…

The change occurred back when birth control became ubiquitous. Women could have sex as easily and without consequence as men and so women took on the behavior of the most hound-doggish men. It has not been good for either men or women.

Oh, usually, when this topic comes up, the discussion turns toward STDs or unwanted pregnancies or abortion. And those are important discussions and a terrible side-effect of sexual promiscuity. But there is a more day-to-day effect of promiscuity: the devaluing of sex itself to the point that it’s purpose beyond reproduction is distorted beyond recognition.

Sex is not just to make babies. Sex is not just for physical pleasure. Sex is a sacred gift between two people.

Here’s an irony that I’ve noticed: the women who put out the most seem to like sex the least. You read that right. Because sex matters so little to them, they use sex as a tool to get a man to like them or they use sex to have physical touch or they use sex for attention. The point is, they use sex. And then, when there is no more use for sex, they stop giving it up. That’s right. They don’t like it or value it that much anyway. They give it to anyone and everyone. And, imagine their eventual husband’s shock when it stops being given. “But we had so much sex before we got married!” Uh huh. I have a newsflash. She didn’t like it then, either. She was using sex to use you. And, it worked.

No one values anything that comes cheap. Why do men and women give away the gift of their body and soul as if it is worth nothing?

…

Go read the whole thing. Do it. All three of you who read this.

I don’t really know what else to write about her post. As a guy with more female friends than guy friends, I get to hear a lot of stuff that most guys never hear. The most frustrating thing is when I see my women friends in all their unhappiness try to convince themselves that what they are doing that makes them unhappy (usually sexually/romantically related) is OK because of whatever excuse they give themselves. It’s even worse when they convince themselves that they are happy even though all they’re doing is surrounding themselves with distractions from their issues. Those issues always come back and bite them in the end, though…

So it is quite a turn on (kidding!) refreshing to see women reject the radical views of some feminists. In many cases, the women who disagree with feminism are as passionate – if not more so – than the women who spew forth the feminist rhetoric. Rachel Lucas, over the last week or two, seems to have made it her mission in life to verbally beat the living hell (with a blunt instrument – see her header) out of feminists (here, here, here, here, here, and indirectly here). To be fair, she verbally bludgeons stupid people in general and there seemed to be a spike in stupid feminists coming to her attention. I also saw Cassy Fiano (here and here), Dr. Helen, and Amy Alkon take on several of the stories Rachel went after (I found those bloggers through Rachel’s site as well as constantly hearing about them on Conservative Grapevine). Those are just the ones I’ve read in the last couple of weeks.

I guess my take on feminism and such is rooted in the strong women in my family. I grew up … (more below the fold) with three very strong women with three very different views on the world, though all more of the conservative variety. My mom is a single mom. When I was in middle school she decided to go back to school and get a college degree. At one point she was working two jobs, enrolled full time in school, and still managing to make it to all of the football games my brother and I was playing in and the gym meets my sister was competing in. That’s real strength. My grandmothers were very much traditional in the sense that they “submitted” to my grandfathers who are the patriarchs of the family (i.e., my grandmothers know the fine art of being in charge without being in charge). Yet these women were and are very much strong women for how they manage the family and hold it together even during the tough times. All three have been involved in running or managing a business (or two) while also managing the household. The radical feminists would look down on my grandmothers for taking on the traditional family role and would probably look down on my mom for various reasons, too. But these women have set an example to me on what real feminine strength is all about. They’ve defied the message of victimhood that I constantly hear from the Left in that they were not victims. They never blamed society for anything. Instead they took pride in being mothers and taking care of the family.

I’m sure I’ll get drilled for this (if anyone actually reads it), but it seems to me that certain versions of radical feminism tend to view strength in only one way: that of the strong male. Everything they strive for is a direct comparison to the male-centric view of the world. They cannot accept differences in success between men and women while measuring that success with the male-centric measuring stick. I’m not too good at describing male-strength and the ruler that men use to measure success with each other and even worse at describing what I mean by feminine strength. All I’m saying is that men and women tend to react differently and take pride in different things when compared to the opposite sex. This in no way takes away from either: women are just as passionate and intelligent as men and have just as much potential for success as men.

