John Boot has an article in Pajamas Media asking “Why Do Women Love Mad Men?”. Boot wants to know why female audiences apparently love the lead character in a TV drama set in a 1960s advertising agency named Don Draper. Wikipedia says that “Mad Men has received highly positive critical response since its premiere. Viewership for the premiere at 10 p.m. on July 19, 2007, was higher than any other AMC original series to date. A New York Times reviewer called the series groundbreaking for “luxuriating in the not-so-distant past. … in the period in which Mad Men takes place, ‘play is part of work, sexual banter isn’t yet harassment, and America is free of self-doubt, guilt, and countercultural confusion.’” How can they like him, when he’s such a cad?
The WSJ says “behind the smooth-talking, chain-smoking, misogynist advertising executives on ‘Mad Men’ is a group of women writers, a rarity in Hollywood television. Seven of the nine members of the writing team are women. Women directed five of the 13 episodes in the third season.” Stranger and stranger. Boot has a theory:
What do women want? The answer is obvious. They want Don Draper. But they don’t know why. … here he is picking up a stewardess in an out-of-town hotel under an alias while his pretty little wife is home pregnant. Any other TV hero who behaved like this would have the feminists outraged, but a glance around the women’s blogs shows that if Mad Men is a soap that men need not be ashamed to watch, it’s women who are positively swooning over the character and the show, which returns Aug. 16 and has earned 16 Emmy nominations for last year’s second season. Why does Don get a pass?
Maybe because at least some in the audience want to give him one. Boot thinks Don Draper’s appeal rests on a secret longing for the two-fisted, hairy-chested, hard-drinking man who political correctness has hunted to extinction. Audiences admire him both because he is admirable in a certain sort of way, but most of all because he can be safely viewed through a TV show where audiences can, as the NYT puts it, indulge in “luxuriating in the not-so-distant past”. Just as we prefer to encounter tigers through the bars of a cage rather than have them sitting beside us in our living rooms, modern politically correct audiences can find a Don Draper amusing because he is at 40 years’ remove. As Saving Private Ryan and Jurassic Park proved, liberal audiences don’t mind watching powerful and unbridled creatures rippling in action provided the scene is set at a safe distance. The Greatest Generation is admired despite the fact — of perhaps because of the fact — that it incinerated cities, interned alien races and nuked enemy population centers into radioactive ash. The key to understanding the popularity BBC’s historical dramas or science fiction fare is that they provide acceptable action settings for the kind of people politically correct society no longer allows. Like Walter Mitty such societies have a life of secret longings hidden behind their pursed and narrow lips.
It is double-think at its finest, and nobody needs it more than the Left. After all, what committed socialist likes to be reminded that all government money comes from private enterprise? That would take all the fun out of spending it. Who wants to tell the European Union that the only reason it isn’t a nonentity like the African Union is because it stands on the shoulders of a history it despises? Where would all their moral authority go then? Fantasy is an indispensable part of modern political life. Contradictions must pass unnoticed if the play is to be allowed to continue. Yet the audience occasionally glances outside the theater. Part of the attraction that Left feels for Jihadis and primitive warriors lies precisely in that they haven’t followed their politically correct instructions. Groucho Marx once said that he would never want to be a member of a club that would accept him as a member. In an analogous kind of way the Left never truly admires someone stupid enough to believe them. Desert raiders are liked exactly because they aren’t timid souls living in council housing staring down at their shoes waiting desperately for the community policeman whenever ‘youths’ come to rob them.
Boot says “Mad Men is a testament to … a consensus that the unpleasant parts of the past ought to be enthusiastically buried. There’s no monster of the deep so fearsome that it can’t be chased away for a moment or two with a pitcher of martinis.” Yes there is if there’s a lingering suspicion that we might need something like these monsters back one day. The problem with September 11 and the global financial crisis aren’t that they happened, but that they happened where they couldn’t be hidden; couldn’t be waved away with a pitcher of martinis and a TV remote. Not everyone wants to be reminded that fantasy doesn’t work forever and that maybe the politically correct man won’t be able to cope when the day comes. But if that someday comes then let’s bring them all back. Not just the Don Drapers but the good and true men who have no “secret place wherein to stoop to sin and shame”. Until then, the party goes uneasily on and the glances pass on many levels.
embedded by Embedded VideoI saw her today at the reception
In her glass was a bleeding man
She was practiced at the art of deception
Well I could tell by her blood-stained handsYou can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need
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According to John Boot:
Don’s wife Betty (January Jones) drives drunk, horrifically mismanages her children, and has an affair of her own with a stranger. Don’s colleague at the ad firm Sterling Cooper, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), denied even to herself that she was pregnant until she was about to give birth, then managed to mysteriously separate herself from the baby without an apparent second thought and return to work. Everyone drinks, smokes, schemes, and keeps secrets.
OK, so who did their kids grow up to be? Did they go into Journalism or Politics? OK, same difference. Maybe hedge funds? I know! They became those therapists who discovered suppressed memories of abuse in a client’s past. They’d tell you that the reason you forget your keys or don’t make lists before going shopping is that your father raped you and you forgot about it. One of these therapist could move into a small town in the Midwest and find 400 such cases and send three hundred geezers to prison for life. This was considered a bit much and they were all told to go into “end of life counseling” instead.
I’ve never seen this TV show but of course that won’t stop me from commenting because this is America (at least where I’m at). So, could this be a “recovered memory of abuse” type deal — past abuse which explains why our society can’t pass health care reform? With congressmen (and woman) forgetting where they put The Death Panel? A nation where Big Drug Companies can offer the White House $80 billion dollars and nobody asks where that money is coming from? Like, it used to be the government that created money, but now the White House is subcontracting the bothersome task to new found friends? After all, Private Business will do a better job of it just look at the Post Office.
I saw her today at the reception
In her glass was a bleeding man
She was practiced at the art of deception
Well I could tell by her blood-stained hands
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need
illustrate perfectly Edward Hopper paintings
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tgzFalhMEI
The cliche misreads Walter Mitty.
He’s in fact the guy undominated by his wife.
The National Enquirer deprived them of John Edwards.
The vacuum had to be filled.
—
You think that I don’t feel love
What I feel for you is real love
In other’s eyes I see reflected
A hurt, scorned, rejected
Love child
Never meant to be
Love Child
Born in poverty
Love Child
Never meant to be
Love Child
Take a look at me
Started my life
In a old, cold, run-down tenament slum (tenement slum)
My father left he never even married mama
I shared the guilt my mama knew
So afraid that others knew I had no name
This love we’re contemplatin’
Is worth the pain of waitin’
We’ll only end up hatin’
The child we may be creatin’
Love Child
Never meant to be
Love Child
(Scorned by) Society
Love Child
Always second best
Love Child
(Different from) Different from the rest
(Hold on hold on just a little bit longer) Mmmmm baby
(Hold on hold on just a little bit longer) Mmmmm baby
I started school
And a worn, torn dress that somebody threw out
(Somebody threw out)
I knew the way it felt to always live in doubt
To be without the simple things
So afraid my friends would see the guilt in me
Don’t think that I don’t need ya
Don’t think I don’t want to please ya
But no child of mine will be bearing
The name of shame I’ve been wearing
Love Child
Love Child
Never quite as good
Afraid, ashamed
Misunderstood
But I’ll always love you
Always love you
I’ll always love you
Always love you
As my time goes on, I see more and more of the world looking for a “father figure”. And, I feel more resentful of the world for needing it. It may have always looked for it and once found, followed.
I only really know my time, my experiences – and those are shaped by my mistakes, my learning and the constant re-tries needed by my goals in life. The need for a father figure, a strong personage to show you the way, is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of – “not knowing”. It’s a sign of youth and lack of experience. It’s a sign of immaturity, wanting to grow up. Not lost yet, but still needing the guiding hand to move it to its goals.
My questions is, when do you tell the youth to make his own mistakes, learn from them and be the father for the next generation?
That is the essence of growing up.
The Socialists live in perpetual youth, constantly afraid of the next decision that they cannot make. One that is tried, true and tested by someone else – the father, the one that has been there before, made the mistakes and moved forward to the next decision. Or, someone else – just not them.
It’s funny you should bring up the analogy to “Jurassic Park.” I remember when that film came out, some entertainment reporter asked a person connected with the film (perhaps Spielberg), why people’s (esp. kids’) fascination with dinosaurs. His answer: “They’re big, they’re mean, and they’re dead.” IOW, they’re the monster that can’t hurt you anymore. All thrills and scares are experienced from that safe remove that you talked about.
I don’t get cable (read: bogie can’t justify paying $1200 a year for it when there’s Netflix) so I haven’t seen “Mad Men,” but I have read about it. From the descriptions, I think perhaps it’s the soap opera that primarily attracts the female viewers, and Don Draper only secondarily. (Remember when “Desperate Housewives” was all the fresh new rage with the girls?)
And I have this sneaking suspicion … again, not based on having watched the show, but having worked for years in Hollyweird around the types of people who create this type of show … that part of the fascination also lies with the subliminal control factor. That is, Don Draper is who he is solely on the terms of the female writers and directors of the show. He is the completely controlled, fictional creation of (largely) a bunch of women. Who wouldn’t be “forgiven” on those terms? I guess the tell will be what happens to him when the series concludes.
In certain circles, Frank Sinatra (in his Pal Joey and Rat Pack personas) has long had the reputation of the premiere male chauvinist pig (to be loved or loathed … it kind of depends on who the female viewer is) of that era. The interesting thing to me, though, is that if you actually go watch the films in which that persona was expressed (Sinatra playing a version of himself, in essence), there were two types of women in Sinatraworld: dames and ladies. Dames played and used guys, and got played and used by them. Watch how Sinatra treats the chorus dancer in the beginning of “Pal Joey”; she’s rude and explicit (1957 version, anyway) with him, and he dishes it right back. OTOH you never see Sinatra treat a lady like a dame. There were just some lines that one did not cross.
Sinatraworld was where the guy struggled between being a bum and being a gentleman. Sex and money were the two great temptations that led him down the bum road. But he always knew in his conscience what he should be and, frequently, in the end he did the right thing.
That, at any rate, was how the 1950s and 1960s reflected itself back to itself in terms of guy codes (lines that one did not cross, notions of what a man should be).
But I am instinctively suspicious of every time Hollywood does retro. Because the portrayal is always, always filtered through modern-day sensibilities. And we know what the sensibilities are of the Boomers in Hollywood, and a great many H’wood Gen Xers as well. If they don’t get what the purpose of “Father Knows Best” (to pick one of their favorite targets of ridicule) was, in terms of the 1950s talking back at itself, what makes us think they would understand the real man on whose type Don Draper is supposed to be based?
The need for a father figure, a strong personage to show you the way, is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of – “not knowing”. It’s a sign of youth and lack of experience.
I guess it was only a matter of time before America the Fatherless finally got a POTUS who himself was essentially fatherless. We now get to see the results when that sort of personal psychodrama is played out on the national level, for all the marbles. Yippee.
Any other TV hero who behaved like this would have the feminists outraged
Unless, of course, his name is Bill Clinton. In which case, he, too, gets a pass on the pig behavior.
It gets weirder and weirder as you try to plumb the depths of this stuff, folks.
An important distinction in art.
Writers can lie in their daily speech but never in their craft.
Hollywood can speecify, and hector, and contribute Left. But in a story, truth will out. Nothing else feels right to artist or audience.
In “24″ we go with Jack Bauer. In “Guarding Tess” we root for Nicholas Cage to save Shirley MacLaine, and to shoot the toe off of the bad guy to do so.
The disconnect is in the modern mind , not in the real world.
The definition of “adventure” is something bad happening to someone else a long way away a long time ago.
Fail any of those qualifiers and it is no longer Adventure but just one big hassle to worry about.
Hollywood can speecify, and hector, and contribute Left. But in a story, truth will out. Nothing else feels right to artist or audience.
I dunno if that’s really true, Robert.
There are times if the whopper is big enough, and it is what the audience wants to hear (esp. if the lie is a flattering lie about themselves, or a lie that villifies an unpopular other), when lies via fiction will catch the popular imagination, and do so like wildfire.
Sometimes lies “feel right” to the audience, too. The best agitprop is what doesn’t seem like agitprop, but “real life.” And it can take years, decades even, before the resulting damage fully reveals itself. Years still before that society can recover … if ever.
Take a work like “Inherit the Wind.” The ways in which it distorted the Scopes case (in a semi-fictitious presentation thereof, but everyone knew what was being referred to) are many, and as a drama it overwhelmingly stacked the deck in favor of the Darrow character’s argument. (At his best, Spencer Tracy could wantonly set your Christmas tree and all your kids’ Christmas presents on fire right in front of your eyes, and STILL calmly convince you that there was a reasonable and humane purpose in his doing so.) And yet “Inherit” was, and still is, considered by many the definitive word on the Scopes trial and the issues at play in that episode.
The lies that Americans have swallowed, esp. over the last 40 years, because they were slickly presented as art and truth, and not recognized for what they were, are legion. That is perhaps the biggest reason this culture is now in the mess it is in. “Itching ears” and a slick teller of tales.
In the case of Carl Foreman and “High Noon,” he was, as someone here put it recently, a better artist than he was a Communist. In that instance, yes, truth prevailed.
But a lot of Communists in Hollywood have been, well, better Communists than artists, but still damn fine artists. Substitute your (least) favorite leftist ideology. When both artist and ideologue are present to a high degree in the same personality, it’s a crap shoot IMO as to which will come out on top in any given work. That’s a dangerous type of roulette to be playing when the culture is at stake.
Is the popularity of Mad Men a rational grab for sanity by the children? Or, a sneer at the folly of the past?
