And yet. . .

 I ran an old editorial cartoon a couple of days ago from an August 23, 1920 newspaper.

August 23, 1920. Portents

From the Sandusky Ohio Star Journal, August 23, 1920.  "The Sky Is Now Her Limit".

I also cross posted that on Reddit's 100 Years Ago subm where somebody made this observation:

Pretty much everything has been ticked off except presidency and it’s looking like that will likely change soon as well!

I hadn't thought of that, but that's correct.

Which makes me wonder why item number one on the rungs is still around.  The slavery one, that is.

Now, this isn't going to be a feminist manifesto proclaiming that something like marriage is slavery, or some other such nonsense.  No, rather, by slavery, we're referring to concubinage.

That may sound odd, and even impossible in the modern context, but it isn't in this one.  

A concubine, as well all know, is a species of prostitute, the prime thing being different from conventional prostitutes is that their services were bound to a single master rather than simply sold to everyone and, therefore, I am perhaps being polite here.  By way of movies, television, magazines and, most importantly now, the internet, thousands upon thousands of women prostitute their images to those unknown and by extension putting their entire gender into a type of ongoing concubinage.

We've dealt with this before.  Starting in 1953, when Playboy magazine brought photographic prostitution into the mainstream, starting first with Marilyn Monroe.  Monroe managed to overcome the scandal, through the intervention of Life magazine which published her naked photographs first, but she was never really able to overcome the image.  She'd always be, in the eyes of thousands of men, about to take off her clothes, no matter how clothes she might really be.

The way we'd probably like to remember Marilyn Monroe, if we could. We really can't, however, as she built her career on her figure in a more revealing way than still rather obvious here (with a nice Yaschaflex camera by the way).  From this earlier thread here.  Playboy's co-opting of her body, sold several years earlier to a calendar photographer when she was unknown and desperate, nearly ruined her career, which was saved only by Life magazine determining to beat Playboy to the punch and publishing it first.  Life's parry saved her from an immediate ruined career, but the overall publicity launched Playboy.  In the end, of course, she'd be only one of the lives effectively ruined by Playboy, although her own selling of her image in less graphic form, combined with an early tragic history, played a larger measure in that.

Anyhow, since that fateful 1953 publication date, the prostitution of the female form has expanded enormously.  And hence the slavery.

Every Kate Upton who appears for the viewing pleasure of thousands of unknown men strikes a blow at women of achievement.  There's no two ways about it.  So that first rung remains one to be overcome.

And, of course, in some direct ways, the portrayal of young women in anonymous pornography is actual slavery, aided along by drugs, desperation, and social decay.

Novella d'Andrea, a professor in law at the University of Bologna and daughter of canon law professor Giovanni d'Andrea, who gave her lectures from behind a screen lest her beauty distract her students.  Both of Giovanni's daughters were professors of law.  What?  You didn't think that possible in the 1330s and 1340s. . . well it was.

No matter how far women come, until their routine selling of their images ceases, and until women themselves stop participating it when they voluntarily do, and until its no longer tolerated by men and women, true equality will never really be achieved.

Oh no, it can't be that. . .

The Birth of A Nation, D. W. Griffith's 1915 cinematic piece of trash.  It came right as the second Klu Klux Klan was experiencing a nationwide revival.  The film can't be blamed for racial violence in the 1910s, but it certainly contributed to the rise of the KKK in that era and to an atmosphere that set the background for events like the Red Summer of 1919.

On the very day I published this:

Lex Anteinternet: Disaffection and Violence: I've written here repeatedly about the cause of American incidents of mass violence, noting in each that actually we live in the most...

The Tribune had an article with this headline:

No, there's still no link between video games and violence

Yeah, bull.

One of the strongest tendencies in American society is to believe that license, of any type, can't possibly be the source of excess, of any type.

It is, and it's demonstratively so, keeping in mind that the impact of things is collective for the most part, and very rarely individual.

Sure, it's absolutely the case that individual video games are not likely to inspire most of the viewers to act out violently.  But most of the viewers will be impacted, and some will be impacted enormously.  We've already conducted an experiment on this for a 70 year period and we know the answer.  

The test set was pornography.

We've dealt with this ad nauseum (or I'm sure that's how our limited audience probably feels in part) but that is in fact the test we've conducted and we know the results.

