Who wants to control your sexuality, who really is controlling it and who should be controlling it

Laws making sex outside of marriage illegal improve the bargaining position of women who want to get married, or stay married, or to maintain a strong bargaining position within marriage. Hence it is rational for women to support such laws.

That strikes me as very clever. Clever in a useful way. It's the mirror image of a cynical comment that was common when I was in college in the early 1980s: "Marriage is nothing but legalized prostitution." When clever people say admittedly shallow things like this, we are forced to think.

It seems to me that both claims are plainly false. Any man or woman who entered marriage in the belief that it was legalized prostitution would soon be far more bitter about their experience than anyone who entered marriage as a starry-eyed idealist expecting to float along on a cloud of romantic bliss. Likewise, while I'm sure that the notion that marriage would be stronger if men didn't have access to prostitution is part of the justification that some anti-prostitution activists make to themselves and others, I don't think it would make an iota of difference to the strength of marriage or marriages if it could be made illegal.

But what about pornography? That's the primary point of two authors Helen Smith calls our attention to. Michael Malcolm and George Naufal merely use the old progressive argument against prostitution as a way to frame a new progressive argument against pornography.

Traditionally, one of the reasons to enter into a marriage was sexual gratification. But as options for sexual gratification outside of marriage have grown, the need for a marriage to serve this function is diminishing. The NIH reports that the fraction of 20 year-olds who have engaged in premarital sex grew by about 50% between the late 1950s and the late 1990s. Besides premarital sex, another option is consumption of pornography, which has become widely more accessible since the proliferation of the Internet. 

The degree to which these extra-marital options for sexual gratification substitute for marriage is an open question. Friedman (2000), among others, has suggested that one of the reasons that prostitution is so socially abhorrent is that it competes with women who seek a stable marriage. While there is a small literature on the relationship between prostitution and marriage, there is almost no empirical work on the substitutability between pornography and marriage. This paper attempts to fill the gap.

Okay, this is delusional from the get-go. Traditionally, one of the reasons to enter into marriage is love. To reduce that to "sexual gratification" is to unconsciously apply a very cynical utilitarian psychology. Notice also that Malcolm and Naufal themselves seem to suspect that the the links are tenuous in the case of prostitution and marriage weakness. They are, nevertheless, willing to plunge forward into researching links between pornography and marriage weakness. And we should further notice the implicit assumption that in doing so they are advancing the interests of women!

This speaks well to the dual purpose of our paper: extra-marital sexual opportunities can reduce marital formation and stability, and this is an important point for policymakers and for society at large since marital formation is generally regarded in a positive light.

Helen Smith, whose blog I found out about the argument from, pretty much nails it,

So, marriage is all about what bargaining power women have and finding ways to get men married off to benefit society, women and children–and maybe get better “trading partners”? Seriously? There is no mention of the benefits to men directly, only how their participation will benefit others. So all men are to be sacrificed to the cause without thought to their rights, needs or desires? It’s no wonder they have turned to porn. Prostitution was made illegal — is porn next?

 But notice something really important about this argument that Helen Smith fails to note. That is that while this argument is being made in the supposed interests of women, it is actually being made by men!

Progressivism from its 19th century efforts to prohibit alcohol to its current efforts to prohibit pornography, fraternities, manspreading, mansplaining and, ultimately, any expression of male sexuality has always presented itself as a movement driven by the interests of women. Indeed, women have always played a significant role in progressivism. But men somehow always seem to end up holding the reins of the progressive movement; not men in general but certain men and we might say a certain kind of elite male who has an interest in controlling the male sexuality, meaning to control other men. These are elite men who want to do this controlling. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, these men tended to be clergymen. Today they tend to be the credentialed elite who dominate, universities, media and the management of government bureaucracies.

They, as I will note below, frame their arguments in utilitarian terms. They say, we should do this for the good of society and they identify the good of society with what women want. As I've said over and over again on this blog, there is a common assumption of the moral superiority of women when it comes to matters of sex. If you weren't paying attention, you might think that it is women in general who are pushing this sort of thinking when it is a small group of elite men and women that is mostly dominated by men at work.

