Romance or Revolt
An attractive girl named Ann Akana with an unattractive disorder finds dating her own sex opens insights into the opposite, and perhaps compassion.
I thought this charming on the surface, but ominous and grim beneath.
It is grim because the ignorance of the whole male and female dynamic described both in the video and in the comments below is not merely comical, it is disastrous.
A civilization where such godforsaken ignorance is the norm is fated to fall.
In her follow up remarks, young Miss Akana apologizes for uttering the cute line saying she expected more kisses, on the grounds that she meant not to imply that consent to sexual contact can be withdrawn at any time.
Further down, in discussing who is expected to pay for a date, and whether a woman’s investment of time and care in adornment and cosmetics equals a man’s investment of picking up the theater tickets and dinner check, several comments express outrage at the unfairness of women.
It would make my head swim if it did not make my heart sink.
If theses comments reflect the consensus of belief of this generation, and I surely think that they do, then only a sad conclusion is possible:
The young used to know about the madness and wonder of romance. Now they know nothing.
Indeed, they know less than nothing, for their minds are not blank. Instead their internal spiritual landscape is fortified like Normandy Beach just before D-Day, with wire and trench, mine and mortar, and all the armaments falsehood that flattery can invent to ensnare the unwary.
In any case, hearing the young lady’s express her surprise about the discoveries about the psychology of the opposite sex, and, more to the point, reading the dunderheads in the comments express confusion or contempt over ideas so obvious and so basic to the human race that one would think even Martians with minimum contract with the human race would know better, is a sad, sad commentary on the spirit of the age.
I know nothing else about this pretty young victim of an objectively disordered sexual attraction. But I know she was cheated, and cheated terribly.
She was cheated by me or those like me, that is, by my profession, the men of letters. The elders. The teachers.
She was cheated by poets and intellectuals, speaker and thinkers, who are the one tasked with carrying the stored wisdom of the ages from the generation before to the generation after.
Her peers among the comments section likewise.
How could everything anyone ever knew about men and women just end up being lost?
How can a whole generation be raised without the slightest notion of why women act the way they do toward men, or why men act the way they do toward women?
It is a sober question, and a sobering one. I think we all know the answer.
The world has two stories to tell about this great mystery.
The new story is a story of revolt. In this story, there is no mystery to explain. The past is a time of darkness and horror, which consists of rapist men victimizing helpless women. The sexual revolution frees one and all to enter into any form of contract for the exchange of copulation rights as “he or she or xe or it” sees fit.
No one has any sexual roles. Instead, one has a “gender” which consists of a set of preferences as to sexual dress and behavior, which each may decide for oneself as one sees fit. On the other hand, same sex attraction is genetically selected by Darwinian evolution to increase fertility, and cannot be opposed or impeded. The male desire for many female partners, including non-consenting ones like the Sabine Women in Plutarch, on the other hand, has no Darwinian reproductive value.
In this story, only fools believe in true love. The sexual appetite is an appetite to be slaked, and the satisfaction is had when the surface appearances are met, and the genitalia stimulated. Sex is the stimulation, not the sex act itself, so any of the fifty genders may indulge.
In this story, no always means no, and consent is the only sacrosanct rule for determining whether the exchange of sexual gratification takes place. All sex is selfish. Love and childrearing play no part in any calculation.
The other story is old. The other story is a love story, where the men seek love by pursuing, and the women seek love by alluring.
In this story, the man takes charge because bold men take charge, and the woman plays coy and modest because that is what fair maidens do, for only the bold deserve the fair.
She arranges obstacles for him, and dallies and flirts with coy and amorous delay, teasing and tempting. She dare not be over-blunt, nor rash and rushing to wed, for she cannot distinguish the frogs from the princes without seeing some sign of princely valor and devotion.
In this story, sometimes a girl is demure, or plays hard to get, but at other times she may be merely toying with his affection. Likewise sometimes a boy is a cad and a flatterer, but sometimes he is truehearted.
Each player in the masquerade goes threw the steps of the mating dance trying to discover which is which.
And sometimes a suitor who sees himself a cad when he thought himself true, or a girl realizes she is a flirt when she thought herself coy, because the emotion of infatuation, and the drive of lust, all too often disguises itself as true love.
