Last Crusade 38: Know Your Enemy
Nothing is less new than the news.
Have you ever wondered why the modern unmarried American woman, who is the most protected, privileged and pampered female ever to be found anywhere in time and space, continually complains about an imaginary Patriarchy, about the male gaze, and about the rape culture in America, but never about any other place, such as the Middle East, where such things exist, and are dangers rather than trivial annoyances?
It seems an insanity, but there is a twisted logic to it. What they are complaining about it not wholly imaginary, and the pain is real.
To trace down the clue, let us look at the most obvious example, and see where the thread leads. Let us look to the news.
If you, dear reader, are perusing the headlines blaring from the newspapers at this same hour when I write, or if, by some unlikely chance, these words are preserved for the next generation, and this paragraph is being scanned by eyes as yet unborn, the news of that distant day and year in this respect will be one and the same as those of this very hour:
Somewhere, a famous and powerful man is abusing his position of authority to cajole, compel, and coerce a lovely young woman into bestowing on him the favors and joys which rightly belong only to the marriage bed. If, in case that future generation has forgotten the marriage bed, I am speaking of sexual pleasures.
Hollywood in your far future day, O reader from years to come, may have been razed to the ground by the Muslims or Feminists, or Communists, or some other manifestation of the Big Brother Anti-Sex League, but if you still have an entertainment industry which allows actresses to be actresses, then you still have a place that rewards pretty young women for being young and pretty.
No matter how many years pass between now and generations to come, certain things remain the same. Human nature, for good and ill, remains the same.
In that future time, as now, men like alluring young women to sing and dance and perform, and will pay for the privilege. Alluring young women will always be found who are willing and eager to use their allure to win fame and fortune, and entertain their loving fans. And any man in a position of power to aid or undermine an actress’s career is someone on whom that actress will be tempted to use that allure. And that man will be tempted to exploit her willingness. She will flirt; he will eye her with lust in his heart. From this playful toying with fire to the degradation of the casting couch is a small step.
The temptations are immense, but we never hear about casting couches for financial consultants or engineers. This is because no one hires them for their looks. Actors seek the admiration and applause of an audience. They seek love.
Hence the entertainment industry is one that by its nature attracts people, male and female both, who are prone to both sides of this temptation. It is not like banking or bridge building, where success and failure rests on cold facts only. Audiences can be lured toward or chased away from shows and stars by their glamor or lack of it. And glamor is an old word for elfish magic: illusion, deception, fakery. But it also means wonder.
Rare is the young woman not tempted to be glamorous. Rarer still is the young women immune to the aphrodisiac of masculine power and dominion. Even more rare is the powerful and wealthy man unwilling to use his power and wealth to overawe glamorous young women and have his way with them. This is the one crime for which every man has a motive.
Now, suppose the young actress stands on her principles, slaps the man in the face, and walks away. Her career is over, no one will believe her. The press, which is always (no matter what they might claim) always, I say, the instrument of those in power, controls the megaphone of public opinion, and she will universally be regarded as either a liar or a gold digger or slut or all this and worse. Her friends in the field will leave her. She will be shunned and ostracized as effectively as anything the Puritans in Massachusetts could do to a woman bearing a scarlet letter.
Suppose, on the other hand, reluctantly or not, she caves in. Wealth and fame will be showered upon her, and hush money, to whatever degree he can command. Powerful men cannot guarantee fame, but they can certainly raise the odds, and if the powerful man is very powerful, other forms of reward, party invitations, favorable reviews, are showered on her.
Of persons, females are less likely than males to be confrontational and willing to risk everything on principle, and young less likely than old, and we in the entertainment field are, alas, far less likely than nearly any other profession.
There are exceptions. There are women who still slap faces and walk away from fame and fortune and all their lifelong dreams. You have never heard of them, because the press reports no rumor of women who buck this system, except, perhaps, to libel them.
While the temptations are more severe for actresses than for any other career, the temptations exist elsewhere. I submit that they are less severe in any field where the results of performance and the reward of performance can be more objectively measured. The more subjective the judgment of the man in power, the more arbitrary he can and must be, and hence the more open to the temptation to abuse his power in return for sexual favors.
Well, in the broadcast news industry, a pretty face and an ability to read from a teleprompter is really all a female news anchor needs.