Red pill, or Blue? You choose.
bogie wheel,
They’re big, they’re mean, and they’re dead.
Mad Men is a Western. Only unlike the noble Indians in John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn they don’t have Richard Widmark to explain things to the audience. Clint Eastwood made two movies about Okinawa. The audience gets to choose which side they identify with. Hollywood could put out a remake of High Noon from the viewpoint of the crazy killer Frank Miller. At one time Hollywood was part of a culture self confident enough to treat fairly with the “other” while still respecting the community that nurtured them. Think of The Bridge on the River Kwai where Sessue Hayakawa gives a fine three dimensional portrait of Colonel Saito without expecting the audience to cheer him or the Japanese Army on. Women did not always make up abusive fantasy figures. Dorothy L. Sayers created Lord Peter Wimsey, and fell in love with him. Perhaps she was the exception and the pattern was set by Mary Shelley in Frankenstien.
Now I get to litter my blog with video links.
Iwo Jima, g-d it I meant Iwo Jima.
What do women want? The same thing they’ve wanted since men first began providing them with cave defense: to sleep with a biker, and to marry a banker.
Good question and answer Richard. I think it’s just human nature though.
By the way, I meant to ask for your input on this piece I did for Pajamas on the CIA’s analysis of the Saddam, al Qaeda question where I interviewed Paul Pillar and Bruce Tefft. I know you’ve looked at this topic in the past and I’d really like to hear your thoughts.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/revisiting-the-saddam-husseinal-qaeda-relationship/
Belmont commenter Whiskey blogged on Mad Men Aug 9. I believe he called it the most feminine show on televison.
I think it’s just human nature though.
That’s about right. Dostoevsky once observed that “man is a mystery” and you could spend your whole life trying to figure it and never succeed. Some years ago I ran into a guy who I had known slightly. For some reason he started telling me the story of his life. We were sitting in the space in front of a church. Said his wife had left him. I asked why, since he wanted to talk about it. “She told me,” he says, “that I had come home every night at 6:30 pm without fail. That I gave her the entire paycheck. That I went to sleep each night at 10 pm.” “And the problem was?” I asked, waiting for the punchline. “And problem she said was that it was like being married to a corpse and she was leaving me.”
But it’s not a simple as being “interesting”. There’s a wavelength you’ve got to get on. Years ago, before I was married, I was often in long conversations with ladies and then realized, hours later, that I had missed the whole point of the conversation. There was some point I couldn’t grasp. And thing was, it seemed so obvious to the ladies. I think the most exasperating thing a person can hear is the reproof that “you just don’t get it” even when you’re trying to get it. Now there are some guys who are naturals. They can tune in and hold the signal even when they don’t actually give a damn. And there are some guys who give a damn and live out their lives grasping in futile effort at a point they never quite seem to catch, like a man trying to grab a fly that’s always too fast for him.
And it’s nobody’s fault really. If I could go back to that guy I met who told me about his wife, I’d say something like, “buddy what can I tell you?” Sometimes life hands you a situation that will forever remain a mystery, like the alien monolith in Kubrick’s 2001. People like Don Draper? If you’re not him, don’t worry about it.
There are some similarities between Mad Men and last year’s movie Revolutionary Road, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie takes place in the mid-1950s and superbly depicts the architecture, interior decoration, clothing and behavior of that period.
I think that the TV show and movie make an instant impression with the clothing of that period. People dressed rather formally. Men wore suits and ties and hats, and women wore well-fitted dresses. The clothing expressed an ambitious attitude of dressing for professional and social advancement.
The movie revolves around a malcontent wife (Winslet) who feels unfulfilled by being a housewife and who therefore convinces her husband (DiCaprio) that they should move to Paris, where they might establish an artistic lifestyle that they deem to be impossible in the USA.
Then the husband gets a once-in-a-lifetime offer from his employer to start a new corporate division that would sell automated businss machines, and then the wife gets pregnant with what would be their third child. Because of these changes, the husband wanted to stay in the USA, while the wife could not abandon her fantasy of escaping to a new life in Paris.
The movie Revolutionary Road was not a commercial success, despite its star power and its many artistic qualities. I think that young people today could not comprehend several elements of the couple’s dilemmas. Why would they have to move from the USA to France to find artistic fulfillment? If they didn’t want a third child, why couldn’t they simply abort the pregnancy? If the wife was bored being a housewife, why didn’t she get a job?
If you watch a costume drama about, say, Victorian England, then you can accept the premises that such social and moral dilemmas frustrated people’s lives in previous centuries. If you watch a costume drama about the USA in the 1950s, however, the dilemmas do not seem so frustrating. The solutions seem too easy, because we know in hindsight that the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s were imminent.
If you were living in the 1950s and wanted to have a future with opportunities to freely develop yourself socially and artistically, then the best place in the world for you to be was the USA. This was especially true if your family was prospering economically. Moving to France and living poor there would have been a big mistake.
Perhaps the show Mad Men attracts women because it depicts a situation where, in hindsight, we know that the business was about to catch a huge wave. If you were working in advertising in the mid-1950s, you had a good chance to enjoy a fabulous career during the next decades, as television and mass marketing would become huge growth industries. A young female secretary who married an advertising guy in the 1950s could count on a life full of lots of money and interesting people.
Doug,
Here’s the Motown companion song to “Love Child” (along with “Papa was a Rolling Stone”)
Notice the absence of Dad in this one too:
RUNAWAY CHILD, RUNNING WILD
WRITERS NORMAN WHITFIELD, BARRETT STRONG
(Dennis)
You played hooky from school And you can’t go out to play, yeah Mama said for the rest of the week In your room you gotta stay, yeah Now you feel like The whole world’s pickin on you But deep down inside you know it ain’t true You’ve been punished cause your mother Wants to raise you the right way, yeah But you don’t care Cause you already made up your mind You wanna run away, yeah You’re on your way
(Run away child, running wild) Run away child, running wild
(Better come back home)Better come back home
(Where you belong) Where you belong
(Dennis)
Roaming through the city Going nowhere fast, You’re on your own at last
(Otis)
Hey it’s getting late, where will you sleep
(Melvin)
Gettin kind-a hungry You forgot to bring something to eat
(Eddie)
Oh lost with no money, you start to cry
(Dennis)
But remember, you left home Wanting to be grown So dry your weepin eyes
(Eddie)
Siren screaming down neon lighted streets (You want your Mama)
all day looking for you You’re frightened and confused (I want my mama)
(Dennis)
But she’s much too far away She can’t hear a word you say
(Paul)
You heard some frightening news on the radio About little boys running away from home And their parents don’t see them no more
(Eddie)
You wanna hitch a ride and go home
(Dennis)
But your mama told you never trust a stranger And you don’t know which way to go
(Paul)
You’re lost in this great big city (Go back home where you belong) Not one familiar face Ain’t it a pity (Go back home where you belong)
(Denis)
Oh run away child, running wild You better go back home where you belong
(Paul)
Mama, mama please come and see about me
(Dennis)
But she’s much too far away She can’t hear a word you say
I want my mama You’re frightened and confused Which way will you choose
Interestingly, this song was from the Temptations’ psychedelic period with “Psychedelic Shack,Cloud Nine,etc.” The tawdriness of the Woodstock meme was already beginning to show. Read Joan Didion’s searing
essay “Slouching toward Bethlehem” for the
definitive portrait of a wretched generation.
weird. watched From Here to Eternity late last night (Ted Turner ain’t ALL bad, he gave us TCM) with Sinatra pre-mannerist really blowing out the acting stops. then sleep and wake up to catch BC featuring the final song of “Let It Bleed” –a true rock/boomer music-is-life peak album. Going for Baroque, two generational gothic cathedrals right there.
that song doesn’t even close the album with Stones but with the Vienna Boy’s Choir slowly coming up in the background behind the band, modulating in harmony on the chords, until the sound engulfs the band, climbing up and over to ascend cathedral-like full voice up the whole chromatic scale, to hold full on the keynote through a long fade to the end. Crazy good rock n roll. i had always thought of those lyrics, all these years, as being about coping with disappointment and how to settle for less. But reading it this morning after such long time out of mind, it dawns that it’s really a prayer, or ‘about’ prayer, how if you try, the trying might get you what you really need –which is “the trying”. dunno how those guys wrote that, it’s such a departure.
I’m currently reading a book called “The Iraqi Perspectives Report” by Kevin M. Woods of the US Joint Forces Command, a compilation of what the Iraqis were thinking to allow the Americans to squash them so completely in the 2003 invasion. The picture is one of politics run amok. Saddam was a case of fantasy trying to tough its way through reality to the bitter end. Saddam killed anybody who brought him bad news, so his battlefield commanders just told him they were winning. Everybody in the world except Saddam thought that Baghdad Bob was an idiot; Saddam thought B.B. was telling the world the unvarnished truth. Saddam’s Iraq was the the Echo Chamber on steroids, and brutalized anyone who didn’t play by the script. It’s Liberal Utopia taken to its logical extreme. And the result, as we’ve seen, has been grim and brutal for everyone concerned, most of all for Iraqis.
As far as what women want goes, I don’t like to think about it, because I think I know the answer. So I think I’ll stick with delusions instead.
As a young man I bought into the notion that women wanted a kinder, gentler man, the metasexual type. My wife (before we were married) would always admonish me to “Be a man!” when I acted in that fashion. So I stopped trying to be something I wasn’t. Women may tell us men and their friends differently, but Deep down women want MEN, not kind little boys, to love.
WilldoMath,
That is a fascinating, well researched book. Did you know there are two editions?
Mark @ 25 – No, I wasn’t aware of that. The version I have I borrowed from a coworker, who bought it commercially. What’s the difference between the two versions?
“What do women want?”
“The same things men do. Only in prettier colors.”
(oldie but goodie from “Northern Exposure”)
“And the problem was?” I asked, waiting for the punchline. “And problem she said was that it was like being married to a corpse and she was leaving me.”
Well, if I were to go all rational on this, I’d say that you can’t really tell what happened to that marriage, insofar as you’re getting only one person’s side of it after the fact. And that’s far to little data to try to come to any conclusion or even half-conclusion.
But what I will say is this:
1. There are truly guys who “just don’t get it.” They can’t pick up on the profound and intense unhappiness of the wife, until the cabinets start getting slammed and the sex gets withdrawn. But by then things are pretty far gone.
2. Even in marriages not characterized by in extremis acting out such as #1, let’s just say a “go along, get along” marriage, the husband and wife often give very different ratings to the marriage. The pattern is, husbands tend to give the marriage a much higher rating than the wife (he rates it an 8, she rates it a 2).
3. Generally speaking, women’s need for emotional, relational intimacy is much higher than men’s. This is just the way it is. Saying “I do” means you find ways to build bridges across that gap.
4. All that said … it also appears that too many women expect too much from marriage these days. Not consciously, but subconsciously, which can be the most damaging type of expectation, since a person doesn’t even consciously know *why* they are dissatisfied, only that they are. Exhibits of stoopid and grandiose female expectations: (A) “When I’m married, I’ll be completely fulfilled and happy.” (B) “It’s my husban’s job to make me happy. If I’m not, it’s his fault.” (C) “Women are naturals at relationships, while men are not good at it. Therefore, if there’s a problem between us, it’s because he’s the one who ‘just doesn’t get it.’” (D) “If I’m unhappy, I shouldn’t have to *tell* him. If he loves me, he should just *know* that sort of thing.”
Dr. Laura does a pretty good job hammering women on #4. Marriage is not an entitlement to fulfillment for women, but some do indeed treat it that way, and what’s more is that the culture by and large encourages this. Men, like America, are always to be blamed first.
Why *would* a guy get married when them’s the rules? When the rules can be changed, retroactively, unilaterally, without notice, and always to his detriment (emotional, financial, and many other ways)?
When I show romantic comedies in my film class, comparing classic-era ones with modern-era ones, and we get to talking about relationships “then” versus “now,” the #1 complaint voiced by both guys and girls seems to be the almost complete lack of rules. It’s chaos out there, people are getting hurt, these young people don’t know what is expected of them, and yet they can’t NOT venture into the arena of broken hearts. Pretty sad.
Most women don’t have a clue what they want. Most women are airheads.
Ok, Whiskey. We know you have hacked Wretchard’s acct.
What women want and what they will tell you they want are two completely different subjects. But to understand what women choose and why they choose it. You just have to look at their Mothers. What you see when you look at a woman’s mother is what you will get… The apple cannot fall far from the tree.
Wretchard must be just as confused about “what women want” as Mr. Freud was way back when, which explains why he’s tolerated Whiskey’s insane misogynistic rants for lo, these many years.
I don’t understand why men insist on categorizing all women in one large lump of estrogen, when they would never, ever, lump Sagan, Vicks, and Warhol in the same category, let alone the same sentence.
“Young people don’t know ANYTHING… especially that they’re young.”
–Don Draper
A bad boy for the genes, plus a “nice guy” to help raise the bad boy’s kids…
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002877.html
I don’t know what women want, various stuff I guess, depending. I do think Whiskey wants Paris Hilton.
@ 27. bogie wheel,
Very well said. There is always much more to the story than what people will typically relate. Concerning the marriage of Richard’s acquaintance, we really have no idea what happened. It’s doubtful that he was telling the whole truth about what his wife said, or that she was telling the whole truth even when she said it. On another point, John Boot’s case seems to rest on this statement:
“A glance around the blogs reveals that women are swooning for the show, which starts its third season tonight.”
Perhaps before everybody begins extemporizing on the topic we should question whether we should even accept the premise, given that it’s not substantiated by anything more than “a glance around the blogs.” The blogosphere is hardly a representative sampling of the general consensus; in fact, it over-represents precisely those whose wont it is to hype and senationalize.
