There are many mysterious things about the modern world, but the biggest mystery of all is how “the sexual revolution” is viewed as some sort of feminist triumph, when the objective truth is that if the most despicable, cretinous, woman-loathing men of a century ago had outlined their views for how society should work regarding male-female relations, it would look pretty much like the nightmare world we have today.
That’s from commenter Brian, kicking off a fine thread upon Kate’s post below on single mothers and the more general difficulty of finding good men.
Well, we all know that the Sexual Revolution and its normalization was not a misogynists’ plot, that is, we know that however many Who’s your daddy? sleazy seducers were involved, there were plenty of bright-eyed gals with odes to Freedom in their hearts, singin’ lines like these from the Stone Poneys:
Oh don’t get me wrong,
it’s not that I knock it,
it’s just that I, am not in the market
for a boy who wants to love only me.
All I’m sayin’ is I’m not ready
for any person place or thing
to try to pull the reins in on me…
So no, not a plot, but how is Brian wrong about the objective truth that it might as well have been? That is, what else would the most despicable women-hating men of a century ago have wanted that the current sexual scene doesn’t provide them?
June 5th, 2012 | 8:13 am
This is a lovely turn on what I wrote. Don’t we bombard young women with the idea that they can do anything, be what they like, be FREE, and it all sounds great, until they find they aren’t free at all. I’ll probably have to say this in my own thread, but what I find endearing in my single-mother students is how much they love that which ties them down and reins them in.
Men hear the same messages, don’t they? What your last paragraph is about is men’s liberation. We’ve liberated men from the requirement of the most basic responsibility towards those who they should protect.
I’ll go deal with my own thread and be back later.
June 5th, 2012 | 10:48 am
I agree.
What is interesting to me is that the sexual revolution has produced unbridled manliness in the way Kate and Carl note, and at the same time that government has vastly expanded its regulatory control over the lives of human beings.
One might argue that government has in effect filled the void left by women.
Tocqueville, I suspect, would not be surprised. After all, he finds the cause of American greatness to attributable to American women, in part, I think, because he holds that their ability to moderate men in the private sphere allows for freedom in public.
Or perhaps what I wrote above is not entirely certain. Is it that government fills the void left by women, or that government creates the void?
June 5th, 2012 | 12:32 pm
The government fills the void created by the absence of strong men in positions of authority over women. Bureaugamy is the best term for it: women are no longer supported by their husband, they are dependent on the modern liberal state.
June 5th, 2012 | 12:37 pm
The other thread seems to hold a lot of resentment, and for good reasons, at what has happened to male-female relations. And a lot of it appears in line with the growing Men’s Right Movement arguments and prejudices- which I think isn’t so good- which men are turning to in desperation because things are BAD out there in male-female relations. Mostly it’s because relations have been privatized to a point where there is no shared language or sense of communion outside the tawdry confines of the mind. This confusion is driving people to extremes and those who poison the well and do not act in good faith are producing a lot of jaded or broken men and women.
Where Brian messes up is that he perpetuates the strange notion, unintentionally, that men as a sex or gender or abstracted notion or whatever is on the academic menu for trying to reconcile what it means to be cissexual with a phallus….DO YOU SEE ANY CONFUSION YET?….
are somehow supposed to lead, be the head, be THE MAN: You lead- you take the blame or praise.
And it’s not his error, it’s still embedded in our language and it’s residue is still in our culture even if we get cognitive dissonance when we are drilled with an idea that a man trying to be THE MAN should never ever ever never ever think such thoughts or act in that way unless the cisgendered partner of said male wants THE MAN, but only when said cisgendered partner is in the mood for cisgendered MALE.
No matter how hard we pretend, it is still with us that there are certain gender roles and it ain’t going away quickly enough (or coming back quick enough?) for the culture to sustain through our confusion….
…and so we have chaos where despicable MEN AND WOMEN [whatever those "things" are] are taking full advantage of the situation and ruining the lives of everyone else; especially the middling- the vast majority of us. And every time a man hears that it is the despicable among his gender, there are clubs of men who rightfully say, “Hold Up! Aren’t women as liberated as men? Where does this notion that women aren’t capable or culpable of degenerate and promiscuous living come from? And why should we act and believe in such a way that betrays our evidence and our egalitarian relations to suggest otherwise?”
