ThomStratton.com

According to a Washington Examiner article, the fertility rate in America has fallen well below sustainable population rates. That’s probably good news for those concerned about the environment and overpopulation. Or is it?

My wife and I are vegan, and we’ve noticed that in general vegans tend to be anti-child. That is not surprising; it fits with their tendency to be concerned about environmental and over-crowding issues. But if the total fertility rate for vegans is below 2.1, which is considered the point of population sustainability, it means they will have to convince a lot of people to become vegans to replace those that are dying off.

Likewise in religion. An article in SciLogs takes a look at reproductive rates by religion in the US, based on 2003 data. They found this:

According to this data, only Muslims, Hispanic Catholics, Black Protestants, and Fundementalist Protestants are experiencing positive populatio growth from birth rate alone. This has likely shifted downward, at least among some demographics, since the recession as suggested by the Washington Examiner article.

Why does this matter? Perhaps it doesn’t. But I have been thinking a great deal about society and culture, and the perpetuation of both. There are two ways to perpetuate society or any group or demographic: birth and recruitment. As long as the combined rate of group growth exceeds 2.1, that group is sustainable. If you want to increase the size of that group you are going to have to raise that rate above 2.1. This is one way to take over the world, albeit very slowly.

The point of this post is not to raise a red flag about any particular group, but to call attention to a point of strategic interest. Any group that does not realize positive growth will die out eventually. If American culture is worth protecting we need to consider finding ways to keep our population growth a net positive. Immigration likely accomplishes this, at least for now. But immigration will likely lead to a dilution of culture rather than net growth unless our attitudes toward immigrant assimilation changes. If it takes immigration to keep our population growth positive, and yet immigrants are not changing to adopt US culture then our culture is still in decline, and we are becoming…something else as a country and society.

This also assumes that just because a child is born into a particular group they will continue to identify with and reflect that group throughout its life. That is not a given, by any means, so this also increases the importance of recruitment.

One way to recruit–or avoid recruitment away from a group–is through indoctrination. Schools, for example, can be used to convince children to identify with a group other than what their parents choose, or they can be used to reinforce the efforts of those parents to keep their children in their group. While it can be argued that schools are intended to teach knowledge and life skills, not ideologies, the truth is that its difficult for schools to not attempt to shape a child’s ideology in addition to teaching skills. When their efforts support the parents’ efforts the group will be stronger; when they run contrary to one another, the group may suffer non-death losses.

The other means of recruiting, then, is actively trying to change the minds of adults, which can be very difficult. Not impossible, but difficult, especially where culture is concerned.

So it seems evident in the ongoing “culture wars” both in America and around the world that, while only part of the equation, any group that starts out with a higher fertility rate, is going to start with an advantage–an advantage that in time can shift the balance between groups or cultures if not checked by other means. And if that group also is effective at recruitment (or defending against counter-recruitment), the balance will shift even more quickly.

In general, it appears that fertility rates among Western nations is in decline–already below 2.1 and falling. Could it be that the fall of Western Civilization begins with an empty crib?

I encountered an article recently from a supposedly devoted fan of the “Game of Thrones” series on HBO taking them to task for the show’s recent gratuitous depictions of rape and violence against women. Ironically, I won’t post a link to the article because of its gratuitous language. The parallel is clearly lost on the author.

The author eventually places the blame at the feet of HBO itself for supposedly encouraging such pushing of the envelope. But can that really be where the fault lies?

I don’t think so, not when the writer’s complaint is only about how far they’ve been going recently. The show has been rife with sex, violence, violent sex, and sexy violence (even those of us who refuse to watch it can pick up that much from watercooler walk-bys) from the outset, but only now they’re going too far? Up to this point it’s been “artistic” or “symbolic” or “realistic”, but suddenly it’s crossing the line?

