The Netflix movie “Cuties” was the final straw for me...gone, bye, good riddance. This hyper sexualization of our children, young children....I just don’t f’n get it. That GMA clip...if anyone thinks that’s ok, on any level, you do not belong in a civilized society. Sorry, not sorry. I retired law enforcement in 2017 after 22 years. For about my last 8 years I worked with state ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) doing child porn cases...that many times involved multiple state jurisdictions. So, I know a just a little bit about how these monsters “groom”. And if that term offends you..F you. If the shoe fits. “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than in the way in which it treats its children”-Nelson Mandela
And our society’s soul is rotting from the inside out.
Given the sickness that contemporary society has imbued sexuality with, I'd say it's good that people are having less and less sex. They're refusing to participate in the death cult of empty sex.
Those who still value love and deep human connection probably are fine. You just don't hear about them, and rightly so. They know better than to talk about their love life. It's too sacred to them to share with strangers.
We're living in the long hangover. After the sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll of the 60s through the 90s, fun just isn't ... FUN anymore. It's like the Victorian prudishness that evolved as a reaction to the wild escapades of the Georgians. Only with the added perversity that we get perversion jammed in our faces as never before.
It almost feels like emotional abuse. Constant arousal, combined with actual interpersonal sexual mores that treat asking a girl on a date like a rape if you do it wrong. Ew, don't be creepy, I'm calling HR.
Also don't forget the impact of Tinder and hypergamy. Most of that calamitous decline in sex is amongst the bottom 80% of male NEETs and wagies. Some people are still having plenty of sex.
There's also just the general state of people. Media depictions aside, walk down the street, look at them. They're fat, they dress horribly, they do awful things to their hair and skin. Not a surprise that a lot of guys look at that and say, meh, porn is free. And, oh yeah: PORN.
Like you said it's a big topic and way too much for a short post.
Love this focus on the journey from there to here. Will be 70 this year, and I am a woman, so I’ve been a close witness to how “feminism” has poisoned our society. Women’s Liberation ended up with women demanding to kill the babies they create because they are so liberated they can have sex with any man they want; being objectified became the goal. We can be just like men, feminists said; now, men can be “women.” It was all poison, sold to America just like the “safe and effective” cure for COVID. Their emptiness is reflected on social media, a “vast wasteland of mediocrity,” as we used to describe other tech innovations in the old days. These days, I am reminded often of Yeats’ words in The Second Coming: “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” Sometimes, I am glad I am old.
I know what young people are up to. They still have sex drives. But they have an extremely unhealthy outlet for it, and it isn't mainstream pornography.
Young women are making porn of themselves and selling clips for the price of a hamburger on platforms like only fans. Young men are buying that pornography, and also some online-only interaction (like text chat). The attractive girls get to be admired, make money, and never have to actually be touched by anyone gross. Boys never have to be rejected if they have a few dollars to pay. They get risk-free access to a girl that is probably way out of their league. No one has to awkwardly try to date or kiss or anything under such an arrangement. Less attractive girls are shit out of luck unless they get into some really weird fetish content, which a lot of them do. Luckily there are a lot of young men with weird fetishes since no one is actually fucking each other.
That's it. That's the replacement for what people used to do. When you look back on how scary it was to try and date someone else, it makes a lot of sense that things ended up this way. Platforms like OF and others don't do much to make sure anyone is actually 18, so what teenagers are up to on it is probably one of the more wholesome aspects of it.
The sexual revolution is really sexual rebellion against God's created order. It continues to this day. We are witnessing that there is truly no bottom to the depths of depravity. As John Adams (for those who are products of government run schools, he was the 2nd president of the USA and one of the Founding Fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence) wrote: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other". God's law is violated and ignored so it only follows that the Constitution is violated and ignored.
