University of Maryland Rides the Beast with Seven Heads and Ten Horns
Belriose remarks:
"I just don’t see why you seem to assumme that feminity [sic] is the top value that always a man is looking for in a woman."
Top value? Perhaps not. A value? Certainly.
Who wants to marry a woman who will not make a good mother to his children? Does he want a gentle and patient women to raise his kids, or a harsh, competitive, and aggressive one? I have seen women who compete with the children for attention, and it is an ugly sight, as well as being unfeminine.
And what wife wants the father of her children to lack the spirit needed to protect and provide for them? Ordinary prudence, even if a woman has no sexual interest in the manliness of her potential mate, should urge a would-be mother to find a fatherly man, a masculine man, to fill the role of father.
"On the other hand, I would say that I can tell if a woman or a man looks intelligent or honest with more precision than I can tell weather she or he is fertile and ready to procreate."
You are equating femininity, a personality trait, with fertility, a biological trait. It is a common mistake of a crude and materialistic age to treat every spiritual quality as a side-effect of a material quality. It is naive.
Your statement confuses me. Either you equating fertility with what I was talking about, looking pretty in a skirt, or you are not. If you are not, you are changing the subject, and uttering something irrelevant, if not misleading.
I never claimed you can tell whether a woman is fertile by whether or not she wears a skirt. What I said was, if all women wear pants like men, the pants will come to be cut in a tighter fashion, and the pockets lowered, so as to place emphasis on the curve of her hips and shapeliness of her buttocks – which is a cruder and more obvious display of secondary sexual characteristics than merely wearing a skirt. (It is also less advantageous to women who lack perfect peach-shaped hamhocks).
But if you are equating fertility with looking pretty, you are claiming, in effect, that you can tell whether a man is honest more quickly, by sight, than you can tell whether he is handsome. If that is the meaning of your comment, then this is a preposterous claim.
Also, the word you are looking for is "virile". Women are fertile, men are virile.
"It was back in the caves, but we evolve."
We also devolve. The replacement of chivalry and romance and true love for the sexual revolution, which entails exploitation of women as sex-objects, deadbeat dads, single-parent homes, and juvenile delinquency, not to mention a coarsened culture, a porn culture, a vile culture, is an example of a devolution.
The evolution of the idea of romance dates to the Thirteenth Century, perhaps slightly earlier. It is as Christian a notion as chivalry. Romance is a Roman notion.
"What I think is that people is now getting sensible enough to pay attention to other details and step over the big breasts or the broad shoulders."
Sensible? Femininity is a spiritual quality, not a material one: masculinity is a matter of honor, not a matter of shoulders.
With all due respect, let me suggest that what is actually going on is the opposite of your analysis: people in their mating habits are becoming noticeably less sensible and less prudent — on college campuses "hooking up" is commonplace, that is, copulating with coeds who are perfect strangers, and whom one never expects to see again — and, with a lack of prudence, also comes a lack of human compassion, courtesy, romance, and love. The term "meat market" is apt.
So, no. This generation has lost its ability to look for spiritual qualities like masculinity and femininity. They are merely meat robots of different "genders", and they seek to exploit each other for their mutual selfish pleasure, with no thought to permanence or consequence.
I am not saying each and every individual falls into this trap. But I am saying it is the norm.
The University of Maryland this week showed a pornography film, with the school’s blessing, and the ACLU gave a speech before the film on the importance of free speech. The same week, the student senate voted to remove the invocation, a prayer, from the commencement address.
Got that?
Exposing young hormone-addicted minds to degrading filth was an expression of their freedom-loving free freedomness that all freely free people freely love; but thanksgiving to a higher power was exclusionary, rude, and made atheists feel marginalized, and we know what sensitive souls they are! They are so polite and helpless and meek, to offend an atheist by a public display of some belief not his own is just like kicking a blind bunny! No one, thank God, feels marginalized when erotic love is commercialized and desecrated, and young man lacking self-control are indoctrinated with the attitude that a woman is a shapely meatbag meant for his pleasure, merely a walking warmth-hole to receive a semen squirt. Only a prude could object to pornography! Ho ho! We are all so above that now, so enlightened! Porn is a constitutionally protected right! The soldiers at Valley Forge died for Hugh Hefner!
