Playpowerment
Posted on 23 September 2011
Note: the article below was written in September of 2011. By the first of October, the show being discussed had already been canceled by NBC.
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I see in the news that NBC is putting out a melodrama set in a Playboy club.
The thinking behind such a drama is not hard to guess. If you want to have an excuse to squeeze lots of pretty actresses into lots of skimpy outfits, you have to come up with an excuse simple enough for a television executive to understand: so you pitch a show about lifeguards at a beach, all of whom are in bathing suits.
If someone has made a crime drama where all the undercover under-twenty she-cops are beauty queens, or cheerleaders, or Hooter’s waitresses, that show would probably get the green light also. I propose someone should make a series about the shadowy world of international espionage and catfight-jello wrestling among lingerie models. The show could be called VICTORIA’S SECRET AGENT.
What I find uproariously amusing, if pathetic, is the following statement by the toothsome damsel who is one of the stars in the show. The young beauty is named Jenna Dewan-Tatum.
She tells PR.com, “Like it or hate it, the Playboy bunny is iconic. I think it’s a beautiful, sexy, womanly outfit. I also believe that by today’s standards, we are wearing a lot more clothing (on the show) than most bathing suits and bikinis out there!
“What I love so much about the Playboy bunny costume is that it creates this hourglass figure when you wear it. For somebody like me who has to work hard to have my curves, it’s nice to wear something that helps me out a little bit, gives me that corset and gives me those hips. As soon as you put it on you feel empowered, you feel sexy and you feel womanly. There are very few things I’ve worn in my life that I can say make me feel more like a woman.”
But Dewan-Tatum, who is married to her Step Up co-star Channing Tatum, is adamant she has no interest in exploring the world of Playboy further and would never consider stripping off for the famous men’s magazine.
She adds, “No. I’m not looking to pose nude in anything.”
Speaking as a guy, and as a rather more shallow and perverse member of my sex than most, let me just say at the outset that I have no objection to Mrs. Tatum flaunting her perfect hourglass figure for my crude and concupiscent lust of the eyes.
Indeed, let us post a picture to admire her glamor.
Of course, maybe mine is not the standard we should be using. I am, after all, the one who suggested a television show about espionage lingerie models catfighting with undercover yet buxom young policewomen dressed as Hooter’s waitresses or bathing beauties would be a good idea. In that spirit, let me post another picture of Mrs. Tatum, that we too may admire how womanly she feels.
And yet I must wonder why, if dressing in the fetishistic uniform of a worldwide pornographic empire “empowers” a girl by making her feel feminine, should not posing as a Playmate in the altogether, everything else being equal, make a girl feel even more powerful?
Also, I wonder at the paucity of her wardrobe, if so little else she wears makes her feel truly like a woman. My suggestion is that she stock up on Edwardian tea dresses.
Or maybe something more Victorian.
This looks plenty feminine and womanly to me.
(Indeed, I seem to recall more than one feminist lady friend of mine objecting that Edwardian and Victorian dress demeaned women by exaggerating the femininity of the female figure. I was also told it demeaned them by being too modest and smothering their smoldering sexuality. How one style of dress can do both, I was not told.)
I draw your attention, dear readers, not just to Mrs. Tatum’s hourglass figure, but to her use of the word “empowered.”
The use is hardly unique to her, and I mean not to single out this one particular young actress for comment, but rather, to note that she repeats a commonplace assertion in our hypersexualized and hypochristian culture, namely, that immodesty is strength and modesty is weakness. That is an assertion of which it is hard to imagine a more blatantly untrue. Speaking of blatant…
Ahem. I am seeing the glamor, but not the power.
The Playboy bunny is iconic, alright. She is basically the modern equivalent of a harem girl, a poor women kept under lock and key to serve the sexual pleasure of some polygamous and oleaginous overweight oriental potentate.
The difference here is that she had volunteered for the degradation. To the modern mind, volunteering for anything makes it palatable and licit. Of course, that does not change the nature of the degradation.
Keep in mind that the same people who regard this as “empowering” regard portraying these same girls in the guise of young wives keeping house, or young mothers reproducing the race, or young lovers reserving their charms for the one and only one man heaven and happy destiny has reserved for her dreams, as either demeaning, or insulting, or contemptible.
It is not sensuousness or sex appeal the moderns find demeaning, it is only healthy sex, normal sex, that is, married sex directed toward making firm the bonds of love or making babies. Unhealthy sex the moderns find empowering.
For purposes of illustration, here is what they find empowering to women:
And here is what they find demeaning:
Somehow, I am just not seeing the demean. It still looks plenty feminine to me, a heavenly vision, and plenty darn sensuous.
So what are Mrs. Tatum and the many others who talk about empowerment talking about?
The mildly ungrammatical neologism of “empowerment” entered popular usage in the 1980′s for reasons not hard to guess: the word sums up nicely the craving of those who deem themselves weak or disenfranchised for the honors and victories they feel life has denied them. The decade was denounced as a decade of greed, but it was also a decade of powerlust from every quarter.
Myself, I first heard the word in political circles, where the talk was about restoring to the people powers unconstitutionally usurped by government encroachment, but soon anywhere where anyone was talking about a powerlust in a positive way, a desire for power rightfully one’s own, the word passed into currency.
It was adopted by self-esteem cultists to talk about the sentiment or sensation of feeling powerful rather than the concrete reality of power. It became a word to refer to imponderables, what prior generations would have called honors, signs and symbols of power divorced from the reality of power.
At about the same time when Feminism entered its pathological phase of being the enemy of all womankind everywhere, the word was taken up by feminists as a shorthand way to express the idea that their envy of men was based on a sensation of feeling weak, and their hatred of femininity and all things female, especially motherhood, was the same as the justifiable desire of the disenfranchised subjects of an overbearing state to have restored to them their natural rights as citizens.
I hasten to add that feminists were not always fruitloopy misogynists: I am old enough to recall days women were routinely treated dismissively or condescendingly because of their sex, and feminists rightfully demanded political and legal equality. Having achieved that goal, the sane women, satisfied, departed from the movement, leaving the helm in the hands of rabid Marxists, who analyzed the man-woman dynamic in the same crude and deceptive terms all Marxists use: not mutually cooperation for mutual benefit, but as a Darwinian war of extermination between implacably irreconcilable foes.
