New Orleans wedding party, 1909. Alyssa Milano urges a return to the past. . . without realizing it.
Every once and awhile, somebody comes out screaming onto the public stage in support of something and, accidentally, makes a really good point in favor of the opposing position, even if they're too dim to realize it.
Such is the case for actress Alyssa Milano's call for a "sex strike".
1940s wedding. The bride wears a cross indicating that even on that day, there's something taking the position of place over everything else.
I know nothing personally about Ms. Milano. I never saw a single episode of what are apparently her big televised acting efforts, Charmed and Melrose Place, and I'm not interested in viewing them either. A review of her Internet Movie Database file reveals that the only movie she's been in that I've seen her in is the horrifically bad Commando. She would have been a child actress at the time that move was afflicted upon the world, so she cannot be blamed for it. Otherwise, I've not seen a single thing she's been in, which is at least somewhat remarkable for somebody who is apparently a well known actress (and I knew her name, so she's at least somewhat well known).
I can't help but be amused, somehow, by the fact that in 1995 she was in a film called Deadly Sins, and now finds herself sort of accidentally advocating for and against the sin of lust. In that film she apparently played a Catholic schoolgirl, which in fact she once was, putting her in the class of those who benefited from a Catholic education they've at least somewhat compromised while achieving entertainment fame, although she retains enough of her faith to have several tattoos that are Catholic themed apparently.
I've come to wonder, frankly, if the Hollywood set can be blamed for their views in general. A review of film stars since the introduction of film shows that class to be, frankly, incredibly screwed up in unusual numbers. Just recently, for example, I ran something here on Mary Pickford, the early silent movie star. A review of her life reveals a rather sad character, for example.
As part of the messed up nature of Hollywood figures seems to be an affinity for "activist" politics of the day. Something about the fake nature of what they do, I suspect, causes people in the entertainment industry to adopt such causes to validate themselves rather than because they've deeply thought them out and really believe them to their core. I generally assume that if you catalog the current activist political agendas you can attribute a belief in them to nearly any actor or actress. Indeed, when exceptions exist, it's always worth looking at what that particular person's audience is, as often their views express that of their audience.
And that anyone would take any Hollywood figure seriously on serious interpersonal relationships is baffling. Even Doris Day, who was featured here yesterday, was married four times while retaining a squeaky clean image (one marriage ended with a spouses death).
And that anyone would take any Hollywood figure seriously on serious interpersonal relationships is baffling. Even Doris Day, who was featured here yesterday, was married four times while retaining a squeaky clean image (one marriage ended with a spouses death).
For that reason, I'm always amazed when people cite any Hollywood figure on anything at all. Did that actor support our war effort in World War Two?* Of course he or she did. He or she was an actor. Does the actor support this or that currently left of center political cause? Almost certainly, he or she is an actor. If tomorrow it became super hip and trendy to support armed intervention in Central Asia to create a Kurdish state. . . . well of course, actor again.
Indeed, I never really take any Hollywood figures politics very seriously unless they stray so blisteringly far from the main stream of activist politics de jour such that they can't possibly be unthinkingly adopted. John Ford's pretty blunt set of views, back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, were no doubt really his. Currently, James Wood, who has a really right wing set of views, probably is really right wing in a unique way.
Alyssa Milano? I dunno. . . from her Wikipedia entry it appears she has checked of the boxes on the usual Hollywood "I'm an actress/actor so must have these views" box. Some are probably very sincerely held and noble. Others are just the regular run of the mill left of center Hollywood stuff.
Milano was raised as a Catholic but has obviously felt free to depart from serous tenants in the Faith in her public positions, something that's common with Catholics obtaining public notoriety in entertainment or politics. Being a fully observant Catholic in the Hollywood environment takes real guts, much more than supporting left of center causes, and its hard to find real practicing Catholics in the entertainment industry.** For one thing, it impairs their ability to make a living, and it has for a long time. From an inside baseball sort of view, therefore, most of the "raised Catholic" and now an entertainment figure, figures, strike those of us who stick to our views, no matter how imperfectly, as sell outs really. That's a disclaimer, I suppose, but I don't think that diminishes my following point.