Sorry, that was sarcasm. What I meant to say is that the Whore of Babylon has triumphed in the University of Maryland, and the Crucifix has been trampled underfoot. Even those who are not Christian should turn and take a last lingering look at Judo-Christian aka Western culture, as we sink slowly into the slime and darkness of a Nietzschean post-Christian post-Rational nihilism.
Every society holds something sacred. In the West, that used to be the things of the West: God, the Law, Reason, Virtue, Honesty, Truth, Honor. In the coming post-Western darkness, the sacred thing remaining is selfishness, called by high and noble names, freedom, equality, self-expression, finding-yourself. Unreason and dishonesty, in the form of political correctness, is the sacred mystery–and folk are expected to utter and to believe blatant self-contradictions. The unselfish and devotional impulses in man, which cannot be removed from his frame, are now devoted toward Homosex and Mother Earth rather than toward the Virgin Mary and the hope of Heaven.
One thing that used to be sacred was romance. Now, in the name of progress, we are leaving that behind. Women are no longer women, but merely men without dicks, and they are expected to perform and act as men, and also expected to be as good at typically male things as men are: and if they are not (no 4’6" 150lb female "fighterfighter" could shoulder and haul my fat and globular body down a flight of stairs) we must refuse to admit reality, rather that hurt the sensitive feelings of the poor little dears. But since trying not to hurt the feelings of the poor little dears is condescending and chivalrous, we must add another layer of dishonesty to the mental process involved, and never admit or hint that this is what we are doing.
Progress is so sacred that the equality of the sexes is no longer enough: the uniformity of the sexes is required, and men and women must be unisex beings, attracted to each other only through traits like honesty and intelligence, not through any sexual traits. Desexualizing sex, instead of being laughed away as an self-contradiction (or a sickness) is now proposed, by many writers, as a perfectly noble and acceptable social goal.
In another post, Belriose says this:
"It might be a new and revolutionary idea, Mr. Wright, but nowadays there are some men who don’t feel compelled to run pursuing women during their "mating" rituals, as well as women who don’t find particulary interesting the kind of men who feel attracted by colorfull and tropical bird-like displays of feminity."
This is not a revolutionary idea. It is a monastic idea, dating back to the Eleventh Century. Monks who take a vow of abstinence do not feel compelled to pursue women. Nuns dress in sober garb so as to avoid alluring men.
What is revolutionary, I suppose, is that you seem to think it is possible, or desirable, to introduce monasticism into courtship.
"You seem to assume that emphasizing sexual difference is how the whole thing works. The woman has to be very femenine and woman-like and the man very manly."
The whole thing? No. It is more complex than that. The essential thing? Yes. And this is not an assumption but an observation. Women are must lewder now than they used to be, because an entire ‘silent vocabulary’ of feminine traits has been removed from them.
"Well, surprising as it might seem, some people don’t really care much about that, and they look instead for some other qualities less related with the shape and function of the sexual organs. So, yes, some men actually don’t care if a woman doesn’t look femenine [sic] as long as she is, lets say smart, strong or honest."
Certainly there are people who do not care much about sex! They are called eunuchs. Also, I assume that somewhere in Lundmark’s Nebula, the amoeba-monsters of Planet Eddore reproduce by asexual fission. However, your comments do not describe any couple, married or dating, that I can recall to mind.
(It certainly does not describe our current culture, which is more obsessed with sex, and has leeched the joy and wonder and mystery out of sex, more so than any culture in history. My email is stuffed with Viagra ads, and my local store carries streetwalker-style clothing for six-year-old girls, with waggish slogans to be written across their butt-cheeks. Meanwhile, pervertarian crusader Alan Moore has published his cartoon of kiddie porn, LOST GIRLS so we can see the copulatory adventures of Wendy Darling, Alice Pleasance Liddell, and Dorothy Gale. No, I do not think people carrying too little about crude sexual characteristics describes this current culture, or its cults.)
