A little heavy culture: Disengaged?

Gauis made a comment on one of yesterday's posts that got me to put so much effort into my reponse that I think I'll make it the basis of today's post.

The comment is about the insolubility  of modern arguments pitting rights against morality (and his argument is reminiscent of Alisdair McIntyre's arguments at the beginning of After Virtue.)

I think the most interesting thing is the mix-and-matching of two arguments, which you could call the "public policy" argument and the "morality argument." And this is on both sides. Neither people who feel strongly that gay marriage is wrong on moral-religious grounds, nor people who feel strongly that it is necessary for reasons of justice-rights-morality, are likely to be convinced by arguments that gay marriage is either beneficial or harmful to society. That’s both because such arguments can never be as fully scientific as they claim to be (whose society? What’s ‘harmful’? what’s ‘beneficial’? How can you prove this? Aren’t such arguments inherently ideological? Etc.) and therefore not convincing, but also because (I think) people recognize legal norms as basically the shadow or simulacrum of ‘real’ morality, and to a degree they hold back from recognizing legal-societal norms as fully legitimate.

I think that is exactly right. and I added the following.

At some level, that [meaning seeing "legal norms as basically the shadow or simulacrum of ‘real’ morality"] is inevitable. There is always going to be a gap between a set of legal moral principles and what we believe for ourselves. What seems to have happened lately in our culture is that we no longer even pretend to think that the morality embedded in the law is real. Somewhere on YouTube there is a video of some of the people now loudly proclaiming that same-sex marriage is a right saying that marriage is necessarily between a man and a woman in an equally self-righteous tone. Liberals are fully engaged in mass morality but they think it is endlessly malleable, which is another way of saying it doesn't really exist.

It makes me think of a line originally in the Ferris Bueller script but cut from the final version, "It took you twenty years to find out you don't believe in anything?"

Christians, OTOH, are more and more detached. My wife made a presentation to a group of Anglicans in their 20s and 30s on popular culture a few years ago. These were pretty typical Anglicans, which is to say pretty easy going and willing to accommodate their practices to make living in the modern world easier. The jarring discovery, as my wife put it elsewhere, was that even these easy-going types had created their own world separate from the common culture. She couldn't get them to even begin to engage issues arising from it. For them the only morality that matters is between them and God, except that you wonder how much separate existence they attribute to God as he always seems to tell them they can do the things they really want to do.

I wonder to what extent this is driven by modernism? Modernism has seen a huge revival as the generation raised on Ikea aesthetics have become adults, parents and leaders. As the Lemon Girl and I were saying just the other day, it's not as if the problems that caused modernism to collapse in the early 1960s have been solved or magically gone away. And yet modernism has seized us all by like some sort of irresistible sexual impulse might do.

I am now reading a great little book called Decadent Enchantments which is about how Gregorian chant was revived at the abbey of Saint Pierre at Solesmes. It's a fascinating story and is very well told by Katherine Bergeron. She makes two fascinating distinctions. (Fascinating to me, anyway, I suspect this may end up being the least-read post in the history of this blog.)

The first distinction is between the situation at the end of the French revolution versus the normal decline and fall of cultures. Most cultures leave some ruins. Which is to say that, however much wanton destruction takes place, there are usually ruins that become ruins through decay. The situation for a religious revival at the end of the French revolution was different. Everything thing had been destroyed or, worse, removed from its historic setting and placed in a museum. The French word "vandalisme" (the source of our English word) was coined to describe this new kind of destruction. Bergeron says that the restorers saw what was left as an era of debris rather than an era of ruins.