Boot’s statement is already laden with fantastical baggage and trigger-words. Anybody who swallows it whole is probably guilty of more than a little fantasy himself: a meta-fantasy in which the fantasy of Mad Men is merely the embedded “play within a play,” a la The Taming of the Shrew.
Not one of the suitors in The Taming got the wife they thought they were getting, but they each got the wife that their actions merited. The play can be thought of as Shakespeare’s grand repudiation of Machiavellianism. Force and deception may initially appear to work, but they do not lead to success. Force can conquer that which can be grasped; it can conquer the body, but the heart remains as independent as ever. Deception can fool the senses, but in doing so it deludes itself as to the desirability of its object.
Why this digression? I mean to suggest that Boot’s perception is faulty. He sees only the fantasy he intended to see in the first place, a fantasy within which anything apparently deriveing from further analysis is already present in germ, pure and entire. The basic notions of sexuality implied in his analysis are really nothing but typical Boomer fetishes, having about as much to do with essential human life as Kayam neck rings.
Frankly, I’m getting rather weary of reading this sensation-driven tripe. Do you not see that the exhortation to “be a man” has far broader implications than the orienting oneself with reference to the characters in some purile piece of fiction? In the present context, being a man might begin with turning off the freaking television set.
Metrosexuals and ogres are both failures: there is nothing more to be said then that. But now, a wicked and adulterous generation (that is to say, the Boomers – the most effiminate men, shrillest women, and neglectful parents since the days of Gin Alley) amuse themselves by obsessing over which one to be.
Never was it more rightly said: “Grow up, already.”
What do women want?
A Prehistoric Man.
Ann Miller works for me, makes me want to beat my chest.
Posting to let you know I’m getting the option to edit other’s posts.
First Lifeofthemind’s@35 when I refreshed the thread, and now Matt Beck’s@34 after I left the site and then returned.
I am in love with a delightful Christian woman. She’s musically talented and well educated, an environmental scientist working with nuclear waste disposal. We are planning to marry. We have talked at length about our expectations and roles. We are both committed to St. Paul’s concept of being equally yoked. But yet, but yet…she expressed some longing for excitement, a wish for male induced tension and perhaps recklessness.
We talked. We concluded a part of her finds bad boys attractive but fears their unpredictabilty. We agreed, what she truly desires is controllable danger. I suggested “controllable danger” is an oxymoron. True danger can’t be controlled. She agreed and yes, the feeling is irrational, but there it is.
Fortunately, her feeling is not strong and she’s mature enough to know the likely costs. Also, she will do nothing that endangers her children. If Mad Men can scratch this itch for her, so be it.
Fantasy will never meet expectations of either sex. IMHO.
“If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
Brought’em all together for one night
I know they’d never match my sweet little imagination
’cause everything looks worse in black and white”
kodachrome
My first father-in-law, who passed away a few years back in his nineties, was a very famous Madison Avenue creative executive of the Mad Men era, much like Don Draper in terms of the work he did for McCann-Erickson.
So I tend to watch Mad Men, and I do enjoy it, with my eye on how accurately it portrays the world (as I recall it) at that time. To me, it does a surprisingly good job (due allowance being made for exaggeration/ distortion/ suspension-of-disbelief for artistic purposes).
I see little if any preaching in the show’s writing, for which I am grateful, and I can draw virtually no conclusions from the show’s contents and story lines about how I or anyone else ought to conduct a life.
Jamie Irons
Willdomath,
The links for both are in the blogroll of my site, http://www.regimeofterror.com.
One is Saddam’s view of U.S., one is examining Saddam’s use of terrorism. Both are very good.
A friend of mine started a band in high school and this led him to an interesting observation about women. Both musicians and women “broadcast” and seek a response.
Perhaps the reason musicians and singers are so popular with woman is that they are both broadcasting. And they both see the broadcasting as a response to their broadcasting.
I too have had long conversations with women and never “got it.” Then one time I did, or sort of. I took her arguments, concerns, and feeelllinngs and gave them right back to her, decrypted and rationalized. As she put it later “I asked to you ‘relate, relate’ and you did and it scared the hell out of me.”
So, Wretchard, sometimes it is not about “getting it.” It usually is about broadcasting back. I think that is what those successful bad boys like Don Draper do. They never get it and never even try to get it but just broadcast back and that is taken as a proper response to the female broadcasting.
Groucho Marx once said that he would never want to be a member of a club that would accept him as a member. In an analogous kind of way the Left never truly admires someone stupid enough to believe them. Desert raiders are liked exactly because they aren’t timid souls living in council housing staring down at their shoes waiting desperately for the community policeman whenever ‘youths’ come to rob them.
Boot says “Mad Men is a testament to … a consensus that the unpleasant parts of the past ought to be enthusiastically buried. There’s no monster of the deep so fearsome that it can’t be chased away for a moment or two with a pitcher of martinis.” Yes there is if there’s a lingering suspicion that we might need something like these monsters back one day. The problem with September 11 and the global financial crisis aren’t that they happened, but that they happened where they couldn’t be hidden; couldn’t be waved away with a pitcher of martinis and a TV remote. Not everyone wants to be reminded that fantasy doesn’t work forever and that maybe the politically correct man won’t be able to cope when the day comes.
Ah, that’s great stuff. Forgive the long quote of your own words, wretchard, but you do this kind of prose poetry of modern politics better than anyone else I’ve seen on the planet, when the muse takes you you’re the James Joyce of current events!
WHAT WOMEN WANT
(Tonio K.)
i know what these women want
they want sex
yeah, that’s true, but
i know what these women want
they want money
yeah, that too, but
i know what these women want
i know what these women really want
i know what these women want
they want champagne and jewelry
and german cars
i know what these women want
they want roses by the dozen
wanna break your heart, but
i know what these women want
i know what these women really want
they want love
it’s been a problem for a couple thousand years
can’t seem to find it ’cause it always disappears
they want love
don’t need no forgery, don’t need no substitute
they need somebody honest, not just somebody that’s cute
they want some affection
and some protection
that’s what they want
i know what these women want
they wanna fight
we’ve got ‘em pretty mad, boys
i know what these women want
they wanna lay down and die sometimes
’cause it hurts
i know what these women want
i know what these women really want
they want love
they want a lover, they don’t want no little boy
don’t wanna wind up bein’ someone’s broken toy
they want love
they want somebody they can maybe even trust
they’ve got a feeling
they’re not asking all that much
some affection
and just a little protection
that’s what they want
i think that’s all they want
Now this is entertainment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4d7qptGDfA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fpajamasmedia.com%2Fvodkapundit%2F2009%2F08%2F14%2Fits-the-greatest-thing-in-the-history-of-all-stuff-ever%2F&feature=player_embedded#t=37
(h/t instapundit)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meNuJhzzBoM
Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux “there is no happy love” Louis Aragon
poem sung by Georges Brassens, subtitles in english on the video
Nobody is ideal, just that we can share a same sensibility of thought, intellectual interests, empathy ; the worst is when you have nothing to say together, when the couple mind their own business on different paths, just that they share their meals, sleep in the same house
WHERE IS THAT PLACE?
(Tonio K./Scott Wilk)
it used to be the teacher’s favorite country
it used to be the showplace of the west
everything worked
and everyone smiled
it used to be another word for the best
where is that place?
where did it go?
whatever happened to that place?
god only knows
that isn’t it over there
and this isn’t it here
now how did a place that big just disappear?
you could see it in the distance
across the desert
you could see it from a hundred miles away
it glowed in the dark
it lit up the world
it seemed as if the sun shined night and day
where is that place…?
they dealt in fantasy and fashion
they dealt in flesh and blood
they dealt in multiple millions of dollars
you could buy anything but love
where is that place…?
LoTM wrote:
Mad Men is a Western.
Okay, I’ll bite. In what sense is it a Western?
Haven’t seen the series, mind you.
But I do teach about Westerns in my film class. The mac daddy characteristic of all Westerns is The Frontier vs. Civilization — the tension between the two, the transition from the former to the latter and whether the filmmakers see that as a good or bad thing.
The Frontier is characterized by lawlessness, violence, and the everpresent risk of death. OTOH it is where you find the risk-takers and independent types. Only the hardiest survive. The harshness of the conditions leads to the formulation of The Code (of the West). In reaction to the formal lack of laws, it’s the laws that the pioneers forge and enforce for themselves to increase the chances of survival.
So what’s the Frontier in “Mad Men”? Draperworld? The gung-ho world of the big-city ad agency in that era? If so, in what way is Draperworld lawless? What is The Code? Who are the savages?
And what sphere is civilization, then? The home, wife & kids?
And finally … it it a classic Western or a modern one?
The female intellect.— Women’s intellect is manifested as perfect control, presence of mind, and utilization of all advantages. They bequeath it as their fundamental character to their children, and the father furnishes the darker background of will. His influence determines the rhythm and harmony, so to speak, to which the new life is to be played out; but its melody comes from the woman.— To say it for those who know how to explain a thing: women have the intelligence, men the heart and passion. This is not contradicted by the fact that men actually get so much farther with their intelligence: they have the deeper, more powerful drives; these take their intelligence, which is in itself something passive, forward. Women are often privately amazed at the great honor men pay to their hearts. When men look especially for a profound, warmhearted being, in choosing their spouse, and women for a clever, alert, and brilliant being, one sees very clearly how a man is looking for an idealized man, and a woman for an idealized woman—that is, not for a complement, but for the perfection of their own merits.
and…
Without rivals.— Women easily notice whether a man’s soul is already appropriated; they want to be loved without rivals, and resent the goals of his ambition, his political duties, his science and art, if he has a passion for such things. Unless he is distinguished because of them: then they hope an amorous tie to him will also make them more distinguished; when that is the case, they encourage their lover.
AND…
A judgment of Hesiod’s confirmed.— An indication of the cleverness of women is that, almost everywhere, they have known how to have others support them, like drones in a beehive. Just consider the original meaning of this, and why men do not have women support them. It is certainly because male vanity and ambition are greater than female cleverness; for, through submission, women have known how to secure for themselves the preponderant advantage, indeed domination. Originally, clever women could use even the care of children to excuse their avoiding work as much as possible. Even now, if they are really active, as housekeepers, for example, they know how to make a disconcerting fuss about it, so that men tend to overestimate the merit of their activity tenfold.
AND…
Love.— The idolatry that women practice when it comes to love is fundamentally and originally a clever device, in that all those idealizations of love heighten their own power and portray them as ever more desirable in the eyes of men. But because they have grown accustomed over the centuries to this exaggerated estimation of love, it has happened that they have run into their own net and forgotten the reason behind it. They themselves are now more deceived than men, and suffer more, therefore, from the disappointment that almost inevitably enters the life of every woman—to the extent that she even has enough fantasy and sense to be able to be deceived and disappointed.
F. Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human
” . . . maybe the politically correct man won’t be able to cope when the day comes.”
And I’d wager, neither will the over-validated, yet perpetually unfulfilled, Sex-in-the-City paper-tiger woman — who is comfortable with the ongoing deconstruction of the very civilization which makes her ‘liberated’ life possible.
In other words (channeling my inner Whiskey here), there won’t be enough G.I. Jane’s to rescue modern metrosexual man.
We are both committed to St. Paul’s concept of being equally yoked.
If you are going into it like a team of oxen, you’re cooked from the start, is my experience.
‘Yoked’ makes the old ball and chain seem like freedom itself, in my mind, is all I’m sayin’.
37. DonB71inWA:
what she truly desires is controllable danger.
I’m no expert but there are all kinds of examples around of controllable danger. For cheap some of the amusement park roller coaster rides around these days are terrifying and yet not dangerous. For more expensive you can take parachute lessons–and if that’s not enough — skydiving. For a summer vacation to remember maybe some white water rafting or even just a drive through yellowstone the tetons &/or glacier.
Keep an eye out for meteor showers and drive on a night 100 miles from the city to catch a glimpse of the falling stars. Two regular showers are in august and november: one is the persiods and the other is — I’ve forgotten its name–maybe Leonids. If you have a yen for tourist stuff — go find the nearest neolithic site. Go see at least one stock car race before you have kids. Maybe go scuba diving–or snorkling.
My brother in law is an accountant. Very much a numbers guy. For years before they had kids he would take my sister out to something different every Saturday. They may well still do that.
Of course they also went to couples bible studies where they got a chance to talk about their Saturday adventures.
If your argument is against spending money of any kind for any reason other than food and shelter so as to save for unknown expenses–then you may not be putting enough trust in God.
What is it that the Lord says?
4 Delight yourself also in the LORD,
And He shall give you the desires of your heart.
Its also helpful to read the context of the passage.
Don’t let the pastor tell you to so live your married life together so that you might later enjoy one another in eternity.
Rather, try to find eternity with your mate in the here and now, right here, right now.
Then your burden will be light, your yoke easy.
If Shakespeare couldn’t figure it out then I have no shot.
(strum strum) “The road goes on forever and the party never ends”
I saw a 1947 movie on TCM last night called “the Hucksters” starring Clark Gable as a wisecracking ad wiz, who meets the tyrannic dictates of his Feudal boss- Sidney Greenstreet, who’s tentative, last minute meetings are called at 2:00 AM or on Sunday at 11:00AM. Gable keeps producing the last-minute save-the-day slogans, until he explodes against the cynicism (and Sydney Greenstreet) and chucks it all (and the salary) away- for love. (of a widowed(?) single mother of two children)
Highly recommended- Georges Sadas personal involvement w/ Saddam at the highest levels, as Saddams Air Force general, in his book “Saddams Secrets”, about Saddam’s WMD ambitions. Too much material to list here, but some background; Sada is christian and Assyrian, trained and educated here, in Austin TX, then trained to fly Soviet jets in Russia (when saddam came to power over the Baathist party, and changed to partnership with Soviets.
