VIDEO: Fr. Robert Barron’s Take Down of Hookup Culture
If the intellectually honest, diverse and provocative PJ Lifestyle had a Catholic ”chaplain” for its culture wars, it would have to be Fr. Robert Barron, the new director of the largest seminary in the United States and producer of the movie series, Catholicism. Who wouldn’t be intrigued enough to at least have a “virtual beer” with the man who wrote the book on post-liberal Catholicism while calling Bob Dylan “one of his heroes?”
Fr. Barron brings his passion for the social implications and religious significance of cultural issues to those most impacted and excels at analyzing the complex shifting permanence that constitutes our human existence.
Baron’s video “Discussion of the Hook-Up Culture” dovetails beautifully with PJ Lifestyle Editor, David Swindle’s article, “When Marxists Make the Anti-Family Argument Honestly”. Swindle reviews a New Inquiry article by Madelaine Schwartz which affirms:
The potential diffusion of the family (emergence of teen motherhood, single motherhood and premarital co-habitation) is one of the most exciting things to happen to the American social pattern since the sexual revolution.
Swindle identifies this ”diffusion,” read rather “destruction,” as a chief element in the Marxist dismantling of the underpinnings of Western Civilization. Fr. Barron defines the “hook-up culture,” as the pervasive cultural attitude that unfettered sexual experience is normal and even beneficial.
In their analysis, both men point to unpublished consequences of these closely related attitudes towards ”liberated sex” and the resulting families. The New Left’s diffused family, for all its lofty promise, leads inexorably to poverty, the natural off-spring of self-seeking disorder. The hook-up sexuality drives women, as Fr. Barron substantiates in his discussion, to the campus-therapist’s office door.
Swindle and Barron argue that the family and family-centered sexuality are not simply conventions that can be swapped out for cooler upgrades, but are deeply rooted in our nature itself and produce specific consequences measurable by social and individual well-being.
Just as it does for the economic and medical facets of our lives, our Brave New World offers first a sexual “paradisum,” a Utopia of rapturous personal and social gratification, only to crumble and leave, in its wake, a human debris field.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
– informative series.
The bulk of feminism beyond “equal pay for equal amount of work” is based upon flawed and ridiculous concepts regarding economic “fairness” and sexual fulfillment.
All men, say the postmodern feminists, can have it all, all the time, all at once, and have been able to forever. So it is the responsibility of government to see to it that women can have everything they want, all the time, all at once, from now on, because feminists believe that this is so for all men.
On its face this is factually wrong. Men do not have it all. Men have never had it all. A tiny fraction of a percent of the richest ones may have approached this state but truth be told even they do not – for example, they do not have that special mother/child bond. The other 99.44% of men had to work so many hours or travel and leave home to earn enough to support their wife and kids, or existed in cultures where a few men monopolized all the females, that believing they had it all is delusional at best and evil at worst. What the feminists are really saying is that ALL women should have what the most fortunate and wealthy men have had. Not the same percentageas in men, ALL.
In the area of sex, a similar dynamic is in place. The feminists assert (again, wrongly) that because all men can have sex without the possibility of consequences that said situation is inherently unfair to women and must be addressed. And once again, the feminists are horribly, destructively wrong.
There is no such thing as sex without the possibility of consequences. Not the pill, not condoms, not IUD’s or masturbation. Yes, some of those things diminish or eliminate the possibility of unwanted pregancy or STD’s. But there are STILL consequences.
Unbounded casual sex trying to find either the most alpha, status-conferrring male partner or for pure concupiscience – the “carousel” as it is sometimes referred to – in an atmosphere where women foolishly feel no possibility of risk for conseuences – has awful results for a society. It inures people (male and female both) to true love. It has had catastrophic dehumanizing effects on individuals. It does NOT build communities. It changes the demographics in ways which weaken nations by making procreation of secondary importance. It puts the family and children into a position less important than selfish pursuit of physical pleasure. In the end, it devalues the individual as well. In essence the postmodern, amoral hookup female has told herself she is so sophisticated when in fact she has reverted to the baboon troupe social model.
The hookup culture is an attempt by young women and their feminist leaders to right a perceived wrong – the idea that for millenia men had, due to biology, an unfair ability to have consequence free sex and women did not, so that oversight by nature must be rectified by government fiat and regulation. Birth control, the ability to acquire money and property without needing a husband to do so, and an apparatus of state which guarantees the ability to abort a fetus or guarantees financial support for the baby via welfare should it be carried to term – all these combined with an unrelenting attack on Judeo-Christian values by our NPR-listening pseudointellectual cultural elite – have created the toxic hookup culture.
Feminism in the US was mostly founded and directed by women who hated men. Some of them had been abused by their fathers while others had bad encounters with men. So, they took to the printing press and other media to spread their hatred to other women, often without the others understanding what was happening, and make a lot of money and gain power in the process. In other words, it is a movement largely driven by hate and lust for power and money.
At the same time, a few of the real feminist leaders, the ones who were active before the 1960′s, were dismayed by what was happening. Those women didn’t hate men but wanted some of the real issues addressed, and by the 1960′s they were. I recall reading one British feminist decried what the movement had become by the 1980′s saying that it had encouraged women to “Exchange slavery of the kitchen for slavery of the bedroom.”
What’s happening to women now is simply the outgrowth of the negative driving energies of the movement since the 60′s. Unfortunately all of society is paying the price.
“Savvy headhunters?” In other words become a used up gold digger. Nothing new about gold diggers, though there do seem to be more of them these days. Not surprising since some studies show that narcissism is way up in the younger generations, particularly amongst girls, especially college girls.
Thing is though, the vast majority of guys have this thing about sluts. They might be more or less inclined to use one for fun, but serious relationship material? not so much. It’s probably a genetic thing, not wanting to spend resources on another man’s child. Then there is the whole “you sleep with everyone they have slept with” and STD thing. After years of decline, those things are coming back with a vengeance. Throw in divorce numbers, the bias in courts against men, etc., it pays to choose very carefully. A savvy headhunter just couldn’t be trusted not to trade up and clean you out in the process.
odd to me how many of the hard core feminists always seemed to be very interested in getting women to hate men, and it worked. you can witness it every day on every t.v. channel, especially in the day time. man bad/woman good. the guys jokes about it have always revolved around the fact that a lot of the hateful women were/are lesbians, and thus hate straight men because of the competition thing for straight women. don’t laugh. there is a lot of truth to it. the more alpha the male, the more hatred she spews. however, men, as a whole, never did anything in past generations to harm women, per se. the vast majority of men have always been the protectors of women and children. these are the first generations of women in mainstream societies to step outside their defined role in society. the Bible speaks of woman as being a help mate for man, which is exactly the role they are being taught to hate. just makes sense to me that anytime you deviate from what G-d intended, well, it always leads eventually to crash and burn.
imho, our society has attempted to substitute the state for a husband. almost every government unearned handout program either benefits women, or some other perpetually aggrieved ‘victims’ group. i guess just talking about it reinforces how there is a constant ‘war on women’. kinda like asking a certain person for some legitimate credentials confirms one’s racism, logic not being their forte.
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Martin Luther King, Jr
“Silence is argument carried out by other means.”
Che Guevera
“Sometimes on creates a dynamic impression by saying something, and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent.”
Dalai Lama