Filed under Sex and Politics, Sexuality
One year later, conservatives still don’t get it
While out driving last Saturday evening, I was listening to some syndicated talker on 810 WGY, the local 50,000 AM radio flamethrower that can be heard as far south as Myrtle Beach. I normally put talk radio stations on as background noise when I’m on the road, but upon hearing the host mention the latest Twilight movie, my ears perked up. And then I heard him DEFENDING the movie. Here was the gist of his argument:
“Well, um, most movies and books aimed at teen girls these days are about getting them to have premarital sex, and Twilight is about a girl who’s trying to get married before she has sex, so that’s a good thing!”
My jaw dropped. Talk about missing the entire goddamn point. I was hoping to hear him say more, but the station cut to commercial, and when he came back he was talking about the Russian spies who were busted recently. Part of me wonders if the host, Bob Lonsberry of Rochester’s WHAM 1180 (and formerly of Salt Lake City’s KNRS 105.7, fired for bad ratings – good for them), wasn’t defending Twilight because it was created by a fellow Mormon, but I’ll give the schmuck the benefit of the tribalistic doubt.
Roughly a year ago, I kicked off this blog by laying into a prominent conservative writer for his ill-formed opinions on pornography, and by extension, sexuality. Kind of amusing that I’ve come full circle. Not that I expect my tiny little blog to part the Red Sea, but it’s still amazing that conservatives who DON’T have their heads up their asses on this issue are still in the minority. They are obsessed with all the little trees in front of them, not noticing that there’s a HUGE FUCKING FOREST right before their eyes. Gay marriage? Abortion? Sexual degeneracy? Completely irrelevant side issues when you consider that the singles market is so screwed up that guys have to read a book by a freak wearing a stupid hat in order to figure out how to even get laid. Or that working a minimum-wage job and playing video games all day is more economically sensible then getting married and having children.
And even worse, when you try and explain these things to them, they shove their fingers in their ears and shout, “Nah nah nah nah nah, I can’t hear you!” I’m just waiting for someone in the manosphere to come up with a version of Conservabot Bingo. “You’re nihilistic moral sexual degenerates!” Funny, I was unaware that the moral goodness of a individual had any bearing on the truthfulness of his words. “You need to man up!” Of course, ask anyone who throws this around what “manning up” entails, or even what being a man is, and you’ll get nothing but silence. “Those people you’re attacking aren’t really conservatives!” Yeah, because no true Scotsman puts pussy on the pedestal.
They don’t realize it yet, but the conservatives have forfeited one of the most important battlegrounds of our time, wielding semantic stopsigns, thought-terminating cliches, and outright idiocy to avoid facing the facts on the ground. When the history of this era is written, their graves will be spat upon just as much as the liberals’ and feminists’. The latter may have plunged the blade into the heart of civilization, but the former spent all their time fretting about a bruise on the victim’s leg.
Actually, according to one survey, true scotsmen don’t put women on a pedestal…
Conservatives know the guy the girl in Twilight wants to marry is, you know, a frickin vampire, right?
[But she wants to MARRY him, and that all that matters, right? - ed.]
Ferd,
This is all part of our elaborate plot to lull impressionable young White women into being attracted to light-skinned men. Please keep it on the downlow.
[Noooo! I will expose you! You will not get away with your diabolical schemes! - ed.]
Or maybe it’s just a plot to get whiny emo guys laid.
Mike,
I would have loved for the authors of that article and study to reverse the question and observe how women and girls think its okay to beat on men and boys.
Reginald,
Social cons are busy looking up to Edward because he is what they aren’t. Powerful. Desirable. Not dominated by his woman. He is the uebermensch. Who cares if he wears eyeliner, lipstick, and sparkly skin lotion?
FB,
I agree, all the cons see is her desire to marry him. Because she wishes to marry, alles gute. Even if he is a nancy-boy emo undead blood-sucker.
To add to your huge effing forest, I’ll add divorce, about which social cons are deafeningly silent. It is as if they concur that a marriage must be disposed of if it gets too hard or either of the partners are unhappy.
But you’re missing the other half of the equation: the Twilight vampire is also incredibly dangerous. He literally wants to kill her and drink her blood.
Women want the dangerous bad boy alpha cad with a sensitive side.
Re the post:
Social cons are so hung on some of these cultural war issues that they refuse to acknowledge many unpalatable truths, like the reality of the sexual marketplace.
