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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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which was invented by powerful men for the purpose of basically sexually exploiting women without recompense

Men have always wanted to exploit women sexually without recompense.

In fact: one of the Church's missions was to prevent this. The assumption was that these male tendencies had to be controlled by the institution of marriage, for women's - hell, everyone's - sake.

What made the sexual revolution special? One theory:

But then, in a single sentence of its reportin 1970, the Committee grasped the central issue: ‘It is the promiscuous girl who is the real problem here.’ In this utterly sexist statement, the Committee actually understood the central issue – that the ‘moral turn’ in female sexuality destroyed the entire house of cards. Boys had always been boys, but female permissiveness meant that a generation of young women were turning their back on the discourse of pious femininity. With this realisation, the Committee could not cope, and by 1972 it voiced total exasperation with ‘the turbulent continent of morality’ and the unfolding ‘promiscuous age’.

Death of Christian Britain.

Men have always wanted to exploit women sexually without recompense.

So the idea of sex outside marriage, done with mutual consent and for the sake of mutual pleasure, is a lie? Is that what both of you are saying?

I can agree with that, with a few caveats.

  1. It's almost always socially deleterious to single hetero women who specifically made it their overriding wish to marry early, and are willing to organize their entire lifestyle around this. And I'm sure such women are relatively rare.

  2. This still does not mean that men were consciously, knowingly exploiting women i.e. the great majority of them very obviously did/do not believe/recognize that premarital sex in itself is almost always socially deleterious to women.

  3. Even when women come to this realization, I'm sure most of these women do not do so before the age of, say, 36. Which is sort of relevant here.

Not an outright refutation of any fact, but a challenge to the emphasis in the final para: i.e. all of this will happen so long as men maintain X-Y Systems. Here:

As a woman, there’s no reason to abandon feminism unless men [my emphasis] abandon the ideas and actions that brought it about quite naturally in response.

Point is that (high status especially) men have always tried to break this system. They managed - continually - to circumvent it. It was only truly broken - according to the exasperated Church - when women themselves rejected the underlying normative argument.

I mean...that passage I quote is telling you that men tried. They tried to hold back the dam. They were told to stop.

So whose revolution is it really? And in whose name does it persist? Whose ideas and actions (which now need to be abandoned) drove it? If men couldn't hold the line on the old system what new one is supposed to be magicked up when the original criticism of sexual protectionism still holds (any solution here would quickly be pilloried as "patronizing" or patriarchal)?

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