The writer goes on to trace HBO’s rising standard of lowering standards from show to show, like “The Wire”, “The Sopranos”, “Deadwood” or “Rome” and concludes that “Game of Thrones” is risking going too far. It’s clearly lost on this person that the fact that the standard has been evolving indicates that someone continues to want more and more of whatever it is these shows are offering, and that maintaining a line is not getting it done. People initially flocked to HBO because of series that weren’t bound by conventional limits.

Do you suppose HBO would continue pushing the envelope if all the viewers suddenly stopped watching? I doubt it.

Sex and violence is like any other entertainment (or dare I say it, drug). Today’s “shocking” becomes tomorrow’s “ho-hum”. People get bored, jaded, desensitized–you name it. They want something new they haven’t seen before. “Game of Thrones” seems eager to provide. You wanted this, dear author. When sex and violence is considered brave, bold, ground-breaking, avant-garde…where does one go from there? Would you like them to try providing the shock-value by suddenly removing all shock-value? No? That doesn’t leave them any other direction to go, especially not on a show founded on being more brutal than anything you’re used to. There’s only three notes to their Song of Fire and Ice, and your only chance for variety is to play them louder–or softer, and you’ve clearly indicated you don’t want that.

So it’s a bit astonishing to hear that our writer is schocked to find, in a show based on a completely amoral, no-holds-barred fantasy world, that there is indeed nothing they won’t do, including bow to our minimal modern standards of decency. Seriously, this is “A Game of Thrones”, where might makes right and anything goes in pursuit of that might, and suddenly you’re squeamish to find they really don’t observe boundaries? “What, you really mean it?! Even MY standards of decency don’t count for anything on this show?!”  It’s a real bummer when your entertainment and your social politics contradict.

In a word? “Waaaaaaa.”

I miss this man. We all should miss the men and women who faced down a threat we really cannot imagine today. At the very least, let us honor their memory and their sacrifice.

Ross Douthat is at it again, this time taking liberals to task for their treatment of masculinity (he’s taken conservatives to task for theirs already). He first holds up a post from Fredrik De Boer as an example of Left thinking on masculinity. Quoting from De Boer:

… Whatever their virtues or vices, the manly men from long ago that these bros imagine they are emulating didn’t spend all their time thinking about what it meant to be manly men. Indeed: it’s precisely the unthinking acceptance of the gender hierarchy that gave these men the “confidence” (read: entitlement) that neo-masculinists want to emulate. But you can’t think your way to an unthinking prejudice. If you have to read a website to tell you to be traditionally masculine, you will never, ever be traditionally masculine. You can’t choose an unchosen attitude. John Wayne did not have a blog. And I truly believe that it’s the combination of this association between masculinity and the capacity for violence on one hand, and the ambient postmodernism we live in on the other, that creates these monsters … They are told that they only have value if they embody an ideal they cannot think their way into.

…

The masculinity that replaces it will not be “anti-male,” whatever that could possibly mean. It won’t be anti-strength. It won’t be anti-confidence or anti-leadership or anti-toughness. It won’t be anti-sex … But it will reject utterly the strangled, stupid, pathetic association between male strength and the capacity for violence. It will stop associating a man’s value with the number of women he has sex with. It will recognize traditional masculinity for what it is: a broken, impossible fantasy that even its most enthusiastic proponents can’t achieve, a straightjacket that constrains men like [the Santa Barbara killer], crushing them, and calls it empowerment. Time for it to die.

To which Douthat replies:

And I just don’t quite know what he’s talking about, because in our culture — Western, English-speaking, American — the traditional iconography of masculine heroism doesn’t really resemble this “Grand Theft Auto”/”Scarface” description at all. I mean, yes, if the “tradition” you have in mind is Pashtun honor killings, then I agree, traditional masculinity would be better off extinct. But where American society is concerned, when I look at the sewers of misogyny or the back alleys of “bro” culture, I mostly see men in revolt against both feminism and our culture’s older images of masculine strength and self-possession, not men struggling to inhabit the latter tradition, or live up to its impossible/immoral demands.