Sada dared giving Saddam advice he might not have wanted to hear, concerning bombing Israel in first gulf war, advice Saddam took until finally overriding it to sending Scud missles to Tel Aviv toward the end, when things were going bad.
Saddam’s obsession with annihilating Israel fits into a pattern in Middle East regions: Annihilating Israel is a high water mark of prestige, crucial to all those who aspire to rule the whole region, and now seen in Iran’s preoccupation with it.
We fight it out with the soviets in a race for the moon, for national prestige, Mid East despots want to chalk up leveling Israel for theirs.
Only one axis of evil member taken out so far, the other two will have to wait for their opportunity, mollycoddled as they are by current regime in Washington.
In the book, Jurassic Park, Chaos Theory (unintended consequences) was the monster, and dinosaurs a means of its demonstration; in the movie, gratuitously huge ugly monsters only serve as villians disrupting the order of things. They can’t be killed by us, so let’s flee and hope we can reach “safety” again, roll the credits and be glad it was all “just a movie”.
I love the line “the two-fisted, hairy-chested, hard-drinking man whom political correctness has hunted to extinction”, and “longed for” by pc strictured women in a politically acceptable format and only in whispers at the water fountain at work (“did you see…?”), or secretly at a klatch after work.
Guilty pleasures, but its only a tv show.
There were plenty drinks and cigarettes politely offer by Gable to women in nightclubs in the Hucksters, including the vivacious affections of Ava Gardner, whom Gable lets go of when he thinks he might still have another chance with Deborah Kerr. and live a life of balance of his male, to her female.
There is a key difference between matriarchy and the project of feminism, which has become the emasculation of men. Many traditional societies have been matriarchal or at least matrilocal; the woman owns the house. Yet, in such societies, men are men and are expected to behave as men. On the other hand, feminism has not been driven by a desire for the responsibilities of power. Instead, feminism has been driven by a desire for the perquisites of power without an iota of responsibility.
All too often, feminism has been about the general’s wife thinking that because her husband is a general, then obviously she must become a general too. Likewise, it has been a fashion among children of privilege to attack the idea of marriage, claiming that it inherently enforces male control over our society. Really? Are children really helped if a woman doesn’t have a husband? Is our society really helped when we have more “children of informal parentage” (referred to as bastards in a more “retrograde” era)?
It appears to me that much of modern feminism is a rebellion against patriarchy, NOT any steps toward any form of matriarchy. Matriarchy has nothing to do with modern feminism because feminism is the creation of wives and daughters of rich men, not responsible women. In other words, feminists are women with too much time on their hands. Rebellion may be the only form of legitimacy that some people recognize, yet rebellion always carries the seeds of its own ruin. Either today’s rebel will become tomorrow’s object of rebellious hatred or today’s rebel will simply not have children.
Feminist ranting against the horrors of patriarchy can sound altogether too much like a woman who pines for a man who will beat her up. This isn’t matriarchy; it’s the petulance of a spoiled brat who is trying to provoke a man into violence against her.
Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union were mirror images of one another; both were despotisms with a strong ruling class. Neither was a democracy. Likewise, patriarchy and feminism are mirror images of one another; both ideologies are neither matriarchal nor promoting equality of the sexes. Most feminists play the “why don’t you yes but” game; they are like prisoners who claim to desire freedom yet can’t feel comfortable anywhere except prison.
In my experience, the most fervent believers in patriarchy have always been women.
Saddam thought B.B. was telling the world the unvarnished truth. Saddam’s Iraq was the the Echo Chamber on steroids, and brutalized anyone who didn’t play by the script.
The accusation leveled against men is that they are also addicted to a fantasy of a different kind; not to a soap operas, but action-adventure stories which they project upon the world, in which they imagine themselves to be a part. The idea is that wars, irrationally aggressive behavior and wild-goose chases are a “men things” born of these imaginings; that Gunsmoke is just as dangerous as Mad Men. There’s probably a grain of truth to that. Imagine Achilles fighting for “glory”. Why didn’t he just stay at home and make soup? Whatever the answer, it’s a valid question. This is the kind of debate that can go on forever.
I think it is actually better that men and women are different; imagine if they were the same? Then one may as well be … well let’s not get into that. So I can’t side with Whiskey and say “women are evil”. They’re not. But I do think that “sexual politics” exists insofar as the Left has found another angle to slice and dice groups. For I think there’s no denying that it raises issues specifically designed to bolster its asexual power agenda by making temporary gender alliances. So slogans like “do it for the children” are raised when it’s convenient to do so, but don’t make the mistake of thinking the Left actually cares for the children, or for women either. They have also, to some extent, pulled the trick of making whole areas of this conversation minefields. And before long I think, when everything that is possible has become political then no discussion on any subject will be possible at all. How one disposes of garbage; what one eats; what one watches — these will define tribes that can be set, one against the other. Gulliver finds a strange country in which politics revolves around which side of an egg is opened. Maybe the modern version is which place you buy your eggs at: vegetarian and “organic” eggs at Whole Foods; or chemical/industrial eggs at Aldi’s. A kiss is not a kiss anymore as time goes by.
Pocketa pocketa pocketa
The mighty airship sang
Sailing free and fearsome in the sky
Below him Walter Mitty saw
The fleeing pirate gang
Led across the bay by Captain Bligh
The bomb bay doors flung open then
The airship lurched and breached
The bomb fell clean upon the men
As seagulls flapped and screeched
Where have they gone these mighty men
Have airships disappeared?
Do pirates now use GPS
Are Zulu foes still speared?
We haven’t gone, we’re here to stay
Though they may curse our likes
We still work hard, and women play
Behind us on our bikes
I’m in love with a delightful Christian woman also; been married to her for 28 years. The equal yoke, Bob is not drudgery, but being yoked to the same dream. Nobody is lesser for it,but the two of you find expression for your lives in a bigger calling and purpose than your own little selfish lives. That’s what kills marriage, insisting on our rights to the place where every i is dotted and every t is crossed.
She grew up in an upper middle class British family loving the arts and dance and such. I grew up in a factory town loving the Dodgers, scrapping and wars and things. No common ground, but we have thrived in love for 28 years because of the common cause of Christian service to a broken down world. I have many friends with like stories. You just have to climb out of your own skin.
#30 Nahncee.
Yes. Thank you.
Don’t lump women all together as a monolithic mass that can be decoded easily.
65% of the viewership of Mad Men is 50+. And, at its best, the series pulled in 1.9m for a single episode–the viewership is usually much lower. Even if most of the audience is female, that leaves a whole lot of us out there that don’t watch. Extrapolating what “women” “want” from such a small data pool? Isn’t that a tad unfair, gentlemen?
And, an anecdoctal glance around the blogs from my perspective suggests that women like the series for its subtle feminist message! Depends where you are looking and whose eyes you are looking with, I suppose.
I just don’t like the image of a yoke. There’s got to be a better image for living together in peace, love, mutual concern, etc.
Symbiosis, maybe, where 1 + 1 might = 3.
Marie-Claude
One of the most touching poems I have ever read is Jacques Prevert, Le Petit Dejeuner.
Onesimus
Why didn’t he just stay at home and make soup? Whatever the answer, it’s a valid question.”
simply because men (who were the legends writers ? BTW) don’t relate their domestic anthology, but their exploits still the instinct to provoke and or to show off in front of the other males
“sexual politics” well, I would say if women play on that register, it’s because they need reassurment, some kind of latent narcissism is the motor
Now, after “globally” reading the different posts,we don’t ask ourselves such dilemns, or if we usually conform our behaviour to a stereotyp, things are more natural, and or traditional, may-be that we are more proxy to “Nature” (umm, don’t take on it for recalling me Rousseau, but may-be there’s a filiation)
Thanks for the stand up Tranbang. You eloquently captured what I was hoping to communicate and am seeking in a marriage. I’ve made one mistake. I’m taking action so not to repeat it.
Our concept of equally yoked is one where we share the same values, commitments and faith. It’s not like a work gang where we are chained together. Instead we are pulling in unison to the same goals.
Possibly where the equally yoked analogy fails is that it may seem to some that our goal is to only be cloned oxen, just doubling the pulling power of one. Our vision permits each of us to use our particular gifts (some gender derived, some not) to walk the path our values and faith sets for us.
onesimus,
Prevert has a cinematographic expression (Besides he made movies with his brother) ; he is more on the descriptive manner. He doesn’t play with words meanings and their harmony, nor on the rymthmes, it’s like a litany, a listing ; He witnesses of an era in Art and Litterature history, I wouldn’t find people expressing in such a way nowadays. Though, generally, Prevert is appreciated by the teens, cuz no difficulty to understand what he means is expected.
One tip on a long lasting marriage might be–don’t sleep together.
At least, not after the first years of the rush of the passions.
Human beings weren’t made to sleep together.
It’s even best to have two separate bedrooms. This way I can rustle around half the night, as I usually do, and she emerges from her den totally refreshed.
Take it from me, was married in 1980. To the same person as now.
I often wonder why people begin a critique or criticism with the sentence,” No offense intended”, so I’ll forgo that and simply state that the Mad Men thread is lame. No one can conjure up a reason why what ever the dudes name is ( I don’t watch TV too often) is getting written by some dames, directed by some broads on occasion and has panties soaked from coast to coast (to read the thread) and metrosexuals panties no doubt in a wad.
Anyone who is old enough to have seen Robert Mitchum act knows what a tough guy is and one who can also seduce the fillies. Since “Rock” Hudson turned into a jelly dildo and other Hollywood types have melted away we’re left with baby face DiCaprio’s and the like pretending to play Bogey.
I worked with directors, producers, agents, and stars when I was with IBM in Beverly Hills. I’ve never seen so much made of such little people. They need the constant reinforcement of award shows they produce to attempt to validate their lives. Playing a part isn’t being or doing what the part calls for but the public has totally forgotten how to get off the sofa and actually live and we do on occasion have Congress call a star to testify about something they read from a script……yeah it’s lame taking even this small time to justify anything Hollywood does. They do one thing very effectively however…they support the Democrats who are totally supported by the Communist worldwide.
Alexis, the big piece
“On the other hand, feminism has not been driven by a desire for the responsibilities of power. Instead, feminism has been driven by a desire for the perquisites of power without an iota of responsibility.”
right, the main motivation is “self expression”
“All too often, feminism has been about the general’s wife thinking that because her husband is a general, then obviously she must become a general too”
Yes, this was in the conquest of the same rights in a professional life, but women never got the same “rights”, it’s simply impossible becuz of their home duties. Though those who managed to insert themselve in a manly hierachy, tend to “parrot” men carricature, and it becomes more odd from a woman. Though, if a woman would exert her authority, she could do it in being naturally intuitive, using men self complacency, and complicity with women. Though she ought never to order something, but rather to ask for a personnal service
“It appears to me that much of modern feminism is a rebellion against patriarchy,”
Yes, I was a rebel to my father first, who was the warrant of traditions, and I was looking for the same freedom like my brothers could enjoy. Though my “feminism” revendication stopped when I took the decision to quit home and travel, and finally selected a man out of the traditional seraglio, that would let me develop my own “self expression”, while I would assist him and let him enjoy his own’s
By us “feminism” hasn’t had a large audience, we finally all managed our ways without external demonstrations, may be cuz we don’t revendique the first place, just the “egery” 2nd’ suffice that our man is happy and socially succesful, or a good hand worker at home (bricoleur)and the whole family is happy
Earth’s the place for love. And marriage. Robert Frost said he didn’t know where it might go any better. And Our Lord, in one of his more direct indications, said there is no marrying or giving in marriage in heaven, but there, where ever there is, they are like the angels.
Well, given that the “yoke” analogy also occurs when Jesus says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light,” I have always considered the “unequally yoked” phrase to mean that Christ Himself is the yoke. Christ connects (binds together) the husband and wife in submission to Himself.
In a worldly sense I can see the yoke image being bothersome, but in the spiritual sense if it bothers a Christian to wear Christ’s yoke, then that Christian has a problem IMO.
But for the practical workings of the analogy think of a three-legged race. Unless both people are going (a) in the same direction (b) at the same time (c) with the same amount of pull … then they are going to trip and fall. You gots to be in sync to an amazingly high degree to run (successfully) a three-legged race. And if the cord binding your legs is not a strong, well-fastened one, then you are also going to have a lot of trouble.
Exact same dynamics at work with being yoked. Same direction, same time, same pull, strong yoke … only way to move the load forward & get done what you want to get done.
And Blake said there there would be no pompous high priests entering in by secret places, but ecstatic comminglings from tip top to toe.
I quit while I’m not too far behind.
Oh Wretchard, I NEVER say “women are evil.” What I do say is that they are totally disconnected from any social mores, need for compromise, or anything else that restrains behavior for the first time in history, ever, and thus give full rein to their worst rather than their best impulses.
Western literature from the beginning, the Ilyiad and the Odyssey, set out the “rules” by which men succeed in Western society: cooperation among men, heroic self-sacrifice, women and children first, and repression of the Big Man impulse. This worked reasonably well, not the least of which was Western Women.
Western Women were ALWAYS different — far more independent, a woman whose love was to be won, rather than simply a slave in the seraglio. Almost every Western Man had the fairly equal ability to win the undivided love of a Western Woman roughly equal to him in status and attractiveness. This made most Western Men deeply invested in society in a way that other men in other societies were not. The key to Western success was always its women. ALWAYS. Just as its collapse is the same. Behind every man at Lepanto, Salamis, Poitiers, or Vienna, was a Western woman.