In any scholarly field where the old disciplines of rigor, logic, reality do not stand arbiter, and no knowledge of past writings is required, the reward of grades, promotions, and success depend entirely on the arbitrary.
In a political system where the laws and regulations extend to all areas of life, and no objective nor rational principles constrain them, the reward of government contracts, of lax enforcement for one’s friends, rigorous enforcement for one’s foes, and all the utterly arbitrary judgment calls made by everything from planning and zoning to the subjective morass of environmental regulation, everything is in the hands of powerful men.
Please note that these are also the fields where sexual scandals are widespread, nay, endemic: in the press, in academia, and in politics. It is also the three areas where the enemy of Christian ideals and American dreams has overwhelming power. This is not coincidence.
Certain objections here should be addressed. What about the scandal of homosexual priests diddling with young boys? What about situations where women are in a position of power and demand sexual favor from handsome young men? What about pederasty, and the abuse of power by homosexuals and heterosexual alike to molest children? Those situations are either rare, imaginary, or fit into this exact same mold of the powerful abusing the helpless.
A sexual scandal involving a priest, no matter how rare, will be trumpeted by the press as commonplace, and by a teacher will be suppressed, even though teachers a far more commonly guilty of this crime.
Despite whatever lies you may have been taught about men and women, their psychology is innately different, and the vast majority are sexually attracted by different cues. The number of men attracted to helpless, young, beautiful women is very high; whereas helplessness is a turn off for women, who rarely admire men younger or shorter or less well educated than they. The dumb blonde is a stereotype for a reason, and so is the trophy wife, the gold digger, and the sugar daddy. These roles with the sexes reversed is rare enough that no common slang terms for them exist. (Thanks to feminism, a term for older women preying on young men is gaining currency. A dubious feather to wear in one’s cap, to be sure.)
Children are the most helpless of all, and, at the moment, being against the sexual abuse of children is the sole remaining sliver of traditional morality that the Left has not yet decreed to be a hate crime. However, if this column is being read in generations to come, your years have seen all those who oppose consensual sex between children and adults accused of phobia, and publicly pilloried as motivated solely by hate, for that is precisely what happened to those who oppose consensual sexual acts between persons of the same sex, despite that this is an illogical contradiction in terms.
It is to be noted that the word “heterosexual” did not enter the language in any form until the 1920’s, and that it did not come into common use until the 1960’s, when the sexual revolution required there to be a special term to distinguish sex from something that was mocking sex in a perverse way. Indeed, an entire vocabulary of false to facts terms with connotations unrelated to reality had to be invented in order for the sexual revolutionaries to be able to articulate their message without the self-contradictions being glaring.
But all this to one side. Please notice that the areas most easily divorced from reality are the very ones where sexual predation on women are most likely, as the temptations are greatest, and the crime the easiest to hide. Those areas are Hollywood, Academia, Townhall, and the Press. The centers of power where the Left, until recently were either utterly unchallenged, or challenged only as much as the Washington Generals challenge the Harlem Globetrotters, that is, as a matter of theater.
Now, again, imagine you are the young woman who has been tempted and exploited in precisely this way, and subjected to threats against livelihood or life itself. Obviously going public involves the kind of martyrdom no one save a fervent monotheist has the tenacity and courage to withstand. This means our poor Leftwing liberal young lady is left with no means to find courage in adversity.
Indeed, if she went to college instead of getting married, she also has no man in her life to whom to turn to beat the stuffing out of the masher. And if she went to a modern college instead of getting real education, or reading any of those old books that talk about things like suffering and virtue, her head is filled with cotton candy, and any common sense was educated right out of her brain. If she studied gender studies, not only does she no longer know what the word gender means, she has lost between ten and fifteen points of IQ on average. She was taught to be a victim.
Who or what in the modern world can aid her in her hour of distress? All the songs and shows about strong women are a stupid joke, since they preach and teach that one hundred pound waifs should resort to physical violence to karate chop her way out of the arms of a man twice and thrice her weight class, and this is far more likely to turn a rapist on, and get his blood pumping, than to rescue the woman from harm. Besides, the whole point of the scenario is that the Lothario has lured the young women into privacy with the lure of helping her career.