An angry man, young or hold, might read Helen Smith's argument and think, "Nasty women want me to stop using porn because they want to control my sexuality." But that's not her point. She thinks that if men don't get any benefit out of marriage they will reject it in favour of other alternatives. Pornography is only one of these. A wealthy or good-looking man could just as easily pursue serial monogamy or casual sexual partners as an alternative. Or he could enter a monastery or become a Catholic priest. Or he could become a heavy drinker. But her point is not that some alternative is pulling men away from marriage but that marriage is no longer attracting them.

There is a subsidiary point that progressives, vile little puritans as they always are, will, rather than face the fact that they poisoned marriage in the first place, now begin to ban prostitution, pornography, monastic life and alcohol so as to eliminate even the solace that a man might find there. And that's probably true but the problems start with sexuality in marriage and not alternatives to it. (I remind you that the elite men who succeeded in prohibiting alcohol sales mostly continued to drink themselves; it matters a whole lot that Malcolm and Naufel don't seem to believe their own arguments.)

Let's take this back to virtue for this blog is always about virtue. The argument that Malcolm and Naufal is ultimately a utilitarian one. It's a pretty soft utilitarian argument as all they are willing to say about the utility of marriage is that "marital formation is generally regarded in a positive light". They don't really believe what they are saying but they are saying it anyway! The mealy mouthed argument they make anyway takes a utilitarian form we might paraphrase as, "Lot's of people think that marriage formation will make for the greater good of society therefore policy makers should restrict or prohibit extra-marital sexual gratification for men if it can be proven that this extra-marital gratification makes them less likely to marry." What we need is to replace that argument, an argument even its proponents aren't committed to, with a virtue ethics argument.

To do this, we don't need to sell anyone on marriage. The vast majority of young men and women still want to get married. What we need to change is the way we tell them to conduct themselves sexually.

I've done a lot of posts on this blog under the heading of "The advice they give". In these posts I look at advice about sexuality and about sexuality in marriage. I think, and you can judge this against your own experience as this post is already too long, that there are certain commonalities in this advice.

1. Men are generally advised to constrain their sexual desires and focus on the woman. We are told that if we are courteous, supportive, loving and respectful towards women, we can hope to be sexually gratified so long as our desires line up with what the woman wants to do anyway.
2. Women are told that they should always ensure that what they really want should always have priority over doing things merely to please men.
3. Neither approach is working. Women, it turns out, are not much attracted to sensitive, caring guys who suppress their own wants to focus on women's needs. Women who choose to make their own desires a priority, on the other hand, get confused because they soon realize they don't have a clue what they really want or that what they really want doesn't fit very well with the way they want to see themselves or with the way they want others to see them.

Okay, do I have an answer to my own challenge? Do I have a virtue ethics argument for marriage? Not yet but I'm working on it. I've even thought of going back to school to work on it.

I'm sure I'll have more to say on this in the future.

Love is ...

Those of my age will remember that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a line of panties that featured a painfully cute little cartoon character and a caption that always began "Love is ...". "Love" always turned out to be something saccharine and, as The Last Psychiatrist would add, something narcissistic because it was intended to make the wearer feel good about herself rather than encourage her to contemplate loving a man sexually, which, given the location of the printing, is what it should have been about.

Anyway, Dalrock, a blogger I know little about besides the fact that Instapundit reads him and often links to him has hit on something really important this week. I think he gets this one half right but that half is really good stuff:

One of the effects of feminism is that men of my generation have had a much wider opportunity to cook. I can’t think of any men my age or younger who don’t know how to cook. Moreover, I can’t think of any men of my generation or younger who don’t enjoy cooking. This is in stark contrast to the women of the same generations, who (typically) view cooking as an indignity. The reason for the difference in attitude boils down to what cooking is all about. Cooking is an act of love, an act of service to others. It is an opportunity to care for others in a very fundamental way, to literally nourish them through the work of your own hands. This is precisely what troubles the modern woman so much about cooking (or cleaning, or changing diapers). Serving others in the mind of a feminist is an indignity, so cooking, cleaning, or any other act of service and love is the object of revulsion. Women now actually compete to show off their miserliness in caring for others, each trying to outdo the rest in proving they are the greatest scrooge with love. It has gone so far that large numbers of women are quite proud of the fact that they have never learned to cook or otherwise care for others.

