To comment please open your gmail account or use my email address, fb or Messenger. Scroll down for other comments.
 |
| In the 2020s the sixties look comparatively innocent |
"Recent
weeks have witnessed the unedifying spectacle of gloves-off gender wars,
fuelled by badly behaving men caught in the glare of the headlights. We
have witnessed alleged rapes in Parliament House, and their tawdry cover-up by
ministers and staff, a convicted rapist footballer, and parliamentary staff
caught masturbating over female MPs’ desks. Not to mention the growing
cacophony of (mainly) feminist voices decrying workplace culture
generally.
It has been a real pile-on. Man-bashing is in, alas, in
the Year of St Joseph, God’s perfected man."
No, it's not that you missed something (but not that much): this guest post comes from Paul Collits of Sydney, Australia, an erstwhile parishioner of Holy Trinity Central Hawke's Bay. He continues:
"Ugly
stuff, without doubt. But hardly new. And there is little evidence
that the depravity is on the rise at present. After all, we have had a
former Western Australian Treasurer who delighted in sniffing chairs, and a
Hawke Government minister who owned up to having sex on his ministerial
desk. Yes it was consensual and with his wife, on this occasion.
Still, far better not to know about it, thank you.
And then we had
footballers who either did or were alleged to have done unspeakable things en
masse with innocent or not-so-innocent women in motel
rooms. (The relevant names are Troy Buswell, John Brown, Jan Murray,
Matthew Johns and Jonathan Thurston and friends).
So
no, not new. But there is a rotten culture all about, a seediness and a
decadence that seems to define our age and to cause revulsion. A wise bishop
recently noted that the real problem with today’s sexual mores and our social
malaise generally is a toxic culture infested with toxic ideas and ideologies,
and not so-called toxic masculinity.
"A wise bishop"? In Australia, we take it?
After all, the plot of a recent
American television show depicted female-initiated sado-masochistic behaviour
in which women and men unknown to one another used an internet platform to seek
partners for rough sex. One of the police suggested – who on earth would
want to do this? His colleague answered “millions”.
As
with all these things, it behooves us to find the real problems and their
causes, and not to be distracted in this endeavour by the seedy and the
depraved, or indeed by the ideological. Perhaps before the sexual
cataclysm of the 1960s and, shortly thereafter, the communications revolution
which allow everyone now to access information about everyone and everything,
all these things were there but simply hidden from view. We now see and
know things we would rather have not seen or known, and cannot now un-see or
un-know. The parliamentary masturbators, after all, filmed the events.
Or
perhaps things changed forever because of the sexual revolution itself.
Most
contemporary discussions of sexual propriety focus on the issue of
consent. The abhorrence comes from a lack of consent, and for those other
than the morally depraved, this is a natural response. For the same
reason, anyone other than the morally depraved abhors sexual activity between
adults and children, including between adults and teens who themselves
otherwise might be sexually active with partners their own age and not to be
judged immoral for this. Now we even let children change their “gender”,
and some people, indeed, cheer them on in this endeavour.
So,
it is all about consent. This way of thinking is necessary, but not
sufficient, in analysing our malaise. The bishop is correct.
"Wise" - and "correct", also? Australia, certainly. NZ just does politically correct.
It is
the culture that is toxic.
Both
men and women thought, in the 1960s, that they were being liberated. By
sloughing off religion, with all its rules and sexual prohibitions, by using
new technology – the cheap, safe, reliable – to prevent pregnancy, by aborting
unwanted babies, by welcoming easy divorce, by (women) escaping the patriarchal
home, by dissing then all-but-eliminating marriage, by outsourcing the raising
of children to institutions, by embracing same-sex attraction as something
normal and indeed something to be welcomed and celebrated.
Of course, I
never really understood why so many women thought the idea of eschewing
domestic self-employment – “working from home” – and embracing wage slavery
only then to spend most of their newly acquired salaries on child-care was a
good idea.
From
about 1970, all the old bets were off. The old constraints of sin and
guilt were hosed out the door. All this was to herald the coming new age
of heaven-on-earth, with us in charge. How did it all turn out?
Well,
guess what? By and large, the sexual revolution mainly benefited
men.
You can say that again.
Or at least it did to begin with, and superficially. It made
sex, sex without commitment, far easier for men to access. In the longer
term, though, it turns out not to have benefited men. Or women.
