by Maurine Proctor
We are a nation divided against ourselves and our own best interests when it comes to our outlook on sexuality. On the one hand we demand and value loyalty from spouses to each other and their families, yet on the other we drive a hookup mentality that is supposed to be sexually liberating, yet in reality cheapens sex, deadens the soul and too often thwarts the very capacity for fidelity.
There has been much speculation on what irrational craziness would drive Gov. Eliot Spitzer to a sleazy and illegal liaison with a call girl named “Kristen” from an international prostitution ring. Thus run the musings–since there have been so many high-profile politicians who have either tainted their reputations or gone down in sexual infamy, is there something about the “Alpha male” arrogant and powerful political personality that drives such behavior? Is there a tendency for some types to trample every form of decency in their quest for what gratifies them?
It is hard to say, but what is certain is that in America we condition people for sexual promiscuity and set up the mindset for disloyalty. Three articles from a page in last week’s Washington Post capture this sexual lunacy and irony.
The first article, “Bad News Travels Fast and Furiously” was about how bad news travels at warp speed in this Internet age and lists a string of politicians whose careers had “vaporized” under sexual scandal. Words uses to describe the promiscuous politicans were heavily pejorative—as well they should be– like “tawdry,” “indecent,” “philandering” and “salacious.” America is definitely condemnatory of this.
Yet, on the same page is an article about the infamous Kristen, “Just Days after Scandal, The Promise of an Audience.” It seems our call girl is really Ashley Alexandra Dupre, and according to her MySpace Internet site she is an aspiring singer. Rather than hiding in shame, suddenly she has, according to the Post, a new hook to hang a career on. “The songs she’d posted online were suddenly getting what they apparently never had before: an audition with some of the more powerful figures in the music biz.”
Apparently, her sorry infamy, was getting her more attention than being a finalist on American Idol. Though her vocals aren’t much, her trashy notoriety is and may be enough to boost her into a career.
But, it was the third article on the page that was the most telling and indicative of how heedless and accepting our culture is becoming of the most casual sex. It was an advice column from Carolyn Hax who apparently specializes in relationships. The question from an anonymous person in Phoenix was whether you had to tell someone you were going to have a relationship with about your “numbers,” meaning how many others you had had sexual relations with. Wasn’t it, in fact, “judgmental or insecure” for them to even ask?
Hax said you should find out why that person wanted to know. “If you get the ‘truth is important to healthy relationships’ lie in return, or some other guilt-generating vehicle, then please don’t question the need to resist this blatant invasion of self.” That a “significant other” should even be concerned is “distracting, silly, juvenile, pointless, judgmental, [and] shame-centric.”
All this was accompanied by a cartoon with a young woman and man sitting across a table at a restaurant. She says, “What’s my ‘number’? One less than it was about to be.’”
You’d have to be asleep to miss the implication. It is that those who might be concerned about the hookup culture who are off base or hopelessly sanctimonious. It is concern for sexual fidelity that is shameful or perhaps Puritanical.
As an American culture what do we glean from this bankrupt philosophy which pervades not just newspaper advice columns, but also entertainment media, schools, and college campuses? For one thing, we get news of a sexual epidemic that also came out last week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National STD Prevention conference.
The CDC presented studies showing that 1 in 4 teen girls, amounting to 3.2 million have a sexually transmitted infection. Nearly half of the African-American girls ages 14 to 19 were infected with the four diseases studied.
Yet it is not just potentially life-threatening infection that takes its toll. The so-called sexual liberation has been anything but the freeing and expansion of soul that it was promised. It has in fact, not only devalued sex, and stripped it from its foundation in marriage, but it has also made us numb. In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom quoted a student who said of casual sex, “We are all obsessively going to the well, but we always come up dry.”
When American popular culture unhooked sex from marriage, our finest instincts became casualities. Lost were loyalty, self-discipline, and ironically, even passion. Bloom said that what he saw in his college students concerning sex is that they became “competent specialists” but “flat-souled.” He said that what today’s students are marked by “is the astonishing fact that they usually do not, in what were once called love affairs, say, ‘I love you,’ and never, ‘I’ll always love you.’”
Our culture’s sexual attitudes are self-destructive. Nothing about the casual sex thrown at us at every turn can possibly incline and prepare people for the lifelong sexual fidelity critical to marriage and family stability.
So, in some ways, learning that another married man, this one a governor, had illicit sex is tragic, but still not surprising. America is reaping what it sows.
But if anyone should wonder if it matters, Silda Spitzer’s humiliated and chagrined face, as she stood next to the governor as he made his damning confession is forever burned in our national consciousness.
