The Dignity of Degradation
This is a revision of a column from 2011, updated to the current decade.
At one time this link from from the ironically named Hookingupsmart.com led to an article entitled “Why Do Feminists Find Abstinence Intolerable.” The original seems to be missing, but here is a quote:
Rachel Kramer Bussel, a sex writer and leader in the sex-positive movement, believes that casual sex is “under attack”:
“There’s a world of difference between being branded a sex object and choosing to be one…I may like to get spanked until I scream, but I still deserve to be treated as an intelligent human being… Feminists are just like any other women, and it’d be a shame for us to hold back in a misguided attempt to live up to the legacies of Susan B. Anthony and Gloria Steinem.”
The article goes on to list other “sex positive” feminist kinks that the postrational postmodern postchristian ladies demand be treated as liberating choices for women: Rape fantasies, BDSM, Swinging, Polyamory, Fisting, Bukkake, Prostitution and all forms of Porn. (It deeply saddens me that the internet has allowed me to know what all these terms mean, who had no such Hollywoodian knowledge in my youth.)
The article is from 2011. In 2015, social media is currently showing boasts by an internet harlot that she has coupled with a record breaking number of men in record time, outperforming even Empress Messalina at her most depraved.
Sex-positivity is newspeak for harlotry. We live in an era when prostitution, adultery, sluttish behavior is lauded, and chastity condemned. Ironically, this is done in the name of freedom.
The modern notion of freedom is an assertion of nothingness. Freedom is the lack of impediment to the willpower.
The modern notion is that we, as absolute and godlike sovereigns of our own souls, we alone have the right to define true and false, good and bad, right and wrong, and that whatever we call right in our own eyes is right. The ancient notion of freedom was that a creature is free the more and more he grows into his own nature: a man cannot be happy living as a dog, nor a saint living as a sinner. The ancient notion held that addicting yourself to vice decreased rather than increased your freedom, even if the addiction were freely chosen.
The ancient notion of freedom was an assertion of a positive good. Freedom is a lack of impediment to one’s own true nature and the lack of impediment to one’s right reason.
By modern thinking, a drunk whose life spins out of control into a wreck because he cannot stop drinking is “free” as long as no one is holding a gun to his head. To ancient thinking, a drunk who cannot stop drinking is not free, but is a slave to his vice, and cannot be free until he is set free by the truth.
To the ancient, holding a bottle to your lips was much the same as holding a gun to your head, if you could not put the bottle down.
But modern thinking washes its hands of such questions, and says “What is truth?” and smiles and shrugs.
The sex-positive movement, if like other movements in modern thought, is being drawn by a law of nature into a position of paradox: by seeking the good of liberty and equality for women, they get instead the degradation of women to the status of unpaid whores, and pervert whores at that.
Whatever is good and pure and noble is driven off: what is degrading and filthy and horrid (do I need to explain what bukkake is?) is set up in its place.
And, like a law of economics, the bad drives out the good. A normal and natural bit of adultery or harlotry as between two consenting adults of opposite sexes copulating no longer stimulates nor titillates.
Either the consent must be bent (as in BDSM) or the adulthood (as in pederasty) or the opposition (as in homosexuality) or the copulation (as in any number of fetishes where the penis wanders into some other orifice).
All too soon, the sight of a naked yet healthy young lady no longer stimulates the sexual response, unless she has artificial inflatable breasts, or tattoos, or wears fetish gear, or whathaveyou. The normal becomes despised; the despicable becomes the norm.
The law of nature involved is the law that ideas have consequences. The human soul, or, if you prefer, human psychology, operates by certain rules that can be for a time evaded, but cannot be for long escaped.
One of those rules is that one cannot elevate a lesser good, like equality, above a greater good, like virtue, without creating a logical paradox. Logical paradoxes do not exist in reality, only in thoughts and words, so that loyalty to such a paradox creates a breach or break between thought and reality: one departs from reality and enters cloudcuckooland, the land beyond the looking glass.