Now, however, contraception allows women to have as much sex with as many “Alpha” men as they like (which means, cocky-funny/arrogant “bad boys” in the appropriate level for the social setting). They can do this without social censure or shame in urban anonymity. And rising living standards for women allow them to forgo traditional marriage altogether, or the need for a “dependable man” rather than an exciting one. This is unique in history — never before have all three factors hit like a tidal wave on EVERY culture that is half-way wealthy and urban. Even Iran, Algeria, and Tunisia suffer it. Which makes, btw, hardly any men invested or caring about society. I’ve blogged on this extensively, as I have on “Mad Men” which Wretchard I think you miss the lessons there entirely.
But it is clear to me, at any rate, that the weakness of the West is the collapse of the model “TWO is stronger than ONE” i.e. traditional, companionate marriage, in favor of what both Barbara Ehrenreich and Sandra Tsing Loh argue for, the “chaotic and amorphic” transient relationships with children “raised by other people” so women can go on “fulfilling exciting and passionate loves and careers.”
I am sure that if men were handed as much unchecked social power they’d abuse it too — being fairly disgusting degenerates like Hugh Hefner and so on. But fortunately they are not. Collapse of the Western model however leaves most more attached to their X-box than the “empowered women” pursuing bad boys, and understandably so. Men don’t like sharing women, when they do they value them not at all.
It seems to me that either people are rational and free or we in big trouble. If society can be destabilized because women cannot resist the impulse to run off like hares once pregnancy is no longer a concern then it follows that “we” (whoever “we” are) must recall the genie to the bottle so that the “dependable man” is once again valuable. How is that different from the idea that women cannot handle freedom? Cannot make a rational choice? If a woman, freed of the need to pair up with a functioning man, is irremediably drawn to the nearest rascal, then is she a person at all, or someone who has to be restrained for her own good?
As you know, I’ve argued that you might as well argue that the “dependable man” has lost his mandate because he has become, in some cases, less of a man. If we have become politically correct weaklings is the failure in our stars or in ourselves? Why should we stare down at our shoes when the arrogant bad boy shows up? Because we are told to? Because we’ll lose our little government pension if we don’t? It cuts both ways.
My problem with sexual politics isn’t that there isn’t a difference between the sexes. Man is a mystery, but he is fundamentally free. We are human beings first. Or should be at least.
“Don’t lump women all together as a monolithic mass that can be decoded easily.”
Everyone is a unique person, but can you hope to understand the specific without first understanding the general principles?
The movie, Revloutionary Road serves to cover some of the same ground as Mad Men (except it’s set in the mid to late ’50s). It is based on a novel that was pubished in the same year as Catch 22. Oddly, but presumably to accommodate a younger or more liberal audience of today, the movie has the protagonist WWII veteran surrounded at all times exclusively by rock ‘n roll and R&B music.
For those interested in my take on this Last Week you can see it at the link.
I think Wretchard misses the salient points.
1. Almost no one watches the show.
2. It’s written by women, as a female soap opera, few men watch it.
3. It’s themes of “beautiful victims of bad boys” is strikingly immature, unworthy of a 16 year old let alone a grown woman.
4. The women selected to write it show the bankrupt nature of Hollywood which runs on connections not talent.
5. The show itself does not make money nor is it intended to make money.
6. Hardly anyone is receptive to the message of Mad Men.
1. Ratings were 900K first season, up to 1.5 the next season. That’s “Gossip Girl” territory — another show with lots of buzz, that few watch. Even with time-shifting viewing, it’s less than 2 million per episode. Contrast with American Idol at 37 million peak viewing, or nearly 100 million for the Superbowl.
2. The show is written by women for women, with the men all being “bad boys” and the women being various put-upon characters you wonder why they stick around. It has a woman’s idea of a man, rather than a man’s. Marti Noxon, who seems to be lead writer, was responsible for the “Buffy I loved you so much I had to rape you” storyline on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with Buffy indeed falling in love with her rapist (to the disgust of series star Sarah Michelle Gellar who fought said storyline every step of the way). Noxon said she based it on her own love life.
3. Noxon came to TV out of off-Broadway plays that never made any money but featured “beautiful victims” who after abuse by bad boys they loved, commit suicide. This is a fundamentally immature, narcisstic approach to life, one too often part of female oriented literature and a huge change from that of female-fiction of years past. Which featured hard choices by heroines who could not, in fact, have it all or the luxury of being “beautiful victims.”
[The parallels between the views of 9/11 making America the "perfect beautiful victim" that the awful George Bush ruined! by striking back are really, shocking when you look at the statements of Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Michael Moore, Michael Chabon, Art Spiegelman, and others.]
4. One writer was hired out of, basically babysitting for series creator Matthew Wiener. This is a network of nepotism, not talent, and therefore a giant red flag that Hollywood as a whole does not exist to make money but rather exploit an assumed and eternal money stream. People trying to make money don’t hire babysitters to write episodes costing $3 million a piece to produce.
5. Mad Men does not make money. Even with DVD sales “assumed” (not yet booked) it’s likely to barely break even. AMC and other “edgy” cable nets like SyFy (rebranded to reach women and tossing its male nerd audience aside), FX, HBO, Showtime, etc. don’t make money from ads — rather fees from cable operators that are “assumed” to be eternal and if anything going up. Mad Men is a prestige product, aimed at Emmy bait and accolades for producers, rather than a money making enterprise. It’s the Toyota Prius or Chevy Volt of entertainment, only with fewer buyers.
6. Hardly anyone is receptive of Mad Men’s message. A few immature women wanting to be “beautiful victims” watch it, and a few men who see the art direction and acting subvert the script. But no one really accepts the Wiener/Noxon message of how women are beautiful victims of the bad boys who break their heart but they really, really love. Most of the male critics have ignored this part and focused on how “cool” un-PC behavior is, similar to “Life on Mars” in the UK (it failed here on ABC last year).
More broadly speaking, the “message” of most female entertainment (“Twilight” is far more popular, with grown women as fans as well as tweens growing bored with Miley Cyrus) ticks men off. Though for the more thoughtful, it provides disturbing information. Traditionally (see my comment above) Western literature from Odysseus, to Beowulf, to Arthur, to Robin Hood, to “Gunsmoke” sets out the rules: be a particular kind of man, physically brave, respectful of women, oriented towards protecting home and hearth, cooperating with friends and family. These are the “rules” that if adhered to, like fair play and sportsmanship, “promise” to find eventual success for most men.
The eternal bad-boy well, “boys” of Twilight, or Buffy, or “Gossip Girl” or “Desperate Housewives” or “Greys Anatomy” or even “Mad Men” don’t follow those rules and are adored by women up through their mid forties. For most men, this generates disgust to anger to contempt, for women not “following the rules” that they get from traditional male culture and see working more often than not in the football field, or baseball diamond, etc.
For those more thoughtful, its another indicator that the traditional bonds between Western Women and Men are irretrievably broken. Broken by technology: easy and reliable contraception, and urban anonymity. Broken by women having full equality and independence in lives including economics, therefore not needing “boring” men who fail to excite them.
If anything, men and women in this new world are mirror images of each other — flipped around. Women view men basically as sources of entertainment and stimulation (seen referenced constantly on the “roller coaster” metaphor in such female-skewing shows as “Veronica Mars” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “Mad Men”) — men selected on the excitement of the ride, and presumed to be responsible for keeping women entertained.
This a vast difference between the responsibility automatically assumed by Western Women in times past, for half of the duties of companionate marriage.
Men in turn, those incapble of processing the new rules and prospering under them (by playing the arrogant jerk appropriate for the social setting) tend to substitute through porn, “bromances” and X-boxes, the stimulation and companionship of the old Western model of romance and marriage.
That’s pretty sad. But as Spengler rightly points out that modernity shatters tribal structures in Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, it shatters it no less in the ‘Western Model’ all across the globe, from the “herbivore men” in Japan, to the uncommited slacker and Sex and the City girl in the West.
My own assessment is that no amount of Kings Men can put companionate marriage back together again, and the great masses of Western men will have simply no interest in women or children, the latter produced by a smattering of bad boys able to navigate the waters of the “New Girl Order” as Kay Hymnowitz put it. This is precisely what makes the West so weak, and easy prey. There is no one left to fight for it. The New Girl Order of casual fashionability and fabulous lives only exists under male protection, it’s likely to collapse under plundering tribes themselves fractured by modernity.
Wretchard, I do believe that putting the “genie” back in the bottle requires that we travel through the hellish parts of the Three Conjectures. This will not end well. And if history is any indication it will exact a enormous toll on mankind.
Whiskey, I agree with your statement, attached below, FWIW.
But it is clear to me, at any rate, that the weakness of the West is the collapse of the model “TWO is stronger than ONE” i.e. traditional, companionate marriage,
My beloved wife, a few years ago, paraphrased an old saying. “Each marriage partner should contribute 75% to the marriage. When the going gets tough, that extra 50% comes in handy.”
I do not claim to know anything about women, but this I do know. A good marriage requires a lot of LOVE, a lot of LUCK, and a lot of LUST. And GOD’s blessing on all of it.
“Anyone who is old enough to have seen Robert Mitchum act knows what a tough guy is …”
Lee Marvin, too.
Although Mitchum playing a preacher after two little kids is THE scariest bad guy I’ve ever seen on the screen. Because he was smart in his evil.
But as Spengler rightly points out that modernity shatters tribal structures in Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, it shatters it no less in the ‘Western Model’ all across the globe, from the “herbivore men” in Japan, to the uncommited slacker and Sex and the City girl in the West.
I don’t agree that tribal structures are shattering. New tribes are forming all the time, but they are different ones. The way back to the past may be barred, just as the angel with the flaming sword blocked the entrance to Paradise, but the way forward is open. The key to going down the road is to create new relationships that work; the “bad boy”/”beautiful girl” isn’t the only model possible, unless we have a complete failure of imagination. And that model will never succeed because it doesn’t work. It works kind of, sort of, only if someone is around the clean up the mess. Otherwise no. The cleanup crew doesn’t have to consist of old style men and women, but it has to consist of functional men and women or the mess gets bigger.
Middle Eastern societies may be crumbling, but the solution isn’t the eighth century, any more than the Western solution is a return to Father Knows Best. But it has to result in a situation where Father Knows Something and Mother Knows Something.
73. wretchard:
“It seems to me that either people are rational and free or we in .”
Mr W.,
I know it has not for a moment escaped your attention …… but we are in big trouble……across the board.
The key to Western success was always its women. ALWAYS. Just as its collapse is the same. Behind every man at Lepanto, Salamis, Poitiers, or Vienna, was a Western woman.
This is an extremely dubious assertion. There is more reason to believe that it was the synthesis of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, to so say it simply, and the long historical slog of working things out. The bromide “behind every great man..” is really little observed in history, however much this rude fact might ruffle the feathers of some middle class, late 20th century feminists.
A great many of the fighters at Lepanto where galley slaves, granted freedom for fighting, and a great many were back in the galleys within a couple of years. Salimas? well women were pretty much chattel in the Agean world.
Mrs. Brahms? Ms. Newton? Mrs. Bismark?
Are you imagining that in the broader world men do not have access to women?
Imperial European courts really had the equivalent of harems and noble bastards (alt almost all levels) were common place and numerous. The elite of Islam, or other cultures of the time outside Europe, did not have all the woman. That is just absurd. In fact they had a tiny minority. You are talking about millions of people. Read “romantic” poetry of Persia, China, etc. and you will see that the courting of females is pretty common the world over. Also, reading of the Canterbury Tales will dispels much of this on the European side.
I would point out that for a large portion of its history, some of the major actors in daily cultural life in Europe were clergy, and great many of the common people were in fact serfs. Nobel marriages were often arranged, and the female nobility were not particularly known for their fidelity, at least no more than their male counterparts.
I think you exaggerate the options and the nobility of the average women (and men) in daily life in Europe and diminish the same in other civilizations.
It is also a bizarre claim to make that the great synthesis of Western Civilization and the many accomplishments derived from this are due to the fact that some sectors of society had to court some women some of the time.
I am not so convinced that contraception is causing any collapse of western civilization. Yes, there was a limited time between the advent of the Pill and the rise of AIDS when the mainstream media promoted a culture of promiscuity. However, the “sexual revolution” didn’t start in the 1960’s, but rather in the 1920’s. Back in those days, large cities had a thriving black market for doctors who would do an “operation”, known nowadays as an abortion. For a woman rich enough to afford it and ruthless enough not to care about killing a child, she could have whatever sex life she wanted back then.
In the 1920’s, it became fashionable for women to drink in speakeasies. This was a massive change because bars had been the preserve of men for centuries. Before the 1920’s, any woman found at a bar would often be one with an ill reputation. In this context, Prohibition could be seen as an effort by early twentieth century feminists to destroy any place where men could congregate out of earshot of their wives.
Much of what the mainstream media portrays as trends are merely shifts in what the mainstream media are willing to report at any given time. It doesn’t mean that the social reality necessarily changes, just outside perception of it.
The most admired warrior culture in ancient Greece was Sparta. Yet, it was called a Gynekratia. Sparta was notorious for powerful women who owned property. Spartan men were notorious for lending each other their wives! Later, Greek women in Ptolemaic Egypt embraced Egyptian law, which included the right to own property. When ancient Greek women had a chance to exercise liberty, they generally did so.
In 1889, Wyoming threatened not to become a state in the Union if women were deprived of the vote. I would hardly regard Wyoming men as lacking in masculinity! I think a strong society has strong men and strong women. Strong women are sexy to men; strong men are sexy to women.