I say that this is only half right because he blames feminism for the problem. That's simply not true. The attitude he describes was already common in women of my mother's generation, which preceded second wave feminism.

I think the attitude at base here is very much like that attributed to Sex and the City, which was that women should be able to "F*&k like a man". The implication being that men had sex purely for pleasure without desire for love and commitment. The problem with that thinking is that while some men do indeed do that all the time and while most men try to do that at some times, most men don't do that most of the time. To really "F*** like a man in the way most men actually do it, a woman would need to want to care for, nurture, encourage and support the man she has sex with while willingly accepting that many of the times she wants his love he just isn't going to feel like it—in other words, it would mean going back to what our grand parents understood as married love.

A similar false parallel was drawn with work. The assumption was that men went to work for self-fulfillment and  that what women did while "trapped in the home" was done "for others". Women, tired of living for others, wanted to be "like men". The problem with that is that while some men no doubt did behave as imagined, most didn't. Millions of men went to jobs they hated as an act of love. They did it to nourish others by the work of their hands.

And thus the recurring issue of women wanting "to have it all". Women, rightly, sought the right to join the workforce but expected that, in doing so, they would find a way to be truer to themselves only to discover that even the best jobs consist mostly of tedious, boring work that can only be made meaningful if we do it as a service to others.

One of the many paradoxes of love is that you must experience the one you love as an obstacle to really love them. This so because it is the sense of their being an obstacle that allows us to recognize them as a truly other being whom we need to reach out to love. The person with whom we never felt frustrated or angry with, the person whom, indeed, we didn't sometimes wonder if life wouldn't be better without them, isn't a real person at all but a projection of our narcissistic fantasies. (And this applies most of all to our attempts to love God.)  Everytime we find ourselves crashing into them as an obstacle, that is an opportunity to love.

Remember Kate Bolick?

I’d spent the past year with a handsome, commitment-minded man, and these better qualities, along with our having several interests in common, allowed me to overlook our many thundering incompatibilities. 

Everyone of those "thundering incompatibilities" was an opportunity to love.

But feminism, despite its many problems, didn't create the sense that the most important thing in life is to be true to yourself and that we should try to eliminate from our innermost circle all the people who prevent us from being true our "authentic selves". Feminism is often ugly because it is a symptom of that disease but it is not the disease itself. Women and men were already starting to think the way before feminism and the ugly sort of feminism that is rightly deplored would not have been possible is we hadn't already made that prior move of thinking that the most important thing in life was to be true to ourselves instead of what it really is, being true to another.

(And, no, Shakespeare did not advise us to do this; Polonius is an idiot about everything else, that this spectacularly bad advice is exceptionally credited as a "modern" way to think tells us a whole lot about what is wrong with modern life and nothing about Shakespeare.)

A little light culture: It's a nice day for a white wedding dress

It didn’t matter that I had never dreamt of my wedding day or created inspirational tulle-filled scrapbooks as a little girl; I still knew exactly what was expected of me, and I did not want to disappoint.

That's TracyClark-Flory writing at Salon.  She planned to have a "feminist wedding" but found that, as the day got closer and closer that it was slipping away from her.

White dresses are a major sticking point. Did you know that white dresses used to symbolize virginity? Actually, no they didn't.* But that urban myth apparently makes it difficult for a feminist to wear one at her wedding.

The problem here is that there is no problem. A real act of rebellion would be to wear a white dress anyway even though you weren't a virgin. Well, it would be if anyone was trying to stop you. You can do anything you want at your wedding. You can wear school-bus yellow or silver lamé if that appeals to you. You could get married naked at a nudist colony, or wearing scarlet leggings and a teal blue tank top in Las Vegas, or dressed up like your favourite super hero in a movie theatre you rent for the occasion.

There are 923 words in Clark-Flory's essay. The word "I" appears 51 times. The word "my" occurs 25 times. "Me" makes 7 appearances. The word "he" referring to her future husband occurs twice (and both times he is urging her to stand up for her feminist principles). The word "his" referring to her future husband does not appear even once. The word "we" referring to something they are doing together appears once ("we got engaged") and, most tellingly, the "our" makes zero appearances.