It is these differences that make the secure men want to put women on pedestals (as opposed to the insecure man who tries to keep them “in their place”) in admiration for the complementary traits between the genders. I firmly believe that men have an inherent desire to take care of women in all their frailty, while women have an inherent desire to take care of men in all of their’s. The perfect mate makes us into a better person when we’re together because of this ying-yang of traits. Notice, this has nothing to do with social position: masculine and feminine are inherent (by nature or by nurture).

So if it’s ok with you, I’ll stick by what my momma taught me: treat women the way you want your mother, grandmother, and sister to be treated. Since I look up to them, respect them, never hit them, and treat them with chivalry and politeness. Also, frankly, I have a healthy fear of what my mom would do to me if I ever didn’t treat a woman this way…

I really agree with her 100%, but she raised some good points that I never thought of before. She points out that it was men that tended to spearhead the creation of new technology and engineering feats. Now, sociologists would probably argue that this is because men were in power and oppressing women. Ms. Lucas disagrees, apparently, and now I’ve thought about it and applying my intense scientific training, I think I agree with her.

What it comes down to is this: Men have more testosterone. More testosterone means men have the very strong, undeniable urge to do stupid shit. Stupid shit leads bad things happening 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time, it leads to great scientific and engineering discoveries. Nearly 99.9% of all fundamental science is driven by the scientist wanting to try something that is most likely going to fail, but is being done for no other reason that “wow, that sounds kinda cool…let’s what happens when we do this…” I.e., the science is driven by men and women wanting to do stupid shit. The more fundamental the science, the more men involved, the stupider and more dangerous the shit they do becomes. Hence, why I am in physics…

I think it is clear that the Iraqi’s have a better sense of right and wrong and unselfish sacrifice than we do. We unfairly force young, poor, minorities to join our army and send them over to fight an unjust war, while the Iraqi’s all-volunteer insurgency sacrifice their lives to repel the invaders.

And considering they don’t have the high rates of teen pregnacy and single mothers caused by the lie of abstinence-only education and propaganda claiming that a fetus is a human life, they must be on to something. Maybe we should adopt some of their strategies? Take for example this story about a 17 year old Iraqi girl who was publicly stoned to death for committing a most heinous offense: she was…dating a boy of the wrong religion. Well, HeLL! I’d have stoned my daughter for dating a religious man as well! He might have tried to have sex with her and then prevent her from aborting the unwanted thing since we know he wouldn’t have allowed her to use a condom! It is much better to die from a stoning than to ruin one’s career and education by becoming pregnant or worse: religious. I’m sure he would have insisted on getting the child raised in his religion, thus corrupting both the girl and the child to believe that morals aren’t relative and what makes a human isn’t a social construct. Next thing you know, he’d convince her that slavery is ok and that Christians and Jews don’t deserve to die. And yes, I am aware that the ones doing the stoning were of a religion, but since that religion is a minority religion, it deserves to be equally protected as Christianity. Besides, Stoning Women was used long before Christianity came and destroyed the practice. If it was good enough for the ancients, why can’t it be good enough for us? Christians have no right to impose their warped sense of morality on any of us! I say stone away. Good sports and practices never go out of style.

I’m sure glad we’re losing this War. With any luck, our immoral war won’t give the Iraqi’s the idea that morality is anything but relative. It would sure suck for those Iraqi women to have to go through the sexism and discrimination that our women face!

The horrific events at VT is still very firmly on our minds and will remain there for some time. According to Sarah Baxter and others quoted in the article linked above, it is an indication of a crisis among young males in a “feminised society.” This is not a very popular line of thinking – it implies that modern feminism is very harmful to the male psyche in ways not based in some misogynistic mindset, but in a subconscious manner. The article makes some good points, I think, and goes far into shedding light on some of the issues facing young men and women today. None of this is an excuse for what Cho did, but it does shed light on some of the issues the young man faced…

To begin, it is important to note that a major change in society from even 50 years ago is the number of young men and women choosing to go to college and graduate schools is much higher than anytime in the past. I cannot count the number of times I have heard many of my peers say “I’m not ready to settle down yet.” There is an effort to prolong the carefree days of youth, and often college students (even some graduate students) are thought of as “just kids” even if by historical standards these “kids” were old enough and responsible enough to be married and have a house full of kids of their own. Not only do parents and society support this image of the 20-something “kid,” but it is reflected in the youth as well:

The baby-faced Cho was 23, an adult by most people’s reckoning. In any other era it is doubtful he would have thought of himself as a boy or described his fellow students at Virginia Tech as “brats”. Trapped in the perpetual adolescence of the student, he has become a new monstrous poster child for boys who would rather kill themselves and others than grow up.

