The great ugly secret about “freedom” is that it becomes a goal in itself. The neoconservatives found this out when, in the name of sharing freedom, they ended up having more wars than they could fight.
Sexual freedom is a form of Iraq and Afghanistan. You can win the battle, but can you win the occupation? The ugly secret rears its head again: freedom replaces the goal, and becomes a new quest like any other “ideological” crusade.
In the case of sexual freedom, the absence of restraints means that there is no goal and thus, no time scale. There is no maturation process. There is no eventual goal to end up as an adult. Instead, one stays trapped in the teenage loop forever and ever.
As a result, the simple idea of “sexual freedom,” of separating sex from any sort of goal such as family or love, creates a mentality of the perpetual loop: act for the moment, and for the self. Do not think of future. Do not experience change over your lifetime.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, who wrote Prozac Nation back in 1994 and should have lived happily ever after, writes about how her teenage loop has led to an unfulfilling adult life:
It had all gone wrong. At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24. Stubbornly and proudly, emphatically and pathetically, I had refused to grow up, and so I was becoming one of those people who refuses to grow up—one of the city’s Lost Boys…By never marrying, I ended up never divorcing, but I also failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security—kids you do or don’t want, Tiffany silver you never use—that makes life complete. Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don’t have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will. I was alone in a lonely apartment with only a stalker to show for my accomplishments and my years. – “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life,” by Elizabeth Wurtzel in New York Magazine, January 6, 2013
She goes on to detail how she fled responsibility at every turn, including sexually. There was never a plan to live happily ever after, but a chance to take someone home for the night. Eventually, the options dwindled and apparently, so did the fun.
The MRM is in freefall at this point because it never really took a stand. “Equality,” like “freedom,” is not a goal but the absence of a goal. It’s like dedicating yourself to not-growing-up or to not-eating-vegetables.
MRAs often talk about how they just want “equality” (and/or “freedom”) for men to be equal to women. This sounds good to them because, despite all their talk of red pill/blue pill, they’re still invested in the dominant narrative of their time.
Since the French Revolution, this narrative has been the hive mind. The individual, dedicated to himself or herself, joins with other individuals who want the same, and they smash down all real goals and replace them with not-growing-up and not-eating-vegetables.
When MRAs talk about “equality,” they’re following the same path. The actual goal is for men and women to have a place where they complement each other, and where they are each sacred and important. This only comes through traditional sexual roles, which have goals beyond the sex itself.
Anything else resembles a fear of growing up:
But when I became old enough to learn to shoot, I took one lesson from my father and then refused to go further. It was a rite of passage, a stage on the way to adulthood. But I did not want the responsibility of handling weapons. And, frankly, I just didn’t want to grow up. And because my parents were a little too liberal, and I was far too stubborn, they didn’t force the issue. So I went out into the world with a child’s salutary fear of guns intact. – “Gun Control & Personal Responsibility,” by Greg Johnson in Counter-Currents, January 16, 2013
Our modern society is based on not growing up because we fear the goal itself. Out of fear from becoming like our parents, who lingered neurotic in jobs they hated and endured marriages they claimed to feel enslaved by, we just avoided all of it. We dated or hooked up, but the second night, went home alone.
Sexual “freedom” crushed our souls. Feminism and sexual liberation were just one of many “revolutionary” movements that mimicked the French Revolution in that they overthrew the goals, and replaced them with personal whims. Like the others, they led nowhere.
This occurred because the absence of something is not a goal. If anything, it resembles a hate movement. If your gender does not feel equal, you might ask whether equality is necessary, or just a talking point. Most likely it’s just the drama of others.
What women (and men) lost was a sense of purpose to their lives. What they gained was a void in which they could project their egos, but which led nowhere but to the endless procession of days of getting up, going to work, amusing oneself with alcohol and sex, and repeating. It’s even more soulless than its antecedent, the grim 1950s “corporation man” and his house with a white picket fence in the suburbs.
Rather than crush our souls with these anti-goals, we should stop giving up on having what nature and common sense would have us possess, namely normal lives in which we mature and learn. Instead, we should crush the “revolutionary” notion that a non-goal is superior to a goal.
thought provoking. i will be considering this parallel for some time to come.
So tell me, GROIN, what are your goals?
I hope they write about this too.