Take the one icon De Boer tosses off as example: The Western-movie hero, the John Wayne figure, the unselfconscious manly man. (Wayne himself, of course, was just as self-consciously performative in his way as any contemporary pick-up artist guru: He didn’t have a blog, but he was an actor with a stage name …) From De Boer’s description of what “traditional masculinity” entails, you would think that the archetypal movies of Wayne’s genre celebrated mass murder and sexual entitlement, or throbbed with palpable misogyny, or made true manliness look like a matter of imposing your will at gunpoint and then reaping your reward in bedpost notches. But watch some famous Westerns from the pre-Peckinpah era: Do you regularly see characters bedding a steady stream of willing women while shooting their way to fame and fortune? Surely not as often as you see men, in the style of the lead characters in “High Noon” and “Shane,” reluctantly shouldering a burden of violence and paying a heavy moral price; not as often as you see men (including Wayne in several of his most iconic roles) who don’t get the girl, don’t get sexual fulfillment (not a major theme of the genre, to put it mildly) or the life of domesticity they want, precisely because of their identity as gunslingers and the obligations and/or sins that accompany that way of life.

Now one can critique the “lonely gunslinger” trope on all sorts of ideological levels, but it’s very hard to see the kind of masculine ideal embodied by Shane and Will Kane as looming large, in any meaningful way, in the fantasy lives of contemporary misogynists.

…

A Humphrey Bogart, a Jimmy Stewart, a Cary Grant, a Spencer Tracy — these were icons whose characters often dealt with female stars as equals, who had sex appeal to burn but weren’t defined by their libidos or their list of conquests, who dealt in violence sparingly or not at all. Likewise in Victorian fiction, in books as eagerly devoured by the masses as any blockbuster entertainment today: How often is a rake or cad presented as a worthy model, how often is a killer celebrated for his body count? How often does a Dickens or a Tolstoy or a Trollope leave the impression that the masculine ideal involves dealing violence indiscriminately and sleeping with every blonde who catches your eye? Is Steerforth the hero of “David Copperfield”? Is Wickham the male ideal held up by “Pride and Prejudice”? In Western literature, who better embodies “traditional masculinity” as an aspirational ideal — Vronsky or Darcy? Angel Clare or Gabriel Oak? Raskolnikov the murderer or Raskolnikov the penitent?

…

One possible rejoinder to these points is that even the positive-seeming aspects of Victorian or Old Hollywood images of masculinity depended on the sense of “entitlement” and the ”unthinking acceptance of the gender hierarchy” that De Boer (quite accurately) describes as central features of those eras, and so today’s more debased “ideal” is basically what’s left when the patriarchy can no longer promise men power in exchange for self-restraint, privilege in exchange for self-containment. Another possible rejoinder is that the traditional ideal was just a pure self-serving fabrication, that the Good Men of art and literature were always, inevitably Don Draper or Pete Campbell in real life.

I think the first rejoinder is partially fair (and gets at why a simple “neo-traditionalism” is problematic), the second one less so. But neither of them gets you to a “traditional masculinity needs to die” prescription for contemporary male problems.

…

Which is basically the root of my disagreement with the left’s writers on a lot of these issues. They look at the state of sex and gender, masculinity and femininity, and see an uncomplicatedly progressive social revolution that just hasn’t fully succeeded yet — that hasn’t brought men, especially, into the sunlit uplands of egalitarian enlightenment — because far too many “traditional” concepts and constraints still perdure. I see a social revolution that has brought good and bad, intermixed, and whose supporters could profit from the realization that some of the human goods they seek are actually more clearly visible behind us, somewhere back in a cultural past they still insist they’re fighting to overthrow, whose actual details the darkness of forgetting has almost swallowed up.

I have to wonder if De Boer has ever even seen any John Wayne movies. As someone who spends a great deal of my movie-watching time in the old classics I have to suspect that De Boer’s idea of a movie classic is anything within the last thirty years (during which time John Wayne was not making movies). He’s clearly never seen “The African Queen”, in which it’s Katherine Hepburn’s character who is clearly in charge through the entire movie, while Humphrey Bogart actually has to rise up to her level before they can truly become a strong partnership. There was no “bedpost notching” involved, but if there were, it was Rose Sayer cutting the notch, not Charlie Allnut.