Women do not typically daydream about slashing the throats of curs who offend them, nor do many of them carry blades in their belt buckles and swordcanes eager for the excuse to use them. Far more likely, a woman caught by a Bill Clinton will be thinking of how to extricate herself from his groping hands without offending him. Women want to be friends after, or make amends. It is a mystery of female psychology.
So: nothing in the modern world, no boy raised on Ritalin and feminist propaganda, no one stupefied by modern education, no voice in the public square, nobody and nothing will aid her. And she has been taught always, in every situation, to blame others for her own shortcomings, and always to be the victim.
I said young females are unlikely to stand on principle, but young Leftist females have no principles on which to stand. So she will be victimized. She will tell herself perhaps that it was consensual, but this is an irrelevant point. The hate that will enter her heart at being demeaned, whether she consented to be demeaned or not, enters and does not leave.
What can she do? To complain after the fact will be taken as evidence of her guilt, not his, and the longer she waits, the less likely she is of anyone at all giving her the benefit of the doubt. A man who can bribe every major newsreporter and editor in his field, and afford hosts of lawyers and private eyes, can dig up whatever he needs to dig up on you, and all the newspapers will use their every trick to blacken your name.
No one who has not been the subject of a newspaper libel will believe how effective it is. In my case, there are people who have never met me, who have never read a word of anything, fiction or nonfiction that I wrote, who are convinced that I am a neonazi woman-hating homophobe solely because a well placed publisher in New York, annoyed at my meddling with the Hugo Awards, picked up the phone and told a dozen newspapers to blacken my name, which they did immediately.
Do not underestimate the power of the press. Even allegedly skeptical readers who know that newspapers routinely lie on any matter the reader might know anything about, will automatically extend goodwill to the news on a matter new to them. They know the newspaper, and they do not know me.
And I am not even someone who is beholden to one New York publisher for my daily bread, nor am I young; but I do carry a swordcane and daydream rather bloodthirsty daydreams I sometimes repent and confess in confession. I do not want to be friends or make amends with those whose slight my honor, and I most certainly do not think about how not to extricate myself without offending them. I am not a girl.
So imagine someone who is young, female, agnostic ergo craven, her brain drained by modern education, made into an almost perfectly helpless victim by the whole apparatus of the sexual revolution and the empty-headed and black-hearted dreck and dreary nonsense which passes for modern worldview. She carries no blade, and she would not stab the man through the heart for his untoward sexual advances even if she did.
There is nothing of the high heroic heart of a Spartan maiden left in the woman formed by modern education. She has been taught it is wrong to protect her chastity.
So?
So what can she do?
What else? She blames someone who does NOT have the power to undo her life and livelihood.
She picks her target based on lack of power and attacks only them. She blames her political enemies. She blames the Church. She blames the rape culture. She blames the college campuses and the glass ceiling and microaggressions and rocket scientists who wear racy shirts.
She blames the patriarchy.
It seems insane, but, as I said, there is a twisted logic to it. You see, she has been victimized by a patriarchal system. She has indeed. Hollywood is now, and for many a year has been, nothing but a system of polygamy, a group of pimps who force the actress into harlotry, if not sexual slavery. She is passed around from man to man.
If you think I exaggerate, look into the details of the death of Marylin Monroe, and her relations with the Kennedy boys.
Any woman in any of the fields mentioned above, where arbitrary power is widespread, and masculine lust is unchecked by old fashioned notions overthrown during the sexual revolution, notions like honor and honesty which are mocked by curs these days, either has had or knows someone who has had a similar experience. Perhaps it was more, perhaps less, but it was a sexual abuse of which she dare say nothing directly.
And she cannot come to grips with the real problem. Reality is not in fashion these days. Virtue is not in fashion. The idea that her young man should have followed the young actress into her private meeting in a producer’s hotel room and punched the loathsome cad smartly in the nose, and dragged her away over her protests is an idea held up to scorn these days.
And yet the only way to deter cads is to encourage men to be men. Being a man is hard work, because one must have self control, and resist a wide number of impulses Mother Nature, not to mention Uncle Screwtape, put into every red blooded youth.
It is much easier to live and let live, to make no fuss, and to let the women whore around if she wants. It is the men, not the women, who get the most benefit and the least heartache out of a society that is a long-running orgy, playboy mansion party, and sexual war of all against all. Much easier.