For the Romantic spectator, then, the violent dislocation of historic monuments offered an image not so much of decay as of debris. The sight of such fragmented remains [in a museum] could produce no meaningful "effects", to use Chateaubriand's word, because these broken pieces no longer possessed the aura of pastness. It was the very existence of debris, a vulgar index of revolutionary change, that seemed to enable this new Romantic ideal of decay. Decay emerged as a countersign, a shadowy figure of not-change imagined, by necessity, as aura surrounding the now lamented natural ruin was a haunted sign, a ghostly specter of lost presence. Decay as such, together with the past plenitude it embodied, became poetic at the moment when debris had effectively taken it's place. (From Decadent Enchantments by Katherine Bergeron, p. 4)

That should be familiar to readers Brideshead Revisisted as it is exactly the attitude of Charles Ryder. I think it needs some work as no fully sound argument will include ugly expressions like "pastness" and "not-change".

Anyway, she then goes on to distinguish between that Romantic attitude and a later Modernist understanding that saw restoration as possibly "recreating" a form of life that "may have never existed".

It is perhaps not surprising that, perched on a hinge between two centuries, the figures of Pothier and and Mocquereau should be seen to swing in such different directions, betraying historical orientations that might be called, for convenience's sake, Romantic and Modern. For Pothier, Gregorian history appeared as an the aura of time imaginatively experienced by one who, standing at the end of the historical continuum looks back—collecting the accumulated reside of the past into a single aesthetic moment. For Mocquereau, such history appeared as a new beginning, a field of possibilities so vast it's ultimate truth, though glimpsed in the present, could only be assigned to some distant future.

The odd thing about right now is that "Modernism" itself has become part of the debris that the Ikea generation has picked up and "restored". Progressives and the few remaining liberal Christians  tend to be "Romantic" about this restored Modernism—that is they see it as an opportunity to put themselves at the end of an historical continuum. The group I see myself in, which includes a lot of the younger Christians I have been working with, on the other hand, tend to be "Modernist" about a restored Romantic Christianity, seeing it as fragmented but offering a glimpse at an ultimate truth to be realized in the future.

A few (incomplete) thoughts on same-sex marriage

Note: No thoughts about Augustine's Confessions today. I read nine more chapters yesterday but have not even begun to digest them yet.

Megan McCardle has written a very good piece on same-sex marriage and adoption. She is responding to some who have argued that one social benefit of making same-sex marriage generally available would be that there would be more parents available to adopt children. Why would this be a good thing? Because there are a lot of children out there waiting to be adopted who need parents goes this new argument. It continues with the claim that, even if you don't think a same-sex couple are the best parents, you should at least acknowledge they would be better parents than no parents.

One problem, as McCardle ably points out, is that these children aren't going without adoptive parents from lack of demand. There are thousands of parents who want to adopt and who go begging. They just don't want to adopt the children that, well, that nobody wants to adopt. The real problem is that there are good reasons for that.

... most are not lingering in the foster care system because of a shortage of infertile people who want to be parents.  They are in the foster care system because caring for those precious babies would be a difficult, heartbreaking job. 

And it should be added that it would be a heartbreaking job with very little likelihood of ending with you watching the child grow up to be an independent person with a job and family of their own.

I don't need to say anything more an the subject because McCardle has said all that needs to be said. But there is something else about it that strikes me and it is the easy assumptions that lie underneath the argument that McCardle dismantles.

And the persistence these easy assumptions is something that has troubled me about the pro-same-sex-marriage argument from the very beginning. It's this easy assumption that because you have loving committed marriages between lots and lots of heterosexual couples then you should be able to have the same thing between lots of same sex couples. And maybe you can but the pro side of this debate insists on taking that as already proven and it's not.

How does this tie to adoption and parenthood? Because one of the things that has tended to define heterosexual marriage is that acceptance of and care for children. (Even for difficult children.) The reason the hey-same-sex-marriage-can-solve-our-adoption-problems argument even gets started is a casual assumption that gay couples (lesbian couples being able, with some manœuvering, to have children of their own) will just be lining up to have children and will cheerfully adopt children no one else wants. But is there any reason at all to believe this?

