The Problem with Women

The problem with women is that men desire them so much.

Excuse me--that's not "the" problem. It's just one of many.

And of course there are many problems with men too. Maybe I should restate the problem:

The problem with men is that they desire women so much.

The reason I bring this up is this: the sexual desire problem is bigger than it used to be. Back in the day, when religions were a formative influence on public morality, the various religions distributed specific, benevolently voluntary restraints on men's desires for women. This made for a fairly well-disciplined society.

But nowadays, with religious disciplines waning, the benefits of God-inspired morality--which is to say marriage, fidelity, vigilant raising of children, etc--these benefits are diminishing among Western populations.

For my generation, the Baby Boomers, the whole situation took a turn for the worse back in the '50s, when the Hefner doctrine came into fashion.

This ideology, promulgated in Hefner's playboy magazine, says a man can do anything he wants with his private parts, and insert them anywhere he wants. This ribald world-view, later popularized through LIFE magazine's promotion of mini-skirts, bunnies, drug experiences etc, exacerbated--or should I say masturbated--the problem.

By the mid '60s, men were walking around in libidinous disorientation so severe that it led to terrible societal problems, such as: ubiquitously irresponsible sex, which implanted a new plethora of children without fathers, and provoked frequently rampant hookups among rootless humans, and sometimes porno-dependent behavioral patterns fixated on mammary obsessions, and even rape, with occasionally millions of jilted lovers hardening their hearts to true love, simultaneously with a pandemic of drunken sex, ultimately accompanied by STDs, and in certain locales a plague of AIDs-ridden bath houses.

It was a wild time for sex. For true love and familial development--not so much.

But now religion is trying to make a comeback.

It's not the old religion you knew about back in the day. It's not that old worn-out hypocritical ritualistic type of religious practice that went hand-in-hand for millennia with Catholic catechism, or Protestant doctrine, or Judaic Torah. It's not even the fundamentalist bible-thumpers' holy-rollin' sanctification, nor the new-agers' spacy universalism, nor the scientology celebritive hoohah. No, none of these are facilitating the big Religion comeback.

It's the new kid on the block, Sharia.

The Sharia-promulgators have an effective solution for our sexual problem.

Keep 'em covered! Keep those women veiled, dammit!

It's the opposite of the Hefner doctrine, which required women to be more and more uncovered while in public places. The Hefner doctrine has, you see, run its playful, toss-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater course. The deleterious effects of the 1960's sexual revolution will soon be neutralized! Maybe even neuterized, if the transies have their way.

And so the new religious Sharia movement, soon to go viral as a revolution, may take control. This development is enabled because of the continuing historical operation of the Hegelian dialectic. The Great Struggle between Thesis ( Western Judeo-Christian tradition) being opposed by the Antithesis (Enlightened godless secularism), will be resolved through the new Synthesis: Sharia Law. It's the Hegelian dialectic, as applied to public morality instead of old fuddy-duddy academic ideologies.

Sharia-think will strive to obliterate the contemporary hot raving dominatrix godless hookup obsessive decadence of the West, which has, in its advanced stages, lately degenerated into a gov.campaign to make men desire men instead of women, and vice-versa. But that won't work in the human race writ large.

So the Sharia-propagators are sure they can take over in a big way, and rest assured of this: the women will be covered.

This is revolutionary! Are you ready for it? Men, all your sexual frustration will be over! Plus, the women will be yours for the taking with your right hand. And the women will be doing all the work by covering themselves discreetly so that you'll be spared the crisis of unbridled desire.

The impending Sharia prescription, however, does come with a warning label:

Warning: Repeated use could provoke adverse side effects such as dogmatic repression and fascist behavior.

This could negatively impact your freedom and everybody else's too.

So I propose a simpler, safer solution to our problem. Let's just go back to the sixth commandment given to Moses. We'll all be more satisfied, and it will be good for the kids.



Glass half-Full

Just say no.

Is this what we want for the next generation of Americans?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6G3nwhPuR4

No. We do not encourage this endorsement, nor the amoral framework in which it is presented.

Vote for Mitt Romney on November 6.