I remember an argument started on a homeschool forum by a very angry third wave feminist that she first started by saying her school proudly distributed birth control to 10 year olds because yes they had seen ten year olds pregnant. Pretty sure they should be calling the police, not distributing bc pills but she didn't see it that way. she then went on to rant that the only reason marriages lasted 60 years when we encouraged society to wait for marriage was because all those miserable women were afraid to leave their husbands. When I brought up my grandparents, still alive and happily married, she told me my grandma was most likely brainwashed. I think there are lot of people that truly think this way and have worked their hardest to impose their own depression and misery on the upcoming generations, with disastrous effects.
It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. Luke 17:2
"It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble." Luke 17:2
"Some people experienced bourgeois heteronormativity as a prison, and so set out to release everybody from their cages, which seem to have not been cages for a whole lot of people. Congratulations, we’ve freed you from being part of a family."
Damn, brother, you write, think, and conceive so well.....though not necessarily in that order.
The Left's Permanent Revolution™ aka the Great Leveling aka The Destruction of Everything Beautiful long ago gave up on the idea of the redistribution of the means of production and, by swapping out the realm of the economic for the realm of the therapeutic, gave birth to the new crusades of the redistribution of esteem and the reversal of stigma.
Thus the new sacred beliefs of 'representation' (I can't go to this college unless the pictures on the walls look like me!) and of Feeling Seen (perhaps the most American idea in American history) and the equitable redistribution of sexual confusion, ie If one child feels sexually confused, 'basic fairness' dictates that all children feel sexually confused.
But all these incredibly neurotic and self-absorbed ideas begin as luxury beliefs for the NPR/NYT class, including the new Puritan terror of icky problematic sex (what if you fuck someone then find out they have the wrong politics? Paging Margaret Dumont!). So if the pattern of the past 50yrs holds to form, soon the Screens are Better than Sex ethos will trickle down to the lesser orders, and the rest of us can be as angry and miserable as our betters. But hey, Narcissus spent his whole short sexless life staring into his reflection and basking in conflicted emotions, and who are we to judge?
Shorter version: Sterile ideas and sterile lives beget sterile people and sterile societies.
The obsession with sex, the elevation of a biologic function to a supreme value — that value from which all others are derived — has always been a headlong plunge into bitterness and disappointment.
Real physical, intellectual, moral and spiritual achievements — those things which distinguish us from animals — have been relegated to second class status behind that which animals do without a second thought.
"Christopher Lasch wrote about Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and described her argument about bread."
Did not see that coming.
Anyway, it seems to me like this relates to your arguments about our society being one of empty, performative ritual, rather than substance. We are deluged in sexual images, and we perform rote, mechanized behavior in response, and this has supplanted the actual thing.
Another great piece, Chris. You should write a book about western culture - though be quick, all the means of printing, downloading or otherwise buying it are about to disappear.
'Gilman argued that bread had become so much better since it had been socialized — taken out of the home and moved to large industrial bakeries, to the superior world of speciality production. The bread that professional bakers made was so much better than the bread that farm wives used to make in their crappy little kitchens in their shitty little farmhouses.'
It should be no surprise that she was wrong even from the get-go. As a once-frequent visitor (I collect 1960s soul records, and was over there a lot), it's been a while since I was in the States - and unless things change, vaccines-to-travel-wise, I'll never be there again - but I don't recall your supermarket bread as being any better than ours in the UK i.e. tasteless, mass-produced shit. Home-baked stuff is way better.
'So we can see, she concluded, how much better all the other household functions will become when we move them out of the realm of homes and families.'
But even if her start point had been correct, the idea that you can extrapolate from the production of bread to the production of good humans is as ludicrous as one might expect.
Orwell famously said that there were some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them, but in the Bell Curve of people who hold belief in absurd ideas we mustn't forget that there is an extremely stupid cohort, too.
