Sort of political Monday

How in the world did that come up?
Let me preface this by saying I think the whole men are acting like frat boys because women are too threatening or something thesis is a crock. I suspect a lot of men are behaving like frat boys for the simple reason they can. It doesn't seem to be making them happy—a point I'll came back to next Monday—but it's not hard to see why they might try it just as it isn't hard to see why some women decide to be real-life Samantha Joneses.

That said, the author of the latest book pushing the men are being pussy-whipped into permanent frathood drew a really strange response the other day. The response is below the fold because I want readers to see the quote that caused the response naked first. Here it is:

Before [today], the fact is that primarily, a 20-year-old woman would have been a wife and a mother,” author Kay Hymowitz told the crowd of about 100 for the Manhattan Institute in New York City. Men would have been mowing lawns and changing the oil in their family sedans instead of playing video games and watching television. In previous decades, adults in their 20s and 30s were too busy with real life for such empty entertainment, Hymowitz says. “They didn’t live with roommates in Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Dupont Circle in D.C.

Read it a couple of times and try to imagine different things you might see to criticize in that quote (and I can see several myself). Then click the link and lean what Amanda Marcotte saw.

The day of Frigg

What she said
Nothing I could think to say on the subject of womanly virtue could top what Wendy Kaminer has to say over at The Atlantic, so I'll just point readers there. Here is the first paragraph:

Civil libertarian feminists have always been a political minority, but these days we seem on the verge of extinction. Reviewing the charges of sexual harassment underlying the Title IX complaint by a group of Yale students and alumnae, I can't find feminism -- at least not if feminism includes independence, liberty, and power for women. Instead I find femininity -- the assumption that women are incapable of fending for themselves in the marketplace of epithets or ideas, the belief that women are rendered helpless by misogynist speech and the sexist tantrums of their male peers.

A quote to ponder

Nothing has so filled me with shame and regret as what I have not done.

Lionel Trilling wrote that. I know the feeling. I don't know if it is a good way to understand life but I think just about everyone thinks that at least once in their lives.

I found it cited in this piece at City Journal.

Manly Thor's Day Special

Do women like courtly lovers?
Perhaps the question seems too stupid. "Of course they do," you say. "Why there is nothing more that women want in this brutal modern age than a return to courtesy and humility from men." Really? Because if that is what women really wanted, you'd think that more men would be cultivating it wouldn't you? I mean, even if only for very cynical reasons you'd think they would pretend long enough to get laid wouldn't you?

And there do seem hints of it. As Lewis says in The Allegory of Love:

To leap up on errands, to go through heat or cold, at the bidding of one's lady or even of any lady, would seem but honourable and natural to a gentleman of the thirteenth or even of the seventeenth century; and most of us have gone shopping in the twentieth with ladies who showed no sign of regarding the tradition as a dead letter.

I'm not so sure it was all that natural even in the thirteenth century. I'll tell you one thing that CS Lewis is far too genteel to say but I'm not: if you behave this way towards a woman, she may well let you and she may even take you shopping with her so you can carry her bags, drive her around in your nice car and buy her lunch but she sure isn't going to put out for you.

And we've all known guys who've tried this approach because we've all had to sit around drinking beers with the guy afterward while he bitterly criticized the woman in question and complained that "it's true, nice guys really do finish last."

Okay, this isn't a "game" or "seduction tips" site, so why go on about this. Well, because it is true: if you want erotic love from a woman courtly love is one of the worst ways to set about getting it. But you also ask, related to the above, if it is such a dumb way to get erotic love, why was so much literature ever devoted to it?

The answer to that is because it is a male fantasy. It's not the sort of fantasy men have while masturbating but rather the kind they have when they are without a woman to love. It's a sort of fantasy they have about what women fantasize about. I mention masturbation fantasies because, of course, the same guy who has the courtly love fantasy has those too and one of the things that drives the courtly love fantasy in the directions he goes is his certainty that real love cannot possibly be anyting like his erotic fantasies.

And there is the primary mistake. Assuming your erotic fantasies are not too weird, one of the big surprises of actually finding real love is that while fantasies are unrealistic, real women actually do crave sex and the actual stuff they respond to is much more like our sexual fantasies than it is like our courtly love fantasies.

We might miss this because there is a whole school of feminist and moral conservative paranoia that focus on the fear that men will become so addicted to fantasies or porn that real women will disappoint. If you want to see this paranoid argument about porn being better than reality thoroughly dispatched, go here. No really, go to that link and read it. Especially if you are a woman who has ever worried about whether your man masturbates too much. I mean it. If you have ever worried that some guy might lose his interest in his real partner because of porn or masturbation, go to this link right now and read the whole thing

Meanwhile, us guys who here in the guy room can ask ourselves a simple question. Think of a woman you like. Not some super hot babe you see but don't really know but an attractive woman you really like to talk to but who has some obvious flaws. In other words an ordinary woman you know and like. Okay, imagine that you have just learned that she thinks your attractive too and she is intrigued by you. No guarantee, no sure thing here—she is perhaps interested and that is all you know. Okay, here is your choice: you can go out with her for a drink alone together right now or you can jerk off to some really great porn. Which one do you want?

