Greek manners and Gothic morals

That piece I linked earlier today, has the following interesting observation:

But perhaps another reason women are losing it is that they're repeatedly told that they're no different than men-and many believe it, particularly in the realm of sex.

This, of course, is clearly not true. Not in the realm of biology, as "Manning Up" reminds us; not in the realm of emotional health-a new book, "Premarital Sex in America," details the heightened correlation between female promiscuity and depression; and not even in terms of interpersonal communication. The irony is that many of the "empowered" true believers, certain we're all androgynous frat boys now, often end up catering to the child-man's every whim.

What Heather Wilhelm  is pointing to here is a growing body of evidence that says that women pay a steep emotional price for casual sex.

What Wilhelm does not acknowledge is that men also have an Achilles heel in this post-sexual revolution world. We pay a far higher price for failures of serious relationships and marriages than women do. Knowing that, it will come as no surprise that two thirds of divorces and eighty percent of living together break ups are initiated by women.

Put those two facts together—the higher price that women pay for casual sex and the higher price men pay for relationship failure—and you have all that you will ever need to know why men and women behave the way they do. Much of that piece by Wilhelm wonders what can be done to stop today's men from acting like frat boys and she suggests that at least part of the problem originates in women's behaviour towards men. There is no doubt something in that but I think she misses an obvious point that needs to be shouted out here:

These child-men or frat boys or what you will, are all behaving perfectly rationally!

There is no rational reason for them to do anything but what they are doing. The irrational thing is love. That is what makes Romantic love such a distinctive thing, it begins with the assumption that love is an irrational thing.

We are apt to miss this because one of the first things that proponents of Romantic love do is to burden it down with all sorts of rules. But the rules aren't there to make the love rational. They are there because it is irreducibly irrational.

By the way, to imagine that other people will start to behave better if you change your behaviour first has another name: manipulation. We see this one all over the place, even from the pulpit. And now in the so-called battle of the sexes. But its manipulation pure and simple.

This series begins here.

The next post will be here.