Whether this “prolonged youth” is a good thing or not depends on one’s views. However, it is an important backdrop to the larger problems that young adults are facing. It often makes for a longer part of one’s life devoid of direction.

In this backdrop, where clear, defined roles between the sexes are often blurred into a mix of sexuality and gender issues. As society is coming to grips with the concepts of gender equality, debating whether masculinity and femininity are social constructs or something more ingrained and whether homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism should be an accepted part of our society, men and women are often very confused about where they fit in.

In particular, the question of what it means to “be a real man” is very much alive today even with the efforts by feminists and those on the Left of the political spectrum to make the question meaningless. According to Paglia, they may be making the question even more important:

Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author of Sexual Personae, believes Cho is emblematic of the crisis of masculinity in America. “Women have difficulty understanding the mix of male sexual aggression with egotism and the ecstasy of self-immolation,” she says. Or to quote Martin Amis on that other killer, Fred West: he became “addicted to the moment where impotence becomes prepotence”.

And also,

Paglia, who has taught in American universities for 35 years, describes America’s residential campuses as vast “islands of green and slack conformity where a strange benevolent and tyrannical paternalism has taken over. It’s like a resort atmosphere”.
Paglia believes the school Cho attended would have been no better equipped to deal with frustrated young males. “There is nothing happening educationally in these boring prisons that are fondly called suburban high schools. They are saturated with a false humanitarianism, which is especially damaging for boys.”

So what does it mean to be a man? Are the needs of men unique to those of women? Research shows that men learn and think differently – a biological trait as opposed to a learned one. It makes sense that we would also have a need to express ourselves differently. One can argue whether this need is biological or social, but it is clear that men today are often lacking some of the traits that men in the past had – as if they didn’t form. It is also clear that men today are showing more frustration than in the past:

“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”

How many men in this middle-class world can’t create anything, especially with their hands? How many men must rely on the working-class to do basic maintenance and work on their cars or houses, that in the past could be done by even the most educated men? Yet, as a society, we often look up to the professional men that “make things happen” in the world, while looking down on the men that just live day by day, doing whatever they can to make ends meet for their families as opposed to their careers – and in turn, keeps society running.

This blurring of the male psyche is very related to the blurring of the female psyche. Once, it was the men that ran wild only to be caught and settled down by a strong woman – having to choose between a life of meaningless lust, or the love and comfort that only a good woman can give. In short, it was a choice between the anchors of love and the meaningless of lust. Now, the stabilizing factors in society – strong women – have been uprooted. Men no longer have to make a clear choice between love and lust. Love has been dehumanized – degraded into animalistic lust. With this new-found, false freedom, men and women become lost in a meaningless existence, where sexuality is no longer rooted in the spirit. The consequences can be devastating:

Cho is a classic example of “someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race”, Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out. “

Paglia goes on to write that,

“Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again.”

If women are behaving like men, why does this send mixed signals? Shouldn’t we, as a society be more happy since we don’t have the efforts of commitment? It is a mistake to believe that promiscuity is a uniquely masculine trait – as research with sociology has shown. On the contrary, promiscuity undermines the masculine psyche. It is a rejection of the fundamental traits that separate men and women, masculine and feminine. Men have a fundamental desire to commit to a single woman, spurned by our subconscious desire to protect and nurture a family. In the past, as men gave in to the desires of the flesh, it was always the call to return to monogamy – to be a “real man” that led them back to a monogamy. Now, this is gone – or at least prolonged as women, too, or giving in to the same base desires.