In 1953, as readers here know (and probably with they weren't reading about again) Playboy Magazine came out with its first edition.  By 1963 it was firmly established as the okay, unless you were in your early teens, American men's magazine, quite an accomplishment for a publication of a type that heretofore was sold in brown paper bags in the dingy part of towns.  By 1973 it was a major American publication, taken seriously and interviewing Presidential candidates.  By 1983 it was in trouble, but not because men had grown tired of naked over endowed women, but because it had been copied and its followers had taken its photographed prostitution further down the road.  Penthouse and Hustler were cutting into it, as they were more "graphic".  Now the magazine is in a great deal of trouble financially and its copiers are no longer in print at all, having moved to the Internet, but that too is significant. The Internet is a sea of pornography.

The way we'd probably like to remember Marilyn Monroe, if we could. We really can't, however, as she built her career on her figure in a more revealing way than still rather obvious here (with a nice Yaschaflex camera by the way).  From this earlier thread here.  Playboy's co-opting of her body, sold several years earlier to a calendar photographer when she was unknown and desperate, nearly ruined her career, which was saved only by Life magazine determining to beat Playboy to the punch and publishing it first.  Life's parry saved her from an immediate ruined career, but the overall publicity launched Playboy.  In the end, of course, she'd be only one of the lives effectively ruined by Playboy, although her own selling of her image in less graphic form, combined with an early tragic history, played a larger measure in that.

But during that time period its frankly the case that pornography crossed over into the mainstream.  In the 1950s, a film like Some Like It Hot was regarded as salacious. It features Marilyn Monroe, Playboy's first centerfold, but it doesn't feature any nudity at all.  Spring forward and you can nearly be guaranteed that any major movie featuring a young woman, no matter how gigantic her star status, and there's a really decent chance that the film will show her nude simply to do it. 

We know this had a big impact on a lot of thing, some of them being the most basic of all.  The spread of pornography helped fuel social change that helped increase the divorce rate and helped lead to the massive increase of "single mothers".  It resulted in the phenomenon of pornography addiction which, ironically, has in turn lead, according to respected sociologists, in a decrease in sex itself and a decrease in satisfactory male/female relationship. 

It also lead to violence.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s this was hotly debated, but it really isn't much now.  It's clear that early exposure on the part of some to Playboy and its fellow travelers lead to a permanently debased view of women to those victims.  Some just went on to lesser lives, but it's also clear that what it did to some is to fuel an increase for more and more "graphic" pornography and, in turn, to violent pornography to eventually acting out violently.  At least one serial killer has related this in his own case.  And its certainly well established that an addiction to pornography on the part of some leads them to other acts, the least of which might be hiring prostitutes to preform what they've been viewing in other media.

So our point about video games?

Arguments about video games have and are taking the exact same trajectory.  Early on Playboy argued that it was just good clean smutty fun.  It turned out not to be, to the enormous determent of women, causing massive sociological and even medical problems we haven't worked out way out yet.

Men and women au natural, but not in the way that Hugh Hefner and his fellow travelers would have it.

Now, sex is different than violence, sort of, in that it taps right into one of our most basic instincts and violence. . . . oh wait.

Actually, not so much. . . at least in the case of men.

Men are more violent than women. There's no doubt about it.  Modern social engineers may like to pretend that there's no psychological or biological difference, but there most definitely is.  Violence is frankly built into men, undoubtedly in a evolutionary biology sense, in a way that its not built into women.  Most men won't act inappropriately violent, of course, but that men seek recourse to violence in any setting in which violence can arise cannot be realistically doubted.  There's a deep seated, and as noted, basic biological reason for this.  Indeed, those who have studied it note that men have a different violence curve, if you will, being more likely to get suddenly made and violent, than women do, who generally rise slow in anger and who have anger very slowly retreat.  Indeed, men are often very baffled by the retained anger of the women they're close to, not experiencing it in the same way as women do at all.

It's no accident that the sort of crimes that have been focused on here recently such as in the thread above are committed by males.  I know of only one instance recently of the contrary.*  Women can and do commit violent acts, to be sure, but they tend to be of a different character.  A self defense argument, for that reason, for a woman in defense of the charge of First Degree Homicide is a lot more likely to be regarded as credible than it is for a man.  We see those form time to time in the form of the "I just couldn't take it anymore. . . .".  Doesn't work that well if a guy says it (and frankly it doesn't work very well as a defense for a woman either, and isn't a legally cognizable defense in and of itself anywhere).