What else can the poor young woman do than blame someone else, anyone else? She cannot call her exploiter a cad and a masher because these words refer to an honor code that respect chastity, and she hates chastity and scorns it. She cannot even call him a rapist unless she did not consent, and she might not be sure, even in her own mind, if she did or not. She did want the part, after all. She did flirt with him, and she said nothing after.
This was all according to the code of sexual conduct she has been taught.
In that same way she cannot blame the real man who really victimized her, she cannot blame the stupid code of conduct she has been taught, because that code also justifies her in all her sins and weaknesses. She would have to overturn her whole life, re-examine her every assumption, and admit to herself that she and her whole world, everyone and everything she admires, is a silly and steaming heap of hogwash and horsepucky. And that she will never do, lest she repent, and be saved.
She has been taught that consent, just consent, and nothing else, is the sole measure of whether sex is licit or illicit. Whatever is without consent is rape, even if she consented at the time. Whatever is with consent is legitimate, even if she is not married to the man she is servicing sexually. But the whole point of luring and tempting a young girl with offers she lacks the strength of will to resist is to obviate her consent.
You see, if you live in a society where consent is the sole measure of right and wrong in matters of sex, then consent also does not matter. Only power matters. Power can compel consent. Power can bring pressure to bear. Power can hold money, fame, friendship, happiness, and all the good things this world can off over the young girl’s empty head, and threaten to crush her. And if, since she wondered alone into the lair of the wolf in any case, she did not exactly consent at the time, it does not matter.
It does not matter because in a world where nothing but consent matters, only power matters. Bill Clinton can never be a rapist in that world. He has the power to give women an excuse to commit aborticide, and kill their babies in the womb. The sacrifice of the life and reputation and wellbeing of a single female victim to his animalistic lusts means nothing compared to that. He has power. She has none. His own wife can command the national television stations to carry statements slandering her.
And blaming all men, or blaming Trump, or blaming the Church, or blaming the hypocrisy of traditional notions of marriage, is the same as blaming everyone, which is the same as blaming no one. Having every sob sister claim she was also molested or raped when all that happened was sex out of wedlock followed by a sense of regret merely provides cover for the wolf. It does not kill the wolf. If anything, crying “wolf” too often merely encourages the real wolves who overhear the cries into thinking that their crimes are normal. Meanwhile, the real rape victims hear the crimes they suffered turned into trivial political talking points.
No one chirruping “Me, too!” is doing any of the ladies involved in this scandal anything but harm. Shut up. You are crying wolf where there is no wolf, blaming an imaginary patriarchy instead of a real system of female oppression housed in the Democrat Party, and seated in the Leftwing strongholds in Hollywood, Academia, Townhall, and the Press.
The real enemy is the one who convinced you, and convinced your mothers, to embrace the so called sexual revolution. The enemy convinced you that consent is the sum total and sole yardstick of what is allowed and not allowed, not just in sexual matters, but in life.
But that same enemy took away from you the mental, moral and spiritual tools and concepts you need to tell you when consent is called for, and should be granted, versus when it is not called for, and withheld. The enemy told you that there is no such thing as objective morality: all things are allowed to those powerful enough to work their will.
You gave up God, and the rule of right over might, for the Enemy, who told you might makes right. He told you your eyes would be opened, and that you would know good and evil like unto a god.
He lied. You are blind.
Will this scandal open your eyes? None of the past ones did.
And those of you who have resisted the sexual revolution and its lies, or who even now are beginning to question the layered system of uproarious falsehoods on which it is built, if you have wondered why feminists and modern young women in general are so crazy, let pity replace condemnation.
The evil fantasy world in which they live is actually the world in which they live.
This is how their fellow Leftists treat them. The division of the world into powerful exploiters and weak victims, a world without heroines able to slap a cad, a world without men willing to punch or knife a cad, a world with all cads and no men, that is the world of the Left.
She merely cannot say who the oppressor is. She cannot name the disease. So she blames the doctor. She cannot name the arsonist. She blames the fireman.
Ignore anything coming out her mouth as nonsense. Let her be silent. But treat the wound she bears as real and as serious. If you are in the Last Crusade, your mission is to save the damsel, not to condemn her, even when the damsel is a termagant.
Did you think this business would be easy?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
