What was the Question Again, exactly?

Belriose seems to have a question about the eternal war between the sexes, but I cannot parse her (or his, or its — on the web One Never Knows, Do One?) meaning. This is part of an ongoing discussion that began here.

Belriose says: "I already asked: I wonder why you seem to assume that everything that doesn’t fulfill the traditional roles is necesarly bad and devoided of the virtues of the old conceptions about romance or family."

This is not a question, but a rhetorical statement. I made no comments about ‘everything’ nor did I say it was ‘necessarily’ bad. A thing can be bad contingently; or it can have good and bad elements, where the bad outweighs the good.

What I said was this. Here is the whole passage, so you can read it in context.

"I confess I am the mere opposite of a feminist. I think men and women are different, and viva la difference. One difference between men and women is that men seek mates by pursuing them, and women seek mates by alluring them. This means that, even if we were, or could be taught to be, the same, men and women should differentiate and exaggerate masculine and feminine characteristics, for purposes of cold Darwinian calculation, even if not for fun. (As a minor example, when women dress distinctively from men, the dress itself becomes a feminine symbol, a poetic symbol, whereas if both sexes dress uniformly, the only way to allure a mate is for a woman to show her cleavage, or some other crass way to emphasize the sexual difference. It seems a paradox, but by being less feminine, the women is placed in a false position of having to be more crudely sexual to work the same allure.) Another difference, which is as much psychological as physical, is that men are more violent and more prone to violence. A related difference is that men can rape women and women cannot rape men. This means women should be armed, and drilled in the use of arms."

Now, picking this apart, it consists of one statement of fact (men and women are different) one observation from experience (men seek mates by pursuit, women by allure) and one conclusion which contains a value judgment (this means that sexual differences should be exaggerated, if not for reasons of ‘fun’ then also for reasons of Darwinian calculation). Obviously this value judgment need not apply to monks, eunuchs, or unisexual feminists, nor any one else who, for whatever reason, eschews sex and romance, or does not enjoy it. It does not apply to Albrecht the Nibelung, for example.

The missing, connecting minor premise between statement and conclusion was one I thought too obvious to mention: that sexual attraction is based on the opposite nature of the sexes.

A minor example of the differentiation of the sexes is dress. Notice I called this a "minor example", I did not say it was the only basis for sexual attraction, or even a major one.

One function different dress between the sexes serves is to emphasize the difference of the sexes. I should think this is, again, too obvious for comment: I need not even mention bustles or high-heeled shoes. The way a woman’s jeans are cut, if they are meant for show rather than work, emphasize the hips and buttocks. 

This being so, "If both sexes dress uniformly, the only way to allure a mate is for a woman to show her cleavage, or some other crass way to emphasize the sexual difference."

Perhaps the sentence admits of ambiguity, because of my word "only". Taken in context, this clearly means  the "only way to achieve the same effect using the same means, i.e., the use of dress to emphasize sexual differentiation" which was what the rest of the paragraph was about.

Now, if you have some question about that comment, please ask. I am not sure what you, or anyone, could find exceptional in that statement. Surely you have noticed that women dress less modestly than they did twenty, forty, and sixty years ago? Surely you do not claim this is random, or a coincidence, or caused in major part by something else? We did not have hot pants back in the 1940’s. Women were rarely, if ever, seen in slacks in the 1920’s.

Now, if you are asking me a more general question as to why I think men and women are happier when they avoid sexual perversion, fornication, aborticide, adultery, divorce, wifebeating, and abandoning their children, that is a separate question too large to answer. You will have to break it down into parts if you are seriously curious, rather than simply uttering a windy trumpet-blast to announce your loyalty to modern vices.

The idea that the sexual revolution has exploited women, exposing them to Clintonesque sexual predation, leaving far too many of them either with aborted (read: murdered) children who never saw the light of day or children who never see their father’s faces, is, I think, almost too obvious to dwell on. In passing we can mention that the term ‘date-rape’ did not exist in the vocabulary of a society were young women were not exposed to young men unchaperoned, in an environment were fornication is the expected consummation of a few casual dates. Also, last I heard, among inner city blacks, three children out of ten know who their father is; the rates among the poor in England are somewhat similar. The rise in domestic violence is commensurate. Among the poor, women seek violent men as their sole protection against other violent men, and often are beaten themselves. The number one cause of death of small children in the inner city is murder at the hands of the mother’s live-in lover. Darwin could explain the evolutionary motives for stepfathers to kill rival progeny.

Shall we take an example from the popular culture? Note particularly the lyric where the young lady boasts that she only fornicates with boys too stupid to notice that they are being cuckolded.

Let us compare and contrast with the popular culture of the previous generation, shall we?