So there are times when no means ‘no’ and times when no only means ‘I don’t know’ — and no man knows which times are which, and sometimes even the woman herself does not know.
And, of course, in the love story, the man picks up the check and pays for the show whereas the young lady’s contribution is too adorn herself to look pretty and to be a gay and charming companion.
The exchange is unfair, if by this we mean unequal.
But, by nature, the exchange cannot be equal: she is the one being pursued and persuaded. Her task is to encourage the pursuit by the right sort of guy. His is to pursue and persuade, and to convince himself and her of his devotion, accomplishments, and worth.
The tactics for male and female cannot be the same because the goal for each is different. If he is decent, what he wants is nubile, true and faithful wife. Blame no man if, for him, lust seeks young and fertile girls. By instinct, he seeks markers of youth and health, a curvaceous body able to bear the travail of childrearing.
Likewise, If she is decent, what she wants is a virile, strong and faithful man. Blame no woman if her lust seeks older, established men, one wealthy enough to bear the cost of childrearing.
Nature demands different things from either parent. Hence, not the same things. Hence they cannot be sought in the same way. Hence the wooer and the wooed cannot won the complementary goals using tactics suited to the other.
When a man holds a woman in his arms on the ballroom floor, both dancers cannot lead. They dance as equals only when separated.
While dating, he picks up the check. After the wedding, she becomes wife and mother and homemaker, and she gives all she has to give in life. If he blenches at picking up a check on a date, how is he going to afford to keep a wife?
At one time, many a boy at least knew the stereotyped expectations of the elliptical and indirect reasoning of female psychology.
He might not understand the reason why girls were so illogical, emotional, strange, fickle, and practical, but he knew to expect that.
Likewise, the girl might not understand why the boy was so pigheaded, unemotional, honor-bound, arrogant, incorrigible, and idealistic, but many a girl knew to brace herself for it.
For the record, female illogic is perfectly logical once the female viewpoint is known, and male logic grows grossly superficial and heartless without a female viewpoint to check it.
In truth, both sexes are not so different in their sins and virtues, but the expressions and manifestation thereof differ wildly.
Many of us used to know that. We knew men were men and women were women.
We used to know the world was round, and East was far from West. Now, in a strange reverse of the old wives’ tale about Columbus, the children think the world is flat.
Someone has taken all the experience and hard-earned lore of the ages, half cynicism and half rose-colored glasses, which used to be carried in jokes, ribaldry, love songs, novels, and plays and heart-to-heart conversations with parents or older peers, telling the young about the thrills and danger, the deceptions and sudden revelations, the whole wild gamble of the heart known as the mating dance, and flushed it all down the memory hole.
I think we know which group in life is the culprit.
Who interprets all specialization of labor or traditional assignment of roles and responsibilities as a sinister conspiracy to bewitch and oppress the weak? Who regards women as ever in the weaker position? Who sees everything in life, including affairs of the heart, through the lens of a heartless Darwinian struggle between oppressor and oppressed?
Who pretends that liberty is found by leveling hedgerows, cutting the brake lines, severing the safety belts, smashing traffic lights and uprooting road signs, and in a word, abandoning common sense and common decency?
What sort of freedom is it to replace self-control with chaos?
Yes, it is now legal to speed down the highway and run red lights in the wrong lane, so all are “free” in that respect. It is the freedom of mere chaos: the freedom of a free for all.
But no one is free to walk away from the resulting wreckage of broken hearts and broken homes unscathed, or to have friends and family untouched by the predicted and predictable horrors of high rates of perversion, infidelity, abortion, abandonment, divorce, child abuse which flow from unchaining all sexual appetites, wholesome or grotesque.
Nor one is free to breathe the clear moral atmosphere of a society that honors virginity, marriage, motherhood, childhood, romance, chivalry, modesty, honesty, fidelity, because no such place exists, not in any land modernism rules.
The sexual revolution encourages unbridled lust, scoffs at self control, incentivizes vanity in women, rewards sexual predation in men and makes the opportunities of finding unwary, unchaperoned victims easier; at the same time it publicizes and glamorizes making false rape claims, and blurs the meaning of the so called “consent” that allegedly allows all things and excuses all things.