The Netflix movie “Cuties” was the final straw for me...gone, bye, good riddance. This hyper sexualization of our children, young children....I just don’t f’n get it. That GMA clip...if anyone thinks that’s ok, on any level, you do not belong in a civilized society. Sorry, not sorry. I retired law enforcement in 2017 after 22 years. For about my last 8 years I worked with state ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) doing child porn cases...that many times involved multiple state jurisdictions. So, I know a just a little bit about how these monsters “groom”. And if that term offends you..F you. If the shoe fits. “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than in the way in which it treats its children”-Nelson Mandela
And our society’s soul is rotting from the inside out.
Given the sickness that contemporary society has imbued sexuality with, I'd say it's good that people are having less and less sex. They're refusing to participate in the death cult of empty sex.
Those who still value love and deep human connection probably are fine. You just don't hear about them, and rightly so. They know better than to talk about their love life. It's too sacred to them to share with strangers.
We're living in the long hangover. After the sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll of the 60s through the 90s, fun just isn't ... FUN anymore. It's like the Victorian prudishness that evolved as a reaction to the wild escapades of the Georgians. Only with the added perversity that we get perversion jammed in our faces as never before.
It almost feels like emotional abuse. Constant arousal, combined with actual interpersonal sexual mores that treat asking a girl on a date like a rape if you do it wrong. Ew, don't be creepy, I'm calling HR.
Also don't forget the impact of Tinder and hypergamy. Most of that calamitous decline in sex is amongst the bottom 80% of male NEETs and wagies. Some people are still having plenty of sex.
There's also just the general state of people. Media depictions aside, walk down the street, look at them. They're fat, they dress horribly, they do awful things to their hair and skin. Not a surprise that a lot of guys look at that and say, meh, porn is free. And, oh yeah: PORN.
Like you said it's a big topic and way too much for a short post.
Love this focus on the journey from there to here. Will be 70 this year, and I am a woman, so I’ve been a close witness to how “feminism” has poisoned our society. Women’s Liberation ended up with women demanding to kill the babies they create because they are so liberated they can have sex with any man they want; being objectified became the goal. We can be just like men, feminists said; now, men can be “women.” It was all poison, sold to America just like the “safe and effective” cure for COVID. Their emptiness is reflected on social media, a “vast wasteland of mediocrity,” as we used to describe other tech innovations in the old days. These days, I am reminded often of Yeats’ words in The Second Coming: “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” Sometimes, I am glad I am old.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
I know what young people are up to. They still have sex drives. But they have an extremely unhealthy outlet for it, and it isn't mainstream pornography.
Young women are making porn of themselves and selling clips for the price of a hamburger on platforms like only fans. Young men are buying that pornography, and also some online-only interaction (like text chat). The attractive girls get to be admired, make money, and never have to actually be touched by anyone gross. Boys never have to be rejected if they have a few dollars to pay. They get risk-free access to a girl that is probably way out of their league. No one has to awkwardly try to date or kiss or anything under such an arrangement. Less attractive girls are shit out of luck unless they get into some really weird fetish content, which a lot of them do. Luckily there are a lot of young men with weird fetishes since no one is actually fucking each other.
That's it. That's the replacement for what people used to do. When you look back on how scary it was to try and date someone else, it makes a lot of sense that things ended up this way. Platforms like OF and others don't do much to make sure anyone is actually 18, so what teenagers are up to on it is probably one of the more wholesome aspects of it.
The sexual revolution is really sexual rebellion against God's created order. It continues to this day. We are witnessing that there is truly no bottom to the depths of depravity. As John Adams (for those who are products of government run schools, he was the 2nd president of the USA and one of the Founding Fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence) wrote: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other". God's law is violated and ignored so it only follows that the Constitution is violated and ignored.
I remember an argument started on a homeschool forum by a very angry third wave feminist that she first started by saying her school proudly distributed birth control to 10 year olds because yes they had seen ten year olds pregnant. Pretty sure they should be calling the police, not distributing bc pills but she didn't see it that way. she then went on to rant that the only reason marriages lasted 60 years when we encouraged society to wait for marriage was because all those miserable women were afraid to leave their husbands. When I brought up my grandparents, still alive and happily married, she told me my grandma was most likely brainwashed. I think there are lot of people that truly think this way and have worked their hardest to impose their own depression and misery on the upcoming generations, with disastrous effects.
