Playpowerment

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.

Jenna Dewan bunny

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.

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edw merry_widow_wedding_dress

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…

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:

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And here is what they find demeaning:

 

1aishbride

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 costume, 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.

Down.