Is there any reason to believe that gay men seeking to get married want the same things that heterosexuals want? For example, while it is true that sexual infidelity is fairly common in heterosexual marriages, most heterosexual couples start off meaning to be faithful and more than half of them apparently succeed. If, on the other hand, you read what a lot of advocates of gay marriage say, you quickly see that they tend not to see fidelity as a very important thing. That's a huge shift and the potential cultural impact here is significant.

The conservative version of the environmental argument goes as follows: you can't change just one thing. You can't take an institution that has been between a man and a woman and make it open to other combinations and expect nothing else to change. Same-sex marriage will have multiple effects on the institution of marriage. There is no reason to believe that they will all be good or even to believe that some of them won't be very bad indeed. We just don't know.

But it looks like we're going to find out.

Are teenage girls really the pathetic losers their "defenders" claim they are?

"Thigh gap" it's the latest threat to pathetic loser girls. ABC did a report on it [Warning: that link causes a video to auto-play]. Well, they talked to four girls anyway.

A new body trend is apparently becoming an obsession among teenage girls.

It’s the thigh gap — a clear space, or gap, that can be seen between the thighs when a girl is standing with her knees together. Some runway models have it, and teen girls want it.

“Good Morning America” sat down with four high school juniors from a New Jersey Chapter of Students Against Destructive Decisions to discuss this latest trend.

The four girls told ABC News’ Juju Chang that they all had friends that were intent on achieving the thigh gap.

Four girls told a reporter that they had friends who were trying to achieve "thigh gap" and that makes it a news story? Seriously!

Notice that all four girls attribute it to others.

Here is something you can take to the bank, when teenage girls sit down to gossip and one or more of them say they have friends who are doing some outrageous thing, they are lying! They probably all also "have friends" who have hooked up with fifty-year-old drug dealers through Craig's List or any other nonsense that is going to make them the centre of attention in the conversation of the moment. Bullshit doesn't get any more predictable than this.

More damaging, however, is the way attractive role models for women are always portrayed as damaging to young girls. Not by young girls themselves, mind you, but so portrayed by middle aged female journalists. And it's not like middle-aged journalists might have an interest or biased here right?

Here's a thought, what if middle-aged women felt threatened by young woman? Can you imagine that happening? I know, and maybe water is wet too. Well, suppose this unlikely thing were to take place. It wouldn't be inconceivable in such a situation that older women might want to imagine that young women are helpless victims of image makers. That would take some of the edge off the threat.

And what better way to reinforce this than to run a steady stream of stories suggesting that young women were ruing their health in the pursuit of various body fads that a cruel and heartless entertainment industry is forcing on them. I mean, how many women in their teens and early twenties do you think watch Good Morning America? The demographic for that show is mostly women three or four decades older than that.

I started re-reading Augustine's Confessions last night ....

I could not honestly claim that my past readings of it were terribly profound. The first time I read it, I skimmed it so as to be prepared for a university lecture. The second time I read it was about fifteen years ago. I long had thought that I should re-read it and one day I saw a beautiful, leather-bound copy of it in a bookstore. I bought that copy and brought it home and read it in the bathroom. It's a good book for bathroom reading as most of the chapters are short enough to read during a visit to those facilities.

That second time I read it "looking for wisdom", which is to say that, much like a westerner who "goes Buddhist", I read it look for bits that would confirm the things I already wanted to believe. Not surprisingly, I found what I was looking for.

Reading the first ten chapters last night, I was struck by two things. The first is that Augustine is not an individualist. Well, duh! I know but "individualism" is usually just a word. We don't think of meaning when we say it so much as we think of any of a number of well-worn clichés.

Augustine's first remarks about his sins are about his sins as a baby. He admits that he doesn't remember any of these sins but concludes that they were there based on his observations of other babies. That's a rather staggering thing. Right from the get-go he assumes that sin is an aspect of our nature as human beings. This is clear if we ask a question that Augustine doesn't ask himself (probably because it didn't occur to him as a question worth asking): How do you know know that you sinned if you can't remember? Augustine's implied answer: Because that's what babies are like; they are sinners.