As anyone who has tracked the news recently can tell, the results of the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 are rapidly coming to a head and, currently, there's good reason to believe the decision will fall.*** That it was severely deficient was always obvious from the very first. No matter what a person believes on the topic of abortion, the legal and scientific reasoning of the decision was always obviously deficient. Even if a person believes 100% in the court's comments about a right to privacy being applicable as applied from its prior decision of Griswald v. Connecticut, the decision doesn't make very much sense. The logic train derails pretty severely in the decision when it takes the position that a right to privacy applies to women such that a third living being (which scientifically you can't escape from) created by two living beings but only in the one means that the third living being can be terminated up to a certain number of weeks but not thereafter. That's just a weird decision.
The court could have decided that 1) women have a right to privacy; and 2) women and men have a fundamental right in what occurs to the offspring they create (removing men from the equation, when it takes a man to create the situation, was odd in the extreme); and 3) a Court can't decide what lives to take and which to terminate outside of the commission of a crime ; and 4) therefore leave the matter to state law. Or it could have held that the natural law meant that all lives that haven't committed a crime are just as protected by the Constitution as all others, which would have made a great deal more political, legal and philosophical sense, but the Court at that time was operating for the time being on a liberal agenda.
Or it could have for practical reasons as well as jurisprudential ones found that this topic was outside of the rational scope of the Court's defining powers and regarded it as a judicial overstep, leaving it to the states. This is the position the liberal magazine The New Republic took in looking at the topic in the 1980s, when was advocating for Roe to be overruled on liberal voting grounds. That's also surprisingly close to the position that Ruth Bader Ginsberg has indicated in comments that she actually holds. That doesn't mean she'll vote to overrule the decision, but she pretty clearly feels that the Court in fact overstepped in its decision and should have gone against "Roe", rather than for her.
As an aide, FWIW, "Roe", the pseudonym for the Plaintiff in the action never had an abortion and in fact, fairly horrified by it later, became a Catholic convert anti abortion activist. I can't, off hand, think of a major protagonist in a Supreme Court case such as this who, after winning and having a major case named after them, disavowed the results. Of course, she wasn't all that vested in it in the first place and in fact was basically used by the organization that brought the case in her nom de guerre. But her personal stances took a remarkably opposite path to that of Milano's.
The public has never bought off on the logic of Roe v. Wade and over time the views on abortion, bolstered by science and the slow leaking of the reality of what that entails had caused a shift to where the majority of the American public is against it. Only in real bastions of left wing political thought is the contrary true, and much like most arguments that have jumped the shark, there's a spasm of political reaction in those areas.
On legislative action, quite a few legislatures are now acting to get as close to banning abortions as they dare, and are directly and intentionally pushing on the line with an eye towards getting the issue back in front of the Supreme Court. Recently Georgia became the fourth state across the county to enact a fetal heartbeat aspect of the law such that abortions are banned after a fetal heartbeat. This has spawned a left wing reaction that's really grisly if you stop to think about it in that their reaction is a full on acknowledgement of the Pro Life position that "abortion stops a beating heart". It's a pretty bloody argument.
Into this fray steps Alyssa Milano, who weirdly taking a line out of Lisastratta had called for a sex strike. We quote:
Actress Alyssa Milano ignited social media with a tweet Friday night calling for women to join her in a sex strike to protest strict abortion bans passed by Republican-controlled legislatures.
The former star of “Charmed” and “Melrose Place” urged women in her tweet to stop having sex “until we get bodily autonomy back.” Her tweet came days after Georgia became the fourth state in the U.S. this year to ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected — about six weeks into a pregnancy and before many women know they’re pregnant.
“We need to understand how dire the situation is across the country,” Milano told The Associated Press on Saturday. “It’s reminding people that we have control over our own bodies and how we use them.”
She noted that women have historically withheld sex to protest or advocate for political reform. She cited how Iroquois women refused to have sex in the 1600s as a way to stop unregulated warfare. Most recently, she noted that Liberian women used a sex strike in 2003 to demand an end to a long-running civil war.
