The Amazing Density of the Reaction to the Abusers and the fellow traveling of Cosmopolitan and Playboy.

We've been hearing a lot about male bad behavior, starting with the entertainment industry (Cosby, Weinstein, etc) and moving on to politics.  It started, I suppose, with Franken (if we don't count Wiener. . . or Trump . . . or Clinton. . . or Kennedy) and has gone on to John Conyers.  One of the weekend shows discussed it in length, again, and again with women who have suffered abuse.  The discussion was pretty revealing.

Most of that we've been through here before, but one thing that really struck me is that women serving in Congress who were interviewed were all big on the fix.  They're going to have training sessions.

Seriously?

Cokie Roberts expressed the view that nothing was actually going to change.  Whether this is a watershed moment or not, this increadably stupid modern American reaction to this age old bad behaviro is really telling.

Training sessions.

That's dumb.

This is conduct that's been regarded as reprehensible in most societies for eons.  It's certainly always been regarded as deeply immoral in any Christian society, and as my now frequent quoting from the Old Testament in this series of stories shows, it's been regarded as deeply immoral in Jewish culture for millennia.

I'm sure that force upon women hasn't been regard as immoral at all in all cultures, however, at all times, even though there are very certainly non Christian and no Jewish cultures where it would have been also.  Certainly Roman Britain gives us the example of Chiomara who had the head of an offending Roman Centurion cut off so she could return it to her husband and note that he remained the only man who had been intimate with her to be alive.

Maybe Congress staffers could take Chiomara training?

Anyhow, this moronic Congressional reaction says a lot about how far gone we really are in terms of grasping what is really a very simple standard. We've worked so hard to divorce ourselves from the natural law and from any concept of traditional morality, based as it is on religious principals that we've effectively returned to paganistic practices and now wonder why things are so bad.  Moreover, in our confusion, we're trying to create the old standard out of new namby pamby social cloth.

You can't sensitivity train people into what is right and wrong and have them believe it.  It has to have a basis in something.  Otherwise, why not get away with whatever you can?

On this, I recently heard a podcast that had some really interesting revelations about the sad state of things and how we got there.  We've been discussing a lot about the eruption of abuse allegations endured by women recently.  In that context, we've discussed the bizarre groping in the dark for the old standards.  But I haven't looked much at the female role, or those who claim a female role, in the decline of the standards.

Related to this is this fascinating story:

The Cosmo Girl Never Existed | Catholic Answers

Here's the synopsis of it:

Sue Ellen Browder helped sell the sexual revolution. And she, along with many others, lied to do it. Her book, Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement, names names as it tells the heartbreaking tale.

It's a really fascinating story.

One of the things I haven't discussed here, in depth, is the female role in subverting the progress of women and the bizarre way that came about.  In part I haven't discussed it as I don't really know that much about it, the way that I do the male role and the figures in it, such as Hugh Hefner.  Sue Ellen Browder really goes into it, however, and from that we can see how there was a female companion to the destructive role that Hefner and his ilk played in the form of Helen G. Brown and Cosmopolitan magazine and that the image it portrayed was just as big of fraud.  Indeed, Browder confesses that the magazine simply made things up and that she participated in that.

Browder is pretty clearly an unabashed admirer of Betty Frieden in her early days, but maintains, pretty effectively, that the feminist movement was co-opted and that even Frieden, who originally regarded Cosmopolitan as disgusting trash, came around to linking what was a libertine sexual movement completely independent from feminism with what was a women's rights movement.   She maintains, in fact, that it was a tactical move on the part of the libetines.  Indeed, Freiden maintained that feminist movement wasn't about sex and originally had fairly conventional moral views which she never wholly gave up, although under pressure she came around to supporting abortion.  Browder's expose is pretty shocking and shows that the feminist movement could have gone another way, and indeed she sees the women who are pro life today as heirs to the feminist movement.