Carey Rowland, author with new novel, Smoke, in progress

From bitches to burqas

We in America and other postchristian societies have among us a widespread cadre of libertines whose identity is founded upon crossing the old fuddy-duddy moral boundaries. A voraciously sensuous video-cinema media/web feeds the frenzy of sex obsession that goes viral every time a new star is found among the constellation of party-down celebrity icons.
From Hemingway to Kerouac to Hefner to James Dean, James Bond and the Jagger blather, through Gurley Brown, gaypride and Gaga, downward toward gahenna, ever-more-permissive westerners celebrate their taboo-busting liberation. Woohoo.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Muslims say no thank you to all that western decadence. One way that they public reject our degenerative licentiousness is by seeking to embrace their legalistic Islamic heritage. Women wearing burqa and hajib is the most obious religious practice by which the neo-Islamists publicly refuse to submit to Euro/American hedonism.
As a Christian who has struggled most of my life to resist sexual provocation of all kinds, I can relate to their resistance.

The aidsy-douchy end of our libertine ways takes many forms: sexually transmitted diseases; epidemic abortions; disappearance of romantic love, of fidelity and of marriage itself. I came across a video this morning that illustrates how far our descent into the libido inferno has taken us. Its one of those undercover videos stealthily obtained at a Planned Parenthood office in New Jersey by a faking pimp/prostitute due. Its a real ear-opener:
http://www.redstate.com/mdannenfelser/2011/02/01/planned-parenthood-caught-aiding-and-abetting-sex-trafficking-of-minors/

Meanwhile, there are among us a few sycophants who have traveled the paths of liberality and lived to tell about it. Phyllis Chesler, erstwhile feminist/neoconservative shares her concerns today--prompted by the current rumblings in Egypt--about the victimization of women in fundamentalist Islam. She posts an alarm today about the trend among women in Islamic countries back to the burqa and the hajib. She includes some "revealing" photos:
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/02/01/am-i-the-only-one-troubled-by-cairo-street-scenes/

The class pictures show, as Phyllis says, "Cairo University graduates in 1959, 1978, 1995, and 2004. Clearly, there is a progression—a regression really, in terms of women’s rights. Former feminist gains have, increasingly, been washed away."

Most of the students in the earlier pics appear very much like you or I would have dressed for a class portrait in 1959, '78, or '95. But the 2004 photo with the Cairo women mostly clothed in burqa and hajib is real eye-opener.

I can see Phyllis' point about the "Islamization" of women in Muslim cultures. From a democratic standpoint, I share her concern, especially with the looming possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood strongarming their way into power in post-Mubarak Egypt.

On the other hand, the Islamists have a legitimate point. It just could be that societies function better when women are willing to keep themselves modestly clothed. In that sense, I think the revolution in Egypt, and even the one that happened in Iran, is about more than politics. Its about the clashing worlds of fundamentalism and libertinism.

As for me and where I stand on this--I'm caught in the middle, like many an existentialist post-religiot westerner, and like many an Egyptian citizen standing in Tahrir right now, somewhere between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mubarak police.

Glass Chimera

Between a rock and a hard (to understand) relativity

The men and women who conduct research in science have a system of procedures for establishing what is a fact and what is not; it's what we call the scientific method, and this is how it happens:
1.) The scientist observes phenomena in the physical world and poses a question. Example: Galileo sees an apple fall from an open window and hit the ground. He wonders: If that apple were a heavier object--say, a pumpkin-- would it fall faster and thus hit the ground sooner?
2.) The scientist forms a hypothesis. Example: Galileo hypothesizes that two objects of different weighty will fall at different speeds when dropped from the same height, and strike the ground at different times.
3.) The scientist tests the hypothesis by constructing a controlled experiment. Example: Galileo drops two balls of different weights, at the same time, from atop the leaning Tower of Pisa.
4.) The scientist observes and notes the effects (data) of his/her experiment. Example: Galileo notices that both balls hit the ground at the same time instead of at different times.
5.) The scientist forms a conclusion. Example: Galileo reasons that the speed of a falling object is not determined by the weight of the object.
6.) The scientist publishes an account of the experiment and its conclusion.
7.) Other scientists subsequently reconstruct or refine the experiment to prove or disprove the first scientist's conclusion.
8.) Other scientists develop new observations and new hypotheses for further inquiry. Example: Isaac Newton sees an apple fall from its tree and wonders: Why does the apple fall?

This method has evolved in the scientific community over the last 700 years or so. And before science was a recognized as a productive discipline, artisans used trial and error along with observation to ascertain useful practice in all human endeavors.

But what about the accumulation of human knowledge prior to the scientific method? Is all human tradition and wisdom from antiquity nullified or brought into question by an absence of scientific method that would have verified it?

No. There is, by cultural consensus, common experience and common sense, established truth in human experience and history that preceded science. I will be offering more on this topic later, especially as it relates to morality and ethics.
Have a nice day, and thanks for stopping by.