(That this description does not match any single real-world example of the rather delicate and imponderable dynamic complexity of the war of the sexes does not deter any Marxist in the slightest. They never let reality interfere with theory.)
Marxism, like most forms of idolatry, is obsessed with power. The worshipers of the devil do not bow and kiss the cloven hoof out of adoration or admiration for their master, but for the sake of power, occult or otherwise.
The limpid beauty of Marx’s idea (and all lies are beautiful, or else they would not act as bait for the snare) is its simplicity: in a Godless world, there is no right nor wrong, there is nothing by the remorseless Darwinian warfare of all against all. Everything that seems to be laws, or customs, or social arrangements, or market place exchanges, once stripped of its mask, is simply the war of Darwin. The mask is the excuses that apologists for the current social order use to paint the face of their selfish class interests with the lipstick and rouge of altruistic concern for the common weal. And those whose interests are opposed to the current social order but who defend it nonetheless, are deceived by false consciousness.
Marxism is a non-falsifiable theory: it can be used to impeach any conclusion with which one disagrees by impeaching the person making it, ad hominem, so that the logic of the conclusion need never be addressed. All persons enjoying some benefit, real or imagined, of the current system who defend the system can be dismissed as having the impure motive of self-interest, and anyone enjoying no benefit, real or imagined, of the current system who defend the current system can be dismissed as not knowing where their true self-interests lay. Hence the revolutionary can call for the destruction of a social order for completely selfish reasons, and laud himself for his enlightenment; but can, without a blush of shame, condemn the selfishness of others who oppose that destruction, on the grounds that they are benighted. Logic is not the strong point of these so called scientific socialists.
All one has to do is accuse the other of enjoying an undeserved “privilege” — and then the sulky sense of righteous indignation rises in your breast, because this privilege is one of which you have been cheated, and to right that wrong all sins, from mere rudeness to mass murder, become for you licit and legitimate.
You can justify yourself dishing out scorn and scathing remarks you would never tolerate to be on the receiving end of with the same ease with which you can justify your own fornications, lies, deceptions, and, if need be, justify riots, and expropriations, and propaganda, and betrayal, and totalitarianism, and genocide.
It is an all purpose excuse, and it never runs out.
The core of this philosophy (if a psychological sleight of hand whose only purpose is to justify the irrational can be dignified by that term) is envy of privilege, or, in cleaner terms, envy of power. When nothing exists aside from a Darwinian war of mutual extermination in a godless world, the only virtue is power, and the only goal is power.
As I said, I am old enough – just barely—to remember the days when the feminists were sane. In those days, is was held among feminists that pornography was demeaning to women, that it treated women as sex objects, and that this “objectification” (another ungrammatical neologism) placed the fairer sex in a position of weakness and dishonor.
In those days, feminists made a common cause with Christians against pornography, against using sex appeal as an instrument of commerce. The feminists were practically Puritans. Their argument was based on classical Enlightenment principles arguing for the innate equality of man, and they were as American as apple pie or as Abigail Adams.
Then, on a moonless midnight, the feminist leadership drank the formula of Dr Jekyll or something, and their minds and bodies warped, and they turned into the Ms. Hyde of Marxism, and decided that true equality with men required the destruction of the nuclear family, the abolition of romance and courtship, the remorseless and grotesque mass murder of unborn children.
Marxists have always seen a conflict between the family and the state, and no father is allowed to have authority and leadership in his house, if all the comrades in the totalitarian commune can have no father-figure aside from the Dear Leader.
The feminists adopted this nonsense, and redefined love and marriage and romance as a system of ruthless exploitation between the economic class “male” and the economic class “female”, and came to the conclusion that their Puritanical feminist mothers of the previous generation had fallen prey to “false consciousness.” True liberty and equality and fraternity for women would be achieved only once women were free of all restrictions of morality and common sense. True freedom was insanity, freedom from nature and from logic. True freedom was complete dependence on an all-intrusive nanny-state. True freedom consisted of killing one’s own children in the womb. In the remorseless Darwinian struggle between mother and child, the child was weak, and therefore not only could be killed with impunity, it could be denied humanity, denied the name “human” at the mother’s cruel whim.
Now you might ask, why would women desire fraternity rather than, say, sorority? The companionship and friendship of men and men is not the same in character and tone as friendships (even Platonic ones) between men and women, or between women and women.
The answer is that if you ask that question, you are overthinking this. Envy has no logic to it, no reasoning, no sense. Envy is a type of hate.
You don’t need a reason to hate someone. You hate first, and then find a reason to justify it.
In this case, everything that can be done to discourage fraternity among men has been done, from the forcible introduction of women into what had once been all-male spheres, to the forcible introduction of homosexuals, to the homosexualizing of what formerly had been regarded as virile and manly relationships, to the erosion of the concept of manhood under a dungheap of mockery, and particularly the concept of fatherhood.
Now, then, what logically must happen to the femininity of the female once fatherhood, masculinity, and therefore motherhood, femininity, girlishness, and romance are abolished by the Marxist analysis as “false consciousness”? Once the mystical adventure of romance and courtship are mocked out of existence, what is left?
The refined and almost spiritual sexuality of a ladylike maiden or matron, who could expect all gentlemen to leap to their feet quick as soldiers when she entered the room, or could lure a man like a siren luring a sailor with no more than the flourish of a scented skirt hem to reveal a well turned ankle is the one thing specifically denied to women if all symbols and signs and specific markers of womanhood are denied to women.
If you all dress and talk and act like men, the only way to look female is to rip open your unisex white shirt like Clark Kent readying himself to become superman, and reveal the lacy brassiere of your jigging milk jugs. It is not an approach meant for shy or demure young women to adopt.
But the economics of the mating market (if I may use that crude metaphor) ensure that the bewildered young bachelor is unlikely to be allured by the famous glimpse of stocking of the demure damsel if her sisters in competition all around him are ripping open their blouse buttons and dropping their slacks. The economics of the competition makes it so that crudity tends to drive out modesty. And crudity abolishes femininity.