He does give us examples of what he means. He mentions that babies will resent another baby having access to the breast. Why, he asks, given that the breast is abundantly flowing, would a baby want to deny another baby access to what it needs.

For us, that is a bizarre way to see things. We tend to think that the baby couldn't know any better. It is unaware of the needs of others; it may even be unaware of the existence of others as separate beings. We would be inclined to argue that the baby couldn't sin because it was incapable of making a decision about how it responds to others.

Augustine would be more likely to respond by saying that in exempting the baby we are exempting sin. His view was that sin was a kind of disorder that inclines us to do bad things. It's not the decision that makes us sinful, it's our desire. That's the second thing that struck me. What follows from that, it seems to me, is that our modern understanding of morality is completely at odds with what Augustine would have imagined as the goal of being cleansed from sin. Our modern morality (whether deontological or consequentialist) is all about making better decisions. Augustine sees sin as part of our very make up. And I'll leave it there for now because I have only read the first ten chapters. Of course, I have an idea of what is coming but I'm am trying to reread the Confessions as if for the first time so I am going to try and forget what I think I know.

Oh yeah, before getting to the sins of his youth, Augustine goes through a series of meditations on the incomprehensibility of God. Nothing finite could understand what it cannot contain and the finite cannot contain the infinite. That must, of course, connect to sin but I don't know how yet, so I just note it.

Chevalier de Seingalt

Today is the two-hundred and eighty-eighth anniversary of the birth of Casanova. You want to read part or all of his memoirs at some point in your life. Ideally, you want to read all once and revisit bits every few years so as the impulse strikes you. You want to read it all once not because every page is wonderful, there are boring bits, but because you want to get the real thing and that is a very difficult thing to find in the various excerpts that get published from time to time.

The thing you are most likely to miss in most of the excerpts is Casanova's very real and very serious religious beliefs. It is no surprise to find that Casanova was censored right from the beginning. It might surprise you to find that he was censored for his religious and political views before anything else. And that remains true to this day. Publishers of modern editions probably don't think of themselves as censors but they are. They "bravely" publish the sex stuff and leave the religious views of Casanova out.

I'll come back to that.

Seduction

Although Casanova is famous for talking women into opening their thighs for him, his skill in convincing men to open their wallets for him was considerably more important to his success. His favourite targets were Enlightenment figures who thought of themselves as being very good at seeing through superstition and pretense. Then, as now, the guy who thinks he is is the smartest guy in the room is the easiest mark.

He particularly liked to pick on Freemasons. They thought of themselves as heroic freethinkers (and there are even some today who continue this myth) Casanova immediately grasped that Freemasons were a bunch of gullible rubes and his first move on arriving in any new city was to do a little social networking in Freemason circles to find a likely mark.

An interesting aspect of Casanova's success as a con artist, and also relevant to his success seducing women, is that his reputation preceded him. His marks knew what sort of guy he was. This seems to have made him more, rather than less, attractive to both his various male victims and his various female lovers.

Casanova's techniques

The women were less likely to be victims. Or, to put it another way, they were already victims of other men when Casanova met them. This because the context that his sexual affairs took place in was completely different from our own time. At that time, indeed, for most of history, almost the only way a woman could find economic and social security was if some man granted it to her. Women either entered into marriages for protection or status or they became dependent on male protectors to whom they acted as mistresses. If not married, the protection offered could be very short term, perhaps only a day or for a few hours.

Casanova's primary technique then was to offer these women an escape from either drudgery to the securely married or to offer an escape from fear to the unattached woman being exploited by another man.

One of the more important things to grasp is that Casanova wasn't an unusual type for his times. If he stands out, it is a matter of degree rather than of kind. There was lots of seduction of the type he did going on and it was subject to considerably less censure than a man who set about seducing other mens' wives and girlfriends would be be subjected to today. Casanova differed from the common seducer in two respects, he did it much more often than others and he wrote, and wrote well, about what he had done.

