I hadn't expected that writing about self-love would lead to a discussion of purity. It makes perfect sense now that I am here of course. To really love yourself in a good way, you have to believe that you are clean or capable of being made clean. So there is a sense in which purity seems like just the ticket.
Except that it isn't anymore. As I've said—and I don't think there is any room for dispute here—our culture has rejected purity as a moral virtue.
And it must be acknowledged that there were some very good reasons for doing so. For starters, purity is a double standard and sexist one to boot. Only women were expected to be pure. Men could sow their wild oats and then be "redeemed by the love of a good woman". Men might strive for purity and perhaps it was better if they did but they paid no serious price for failing to do so. The slightest blemish on a woman, however, condemned her forever.
Still, the shocking thing about the rejection of purity, is how quickly it went. In the mid 1960s the idea still dominates although it is clearly under attack. By the mid 1970s, it is defeated. How did that happen?
Well, mostly I think because it had become a taboo. Taboo morality, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, is a morality based on rules that everyone shares and acknowledges but the way of life that made these rules meaningful is long gone. A gentleman always walks on the outside of the sidewalk. Why? Well, originally so he could deflect runaway horses but my father in law still walked on the of the sidewalk until his death a little more than a year ago.
I use the example of my father in law because there is something unquestionably beautiful and admirable about what men like him did. And to replace that morality with one where men act like selfish jerks simply because the old morality no longer holds would be worse than to keep following a series of formal rules that no longer make sense. And that, I think, is the thing that MacIntyre misses. Taboo morality is not some weird contemptible fluke to be mocked and discarded. It is a beautiful and very human thing.
At its best, we see this attitude in some kinds of prayerful rituals that are kept on because these were the things done by our ancestors in the faith. With the dead in a dead language.
But purity was not accorded such respect. When it's time to go came, it was dispatched brutally and cruelly. A good example of this is the novels by writers such as John Updike, Phillip Roth and Norman Mailer. Like many in my generation, I find these novels unreadable and always have but I can sort of understand the feeling that went with them. After being raised on the morality of purity, they were tearing into it with all the abandon of (to borrow a metaphor from Raymond Chandler) a gangster with his first machine gun.
They felt justified in this destruction because they felt they had been lied to. And they felt that way because they really had been lied to. They'd been fed a steady diet of the moral superiority of women. A while ago, I mentionned this quote of Fulton Sheen's:
To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.That is the lie they were rebelling against. After being told from an early age that their desires towards women were base and unjustifiable and that they had to reject these desires to become worthy of a woman, these men started actually having sex with women and discovered to their shock that "A lot of women really like getting ______!" And they went a little crazy about that producing a whole raft of novels that are now unreadable but that meant a whole lot to them and other men and women of the era.
And hiding there is the key detail. Bear with me a second and go back to my father in law always walking on the outside of the sidewalk. To really work, that morality requires both sides to fall in. The woman has to grasp her part in the dance and willingly dance that part. And thus it was with the morality of purity. A man could only move to the outside of the purity sidewalk if the woman would slide to the inside purity role as he stepped back to go around to the outside.
And that is, I think, the key part of the story (and the one traditional moralists just can't bring themselves to see). The sexual revolution, which might also be called the rebellion against purity, happened because of women. The very fact that John Updike is now so easily disposed of tells us how little he mattered. The same is true of Hugh Hefner. It is the waves of young women who went gaga over pop stars and took to wearing less and less clothing and generally insisted on their right to be impure who made the revolution.
Men took note of what was happening and adjusted their responses as they thought appropriate. No teen-aged boy watching television coverage of Beatles-crazed girls losing it as the boys arrived at JFK in 1964 was ever going to believe Fulton Sheen again. Those girls were sex-crazed animals just like him and it was never going to be the same.
But there is a puzzle here. To have existed as long as it did, the purity taboo had to have been something girls and women really wanted to have. As unfair as it was sometimes, they preferred to be thought of that way. Why did large masses of girls suddenly decide otherwise?
aw, no love for updike?
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