The woman has only two choices, once feminine nature is abolished from the public square: she must either become masculine, that is, unfeminine, or she must become crudely hypersexualized, that is, unladylike.
Now even a little experience in the sad and fallen world will tell you that even the butchest girl in the world does not have the cajones to pull off acting like a balls-out uber-masculine cowboy, much less like a refined gentleman willing to duel a foe to the death over a point of honor, without failing at it.
When women try to act masculine, instead of acting with punctilious honor, they tend to get bitchy and pushy, or be seen that way. It is not a role most of them are comfortable with.
I am not talking about that mystical and imponderable thing called dignity, which women can wield with greater effect than men: and I most certainly not talking about leadership. In my personal life, I have had women as bosses and supervisors more often than I have had men, and my experience is that they make better leaders, more organized, and more efficient, at least in a modern business context. My reading of history tells me that some of the greatest monarchs of history have been Queens. But Queens act queenly; this is not the same as machismo.
So, given a choice between acting like an unfeminine female and an unladylike one, the young women expelled from the protection of the customary feminine role soon discovers that the first one—acting like a dickless man with breasts—puts her in a position of weakness. Maybe there are some women who can tackle a linebacker, or who can exploit a sexual partner with the ruthlessness and sublimated predatory violence of an aroused male. If so, such women are freaks, and their unusual nature means they cannot serve as role models to imitate.
But the second choice, acting immodestly, flaunting one’s physical charms, the young women enters a sphere where her masculine counterpart cannot compete. Small wonder she feels empowered. And the more immodest and less dignified, nay, even to the point of wearing bunny ears and a fluffy tail, cute and infantile and even ridiculous, the more empowered she becomes. Empowered, that is, as long as the nothing serious is being discussed.
Yes, I said ridiculous. Let us consult that expert of all things feminine, James Bond, to see what he has to say about what to do with women when the time has come for men to talk “Man Talk”, shall we? Perhaps hawkeyed observers will note a slight nuance of condescension and even ridicule as Bond pats his girl a dismissive dismissal.
It easy to imagine a young man casually swatting a bunnygirl on her curvaceous bunny tail. It is hard to imagine him shaking her hand like an equal, and impossible to imagine him leaping to his feet as she entered the room and tipping his hat. She has become an object, just as the old feminists once complained, a sex object, a toy.
So the logic of Marxism brings the new feminist to the exact opposite conclusion as the old feminist, or common sense or common decency, reach. It turns out that to turn oneself into a toylike sex object to serve the pleasure of men and be exploited by them is “empowerment.” The feminist pretends she has discovered a new continent: if she is attractive, and can flaunt an appealing cleavage, she discovers that men will be attracted to her! And she calls this power.
Sorry, ladies, but this power, if it can be called that, not only was not discovered by feminism, nor liberated for your use by feminism: it is the very thing that your mothers and grandmothers back to the dawn of time erected social customs, laws, taboos, and moral codes to contain and control, so that you would not be enslaved and demeaned and exploited by it, or by the backlash of its use.
Left to itself, the natural use of raw sex appeal is not to win love and lifelong commitment from a princely paramour, domesticated, civilized, and made whole by the sacrament of matrimony: the natural use is that a strong man will use the woman to whom sex appeal lures him, and the moment the infatuation of the lure is lessened, he will seek his next sexual conquest, and his next. The Playboy bunny is an icon of frivolity and impermanence. The bunny-girl is temporary.
Picture your young wife in the kitchen, awake at dawn, packing a lunch for junior and Sally as she trots the moppets off to school. Now picture her going through the same routine in a bunny custom, cotton tail, fishnets and nosebleed heels, with Sally saying, ‘Mummy, I want to grow up to be just like you!” — Something not right in that picture, is there? Sally trying on her mommy’s wedding dress is kind of cute. Sally trying on her mommy’s bunny suit is kind of creepy. But why is that? Because wives are serious and playmates are for playtime only.
The power of sex appeal rests on the power to attract powerful men, and to bind them to your love by invisible bonds. The civilization that the feminists are busily attempting to overthrow, Christian civilization, rests on monogamous marriage. Marriage rests on the consent and the fidelity of man and wife. By the traditional laws of Christendom, divorce is unacceptable, even impossible. One the man is bound, he is bound. If you lure a true Christian gentleman into wedlock with your feminine charms, my dear ladies, he is truly bound, and unto death.
Let me hasten to add that the Christian rule against divorce protects the man was well. The toxic combination of no fault divorce, the no-commitment condom culture, and deadbeat dad laws means that the merry wife can commit adultery, bear a bastard, divorce her husband, and have him thrown summarily in jail for failure to provide child support.
Your new feminist and postchristian and antichristian non-civilization rests on the unbridled power of the individual will. You delude yourself, my sweet girls, into thinking your willpower is strong enough to resist the will of the unchecked masculine sexual predator. In the contest between, say, Monika Lewinsky and President Willie Clinton, whose willpower was stronger? Who got the better of whom?
If you have not been exploited and lured by false promises into heartbreak so far, young ladies, I can only say either you are young or shy or blessed by unmerited good luck. Certainly the society around you is doing nothing to make betrayal by selfish boy-man lovers unlikely.
The boy-man is no gentleman caller, who holds his raging passions under the bridle of Christian decency and public modesty. Immodesty is the order of the day. Sexual dominion and ruthless exploitation of as many sex partners as possible wins the applause and laurels of the depraved and darkened public opinion of this corrupt generation.
If Don Juan talks or pressures or commands you to drop your panties, young ladies, and after having his ruthless way with you and giving you a venereal disease, and talks or pressures or commands you to kill your baby and his in the womb, society will not hiss and sneer at him: they will throw roses at his feet. He is a James Bond, and the Playboy of the world.
And from him you will get a “Say ‘goodbye’, Dink” and a friendly swat on the rump to send you on your lonely way, if not a sock on the jaw. Playboys don’t like bunnygirls past their sell-by date: they despise them.
