So men aren't allowed to say they understand a female perspective, and they aren't allowed to say that they don't understand a female perspective?Well, you know how men can be.
Yeah, those things are so mysterious. Unlike men, who are easier to understand and predict.Yep, I honestly think women are inscrutable objects. Thanks for catching my drift, man.
posted by swift
I was set to reply one way, then realized you weren't being sarcastic.
posted by vito90
So men aren't allowed to say they understand a female perspective, and they aren't allowed to say that they don't understand a female perspective?Men are allowed to do whatever they want, apparently.
Sorry about the confusion, but I meant contemporary "Victorian" attitudes (in America), not the ones that were in practice during the reign of Queen Victoria.Like Sidhedevil said...
Which brings to mind a question: where did those Victorian mores come from? The church? Darwin? A response to various and virulent venereal infections?I think there was a post the other day about some research into pre-Victorian sex clubs, which were all the rage apparently.
So in contemporary America, middle-class and upper-middle class women are denied ANY sexual agency?I mean the contemporary, generally accepted meaning of 'agency.'
Even so, I have to say that it would satisfy me very, very, very deeply if Tiger Woods' wife, say, or Ted Haggard's wife, or whoever else is the next "ADULTERER UNVEILED!" ... it would really, really be gratifying to me if that person's wife would hold a press conference the day after the story broke and said:If she really felt that way, would she have chased him down the drive way with a golf club?
“Thank you for your concern about the recent allegations concerning my husband's sexual activities. I would like to make it clear that I know exactly where he is and what he's doing, and I don't really mind; he's my husband, and I love him. And he doesn't demand that I stay at home all alone when he's out of town, either, because he cares about me just as much. So I'd like it if everyone would please get their noses out of our sex lives; that's our business, thank you very much, and we're very happy the way we are.”
Unfortunately, in America, which still seems to be a Puritan country, that probably wouldn't play very well. Everyone columnist in the country would have their thesaurae open to "slut" before the press conference ended.
George Gilder was a prophet.Huh. Really? IMO he was just another apologist for the systems people are talking about in this thread. But that's another topic, I'm guessing...
Gilder moved to New Orleans and worked in the mornings for Ben C. Toledano, Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1972. The rest of the time he wrote Sexual Suicide (1973, revised and reissued as Men and Marriage (1986)). He argued that welfare and feminism broke the "sexual constitution" that had weaned men off their predatory instinct for sex, war, and the hunt and had subordinated them to women as fathers and providers. The book achieved a succès de scandale and Time made Gilder "Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year".[6]... which is all very interesting and rather icky, but I remain at a loss to see what relation this has to the Wise essay that's the subject of this discussion -- unless, of course, a reader projects a metric shitload of baggage into the space between Wise's lines.
Gilder also wrote Visible Man: A True Story of Post-Racist America (1978, reissued in 1995), which the New York Times described in 1981 as "the account of a talented young black spoiled by the too-ready indolence of America's welfare system."[7]
The male group treats women exclusively as sexual objects. Pornographic movies near military centers reek with attacks on women, and one of the favorite stories told on return to the base from liberty is of the violent abuse of a whore. Mass rape has been frequent throughout the history of war. The alternative to the system of men and marriage is usually the system of men and misogyny. The men are freed to pursue their own sexual cycles in uncivilized groups of hunters.So far, that's a relatively pedestrian (if icky-to-lodurr) restatement of "Boys will be boys, so women had better watch out."
This is the ultimate pattern that might unfold if the new bioengineering technology is devoted heavily to the agenda of "women's liberation." The women might be released from pregnancy, but the men would be released from marriage, and thus from the influence of female sexuality. The male physique, far inferior to the woman's in a sexual society, would become superior in a sexual-suicide society in which the state manages reproduction. The women's breasts and womb would lose their uses. The male body would become the physical ideal and lend symbolic authority to the male command of other instruments of power. The technocracy, a dominantly male creation in the first place, would remain in the hands of a male minority.Gilder uses the phrase "Sexual Suicide" as a catchy shorthand for the transfer of reproduction to state control via technology. But this is really Cold-War thinking (not surprising given the publication date). The state no longer has control of technology, private industry does, and the number one use to which reproduction-related technology has been put is the widespread availability of fertility treatments enabling more people to bear children in the way Gilder approves.
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posted by Joey Michaels at 7:18 AM on December 26, 2009 [3 favorites]