A culture of justified violence, or a subculture of one, does have an impact on a society or some of its members.  That's why some governments, movements, or political parties, embrace it.

By the late 1920s and 1930s the propaganda associated with the KKK had been so successful that it was able to use its violent imagery openly for other purposes.  Oddly enough, the KKK was a strong proponent of Prohibition.  Why this is the case isn't clear to me, but an element of it may have been that beer was strongly associated with Catholic Irish, whom the KKK detested.

Indeed, that's why even now, in spite of the absolute horror it represents, the stirring imagines of some hideously evil causes are still visually attractive.  And if they are now, they were even more so when they were first released.

Common German portrayal of member of the SS.  The SS was a branch of the Nazi Party itself, like the SA, and while the means by which it acquired members varied, an element of it was trying to appeal to young men with very manly looking portrayals.  Indeed, the Nazis were very deeply into visual portrayals of all types, including uniforms, and were very effective at it. They were much less effective in terms of written propaganda, which was often disregarded, and quite ineffective in terms of music, with the Germans retaining a fondness for music that the Nazis didn't really approve of.

And indeed, this is the very nature of visual propaganda, to stir emotions.  If that can't be done legitimately, it can be done visually.

French poster of Che Guevera from the 1968 uprisings.  Guevera was a detestable butcher who deserves to be remembered in that fashion, but even now this iconic depiction is the way he's commonly remembered.

And doing this visually not only means doing int artistically in posters, something that would frankly appeal very little to most people today as you don't normally go somewhere in which posters are routinely encountered, but in terms of images.

North Vietnamese poster of the Vietnam War depicting an actual female combatant heroically circa 1972.  In reality by the end of the war the NVA was down to teenage troops and even had to take recaptured deserters back into service.  Only a tolerance for the utter destruction of any human life, including that of the North Vietnamese, allowed North Vietnam to prevail in the war.

The moving pictures ability to inspire and be used as propaganda has long been known.  Nazi cinematic propaganda was so effective that it won an Academy Award for cinematography prior to World War Two for the film Triumph Of The Will.  That a body that has never been sympathetic to fascists of any stripe, and which frankly prior to World War Two contained a number of barely closeted Communists, and which indeed was so left leaning that even highly Catholic film maker John Ford could release a pretty lefty The Grapes Of Wrath, really says something.

Which takes us to "Slam" Marshall.

I've dealt with S.L.A. Marshall before here.  He was the bulling U.S. Army historian who came up with the complete crock that soldiers in combat don't shoot their weapons (in reality, they shoot too much).  While Marshall's thesis was a dud, and he should be another recipient of the Defense Boobie Prize for Strategic Doltery award, it was widely accepted and the military, among other things, has invested in video game technology for years and years now.

The purpose of those games is combat environment desensitization and familiarization.  That's the purpose of a lot of military training.  To get you used to the really bad stuff.  It's why soldiers of every army spend a lot of time practicing war, in part.  Combat is distracting and the Army, every army, wants its soldiers to be able to do their jobs.  In the case of the U.S. military, video games have been part of that for quite some time.

So do video games have a link with violence?

Undoubtedly.

Will video games make everyone who plays them violent?

No.

Will they impact every player in some fashion?

Undoubtedly again.

The same is true, we'd note, of what we've otherwise noted here, and we can and should expand on that.  Viewing pornography doesn't turn everyone who views it into a rapist.  But it's part of the pathway for a lot of rapist (the correlation is in fact quite high).  Watching episodes of Friends won't lead everyone to think that they need to shack up with a girlfriend, but it will have that bar lowering impact on some, maybe most, who view it.**

Add to that, the impact of movies.

In the current era the rating system has been reduced to what is basically a joke.  In an era in which "basic cable" includes all the violent and pornographic fare that a person could possibly imagine, ratings effectively do nothing whatsoever.

As an example, the other day I was flipping through the movie lists on television, which I'll occasionally do to see if there's something I'm inclined to watch on.  There usually isn't, which sends me off to a book or perhaps this machine (which is another topic).  However, in this instance I saw a brief snippet for Red Sparrow, which in reading it portrayed the film as a late Cold War spy thriller. I like some films of this genera, so I hit it.