The ruthlessness that the foes of the free market denounce in the free market is here at play. If you get used and abused, ladies, our current society blames not your abuser for his callousness or faithlessness: YOU get blamed for having made an unwise deal, a bad partnership.
No one weeps for a merchant who loses money after a bad deal. Once love and romance is desecrated, no longer seen as a sacrament but seen instead as a business exchange, the wife or paramour or concubine or harlot is extended no pity when she is betrayed by her faithless lover, and neither law nor custom protects her from betrayal.
If Don Juan sniffs after the skirts of another women, you are merely a merchant who lost a customer: Burger King loosing business to McDonald’s because of shinier toys given away in the Happy Meal of love.
Do you understand what feminism has taught you? It tells you that he owes you no loyalty. His love lasts only for so long as his erection lasts. You do not get to have a claim on his soul.
You, who wish for something more out of a relationship than crude physical pleasure soon lost, your bargaining position is now the weakest it has ever been since the Stone Age. A cavegirl had more power over her life and her life-mate than you do, because the caveman who mated her was unlikely to depart the tribe. He could not jump in his sports-car and flit off to meet with his other lovers, nor could he power up the Internet when he was horny to fish for pictures of Mrs. Tatum in a bunny suit.
The empowerment of dressing in the somewhat demeaning corset and bathing beauty uniform of a worldwide commercial empire built on pornography and gambling houses is the power of meekest female submission to triumphant masculine sexual desires.
It is a power women can wield (if they are lucky enough to be born with naturally curvaceous bodies and comely faces, and have suffered no disfiguring diseases nor accidents) between her late teens and late twenties.
After that expiration date, the next generation of buxom bunnies is all too eager to enter the mercantile competition for masculine affection.
But in a society where marriage is demeaned by no fault divorce and by widespread contraception, and fidelity and virginity are scorned and hated, it is a power which can win you only a temporary alliance, not ensure a faithful husband.
And I assure you that this so called power has been around since the cavegirl days. It was to protect women from the exploitation of polygamous men seeking younger mates that monogamy was enacted into law: it was to protect women from the dehumanizing degradation of becoming sex objects that contraception was condemned by every civilized denomination and nation from the Third Century to the first third of the Twentieth. You gave that all up because you thought that these protections were prison walls rather than castle walls, a cage rather than a citadel.
You were offended at being put on a pedestal, and treated with respect mingled with awe. So now you have stepped off the pedestal and into the gutter, and found the path to power leads you to don a bunny suit.
You’ve come a long way, baby.
A powerful and accurate condemnation. I belong to a peculiar subculture which still tries to attain a measure of modesty among its women – namely, the Mormons. My son was married on September 3rd to a darling young woman, and she had great difficulty in finding a wedding dress that she considered modest. Her needs were not extreme – we prefer a dress which is neither strapless nor sleeveless. But such a dress was impossible to find at most outlets. At one place, the owner showed her dress after dress that displayed my future daughter-in-laws “assets” more openly than she preferred, and each time said something along the line of “we can adjust it”. Finally she went to a store 180 miles away to find a suitable dress.
I don’t blame or condemn women who wear such dresses, mind you, but it seems our culture has degenerated to the point that even a bride need not dress as someone who goes to the altar pure and innocent. I suppose most don’t, nowadays.
I also recognize that I am from a more-modest-than-most subculture. But to have NO dresses that fit a somewhat more conservative worldview? That seems extreme.
God bless the Mormons!
Sandy, I had exactly the same problem when I got married in 2007. I couldn’t find any dresses with sleeves except for one that looked like a floor-length satin T-shirt. I ended up going with a strapless dress that at least didn’t show cleavage because it was the best I could do. (Oddly enough, there were plenty of downright gorgeous bridesmaid dresses with sleeves. You’d think that the dresses designed for the married woman would be less flashy than the ones for her potentially single friends . . .) A friend of mine who got married the year before ended up going for a blouse and white skirt because she was so disgusted with the dresses available to her.
Hopefully Kate Middleton’s gorgeous, long-sleeved dress will usher in copycat designs that will allow brides to look both beautiful and modest.
If you google modest wedding dress the entire first page are stores catering to the LDS market. Most appear to be in the Salt Lake-Provo area, so if someone is desperate for a modest dress then they could fly into SLC to be in reach of maximum selection in minimum amount of time.
Last year, my mother and my older sister and I went to a local park to see the roses, and we also got a look at the wedding parties who had come to get their pictures taken, and so at the bridal gowns.
As in commenting on — oh look, that one is not strapless — but look at that one it has sleeves.
Perhaps this question is simply revealing how far standards of modesty have sunk, in that I myself have succumbed to their decline without realizing it — and I apologize for any offense; I don’t mean to be rude, I am simply honestly surprised. But is it genuinely the case that a dress which displays the *arms* must be deemed “immodest”?
Not wanting a wedding dress to have the same plunging neckline as a nightclub tank-top makes perfect sense to me, but I honestly can’t see what’s immodest about exposed arms. (My wife, in fact, did wear a veil-like jacket over *her* sleeveless dress at our wedding, to conceal some tattoos on her arm that were not in keeping with the decorum of the Church, but I made it clear to her that I myself had no objection one way or the other – none of the tattoos themselves are obscene, in bad taste or directly offensive to a Christian viewer.)
I’d hate to think of a bride who goes for a sleeveless, boatneck style of dress (as something appropriate to a summer outdoor wedding) as being “immodest”, but it’s entirely possible I’m missing a key way of looking at this.
Precisely this. You are missing that mormon’s tend to have temple weddings that has a very peculiar dress standard and that even for those that don’t or haven’t been to the temple they are still supposed to dress to that same standard of modesty .
Although, there is a subculture among those Mormons that choose to have bridesmaids for their reception to have the bridesmaids not meet the same standard of dress as a way of signaling their availability, as can be seen in the strapless bridesmaids dress sections of some of the sites that cater to LDS wedding dresses. This to me is confusing on so many levels, starting with do people really go to weddings looking for potential mates for themselves?
Why not? Nice social event, quite possibly a lot of unmarried people whom you’ve never met, chance to talk. . . Miss Manners in fact characterizes such meetings at weddings as traditional.