Nor can the breach exist in thought only, but must also be reflected and expressed in appetites and passions. Devotion to an unreal philosophy produces a craving for unreality in life, and a fear of truth, and a hatred of logic, and, at the same time, a pride in one’s own superiority of mind and soul, since one finds oneself apart from the sane majority.
Nor can the breach exist in the passions only, but must be reflected and expressed on one’s morals. A devotion to untruth leads eventually to a devotion to immorality. Morally sane behavior begins to look offensive, even repugnant: and the glamor of evil grows in its allure.
These lesser goods are what we call idols. They are never perfectly evil at first. Even Moloch and Ashtart were a rain god and a fertility goddess, whose offices were to the bring the rain and bless the crops. Only in civilized and overcivilized times, after the law of corruption had time to operate, did these become patrons of child sacrifice and temple prostitution.
Idolatry is bad not only because it is illogical, but also because it is harmful to the human soul: a distortion in the reason sooner or later expresses itself as a distortion in the morals. Anything can be turned into an idol, even a noble cause like that seeking equality for women.
What makes it an idol is not whether the idea, in isolation, is good or bad. What makes it an idol is elevating a good idea to the position of being the sole and sovereign idea of one’s whole life and philosophy: mistaking a lesser good for the Sum of All Good, the summum bonum. Elevating a lesser from its subordinate position is what causes the logical paradox, and the paradox is what causes the devotion to unreality, which causes the associated neurotic devotion to immorality.
No doubt at this point you are asking, dear reader, whether I think feminists should urge their buxom yet nubile and svelte smoldering-eyed daughters into careers as porn stars, or, better yet, enslaved temple prostitutes. All I can say is that there are plenty of men willing and eager to exploit your weaknesses, sexual and otherwise, but that the Creator that designed you designed you for much better things.
Feminists, you were told that the traditional morality was a trap, meant to force you into being chaste and doing housework, and that by working outside the home, you would be free. The freedom you sought by rejecting traditional morality, as is the way of such things, is also a trap: so while you are free to work outside the home, move in with a live-in lover, who no doubt, if he is a gentleman, is willing to spank you until you scream, you are still probably going to end up doing the housework anyway, because he is not going to clean, and he is not going to put a ring on your finger, and your work outside the house gives you the freedom to loan your live-in boyfriend money, because he no longer acts the part of a man and supports his wife.
And, if statistics are any guide, he is likely to beat your children that you had from a previous alliance, and, to keep you away from other men like himself, to beat you, too.
This era promised you freedom, but it disarmed you. Look around you. Look at the culture that normalizes porn and lauds abortion as a sacred right. This culture hates virginity, it hates motherhood, it hates marriage, and it is not that friendly to old ladies.
It hates everything about you, ladies, everything feminine, everything maternal. The only time the modern culture praises femininity is when it sees feminine traits in menfolk. The only form of the feminine principle this culture admires is the adulteress.
Oh, to be sure, there are men who do not fit this description, but they are men who disobey rather than obey the common wisdom and the common attitude spread by our day and age.
This era is not friendly to you, my ladies. If you want to avoid that same pagan world view and mind set that created the cult of temple prostitution, you must seek out the Church that ended paganism.
Did I say pagan? My mistake. The chastity and wisdom of Athena is absent; the virginity of Artemis is despised; the dignity of Hera, mother of gods and men, is gone; and Hestia, goddess of hearth and home, weeps. All those ancient fertility goddesses, what would they make of the sterility of contraception and abortion?
We are far, far below the standards set by the pagans.
So did Susan B Anthony and Gloria Steinem work and struggle and devote themselves to your cause, O feminists, so that Rachel Kramer Bussel could be spanked until she screams, and then demand dignity afterward? What that really what the suffragettes fought to achieve?
A reader, Nate Winchester, suggested this illustration to illustrate the point. I think it captures the paradox, or, to be blunt, the moral insanity, of the modern age quite adroitly:
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.