It isn't what I was expecting.  It certainly wasn't The Third Man and its not The Americans either.  It's basically a violent pornographic movie featuring Jennifer Lawrence, famous for The Hunger Games, which I haven't seen. Ostensibly with a theme somewhat related to that of The Americans, but involving Soviet agents trained to seduce their targets as it turns out, it's really just violence and sex and, for its young probably mostly male viewers, a chance to see Jennifer Lawrence naked.***  The accents are, by the way, horrifically bad.****  Anyhow, after about five minutes of this and it being plain that it isn't a spy thriller, but a porno flick, I turned it off and moved on.*****

But that's the point.  When the motion picture rating system came in during the 1960s, I'm pretty sure that this film would have been rated X.  And the blue content of the film doesn't serve a point, like the violence in the highly violent 1969 film The Wild Bunch does. That '69 Peckinpah film sought to strip away the good bad guy image of Western criminals that was so common in prior films and American culture, and shock the audience by showing us that we (again, probably mostly men) are attracted to the violence of those men because they are violent, not for some higher redeeming reason.  Now, with films like John Wick and the like, we don't make that pretension much, at least not in what we might regard as lower films.

As part of that, and as noted above, cinematic portrayals of American troops have reached the near Marvel hero movie of the week level. 

Portrayals, particularly American ones, of soldiers have usually portrayed them heroically, with some films made in the 1960s being a notable exception.  Any portrayal of war tends to glamorize it no matter what, and no matter what the intent, however.  Indeed, one Vietnam War era reporter noted in response to a question that it was impossible not to glamorize war, no matter how horrific it is.

Make no mistake about it, being in a war is not glamorous.  It's horrific.  People who experience war are about as negative about that experience as it is possible for a human being to be, and in ways that are completely impossible to explain.  Even being in the military, for a lot of people, is far from glamorous even if nothing actually occurs during their service.  But irrespective of that, it's impossible, for some deeply elemental reason, not to have portrayals of war come across as glamorizing it.

Even real attempts to avoid this generally fail.  Platoon, for example, is hardly a pro war film, but lots of young viewers watch it with fascination and it remains the most popular of the Vietnam War films.  How many movie viewers (again, almost certainly mostly male) have watched the 1st Cavalry helicopter assault scene of Apocalypse Now again and again.  Apocalypse Now may be an anti war film, and a critique of the Vietnam War, but its Robert Duvall's shallow minded Col. Kilgore who is reduced to a meme with "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" and "Charlie don't surf" being the catch lines that people (men, again) like to repeat.  And telling again, if you prefer Full Metal Jacket, the scenes that are likely to be remembered are R. Lee Emery's portrayal of a drill sergeant, which is very effectively and accurately done, and the line most recalled is likely to be the Vietnamese prostitutes "Me so horny. . . " line.^

Indeed, in regard to anti war movies, in my view, only two are really effective in that genera, that being one I've really criticized here from time to time, The Deer Hunter.  Whatever its faults, The Deer Hunter is a very effective anti war film if you can stand to sit through the entire thing, with its concluding scene being hugely tragic.  Perhaps Paths Of Glory might be another, the most unromanticized portrayal of World War One I've seen.  Not even All Quiet On The Western Front can compare. 

Lesser movies in recent years have really taken the American soldier as hero depiction the next miles.  The Baby Boom generations depictions of their fathers, having recovered from depicting them as dolts in the 60s, definitely took a turn in this directly with Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, both of which are excellent and realistic and which certainly don't seek to glamorize war.  Those movies are first rate, but after that there are a lot of war films, particularly very recent ones, which are simply action pictures, think Fast and Furious, in military garb.  Twelve Strong and Lone Survivor, the last of which isn't bad, are examples of this.  The soldiers perform physical feats and combat feats which are frankly impossible, and they adhere to the strict American movie rule that all American soldiers are crack shots and all our opponents are horrible shots.

The point isn't that any one of these films causes violence.  Most people, and again these movies are watched a lot more by men than women, could sit through anyone of them and not be impacted.  But they do have impact, in concert what we've noticed above, for the marginalized.

And that's where any one item isn't the cause of anything, maybe, but the sum total of them are.  Sure, playing World of Improbable Heroism II all day won't turn most people into violent loners.  An entire day sat in front of photographs of nameless young prostitutes (which is almost certainly what most are) uploaded to the net won't turn a person into a rapist.  A steady diet on the television of violent super American military heroics or Jennifer Lawrence stripping in the name of Soviet glory won't make a person into a debased lone wolf either. . . well it probably actually will, but maybe not one who acts on it.