Hoping to meet a man at a wedding does not seem out of place to me. I thought that’s why they had bridesmaids in the first place, and why they threw the bouquet or garter or whatever.
More confusing to me is why anyone would think dressing immodestly is the way to find that man.
Sandy, you’re on here TOO?
Damn, are we stalking each other or does the lord Jabootu work in mysterious ways?
(no accounting for taste, eh?)
Awesome read.
From the other end of the spectrum, the internet offers plenty of opportunities to view ripped open blouses. However, you tend to find it doesn’t satisfy as much as in the beginning, so you go off searching for the next thing. As Spock would say, “having is not so pleasing a thing, as wanting.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlI3zZk5UGI
The way out of the trap, of course, is to stop treating fellow human beings as playthings for your amusement. In that context, Christian matrimony makes a great deal of sense.
Pics, or this essay didn’t happen! Oh, wait . . .
Actually, I bet the actress genuinely did feel empowered. Such is the rapid march of our degeneration that a costume that in its time was degrading self-display is now cute, even a touch demure in its way.
I bet she felt empowered! The rush of power that comes with a cat suit or any other tight fitting thing that shows off ones assets is heady! Because it comes with an innate knowledge that the men will have their heads whipped around as if their eyes iron filing and your outfit was a magnet.
But that kind of power is, like the person above who quoted Spock, only good for the catching. It is good for impressing, for getting his attention. Once you have it, you’d had better have something more substantial to move onto, or all is lost and all that is left is just the trappings.
Even if you have something substantial to move on to, making the move is difficult. Very few men, having asked you to come sit on their lap, will be quite prepared for you to discourse on good books and good works.
The way these things were traditionally managed is that you let the fellow catch some glimpse of some alluring portion of your flesh, but in a setting where geography or custom imposes some distance, so he only meets you later when you are your more demure self. Thus the “move on to” happens organically. But nowadays that’s more difficult to do
Wow. That is a point I did not even consider. I did notice the cute young actress saying that a bunnysuit was less lurid than a bathing suit, but did not know what to make of that.
No visible midriff, for instance.
I would think that, even today, putting a grown woman in bunny ears and a tail would still appear degrading.
“I hasten to add that feminists were not always fruitloopy misogynists:”
This is true. My church, until about the early 1970′s, was considered pro-feminist in its positions. Then, suddenly, it was considered to be the opposite because females weren’t given the priesthood, traditional marriage was supported, the ERA was opposed, and praying to or worshiping female deities continued to get one excommunicated. The Churches doctrine and policies didn’t change, what was considered to be feminist did.
The same thing happened with the environmental movement.
I imagine that many other organizations experienced a similar shift.
Conservatives are discarded liberals in lots of ways. We are the fools who agreed to put aside outmoded traditions and now find ourselves in the wreckage of the moded ones.
Indeed, the same thing happened with “liberalism”.
As far as I can make out, what are now labeled “neoconservatives” (or were before it degenerated into a swear word) are old-fashioned “liberals” who continued to believe what they always believed.
I would argue that Feminists were always fruitloopy misogynists as far as we can track these things. Virginia Wolfe and Gloria Steinem (Funny you should talk of Bunnies!) were and are leading lights of the Feminist movement, and neither were what you could call a functional human being. I think it’s more a case of bringing “Mean Girl” tactics to the political stage. Play at being nice, so as to learn the weaknesses of one’s enemy, while lacking in soul enough to follow through on the betrayal. Divide and conquer is an excellent tactic, and the Feminists seem to have done it so well that Mr. Wright has been reduced to “Some Feminists”, a construction he has correctly railed against in the past when applied to other movements.
I was excluding the Mom from Disney’s MARY POPPINS.
Thank you sir. I did understand that, but we revisit the purging of the John Birch society from the Conservative movement. “Some” Feminists (See Mary’s post below) have pushed for vile points. We have seen no attempt to purge these elements from the movement, so our worries that the Rank and File approve of the firebrands is not extravagant, I think. The fact that your counter example is Imaginary is telling. I can think of a few feminists who acted in a reasonable fashion (the NOW leader who spoke against Pornstar, for example) but they were quickly purged from the movement…..
Some feminists were. One of the Pankhurts, for instance, said that men deserved no credit for not taking seats on lifeboats, because that was the rule at sea.
They are more conspicious now.
I suspect that some have gotten fruitloopier. That’s the thing about achieving your goals. Go back to the quotidian burdens of life, and the quotidian ways to be good? Why you might have to start being nice to real people to think yourself good, instead of having the Cause, which means you’re Good for serving it.
The show about secret agents jello-wrestling was called Freedom, and it didn’t last very long.
A young man of my age once inadvertently but aptly summed up the state of things when he told me he couldn’t think of any reason to oppose the legalization of prostitution because when he dates a woman he is doing the same thing as a john–paying money to convince a woman to have sex with him. I don’t think he was an especially piggish fellow, either; he was merely a typical young man of the present age, for whom courtship has been entirely replaced by seduction.
I am not sure that the modest woman today is as disadvantaged as you say, though. My friend who thinks dating is about paying for sex might not be interested in a modest woman, but the men worth marrying are. I know a woman who wears only ankle-length dresses and always ties her hair up under a kerchief, and I also know gentlemanly men quite taken with her, I think precisely because her femininity is enhanced by her modesty. In my experience, modesty always makes women more attractive, not less. In a world in which modesty and femininity are quashed, feminine and modest women are standouts who turn heads faster than the bunnies, who nowadays simply look like most other women.
Sorry about the italics. I misused an HTML tag.
I fixed it
Thank you!
The modest woman is disadvantaged today, if perhaps not quite for the reason Mr. Wright stated. I confess my first thoughts when I see a modest feminine woman is “Wow, that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen!”. Modest women, by definition, are not forward with their desires, yes? And this is a world where asking a woman up for coffee can set off an international firestorm……
I don’t think I understand. In what way does modesty lead to lawsuits?
