The WHAT?
Ah, yes. The "crisis of young males in a feminized America." Alternately responsible for the Va. Tech shootings, Islmaic terrorism, and Camille Paglia. Madame Paglia and Frank Fukuyama both conclude that it is the insufficient respect and inadequate outlets for the natural sexual aggression of the male of the species that drives our little pussycats to Kill, Kill, Kill! And yet, they also conclude that the "hook-up culture" is driving our little daisies and butterflies to open their tenderparts to all manner of young menfolk. But some of the boys are left out. Look out!
I will admit that I never had a terribly difficult time getting laid in the years of my education, but then again, it is the experience of many young fags that college life is something of a fractal series of orgasms, superficially self-same, but flowering eventually into a lovely pattern. That said, I knew plenty of yutes left to the borders of the bordello, gay and straight alike, some because they were plain, some because they were lame, and some, lord knows, because they simply had to concentrate on jobs or schoolwork or had a regular girlfriend or had a real hobby. None of these people ever went on a shooting spree, nor strapped dynamite to himself and wandered off to a busy intersection.
Anyway:
The sex, Paglia argues, “is everywhere but it is not erotic”…“It’s not even titillating. It’s banal and debasing.”Oh. Shut. Up!
First of all, it's obviously titillating for someone, since geriatric peeping Toms like Tom Wolfe can't stop panegyricizing the love mounds and throbbing erections of coeds under a tissue-scrim of moral outrage just as transparent as the "Medical Film" disclaimers on classic porno. You can barely open a book review without finding some thin-lipped schoolmarm peering in judgment up the collective twat of our young ladies, diagnosing every possible ailment except the need to get off. And now it's the fact that les nouvelles Roxannes won't let every scrawny geek in Christendom have his five-seconds-to-heaven that compels them to murder?
Conservatives, for as long as they've claimed the mantle of conservativism, have engaged many hypocrisies, but it's still true that for a long time they resisted too-clever social-science contextualizations of heinous crimes, pointing out that while yes, it's true that some mommies and daddies are abusive, and some of us were molested, and persistent poverty drives desperation, and some people really are so mentally ill that they cannot appreciate their actions, at the heart of most crimes is a criminal, a man or woman responsible for his or her own actions, an autonomous being who must bear moral and legal consequences, who has no right to shift blame to society or the lack of a loving home. But now we're to take it all as mere evidence of some vaster, societal sickness, this "feminization," that presumably must be corrected by a government program, some affirmative authority for the development of testes? Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one who gives a fuck about the rules?
7 comments:
I know what you mean and I agree with you on the sex base—and that Cho was obviously the wrong man to use as any example—but there is something to what she is saying. We are a violent species and if the expression of violence is eradicated in society via compulsion and not choice it doesn’t just go away and hide somewhere quietly inside us.
Young men (generalizing) are forced to be milder than their DNA wants them to be. This is unhealthy. This is why we get the gun-monkey mentality in some of our young military men who are enjoying killing people overseas who they know to be basically innocent of any offense. Some argue this sort of violence is sexual in nature. And I hope I’m not the only one who is a little scared to have all these freshly minted killers coming home where they have zero outlet for their newly rediscovered blood lust.
We, you and me and whoever, not the great white G, would do well to figure out ways to sandbox our violence so it can be healthy. Maybe that’s what professional sports was. I don’t think going all the way to Rollerball is the answer but the nanny state mentality is holding our heads down in the trough of “Be Sheep.” They are small humiliations but they can scar.
they're not totally out there... but why lay it at the foot of... erm... the bed?
i mean, we could as well blame a culture of hypercompetitiveness--i.e., everything is a competition. there must be a loser. so what of those who are forever losers? who can see no way out?
Ashley, in order for that assumption to be true, you'd have to demonstrate that males these days are pushed to be less violent than they were in the past, and that being more violent in the past caused less violent outbursts. I'm not sure how you'd do this.
Should we go back 150 years, when men were allowed to be men, and armies of tens of thousands of these men slaughtered each other all over the southern United States?
And how are men pushed to be less violent? are good old-fashioned baseball games more gruesome than the video games of today?
Do the troops of today like killing more or less than the troops of Vietnam did? World War II? The War of 1812?
I see absolutely zero historical justification for this kind of thinking.
Ashley, sorry to gang-up on you (poor choice of words, perhaps), but any cross-cultural analysis destroys your point. If you don't also contend that the US has significantly higher social constraints on behavior than other post-industrial liberal democracies, something I find to be completely unsupportable, violence as a manifestation of social constraint simply doesn't cut it.
It's not really a big step to say that when some person (man) snaps that it's due to frustration, sexual or otherwise. It's another thing eentirely to suggest that we live in singular times of male frustration, as appealing a notion as that may be angry young males everywhere (and their mothers).
As the tree and the frog note, if American life is at any kind of unique point, it's one of relative peace and prosperity (the tail end of one, maybe, but still). Modern violence, though it's easy to inflate to spectacular dimensions, doesn't really measure up to the historical versions where Camilla et al remember men for being men dammit. If there's really been a gradual wussification of the American male ideal, then it looks like it's been a good thing, and not the horrorshow that the Paglias claim.
Or to put it another way, we aren't bombing the living fuck out of Iraq because our leaders felt they failed to live up to feminist ideals.
you'd have to demonstrate that males these days are pushed to be less violent than they were in the past
but any cross-cultural analysis destroys your point
You both make good points and I concede some ground but I still think there is something to it.
Deaths and serious injuries in professional sports, for one example, were drastically more common 80 years ago. And there is no perfect cross-cultural analysis possible because there is no culture identical to the US. As close as some of Europe comes, it's the more violent countries like the UK (they have high and rising rates of violent crime) that come the closest; which would tend to support what I'm saying. Though I do get that someplace like South Korea without much violent crime contraindicates the ideas.
Okay, what's the mechanism then?
What if a kid pushes me down at school and I hit him back. I get expelled maybe. Suspended at least. I'm not allowed to stand up for myself. To be myself. To judge what my own boundaries are.
What if a DJ says, "Nappy headed?" He loses his job and potentially gets civil suits.
There are pervasive pressures, slight or participatory as they may be, to behave in ways that are neither natural nor connected to freedom. The whole PC speech thing is in fact a way to force us to not even be allowed to think "violently."
When it's illegal to get on a bike without a helmet or a skateboard without a full set of pads it does force you to be a pussy (sorry, can't think of any other word which conveys the sense and it is no accident the term is in line with Paglia's feminization argument). It's not just laws, it's become an undercurrent of daily life.
While I may not articulate it well enough today, I have certainly felt its unpleasant caress.
"When it's illegal to get on a bike without a helmet or..."
Oh come on. Wearing a bicycle helmet makes you a PUSSY??? Why are you hanging out here? Promise Keepers and Dobson are full of traditional gender role propaganda!
I bet you don't wear seatbelts, either, cause you just gotta be free. The paramedic who scrapes you off the side of the road thanks you for your brave stance.
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