Galatians
3:26-28 "For you are all the children of God by faith, in Christ
Jesus.
For as many of you as have been baptized in Christ, have put on Christ.
There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there
is neither male nor female.
For you are all one in Christ Jesus."
The Garbage Generation
By Daniel Amneus
This book
outlines the consequences of the destruction of the two-parent family
and the need to stabilize it by strengthening its weakest natural link,
the role of the biological father. It is written from a secular
perspective and includes a few things with which the owner of the
FishEaters Website would definitely quibble, and it doesn't
even
mention the importance of chastity on the part of men, too, which is
sad. But it most certainly makes its case about the need for
patriarchy, destroying the Victorian myth of women being innocent, sexless little
fluffballs in the process -- a quite necessary destruction in that
reaching the goal of chastity shouldn't be based on lies and pious
tales about the reality of human nature -- women being a little more
than half of all humans. Failure to deal with actual human
nature, rather than sentimentalized versions of it, can only lead to
failure, resentment, neuroses, and backlash.
At any rate, this book is must-reading for all who are
concerned about the future of Western civilization -- and is definitely
the book to give to the radical
feminist who decries "the evils of the patriarchy" (which is not at
all to belittle real evils suffered by women at the hands of those
with sentimentalized, condescending, nasty attitudes towards
them, or by the very small sub-set of men who actually do behave like brutes
toward women).
Just think of what our world is like in the West --
the Maury Povich "Who My Baby Daddy" shows with the paternity tests
given to ten different men in an attempt to find out who a child's
father is, the newspaper birth announcements which amount to lists of
names of single women.
Think of the women, bewildered about why men
won't commit, and the men who'd love to commit, but know that doing so
is to risk being raped by the judicial system because of no-fault
divorce, unfair custody laws, etc. Consider our
"pornified" culture in which women compete to "out-slut" each other in
how they dress, in what they're willing to do to arouse men and get and
keep their attention -- men who likely refer to them as "pump and
dumps" and will never call them again after sex that most likely wasn't fully physically satisfying for them in the first place. Think of how a rating scale
exists out there, with women being judged as being a "4" or a
"solid
9," all based on their "hotness," with no regard for their intellects,
their hearts, their dreams, their souls. How far we've
fallen. Pope Paul VI nailed it
way back in 1968 when he wrote, in Humanae Vitae, about the effects of
artificial contraception:
Responsible men
can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down
by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of
methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider
how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital
infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much
experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to
understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so
exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is
an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another
effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to
the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a
woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce
her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires,
no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with
care and affection.
And think of what modern sexual mores have done to relations between the sexes. We have vast campus bureaucracies that deny young men of due process when they're accused of "rape," where "rape" can mean absolutely anything a female wants it to mean. We have incredible confusion, pain, and regret stemming from the fact that our culture fails to affirm the simple facts that men and women are different, that our bodies are radically different, and that the biological, psychological, and sociological consequences of sex are radically different for us. From an article by Heather Mac Donald at City Journal:
The New York Times now has a “gender editor” and “gender team,” created in the wake of the #MeToo movement to infuse feminist sensibility even further throughout the paper. The gender editor, Jessica Bennett, penned an op-ed last month that serves as a template for the hypocritical state of modern feminism. Bennett had unforced sex with a 30-year-old acquaintance when she was 19 because “saying ‘yes’ [was] easier than saying ‘no,’” as the op-ed’s title puts it. She allowed the encounter to proceed out of “some combination of fear (that I wasn’t as mature as he thought), shame (that I had let it get this far), and guilt (would I hurt his feelings?).” Naturally, Bennett attributes her passivity and embarrassment at that moment to “dangerously outdated gender norms.” It is the patriarchy, she claims, that makes “even seemingly straightforward ideas about sex—such as, you know, whether we want to engage in it or not—feel utterly complex.”
Actually, it is not the patriarchy that makes sexual decisions “utterly complex”; it is sex itself. Sex is the realm of the inarticulate and irrational, inherently fraught with “fear,” “shame,” and “guilt.” Sexual seduction is carried on through ambiguity and indirection; exposing that ambiguity to light, naming what may or may not be going on, is uncomfortable and risks denial and rejection. “Dangerously outdated gender norms” are not what make it difficult to say no to sexual advances; contemporary gender norms have confused these already fraught situations. Traditional mores set the default for premarital sex at “no,” at least for females. This default recognized the different sexual drives of males and females and the difficulties of bargaining with the male libido. The default “no” to premarital sex meant that a female did not have to negotiate the refusal with every opportuning male; it was simply assumed. She could, of course, cast aside the default assumption; that was her power and prerogative. But she did not have to provide reasons for shutting down a sexual advance.
Sexual liberation reversed those default settings. The default is now “yes” to premarital sex; it is a “no” that has to be extricated in media res. No cultural taboos remain around premarital sex; those represented a repressive version of female sexuality, declared the liberationists. Males and females are now assumed to pursue sexual conquest with equal zeal. A contributor to the website Total Sorority Move described an instance of drunken college coitus several years ago that she, like the Times’ Bennett, allowed to happen simply because stopping it would have involved providing reasons. “We have sex with guys, because sometimes it’s just easier to do it than to have the argument about not doing it,” observed Veronica Ruckh. Ruckh quotes other females who have been defeated by the “yes” default for sex: “To be honest, it would have been awkward to say no, so I just did it.” “Sometimes you have to have lunch with girls you don’t want to have lunch with, and sometimes you have to have sex with boys you don’t want to have sex with.”
This state of affairs would have been unthinkable 60 years ago. Then, there was no cultural compulsion to have “sex with boys you didn’t want to have sex with.” The assumption was that of course you would not, and that assumption gave females power to control the outcome. Now, however, females have to go mano a mano with the male libido in a realm filled with indirection, embarrassment, and uncertainty. The male libido will win in many of those cases.
Feminists cannot acknowledge the divide between men and women when it comes to sex and sensibility. Doing so would violate what Steven Pinker calls the blank slate doctrine, a foundation stone of modern liberalism. One of that doctrine’s core tenets is that “differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety,” in Pinker’s words. Ignoring biology, feminists recast difficult sexual interactions in terms of power and politics. Sexual harassment, real or imagined, is portrayed as an effort to subordinate females. Actually, sexual harassment is usually just about sex, even if differential power is used to obtain it.