Most every movie from this era of “horrible masculinity that must die” shows man after man being anything but what De Boer describes. Did their “male privilige” give them confidence? Perhaps so, but if so, they used it poorly. Most of the movies show them resisting taking what they want from women (if indeed they ever wanted that), doing everything they can to not exploit their advantage. In “Roman Holiday” Gregory Peck goes out of his way to not take advantage of a drugged Audrey Hepburn. “No means no” never entered into it, because he refused to even ask the question. If I had to choose an era of film characters to entrust my daughter to, it would not be our “enlightened” modern age. But the characters from the era De Boer decries? I would trust them in a heart-beat to not only not take advantage of a woman, but to only resort to violence in defending her from the low-lifes who would.

I am left to conclude that De Boer has never watched any of the movies he’s so against. Either that or he finds the integrity and true manhood of those characters so intimidating and so unlike himself that he has to resort to slander to put them back in their box as part of that past we must set fire to at all costs. I believe he is just another sad example of these “right-thinking” social engineers who, in spite of having had their social way for over fifty years, can’t accept the fact that they’ve actually made things worse, and therefore have to keep casting back farther and farther to find a bogey-man to pin it on. Sure, that era had its problems, but they seem to forget that it was the people of that era that took the biggest steps to fix those problems and nothing that anyone today can take credit for–though they sure try to. “What, our programs haven’t fixed poverty?–hey look! Civil Rights Movement! High five!”

It’s worse than neo-centrism. It’s a complete lack of understanding about what makes society work. They see the problems of the past and, rather than looking closely to determine what caused those problems and what things actually made society stronger, they want to throw it all out. They instead put up their picture of how they want the world to work and keep pushing and pushing . What, it’s not working yet? More cowbell! Shut up you idiots who keep suggesting we borrow from the past. The past was bad Bad BAD! Our new order is superior. Why? Because we say so, and if you can’t see that it’s because you’re bad Bad BAD too! We just haven’t tried things our way long enough or pushed them hard enough! More cowbell, I say!

I’m not saying their vision is entirely wrong, or their solutions, either. But when they put on their blinders and insist that nothing old can stay I have to question if they really know what they’re doing. It wasn’t the classic movies that created Don Draper. It wasn’t classic literature that puked up Jamie Lannister. If we’re so much better than that now, if we know so clearly what a real man should be, why are these men so interesting to us? It’s not because we love to hate them–that’s not the buzz I see surrounding these characters. What the success of these and so many other similar characters tells me is that we say we want one thing, but worship another.

Kill traditional masculinity? I think I understand why they would want that. We can’t have those icons around to make us feel guilty for what we’ve become. We can’t seem to figure out how to both wallow in the muck and ascend Olympus simultaneously–and it’s all John Wayne’s fault.

———–

Update: Another interesting article, somewhat related, but on an entirely different topic: Washington Post: Too many women ignore their own misogyny

I may have talked about this before. If so…oh well. I recently got into a discussion online about discrimination and the imposition of beliefs. At one point someone made the statement, “It’s not right to impose your religious beliefs on others.” As this came up in a discussion about discrimination, I found this particularly interesting.

Let’s take that statement in two parts. First: “It’s not right to impose your beliefs on others”. Clearly this statement is wrong. I’ve yet to hear very many people espousing this belief simultaneously pressing for anarchy. (“a state of society without government or law.” – dictionary.com) And yet there cannot be a government or law without the imposition of will. Someone has to create that structure, and while it may be possible to give everyone input into that structure, sooner or later someone is going to disagree with part of that law. At that point they have the choice to leave, submit, or bear the consequences of disobedience. But the fact remains that someone else’s belief was imposed upon them.