This, by the way, actually has nothing to do with feminism, however much it may appear to. Clark-Flory's feminism is every bit as much an I-I-I-my-my-my affair as her wedding:

... I have no interest in defining what is feminist for other women. All I can speak to are my own feelings about my own feminism ...

All she can speak to are her own feelings about her own feminism. Clark-Flory has no trouble seeing that "modern girdle" is a contradiction in terms, and it is, but she can't see that "my own feminism" is no feminism at all.


* White wedding dresses became popular because Queen Victoria wore one. She picked white because she had some lace she wanted incorporated in her dress. They have remained popular since then because most women really, really, really like them.

The thought for the day

I'm not blaming the victim, I am observing a universal rule: the common denominator in all of your failed relationships is you.
                                                         The Last Psychiatrist

It seems to me that that is a really good place to start thinking about virtue. You can easily lie to yourself about any other measure but counting is just counting. How many failed relationships do you have? Not teen romances, as I've said before, they are supposed to end. But since you were twenty, how many?

Of course, we could do it with anything. How many times have you handed your assignments in late? But relationships seem more important.

Here's a question, "What if there is no better measure of your worth as a human being than your ability to make a successful marriage?"

Celebrating: the Patron saint of discount retail

Today is the feast day of Francis de Sales. Always the "de" and never translated as "of" for reasons that are kind of funny if you think about it. I own five books of saints and every single one of them unhesitatingly prints "Francis of Paola" but then "Francis de Sales". This says a lot about our idea of saints, and not just the way Catholics think about saints; it tells us that no one wants to suggest, even accidentally, that there might be a patron say of discounted retail prices.

Well, there ought to be and I hereby, on the basis of no legitimate authority whatsoever, add this to his patronage. Retail sales are a very good thing and the world is a better place for them. Those who hold them and those who attend them now have a patron saint.

And it seems to me, in that regard, entirely fitting that his most famous quote is: "Whoever preaches with love preaches effectively." And anyone who doubts that we live in a debased age, compare that believe with these sentiments where all distinction between moral persuasion and moral manipulation is obliterated.

In his honour, I give you this fascinating discussion:



Lots to comment on here, but for now I just want to highlight this fascinating tidbit from the above:

Ann Althouse: "It might be that there is something at a biological/sexual level with most human beings where they are more satisfied with the man in the dominant role."

Emily Bazelon: "Um, I don't now, you have to cite me some really solid study or else it is going to sound like [inaudible] baloney to me. How can we be wired for men to be in the dominant role."

Ann Althouse: "No, no, no listen to me, In. The. Actual. Sex. Act."

Emily Bazelon: "Oh, Oh I missed that part."

After which they proceed, Ms. Bazelon having no trouble accepting that possibility.

The thing that I have been highlighting in these "celebrating" posts is what has changed and what has not. In the 1980s, that discussion between two self-identified feminists was unthinkable.

Marital assymetry

This is a term that I found in some Austen criticism. It refers to a number of marriages Austen portrays in which one partner is clearly deficient. Mr. Collins is a good example. Another, and the one that this critic I am reading (John Dussinger) singles out is:

[Mrs. Allen] was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. Northanger Abbey

Nowadays, these people tend to be divorced. When I think of the single and divorced people I know and like I have to say I am not terribly surprised that most of them are. Most people I know are married but there are friends and relations who have made it into their late thirties or forties without getting married or, more frequently, without getting remarried.

They're good enough people. I like them all and dearly love some of them. But I don't sit around wondering why they just can't seem to meet someone because it's pretty obvious why they cannot. I keep hoping they will find someone to be happy with but I suspect that no one in their right mind would marry one of them. Nor does anyone other than themselves spend a lot of time wondering why their marriages didn't work out.

The thing about Austen is that she unhesitatingly blames Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Bennett and Mr. Collins for their respective predicaments. She sees all three as having failed as human beings. We might nod politely and change the subject when our divorced friends bemoan their fates but we don't, even to ourselves, hold them morally responsible. We don't think, "If you had spent your time developing a more amiable character you wouldn't be in this fix."

Perhaps we should.