no longer acts the part of a man and supports his wife.
And, if statistics are any guide, he is likely to beat your children that you had from a previous alliance, and, to keep you away from other men like himself, to beat you, too.
This era promised you freedom, but it disarmed you. Look around you. Look at the culture that normalizes porn and lauds abortion as a sacred right. This culture hates virginity, it hates motherhood, it hates marriage, and it is not that friendly to old ladies.It hates everything about you, ladies, everything feminine, everything maternal. The only time the modern culture praises femininity is when it sees feminine traits in menfolk. The only form of the feminine principle this culture admires is the adulteress.
Oh, to be sure, there are men who do not fit this description, but they are men who disobey rather than obey the common wisdom and the common attitude spread by our day and age.
This era is not friendly to you, my ladies. If you want to avoid that same pagan world view and mind set that created the cult of temple prostitution, you must seek out the Church that ended paganism.
Did I say pagan? My mistake. The chastity and wisdom of Athena is absent; the virginity of Artemis is despised; the dignity of Hera, mother of gods and men is gone; and Hestia, goddess of hearth and home, weeps. All those ancient fertility goddesses, what would they make of the sterility of contraception and abortion?
We are far, far below the standards set by the pagans.
So did Susan B Anthony and Gloria Steinem work and struggle and devote themselves to your cause, O feminists, so that Rachel Kramer Bussel could be spanked until she screams, and then demand dignity afterward? What that really what the suffragettes fought to achieve?
ADDED LATER:
A reader, Nate Winchester, suggested this illustration to illustrate the point. I think it captures the paradox, or, to be blunt, the moral insanity, of the modern age quite adroitly:
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.
