Mastership versus Sado-Masochism
In reference to our ongoing conservation about the nature and conventions of femininity, Nate Winchester writes:
On chicks digging jerks… look at what women are voting for with their dollars.
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2012/03/14/mommy-porn-novel-explores-submission-titillates-women/
If you haven’t heard about “50 Shades of Grey” yet, you likely will soon. The independently published erotic novel is plunging into the mainstream this week after being acquired by Vintage Books for a seven-figure sum. Written by a little-known London author named E.L. James, it relies heavily on “BDSM” — bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism
My comment:
What p0rn is, is a perversion of a natural and normal thing.
St Paul tells wives to submit to their husbands. Men are supposed to be the head of the household and women are designed by nature to admire and be attracted to strong and dominant and masterful men. Look at the cover of any romance novel: the woman is always swooning or yielding or kneeling, or being carried away.
Swooning
Yielding
Kneeling
Being Carried Away
Romance novels are normal. While it is true, young ladies, the chance is small that the Prince of Wales will fall in love with you, or a Scottish Highlander, Dashing Pirate, or Brooding Indian Brave, you are likely to fall in love. (This is no less realistic than Science Fiction or Fantasy. While you are unlikely to voyage to the moon or face the Dark Lord Doomshadowgoth, you will at times need to display the courage and resourcefulness of an astronaut, or resist a creeping tyranny.)
It is natural and healthy and normal for a young woman to yearn to be carried off by a prince on a white charger. If he is the right prince. If he has the right charger. It is even natural, if perhaps slightly more pagan and old fashioned, for a young woman to want to be carried off like Jane over the shoulder of Tarzan. If it is the right Tarzan.
Sadly, the reason why the feminists must insist that “no means no” is that a woman’s natural instinct is to say “no” when she means “yes” to see if the man is masterful enough not to be denied, passionate enough not to care about her protests. If it were not a commonplace, feminists would not have to fight it.
The natural and normal social convention used to handle this paradox was to chaperone meetings between young men and young women, not to let them be alone together, so that the woman could get away with saying no when she meant yes, and the chaperone could say no and mean no.
And then the woman’s brothers could show up and beat the tar out of the masher.
The natural social convention has been swept aside, replaced by nothing. The feminists are asking each women to play the role both of beloved and of chaperone, putting instinct at odds with the new social convention, and on top of that making the social convention optional. All this leads to the sad result that men get both no and yes signals, while at the same time being weaned away from notions of chivalry and honor and gallantry. You have the previously unheard-of phenomenon of date rape, including rape from men with whom the woman previous copulated, rape from boyfriends.
The abolition of reasonable social conventions in the name of freedom has led to the blurring of the line that should be as sharp and bright and clear as the difference between virginity and marriage.
ON THE OTHER HAND when chivalry and gallantry are exiled from the equation, and even healthy paganism is banished, you get ‘The Story of O’ where real leadership and real masterful masculinity vanish, and the fetishes or symbols of dominion, whips and chains, and the perverted version of masterful masculinity, sadism, takes its place.
Romance is normal. Romance about the most masculine of male figures is normal. The model on the cover of a paperback romance is muscled like Apollo of the Greeks, or Hercules. They don’t look weak. They look masterful.
What is not normal is when these things are removed from their social artifices and conventions, courtship and married and feminine markers of behavior, coyness and allure, and replaced with a system of signal-free and convention-free sexual anarchy, where men and women agree to copulate by bloodless agreements, or by mutual lust or mutual ennui. Getting rid of the artifices, getting rid of the female role, gets rid of the male role. P0rnography, which is the exaggeration of the sexual aspects of love at the expense of the romantic aspects, steps in to fill the missing role.
Creepy how similar to a romance cover this is.
What a good and Memorable name for an Author!
The love of vampire novels about demon lovers is a similar thing. Of course women find it sexy, because the vampire is as uncontrollable as a brooding Highland viscount or a Dashing Pirate or a wild Indian brave or a bold Knight on a white steed: the undead only come out because the normal healthy channels of sexuality have been closed off, and the knights driven away.
(Obviously, there is more to sexual perversion than this. There may be psychological or even genetic influences, or, for all I know, demon possession: but the rejection of the normal and healthy expressions of female submissiveness is one of the factors.)
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.