Where Casanova did get into trouble it was not for doing what he did but doing it so often and so shamelessly. By analogy, you might think of speeding today. Everyone speeds today and does so with little risk of criticism provided they keep it within certain limits. So too, just about any man of Casanova's era, including a few members of the clergy, could set about sexual adventures with women who were married or other wise attached without risk so long as they didn't cause scandal or do it so unrestrained a fashion that others were forced to notice.

It was also the case that shame attached to being a cuckold at that time (an aspect that still remains true today). A man was supposed to keep his wife under control and while the moral standards of the time allowed that he could deal with her harshly if he caught her, he still would be an object of mockery. Once a man was sure he had an heir, he hand considerable incentive to not notice  what his wife was up to provided (again) she and her lover had the decency to be secretive enough about it that she didn't shame her husband.

Casanova was pretty good at avoiding scandal, he wasn't so good at being restrained. You can work out his second technique from that, however, and that was that he was always on the make. Generally, successful seduction artists don't talk about this aspect of what they do much and they don't talk about it for reasons of pride. It's far more flattering to make it sound like sex just drops into your lap rather than acknowledge that you are constantly snuffling it out. It is also more self-flattering to leave out the many women who turn you down for every one that accepts.

Casanova's third technique wasn't really a technique so much as a disposition. He tended to fall in love with women very easily. As some Catholic moralists like to say, if physical chastity is a challenge for men, emotional chastity is a struggle for women. The feeling that she has power over a man is an intoxicating one for a lot of women and the ease with which Casanova fell in love gave women this power. Once they knew they had it, they used it recklessly, thereby ceding a lot of their self control.

The second-to-last technique was one I've already broached in writing about his success as a con man. Casanova never pretended to be a nice guy. All the women he pursued knew they were being pursued by a seduction artist. They knew he was a rogue and they knew he wasn't the sort they wanted to have a permanent relationship with. Not incidentally, they also knew he wasn't going to cling to them.

His final technique was a little contradictory. Although he let women think of them as a seducer and a rogue, he was as kind and generous as he could be with them.  He offered them love and tenderness that was missing from their lives.

And it worked.

Sin

The final lesson from Casanova is about Catholic sexual morality. What he did was then, as it is now, condemned as serious mortal sin by the church. Neither the moral law nor its interpretation were much different from what they are today. But the application was different. It was understood that men were just like that. They weren't as much like that as Casanova but they were the same thing to a lesser degree.

There is a much-quoted ditty from Hilaire Belloc that runs as follows:

“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!” 

He doesn't mention sex but it also tended to be quite freely available where the Catholic sun did shine.  That was beginning to change during Casanova's time with a new moral rigorism that began with the Jansenists but was far from unique to them. This is not to say that what Casanova did is morally justified. Reading his memoirs, I think it highly unlikely that even he would deny that he was a sinner. But he lived in an era that, unlike ours, expected most people to sin sexually and then repent.

I would add that it is pretty clear that Casanova didn't get as much pleasure or sense of satisfaction from his sex life as he ought to have done. He would have been much happier had he lived a much more restrained life. That said, he was too much of a restless risk taker to ever have done so. He had, again in Catholic moral terms, seriously disordered desires. But Jesus loves such people and we should pray for his salvation.

Happy Birthday Jacques!

Decadence: for those who came into this world too late

With this post I sign off until Tuesday next. Wishing all a blessed Paschal weekend.

"... he shrunk more and more from the realities of life and above all from the society of his day which he regarded with an ever growing horror—a detestation which had reacted strongly on his literary and artistic tastes; he refused, as far as possible, to have anything to do with pictures and books whose subjects were in any way connected with modern existence.”  

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

" ... consider, if it please you, the need of my afflicted soul ..."

Manimals!

Marni Battista calls herself a "life coach" and she calls the organization she founded "Dating with Dignity". She also calls men "Manimals" and the "Manimal species". There isn't a lot of dignity in that. (Of course, men sometimes use similarly degrading concepts to describe women, I sometimes do it myself, but it's odd to talk this way when advertising yourself as someone who cares about "dignity".)

