Cads and Dads

Please realize that, no matter what the abstract argument might be, my argument will always begin from the viewpoint of that experience. I also used to work for the newspaper, covering the crime beat. Even if you law abiding people can meddle with the most powerful forces in the human psyche, the sex drive, and play with matches and not get burnt, the strata of poorer humanity that comes to public attention only in the police gazette cannot. Looking back on my youthful indiscretions, I find that I cannot. You no doubt may be excused from obedience to law commanding wisdom in the sexual arena because of your superior brains and goodness — but I and mine cannot.

From an economic point of view, the burden of misjudgments in the sexual arena just so happen not to fall on those responsible for the misjudgment, which, most often, is the man. In the case of an unwanted pregnancy, the burden falls on the unborn child, who is either killed, or given away, or raised by a teenager, or raised by a single Mom. Economists call this a negative externality, not unlike a riparian owner who enjoys fresh water and dumps his pollution on the downstream user. Even in a libertarian commonwealth, logic suggests that the burden of the misjudgment must be placed on the party whose responsibility it is. Cads are responsible for raising their kids. The only sure way to tie the responsibility to the act is to put the act offlimits to those not willing to vow the responsibility. We might claim that women bear an equal part of the responsibility, but even so they do not share the risk of pregnancy with the male, so the risk-responsibility ratio is skewed.

Perhaps you know a better quality of people than I do: all I can report is that your cheerful expectation that every-dick-for-himself dog-eat-bitch sexual anarchy will be beneficial to women and aid in their independence has proved horribly, horribly false when I consider the women I know personally, and their children.

Addendum:

Just to put this into perspective: here is the modern picture of equality and dignity for women. I did not go out of my way to find anything particularly shocking–this is what passes for the norm these days. You’ve come a long way, baby:

A long way down. I note the braless wet nipple shot at 30, the pantomime act of copulation at 1.05, the breast wiggle at 1.25, and the pouring of the wine down the breasts at 2.15. All very artistically done, and any warmblooded male seeing images this no doubt has the natural caveman urge to club his rivals to death and carry off the  woman Sabine-women style. It is a Roman part of human nature, if not Romantic.

It also inevitably leads to what can only be called erotic gluttony. That is, the young males inundated with hypersexualized images of nymphs as their normal cultural background noise have only two possible reactions: they grow inured to it, whereupon normal women with normal sized breasts and normal tastes in copulation no longer rouse the libido; or the opposite, they get stimulated by it, whereupon they learn to look upon women as a commodity or a possession. There is no mystery to the fairer sex, and no respect.  I suggest that it is not just unlikely, it is impossible, to respect women if your image of them is like unto the nubile and dank dancer in this video.

I would ask my male viewers how many, looking upon the young lady in the vid, wondered about her hopes and fears and smiles and tears, the problems she faces in her family life, job, spiritual life, as if she were the sister of some friend of yours, or the daughter of someone you respect — how many, in other words, looked at the wiggling softcore nymph that passes for family entertainment these days, and saw a human being?

Nymphs are mythical beings.  Does a boy raised in the Internet age see more nymphs or more human women?

Freedom and respect? If you say so. But we have now raised a generation of young men who have  never known a world where it was considered wrong to portray women as Playboy bunnies, Baywatch models, Hooters girls, Palmer girls: they are saturated with such images continually, and, thanks to the Internet, ubiquitously.

Second Addendum:

Another reference point to allow us a clear view of the current culture and of what is considered normal in the current culture, please note that Mr. Woody Allen, famous both for his movies and for the seduction of the underage adopted daughter of his common-law wife and/or live-in girlfriend, has publicly voiced support and sympathy for the plight of Roman Polansky, famous for his movies and for the rape and sodomy of an underaged and drugged teen, and for fleeing the country to escape prosecution.  The aura of sinister creepiness that surrounds these two old pederasts, when the incestuous creep comes to the defense of the rapist creep is nigh unnoticeable in the modern moral atmosphere.

I leave it as an exercise for the alert reader to deduce how this point pertains to the above conversation.

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artimaeus does me the honor of replying to some of my statements here: http://artimaeus.livejournal.com/2892.html

As best I can tell, my argument is sufficiently unclear that artimaeus spends effort answering things I did not say nor imply. This is usually the outcome when the starting axioms are radically different. Rather than spending time repeating “But I didn’t say that!” I suggest my kind interlocutor merely re-read what I did write, and, if interested in a debate, write something in return on the same topic. If we talk about two different things, that is not a debate, it merely an exchange of mutually incomprehensible opinions (which is also an honorable endevour, if that is what we set out to do.)