And that tells us something really important about courtly love: It was dreamed up by guys who didn't have such a choice. In much the same way that a bird in a cage can only imagine freedom as the opposite of being in a cage, a guy without a woman can only imagine "real" love to be the complete opposite of his masturbation fantasies.

I don't want to over play this hand: masturbation fantasies are not realistic either but the thing is we know they are fantasies. But reality is not and never will be the mirror image of a fantasy. What men forget when all they have is masturbation fantasies is that women do want to really get it. A lonesome guy I knew when we were both in our late teens once told me that he wished he could live in a world where women really did "all want to get it". What he couldn't see is that most of the women around him really did.

So he spent his life in pursuit of impossible dreams who let him grovel before them and serve him and then gave it to "some jerk" who didn't care. Meanwhile the girls he actually seemed to end up with angered him. There is a Charles Bukowski poem called "quiet clean girls in gingham dresses ..." that embodies the mindset perfectly:

all I've ever known are whores, ex-prostitutes,
madwomen. I see men with quiet,
gentle women ­ I see them in the supermarkets,
I see them walking down the streets together,
I see them in their apartments: people at
peace, living together. I know that their
peace is only partial, but there is
peace, often hours and days of peace.

What the guy in the poem never sees is that the whole thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if you see that clean, quiet girl in her gingham dress well, she's kind of hot isn't she.  She may be subtle, restrained, elegant, classy in public but you can imagine her all flushed, her pupils dilated, her eyes with that rather vacant look of total abandonment, her breasts heaving as she breathes harder as she gets more and more out of control. You've already imagined that haven't you. And you really are counting on her really wanting to get it? Am I right?

If not, let me assure you she wants you to take her shopping.

Some search terms that brought people here yesterday

1. "mad men 666" also "666 in mad men" and about twenty other variations on that. Several hundred people have come in on that every week for the last three weeks. I can always tell which shows are being rerun and even which countries they have been rerun in because there has been a sharp uptick in views on the relevant post lately.

2. "how to talk with your enlightened self" This is the one that cracked me up. I had to Google it myself just to find out where it was from. It comes from a book called Answers From Silence by Jeffrey Chappell. Here is a quote from the author:

At each time in your life, there was a part of you that was always there and that was always the same. Stay with that silent sense of self.

At each time in your life, there was a con artist in the wings willing to sell you a simple and ridiculously false approach to achieving happiness. If you were stupid enough to believe the others, you're probably stupid enough to believe Jeffrey Chappell too.  You're coming to this blog was a mistake: Stay with that silent sense of self.

3. "the silent generation" This is a steady draw. I get a few of these almost every day. It takes you to a post I'm often tempted to rewrite because it doesn't quite come together but hundreds of people are good enough to read it even now months after I wrote it so I'll just leave it as it is.

4. "anti princess movement" A hot topic of the moment that I happened to shoot my mouth of about a while ago. Because, you know, little girls never wanted to dress like princesses or ballerinas at any other time in history and it would be a cultural disaster to have feminine role models that were actually, you know, feminine.

5. "if personality is a series of unbroken gestures" Another steady draw. I suspect because people want to know who said it and where. My fond hope is that a few people who land here will come to consider the possibility that Fitzgerald intended to be ironic when he put those words in Nick Carraway's mouth. If you've just Googled here looking for it, it's from the Great Gatsby and Nick says it describing Jay Gatsby. And I'd humbly suggest the single most important word in the sentence is "if".

6. "sexuality nihilism" Well it's obvious why these two go together. Right? Actually, the more I think about it the less I want to know about the person who Googled that.

7. "we're flawed because we want". The most popular post I have ever written. Thousands of people have come here to read it. I suspect because they have all seen the Mad Men episode "The Summer Man" and they want to find this cool quote they only half heard while watching the show. And because I'm such a nice guy, here it is:

When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere. Just ask him. If you listen, he'll tell you how he got there. How he forgot where he was going. And then he woke up. If you listen he'll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel and dreamt of being perfect. and then he'll smile with wisdom, content that he realized the world isn't perfect. We're flawed because we want so much more.

And it wraps up with this, I think, rather shallow conclusion:

We're ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had.

That last bit ruins it in my opinion. It has a sort of English-major-who-just-smoked-a-joint feeling about it.

Authentic is another word for bogus

I know, that is not a stunning surprise to anyone who reads this blog. I had no idea, when I started writing this blog, what themes would emerge. I figured, was sincerely hoping, that some would. If I were to look back now and find no recurring themes, that would be a rather worrying thing. (Of course, if I was that inconsistent, I probably wouldn't notice.)

Anyway, one of the themes is authenticity; or, rather, one of the themes is that authenticity is a fraud.

I thought about that reading in the New York Times about John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley.