But put this all together, and then put it in front of young men who have nothing. . . no friends, no work, no girlfriends, no meaningful existence, no skills of any value. . . and sooner or later, you're going to get some very bad results.^^

Could society act on this?  Of course it could.

But will American society act on it?

Probably not.  Doing so would be hard.  It would require deep thinking.  It might likely mean restoring old standards, in full or in part, that we abandoned in the 1960s and all the responsibilities that went with them.  And it might mean banning, limiting  or curtailing things that most Americans make frequent access too, rather than just a few, such as violent and sex based entertainment and depictions.  It would mean asking a lot of hard questions about "progress", the nature of men and women, the illusion of perpetual growth and the illusion of limitless benefits of technology.

Yes, it would require a lot of deep thinking about really deep topics.

And deep thinking isn't what we're into.  We're into simple solutions and blaming the machine. And, frankly, at the end of the day, no matter what Americans say about "Me Too" this or that, or instilling values that uplift people, we'd generally rather see Jennifer Lawrence naked and violent and are willing to pay the price for that, as long as we personally aren't the ones paying.

Even though we are.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*It might be worth noting here that one woman who is commonly depicted as a cool killer likely really wasn't, that being Bonnie Parker.  Parker is a sad case and she obviously tolerated murder, but there's no real reason to believe that she ever committed one.

The only woman that I personally know, and only barely at that, who committed a homicide was a young woman that I vaguely knew who was repeatedly molested in the worst fashion by her father.  She ultimately committed what clearly amount to First Degree Murder but was never prosecuted. That's worth noting here, however, as its demonstrative of the anger curve noted above.

**Indeed just recently I heard, on NPR, an interview with a young man who was distressed that his adult life doesn't match that depicted in How I Met Your Mother.  I didn't watch that television drama, but what he noted, and what is obvious from even the short snippets of it I've seen, is that it depicts 20 somethings hanging out with a tight group of friend in bars.

There's really some truth to that, quite frankly.  Young people still do hang out at bars and much of young life remains as traditional as ever in regard to socialization.  Indeed, the bigger change has really been for older people, particularly middle age and older professional people, for whom casual socialization has massively declined.  But at the same time, something that has also altered is the economic demographics of that and how that works.

Dropped out of the picture pretty completely are those who aren't either students or those who aren't relatively well employed.  For those without a post high school education or who aren't fairly well employed, economic means for everything are pretty limited and people are quite isolated.  An additional aspect of that is that the economics of earlier eras simply forced people out of the house and into work, whether they lived in their parents homes or not, and as there wasn't all that much to do that wasn't labor related at home, home conditions also lent themselves to getting out of the house and into some sort of society.  It might be noted that even terrorist in the pre television days were rarely pure loners but were part of some sort of society.

***"Honey pot" type espionage traps by the Soviets were a real thing, to be sure, but the technique aspect of that is almost certainly less sophisticated and less debased than portrayed (to the extent I saw it) in Red Sparrow or, for that matter in The Americans. The Americans is very well done, but frankly in my view it pushed that aspect of the plot line a lot further than was justified.  At any rate, according to something I recent read, the recent Maria Butina episode may have involved this angle, apparently reluctantly on Butina's part.

****As in worse that Bullwinkle cartoon bad.

*****The degree to which things have really descended, cinematically, is well demonstrated by this film.  The 1960s film Barbarella nearly destroyed Jane Fonda's ability to be taken seriously as an actress and while Brigette Bardot was only ever partially taken seriously in the first place, her more revealing films of the period reduced her quickly to a character.  Lawrence's career, in contrast, will continue on without a blip in spite of having now appeared in this film.

^Note that in Full Metal Jacket, irrespective of its status as an anti war film, none of the important characters get killed, the American military wins, the Communist lose, and the tiny Vietnamese prostitutes are available at all times.  This is remarkable in regard to a war which we lost and the Communist won.  Only in The Deer Hunter do we lose, the Communist win, and the Vietnamese, including the prostitutes, are treated tragically with real human functions.

^^As noted above, this thread isn't on gun control at all, and I've barely touched on firearms here whatsoever.  That's because the factors noted above are the underlying cause of what we've been exhibiting here.

But here's where this links back in, in a weird sort of way.  The same sort of exaggerated glorification of the military and combat that's occurred in the last two decades has also occurred in regard to combat firearms.

