After listening to the various talking heads programs this morning, I’m concerned that there is a lot of miscalculation going on. The direction in which we’re heading does not lead to another victory for the liberation of women. Quite the opposite. It leads to strict separation of the sexes and, ultimately, purdah.
Keep in mind that such liberation as women have experienced over the last several generations in Europe and the United States is an aberration from the standpoint of the rest of the world and the rest of history. For most people it is viewed that way rather than as received wisdom.
Purdah seems pretty far fetched in our society. I think that probably assumes that things are already much better for women than is probably true. It still isn’t that uncommon for men to physically abuse women at work, to say nothing of physical abuse. That is just plain old abuse, before you get to the sex stuff.
Steve
I think I’ve gotten to the point where if women want nothing to do with me, then I want nothing of them, I even resent their casual flirtation, because they only do it to flatter themselves. There’s only one thing they want from us, pictures of dead presidents. When we run out of that, they’re gone.
The Mike Pence rule (aka the Billy Graham rule) was certainly wise advice 60 years ago; and even wiser now.
But with technology; it would not shock me in 20 years if everyone has body cams on all the time and has their location tracked all the time. The stakes involved are getting too large.
I guess I would put it a bit differently. I think the “debate” about the liberation of women is, like so much else, increasingly becoming a culture war issue viewed in zero-sum, zero-defect, binary terms. And then there’s the problem of the dogmatic belief in the blank slate theory. Altogether, that’s not a recipe for anything good.
It depends on whose definition of liberation we accept. Second-wave? Third? Post-modern? Transfeminist or TERF? There isn’t a monolithic set of principles. As an example the post-modern feminists and radical feminists don’t get along and have nearly opposing views of what constitutes liberation.
There is a segment of American society that believes that their ideas are so powerful, influential, and attractive that their acceptance and triumph are inevitable. That is ahistorical. The actual historical experience is that the influence of America’s immigrants works both ways. The Irish didn’t just accept American mores; they brought their own, too, and introduced machine politics to the U. S. or, as Pat Moynihan put it, “an Irish village writ large”.
The Scandinavians brought Northern European social progressivism. The Eastern Europeans brought their own views.
The population of Latin America and the Caribbean has basically peaked. The next major cohorts of immigration to the U. S. will inevitably be from Asia and Africa and the notion that they won’t bring their own cultures and mores to the U. S. with them is a free flight of fancy and they are very, very conservative. Reactionary. It’s already happening.
But with technology; it would not shock me in 20 years if everyone has body cams on all the time and has their location tracked all the time. The stakes involved are getting too large.
How sad that would be. And, yet with woman upping the ante by aggressively pursuing males, and at the same time playing a victimized maiden and weaker of the sexes, males might be better off, and at least safer, going into a monastery.
Anecdotally, when my son was in middle school, through the end of high school, he never asked a girl out, because it was the girl(s) who did the asking. As he didn’t get a driver’s license until 19, the girls would also pick him up and often pay for the date. It was such a reversal from what I was accustomed to!
More shocking still, in middle school there was a club created by the most popular, pretty, and I guess risque girls in the school called The BJ Club. It took me some time to understand the focus of this group, and once I did found that most of the girls’ mothers were clueless about the preoccupation of their daughters at lunch time.
IMO, some females do have a way of playing both sides of a coin involving sex and their sexuality. For instance, there have been numerous cases of college girls alleging sexual misconduct by the opposite sex. In many instances these males had no due process, and were convicted and expelled solely on the word of their accuser. The other day a news item was released saying that 50 such accusations have been overturned, some with damages awarded to the wrongly accused male.
This leads me to an article posted today, written by Clarice Feldman, entitled, Life in a Gynocracy.
The opening paragraph rang so true to me:
“The performance of women this week – from Senator Dianne Feinstein to Christine Blasey Ford to the howling mobs on Capitol Hill – made me seriously consider surgically altering my sex.  They are demanding special treatment because of their sex and in the process placing all of us – male and female alike – at peril of witch hunts against men and then, in time, against all who will not bow to their rule.”