It
(through the pill) made infidelity safer, and therefore more prevalent.
It led to the killing of literally hundreds of millions of babies globally, all
as a solution to the “unwanted” outcomes of casual sex, and often urged upon
women by men.
It
made divorce – always previously seen by men and women as a failure (hence the
term “failed” marriage) – the norm in society. It led to the notion of
not one, but two or three wives or husbands, for life. This massively
diminished the chances of children being brought up in stable homes with a
natural father and a mother. In fact, it has all but destroyed fatherhood
as a noble profession. (This, decidedly, has NOT benefited men).
And
it forced children to share their lives and homes with total strangers, and,
often, with abusive step-fathers. In creating the latter as a class, it
ushered in a new age of domestic paedophilia. It continued, in fact,
intensified, bad behaviour by men towards women.
It
visited hookup culture on the world, with more and more (mainly young) people
living alone and only meeting others for sex. Except for all of those
numberless, poor souls addicted to the now free and ever-available pornography
that is a fixture in a hyper-sexualised world that is awash with imagery of
naked flesh and de-personalised, online sexual encounters. For these
folks, you don’t even have to leave the house for sex.
The pill severed
the link between sex and procreation, itself a disaster. Pornography and
online sex have severed the link between sex and even needing another human for
the encounter. In severing these links, the sexual revolution has,
indeed, encouraged a pandemic of loneliness. All in the name of
liberation.
More
than this, sex has been diminished, step by step, from a God-given gift and
mechanism to prolong the human race to a casual, performative, recreational and
often meaningless activity undertaken by mainly disconnected participants –
total strangers, no less – where the desire for it and the rules surrounding it
have become a murky matter at best, often assumed but nonetheless unclear to
the other person. A fetid place where rape allegations can only
fester. And not necessarily even enjoyable, as a number of observers have
noted that monogamous sex is more enjoyed than its modern, upstart competitor.
Tom
Wolfe has brutally satirised hookup culture. Jordan Peterson has also
addressed our technologically enabled Tinder-culture’s disastrous outcomes.
https://www.rivervalleycc.org/rivervalleyblog/jordan-peterson-on-the-hook-up-culture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TrBXMQDAIk
One
of the outcomes of Tinder-sex may well be the sexual marginalisation of those
men outside the preferred sub-group of Tinderers who attract most of the
women.
And,
bizarrely, the sexual revolution has turned the chaste and the modestly attired
into figures of fun and sources of bemusement for the liberated generation who
simply do not understand chastity and who feel no compunction in routinely
baring their bodies to total strangers in public places.
I
defy anyone to attempt to argue successfully that the sexual revolution has
been a good thing for society, that it has helped women, that it has enriched
our culture, that it has maintained our moral energy – the moral energy that
any society needs so that it might genuinely flourish – and that it has all
been worth the unshackling of libido that justified the whole thing in the
first place.
While there is little uncontested evidence that sexual
assaults are on the increase – despite the heightened current focus on them –
the total destruction of all sexual boundaries, bar consent, has done nothing
to dampen the environment in which sexual assault and sexual harassment
occur.
Creating
the very expectation that sexual encounters are always there, ripe for the
taking, and no big deal anyway, is no way to reinforce the message that no
always means no. Knowing one’s partner intimately is a great starting
point for reducing any likelihood of misunderstandings. (Someone might
explain this to people like Jarryd Hayne, and his complainant).
Eliminating, or even blurring boundaries, and endlessly celebrating this,
cannot be remotely thought to encourage the kind of self-restraint needed to
make men and women behave honourably towards one another, both in and out of
the bedroom.
Bringing
up well-formed males must include the embedding of restraint, deferred
gratification, praising chastity as a noble thing, restoring marriage as the
preferred model of living adult sexual lives, and, above all, reinstating
boundaries as a norm of behaviour. Living in monogamous marriages would
do wonders for the sexual enculturation of children, too. Doing all this
would not eliminate rape. It would help, though. And it would
achieve so much more for society in the process.
The
same bishop who identified toxic culture as the real problem also noted that,
in the very early days of Christianity, most of the converts were slaves and
women, including rich women. Christianity liberated them! Slaves in
Roman Christian homes were no longer treated as slaves, but as family.
(And no, not all later Christians either stopped having slaves, or treated them
well).