Technologically, as we've noted here in depth before, firearms have changed very little for a very long time.  The basic technology that pertains to semi automatic firearms has existed it more or less present form for nearly a century.  The AR type weapon that seems to figure so prominently in the discussion in the media has existed since the early 1960s.  The AK type weapons that's also mentioned has existed since 1947.

We dealt with the rise of the status of the AR in a prior detailed thread.  The reason we note it again here is that the odd status that this old weapon has acquired in the popular imagination, including the imagination of the disaffected class we're speaking of here, contributes to part of the overall odd zeitgeist.

Accidentally getting an argument right for the wrong reasons. Alyssa Milano discovers the connection between sex and babies.

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).

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.

And we add:

“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.

Oh, the rich irony.

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.

Monday at the Bar: Kim Kardashian to become a lawyer?

Byron White Courthouse in Denver Colorado.

Kim Kardashian, known principally for her bust and rear end, has declared that she's reading the law and intends to take the bar exam in her state in 2022.

She's drawing skepticism on that, as in this headline:

Kim Kardashian's Bid to Become a Lawyer Faces Long Odds

The reality star has said she plans to take the bar exam in 2022 without attending law school, but few who go that route pass the test.

Well, skeptics aside, the more power to her.

Reading the law is basically self study for the bar exam.  Bar exams have been around for a lot longer than most law schools, and indeed early law schools were of a different nature than today's.  Originally it was widely assumed that nearly all lawyers had read the law.  Law schools started as largely private affairs where a lawyer offered his services to help those reading the law.  They then evolved into what we have today.  Over time, the ABA stepped into regulate them privately and, as they became common, the ABA pushed for state bars to require law school attendance in order to take the bar, arguing that this showed that a student was more prepared to become a lawyer.  Over time, they pushed for state bars to require ABA certification for such law schools.

But not all states have gone along, and some will still allow an applicant to sit for the exam with that applicant not having attended law school at all.  According to Wikipedia that number is down to California, Vermont, Virginia and Washington with, it's claimed, Wyoming, Maine and New York allowing it after the applicant has studied in a law office and have spent some time in law school. At least as to Wyoming, that's in error as Wyoming applicants can still sit by motion, which is effectively the same thing, but it requires permission of the state supreme court to take the exam.  Indeed, I knew one lawyer who had been a law school graduated by who was admitted by motion without passing the exam, which he'd failed a couple of times.

Okay, having said all of that, what's "reading the law".

Self study. That's what it is.

Or self study under the tutelage of a lawyer you are working for, which in the older days meant that you were apprenticed to that lawyer.

Plenty of famous lawyers became just that by reading the law.  

John Adams read the law.  

Abraham Lincoln read the law.

Locally, long serving and well known legal figure, the late Federal Judge Ewing T. Kerr read the law, and the local Federal Courthouse is named after him.

Ewing T. Kerr Federal Courthouse in Casper Wyoming.

Now, this isn't to suggest this would be easy.  But at the same time it is to suggest that this may not be as hard for Ms. Kardashian than the skeptics may suppose.

First of all, while she's made a career so far by partially prostituting her image, in the form of selling photographs to fuel illicit dreams of juvenile males, there's no real reason to suppose that she's dumb.  Indeed somebody in her family pick up early on the fact that the Kardashian girls, with their exotic half Armenian features, were very good looking and could make money in their youths based on that.  The way it was done was not admirable at all, but it was cunning.

And signs of her further intelligence may be revealed by this proposed change in careers.  Her assets have a shelf life, and they will expire.

After all, you don't want to advance into middle age trying to look youthful and come out scary, a la Lisa Vanderpump or Cher.

And maybe you don't want to go to your grave remembered for your butt and chest.  

And recognizing that shows some real intelligence.  Not all who rose to fame in that manner survived that frightening realization.  Saying she wants to take the bar exam is a lot smarter than doing what Marilyn Monroe did, which was to face the whole thing badly.

And skeptics aside, her father was a lawyer.  Often the family members of lawyers get legal educations whether they want them or not.  They're reading the law, more or less, all the time.  Sit around the dinner table of most families in which their is a lawyer and you'll get some some sort of legal education, or at least an education in debating, whether you like it or not.  And by all accounts, her father was a good lawyer at that.

And, quite frankly, it doesn't take near the smarts to be a lawyer that the general public believes and that lawyers like to imagine.  I'd guess that the vast majority of lawyers measure no more than average in that department, including some hugely financially successful ones.