Take Auster for example. He seems somewhat willing to accept the realities exposed by Roissy, but Roissy’s abject nihilism precludes Auster from accepting it wholeheartedly. And by not doing so, Auster’s offering implicit approval of the noxious sexual marketplace that undermines beta males.
I wanna see a matchup, “Twilight meets Blade”
EW,
That shows that Larry Auster is right about the one-drop rule and conservatism in our society. If you take one tiny little conservative position, you’re considered a conservative (by both liberals and conservatives) even if you’re liberal on everything else.
When one tries to, um, “raise awareness” about no-fault divorce among social conservatives, one gets the typical responses about deadbeat dads, men cheating, abusive husbands, etc. If one tries to cite the statistics about women filing the majority of divorces, they say “oh, they must be cases of abuse, or the man had let the marriage fall apart but it fell on the wife’s shoulders to go down to the courthouse and make it final because the husband was willing to just live in a defunct marriage indefinitely.” If you try to cite specific examples of women cheating or divorcing their husbands for no good reason, they dismiss those cases as insignificant exceptions. They can’t SEE these things, because they do not fit within their worldview.
Last fall, when TFH kept ranting all over everyone’s comment sections about social cons, calling them “betacons” and blaming primarily them for no-fault divorce, I thought, he can’t be right, so I did some searching and found plenty of examples of social conservatives opposing no-fault divorce when it was first sweeping the country. I’ll have to do a post on it someday. But that was what, the early 1970′s? The younger generation of social cons hadn’t even been born yet. Now, no-fault divorce has always been part of their cultural landscape. It’s relatively easy to be conservative about things in which one has observed change in one’s lifetime; OTOH, it seems to be in our nature to regard going back to the way things were before we were born as reactionary and simply absurd. Too many people today can no more entertain the notion of going back to at-fault divorce than they can enterain the notion of going back to monarchy.
Hermes,
I think that’s a pretty accurate analysis of the one-drop rule and socons, and how modern-day socons have assimilated the environment they grew up in. I am shocked at just how left-wing those in the conservative establishment really are. Which does help explain the strong reaction to the Tea Partiers by both leftwing dems and leftwing reps–the Tea Party represents a more ideologically coherent conservatism than the rep party these days.
Conservatism these days means standing athwart history and yelling “slow down!”. It has very little substantive agenda other than that. And an ideology that is nothing more than an e-brake on the dominant cultural force is an ideology that is doomed to give ground. Every time.
“Too many people today can no more entertain the notion of going back to at-fault divorce than they can enterain the notion of going back to monarchy.”
The irony is that no-fault divorce is really default man-at-fault divorce when one thinks about it. And why go back to monarchy when we can have East India Company-style mercantilism instead?
Mike Huckabee and other social conservatives have pushed for covenant marriage, albeit with limited success. Huckabee also wrote the foreword to this book:
http://www.reducedivorce.org/Documents/HowToCutAmericasDivorceRate-PRESS.pdf
Agreed. I think a few, are coming around slowly. Realizing the sexual marketplace for young guys is so skewed that even “Affordable Family Formation” (i.e. cheap real estate, living wages) are not enough.
But for the most part, an active denial. Mostly about the true nature of women, which can be depressing for those raised in pedestal environments. Older guys are the worst, they assume it’s still 1955. That there is no real penalty for denying the reality of female human nature. When they’d agree that there is a penalty for denying the reality of say, walking alone in South Bronx at night.
Hermes
Yes. Including my father, who is a goddamn FAMILY THERAPIST, and who has every reason to know better.
The social conservatives are trying to recreate an IMAGINED version of the 1950′s American culture than never really existed in reality. Also, consider that many of them are gay, pedophile, or simply cannot keep their hands off women other than their wives and you have a milieu that does not qualify being called a coherent philosophical worldview.
Some social conservatives even attempt to justify the logical incoherence of their worldview by insisting that reason and analytical thinking are not sufficient for understanding the world around us and human relationships. They claim that emotion and feelings (just like the left, BTW) are also proper tools for relating to each other and the world around us. My usual retort to this psychobabble non-sense is that different people feel different things and that the worldviews of Hitler and Stalin were based on feelings and convictions that were felt just as strongly as those felt by social conservatives (and liberal-left).
The social conservatives complain about how there is no way to get to “ought” from “is”. The problem with their worldview is that no such thing as “ought” exists in reality. It is a figment of their imaginations. Only “is” exists in reality.
Mainstream conservative men, especially Evangelicals, are completely clueless when it comes to the state of men in modern America. Like liberals, they blame everything on men. Chivalrous conservative men helped pass VAWA, IMBRA, and similar laws.
