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Saturday, May 03, 2008
Footnotes to “Where are the men?”
The Curmudgeon has been tirelessly writing for the last few days about a problem I have been thinking (and writing) about for some time - namely, the severe degradation of our traditional notions of masculinity and femininity and the concomitant vulgarization of our sexual mores. As I have written before, I have to come conclude through observation on my college campus that these two processes have dome great damage to the psyches of many of my peers, and I myself have not escaped entirely unscathed. To judge from the articles the Curmudgeon has linked to, the older generations, even the significantly older generations, have not escaped the consequences of de-masculinization and de-feminization either. Unfortunately, analysis of this problem, as with so many things dealing with sex and gender, is often one-sided. Indeed, we can see clear evidence of such in the blatant projection of the two female authors who have been the objects of the Curmudgeon’s thorough deconstruction - they ask, “Where are the manly men?” as if that question does not also immediately imply its counterpart, “Where are the feminine women?” That species too appears endangered in much of the United States.
Perhaps the connection between the two questions is not immediately obvious to these women. No doubt there are also many men wondering about the second question without stopping to consider the first. After all, projection is a very human quality. The truth is, de-masculinization and de-feminization are parallel, complementary processes. Once one begins, the other must logically follow. Given that our current situation is unique in history, it is an open question whether they will also reverse in tandem, or if such a thing is even possible given the technological innovations such as oral contraceptives that seem to have precipitated our current spiral. In either case, because I feel I might be making a controversial argument, and one that was only implicitly made in my previous piece, I wish to explicitly lay out my reasoning.
I begin with the premise that all human beings are endowed with the knowledge of a set of idealized sexual characteristics written into the natural law by God Himself. Even if we are reluctant to posit the intervention of a deity, my premise would not be damaged for we can certainly make a reasonable inference from the axioms of modern evolutionary theory that sex is a fundamental division in most of the planet’s organisms, and certainly in humans. If one is reminded that our sex is written into our genetic codes such that we can predict with nearly 100% accuracy the sex of an individual just by examining one pair of his or her chromosomes, this conclusion becomes inescapable. I will leave aside the exceedingly rare cases of genetic sex disorders as I do not wish to derail my argument, and in any case they do not do serious damage to its validity.
I further adduce evidence for this beginning premise based on the fact that art and literature has always, traditionally at least, been able to easily pick out the essential qualities of the idealized man and woman. They are so obvious that they do not even bear repetition - only those raised by wolves could escape being exposed to the traditional tropes of masculinity and femininity. Unlike the charlatan post-modernists and post-structuralists in our midst, I cannot dismiss these tropes merely because they are just that - literary forms have an origin and a purpose that transcends the petty ideological goals that most of these “scholars” ascribe them to. If they were actually so fickle, we would expect a much greater variation over time; in fact, we are struck by their similarity, even in the underground homosexual literatures embodied by Sappho we find constant repetition of the qualities and characteristics that make a man or a woman desirable. This suggests to me that our idealized conceptions of gender cannot be damaged even by homosexuality. In fact, the very fact that I find that conclusion somewhat surprising shows how far we have come along in the processes of de-sexualization, for they have just as surely altered the mores of homosexuality just as they have heterosexuality. A quick investigation into the nature of homosexuality among the ancient Greeks will be sufficient to show this.
From this premise I conclude that our essential ideas of sex are unchanging - just as Natural Law decreed that it was wrong for Abel to kill Cain even though God had not yet passed the Ten Commandments to Moses, we cannot escape these ideas by ignorance; ignorantia legis neminem excusat, as the Romans used to say - ignorance of the law excuses no one. What does change is the attention we pay to natural law, whether we choose to give credence to what we subliminally believe or whether we choose to consciously override it. And make no mistake, it requires conscious effort. It requires work, and as Mr. Schwarz demonstrates, a healthy dose of doublethink to believe what radical feminists and their equally radical male allies say about gender and sexual relations is true. I know - for awhile I believed it.
Why then do we do it? There are many reasons. The Curmudgeon has highlighted many of the larger, non-human forces such as the Pill driving our daily absurdities. To them, I would append the classically human weakness of prioritizing selfish personal pleasure over other pursuits. We were not meant to deny pleasure, but nor were we meant to make it our sole motivation. Before the advent of innovations like the Pill, it was fairly hard to do that with regards to our sex lives because the consequence was sufficiently obvious and painful that even the most ignorant could grasp it. Condoms and the Pill changed all that, and now I can proceed to the most important part of my argument, which is to supply the missing link between the sexual revolution and our notions of gender.