It’s quite simple. The Feminists have destroyed the old rules of courtship and flirting. So, how is a man to tell if an advance will be welcome, or an unwelcome criminal record (Sexual harassment laws being what they are. It’s harassment if she thinks it is, or if she was, unknown to you, doing drugs or drinking, and so was not in control of herself)? The less then modest woman, who dresses with more air then fabric and who comes on to the men she is interested in to the point of almost leaping on them, is an unwell woman who at least has announced publicly that she is interested, which is quite useful if a moment of weakness causes a lawsuit. What such signal do modest women send, to let men know they are open to the dance? Are you willing to risk international shame over an exposed ankle? Uninterested and modest often look the same to those unskilled at flirting, which is most of us, the venues to practice that skill having been destroyed by the Feminists. Really, google Atheist Coffee Sexual Harassment. I’m not talking about imaginary lawsuits, I’m talking about avoiding where others have already gone……
Okay, I think I see what you’re getting at. I knew of ridiculous sexual harassment suits (who doesn’t?), though I’d never heard before of the Atheist Coffee Incident.
The exceptionally modest women I’ve known–and by “exceptionally” I mean long dresses only and always a head covering–have been devout Christians who were unlikely to press a charge of sexual harassment unless the guy was really being a creep. They were the sorts who seemed to know how to rebuff a man without making an incident out of it. One of them is happily married now, so I guess things worked out okay for that guy.
Ah, Elevatorgate: the one where Richard Dawkins was on the wrong side of the argument.
Gentlemen, from the female side, may I say that although the woman in question may have made a mountain out of a molehill in her later actions, she was only expressing what women have to do.
Women have been given the task of monitoring not only their own behaviour but that of men. To you, a clumsy advance from a man to a woman in a lift late at night may be just that: a clumsy advance. To a woman, it is “Am I at risk here? If I turn him down, will he continue to press his advances? Will he turn violent? How do I get out of here fast?” Because, gentlemen, it happens: women do get attacked.
And if it had turned out worse than it did, I guarantee you that there would have been those piping up “Well, it was her own fault! She got into an enclosed space with a man alone late at night – what did she think was going to happen?”
I’ve had at least one experience, in my early twenties, that was genuinely scary: guy on a bus sat down beside me, started chatting, got too friendly, put his hand on my knee. I got up, switched to another seat; he followed me. I *jumped* off the bus when it pulled into my hometown stop and believe you me, I was *exceedingly* grateful that my father was there to pick me up and I didn’t have to walk home, because I really did not want to walk through the town in the late evening with this guy following me (and yes, he did start to follow me off the bus until I got into my father’s car).
I’ve also had drunks hitting on me at bus stations, so me and buses are not a good combination, obviously. But the point remains: the “Atheist Coffee Incident” may sound like “It’s Political Correctness gone mad!” but gentlemen, you at least don’t have to be consciously monitoring your behaviour in case you give ‘the wrong impression’ to a woman who may be no more than obnoxiously persistent in her attentions but who may also turn on you for ‘what, think you’re too good for me, do you?’ and get violent.
That’s life as she is lived.
And what I mean by having to monitor men’s behaviour as well as your own: back when the Yorkshire Ripper was operating, the police advice to women was not to go out at night. Nobody thought that anyone should say “Men, stay indoors” even though it was *women* who were being attacked and a *man* who was doing the attacking.
Women were being assaulted and the result was that the freedom of all women was curtailed. That’s what I mean about having to monitor men’s behaviour; always having one eye on how is he acting? is what I am doing likely to set him off? am I being too forward? I better not go that way or walk down that street or I should just wait in this doorway until he passes by and not have him behind me.
It sounds paranoid. It *is* paranoid, but it’s drilled into us as women: you have to keep yourself safe because it’s your responsibility not to get attacked, not their responsibility not to be attackers.
Ah, no, and no. Coffeegate does not “show what women have to do”, it shows what men have to do, and just how dishonest women can be. She did not brush off the request of a stranger. She publicly humiliated a man after she closed down the bar with him. She took his drinks, she took his time, and when they are kicked out the bar, together, and he suggests they get some coffee (since he was under the illusion she was enjoying the conversation) she crushes him and posts it for all the world to see. Contemptible. Made worse by the number of women who circled the wagons around her, and the fact that she is one of the “Strong, Independent” women who destroyed the old, “Oppressive” rules of courtship. “He shouldn’t of asked her out for coffee, he should have know better, known that would have made her uncomfortable.”. “Does that make all women uncomfortable? Is that a new rule, don’t drink coffee with women?”. “No, of course not. That’s silly. I’m just saying that different women react differently to things, so get to know them better before being so forward.”. “Well, how can I do that?”. “Do something low key and no stress. Maybe ask her out for Coffee.”…..
Ah, no, once again. Women’s freedom was not curtailed at all. The police did not lock women inside to keep them safe. They were given information and the freedom to act upon it. Twisting that into a moment of special pleading is cruel, insofar as only men can be drafted (You know, an actual curtailing of freedom, as opposed to “I can’t do whatever I want, whenever I want, in absolute safety. Men are Pigs!”). And, in this modern world, it is the man who has to monitor the woman’s behavior. This is a world where “Bobbitt” has entered the language (Spellchecker knew the word!) and a man must watch lest his wife shoot him in the back and claim the insurance money, claiming without any proof that you “were scared of him” (Dishonest on the fact of it, insofar as he trusted you with a gun….). Note that these women did not spend life in prison, or even season in prison. It would seem that women can maim and murder on a whim and get rewarded for it. I would tell men to be paranoid, but can you be paranoid if they are actually after you? Anything like that on your side? When the Ripper was operating, did the police ask women what they had done to deserve it? Was the Ripper caught and then let go, because he was in fear? Has “Amazon” (A metaphor for cutting off a woman’s breast to put her in her place) lightheartedly entered the language?
“Not their responsibility not to be attackers.”. I call hooey. Women would not be walking around in skin tight hotpants with “Juicy” in big, bold letters across their bum, if they did not have an absolute belief that men are Gentlemen, and will not act on that come on without consent.
Excuse me, but the insistence that “this only happens to women” is false.
