If she’s good enough to sleep with she’s good enough to marry.
Dominic James Ingemi (1921-1987)
I’ve been saying for many years that the Sexual Revolution is over and men won and the time has come when some young women are figuring it out too.
I’ve also been saying for years that the primary cause of this insanity has been the 60’s generation, unlike every generation before them never growing out of the idea that they were smarter than their parents and thus rejecting literally millennia of trial and error in how to raise kids and maintain a society.
Feminist Bari Weiss (born 1984) is a product of that generation and would have reflexively rejected the advice my very Catholic father (born 1921) and my even more Catholic mother (born 1924) would have given on how woman should carry themselves as being patriarchal tripe from a repressed society (ironically while at the same time referring to them as part of the “Greatest Generation” which is a device used to excuse all generations that follow from reaching their levels of success) however she was so impressed by 30 Year old Louise Perry arguments on the subject that she gave her space on her site to repeat them:
I’m not a religious conservative. I’m a feminist, and I’ve spent my entire professional life working on the issue of male violence against women—first in a rape crisis center, and later as a journalist and a media relations director for a legal campaign against sexual violence.
Ah reality, what lessons it teaches
It’s precisely because I’m a feminist that I’ve changed my mind on sexual liberalism. It’s an ideology premised on the false belief that the physical and psychological differences between men and women are trivial, and that any restrictions placed on sexual behavior must therefore have been motivated by malice, stupidity or ignorance.
In the piece Ms Perry goes on to give advice to young women, advice which sounds rather familiar to my nearly 60 year old ears. Here is a smattering of it:
- Distrust any person or ideology that pressures you to ignore your moral intuition.
- Chivalry is actually a good thing. We all have to control our sexual desires, and men particularly so, given their greater physical strength and average higher sex drives.
- Sometimes (though not always) you can readily spot sexually aggressive men. There are a handful of personality traits that are common to them: impulsivity, promiscuity, hyper-masculinity and disagreeableness. These traits in combination should put you on your guard.
- A man who is aroused by violence is a man to steer well clear of, whether or not he uses the vocabulary of BDSM to excuse his behavior. If he can maintain an erection while beating a woman, he isn’t safe to be alone with.
- The category of people most likely to become victims of these men are young women between the ages of 13 and 25. All girls and women, but particularly those in this age category, should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: It’s usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing.
- Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable foundation on which to build a family.
Any of those things could have come right from the lips of either of my parents and she throws in a few more that Mom would have had mom nodding her head in agreement with a caveat or two.
- Get drunk or high in private and with female friends, rather than in public or in mixed company. (mom would have suggested avoiding getting drunk or high period)
- Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up. (They would agree but suggest holding off sex period)
- Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children—not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether he’s worthy of your trust. (that’s basically my dad’s advice to me with the sexes reversed Mom would have said wait till you’re married, but should would tolerate, with overt disapproval waiting till a wedding date was set.)
This next paragraph produced a wide grin from me:
None of this advice is groundbreaking. It’s all informed by peer-reviewed research, but it shouldn’t have to be, since this is what pretty much most mothers would tell their daughters, if only they were willing to listen.
The source of said grin is that all of this had already been known thanks to many centuries of experience and reality informed by trial and error, the best type of peer reviewed research there is which was handed to the 60’s generation on a silver platter and tossed away.
Nor did we have to go back to folks born in the 1920’s to hear said advice. Stacy McCain who has been writing and blogging on this subject for a decade is only a couple of years older than me but if Ms. Weiss had read these words from Stacy written in 2015
Pardon the deliberately provocative clickbait headline, but the campus “rape culture” discourse keeps avoiding this issue. There is an obvious connection between (a) claims that sexual assault is an “epidemic” among college and university students; (b) the phenomenon of binge drinking among students, most of whom are below the legal drinking age; and (c) the adamant insistence of feminists that it is “slut-shaming” and “victim blaming” to suggest how (a) and (b) are most likely related.
She would have immediately rejected him as a misogynist and cheered as Twitter banned him for daring to quote feminists in their own words online, yet when the 30 year old Ms. Perry suggests that a woman should not get drunk or high in public or in mixed company it’s a revelation worthy of her site. That of course is the cynic in me for in the 18th Century Ben Franklin wrote
Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other,
Poor Richard’s Almanack 1743
and the belated relearning of these lessons proves his timeless wisdom once again. There is however more to life than cynicism. The Catholic Church teaches about redemption to understand the the joy and value in it
In the end the fact that Ms. Perry has managed to relearn the lessons her parents and grandparents rejected from history is a commendable thing and the fact that Ms. Weiss is able to see the wisdom of these lessons from her and pass them along to others who need them is even better, something to be celebrated because it’s by relearning these lessons and applying them that we can avoid the costs that three generations have and are paying for the insanity that is modern feminism.
Or as Jesus Christ himself said when the disciples told him that others outside their company where driving out demons in his name:
For whoever is not against us is for us.
Mark 9:40