Milano received support from fans and fellow actress Bette Midler joined her in also calling for a sex strike with her own tweet. But both liberals and conservatives also lampooned her idea, with conservatives praising her for promoting abstinence and liberals saying she was pushing a false narrative that women only have sex as a favor to men.
Austrian cavalrymen and their girlfriends, early World War One (November 1915). These girls were no doubt literally the girls next store, or likely from the same village, as these two men. They're also pretty good examples of the girls next store in a lot of ways, real ways. They're both pretty stout, which frankly a lot of American girls now are (and which is surprising in context) and they're not fantastic beauties, which most people really aren't, while they're not hideous either. Not the plastic model of girls that Hugh Hefner's Playboy encouraged people to believe were ready to fall out of their clothing at a moments notice.
One of the byproducts of pharmaceutical birth control is that it made the Playboy Dream true. Playboy, starting in 1953, promoted the fantasy that all women were; 1) sterile, 2) had huge boobs, and 3) wanted sex all the time and with anyone (or at least the reader of the magazine). The girl next store went, basically, from being the girl next store whom you might marry, which meant a lifetime of dedication to her and the result of the marriage, to being a giant breasted dimwit who wanted sex now and who couldn't produce offspring. Irrespective of whatever the original purpose or intent of the drug's developments may have been, the fact of the matter is that it made at least one part of the Playboy Dream true. . . the sterility part. Over time, the second and third parts have had pushes to become true as 1) women and girls are expected to put out, and sold that message in everything from magazines to sitcoms, and 2) the medical industry has made it possible for women of average and normal proportions to be built like Marilyn Monroe or Claudia Cardinale irrespective of their genetics, and many chose to undergo the knife to achieve that result.
As part of that came the bizarre failure to realize that sex causes people.
These people again. They're married and they have. . . wee little people. Gee, I wonder how that happened?
As bizarre as that may sound, that's an absolute in the contemporary Western World view of sex. It has nothing to do with people, or at least making people. It might be about fulfillment, or release, or your view of who you are, or even define you identify, but a natural process resulting in people? How could that be true? Indeed, contemporary American popular culture is as dim on that point as extraordinarily primitive cultures which, and rarely, have no acknowledged connection between procreation and creation of people.
And here Milano steps in to accidentally, and unbeknownst to herself, make that very point.
Abstain from sex? Go ahead.
If more people did, there'd be a lot fewer abortions. Indeed, if people returned to the view of sex that predated the Sexual Revolution, not all "accidental" pregnancies would go away, but there would be a lot fewer of them and the view of them would necessarily be a lot different. So by emphasizing sex she's actually exactly emphasizing the right thing, but doesn't realize it.
Not surprisingly, a lot of her progressive fellow travelers are horrified. Acknowledging that connection is the last thing on earth they'd want to do. Its exactly what they have worked so hard to suppress. But the point, no matter how poorly made, is in fact a good one.
Let's follow the logic train on this one.
Milano is maintaining that women can abstain from sex. Horror of horrors, if that is correct, the entire post 1970s ethos that now reigns on televised slop like The Big Bang Theory or Friends that women must have it, let alone men, pretty much all the time would be. . . wrong.
That would suggest that the entire history before that that women didn't have to and "good girls" shouldn't, might. . . be based on something.
One of the something's that would be based on, even if Milano doesn't realize it, is that sex results in pregnancy. The huge achievement of the prostitution of modern Western females was delinking any concept of pregnancy and sex. That was a huge achievement in that movement and its succeeded to such an extent that at the current time people even dispute the existence of their genetically programmed genders. People even identify themselves by this point with their sexual urgings, something that we noted just the other day is a new development, and not a positive one. Milano here put the link back in, even if she doesn't mean to. Or maybe subconsciously something penetrated and subconsciously she does. The argument really is that sex without restraint or societal limits gets women pregnant, those pregnancies are bad, and therefore abortion is necessary. To prove the point, she argues don't have sex. That will in fact work, but not for the reasons noted, as if there's no sex there'll be no pregnancies and the original societal restraints were right all along.