Imagine if a woman were to complain on and on (and on and on) that no man seems to be interested in her, that men get attracted to “alpha women” who are more beautiful, intelligent, articulate, and accomplished. She mutters darkly how men have become depraved and how western civilization is falling because men ogle those “alpha women”. She points out how all those “alpha women” have lots of boyfriends while women who aren’t as good looking get ignored. What she doesn’t realize is that her negativity drives men away. Yet, if she took a positive attitude, more men would take an interest in her – and not just the occasional charming drunkard with no self-respect, but “alpha men”.
You see, she could talk all she likes about how women should stick together or how women should all play by the rules to ensure that each woman gets a good man. It won’t make any difference. All is fair in love and war.
Mongoose:
I think the rise and fall of many a civilization has often been the result of dumb luck. Athens struck silver so it was able to build a navy in time to defeat Persia. Macedonia struck gold so it was able to assemble an army to conquer Persia. Gold was found in California just as soon as it had become part of the United States; imagine if that gold had been found under Mexican control twenty years earlier or under Spanish control fifty years earlier!
People like to think that they make their own luck; sometimes they do. Yet, however comforting it may feel that one’s ascendancy must derive from superior values or superior skill, all too often Fortune shines her eyes upon an undeserving society and gives it something it could never deserve. Let’s be grateful for our good luck.
Explain these literary events to me:
Ayn Rand, a woman author, in The Fountainhead has her female protagonist raped by a man she believes to be a stone worker and afterwards rather than have him arrested becomes his lover.
John Irving, in The Hotel New Hampshire, has a teenage character raped by a football team and she spends much of the remaining novel writing letters to the quarterback trying to form a romantic relationship.
In one of those murder mysteries (perhaps silence of the lambs) the hero’s wife has her leg broken in a car accident and a Mexican worker comes along and rapes her while she is in agony from her injuries. She reports it to the police and they show her a suspect. She says of course he is not the rapist but give me his address so I can send the poor fellow a few bucks. She contacts the fellow who is the rapist and starts a torrid affair with him.
Now what is going on here? I was honestly confused by all of those novels.
I recommend the book “Who Stole Feminism” to everyone.
The author, Christina Hoff Summers, points out something astonishing, especially from a committed and long term feminist.
She says that the old fashioned feminists, like her, are “equity” feminists, promoting the idea that men and woman should truly be given equal rights and opportunities.
But modern feminism, or 2nd wave femanism, has been dominated by what she calls the “Gender Feminists” that believe that that woman are enslaved by a male dominated society; they see evidence of such enslavement everywhere, and view every issue through that prism. In many ways the Gender Feminists believe the exact opposite of the Equity Feminists, but they have come to dominate feminism.
I think that C.H. Summers has uncovered a basic difference between old style civil rights and the new version. Whether Black, Asian, or Latino, almost all modern civil rights advocates have moved from Equity to a Race Prism view of the world. And in so doing they have taken on the same kind of viewpoint as fascists.
Now what is going on here? I was confused by all of those novels.
See the Slave of love post sometime back. The trick is not to want to be the stone worker, quarterback or Mexican worker but yourself, if being yourself is good enough. If you can be perfectly happy as a functional person whatever else other people may think, or however bizarre their attractions are, that’s the key.
W: “you can be perfectly happy as a functional person whatever else other people may think, or however bizarre their attractions are, that’s the key”
So you think I ran across three examples of Gothic American literature? Fair enough.
86. Peterson:
The Ayn Rand model is a Victorian literary device, and it is used equally in Atlas Shrugged. To what degree it has ever reflected reality, I dunno. Though you might note, in neither case was the female protagonist surprised, much less displeased, with events.
I’ll leave it there.
testing …
86. Peterson:
The Ayn Rand model is a Victorian literary device, and it is used equally in Atlas Shrugged. To what degree it has ever reflected reality, I dunno. Though you might note, in neither case was the female protagonist surprised, much less displeased, with events.
I’ll leave it there.
First, it’s great to see so many folks contributing to the conversation. AND maintaining and even raising the level of discourse. Thanks, and Welcome.
So much for self-congrats. Whiskey is in unusually expansive and good form today, and addresses right out of the gate, the question of whether a TV show deserves so much of our consideration and analysis.
To call television a triviality is not really correct (not that anyone has) any more than it would be accurate to describe it as governing and controlling the culture.
Both of those are true though, for a LOT of people.
Working for years in the so-called “hospitality industry” to pay his college expenses, my brother ran into a mess of women he finally understood are acting out dramas as they seen on thuh TeeVee. And let’s face it, the people that show up on Jerry Springer really do exist and live like that. Whether you want to excuse their self-mutilating behavior in terms of post-modern deconstructionist theory, or pitiless social darwinism, their behavior is nonetheless f****d up.
On the other hand, our culture has a voracious appetite for the chewing gum for the mind that Television quickly became. Movies (in the theaters, produced through the “studio system” prior to it’s dismantling by the DoJ) represented much more dream than reality, but at least the longer format tended to allow for more of a logical connection between behavior and consequence. Television seems to have taken over the function of the worst of comic books and “penny dreadfuls” – which live on in the cheap romance novels with bare chested macho males clutching swooningly cleaved candidates for child-bearing duties.
There have been many times people have tried things they’ve seen depicted in movies or commercials, only to be surprised that their ATV actually broke after flying 30 feet over some barrels, or that leaping from a rooftop resulted in two broken ankles, or some other damn stupid stunt. People are stupid, though (I’ve done plenty of dumb things myself) and you can’t blame that on television. It is fair to say though, that Television writers and producers don’t help much.
Decades back, when there was much scornful talk of how much violence there was on TV, it struck me that the Westerns and Crime dramas – maybe just cause their budgets were so pitifully small – seriously mis-represented the physical injuries and pain involved in death by violence. And then there was the extended bizarre period (Thanks, Mr. Peckinpah) in which producers and directors devoted major portions of their budgets to exploding squibs, buckets of blood, exploding guts, teeth, hair, and eyeballs, for fear of losing the fickle audience to other producer’s with even more gore. Some do-gooders insisted the solution was that stories should include more grieving parents and spouses stumbling away from bodies with sheets, more funerals with weeping mourners, more attention to the consequences of violent death… That probably would have really killed the entertainment industry.
After all, who knows how the LEFTward scampering society would have gotten through EIGHT YEARS OF CHIMPIE BusHitler if they hadn’t had the blatant wish-fulfillment fantasy of “West Wing” ? With its cast of certified lunatic Leftists, playing out heroic deeds of preserving the Union from evil rightwing plots and occasional threats from some external-but-definitely-not-Islamic foe, each hour validated the fundamental goodness of Liberals, and showed they were tough and assertive, and, DAMNIT, They Cared, and they were READY!
It really was the perfect thing for all those people who couldn’t accept – even after the New York Times acknowledged that every single recount with all the changing rules still had shown Bush with the most votes – the victory of Republicans in 2000 and 2004. All problems were easily within the measure of a proper Liberal White House, all tidily disposed of within the hour format, even allowing for commercials. But I maintain that premise – the requirement that a problem be resolved within the 20 minutes of a half-hour show – or 40 minutes for an hour-long show – has profoundly prefigured many people’s expectations.
J: “much less displeased”
Isn’t that the point of my confusion? In fact it compounds my confusion. Are these novels telling us something about our existance, or are they pornography, or are they out of date and deserve the memory hole? What?
Peterson,
Perhaps in is a matter of professional courtesy?
(one chiseler to another?)
A dozen attempts to post this have failed. Now trying with the “compatability view” button clicked. Who knows….
There is an interesting review of “Mad Men” at the London Review of Books.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n20/grei01_.html
The author descends into a little too much Liberal sanctimony as you would expect (tut-tutting America on its lack of advancement in race relations, of all friggin’ things), but he still brings an interesting perspective. This is the money paragraph:
Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. We watch and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives’ depression, nutrition and smoking. We wait for the show’s advertising men or their secretaries and wives to make another gaffe for us to snigger over. ‘Have we ever hired any Jews?’ – ‘Not on my watch.’ ‘Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology; it looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.’ It’s only a short further wait until a pregnant mother inhales a tumbler of whisky and lights up a Chesterfield; or a heart attack victim complains that he can’t understand what happened: ‘All these years I thought it would be the ulcer. Did everything they told me. Drank the cream, ate the butter. And I get hit by a coronary.’ We’re meant to save a little snort, too, for the ad agency’s closeted gay art director as he dismisses psychological research: ‘We’re supposed to believe that people are living one way, and secretly thinking the exact opposite? . . . Ridiculous!’ – a line delivered with a limp-wristed wave.
Like almost everything from Hollywood that concerns an earlier time, the sensibility is just what he describes: oh my, we’re soooo much smarter and morally aware than those (invariably white, Christian, male) racists and bigots! One of the things that made HBO’s “Rome” a standout show was that it didn’t traffic in this anachronistic masturbation. The slaves were treated like slaves — which is to say, of no moral worth or meaning — and nobody gave a seconds’ thought to how they might feel about anything.
To pull a Whiskey-ism, I think in general women are more seduced by such forms of moral self-congratulation and moral preening. Though of course that preening is also precisely what separates a metro-sexual male from his non-metro counterparts: preening over fashion, styling, food, artistic enjoyments, morals, etc. In the context of “Mad Men” (which I haven’t seen but want to see, if only for the stylized recreation of the look of the period — the one thing Hollywood is stunningly good at visualizing), I suspect it’s a double-rich experience for female viewers. They get to frolick in both their moral vanity (look how they treated women! Jews! Gays! we’re sooooo much better than they are!) and their deeper sexual longings (whiskey’s strong-man thesis, the bad boy, etc).
To flip political just a bit, it’s of some interest that metro-sexual Obama nevertheless courts his image as a smoker — just the lick of bad-boy that he needs to avoid being too squishy. I happen to think he also doesn’t like gays — perhaps the Islamic influence here, but also very common in black communities — shown by his oddly persistent refusal to push gay marriage very much, an area that would otherwise be top-of-mind for a progressive agenda.
93. Peterson:
Are these novels telling us something about our existance, or are they pornography, or are they out of date and deserve the memory hole?
Serious question? My answer is all of the above, just as far as the Rand stories. Mostly out of date as a literary convention, mostly out of date as a real behavior.
The pill, doncha know, for one thing.
I looked up the line from Flannery Oconnor’s book “A good man is hard to find”, read the passage and context and decided this would probably be a better quote.
Hebrews 6 (New King James Version)
God’s Infallible Purpose in Christ
13 For when God made a promise to Abraham, because He could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself, 14 saying, “Surely blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply you.”[d] 15 And so, after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise. 16 For men indeed swear by the greater, and an oath for confirmation is for them an end of all dispute. 17 Thus God, determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath, 18 that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might[e] have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us.
19 This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil, 20 where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become High Priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.
92. Mad Fiddler: Excellent analysis!
TV has also taught people:
1) that there are two (reasonable) sides to every story, and
2) that all problems can be resolved among people of good will if they just agree to compromise, after having been shown the way by a wise child/alien/elderly black man.
Both suppositions ignore the reality of evil such as NAMBLA and Islamic jihad.
wretchard the cat:
The clip was funny, by the way. All-powerful aliens from the Planet Venus!
Programmer wrote:
I do not claim to know anything about women, but this I do know. A good marriage requires a lot of LOVE, a lot of LUCK, and a lot of LUST. And GOD’s blessing on all of it…
This is exactly right. I speak from an N of only 1, but from thirty-eight years of happy, passionate marriage. (And all the credit goes to my wife.)
Jamie Irons
Love, luck, and lust, that’s a winning ticket, I too agree. A little lucre doesn’t hurt either.
Or, to save time, you can just find a woman who hates you, and buy her a house.
(stole that from…PJ O’Rourke, was it?)
#87 RWE- “Gender Feminists” is one that really burns my barn down.
Although not a fixture of the english language, gender is a function of words-
Example’s include la mattequilla, La Lune, die Preis for feminine
And El burro, Il Pomodoro, or der Mond for masculine.
This stuff is junk science of the first order.
Men and women, boys and girls don’t have “gender”, they have [a] sex.
And its akin to your navel, or belly button: you’re born with either an innie, or an outie.
This is all a follow through of all that Frankfurt School nonsense taken all too seriously by those revolutionaries when the “proletariat” gave their “peoples” revolution talk of Marxian economics a pass and refused to join their treachery out on the streets.
With their hopes of “Glorious” this and that dashed, they seethed with resentment of the once vaunted “enlightened to action” proletariat, e.g. “the people’s” and plotted their psy-war against them all.
In a pickle, and facing obscurity, they considered and chose the subliminal route to re-engineer the ones, and specifically the institutions of those who had ignored and rejected them all, and now have taken over most places in any once great institution you can name, education and its curriculum “government agencies”, arts, entertainment and even your local church edifice.
If there was a plausibly jusifyable concept of “feminism” that once existed, it too has been hijacked for the purposes of “gender” reassignment, with variation the order of the day as long as any [of the] variation[s doesn't or] don’t go errant or retro and start resembling the old archetypal ones.
They keep tampering with it to stave off real human nature, because with man as the measure of all things, the perverse extremes we are going through are all justified, because man is perfectible.
Oh really?
Once I decided to give “feminism” as we know it a new derogatory moniker and I came up with “womenist”, as in the definition of the woman is that they are the womenist of the womenists, the ultimate ‘feminist’ who can do anything a man can do, only better, the ‘purest’ form of the feminist, etc., just as Pol Pot’s executioners and slave drivers used to point out that Pol Pot’s marxism was the “pure” form of [a] more perfect marxism, as opposed to the “compromised” form in, say China and elsewhere. Pol Pot had come closer to the ideal, and now you would either live up to it or die and be discarded in the name of “social justice”.