Women, through Christianity, found a perfect solution to the
age-old problem of imperfect male behaviour. Christian marriage domesticated
men. In return for sex – yes, I know women too like sex – men provided
for their wives devotion, respect, security, safety, food on the table, income
and co-parenting.
Without ever guaranteeing fidelity, Christian marriage
encouraged it. Men went off to do whatever they did, running governments
and businesses, exploring the globe, getting killed fighting wars and so on,
and women got to run their own small-to-medium enterprises, largely unimpeded
and all with a guaranteed salary. And this continued, right the way down
the ages, till about 1970.
What
a great deal that was for women. If only more men and, yes, women,
realised it. And realised just what we have lost.
So
no, rape is never welcome and never justified. Not now, not before.
As crimes go, they do not come much worse than rape. (And men and boys
are raped, harassed and bullied, too, of course). It is never right to
blame the victim or to excuse the perpetrator. No one is “asking for
it”.
Rape
also demeans all the good men who roam God’s green earth looking to do the
right thing by women. It is not endemic in male behaviour, whatever the
toxic feminists might claim. Just as paedophilia is not endemic in
priestly behaviour. It too has been given a massive fillip by the sexual
revolution. But just remember that consent is not the only criterion by
which we should judge good sexual behaviour in our age. Consent is never
the end of the discussion about a culture that is truly toxic and that demeans
us all.
And
what is at the core of this toxic culture, with its toxic ideas and
ideologies? Essentially, what we have lost is a sense of the good, the
true and the beautiful. Losing any sense of truth has been
disastrous. It has trashed standards of behaviour, and a sense of good behaviour
is at the heart of virtue. We have replaced truth with post-modernist
pap, with “my truth” and “your truth”, with anything goes, with “everything is
relative”.
A
flourishing society is underpinned by not just laws but by promises too, and
accepted constraints on otherwise out-of-control behaviour. By men and by
women too. The expectation of promises kept builds in a predisposition
towards accepting deferred gratification. Abandoning “virtue” and instead
promoting individual “values”, too, has helped to deflate sexual and other
behaviour. Ditching religion has forced us back on our own meagre,
Godless resources, and these have not been up to the task of creating agreed
standards of behaviour for the post-Christian world order.
Paraphrasing
Yeats, the centre (of morality) has not held, nor could it. We are
unmoored, and things HAVE fallen apart, as he tells us:
Turning and turning in the widening
gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the
worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Moral
anarchy is a very good way of thinking about our current state. Yeats was
writing in the shadow of World War One and the sheer scale of the revolutionary
events of the 1960s described above were, at that time, still a long way
off. Yet his reflections capture much of what had begun to emerge with
late nineteenth century Nietzschean thinking, about God and about the
fundamentally new and different world order, and in which the once-prized
elements of the old order were gone forever. Back then it was called
“modernism”, described by Pope Leo XIII as the heresy of heresies, and, as the
name suggests, it very precisely prefigured the catastrophic events of half a
century later.
You
can measure a culture by the quality of its commercial television and its
tabloid newspapers. I have all but given up on free-to-air television,
and only wonder what sort of people still watch it. The competition among
the prime channels is a race to the bottom.
For
my subscription to the Sydney Daily Telegraph, I get seedy gossip,
soft porn, endless reality TV reportage, celebrity culture where all the
celebrities, most of whom I have never heard of, are themselves boring and
depraved. Oh, and rugby league. With its own multi-layered
off-field depravity and tedium. (Down south of the Murray, you get all of
the above, except for the rugby league).
It
ain’t pretty.
Paul Collits
Paul Collits is a freelance writer and independent
researcher who lives in Lismore New South Wales.
He has worked in government, industry and the
university sector, and has taught at tertiary level in three different
disciplines - politics, geography and planning and business studies. He
spent over 25 years working in economic development and has published widely in
Australian and international peer reviewed and other journals. He has
been a keynote speaker internationally on topics such as rural development,
regional policy, entrepreneurship and innovation. Much of his academic
writing is available at https://independent.academia.edu/PaulCollits
His recent writings on ideology, conservatism,
politics, religion, culture, education and police corruption have been
published in such journals as Quadrant, News Weekly and The Spectator
Australia.
He has BA Hons and MA degrees in
political science from the Australian National University and a PhD in
geography and planning from the University of New England. He currently
has an adjunct Associate Professor position at a New Zealand Polytechnic.
Latest from Paul Collits
Related items