Latter-day Center for Moral Liberalism contributor, Maurine Proctor, is the founder and publisher of Meridian Magazine and FamilyLeader.net
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emarel said,
March 17, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Artfldgr said,
yes. your lumping sociopaths who have needs for the things you mention in your first paragraph, and that they are NOT alpha males, but throwbacks to our family clan based wanderers who could parasite upon any opportunity.
eventually the more socially cohesive, religious, and superior men showed up. you know, the ones that your forgetting while painting all of us, or all upper men as the same.
it only since he modern era that the excuse that the power made me do it is acceptable. read history, and you will find that history is full of superior alpha males that dont act at all like this.
george washington… was asked to be king… retird and went home after giving us the most freedom in history… more than marx every did.. in fact marx was a layabout parasitical lout…
to not make distinctions, is to reletevate all sociopathsi with good leaders, and all men with all men…
you cant tell the difference. you assume that they are all the same since they all lead.
except you hacvent noticed that the left are mostly lawyers, and produce nothign but manipulation and new ideas for manipulation.
so there is a difference between the lectist communist socialist leader (stalin, hitler, pol pot, mao, castro, etc), and the rightest paleo liberal leader… churchill, jefferson, washington, etc
problem is, that unless someone like me points it out… everyone blithly goes on saying… the left is good… but both the left and the right are equally bad.
kennedy… cheated in office and dealt with the mob, attempted an assasination, and created executive orders that paralleled those needed to take over like hitler did.
clinton, finihsed the executive orders, also had sex in office, was close to a marxist who is thoughyt to be a spy, lied… etc
Marion barry, how did this democrat do? oh yead.. cocain crack, and a street hooker…
Spitzer… same thing.
how about ted kennedy? his date drowned..
whose side was mcgreevy on? another democrat
how about Antonio Villaraigosa?
Gavin Newsom?
[the republicans are not saints, but their infidelities tend not to be so wacky... and on some, the jury is still out on]
david vitter
Larry Craig
Rudy Giuliani
and the story is even more interesting if you say split the times from pre socialism and post socialism… in the ‘pre’ times the behaviors accepted as common then, were very much NOT that way… they were in the movies (thanks franfurt), but in real life, few could afford the moral slam.
today… its a perk of the democractic socialist concept of why they went into power in the first place.
women are no better… but unlike men, women dont need to get into politics to have sex, all they have to be is open to it, and freaky.
so for them, cheating in the office makes no sense, for them power over others and to do the same thing that queen bees do. control the very public and private lives of women. whatever those choices may be and wahtever the outcomes. the more they hurt the ones they have contempt for, for wanting and being able to have real love, the more they destroy their lives and invite hell to them!
March 17, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Artfldgr said,
in fact… it would be really fun to list out all the political wackies we could find since 1960… and then assign their position.
March 17, 2008 at 2:03 pm
fourthwire said,
Like Emarel, I’m sick to death of being lectured by women about MEN’s sexual nature. Talk to your “sisters”, Maurine. Take a message from me, please:
Made bed, lie in same……..
March 17, 2008 at 6:42 pm
wadestar said,
Thank you for putting you finger on the problem with Hax’s advice. I had read that column and was vaguely disturbed by it but wasn’t quite sure why. These days you would be hard pressed to find a woman in her 30’s who is a virgin and so Hax’s point about dwelling on the ‘number’ made some sense. That said, there are numbers and there are numbers. A local morning radio show does an “Are you a whore or a bore?” segment where they have young ladies call in and they try to guess her number. These women are rarely over 30 and often in there 20s. I am astounded at how many of them have slept with *hundreds* of men. As the show laughinly points out, to get some of these numbers some of the younger women would have to sleep with mulitiple partners every week… for years. They often laugh back and say they were ‘pretty wild’ in college. They often seem fairly proud of their big numbers. “I am woman… hear me rut.”
As I said above, if I’m starting a relationship with an ‘older’ woman I certainly don’t expect her to be a virgin. That said, I would appreciate some up front information from the women (without my even asking!) if she had rolled up any sort of a substantial number. What is ’substantial’? Well, maybe that should be part of the conversation but lets just say that if you ever considered yourself to be ‘pretty wild’ then you owe your prospective partner some information to allow them to judge the situation.
March 18, 2008 at 6:58 am
PolishKnight said,
I also don’t want to hang the results of women hooking up with hundreds of men only on feminism. Many men wanted women more “slutty” so that they could get casual sex more easily. Many men embraced the sexual revolution and the abortion culture hoping to score. Many did and not just the alpha males either.