This isn't intended to be a review of the podcast, but we've delved a lot into this topic, i.e., the roles of men and women and the nature of the relationship between men and women, a lot recently.  There was an aspect of this missing that Browder cover, and that is that the role of women popularized by Playboy and then picked up, in a morphed form, by Cosmopolitan, has been aggressively destructive to women.  It in facts supports the view that abusers today hold of women and helps keep that conduct going on.  It will as long as the image, which was not one women ever wanted, and don't want now, keeps on.

Now, to be fair, Browder discusses at length the horrible work environments that women worked in prior to the rise of the feminist movement.  That's important also as its very easy to either imagine that things have always been as bad as they currently are in the workplace for women, or they are worse than ever.  Neither is true and Browder makes that pretty clear.  A lot gains were in fact made and the workplace is much safer now for women than it used to be.  Abuses haven't stopped, however.

And here's where things circle back around. Women will never be equal in society as long as a pagan concept of their sexuality remains the popular one. Women want it, now, and always.  That's the societal view.  Take any sitcom you watch, or look at the copy of any magazine, etc. and you'll get that message.  The Playboy message was that all women were young, big boobed, dumb, available and sterile.  The Cosmopolitan view was different in only in the message that they were thinner, smarter and really slutty.  Women have had to contend with that expectation every since.  In that context, it's a lot easier for men with Cosby or Weinstein instincts to get away with immoral behavior for a really long time.

So, train up a new standard?

Not hardly.

Acknowledge the old one.  Indeed, the original feminist never intended or desired to abandon it.

Depictions, Mispreceptions, Objectification, Shame, Shamelessness, Progress and Regression.

I started this post recently, and then I stopped it as it was pretty far off topic from my usual fare, and perhaps it just didn't fit in.  It started off as something I heard on XM Radio as a news story.  Later, however, I revived it as I heard a disturbing episode of Talk of the Nation.  One of the things about being a lawyer is that most lawyers have opinions on everything, and that being the case, we often tend to express them, so I'm back again.  However, the post take a bit of a different turn this go around.

Every once in a while, you actually read or hear a news story that suggests that things aren't in a hopeless downward spiral, and that just maybe there's actually real progress on something. And not the social movement of the moment type of progress, which more often than not is a passing fad, but an actual evolution in thought.  Of course, sometimes that's just people coming to their senses and returning to an earlier standard that made sense, was misunderstood, and then returned to as a new discovery.  Unfortunately, you can find plenty of evidence of the opposite as well, and both of these, in the same general area, are examined here.

On the topic of a positive evolution of thought, it seems that just such an event may be happening, and while it's hard not to be laugh a bit at some of the text associated with the story, this really probably actually does indicate a true, and significant, shift in views.  What that story entails is news that a campaign has been launched to take the "page 3 girl" out of the British newspaper The Sun.  Given the double entendre title, "Take the Bare Boobs Out of the Sun" the Internet effort, which looks as if it actually might succeed, seeks to get The Sun, one of the seemingly endless number of trashy British newspapers, to quit publishing photographs of topless models on page 3 of the newspaper.  The Sun started doing that about 40 or so years ago, in an effort to boost readership, which worked, showing, perhaps, that they, or maybe Britain in general, had a mostly male newspaper readership at that time.  Doubtless most women don't really want some topless tart showing up inside the newspaper.

What that significant shift may be is a real change and actually a change that matters.  The Sun is, once again, concerned about readership, but this go around its finding that women count in terms of readership just as much as men, and they're not amused.  Nor should they be. The Sun, a business like any other, is now finding itself the target of a campaign that seems likely to work.  If it does, and I hope it will, it may be the beginning of the end for the trashy Brit fishwrappers.