@ Whiskey:
“Older guys are the worst, they assume it’s still 1955.”
Exactly. They think that young men are lazy, childish, unfocused, and unwilling to commit because they would rather play video games and drink alcohol than get married and have children. They don’t understand that marriage in modern America has more drawbacks than benefits for men.
If you want another example, take The (NOT) Thinking Housewife. Do you know what important issue she’s worried about? Lady Gaga. Maybe she will worry about Elvis Presley next while civilization collapses.
[She's an acolyte of Larry "Soccer and the Vuvuzela are the Embodiment of Civilizational Decline" Auster - what do you expect? - ed.]
Exactly. They think that young men are lazy, childish, unfocused, and unwilling to commit because they would rather play video games and drink alcohol than get married and have children.
Yes, and young women are virginal creatures that only want pure love and are taking advantage of by these heartless men. How deluded can someone be?
Repeat after me: S-TU-PID
In fact, I once read a socon telling that, even if most girls were not fit for marriage, what about the few that are so? They deserve better and men must behave as gentlemen for these girls.
I remember thinking “Wow. All men have to change their behavior only because of a few women “who deserve more”. Talk about entitlement.
It remembers a sentence uttered by an Islamist: “All men in Iraq are willing to die to protect the honor of one Iraqi woman”. I remember thinking: “Are millions of men’s lives worth less than one woman’s honor? And do they call this “patriarchy”?
Traditional religions = Paleo-pedestalizing
Social conservatism = Pedestalizing as thought in the fifties.
Feminism = New pedestalizing
MRA, PUA, MGTOW = The most revolutionary movement in decades. Having men rejecting their role as a semi-slaves is revolutionary.
Kind of funny, Ferd, that you would make a reference to “No True Scotsman” when just a few days ago you called Ronald Williams a “liberal masquerading as a conservative, like most of the ‘Reagan right.’” Are you just shifting the goalposts of conservatism to suit your purposes?
[Nope. Most mainstream conservatives are more or less right-liberals. That doesn't mean that the damage they've wrought can just be wished away with a change in terminology. When I alluded to the Scotsman fallacy here, I was thinking of "traditionalists" like Laura Wood, Larry Auster, and Mark Richardson who, when told how conservatism has utterly failed men and are given examples of conservatives who are responsible for that failure, will reflexively respond "but but but those aren't REALLY conservatives, I've always opposed those people!" It's like how Muslim apologists for Islamist terrorism or Muslim gangs in Europe try and say that the suicide bombers and rioters aren't really Muslims. Because the ideologues in question cling to conservatism as a tribal identity and are acknowledged by most average people to be conservatives, whether they hold to all (or most) of conservatism's tenets, the damage they've done can't simply be disavowed by more hardline rightists. One could argue that the infiltration of liberal ideas into the conservative establishment is in part responsible for this, but that's a topic for another day... - ed.]
They think that young men are lazy, childish, unfocused, and unwilling to commit because they would rather play video games and drink alcohol than get married and have children.
I don’t see why a man would give that up for a traditional marriage. It’s the same hard work and sacrifice, except she says “thank you”, and you get duty blow jobs in lieu of pity sex. Politeness and sex do not make up for the hard work needed to sustain a family.
Great post,
bravo! excellent post.
and god bless mystery.
Damn XHTML tags.
It should have been:
“Twilight is about a girl who’s trying to get married before she has sex, so that’s a good thing!”
/facepalm
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
Your comment … “Gay marriage? Abortion? Sexual degeneracy? Completely irrelevant side issues when you consider that the singles market is so screwed up that guys have to read a book by a freak wearing a stupid hat in order to figure out how to even get laid.”
Absolutely on target. I made a similar comment on a guy bashing blog recently, but you are the first i have ever seen make this point this cogently. Game is just remedial man, and modern man seems to need training wheels. You’ve earned my undying respect with this post. Obviously you can see the matrix. I am pushing you up further on my list of favorites.
Conservatives and Christians alike have lost their bearings in this world.
Conservatives make little sense these days. They complain incessantly about how the liberals keep making bigger and bigger government and the intrusiveness of that government into our lives. Yet, when in power, the conservatives simply want to make THEIR version of big government as well. I see no point in supporting such a movement.
Perhaps the idea is to have an equal division of power between liberals and conservatives so that the government neutralizes itself.
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Wtf? Are the fifties over already?
I didn’t get the memo!
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