[I do not believe the warmed-over pagan truism that men are built for promiscuity and women aren't- or that it should be that way- I think Miss Ansecombe's famous paper on contraception brings this false myth most clearly to our attention. But it is the truism that has sustained the culture from at least the Enlightenment, so what's the next mythic diversion to explain our muddling along through a fallen state without Christ?]
And the male rights people and the contempt towards women that is building up is not healthy but it is something men are grabbing onto for they feel like they are drowning- and men (let’s blame testosterone) are apt to fight when they feel a fight/flight scenario. Women, as the converse to this is also true of course, do not understand some of the things that go through a man’s mind, especially when they hear certain magic phrases like “where are all the good men?” It is meaningless to men, and I’m afraid as things become more confused, it will be taken not only as a ciphered message but a coded challenge to raise generations of ultra-men who immanentize their manly man MALE manness to a even more grotesque point. What I don’t think this male-defense movement understands is that women are feeling (and responding in) the same exact pressures in their own peculiar ways and reacting accordingly. It’s mutual ugliness where we are getting the partners we deserve.
And how about this: The Good manish-male-man is a conceit that only (unfairly?) applies to men and is just another mental construct. Think about how low-status and trashy saying something like: “Where have all the good women gone?” sounds. Even thinking it seems kind of dirty and wrong. And saying it out loud seems petty and misogynistic to the hilt…so why should men listen to women who speak about men that way be listened to? It too shouldn’t hold and it furthers despair…
It’s this sort of despair I’ve been hearing from a myriad of decent men and women on two different continents, across several nations and languages.
And the problem I’ve come across can be best summarized by this reflection I had from my experience as an long term traveler in London and the United Kingdom talking about and observing people’s relations:
“Chastity is a calling meant as a witness to love. It doesn’t matter what other people do or think, but it is important for me that I am able to say: I love with these hands and I have not used them in vain. For Christ’s sake and for my heart, I shall not budge.”
…I may be obtuse but it is the problem we have where the body is somehow a separate entity from our mental activities manifesting most disturbingly in our love lives. I didn’t intend sleeping with him/her/hir to be X Y and Z. It’s all non-correspondence, magical thinking and George Berkelys all the way down!
To a point where we can’t even pass as libertines and degenerates from a bygone era who used their body to chase their peccadilloes until they gave out. We are shared mental reservations who slap their genitals together in some sort of ritualized ambiguity for a simulacra of contentment.
I wish more people would take Vladmir Mayakowsky’s poem, “A Cloud in Trousers” to heart and manifest the spurned lover who arrogantly tells Maria that he justs wants her body. At least it’s real and passionate and can’t pretend like the soul isn’t attached! It’s skips the messy business about trying to mentally conjure up an image of a coupling satisfactory to every party or, at the very least, it keeps you from being trapped in a romance with your own mind. I have loved the minds of all the women I’ve been inclined towards, but damnit that is not good enough if they can’t share their bodies until we became all lips inwards!
And at the ripe old age of 28, I am jaundiced enough to hesitate about attempting romance, and I am having trouble of imagining it ever naturally arising again. In some ways I have become just as wounded as the rest of my fellow travelers and though I don’t share the cynicism of some, I can see how easy it’s to survive as one of the “no good” men and how difficult it is to change that when considering the types and depths of trauma that comes from these sorts of wounds. So the idea of marrying a women with children, with all the extra baggage that entails is a difficult cross to bear even if it isn’t the kids as much as the uncertainty that the woman is present and committed in body and able to work on healing her soul from her own travails.
And that won’t change until we can start loving as bodies again; where we can be both as vicious as raw meat held up by meat-hooks and as gentle as a cloud in trousers when need be!
June 5th, 2012 | 3:15 pm
I am unfortunately too busy at work to read Kates Original article right now, only to comment on the current post. From what I’ve read of the Men’s Rights Movement, their analysis is that things are actually better for women in a very specific way – the dating/courtship world is completely tilted in their favor. And according to the evo-psych logic they follow – what is returning is a “harem” system where the top 10 percent of the men are monopolizing most of the women, and the rest of men are actually not getting much use of the liberties the sexual revolution promised, even if celibate-til-marriage is no longer the norm. From what i’ve seen, there is some truth to this.
But the Men’s Rights movement contains alot of cranks, near-fascists, and odd “seduction community” members, so its hard to know how much of hold on reality they have.