I know I go on a lot about narcissism here but think about that for a moment. The concept she is pushing for her customers is "dating with dignity" and she takes it for granted that they will take this to mean their own dignity and no one else's.

How did we get here? By abandoning the belief that there are real moral truths. When morality becomes merely a matter of competing personal preferences then it also becomes merely a matter of manipulation. Moral argument becomes moral manipulation for the simple reason that that is all it can be. If we believed in moral truths outside ourselves then we could appeal to them.

It's important to note that you don't have to have a sure grasp on the truth in order to believe it's there. I can point at some moral truth that I believe in and you can reply that I'm just wrong about the moral truth. The point is that we are arguing about things that are outside of us. Take that away, by saying that all moral truth is just a matter of personal desire and, therefore not subject to rational argument, and the only move left to you is moral manipulation.

Which brings me back to Marni Battista.

When you're finally ready to remarry post-divorce, you need to know what characteristics to look for in a husband. Although you've been married previously, we're willing to guess that you didn't have a checklist before you took your vows! To help when you're looking for a long lasting, serious(ly) fun relationship that has the possibility of leading to marriage, here are five traits you should look for in a guy ...

Notice whose needs are completely absent from that discussion.  Similarly, while it's pretty clear we're going to be analyzing men in terms of their strengths and flaws, there is no suggestion that the woman reading this article might consider her own strengths and flaws.

She is not held entirely blameless. We are "willing to guess that you didn't have a checklist before you took your vows!" But note that the implication is that she didn't think carefully enough about her choice. She failed herself, in other words. There is no suggestion that she might have failed the man whom she made marriage vows to. And that is a little odd given that the odds that the problem with her marriage were her fault are at least fifty fifty.

Marni Battista is in the business of selling advice and she no doubt grasps that the market for advice that encourages people to be self critical isn't nearly as big as the market that encourages people to look for Prince Charming. That is what she is selling. She's more up-to-date though; she calls the prey being sought "the one" or "boyfriend material" rather than Prince Charming.

Okay, Mr. Smart Manimal, what should she do then?

You might think that women might simply reverse the questions Battista applies to the men these women might date and asking them of themselves would make the thing work better. But it's not that simple.

Battista tells divorced women starting to date that they should look for a guy whose "actions match his words", "has strong communication skills", has the ability to "take charge and make decisions", "has a great sense of humor" and "shares a similar value set". First off, that is a pretty obvious list. You could have come up with that without any help yourself. She isn't telling you anything, she's flattering you.

And what are the odds that you will be fully honest with yourself if, for example, you asked whether your actions match your words? Well, of course they do, you say. Okay, but has anyone ever accused you of being dishonest about your real motives? Your ex maybe? More simply, do others have trouble figuring out what you really want? Do you sometimes have trouble figuring out what you really want? Have you, for example, ever purchased something that you really thought you wanted only to find that you never made much use of it?

Since the answer to most of those questions is going to be yes, why is it fair to ask that of the person you want to have a relationship with? It's perfectly reasonable, when shopping for a car or a dishwasher, to ask for something that is dependable and reliable. I want my dishwasher to clean the dishes every time I push the button even though I myself tend to not do the dishes if I don't feel like it. I can't treat another human being like that. The advice here isn't crazy, you do want someone you can count on but it only makes sense to apply that standard to others to the same extent you apply it to yourself.That is to say, since you know you often fail to be consistently good at these things, then you can't expect him to be either. You also can't expect him to have any better self knowledge than you do and, be honest, yours isn't as good as you would like it to be.

The next one is much the same. Here is Battista on communication skills:

Guys who are able to identify their feelings, express them appropriately and manage them will most likely have an easier time being in a relationship with a mature woman who has the same skills. Although it can be attractive at first when a guy is closed off and mysterious, as time goes on you're probably going to get frustrated.