About asking for the number or someone’s sexual background. It seems to me to be like a game of 20 questions. A woman might have only slept with a few men, perhaps, and this may make us feel better but what if she slept with a woman in college? We’d almost have to break out a questionaire to figure it out. But even so, maybe it’s a good idea. An older woman, or even a younger one in this culture, is likely to get diseases or even emotional ambivalence from their sexual past and men should know it just as much as a woman checks out a man’s job and car.
March 18, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Demosthenes said,
March 18, 2008 at 6:27 pm
fourthwire said,
As a woman, she no doubt BENEFITED from the feminazis’ war on men and boys.
She likely enjoyed those short-term benefits to women resulting from the steamrollering of America’s men.
Did she loudly tell the feminazis and their sycophants that they do not represent HER as a woman?
Did she insist that men enjoy equal rights, as women enjoyed burgeoning privileges, entitlements, at the expense of men’s rights?
Or has she only now begun to notice that all hell is breaking loose in our society, as the feminazis’ anti-man, anti-boy, anti-family policies have come home to roost…… and heaven forbid, women are being inconvenienced?
And then there’s your paragraph that REALLY made me nauseous:
“I also don’t want to hang the results of women hooking up with hundreds of men only on feminism. Many men wanted women more “slutty” so that they could get casual sex more easily. Many men embraced the sexual revolution and the abortion culture hoping to score. Many did and not just the alpha males either.”
So tell me, PK…. if women became more “slutty” because men wanted them to do so…. then why aren’t women becoming more LOYAL to their husbands?
Certainly men want them to be better mothers and more loyal wives.
If men’s wishes determine women’s behavior, then why are so many men being thrown out onto the streets with only the clothing on their backs, then forced to pay, pay, pay women every month or face Bubba in prison?
Has it started to sink in that if men must bear some responsibility for women’s own decisions, as you seem to believe, that it ought to follow that men would have had to have CONTROL over those women’s decisions?
So don’t hand me or any other man the responsibility for women’s “slutty” behavior.
Women decided for themselves, by and large to spread their legs in a prolific manner, to feel “empowered”, and to have as many sexual partners as they damned well pleased (until gravity began to take its toll, of course).
As card-carrying members of the evil patriarchy, men who counseled women to abstain from casual sex were denounced as “oppressing” those poor women.
Well, PK. I DO want to hang the results of women’s own sexual behavior (hooking up with hundreds of men) “on feminism”, not to mention on those women themselves.
Don’t be so quick to free women from taking responsibility for their own decisions to behave like sluts.
And try to remember just who had the ears of those women, telling them that engaging in promiscuous behavior was not only perfectly acceptable, it was “empowering”.
March 18, 2008 at 6:54 pm
emarel said,
It ain’t pretty reading. And it’s not becasue men wanted it this way.
March 19, 2008 at 11:38 am
PolishKnight said,
I think a lot of this is quibbling over terminology. For example, I said that the responsibility shouldn’t rest _ONLY_ with feminism for slutty women. I was merely pointing out that many men like slutty women and this is reflected by a media that men clearly buy into such as Howard Stern, Playboy, and other pornography. I know personally of many men who bought into feminism purposely to get more slut action. (No, that doesn’t include me.)
I don’t want to get into the blame game (just now). Some of this is a matter of circumstance. For example: Many young men want to sow their wild oats and not marry right away and for good reason. Many are simply not ready, yes? I sure as hell wasn’t. Our puritannical society of the time made casual sex and even pornography and other sexual releases unavailable causing men to pressure _all_ women to be more slutty. As St. Augustine put it: If you don’t have a sewer in your home, the shit backs up. If prostitution is illegal, ALL women are pressured to become them.
Feminists ironically didn’t want women to be more slutty (as a goal). Come now, do you view Hillary as a slutty woman? Or Anita Hill? These are women who actually attacked heterosexual sex in general to achieve power goals. They punished men for responding to slutty women and ultimately made workplaces into a sterile, cold environment.
On the contrary… I think (one) of the main threats to feminism is that it is so negative to heterosexuality that many normal young women are slowly starting to balk. They WANT men to pay healthy sexual attention to them ESPECIALLY in the workplace! They DON’T want the “option” of a lesbian relationship in leau of men. This is the big gorilla issue in the style sections of millions of metro dailies.
About Maurine: I think it would behoove us to not blame women for the actions of the feminist movement simply because feminism did provide benefits for them. It reminds me of the logic of leftists who argue that all whites should be blamed for racism against blacks because of the actions of white supremecists and slaveowners. I would even argue that it buys into feminist logic to treat women as equals by assuming that they should be as politically active as men. Healthy women who liked men may have simply decided to not get involved and just spend time taking care of the family and her man. We have to give women a healthy, reasonable role expectation precisely because feminism doesn’t do that for ANYONE. Does that make any sense?
March 19, 2008 at 11:52 am