The results are predictable: a rise in rape and assault hidden beneath the smokescreen and clamor of false rape claims.
The sexual revolution legalizes contraception, which severs the link of cause and effect between sexual stimulus and sexual reproduction. Prenatal infanticide is protected as a sacred right of mothers, while the fatherly role of caring for his own is reduced to child care payments without child visitation rights.
The results are predictable: a pile of unborn corpses outnumbering the Holocaust and the Holodomor.
The story of revolt has won the day, so entirely that few even see they were robbed of anything, or that things had ever differed.
I recall, not long ago, being solemnly told by a glassy eyed true believer that all Presidents were serial adulterers like Bill Clinton, if not rapists. Yes, comrade. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
The disadvantage of the story of revolt is that is it shallow, hence false. And one falsehood leads to another: in swift steps, and in living memory, the nation lurched from inventing allegedly constitutional rights to contraception, no-fault divorce, to normalizing pornography and perversion, to legalizing, then celebrating sodomy, to redefining the sacrament of marriage into a satanic parody of itself, to punishing those who refused to aid and abet abomination at law, to scorning and silencing those who said sexual orientation was not genetic, and then adding eunuchs in drag to deviations to be lauded, which led to abolishing the two sexes altogether, and then to scorning and silencing those who said sexual orientation was not arbitrary, able to be changed at will. Freedoms of speech and association were trampled during this mad rush, and exist now only for the privileged.
In time, the story of revolt will destroy itself, and fall like the Berlin Wall. But the Evil Empire of Lies is deeply rooted and strongly walled, and its downfall, albeit inevitable, will not be effortless nor swift.
One the other hand, the fact that the story of revolt is is false and shallow is also its greatest strength.
Several of the deadly sins, including pride and lust, cajole even upright hearts to welcome the story, false though it is. Because it surely explains the surface appearance in the most uninsightful and trivial way possible: in times past, married men were not allowed to divorce their wives nor commit sodomy with boys, nor women free to have sex without risk of getting pregnant, as men are free. These restrictions were bad because penis bad, vagina good.
Any philosophy that can be summed in four words is shallow.
Now, all people are equal, except some are more equal than others, particularly when the mother of a man’s daughter decides to kill her in the womb. The law does not require he even be informed: but if the mother carries the daughter to term, the law requires the father be jailed for failing to support her, even if robbed of the right to raise her.
So the story of revolt is simple. It appeals to the simple minded. Sex is an appetite, so the story runs, and satisfaction is found in slaking it. Any barrier to slaking it must be cast away.
The story conveniently does not mention the other things these practices cast to the winds: prudence, modesty, fidelity, honesty, law, human decency and humanity.
The one great advantage of the story of romance is that it is true. Men and women will be allured to act as nature and prudence decree, whether they know it or not. Even a vile harridan who boasts that women need men no more than a fish need bicycles ends up seeking wedlock.
Not just the best sexual experience imaginable is found at the climax of the traditional path, but also companionship, love and joy. The bridegroom needs no humiliating balloon to wear on his male member while enjoying the loveplay, and the bride need not pollute the delicate hormonal and neurochemical environment inside her body seeking artificial sterility.
And following the story of romance may indeed lead to that one final and crowning thing without which happiness in life is impossible: that one thing no one following the selfish story of revolt can ever find, because he never seeks: gratitude.
Alas, the greatest drawback to the story of romance is that it is true. Truth is not a wine the human soul can drink undiluted.
In the long term, truth prevails, if not here, then hereafter. But in the short term? True speech is called hate speech. No one really believes it, but everyone hears honesty mislabeled as ignorance, rudeness, or malice.
Sin darkens the eye, so that we sinners not only crave darkness, but we blink and blench at the sun, and curse it for the pain it causes.
Another drawback of truth is that it is not shallow. The shallow water runs clear. Shallow ideas are easiest for the gullible to gulp down. Truth rises up from a profound deep where words fail, and we are left groping, and speaking in riddles.
In the Catholic practice, at Mass we perform an act of ritual cannibalism where we eat God and drink His blood under the appearances of bread and wine.
While this amuses fools who pretend we Catholics would faint with shock to discover that we are Catholic and that we actually believe the Catholic things we shout from steeples, the fool is himself the butt of the joke.