Our gender is not just something that we sense about ourselves, it is also acted out, or performed in the post-structuralist parlance. Many of our expressions of masculinity and femininity can change without doing damage to our overall conception of our genders - for instance, I adduce little evidence that the re-channeling of male aggression from military pursuits to business pursuits in the modern world has fundamentally changed the way men see themselves. We must not forget, however, that the purpose of our sexual differentiation is not merely to “provide a little spice to the world” but is to reproduce. We are this way because that is how we propagate, and most of our most fundamental yearnings turn on that necessity; hence, God’s commandment to Adam and Eve to “go forth and multiply” was less about packing the world with a bunch of believers, as the cynic might have it, and more a command to fulfill ourselves as humans. It is therefore no surprise that much Hebrew literature endows the married mother with almost supernatural qualities, for she, unlike the maiden, is a fulfilled human.
The foregoing makes the conclusion that how we express our sexuality is fundamental to how we view our gender. I said that it takes work to believe what radical feminism has to say about gender. The Pill has made it much easier. As we have come to devalue sex, it was absolutely inevitable we would come to devalue the ideal qualities of our respective genders. Romantic love, which only springs from sexual denial at the outset of a relationship and serves to heighten our sense of sexual identity, is all but unheard of these days outside the films which forlornly memorialize it. Sex now usually comes within weeks of the first date, if it even takes that long. In many cases, particularly on college campuses, sex is actually how the relationship begins. Virginity, once considered an essential, if often not realized, virtue of a young gentleman or lady, is now mostly scorned, and it is common practice to have sex simply because one “doesn’t want to be a virgin anymore.” I know, I’ve been there and participated believing many of the things feminism, my peers, and pop culture told me about sex. I only began to meditate on these arguments once I began to feel cheated by the whole sordid game. Certainly, it would be a distortion of history to claim that the vast majority of people held off sex fastidiously until marriage before the pill, just as it would be ignorant to claim that teenage males before the mid-twentieth century weren’t horny bags of hormones ready to jump on the first minimally acceptable moving object. However, the change in the perception of chastity from being an admirable virtue to an object of derision does matter, and with respect to the latter observation the difference between then and now is that we find this behavior acceptable and even encourage it.
Much of the foregoing will probably be obvious to the astute readers of this website, but in a culture where it is now acceptable to hand out condoms and oral birth control to 12-year olds, it is important to state this argument explicitly. There are many here among us who feel that what you do with your sexuality, unless you are unfortunate enough to contract an incurable STD, will have no effect on your outlook, personality, or life prospects, and it certainly has nothing to do with how you see your gender. This belief is laughable, but many subscribe to it and then wonder why they are unable to achieve a fulfilling relationship with the man or woman they started sleeping with a week after they met. The fact is that the mis-use and over-use of sexuality is both unmanly and un-feminine, and because our conception of our gender, our ability to perceive and reach for the ideal characteristics we all have written into our hearts is very much wrapped up in our sexuality, the decoupling of sex from procreation and consequences by technology has done enormous damage to our gender identities. However, because the physical pleasure is so immediate and palpable we are participating quite willingly in the complete disordering of our souls and psyches. We respond by rationalizing our lack of fulfillment to other causes, but until we confront the impact of our sexualities on our conceptions of ourselves, we are hopelessly stuck in a rut, and the dual processes of de-masculinization and de-feminization will remain with us.
Comments
It is postualted that hormones are produced during the act of sexual intercourse that are associted with the creation of a bond with the other person. The same hormone, in fact, that has been associated with the unconditional love of motherhood. Tell me that it is good to constantly form attachments and then break them off, sometimes with people that are essentially strangers by the sum total of what one knows of them. I agree that the demotion of sex from a serious, intimate act of love, to a casual “hand-shake with a happy ending” is eroding away at the psyches of the folks that participate. Promiscuity always seems to me to be linked with some other psychological disorder or unfulfilled need.
For feminists, or anybody else, to promote this as being “empowered” or otherwise, is unhealthy and dangerous. They are not doing any good for anyone.
Excellent insight, Aaron. I am constantly suprised and impressed by the level of world-wise insight that you obviously possess at such a young age. My Grandmother would have called you an “old soul,” but I cannot find a proper label for you other than “impressive.”
I am 28 years old, not much older than you, but I know that at your age (22, if I recall correctly???) that I could not have found the proper words to state the way I felt so eloquently and without compunction. At 22, I was too much the victim of pop culture to be able to state the way I felt, but I can tell you that when my peers were doing drugs and drinking alcohol and having promiscuous sex, I KNEW that there was something wrong with that. Sometimes I felt like I was the odd man out because of it, like everyone else was privy to a secret of which I was sorely unaware. I found out later that it was I who held the secret, and it took the rest of them a lot longer to figure it out. You’ve got a head start on a happy life, and I hope you know it.
Posted by on 05/05/2008 at 11:54 PM