A while ago, I had to research literature from the “women’s anti-rape movement”, for reasons which need not concern us. What I found was incessant repetition of “MEN never have to constantly worry about their safety in secluded areas at night, bla, bla, blah….” I could only wonder what planet they were talking about, where apparently a penis is not only a magic wand but a shield of invulnerability, and how I could move there.
I have repeatedly been physically assaulted on streets (in daylight) and in the subway, and then told it was my fault for not “being alert” or “staying out of bad neighborhoods” (including Washington Square and Park Avenue). THEN I get told that it didn’t happen at all, because white males all live off on Cloud Nine. (Just like being beaten up by so-called “anti-war protesters” didn’t happen, because “they’re the PEACE movement.”)
Oh, and I submit that an injunction to men to “stay indoors” would not have had any likely effect on someone who was ignoring the prior social injunction “Men, do not murder women gruesomely.”
On that incident — anyone who tries to ward off the natural interpretation of his actions by disclaiming them in advance knows perfectly well how they will be interpreted. The correct course of action is to refrain.
Advise him to alert his dates of the fact. Then he won’t have to spend any money on them.
One of the greatest articles I’ve ever read deals with this:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/whefb_bill_buckley_playboy_and.html
By my reckoning, WFB lived the winning formula. Iowahawk summed it up neatly: never stop laughing at the left. Be the winner you and WFB want you to be.
Things will be okay, the kids are alright.
Our challenges are vast, so thankfully our American heritage will be there to guide us. Just remember, as bad as it is here, it could be a helluva lot worse, and is, lots of places.
A Russian airplane recently crashed killing two former Colorado Avalanche players, both in their late thirties I seem to recall. Amazing it doesn’t happen more often considering the miles flown every day. Tragic.
By God, I just saw James Rosen on Fox News as I was rereading his article.
Yes, PLEASE people, can’t we be modest? Just browse through the teens section of a department store and you will not see one dress that does not show – or aim to show – some cleavage. Argh!! How on Earth are high school girls (I’m speaking as one of them) supposed to dress modestly if all that’s available is skimpy? (though there are some pretty dresses – but that doesn’t make the immodesty any better).
Please bring back Edwardian tea gowns and Victorian dresses! Just a historical note though, Victorians were not immune – some of their evening dresses showed plenty of cleavage too. I’ve often wondered what would happen if I were to go out in a Victorian dress (it would be so much fun!). Would people assume disgustedly that I am under the influence of a patriarchal family and lecture me about modern liberties?
There is a fashion movement in Japan called “Lolita”, which draws most of its inspiration from Victorian dress. Unlike steampunk, which is also heavily Victorian-influenced, Lolita emphasizes modesty – if it shows too much, it’s not Lolita. My friends and I would love to wear those things, but to wear it in California…
Well if you wear it to Anime Expo no one would bat an eyelid; you’d probably get a lot of compliments rather than lectures. Unfortunately Lolita fashion is likely to remain contained with anime conventions in the U.S. until they give it a name that doesn’t have negative connotations stateside.
I saw a girl dressed in Lolita fashion at the zoo in Chicago a month ago, but that’s about the only time in the US I’ve seen it in public.
As modest as it may be, though, I can’t get over the creepy, pseudopedophilic nature of the subculture. A lot of the fashion is ridiculously frilly, too, and winds up looking more like a Halloween costume caricature of Victorian or Rococo dress.
Learn to sew, and then get Singer sewing books that show you how to alter patterns. If you get good enough, you will be able to design clothing without a full pattern because you will know how the structure of certain types of clothing ought to be pieced and what allowances are right for you.
I sew a lot for my kids. One of my daughters and I made a gorgeous, modest prom dress from a pattern from the 1940′s. She was stunning! I bought a whole box of old patterns from the 40′s and 50′s at a garage sale for $5 and have used so many of them, but the pattern companies have ‘vintage’ patterns reprinted, too. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to make pretty and modest skirts and dresses once you have the basic sewing skills down. A number of community colleges offer night classes in crafts, some offer sewing, and many woman sew as a hobby, so if you do not know how to sew, maybe you can find someone to teach you.
It is a very useful hobby!
I don’t live in an obscure, or hyper-liberal backwater. I live in Dallas Texas. Somewhat embarrassingly, the sources we found for local modest wedding dresses were Muslim, which were not appropriate for other reasons.
I realize I could try to convince my wife to sew wedding dresses (or, to be less sexist, learn to do so myself), but frankly why should we? Is the belief that sleeveless dresses, short-shorts, and exposed midriffs are a trifle immodest now SO extreme and marginal that we are forced to do what our ancestors did 100 years ago? My daughter homeschools her kids, as do many of my relatives.
Orson Scott Card, some years ago, noted with alarm the trend of socially conservative Americans to withdraw from society rather than trying to fight for their positions. He basically said that many of such people are starting to feel so alienated from our own culture that they give up on it. As more and more feel that way, he thought (and I agree) that the underlying foundation of Westernism would be destroyed.
Card also made the point that by and large, our police and soldiery are recruited from those social conservatives. Certainly my liberal friends don’t have kids or nephews in service (as I do). And when no one is left that is willing to fight for a society, the barbarians have an easy victory.
Yes, civilization crumbles, etc. On a more practical note, there are a number of fine purveyors of modest and attractive fashions online. Some of which, if I may make a guess at your faith, are even your co-religionists.
Lord save me, I’m glad I’m old enough to be past this kind of foolishness. Dear child, if you have trouble getting curves, may I suggest you think about the kind of industry that requires women to have the bodies of stick insects to be thought desirable, and instead say “To hell with it, I am not going to diet down to a size zero”?
And this might be veering off-topic, but I found this quote (whilst browsing for a different quote) and somehow it made me think of our esteemed host, for some reason
Attributed to George Orwell, “The Road to Wigan Pier”:
“[One notes] “the horrible — the really disgusting prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, ‘Natural Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
(Please note that the man was a Socialist himself, if an anti-Stalinist, so he couldn’t be accused of Right-wing bias. Though I am curious to know what did the Quakers ever do to him?)
“Empowerment” has impeccable philosophical credentials:
Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls.
(The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the feeling of power.)
