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Amaros -> RE: things are changing...and the v-nillas are scared (12/18/2006 8:29:24 PM)
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Sounds to me like the guy can't get laid. The dynamic, up until the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies was based primarily on the economic dominance of men. First you have to understand the historical background.
To begin with, all patrimonial cultures, based on inheritance through the first born male heir, tend to be somewhat misogynic, and demand chastity from women - before DNA testing, there was no way to be assured that your firstborn son was actually yours, unless your mate had been under nonstop scrutiny from pretty much the day she was born to the day she died (usually during childbirth). In certain Muslim cultures, the suspicion of women crosses into outright neurosis, while others go so far as to try to remove any possibility a woman might stray for pleasure, by performing clitorodectomies.
In Western civilization, we developed the dichotomy of the Virgin/Whore - the former the receptacle of all that is good and chaste, the other a demonic seductress. This abstraction carried, and still carries, enormous political weight, while in the practical sense, it was convenient for men to have a virgin to bear and raise the children, and whore on the side for recreation.
The fallout of this, echoing the clitordectomy, is that it was highly suspicious for a woman, a wife at least, to take pleasure in sex at all, i.e., by the same logic, if she takes pleasure in sex, there is no guarantee she'll only take it with her husband, so there was no pressure on men to perform or even consider his wife’s pleasure, quite the opposite: women not only had no souls, which justified treating them like breeding stock, but they were considered incapable of orgasm, and thus one need not feel any remorse for not giving them any - sex is for procreation, etc., etc. Prostitution, meanwhile, continued to mysteriously thrive.
Jumping all the way ahead to the Sixties, the sexual revolution was more or less a direct result of women going to work during the war effort of WWII - they had always worked of course, but generally within the confines of the nuclear and more common extended family of the predominate agrarian social economy that prevailed up until after WWII. In this system, the family was run much like a business - everybody either worked together or everybody starved.
The urban-industrial political economy that had been slowly growing however, operated by a slightly different set of rules, one in which women were almost entirely dependent on men economically, and this was typically enforced through social controls: very difficult for a woman to gain economic independence on her own merit, and social scrutiny demanded obedience to the husband - even if the woman happened to be the dominant person in the dyad, income was mainly dependent on the husband, and if it appeared that he was "weak", the resulting loss of social status might well be reflected in a loss of economic status.
Hence, the urban-industrial political economy spawned the "nag", an ambitious woman with no way to persue her ambition save through her possibly less ambitious husband, alongside the demure and chaste "virginal" wife.
This demographic shift had in truth begun much earlier, following the civil war - with so many men dead and families broken, entire populations uprooted, women were forced to find work outside the home in any capacity they could, in order to keep their children fed - usually as domestics, and they were "kept in their place" - with this small degree of economic independence, did not come social mobility.
Similarly, an almost underground "cult" of feminine sensuality had been slowly gaining ground, probably since the enlightenment, among the bourgeoisie, the Romantic movement of the Eighteenth century was one of the earlier outward manifestations, echoing the romanticism of the Cathari of the Langdu'oc, violently crushed by the Roman Church in an earlier age.
In this century, this cult of sensuality became associated with the progressive movement, which included feminism, so at the same time women gained some measure of economic independence with accompanying status - Rosie the Riveter was a hero, not drudging dyke - and the patriarchal grip loosened - not only had the men returning from WWII experienced a taste of unrestrained sexual freedom when they were sent off to war with smiles on their faces, but they returned to a world where the ratio ran towards an excess of women - at the same time, staring death in the face had left most of them little inclined toward politics, sexual or otherwise, and we got the cocktail culture of the Fifties and Sixties - these people wanted to party.
This is getting pretty long winded, but if you've been paying attention, you'll remember that the big demographic shift here is the entrance of women into the workplace - before WWII, it was a rare thing, and generally only in certain professions: teaching, some secretarial, shopkeeping, domestics, etc. - now, women war making inroads into traditionally male dominated fields - not without resistance or grumbling, but steadily and inexorably nevertheless.
The balance of power has shifted, and it's economic power - but it has only shifted so far really, as to give women some choice where they essentially had none before.
Socially, the pendulum swings back and forth, each swing precipitating a reaction formation in the opposite direction - feminism spawned "The Total Woman", whereupon feminists became radicalized, etc., etc., until you have almost entirely separate cultures in uneasy balance, with so many crossovers and variations it's almost impossible to keep track of them all: religious agrarian traditionalists, secular traditionalists, agrarian agapists, and their urban counterparts, swingers, secular virgins, gays, lesbians, etc., etc. At the same time, feminism itself has swung back and forth between extremes, from a sudden desire to enjoy sex, to being content with a modicum of respect for being mothers, as opposed to domestic drudges and breeding machines, to a total rejection of men, to porn queens, etc, etc., and this is probably what the author is complaining about - just bad timing for him - in five years it’ll all be swinging back the other direction.
The beauty, of course, is that in such a milieu, is that it's all good: there is bound to be something for everybody, the only problem being that there are always those who cannot accept that there are those who perversely refuse to do things their way - and devote their energies to attempts to distort the political-legal system in favor of some imagined ideal of perfect conformity.
Briefly aside, in truth, culture advances through a combination of both conformity and non-conformity, it isn't either/or - non-conformists innovate and advance, while conformists consolidate and stabilize - politicians and businessmen just sit around and figure out how to profit from it and take credit for it.
The irony here, is that these conformists are typically not secular conservatives, but religious conservatives, and the irony is that it's primarily the profit driven capitalism that religious conservatism has sold out to that assures women are going to remain a permanent part of the workforce - which thrives on cheap labor - and thus, no longer subject to the economic extortion that was able to enforce the Virgin/Whore mythology.
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