The quality of a government system, arguably, comes from the breadth of input accepted. An absolute monarchy or a dictatorship may impose the will of one or a few people on the whole. If this one person’s belief system reflects that of those ruled, it’s not necessarily a bad system. But that doesn’t happen very often. As a general rule, at least in Western culture, the more the merrier. We like democracy, because it gives the most people the most say.

But even then, even if we were able to establish a government where everyone truly did have direct input into every governmental decision, at best we would still have the majority imposing their beliefs on the minority. Some will be gaining something, but others will be losing something. Even in America, which is founded upon the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, just what those mean and how they should be supported diverges quickly. In the end it will always come down to the majority getting their way while the minority are forced to either go along or face the coercive power of government. The beliefs of some are imposed on others. Show me a government where this is not so.

It has to be that way, or there is anarchy. And chances are under anarchy there is still the imposition of beliefs on others. It’s just more often imposed more violently.

So that brings us to the second part: “It’s not right to impose your religious beliefs on others.” This can be taken a couple ways. The first is that it’s wrong to force someone into a specific religion. There are nations where this is not accepted–you will be a certain religion or you will die. Fortunately for us, the United States of America is not one of them. Our charter states specifically “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” For now only a minority challenges that. But much more vague, and at the heart of this discussion, is the growing idea that religion should not be allowed to drive or inform our politial views.

That’s a disturbing and silly perspective simultaneously. Our nation was built upon a foundation of religious ideals–many universally accepted as ethical, but nonetheless growing from religious influence. But at the very least it is difficult to claim that any of our current laws are based entirely on ethical considerations without religious “taint”. That’s almost like saying we should not paint pictures using any paint with pigment.  I suppose it could be possible to arrive at our current ethical standard (actually a contradiction in terms, really) entirely independent of religion, but a large percentage of it would overlap. To eliminate religion from public discourse would result in a comical farce in which people keep changing their hats in order to say the exact same thing.

What is disturbing about it is that one common area where complaints against imposing religious beliefs surface is when discrimination is perceived. The already-established notion that governments exist to discriminate aside, this argument seeks to claim “because your religious beliefs would cause us to discriminate, we believe we should be allowed to discriminate against such beliefs.” It’s the idea that some ideas invalid if reached by unapproved means, regardless of whether they are the same ideas approved of when reached by approved means. It seeks to discredit an entire viewpoint simply because it is currently in the way of your getting what you want.

I’m okay with government saying, “If you religious-minded people are in the minority on this issue that’s too bad. You had your vote and you lost. We are now doing X.” That’s the role of government. I am not okay with government (or anyone else) saying, “Your source of influence is invalid. If it at all figures in how you might vote your vote will be invalid also.” If we can discriminate thus against religious influence can other ideological influences be far behind? We could eliminate liberal or conservative views as inharmonious belief systems. We could decide that people who live in desert areas are invalid for votes on water rights. Anything that might influence someone’s vote in a way that might be viewed as discriminatory against someone else could be effectively discriminated against.

It’s one thing to change the course of a country by getting enough people on your side to win the majority vote and impose your beliefs on others. It’s another thing to tell someone they’re not even allowed at the table because their belief system is not approved of (not voted against legally, mind you, just deemed unacceptable by “right-thinking people”). How can you claim to be different, let alone better, from those you seek to keep from discriminating? Because your ethics say it’s okay, and won’t cause any problems? Can you prove it? You are asking us to take a great deal on faith. Does that not, then, make your ethical framework very much like a religion? Surely you wouldn’t want to force your religious beliefs on others. That would be wrong.

Actually, it wouldn’t. Not if you follow the rules we all agreed to on how to resolve conflict and define our government and laws. Like I said, I can accept you getting your way by majority rule; I don’t have to like it. But to tell me I shouldn’t shape my beliefs around something because it’s not something you accept is not how we do things in this country. If someone wants to get their ideas on society from banging two rocks together and listening to the noise, or by reading tea leaves, or by getting their palm read that’s none of your affair. If you want it to be otherwise there’s a process for that too. Just be careful. The law is a two-edged sword, and the lady swinging it is supposedly blindfolded.