What the fool does not realize is that while earthly bread, when consumed, is broken down and ceases to be what it is, become part of the body of whoever eats it, in the case of the bread of heaven, it is we who become part of the Body of Christ. All is backward.
The worshiper, in this case, by eating, does not consume the Holy One he eats but is consumed by Him.
The eater is broken when he breaks the bread. This does not consume his life as an ort of earthly bread is consumed, but grants him a greater life, and in more abundance.
Likewise, here, in this other and more worldly form of worship and love, the result is a paradox. All is backward.
In love, he is the hunter, she the prey. What the fool does not realize is that the suitor, in this case, when his prey is found, she catches him, not he her.
During the courtship, she receives his adoration. He bears the costs. But if successful, in marriage, she sacrifices even her family name for his, and suffers the dangerous pangs of childbirth, while he, as the leader and master of the household, becomes as the lowest servant and strongest protector. She nurses the children and he serves and protects.
The fool regards the primacy of the bridegroom in wedlock to be oppression and tyranny. So it is when selfishness smothers love, and marriage vows fail. This disaster happens perhaps as often as matrimony for the bride is mere gold-digging or status-seeking.
In truth the primacy of the bridegroom is meant to be parallel to the primacy of Christ, who climbs onto the deadly cross for those He loves, a king who serves and saves.
Love turns service into mastery, and mastery into service.
No matter what the fools say, women, by and large, do not like weak men. Weak men drive women crazy. And crazy women make men weak.
Among pagans and barbarians and all who calculate in the short term, greater strength means greater motive, means, and opportunity to victimize the helpless. So all those who see the world in these terms act when they have power.
For those who calculate with an eye to eternity, all is backward. Greater strength means stronger love. Stronger love means shouldering heavier duties and answering higher callings.
And that is one truth which applies to both sexes and to all saints.
We shall be kings and queens in heaven, and wear crowns of glory, so it behooves us now, both in the romantic arena and among struggles and gambles of lesser risk and import, to behave as boldly and nobly as any royalty from fairy tales.
We dwell on Earth as if on the roof and upper floors of hell, and as if below the lowest basement of heaven. It is no fairy tail. All stories in time end sadly. Joy is safe only in the foreverness of happily ever after.
But for this reason we are called to bring the elusive joys of fairyland to earth, plant them in this corrupted soil, and tend and water them to let them take root.
Romance and the surrender to ecstasy is the closest glimpse and promise was have on earth of the ecstasies of heaven.
Elevating sex above the things toward which sex is ordered merely demeans sex. Perhaps you have heard that fewer men are seeking sexual partners these days, and fewer women dream of marriage. Well, who would willingly enter the sportscar with disabled brakes on roads whose stoplights flash false colors?
The fool bases all his thoughts about sex on appetite and lust. Lust is the disordered desire for sexual pleasure when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.
The fool thinks talk of decency and chastity is misdirection meant to rob him of all the infinite carnal pleasures of rampant lust unchained, when, in fact, the forbidden fruit of the various perverse and sterile sexual practices are forbidden precisely because they are dead-ends, or even deadly.
Sexual orientation is not like preferring pie to cake, a mere matter of private taste. Sex is innately ordered toward reproduction, and homosex is innately ordered toward the opposite. The marriage bed is ordered toward unity, and fornication is innately ordered toward the opposite.
Pornography is the attempt to excite lust without love, that is, it is meant to disorder the appetites, undermine prudence, to substitute a slavish addiction to emotion for the self mastery of a man of character. Adultery is fornication combined with treachery. Divorce is legalized treachery. Contraception is what makes all this feasible.
So in all cases of what the fool regards as oppression and Puritanism.
We are asked to order and rule our most potent of appetites and tame the wild, beautiful purple winged god named Eros.
This is not prudery. It is prudence.
When he overthrows the traditional marriage and sexual roles, the fool thinks he is breaking the bars of a jail cell. He is breaking a dam.
The paradox of love was never easy to understand, even when it was understood. It is what theologians call a mystery, thing itself never understood, a light too bright to look upon. But a mystery in this sense of the word is what brings clarity. It is that by whose light all other things can be understood.
How much harder is the mystery to understand when the men of letters, the teachers and song writers never actually tell the young what love is?
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.