June 5th, 2012 | 7:06 pm
I think that this discussion is too heavy on hyperbole, and rather Pantheistic (i.e. an immagination/empathy driven Macro-view of the cosmos, that includes the brand “Sexual Revolution”)
Personally if my world is a nightmare it is because I am too analytic, or unerotic or unrelational. I actually feel more sorry for myself than I do for the single mother. Having this child actually forces her to be responsible for another living being. As Kate says: “what I find endearing in my single-mother students is how much they love that which ties them down and reins them in.” I think Kate is exagerating a bit. The grass is always greener on the other side, I am not buying the “broken soul” mantra, but I doubt many of them have the Zen of Robert Frost’s Mountain Interval.
Take “Sex and the City”, I don’t really watch it, but I have caught a few late night episodes. Seems glamorized. It is certainly part of the copyright industrial complex. So I think of the writers and the actors and the producers and what goes into making and distributing the show. But if I am to actually be caught up in the story line then then the women are good looking, fairly intelligent, and seem to be having a good time playing the game of life. Likewise I would say the Stone Poneys seems like a good song.
But I really sort of suspect the conventional wisdom and moralizing, applied to specific circumstances. I can’t tell you for sure that you are worse off in life for getting pregnant and raising a kid.
I do believe in poor life choices, but I also don’t believe in being scared shitless. I believe in plans, but also in flexibility. Que Sera Sera.
June 5th, 2012 | 10:40 pm
“Personally if my world is a nightmare it is because I am too analytic, or unerotic or unrelational.”
I am always afraid that I will dip into uncritical acceptance of evils if I do not remain perpetually analytical. I am also simply delighted by being analytical, although it does have the unfortunate side effect of showing the world to be a nightmare in many respects. Live in boyfriends sexually abusing, forced abortions by grandparents, etc.
June 5th, 2012 | 11:28 pm
Women can get away with independence until they have children. Isn’t that why abortion is so important to feminist ideology? Contraception and its backup, abortion, free women from the dependence on men that is created when a woman has a child. Said child changes a woman’s sexuality, making her less free in many ways. Our “sexual scene” changes radically with a product from conception — kids mess everything up in the sexual revolution.
John Lewis, I was not exaggerating. Women have children and fall in love with them. Hormones have something to do with it; we are made to fall in love with our children.
June 6th, 2012 | 1:34 am
“It’s all non-correspondence, magical thinking and George Berkelys all the way down! ”
If you meant George Berkeley, well, magical thinking and non-correspondence have nothing to do with his philosophy.
June 6th, 2012 | 5:28 am
Some of these comments are a bit, um, interesting, but it seems that no one has offered anything at all that a despicable cad from 100 years ago would want that isn’t on offer by today’s societal norms. Phrased another way, there’s nothing an adolescent male would want that isn’t on free offer. And a society designed to cater to the whims of adolescent males isn’t one destined to long endure.
June 6th, 2012 | 12:04 pm
I am glad I don’t live in Cad City with the despicable. Yes, that’s definitely something to avoid.
June 6th, 2012 | 5:15 pm
“And a society designed to cater to the whims of adolescent males isn’t one destined to long endure.”
Very true. Although I would remind everyone once again that this society is also to satisfy sluts, not just cads.
June 7th, 2012 | 5:43 pm
Gene Callahan wrote:
If you meant George Berkeley, well, magical thinking and non-correspondence have nothing to do with his philosophy.
MPB:
That was a poor attempt at a joke, as the whole message was tongue in cheek. I’m not a world weary 28 year old either and old Soviet Futurists and agitprop poets aren’t figures to emulate. I’m afraid it was a joke that failed, I apologize for that.
Brian wrote:
Phrased another way, there’s nothing an adolescent male would want that isn’t on free offer. And a society designed to cater to the whims of adolescent males isn’t one destined to long endure.
MPB:
What’s the difference between a cad and a prince encouraged in a court romance? And is not every man allowed to enjoy the life of a prince in this democratic time? And if marriage isn’t procreative based and the social, legal and biological realities of fatherhood aren’t bound in a single institution, whose to say how and what it means for these things to be ordered.
I’m just not sure if despicable cads from yesteryear have anything to do with today; just like endurance is not self-evidently ideal for today’s culture. We’ve severed these sort of links.
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