The ink is not yet dry on a law in Seattle raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and the problems are beginning. Granted, considering the source of the information, there may very well be some cherry-picking going on, but it’s not in the least bit surprising or counter-intuitive:

But 15 minutes south near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, employees are already seeing the negative effects of such a hike. A February report from the Seattle Times revealed:

At the Clarion Hotel off International Boulevard, a sit-down restaurant has been shuttered, though it might soon be replaced by a less-labor-intensive cafe…

Other businesses have adjusted in ways that run the gamut from putting more work in the hands of managers, to instituting a small “living-wage surcharge” for a daily parking space near the airport.

That’s not all. According to Assunta Ng, publisher of the Northwest Asian Weekly, some employees are feeling the pinch as employers cut benefits. She recalls a conversation she had with two hotel employees who have been affected by the wage hike:

“Are you happy with the $15 wage?” I asked the full-time cleaning lady.

“It sounds good, but it’s not good,” the woman said.

“Why?” I asked.

“I lost my 401k, health insurance, paid holiday, and vacation,” she responded. “No more free food,” she added.

The hotel used to feed her. Now, she has to bring her own food. Also, no overtime, she said. She used to work extra hours and received overtime pay.

What else? I asked.

“I have to pay for parking,” she said.

I then asked the part-time waitress, who was part of the catering staff.

“Yes, I’ve got $15 an hour, but all my tips are now much less,” she said. Before the new wage law was implemented, her hourly wage was $7. But her tips added to more than $15 an hour. Yes, she used to receive free food and parking. Now, she has to bring her own food and pay for parking.

You can’t double payroll while leaving income unchanged and expect business as usual to continue. Contrary to popular belief business owners are not sleeping on five mattresses stuffed with cash and considering a sixth to hold all the loot. And businesses can’t just print more money like the government does whenever its expenses exceed its income. Something has to give somewhere.

In most cases a business has few options. In Seattle they can relocate to a part of the city that is not subject to the law. Or they can cut employees or employee benefits. Or they can increase prices. Or they can go out of business. None of these are particularly desirable outcomes. What good is a job paying a living wage if you can’t get one?

I’m a business owner. Our business is on the verge of hiring employees so that our partners working the store can actually get away from the store. Yes, that is the reality of being a business owner–you’re just barely getting by and your quality of life is practically non-existent. You think we should increase vacation time to be more like Europe? My partners would do cartwheels if they could get even half the vacation time you get. They work six days a week (and that’s only because we close one day a week), every week, all year round.

But if we suddenly had to consider paying double the current minimum wage you can bet we would think twice about hiring anyone. Paying our managing partners is our single largest line item, and even at that they often must rely on what profits we make to maintain a livable standard. They could use some help in the store, but if they hire enough employee hours at $15 to do what needs to be done we’re looking at close to a 50% increase in payroll. Boom. There go any profits.

So it’s not surprising that Seattle is beginning to experience some fallout from their well-intentioned but highly uneducated economics nose-thumbing. They’re trying to push the model out into what my economics professor called “The Gretzky Zone”: You can’t go there. It just can’t work. Gradual increases in minimum wage slows the process down, but to double it overnight is going to cause some serious repercussions. Sea-Tac and Seattle are in for an economics lesson.

I came across a couple of articles today that suggest our society, with it’s obsessive, excessive fixation on sex, is creating a relational wasteland. With sex being the goal and pinnacle of our existence, other types of physical relationships are falling by the wayside. In our drive to connect in a sexual relationship we may very well be disconnecting from the relationships that could be more beneficial.

First, from Leah Libresco for The American Conservative, “Our Starved for Touch Culture“:

The friendzone is treated as a wasteland not just because we treat sex as an idol, but because friendship and non-sexual affection is written off as irrelevant. Casual dating has been replaced by casual sex; platonic touch has been eclipsed by erotic signalling. Pickup artists teach their pupils (not inaccurately) that taking someone’s hand, touching a shoulder, or even moving into one-on-one conversations are indications of interest, and a signal to keep escalating, in the hopes of transitioning to a hookup.