I personally found the reference to Dr. Ford, as a “survivor,” to also be questionable, as well as hyperbolic, and unfair to those women who indeed have survived some physical form of brutalization. Apparently, so did Clarice Feldman:
“Since when do those accusing others of crimes become “survivors” rather than “accusers”?  How you frame your self-description affects views, doesn’t it?  If you claimed that someone had raped you, why must we always believe you just because you tag yourself “a survivor”? “
Good question!
The notion humans have no innate nature is a very attractive idea for intellectuals. Firstly because they, in their own estimation, are the ones who ought to do the shaping of others but also because their ideology can be made an historical inevitability.
Jan, even bookmarking “American Thinker” labels you. I have too, but sorry, you are labeled.
I don’t find any rejection of innate character credible. Reportedly, I was fighting from the moment of my birth and fought practically continually until my parents enrolled me in judo when I was 12. As I progressed both mentally and morally through practicing the martial arts I gradually eschewed fighting. To this day I live in a permanent state of controlled rage.
People have natures. They can control them but they cannot transcend them. Or ignore them.
There are many influences. Education, training, family culture, local culture, experience, and many other factors color one’s behavior.
Fightin’s fun if you’re the one on top, if your’e on the bottom, it sucks. Quote from my daughter’s 10 year old female friend.
I don’t find any rejection of innate character credible.
There’s a short video where Chomsky discusses this as a pathology of the authoritarian Left. I agree with his assessment.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3gS6g41m_NU#
I’m familiar with Bakunin.
Unlike many I have no desire to rule but I have an even greater desire not to be ruled.
GS:
However big and mean and tough you are, there is always someone bigger and tougher and meaner than you are.
” risque girls in the school called The BJ Club.”
This almost always ends up being apocryphal, as in I don’t know if it has ever been true. An early version of this was the Rainbow BJ club, where girls supposedly wore different colored lipstick so they could create a rainbow on the sex organ of the lucky males at the parties. An enterprising female journalist chased this down and could not find evidence than any had ever occurred. Then tried to replicate what supposedly happens with her boyfriend. Doesn’t work. Same as with the alcohol soaked tampon stories. Pretty funny.
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/danielle-crittenden/vodka-tampons_b_1105433.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000008
A lot of this goes back to the misperception that women now have it “all their way”. We still have instances of men physically abusing women at the workplace in our area. Girls still need to be careful when they go to parties. Boys? Not so much. I think that when we are at the point where a girl can go to party or bar, dressed anyway she wants and not have to worry about being grabbed, harassed or attacked, then we can start worrying about purdah. There are many lists you can find online of things women do to stay safe from sexual assault. I have yet to find a list of things men do to keep safe from sex assaults by women.
Query- I do find that among some older women there seems to be a kind of “macho” (for lack of a better word) attitude that accepts that boys and young men are just going to grab your boobs and ass, but you just tell them off and they will stop so it is OK and not that big of a deal. A real woman knows how to deal with that kind of stuff and doesn’t let it bother her.
Steve
Also, on the girls asking guys out now, when people survey this, it turns out that asking someone out on a date is still mostly the male thing. (7 y/o article but hard to believe things are changing that fast.)
Steve
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-differences/201104/why-dont-women-ask-men-out-first-dates
By the way, the body cam everywhere thing is not just to help the innocent; but to deter and quickly catch bad actors.
The Catholic Church, Police, workplaces, universities are all institutions where the incentive for 24/7 video and the liability of not having such video is growing day by day.
Agree future immigrants come from cultures very different from ours yet politics make strange bedfellows as they say.
Greatest ironic event in history:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/world/asia/china-maoists-xi-protests.html
When the Communist Party just isn’t communist enough…
I wonder if they’ve figured out the CCP is and always has been a strategy for keeping a few people and their families in power?
At least in my circle of friends with kids, teenage sex seems a lot lower than when I was at that age. Boys are still expected to ask girls out most of the time. Who pays for dates is a lot more variable – based on my limited anecdotal data it’s much more evenly spread between boys and girls but the first date is usually paid for by the boy (if he’s the one who asked for the date).