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power #534:
On the topic of wedding dresses:
I happen to live in an area blessed with many small-scale seamstresses, and I have yet to meet a bride who didn’t have her dress either made to order or, in the few bought-off-the-rack cases, substantially altered. Getting someone to sew you a dress (or sewing your own), is really the easiest way to get exactly what you want. And, you’re supporting local (and usually very small) businesses!
And the Spirit of Halloween stores are opening in this neck of the woods in the empty stores. I looked through one, once.
I am pleased to report that the costumes for little girls were not actually all immodest.
“It *is* paranoid, but it’s drilled into us as women: you have to keep yourself safe because it’s your responsibility not to get attacked, not their responsibility not to be attackers.”
I’d suggest a fairer way to put this that is equally accurate is: Given there’s nothing society can do (short of making you an anchoress in a secret convent) that can absolutely guarantee that no man will ever attack you — punitive laws, proper moral training, and our own consciences can only reduce the risk and incidence, never eliminate it — women who wish to reduce the risk further than society can do must reluctantly adopt certain measures themselves: Vigilance; caution; mutual accompaniment; and occasional rudeness as necessary. (I don’t include false accusations of assault or public slander/libel in here — those are crimes in themselves and a different issue — but I have to admit that it’s hard for me to protest when a woman decides she’d rather hurt a stranger’s feelings than risk an encounter that could get her raped.)
This is a “responsibility” only in the sense of it being a responsibility to look both ways when crossing the street — yes, each and every driver is supposed to be aware enough not to hit you and it’s still the driver’s fault if he does, whether you looked or not; but that doesn’t make figuratively walking into highway traffic without a second’s preparation any less stupid, when your goal is to avoid getting hit in the first place rather than have to worry about punishing whoever hit you when you do. (Again, I discount those women who deliberately throw themselves in front of a driver and then claim injuries that don’t exist in order to punish him.)
Our society really doesn’t have much formal calculus to decide where responsibility can be fairly allocated, which will always cause difficulty of this kind.
Wups. Meant the above to be a reply to Deiseach, above.
Speaking of which, I thought you’d get a kick out of Furious D’s take on the show.
http://dknowsall.blogspot.com/2011/09/hollywood-babble-on-on-814-ptc-cries.html
And yet the worst of it is that they see “power” where none really exists. How much more insane with rage do they become when finding that what they “desired” was nothing more than a mirage all along?
The loss of this has probably cause far more male anger than anything else – yet fewer and fewer males possess the capacity to express this.
That might also be an excuse for the rise of the PUA community. It’s a new fraternity that women (and homosexuals) can never, EVER be a part of.
No kidding. Here’s studies proving that.
http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2011/09/27/hookinguprealities/has-the-price-of-sex-bottomed-out/
What do you think would happen if the mating market place had a “depression”?
I can’t help but think of this whole thing being a warning for your own daughter as she grows up.
At any rate, looks like someone’s figuring out that natural selection will ultimately favor well… tradition:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3768
I am puzzled and disgusted by a man who says he wants his wife not to depend on him. I guess he is just lazy, and does not want the chore of protecting and supporting his family. Or is he using the word ‘independent’ to mean a woman who ignores him, or scolds him, or disobeys him, or raises the children the opposite of he wants them raised? I suppose if you hired a maid who doubled as a nurse and a cook and a geisha at night, you could ask for someone independent of you, who would give you no more love and support and devotion than a hired hand. But if, instead of hiring a woman, you give her yourself, your body and soul and love eternal, and she gives you only what an independent hired hand would give in return, you are getting a bad bargain.
Love and independence are mutually contradictory terms. Had the colonies loved the English King, no amount of storming and complaining about their mistreatment would have let them to rebel in arms; likewise, had the king loved the colonies, he would have stopped at nothing to preserve them and their rights. The reason for the rebellion, in short, is that the relation of father to family, the love-relation, which is supposed (in monarchic theory) to obtain between the person of the sovereign and the people of the nation turned out to be a legal fiction.
This fellow utterly misunderstand the male-female dynamic. He might like a strong and independent woman, because she is easier to abuse and leave; but the relationship between men of equal strength and rank is a masculine quality, the fellowship or brotherhood you find in military barracks, hunting clubs, baseball teams, and the like. Women do not like weak and dependent men. Indeed, given a choice between a kind yet weak man and a strong yet ‘bad boy’ a rebel who plays by his own rules, most women, even very modern women, will find their breath fluttering. Feminists talk a good game of finding a man who will merely a partner, and who leave the women to defend herself from everything from mashers to financial ruin to pushy vacuum cleaner salesmen, but when out of the public eye, and curled up on the bed with a trashy romance novel, her daydream return to princes on white steeds, brooding barons and dashing pirates and all the absurdities of hyper-masculinized romance. I woman who says, “I want a partner” is telling a half truth. A woman who says, “I am holding out for a hero!” is speaking her heart.
But do not be deceived. Even girl smitten with hero-worship are acutely, nay, very acutely aware of the shortcomings of their menfolk. Inequality in this one case does not mean a dominant man and a submissive woman. It means a heroic man, an Odysseus, and a heroine like Penelope who knows full well his faults and shortcomings, and her thankless task is to amend him. Just because man is King in his own cottage, does not mean the woman is not in charge.
He carries this bride across the threshold as if she were the fair captive of the Sabines being carried away by the brutal valor of the Romans — and once inside the threshold, the home is her shrine and her empire, and he is master in that he is the least of the servants.
Anyone who cannot comprehend that basic paradox is unable to make any sensible statements about the war between the sexes.
Indeed, we’re facing a sort of crisis of “pricing”.
Women want heroes but many do what they can to prevent their training and raising. They disparage men at every moment of every day, then write articles complaining about “peter pan” syndrome. They want men to be valiant, but refuse to be chaste. In all the cries of “where have the heroes gone”, is there any consideration on whether one has made effort to be worthy of rescue?
And of course, men have played their part in this foolishness.
It all strikes me as a rampant epidemic of narcissism and envy.
If anything, I’m a bit jealous if you that I’ll have to watch this whole fallen world freakshow a bit longer than ya (probably).