Respect for women

I am the only person I know who stands up when a woman enters the room, the only one who offers women my chair when the room is full. I am not bragging, I am complaining. It is so wrong that it should be this way. Courtesy should be unnoticed; it should be a background detail; it should be subliminal.

Courtesy should be like an aura: an invisible field surrounding every man, so that when she steps near, she turns into a lady in his eyes. Why? You put a woman in a culture where every man gives off unconscious and unselfconscious signs of respect for womanhood, your young women will naturally absorb an impression that their femininity is worthy of respect. You put a woman in a culture were every man gives off the unconscious signs of hostility all men feel for rivals and the contempt for eunuchs, your young women will absorb an impression that their pseudo-masculinity is worthy of disrespect. Women of low self esteem and weak willpower are easier for ruthless Lotharios to victimize. It is merely a matter of economics: what men hold at low esteem, they value lightly.  That is true for self-esteem as for other estimations of value.

Once womanhood is held to be of low esteem, the idea spreads. How many fathers interview their daughter’s dates these days? How many brothers make sure their younger sister is being treated with honor and respect by her suitor, and that the boy is worthy of her?

What do we have instead of the old rituals and playfulness of love, the romance, the mystery, the wild hopes, and solemn and cherished foolishness, the lighthearted sobriety? What do we have instead of knights and princesses, the flirtatious glance, the love poem, the lover’s vow, Hero and Leander, Romeo and Juliette, the waltz? For what did we trade that all?

For sleaze. For date rape. For disposable relationships. For trophy wives. For teen pregnancy and  single-mothers with their temporary live-in boyfriend.  For the reduction of the feminine mystique to a meat market commodity. For a generation of bitter girls of brittle self-respect and lustful slobs who abuse them. You’ve come a long way, baby.

Romance was killed off by the sexual revolution. But the sexual revolution was, in the informal setting of love and courtship, what the abolition of private property was in Russia after the October Revolution, in the setting of political economy. I put it to you that no productive and honest man, one who worked hard and wanted to keep the fruits of his labor, no such man had any benefit coming to him from the collectivization and expropriation of private property. Only the dishonest had an incentive to collaborate: only those who wanted what they had not earned. Likewise, I put it to you that no healthy, truthful and honest lover had anything to gain from the abolition of standards and rules concerning the mating game. A man who wanted to remain a virgin before marriage, marry his true love, and remain faithful to her for happily ever after, fathering and raising his own children and not another man’s, well, he had nothing to gain by the removal of social norms, by the degradation of women, and the social acceptance, first of fornication, next of adultery, finally of grotesque perversion. He had nothing to gain by collaboration.

Who stood to gain? Hugh Hefner, who made money exposing women to the insincere lust of strangers; Bill Clinton, who can explain away perjury under oath, so long as it was done in the name of extramarital unnatural acts with a young woman who trusted him; Robert Heinlein, whose free-spirited characters started by questioning the wisdom of monogamy, and ended up  playing Oedipus with their mothers?

What did the honest man stand to gain from it, the non-exploiter, the non-polygamist, the non-pervert, the non-stalker, the non-creep?