If affection is merely foreplay, then a person who isn’t having luck approaching people romantically is also cut off from most normal human comforts. That kind of isolation is tremendously harmful.

…

The isolation may be more pronounced for men, since physical contact between two women is less likely to be stigmatized or even remarked upon. In my own experience, however, usually the only time I make physical contact with another person is when I shake the priest’s hand on my way out of Mass. When I went on a cultural exchange trip to China, I was surprised and jealous when our group leader warned us that friends commonly hold hands in China, and we shouldn’t assume a host was flirting with us if they did so.

In America, that kind of physical affection would be unusual between pairs of friends, especially if both were male. But, if friends are off limits, where else are people to turn for physical reassurance?

Then there is this from The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, in “Prisoners of Sex“:

The culture’s attitude is Hefnerism, basically, if less baldly chauvinistic than the original Playboy philosophy. Sexual fulfillment is treated as the source and summit of a life well lived, the thing without which nobody (from a carefree college student to a Cialis-taking senior) can be truly happy, enviable or free.

Meanwhile, social alternatives to sexual partnerships are disfavored or in decline: Virginity is for weirdos and losers, celibate life is either a form of unhealthy repression or a smoke screen for deviancy, the kind of intense friendships celebrated by past civilizations are associated with closeted homosexuality, and the steady shrinking of extended families has reduced many people’s access to the familial forms of platonic intimacy.

Yet as sex looms ever larger as an aspirational good, we also live in a society where more people are single and likely to remain so than in any previous era. And since single people have, on average, a lot less sex than the partnered and wedded, a growing number of Americans are statistically guaranteed to feel that they’re not living up to the culture’s standard of fulfillment, happiness and worth.

…

This means that the feminist prescription doesn’t supply what men slipping down into the darkness of misogyny most immediately need: not lectures on how they need to respect women as sexual beings, but reasons, despite their lack of sexual experience, to first respect themselves as men.

Such reasons, and the models of intimacy and community that vindicate them, might have done little to prevent the Santa Barbara killer’s deadly spree.

But they might drain some of the swamps that are forming, slowly, because our society has lost sight of a basic human truth: A culture that too tightly binds sex and self-respect is likely, in the long run, to end up with less and less of both.

If the only outlet of affection we are allowed, and the only criteria by which our self-worth is measured, is sex, we are dooming ourselves as a society. Could Pat Benetar have been prophetic, that love is a battlefield on which as engage with the enemy in order to prove ourselves to our gender? Is that really the world we want?

In many Native American cultures young warriors would hunt and kill a fearsome predator in order to prove their worth to the tribe. Is that where we’re headed, to a society where sex is no longer even an expression of affection, but a bizarre form of “counting coup” in order to prove our wo/manhood to our homo-gendered tribe?

Count me out.

I’m not sure I want to let you in on what’s on my mind today, so I’ll give you a few pieces of other people’s minds instead:

A Dream Within A Dream
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

A Night-Piece
——The sky is overcast
With a continuous cloud of texture close,
Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon,
Which through that veil is indistinctly seen,
A dull, contracted circle, yielding light
So feebly spread, that not a shadow falls,
Chequering the ground–from rock, plant, tree, or tower.
At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam
Startles the pensive traveller while he treads
His lonesome path, with unobserving eye
Bent earthwards; he looks up–the clouds are split
Asunder,–and above his head he sees
The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.
There, in a black-blue vault she sails along,
Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small
And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss
Drive as she drives: how fast they wheel away,
Yet vanish not!–the wind is in the tree,
But they are silent;–still they roll along
Immeasurably distant; and the vault,
Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds,
Still deepens its unfathomable depth.
At length the Vision closes; and the mind,
Not undisturbed by the delight it feels,
Which slowly settles into peaceful calm,
Is left to muse upon the solemn scene.

William Wordsworth