That's good stuff but if a guy seems "closed off" it's just as likely that the fault lies with you for being inattentive as it is that he has poor communication skills. Maybe you're just not very good at understanding others or, a slightly more brutal point, maybe you don't tend to notice other people's feelings because you are too selfish to notice. As long as I'm being brutal, let me remind you that you are divorced and therefore you have something to prove about yourself.

By the way, situations where the other person seems to be bad at identifying, managing or expressing their feelings are often the result of neglect on your part. If someone is hurt and you don't notice it, they will try other tactics. The longer you fail or refuse to be attentive to their feelings, the more extreme or bizarre their efforts to make you pay attention will get.

That a man should "take charge and make decisions" is an interesting one. Is he also required to only make decisions you agree with? You want him to take charge, okay but what if he tries things that you don't like? This one also doesn't work if, as too often the case, a woman uses this requirement as a way of weaseling out of all responsibility for making things work. You have to be very good at telegraphing your feelings for this to work. You have a right to expect him to be attentive to your feelings and needs (including the ones you aren't very good at understanding or expressing) but you also have to be open-minded enough to recognize that you don't always understand yourself and willing to let him lead things in directions that are new to you. (You also have to be very good at being consistent about and at making it clear where your private concerns that you don't want him to be masterful about are.)

He should have a great sense of humour? Note the requirement is not for a "good" sense of humour but a "great" one. It's also worth noting that there is a double standard here and in the previous category. Battista grasps that women want a man who can " a guy who can masterfully solve a problem or protect you from a threat" or who can "you laugh when you're feeling down or helps lighten up your mood". Nobody even pretends that these are essential requirements going the other way. Yes, there are women who can masterfully solve problems or who can lighten your mood when you are feeling down but you won't see many romantic comedies wherein a woman wins a man over by doing these things. (and before you get snarky, remember that women are the primary consumers of romantic comedies; it's not sexist men who are responsible for this double standard.)

Here is the rude question, given that there is a general cultural agreement that men don't seek these qualities in women to the same degree that women seek them in men, what is the explanation? Is it simple sexism? Or is it the case that men look for other qualities in women? Those questions are rhetorical of course. Everyone knows that men don't especially seek those qualities in women. When a man praises a woman's sense of humour he either means that a) she laughs at his jokes or b) she is good at making sharp witty observations. He doesn't mean she makes him laugh and helps stabilize his emotions with humour when he is out of control.

Battista is, as I said at the top, merely flattering her audience. Women already want these things and they know they want these things. Reading an expert telling them to look for these things doesn't give them any new information, it gives them validation. The real point of the article is to tell women that it's okay to want these things. Battista might simply have said, "it's okay to hold out for a good one." Except that that would have been too obvious.

If you are a man, she has inadvertently done you a much better service than she has done for her female readers. Battista has given a good solid list of what a man should be if he wants to attract women: be emotionally stable and predictable, be good with words, be masterful and protect her, make her laugh and help soothe her when her less stable and less predictable emotions get the better of her. I know, kinda old-fashioned when you put it that way.

But it gets worse. Turn the microscope around and make a complementary list for what men seek in women. Because if it's fair to ask men to be good at the things women want them to be good at, it should be fair to do the reverse. And that is a problem because every woman knows what those other things are and they can be a lot of work. Especially when she is already in a relationship as opposed to seeking one because then she isn't doing these things for herself anymore. When she was single, these things got her attention and helped her find the relationship she was seeking. To keep doing them afterwards is to do them for you. But it is what he wants and if she want him to be a masterful problem solver and the sort of guy who can help her through the rough patches when things get rough, she should be willing to deliver in those other areas that matter to him.

Finally, "he shares a similar value set". That's true enough but how did you both come by your value sets. Is it just a matter of fluke and contingency or does something else matter? Does it matter that your values should have some relationship with the truth or is just enough that they be similar to yours?

And that is where I began.