 It sounds insignificant, but it's not.  What The Sun did was to follow a trend that the US kicked off, or rather Hugh Hefner kicked off, with his one singular clever idea.  "Girly Mags," as they once were called, had been around for a long time, probably making an appearance only shortly after photography itself.  But they were disreputable trash.  Even magazines the crept up on such depictions, such as the World War Two GI journal "Yank," were regarded as a little unseemly.  Hefner's clever idea, and the only really clever one he ever had, was to make his magazine, Playboy, launched in 1953, glossy and slick, like Life magazine, and to hire some good writers to write in it.  And it didn't hurt that he found some lost photographs of Marilyn Monroe to use in the first issue, taken when she was a young starving actress.  Life magazine saved her career by publishing them first, so that the sting would be taken out of it, saving Marilyn from her early indiscretion, or maybe not. 

The impact of that was to make pornography more acceptable.  That's about it, but that's a lot.  All of the other claims for the magazine are baloney.  In terms of a trend setter, it isn't.  It's rarely on the cutting edge of anything serious, and its popularity really is based solely on chesty female 20 years olds.

But that impact has been huge.  It started off the pornographication of American society and, rather than liberalize sex, it demented it.  Much of what has gone wrong in this are since 1953 can be laid at the door of the ossified creep, Hefner.  And amongst the worst impact, is the trinkitization and objectification of women, reducing them from real people to toys.

It's coincidental that feminist movements came up at the same time Playboy did, as they have nothing at all in common.  Most American women, indeed most women everywhere, reject the radical propositions of feminism that suggest there's no difference between men and women, as there certainly are, but it cannot be denied that women's roles have changed enormously in society since 1945, although I'd argue for reason that feminist have very little to do with.  But, as the same time, pornography, which has spread from Playboy into everything, has really set women back.  Women will never achieve real equality with men as long as there are Page 3 girls, or perhaps as long as Kate Upton is willing to go bare chested in Sports Illustrated.  It just won't happen.

Given that, a spontaneous uprising against Page 3 girls is a good sign.  We can only hope that they succeed in getting The Bare Boobs out of The Sun and shed some light of day on women themselves.

So much for the hopeful part of this story.

Back to objectification.  Followers of the news have been the horrified spectators to two suicides of young women who were raped by boys they knew and who photographed it, and distributed it on the social media.  One is the Nova Scotia teen Rehteah Parsons, who in the words of her father took her own life as she was "disappointed to death."  The other was California teen Audrie Pott.  I know less about her motivation, but I suspect it was similar.  Both girls were crushed by the abuse at the hands of boys that they knew, who treated them or at least their bodies like objects. 

At least according to a story I recently heard on NPR, that view amongst males is shockingly common.  Apparently a fairly high percentage of rapist who take advantage of young girls being drunk or otherwise impaired, a situation that has increased with "equality," have no idea that they're doing something wrong, and they don't even grasp why what they've done isn't somehow funny. For the victim it certainly isn't and her trust is forever damaged.  All the more so, as whatever our claims to modernity are, at our root, we remain the primitive people we started out with, whose psychology does not accommodate a "sexual revolution" and which still expects men, at some level, to be their protector.  And men should be, no matter what feminist or academics in Ivory towers wish to be the case.

What's that have to do with The Sun and Playboy?  Well, everything.  Prior to Playboy stripping away the shame associated with being a nude in a men's magazine, it was understood that was a species of fallen state.  Not irredeemable, as no fallen state is. But a fallen state none the less.  After Playboy's influence worked its way into the general culture, however, young women became objects. At some point, the culture began not only treating them that way, but expecting them to behave that way.  The entire "hook up" culture is evidence of that (which is, thankfully, dieing away amongst teens today).   A serious model like Kate Upton appearing nearly nude in Sports Illustrated is another. 

So, back again to taking "the Bare Boobs out of the Sun."  Perhaps they'll not only come out of the Sun, but perhaps this will start of women saying enough is enough on being portrayed as toys.  It takes 100 Condalisa Rices, Margaret Thatchers, or Hillary Clintons to make up for just one topless tart, maybe more.  And women are, unfortunately, participating in that demeaning of their gender..  Once that occurs, and shame returns to being part of such depictions, women will be along ways towards real equality.  Or at least perhaps those who would appear on Page 3 might think of the unintended consequences for their young fellows, whom deserve better.