Or to quote Justice Janice Rodgers Brown: Communism- great for ants, a horror for humans.
Only to discover that feminists had already broken with the old feminist model and were already calling themselves now- “womenists”.
It seems to me that there is no popular equivalent for young men of Mad Men/Sex in the City or post modern bodice rippers for women that, reducing men to the role of casual sperm donors, glorify hedonism and bastardy. Pulp for men in the mass market tends to not so much denigrate women as ignore them. The overt reduction of women to objects is largely confined to the niche markets (large as they might be) of pornography and rap.
—
bogie wheel,
Okay, I’ll bite. In what sense is it a Western?
First as I have made clear I do not receive cable television and have only seen an episode or two of Mad Men.
As is well known (there is a tool of a phrase from the Old Left) there are only a handful of basic plots. For example My Fair Lady and Frankenstein are really the same story. King Kong is the same story as Beauty and the Beast. What makes for a Western? To me it needs a wilderness, a line between law abiding society and a savage zone, with a protagonist who can cross the line; bringing knowledge from one place into another but never completely at ease in either. If the story is simply about a primitive in their own place then it may be an interesting anthropological study (like Nanook of the North) but it is not a Western. The struggle between Law and the Wild can be set in many times and places, America, Japan (they instantly saw the connection), or Sumeria (think about Gilgamesh) or the future in Planet of the Apes. However John Wayne was spectacularly wrong about a film about Genghis Khan working as a Western. The story can work in reverse, with the primitives visiting civilization and they or those they encounter succeeding by adapting outside techniques to the new location. That was the idea behind Crocodile Dundee. The attempt to bring the Insurance Cave Men to television flopped but if done right it would have had the elements of the meeting between the ordered and the wild with growth happening. The idea of change happening because of the encounter is essential. As I said it cannot be a passive observation or travelogue. As I see it Mad Men is doing the same thing that Dundee did only here there are more primitives and they are home grown instead of imported. The women enjoy seeing them navigate through the corporate jungle and play with forks. What do they learn from us? What can we learn from them?
#85 Alexis:
“Athens struck silver so it was able to build a navy in time to defeat Persia. Macedonia struck gold so it was able to assemble an army to conquer Persia. Gold was found in California just as soon as it had become part of the United States”
And the discovery of gold in California led to the Comstock Lode, which financed the Union effort, which had been foundering until 1863. Grant and Sherman whupt the Confederacy, but they were backed by silver.
If we are going to talk about sex then we should talk about the consequences. This is worth looking at.
Childrens Parties An Adults Survival Guide,
BTW, I provoked a dhimmi or agent on Roger Kimball’s PJM blog post on Yale to amusing hauteur. His response reads like Charlie Gibson talking down his nose.
“Yez, Mz Palin, ‘fI may ahzk, can you comment on Stendahl’s reahction to sixteenth century bien pisantism’s Third Wave psychometronomical boojwah revanchism….um, where was I…”
GP/102; here ya go, have big steamin’ bowl of wonderful Frankfurt School clarity!
[edit] Slang
Pissant is an epithet for an inconsequential, irrelevant, or worthless person, especially one who is irritating or contemptible out of proportion to his or her significance. A Virginia politician who also popularized the term once silenced a heckler by saying
“I’m a big dog on a big hunt and I don’t have time for a piss-ant on a melon stalk.”[7] wiki
Now that is an interesting description. Maybe more of a mirror than how the world worked in the ’60s on Madison Ave.
It seems to me that this depiction of NYC and Madison Ave. in the ’60s is just one that the writers WISH for rather than one that is actually accurate. One to justify their current bad behavior?
bogie @ 27:
I will say this. TV has set expectations of “romantic love” that are pure fantasy and impossible to fulfill. We made a huge mistake back in the ’60s, us boomers. We thought we could throw out all of the rules and ‘do our thing’ without repercussions. We were so very wrong. We cheapened so much and lost sight of what was truly important. We f-cked up. Badly. Now we are reaping the results and they bode badly for the culture. I was one of the counter culture folks back then. I can tell stories but they mostly bore unless you were there.
Finally, one last thing occurred to me. That some in the society think that what happens on the TV or ‘silver screen’ is real life rather than simple stories sometime told well, sometimes told very, very badly. Also, they look at the “news” and do not recognize that those delivering it are not just reading facts but reading from a predetermined script. And that script has bias built in.
buddy @ 101: Lewis Grizzard I think gets credit for first. PJ stole it from him later.
luddy barsen,
(BTW your new name has the air of Barsoom about it)
I am confident that Roger Kimball can handle any pretentious visitor from the Columbia Junior Faculty lounge or International and Public Affairs students taking a break from their 8th year of work on their dissertations. Still the thought of a delegation from the Belmont Club striding in there like the Ghostbusters cheers the heart.
“The truth is, and I didn’t know it until tonight- is that it was Barsoomi all along.”
“Part of the attraction that Left feels for Jihadis and primitive warriors lies precisely in that they haven’t followed their politically correct instructions.”
!Ding! And the boy gets a cigar! –Groucho Marx
ditto’s #92 and #111,
I believe that Belmont Club has become an ad hoc sort of ‘think tank’ with emphasis on the armoured version rather than merely the reservoir that fuels said tank, faced off as we are against the more culture side of the war (in this and other posts) than giving away too much in terms of strategy as in the earlier days of the club. Replete with newspaper folded ‘Admiral Nelson’ hats, and cardboard swords (and enough alliteration to kill a man at close range!) we form a pretty formidable militia; evidence of one of those spontaneously forming ‘tribes’ wretchard assured us are not necessarily such a (previously) bad form of the word.
luddy, thanks for all the links, although I’ll see your link with part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyu-9-OhHog&feature=related
and raise it with part two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI3ulKg5gH4&NR=1
I am late to the party so I will make this short.
@67 Habu
“No one can conjure up a reason why what ever the dudes name is ( I don’t watch TV too often) is getting written by some dames, directed by some broads on occasion and has panties soaked from coast to coast (to read the thread) and metrosexuals panties no doubt in a wad. Anyone who is old enough to have seen Robert Mitchum act knows what a tough guy is and one who can also seduce the fillies. Since “Rock” Hudson turned into a jelly dildo and other Hollywood types have melted away…”
Good point. For some reason Hollywood has disintegrated over the years and it seems like Metrosexual stars are the “in thing” for women viewers. Maybe the female audience thinks they somehow will “set” those metrosexual men straight – but, that is not likely.
@72 wiskey
“Oh Wretchard, I NEVER say ‘women are evil.’ What I do say is that they are totally disconnected from any social mores, need for compromise, or anything else that restrains behavior for the first time in history, ever, and thus give full rein to their worst rather than their best impulses.”
I hear you wiskey. There are a huge number of women in SoCal and San Francisco that want to game the system by taking after the likes of Joan Jett (being queer and in your face). Others, prefer radicalism and homosexuality for a chance to play the victim card; get attention and possibly government money. Some are just off their rockers.
Just look at how Barbra Boxer used the female victim card to sue her old professors and climb the political feminist ladder. Her lawyer husband played a huge role. It is nauseating. And, she claims he is a Veteran – which I have no evidence of.
@57 Wretchard
“I do think that ‘sexual politics’ exists insofar as the Left has found another angle to slice and dice groups. For I think there’s no denying that it raises issues specifically designed to bolster its asexual power agenda by making temporary gender alliances.”
I do see how 0bama has sliced and diced the female vote in his favor. But, most of his supporters are obese, disaffected Code Pink women. Those types of women have an axe to grind with straight white men. They simply cannot attract them. Hence, the use trick of divide and conquer on the straight white male vote to gain power.
Sure, are blacks and some Asians who basically harbor racists grudges against whites and see tremendous gain in slamming the strait white guy. Not only will they slam the straight white they smear the hell out straight white women like Sara Palin. That shows their vile nature.
The destructive aspect of these Code Pink Mamas and other various disaffected women is they cause the entire county to suffer (and that does take into account the poor Iranian protesters – including many women – who will die a painful death an the hand of the Mullahs).
@81 Habu:
73. wretchard:
‘“It seems to me that either people are rational and free or we in .”’
“Mr W.,
I know it has not for a moment escaped your attention …… but we are in big trouble……across the board.”
Damn straight habu.
Thanks to those idiots who put the big 0 in office were are at a most dangerous point in our history. The war in Afghanistan could be lost and many of our allies will be disillusioned.
America has been hobbled by a slick talking race hustler who wants to instill Marxism into our country for personal gain.
Our foreign policy is weaker than a wet noodle. There Russians are tightening their grip on the old Soviet Union. They are also helping to encircle Israel. They are supply our enemies with powerful conventional weapons and support (and probably nuclear weapons).
0bama is openly supporting Marxist dictators such as Castro and Chavez. And, I believe his statement about “not caring about victory” in Afghanistan is a kick the collective crouch of our Military. The Military is not trained to “cut and run” they are train for victory.
It believe that 0bama will deflect attention away from victory in Afghanistan with a million small financial cuts, ever restrictive ROEs, and other dubious distractions.
Hence, I would push back those who put 0bama in Office and hopefully find a legal way to quickly remove him from Office. 0bama is a disaster.
Listen to what UJ at B5 has to say about 0bama’s “victory is not important” statements.
http://tinyurl.com/qsmo6p
Neighbor? How long has it been since you a big, thick steamin’ bowl of ‘Wolf Brand Chili’?
heh heh, well that’s too long!
That was a short count on the editing clock. None of my changes stuck.
Interesting WP article on the firing of Gen. McKiernan in Afghanistan. The WaPo tries mightily to spin things as an exoneration of Obama but the message is clear that political connections are all that count now.
http://tinyurl.com/mm7ptq
The best comment I read was to the effect that we started this war with Clinton’s generals and that Obama and company will conduct another purge in favor of the morally dubious who specialize in politically connected projects at the expense of combat capability. Right now BHO is throwing resources at the new team that the Congress would have fought giving the old team but there is no credibility in the American regime. The smell of defeat hangs over us and the allies that were cultivated by Bush and his generals, even as they carped and foot dragged, will now cut and run. The partisans of the left are shrill and desperate in their efforts to assign responsibility for their disasters to Booooosh.
HT/Instapundit
110. Robohobo: It was Rod Stewart who said, “Instead of getting married again, I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and just give her a house”. http://thinkexist.com/quotation/instead-of-getting-married-again-i-m-going-to/539126.html
It’s true: all the best men are taken http://bit.ly/E4UoP <- single women prefer married men
does Whiskey have an explanation ?
Gaffe Prices #102:
Please note that “Gender Feminism” is not MY term but is Summers’.
And I dislike the term “gender” myself, which in reality is only meant to refer to language.
What Summers means is in reality “Sexism” – in the same sense as the term “racism.”
But of course, woman can’t be guilty of sexism any more than blacks can be guilty of racism or the Left can be guilty of Fascism. At best they have defined the terms to leave themselves out. At worst, they have, like Congress, exempted themselves from what they impose on others.
I think it is important to recognize the validity of Summers’ observation. By standing atop the shoulders of those who promoted Equity the modern Sexists – Racists – Fascists can gain legitimacy for what is in reality the opposite of Equity.
**SPOILERS ALERT**
Having read through this post last night, and the comments, it came to me that there is something missed about the show that might appeal to a broader base.
My wife started me watching the show, and while I certainly liked the whole look and feel of it, and felt it well written for a nigh-time drama, part of it bugged me. It seemed to be just another element of men/America bashing, albeit with a very gentle and deft touch. Cue roll of eyes.
Watching it develop, however, there is something more about the show, about Don Draper, about the era and America that speaks well.
Draper IS a cad when it comes to women and there are certainly elements to character that are less than laudable.
BUT, here is also a guy with also a lot of integrity and character at his core.
* He supports Peggy in her initial forays into becoming a copy writer. This is true of most of the firm, which despite ‘sexism’ of the era, recognizes talent, ability and worth in spite of gender.
* He doesn’t try to bed her, although it is obvious he could have in a second.
* When Peggy disappears after giving birth, Draper; tracks her down; tells her she needs to get off her ass and survive no matter what; makes sure her job is waiting for her even though she’s been gone for months.
* When Don finds out a co-worker is homosexual, he makes a POINT of not making a point of it. To Don, how you do your JOB matters; not what you do outside of it.
* “Don”, really Dick, came from the most miserable and low of backgrounds, bastard son to a prostitute and step-son to bastard of afather, mean and abusive. As my wife said to me last night, his appeal to women is that he is damaged. She did not elaborate on that, but the important part is he IS damaged. He pathological behavior comes in part from his completely ******-up childhood, but he has striven to overcome it entirely. Indeed, part of the tension of the show is whether his past can and will catch up with him.
One scene from last season really struck me, and made me start to think differently about the show, and what its attitude about America is.
Don runs off with the 20 something sexpot from Europe who is on vacation with an apparently wealthy caravan of other Europeans. Better said, he is running from his former life which looks like it might collapse, and in any event, has gotten “complicated”, what with wife and kids.
Seems a great life at first; boffing the young hottie and hanging out with the folks who have cash enough to not have to work.
Then, Don gets a closer glimpse at their life, and revulsion seems to set in.
* The father of the daughter seems a little too, er, relaxed or familiar about her sexually.
*The family are a bunch of snobs about working people in general, but seem like Euro–trash themselves.