Be Transgressive; Traditional Families are now the ultimate transgression.
And its not even a luxury.
Budget yes, not *yet* a luxury item.
Bonus; you’ll have personalized Eldercare.
It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. Luke 17:2
To the audience at the ABC TV show...
"It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble." Luke 17:2
"Some people experienced bourgeois heteronormativity as a prison, and so set out to release everybody from their cages, which seem to have not been cages for a whole lot of people. Congratulations, we’ve freed you from being part of a family."
Damn, brother, you write, think, and conceive so well.....though not necessarily in that order.
Probably the reverse....hahaha........
The Left's Permanent Revolution™ aka the Great Leveling aka The Destruction of Everything Beautiful long ago gave up on the idea of the redistribution of the means of production and, by swapping out the realm of the economic for the realm of the therapeutic, gave birth to the new crusades of the redistribution of esteem and the reversal of stigma.
Thus the new sacred beliefs of 'representation' (I can't go to this college unless the pictures on the walls look like me!) and of Feeling Seen (perhaps the most American idea in American history) and the equitable redistribution of sexual confusion, ie If one child feels sexually confused, 'basic fairness' dictates that all children feel sexually confused.
But all these incredibly neurotic and self-absorbed ideas begin as luxury beliefs for the NPR/NYT class, including the new Puritan terror of icky problematic sex (what if you fuck someone then find out they have the wrong politics? Paging Margaret Dumont!). So if the pattern of the past 50yrs holds to form, soon the Screens are Better than Sex ethos will trickle down to the lesser orders, and the rest of us can be as angry and miserable as our betters. But hey, Narcissus spent his whole short sexless life staring into his reflection and basking in conflicted emotions, and who are we to judge?
Shorter version: Sterile ideas and sterile lives beget sterile people and sterile societies.
The obsession with sex, the elevation of a biologic function to a supreme value — that value from which all others are derived — has always been a headlong plunge into bitterness and disappointment.
Real physical, intellectual, moral and spiritual achievements — those things which distinguish us from animals — have been relegated to second class status behind that which animals do without a second thought.
No wonder we’re in trouble.
"Christopher Lasch wrote about Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and described her argument about bread."
Did not see that coming.
Anyway, it seems to me like this relates to your arguments about our society being one of empty, performative ritual, rather than substance. We are deluged in sexual images, and we perform rote, mechanized behavior in response, and this has supplanted the actual thing.
Poor mixed up kid and they’re encouraging him. That’s sick child abused!!!
Another great piece, Chris. You should write a book about western culture - though be quick, all the means of printing, downloading or otherwise buying it are about to disappear.
'Gilman argued that bread had become so much better since it had been socialized — taken out of the home and moved to large industrial bakeries, to the superior world of speciality production. The bread that professional bakers made was so much better than the bread that farm wives used to make in their crappy little kitchens in their shitty little farmhouses.'
It should be no surprise that she was wrong even from the get-go. As a once-frequent visitor (I collect 1960s soul records, and was over there a lot), it's been a while since I was in the States - and unless things change, vaccines-to-travel-wise, I'll never be there again - but I don't recall your supermarket bread as being any better than ours in the UK i.e. tasteless, mass-produced shit. Home-baked stuff is way better.
'So we can see, she concluded, how much better all the other household functions will become when we move them out of the realm of homes and families.'
But even if her start point had been correct, the idea that you can extrapolate from the production of bread to the production of good humans is as ludicrous as one might expect.
Orwell famously said that there were some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them, but in the Bell Curve of people who hold belief in absurd ideas we mustn't forget that there is an extremely stupid cohort, too.