Indeed, that's been the dirty little secret of the modern practice of law for a long time.  Lawyers like to rely on their reputation as a "learned profession" to pose as a class of great intellects, and certainly there are lots of lawyers who are just that.  But there are a lot more who are not.  The entire ABA supported move towards requiring law schools in the first place was to combat the fact that a lot of lawyers just weren't all that professional, and in the 19th Century law was a very common American occupation filled by those who didn't want to be farmers but who had no other skills to fall back on.  Most weren't college graduates and indeed there were few colleges for anyone to attend. The entire American image of the crooked lawyer came up in that time, and indeed lawyers moving from town to town to evade their reputations and take advantage of frontier opportunities was pretty common.  

Bar exams meant to address that, but bar standards have been dropping like a rock for some time.  The Uniform Bar Exam has accelerated that.  I don't know if the UBE is the one that Kim Kardashian would be taking, but the fact that it is a uniform exam sort of speaks for itself in some ways, and at least by observation, the amount of knowledge that's required to pass it is considerably lower than the old NBE and local exam system that used to prevail.  You'd think the ABA would oppose such an evolution, but on the contrary they seem solidly behind it.

So I hold out a lot more hope for her to pass the exam than others.

Indeed, I hope she passes it and frankly I hope she redeems her reputation.  

Armenians in the United States and around the world have a really well deserved reputation.  The Kardashian's are an embarrassment to it.  The culture is a really old one, and the country was the first Christian nation in the world.  The Armenian diaspora in the United States has untold numbers of members who have contributed greatly to American society.  The Kardashian girls cut against that hard working conservative set of values by rising to fame through what amounts to, at best, their appearance.  

One of the things that holds women back in real terms is that fame based on selling your appearance, let alone appearing on the cover of magazines naked, or in sex tapes, reinforces a pagan view of women. That's a lot to make up for.  I hope she does.

Indeed, I hope she does and that she actually practices, and in some future year that when people speak of Kim Kardashian, it's in that context, with few remembering when she was just a barely clad, or not clad at all, public figure.

John Wesley Hardin.  If Hardin could become a lawyer, why couldn't Kim Kardashian?

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Throwing one more rock

I know that I should let the passing  of the ossified creep Hugh Hefner go, but one more minor comment, following the several I kicked off with this one:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh:   Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...

He's going to be buried in the plot next to Marilyn Monroe.

How unfortunate for Monroe, but how oddly appropriate in a way.

Hefner nearly ruined Monroe's career by running her as Playboy's first centerfold, but she sure managed to accidentally boost his career in the same fashion.  The fact that the introductory issue of the magazine didn't torpedo Monroe was due to Life magazine running the photo first, in a smaller form, as a glamour shot of some sort.  It was an intentional act on Life's part to try to save her career, and it worked.  But the thousands of men who wanted to seek Monroe naked so that they could. . . well anyway, worked for Playboy too.  It was a gamble on Hefner's part as he had to buy the images from a vendor who had them, they were not new but she had posed in her original name at the time, when he didn't have a lot of cash.  The fact that a glamorous actress was the subject of the centerfold, rather than a prostitute (whether people realize it or not, the subjects of those magazines prior to Playboy and still for much of pornography today are prostitutes) meant it was off to a less trashy superficiality than was the standard at the time.

But what became of Monroe?  She was a troubled person to say the least.  Defined by her image, she became a captive of it.  She was never all that mentally stable to start with, but she does not seem to have been a happy person. I accept that her death was an accident, but it was an accident in some ways that people should have seen coming.  She was unlikely to gracefully make the transition from youth to middle age to old age and she didn't.  It's sad.  And tragic.

Well, she's been preserved forever in the American memory as a sleepy eyed barely clad beauty in her twenties and even now adorns countless t-shirts and, bizarrely, even shows up in an increasing number of tattoos on women.  How Monroe, who never would have tattooed herself and who of course lived in an era when women did not get tattoos ends up as a tattoo for women is truly odd in and of itself.  But all of that just pertains to an image.  The truth is that in some ways her image deprived her of an actual life, after making her early life rich, after having been desperately poor.  She died alone.

Hefner died old in comparison, having profited first from Monroe's image and then from the naked images of hundreds of other female subjects, all of whom have to trod Monroe's path in some fashion in the end. We should pray that they do and have endured it better.