Indeed Milano's position fully implies that abortions are the result of sex outside of marriage. Milano is calling on women everywhere to do a sex boycott, but that seems to imply, no doubt intentionally, that married women have the exact same interest here that unmarried women engaging in sex do. But that's pretty clearly not the case.
All along the hardcore feminist movement has made a practice on dumping on married women in general, but here the lid starts to come off of that argument. The overwhelming majority of abortions are conducted on unmarried women, not married women. This suggest their must be sisterly solidarity on this point, but the fact is that married women have no real interest here of any kind.
In fact, a decreasing number of unmarried women do. As examined in a post on this blog earlier, the destruction of the social norms has slowly worked their recreation, and the societal hip and cool have come around to defining common law spouses as "partners". The relationship may not be exactly the same, but it's pretty darned close, suggesting that what ultimately occurs is that male and female relationships, not matter how damaged by a disastrous pornographic experiment, revert to the human norm.
As that's occurred, while there remain a large number of abortions, even women (and quite frankly often girls) have come around to viewing abortion as pretty abhorrent. That demonstrates that the arguments about it have essentially failed at this point. Young women, and girls, who proceed on to full term are picking up a big task, and often spend a fair amount of effort hoping for some stable relationship with a man, but that they pick up the indicates that in part they may have been fooled by the delinking of sex and procreation, but they aren't blind to the larger implications. It's also suggest that the Cosmopolitan/Playboy argument that children ought not to ever enter the picture has been overridden by basic human nature in which people actually like children.
So Milano, part of the Me Too Movement, demonstrates how that movement gets back around to the standards of the past while desperately seeking to avoid their implications or that they even existed.
Which doesn't mean that they didn't or that those standards weren't correct.
*Before people assume that this is a screed against the "Hollywood Left", let me note that one actor who is common cited as being an "American Hero" fits into the category of "I don't get it" for me, that actor being John Wayne.
I like a fair number of John Wayne movies. I don't like them all, but I really don't get why he's lionized in the fashion.
John Wayne played Sgt. Styker in the Sands of Iwo Jima. He wasn't Sgt. Stryker.
Indeed, he wasn't in the military at all during World War Two.
I know that there are apologist on this but it's pretty hard to accept that any major figure who didn't make it into service, if of service age, during the Second World War wasn't at least willing to avoid it.
FWIW, I feel the same way about conservative citations to Clint Eastwood, who did serve in the Army during the Korean War. So he did, so what? That doesn't make him a political luminary.
**Oddly, one exception to the rule are women who have been married to or dated Tom Cruise.
Cruise was raised as a Catholic and its claimed he at one time considered becoming a Priest. He of course, in the Hollywood fashion, has abandoned his Catholicism and has taken up Scientology, a religion that's popular in Hollywood. But two of his former wives and one of his former girlfriends returned to their Catholic faiths after being in relationships with Cruise. That statistic is odd enough that a person can't really dismiss it.
Another example form the Scientology fold would be Leah Remini, who was a Scientologist while a prominent actress but who not only left it and returned to the Catholic faith she last experienced as a young child, but who became an anti Scientologist.
A remarkable exception is Neal McDonough, who is not only an observant Catholic, but openly so and who has been frank that his Catholicism has hindered his movie career. He keeps on keeping on anyhow.
And other Protestant and Catholic examples can be found. Shia LaBeouf became a devout Protestant after playing one in Fury. Some actors and actresses are more open about it than others. One surprising entertainment figure who is pretty open about it is model Kate Upton, who had a cross tattooed on the web of her hand after being pressured about wearing a cross at a photo shoot. Upton is principally famous for being a very chesty Swimsuit model but in her private life she's openly Christian (she's an Episcopalian) and while she's pretty clearly engaged in the modern rationalizations that allow for conduct that isn't Christian, she's recently married and had a baby, showing she gets a link that Milano apparently does not.
***Since I first typed this out the State of Alabama has passed a law which squarely takes on abortion and will undoubtedly go to at least one of the Federal Circuit Courts.
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