You misunderstand my point. Because the spiritual and symbolic qualities have been, by and large, removed from womanhood, is (at least one) reason why the crude display of sexual characteristics has been emphasized. I am not suggesting that *crudity* (with its emphasis on "the shape and function of the sexual organs") is to be preferred to *romance*, with its emphasis on spiritual qualities like femininity. Nor am I suggesting that a man would prefer a shapely but dishonest women to a plain but honest one — we have all seen enough Film Noir movies to know where that sort of thing ends.
I am not suggesting that a man does not want an honest wife. You are setting up what is simply a false dichotomy. Women do not decide either to allure a mate through feminine appeal or to allure a mate through honesty. The characteristics are not mutually exclusive.
But I am suggesting that, plain or pretty, any girl who does not like getting flowers from her beau has something wrong with her: something crude and crass has overtaken her, beauty and magic has left her life, as if her mind is now wearing the unisex jumpsuit of a Maoist.
(I would make a crack about Puritans dressing in broadcloth, but, honestly, Puritan women dressed differently than men, acted differently, and were feminine as all get out. The stern and hardworking Puritan men with their buckles on their hats were about as masculine as you can get (just ask Solomon Kane!) — so I cannot call this unisex progressivism Puritanical, without dishonoring the name of Puritanism, which never went so far in desexualizing sex as the feminists and their fellow travelers, the thuggee-cultists of Progress.)
I am suggesting that it is no longer commonplace for men to woo women with flowers. Indeed, it is no longer commonplace for men to woo women at all. They copulate first, and then the women decides, after she moves in with him, whether he is willing to commit to a long-term relationship. It is all very casual, straightforward, and dreary– and the boys can remain boyish and irresponsible long into their middle years, thanks to his system.
The couple will copulate without affection and cohabitate without marriage. The woman will have an abortion or three. If the couple does marry, likely as not, the man will throw her over for a trophy wife when it suits his self-centered convenience. Or, these days, he will leave her for a younger man, and she can raise the kids by herself.
(This is all based on people I know personally: the only women I know THE ONLY ONES I KNOW, who use a modicum of prudence, and who retain a modicum of self-respect, are the devoted Christians, who remained chaste before marriage and honest within marriage. And they are not typical even of Christians, whose divorce rate matches that of the heathen world.)
"There is plenty of room for romanticism apart from showing femenity and masculinity, Mr. Wright, and that doesn’t imply that women -or men- have to be "more crudely sexual"."
I disagree. As a matter of logic, if two persons become friends, and they are drawn together by intelligence and not by a difference of the sexes, then the friendship is not romantic nor erotic. Romance by its nature is a drawing together of opposite sexes.
As a matter of experience, no couple I have ever seen, from the oldest to the youngest, has ever been drawn together in this oddly monklike non-sexual sexual attraction you mention.
Here is the closest thing to a non-sexual, non-mating-dance type of behavior I have seen between the opposite sexes: I have seen men try to get laid without any romance on their part. They treat it like a physical need, or, at best, like a past-time or recreation, one were you use the woman, and you want her out of your bed and out of your life the next morning, if not immediately.
The reaction of such men toward women, the moment their lusts have ejaculated, is disgust.
There is no room for romance apart from masculine and feminine, because what romance is, is the indirect display of masculine and feminine traits meant to pursue or attract a mate: if a man gives a woman flowers, it has a different meaning than if her brother gives her flowers. The man is displaying his courtliness, his largesse, his admiration, but also signaling his intentions.
The dictionary gives the definition of ‘romance’ as "to court or woo romantically; treat with ardor or chivalrousness." Hence, it is part of courtship, it is the correct way of wooing. Courtship and wooing aim at and culminate in erotic love, that is, the unique form of love which arises from the fact that the sexes are opposite.
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.