This leads to a blurring between the erotic and the pornographic:

The sex, Paglia argues, “is everywhere but it is not erotic”, as can be seen by the sad spectacle of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears flashing their lack of underwear during a night on the town. “It’s not even titillating. It’s banal and debasing.”

Often, it is the Puritans amongst us that clumps the erotic and the pornographic. They are different. The world of the erotic strives to connect beauty to the most intimate moments between a man and a woman, while the pornographic dehumanizes these moments into lustful desires. In the promiscuous activities of today, the erotic is replaced with the pornographic, and every effort to fool the participants into a false-love ends in failure. Love is the complete giving of one’s self to another. The premature giving of one’s physical self to the other without a complete giving of one’s heart to another undermines the whole effort.

The very real and strong link between the pornographic (lust) and violence is very apparent in sex crimes and in literature and movies (not to be confused with the link between pleasure and pain often found in erotica). Lust is deeply connected to a power struggle between the participants – a selfish desire to exploit another. Rape is one of the many possible crimes associated with this link. Mass murder, it seems, is another:

But the plays show he was preoccupied not just with girls but with paedophilia and sodomy.
In Richard McBeef, a drama about child abuse, a stepson rants, “I will not be molested by an aging, balding, overweight pedophile [sic]stepdad named Dick”, before threatening to shove the television remote control “up his ass”. It concludes: “I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick.”
Dr James Gilligan, a former prison psychiatrist who teaches at New York University, believes that misogyny and homophobia are a central component of the make-up of violent criminals, who often fear they have homosexual tendencies.
“An underlying factor that is virtually always present is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood and the way to do that, to gain respect, is to commit a violent act,” he says. “It is tremendously tempting to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one’s sense of masculine self-esteem.”

The idea is that since what it means to be a man is no longer clear, men are finding a new, violent outlet for their masculine issues. For some, rape is no longer enough. They must take away the very objects of their hatred – by murdering them. Since they include themselves in this downward spiraling society, the only escape for them is death as well.

However, if Cho was confused on his masculinity, what about the students (especially the men) in the line of fire?

In a twist to the debate on masculinity, some commentators have complained that the terrified Virginia Tech students were no Rambos when it came to defending themselves. John Derbyshire, a right-wing British writer based in America, wondered, “Why didn’t anyone rush the guy? Yes, I know it is easy to say these things, but didn’t the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything?” — a reference to the passengers fighting back in the 9/11 hijacked plane.
The columnist Mark Steyn took up the theme with an essay on the “culture of passivity” that is overtaking America. In his view, students are becoming so infantilised that they have lost their capacity to take responsibility.
“In a horrible world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself and others,” he believes. “It is a poor reflection on us that in those critical first seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor understood instinctively the obligation to act.” Librescu, 75, forced his body against the door to prevent Cho storming his classroom, gaining time for some of his students to escape. He was shot dead. But there were younger heroes, too, such as Derek O’Dell, who was shot in the arm but managed to wedge his foot in the door and prevent Cho from re-entering the classroom.
Another student, realising that a friend was playing dead, was said to have deliberately drawn Cho’s attention to himself as the gunman searched the room for survivors — and sacrificed his own life.

The heroes of the tragedy give us hope that real men are still out there and that what it means to be a real man has not died along with chivalry. However, in the past, when men were bred to face danger to protect others, would there have been more heroes? Would Cho have been rushed and tackled? Paglia suggests that the semiautomatic guns prevented this since they could be fired so quick (see article for direct quote). It seems unlikely that we can rid ourselves of semi-automatic weapons at this point (even with legislation), however, is this really a necessity?

The article and Paglia’s comments struck me hard, as I see much of myself in her description of Cho. The frustration that she describes men feeling in such a promiscuous culture is very much apart of me. The difference, however, is that I don’t feel any desire to violently lash out at the men and women engaging in such a meaningless lifestyle. I see the hurt and the pain that it causes, and my masculine instincts lead me to want to protect these women more. To take them into my arms and my heart as they begin seeing the effects of their actions, and to hold them until the pain goes away without judgement or resentment. I believe that’s the way the way a true man should react. I say this not to “advertise myself” as the role model – I’m far from it, but to demonstrate that there are some men out there with a different attitude than the jerks in the bars…