*He sees two children, not unlike his own, whose father is not around for them, and the look in their faces. There is not “endless” holiday for them.
The last scene among those people, Don is holding a glass. The young hottie is swimming topless in the pool, but he is transfixed by the glass, and when we get a good look at it, it is a cheap, ugly thing which makes one less eager to sip whatever is in it.
I THINK what the show may also be about, is that America, for all its flaws, has a great many attributes to its culture and society. One of the best is, when it comes down to it, we believe you should be judged on WHO you are, and not where you came from or what sex or your sexual orientation.
Yes, we not always lived up to that, but like Don Draper, it is in our core.
MC/120; single women prefer married men –does Whiskey have an explanation? I’d say, yes, sometimes, though it could just as easily be beer, wine, pot, coke, meth, uppers, downers, vitamin B12 deficiency, thyroid malfunction, and/or including but not limited to the absence or presence of one or more underlying psychological conditions within the core, non-core, or encore personality. As old professor Spooner once said, it is a very pomclex topic.
Thanks for links GP –on my way there –and LotM, yes, BC has rebranded (or beranded) me –anything i try under the old moniker just disppears. maybe it ends up in Moniker Lewinsky’s inbox. The email addy i use with ‘luddy’ is ‘fake email addy @ 789.com –when i put it in the box, it catches the eye as “Fakeem Ailaddy” @ so n so. I think probably somewhere, maybe Cairo, there is a real Fakeem Ailaddy.
If so, i’ll bet –if he uses english –that he has noticed that if he uses his real name in his email addy, if catches the eye as ‘fake email addy’, and that this probably either amuses Fakeem or irritates him a little, one or the other. hm, I guess beyond that i didn’t have any point, so that’s pretty much that on that.
Anyhoo, i’ll try to find the Kimball thread –yes PJM has attracted a lot of trained seals from the circus lately. I don’t argue with ‘em much past the first time they ignore any actual points and proceed with the thread upmanship (“are too am not”) rather than any adds of actual exchnge of idears on ar about a topic. wonder if ‘topic’ comes from ‘to pick’? or even ‘toe pick’ ? naw that’s disgusting
Couple of observations:
Shortly after 9-11, Peggy Noonan wrote a column entitled “Welcome Back, Duke” which can be found more easily if you remember the comma.
In it she refers to the reappearance of the “manly man”. She muses on what happened to him.
But the war requires manly men and those who feel threatened–in their adequacy which Noonan describes–might think discrediting the war would discredit manly men, or at least their utility.
Timmerman in his “Song of The Nightingale” refers to a crowd of college protestors meeting soldiers (Old Guard on riot duty in DC, iirc). It was the people who thought words were paramount meeting the guys who played football and stole hubcaps now armed, trained and disciplined. It scared the hell out of them.
For grins, search for “nice guy” or “nice guys”. You’ll find a bazillion hits, mostly text with the words. But there are a sub-bazillion from dating systems ads, advice columns, personal blogs, and even feminists.
NOBODY likes the nice guy and even feminists are creeped out.
Even feminists talk about wanting a man with a life, with confidence, “who will call me on my crap”. “Nice guys” are weak, manipulative, frightened assholes.
There is even sneering at men who are so, so nice in bed. “We won’t break.”
“Nice guys” can’t stand manly men, can’t stand the competition.
If the war goes away–at least from public attention–who will be interested in manly men any longer? Women will, but the “nice guys” don’t know that.
jWarrior @ 119:
I see you and raise a “I don’t think I’ll get married again. I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.”
Since there are no dates with them it is hard to tell who originated what but it is surely a good one! [ROFL]
luddy @ 123:
Google ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk’, follow the 2md return and you may understand who the trolls on other PJM threads are. The are paid astroturfers who are there to spew Lefty talking points and get paid in …crackers? …dog biscuits? …credit at some por- d/l site? Who knows. But they are vile and stupid to boot. I doubt they would come to the BC, they would just end up being chew toys for the big dogs that haunt these pages.
How is that different from the idea that women cannot handle freedom? Cannot make a rational choice? If a woman, freed of the need to pair up with a functioning man, is irremediably drawn to the nearest rascal, then is she a person at all, or someone who has to be restrained for her own good?
Men and women both must be restrained for their own good. The best way of doing that is self-restraint, and the greatest problems we have today are due to failures of self-restraint. c.f. “the price of information” thread and Wretchard’s lament that “If all the Wall Street insiders can do is rip off the toxic assets program, well that’s pathetic.” It is pathetic and short-sighted, but that’s what a lack of self-restraint will do for you. Rules of good behavior that discouraged people from behaving that way have broken down. The consequences (whether they be jail cells or merely being a social outcast) have vanished. Men aren’t capable of handing freedom if society as a whole doesn’t give a fig about irresponsible behavior.
Neither is the female of the species. “Moral hazard” is a good concept. There are exceptional individuals, heroes and heroines if you will, who can resist the temptations and in whom honor will defeat greed unaided. But they are the exception. Most people need a little help for honor to come out on top, and holding up as great examples those who are naturals at it is one source of help. Sadly, the keepers of our heritage betrayed us and stopped doing that. The long march through the institutions was a march of treason. For my part, I have no problem dealing out the traditional punishment for treason to these people… but I’m getting a bit sidetracked.
The problem isn’t birth control. The problem is a societal attitude that says pregnancy was the only reason for the old social mores, and so now that we can control that, anything goes.
@ #122 RWE:
Duly noted; Christina Hoff Summers, makes a clear distinction between the founders of a just cause for a womans case against barriers to [a] individual woman’s advancement.*
Hence her title- “who stole feminism?”
If the rights of man stress individual rights for (hu)mans, why shouldn’t an individual be free to rise and advance based on her own merits?
*and the second wave hijacked (mutant) bludgeon; this second stage bent on avenging the motivations behind the irrational urge to preserve any good old boys network (alone), and victimizing a system that worked but whose prejudice was corrupted by a fixation with making sure the female was on the bottom peg of the pecking order.
The paradox of these self proclaimed “victims” groups victimizing anyone who might question their “solutions” to “inequities” (that these 2nd stagers only paid lip service to), was that they and other “civil rights” groups, soon learned that intimidation and anarchy allowed them to skip the merits part and attain positions of power they had not the wisdom nor years to justifiably administer. So they just played a “simon says” and guarded and expanded the fiefdom.
A classic “Peter Principle” that was worse than the patronage network they had so much contempt for, and replaced entirely with a *new* system with the same disadvantages of the old system built right in. Case in point, Sonja Sotomayer and her “I dare you to question it, go on, I dare you”- “ethnic” superiority.
New boss, same as the old boss…
The bile from my spleen was directed entirely toward that most revolting of their little creations, the “Gender Feminists” (dfined by Summers) and their falsely premised “Gender Studies” vomit for us dogs to lick up.
No legitimate scholarship created it, and God bless authentic scholars such as Christina Hoff Summers, and our own Dr. Kimball and Victor Davis Hanson, for their worthy, scholarly documentation of what happened and what went wrong when the time comes to present these covetous Impostors with the bill.
I’m glad you shared this with us, it explains an awful lot.
Alexis @ 83:
“Yes, there was a limited time between the advent of the Pill and the rise of AIDS when the mainstream media promoted a culture of promiscuity. However, the “sexual revolution” didn’t start in the 1960’s, but rather in the 1920’s. “
And Robohobo @ 110:
“We made a huge mistake back in the ’60s, us boomers. We thought we could throw out all of the rules and ‘do our thing’ without repercussions. We were so very wrong. We cheapened so much and lost sight of what was truly important. We f-cked up. Badly. Now we are reaping the results and they bode badly for the culture.”
Yes, it was a huge mistake to start the sexual revolution of the 1960s. But it was not a direct continuation of the sexual revolution of the 1920s. That one didn’t last. Why? The Great Depression, then WWII. To quote from my own book, (Chapter 7, http://www.upandout.us):
“Back in the early 1900s, divorce began to be at least somewhat more tolerated, at least among the very wealthy. Then after WWI, there was a sudden explosion of unmarried sex. That was the “Roaring Twenties.” It was a lot like the explosion of the hippies and their sexual revolution in the 1960s, but with one big difference. The hippies continued their sexual revolution into the present. But the Roaring Twenties, and its sexual revolution, were stopped cold in less than a decade, by the Great Depression of the 1930s.
“The Great Depression took the wind out of everyone’s sails. Suddenly, in the great troubles of that time, the ‘Twenties’ generation rediscovered the bedrock values. Family and home gained a new respect and new meaning. A whole nation celebrated the joys of home and family. The huge change can easily be seen by comparing movies from the 20s with those of the 30s.”
Actually, sexual revolutions have always broken out from time to time, like opportunistic infections. Maybe they are the anti-civilization “natural” default position of humankind. It was the core of the great apostasy of the Israelites from right after King David’s time to the Dispersions. (Why did they keep reverting to idol worship? Because that involved ritualized free sex, which in turn debauched the culture.)
In the 1700s in Britain, a sexual revolution was enabled by the gin mills, which destroyed family life. The “Great Awakening” of the mid-1700s helped turn that around. But a renewed sexual revolution broke out again in England later.
Given the enormous power of sex, many would question whether once established, a Sexual Revolution could ever be turned around. To quote from “Up and Out” again:
“Actually, they have been. Not only between the 1920s and the 1930s either. It also happened in England during the reign of Queen Victoria. As summarized by Dr. Myron Magnet;
“Though Cassandras may believe that cultures only ratchet downward in an inexorable process of decline, the example of Victorian England proves otherwise: in a single generation, an elite of writers, social reformers, philanthropists and clergymen – backed by an exemplary head of state – turned a gin-swilling nation addicted to cock fights and bull-baiting, with soaring illegitimacy and crime rates and a degraded urban poor living in squalor, into a law-abiding, sober, upright country, with strong families and rising health and prosperity widely diffused among the population.” (www.upandout.us , Chapter 10.)
Is the U.S. likely to turn our sexual revolution around? Maybe. If the coming hard times are hard enough. If there is another Chrristian “Great Awakening” to re-establish a broad-enough acceptance of Biblical sexual morality. We could win or lose this one. As always, it will depend mostly on us.
iirc, it happened twice in England. Once to tamp down the excesses of the Restoration–Methodist–and once to restrict the excesses of the Regency–Victorian morals.
The guy who doesn’t get drunk on Wednesday night can show up to work early on Thursday, thus out-competing his libertine competition.
The folks who think going to a potluck at church to see a missionary’s presentation may seem dull, but they’ll be up early and with no money gone to the casino.
It has been said that conservative Christian couples average three children, conservatives two and a half, and liberals just over one.
Doing the math offline indicates the Christian conservatives are going to take over.
Richard Aubrey @130
Actually Richard, I can think of probably 4 sexual revolutions, not just 2, in England during the time you mentioned. That would the first gin-mill one, early-to-mid-1700s. The 2nd gin-mill one, early 1800s. A possible “gilded age” one, end of 1800s and early 1900s. (At least among the gentry – or did it ever end among the gentry?) The “roaring 20s” one, 1920s. And the 1960s one. Does that leave out any?
But you are right. Religious renewals can cure sexual revolutions. But then the next sexual revolution “cures” the previous cure. Good point, wittily made.
It would be great if we could cure social disasters simply by dismissing them. And also without any party-pooping changes. But wait – didn’t we already try that?
Richard Aubrey,
Jesus Saves but Moses Invests. We who believe in life can have a future in despite of those who believe in death. The demographics regarding the immigrant groups the left depend on are not the same as those of professional liberals with one designer baby. The Left thinks that they can support their indulgences with imported labor. They will find, as the Europeans are finding, that the new workers aren’t going to be happy toiling down on the plantations for the liberal Masters. Some on the Left may think that their families will survive as a sort of American aristocracy, like the Kennedys, and some just truly don’t give a damn about what happens after they die. Worse are some who get a thrill from creating a nightmare future for others to live in. They are capable of anything.
Jake Gittes: How much are you worth?
Noah Cross: I have no idea. How much do you want?
Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you’re worth. More than 10 million?
Noah Cross: Oh my, yes!
Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford?
Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gitts! The future. Now, where’s the girl? I want the only daughter I’ve got left. As you found out, Evelyn was lost to me a long time ago.
Jake Gittes: Who do you blame for that? Her?
Noah Cross: I don’t blame myself. You see, Mr. Gitts, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of ANYTHING.
/IMDB, Chinatown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yJJWXhXbuI&feature=related
GerryP.
A friend read Manchester’s “The Last Lion” and said that one conclusion was that the aristos were never all that restrained, although they played along publicly.
On the other hand, it became necessary for the aristos to sell their titles–which is to say accept the thrusting, Victorian, upper-middle class Industrial Revolution fortunes marrying into the stratosphere–to survive.
I have some friends and family who, with a little luck, might include a couple of tables of public school teachers. One, remarking of her daughter’s daughter as a toddler, “I will bet Jen sends Gracie to a Christian school.” Happened, too, and the cause was secondarily the religious issue and primarily the ability to avoid the sordid, fetid aspects of society which the public school teachers must accept, or deal with every day.
The family in question now has three kids, two in Christian school and the third will follow.
The three young mothers in the family, all trained as teachers, have quit working in public schools and instead do private tutoring following referrals from Christian schools.
Interesting bunch. When my granddaughter was nine months old, I kidded my DIL that she and my son were calculating which sports the little girl would be all-conference in. She gave me a look. “All conference. As a freshman, maybe.”
All jocks, all the women are tall and beautiful and the men are huge and impressive and work their asses off. All are devout churchgoers.
I sometimes think of Gordon Dickson.
But, good catch. I hadn’t been thinking of the twentieth century.