@Franklin, this is the clearest he got: “The actual goal is for men and women to have a place where they complement each other, and where they are each sacred and important. ”
Whatever the fuck that means. It seems to really be “the actual goal is to agree with what I’ve arbitrarily decided I want”.
@person, it isn’t fair to criticize a goal as being arbitrary since all goals are somewhat arbitrary. My criticism of the goal that men and women complement each other is that it is no more specific or concrete than the modern goal of equality. A goal needs clear goalposts so that the goal is clearly defined. My goal is to live in a traditional community which includes specifics like requiring female premarital chastity, harsh punishment of adultery (defined as sex with another man’s wife), and enforced public modesty. These kinds of goals may seem arbitrary, but in fact they were part of every successful culture in history.
@Franklin, yes, goals are all arbitrary. And while that may not be a fair reason to criticize any particular person’s goal for themselves, it is a perfectly fair reason to criticize someone who has a goal they want to impose on everyone in the society, and which they want to say are “the goals” of that society.
Also, since goals are arbitrary, that means that equality and freedom can perfectly well be goals in their own right. His claim that they are not goals, but just the absence of goals, is completely baseless.
And yes, he was very vague and nonspecific about what his goal actually was.
As for your goals, again, they are not really personal goals, but goals that you’d like to impose on everyone else (they don’t really work otherwise), and yes, they are arbitrary (they don’t just seem it). You claim that they were “part of every successful culture in history”; even if that were true, it’s a bit misleading, since they’ve also been part of many non-successful cultures. The alternative may not have been tried until recently, which means you can’t really say whether they were a deciding factor in anyone’s success until we see what its absence does.
But I’m not convinced that the claim is true, anyway. There have been many cultures in the world, and they have differed widely, including in those ways you mention. I’d like to see you first define “success” of a culture, and second really show that the more successful ones are the more chaste ones, before I’d believe you.
@person, I never said that I want to impose my goals on anyone, I only said that I would like to live in a community that adheres to certain standards. By choosing to live in this community, one would be voluntarily accepting these standards, so violating them would be like a contract violation. The Ten Commandments were an example of this, being a covenant that the Israelites agreed to. I hate people who want to impose their goals on everyone, but community standards make perfect sense and allow everyone to choose a place to live that supports their goals.
As for my historical claims, I suggest you start by reading “Sex and Culture” by Unwin where he shows a perfect correlation between female premarital chastity and cultural success.
Well, that works as an adult, if you’re choosing from a smorgasbord of communities that are already formed. But it doesn’t exactly work for multiple generations, since children are continually born into any given community, and they have no say in the social norms that are imposed by the community they are born into. Some communities are good about informing such children that when they grow up, there are other choices available, but many are not.
As for the reading assignment you’ve suggested, that might happen, but I’d like to know how he or she defines success in the first place.
Maybe they shouldn’t have a say until they’re older and (bud)wiser… Most people don’t grow up until their 40′s.
Yes, and by that time, they’ve already been indoctrinated until whatever their community says is right. So they never really have a choice. That means that when the older generation decides what the goals of society should be, they are not deciding just for themselves and other willing participants, but also for others who don’t get much choice in the matter. I’m not saying that this is inherently bad, but rather that it means that they have to choose the goals with this in mind; the arbitrary whims of a particular generation won’t cut it.
Because there’s also the problem that even if the correlation holds based on whatever definition of success (as well as chastity) the author chooses, it might not be any particular reason to choose it as a goal.
Someone memorized the language debaters use in TV.
“Completely baseless” sounds so good. Equality means not having inequality. Freedom means not having restrictions. Those aren’t goals, they’re fears.
Would you prefer “obviously wrong”? It’s the same thing really.
So you think that it’s somehow obvious that *inequality* is the positive while *equality* is the negative? Even the language proves you wrong there. And you think it’s obvious that freedom is just the absence of something? In a technical sense yes, but then restrictions are themselves negative; they’re forces that prevent you from doing things.
In any case, you haven’t said anything to suggest that equality and freedom can’t be goals. And clearly they can. They correspond to some possible situation, and the goal is simply to get us to that situation. That’s all it is.
What is the goal?
That seems very clear to me. That’s a goal; specifics to this end are methods. Maybe “person” got that confused? He/she seems very confused, which is normal for a feminist.
Actually, it’s extremely vague and non-committal. “have a place”? What place? “complement each other”? What does that mean. And you can’t get much vaguer than “sacred”, especially if you’re not even religious.