I should preface this by saying that Steinbeck is largely a forgotten guy nowadays and deservedly so. Like Sinclair Lewis, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates, he was writer whose fame was mostly a factor of his ability to reflect trendy intellectual ideas of his era back on the trendy intellectuals who produced those ideas in the first place.

But he was much beloved of liberal intellectuals of my parents age and, in fact, much beloved of both my parents. Worried that I had, as the old politically incorrect expression has, "gone off the reservation" a few years ago they gave me a copy of Travels With Charley a few years ago in the hopes that would bring me back. It didn't. I hated the book.

Here is what happens. Steinbeck and his dog Charley get in a camper van in the early 1960s and head out to find America. And before we sneer too much, it wasn't quite such a cliché at the time. Here is the thing, though: he didn't actually do it. Steinbeck may have thought about actually doing it but in the end he was too set in his ways and just made it up to get an America that conformed to what he wanted to find.

The only odd thing about it is that it took so long for the fraud to come to light. As the writer who figured it out, Bill Steigerwald of Reason, points out, uncovering the fraud was really grunt level research. The only credible reason for it not coming out long ago is that no one wanted to know.

And this is confirmed by the defences of Steinbeck from the academic world.For example, Jay Parini, who wrote a biography of Steinbeck said:

“I have always assumed that to some degree it’s a work of fiction. Steinbeck was a fiction writer, and here he’s shaping events, massaging them. He probably wasn’t using a tape recorder. But I still feel there’s an authenticity there.” 

"I still feel there's an authenticity there." In other words, he really wants to believe and that is all the confirmation he needs.

Oh well, that's okay then. Really, why even bother with truth, let's just ask intellectuals what they "sense" is "true" and go with that? Except of course, that intellectuals say the same thing without irony.  So long as the "truth" reinforces the right moral outlook, they don't much care.

One thing you can be sure of is this: if you are inclined to believe things that feel authentic to you, you will never be surprised. You'll be disappointed but never surprised because you'll be so used to being disappointed.

Greek manners and Gothic morals

So what does CS Lewis claim about courtly love. Well, he claims this:

Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. Neither the form nor the sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving indelible traces on our minds. We shall understand our present, and perhaps even our future, the better if we can succeed, by an effort of the historical imagination, in reconstructing that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression.

Lewis thinks what all academics think; he thinks the period he is studying is a crucial one in the development of modern thought and culture and that studying it will enable us to understand not just this period but the periods that come after. And that, rather than logic or reason, is the principal reason he is so gung ho to claim that an emotion that never existed before was invented in the 11th century in Provence.

Many of the features of this sentiment, as it was known to the Troubadours, have indeed disappeared; but this must not blind us to the fact that the most momentous and the most revolutionary elements in it have made the background of European literature for eight hundred years. French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.

Well, no. But let's humour him a while. Let's forget the most ludicrous part of his claim—that an actual new emotion was created—and let's consider the possibility that there were a new series of cultural trappings for relationships between men and women created during this period and that these cultural trappings remain very important for some people in our society.

For Lewis is well aware that most people aren't much influenced by it.

As for the matter, what have we to do with these medieval lovers - 'servants' or 'prisoners' they called themselves - who seem to be always weeping and always on their knees before ladies of inflexible cruelty? The popular erotic literature of our own day tends rather to sheikhs and 'Savage Men' and marriage by capture, while that which is in favour with our intellectuals recommends either frank animalism or the free companionship of the sexes. In every way, if we have not outgrown, we have at least grown away from, the Romance of the Rose.

Okay, so most popular and intellectual literature of Lewis's day seems to have dumped this stuff. So who still cares? Lewis thinks someone does, or ought to care. I think a lot of people did and do care and here are some reasons they might.

1. Anyone who does certain kinds of literary criticism will care a whole lot for starters. The Troubadours were a huge influence on Dante and Petrarch and, consequently, on the entire subsequent history of love poetry—most notably, on the love poetry of Shakespeare. In The Allegory of Love Lewis makes just this point but he mentions only Petrarch. Why not Dante?
2. Well, that leads us to the second reason to still care, the understanding of erotic love we find in the Provençal troubadours has an enormous influence on Catholic piety. Lewis talks his way all around this point without ever quite seeing it. And that weird mix of sex and religion has had a huge influence in English literature (Something I have called the English Romantic Catholic Tradition).
3. Finally, the love lyrics of Provence have had an enormous influence on the field of fantasy fiction. It was a  field that began with the Gothic romances of the late 18th century but was undergoing a significant revival in Lewis's day and one of the key figures was a guy named CS Lewis.

And thus it is perhaps not surprising to find two contradictory drives in Lewis. One is a push to prove there was something new and distinctive and deeply influential about this "new" vision of love  that sprung in the 11th century and had never existed before. The second was deep need to differentiate himself and his own deeply romanticized account of love and Christianity from what went before.

Tomorrow, a bit of a  side trip into the peculiarly male aspects of courtly love

This series begins here.
The next post will be here when there is a next post.