Until Death Do Us Part. Divorce and Related Domestic Law. Late 19th/Early 20th Century, Mid 20th Century, Late 20th/Early 21st Century. An example of the old law, and the old customs, being infinately superior to the current ones and a call to return to them.

  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939.

Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.

For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body.

As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for hert to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

So husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

“For this reason a man shall leave father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.

In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.

St. Paul, Ephesians, Chapter 5.

As the old phrase goes, fools rush in where angles fear to tread, and my commenting here is, I am well aware, completely foolish.

I know next to nothing about domestic law, and even less than that.  I've never experienced any aspect of it myself personally, I don't delve into it regularly at work, but on odd occasion I, like every lawyer, must.

I don't like it when I have to.

When a civil litigator takes a look at domestic law, he often tends to be shocked.  I was that way when I looked into the topic of grandparent's rights some years ago.  The opponent was also shocked when I started treating the case like heavy duty civil litigation.  What the heck?  Well, the case ended up changing that area of the law after years of the domestic practitioners just doing the "well, that's the way we do this".

Not anymore.

Recently I've been looking at divorce law for a tangential reason, and once again I'm shocked and appalled.  

Wyoming uses "no fault" divorce, like most states.

Or maybe it doesn't.  More on that below.

No fault was the biggest insult to the law ever created and a knife to the gut of society.

Illustration of No-Fault Divorce. The petitioner is taking a blade to the gut of a helpless defendant.

The legislative stupidity in this area, however, started some time before that.  As such things often do, the story has a "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" aspect to it.

Let's go way back.

At least during the state's territorial days, court's would occasionally order a cohabitating couple to marry.  This led me to assume that cohabitation of unmarried couples was illegal, and perhaps it was, but I've not found any statutory basis for that.  I haven't researched it in depth, either.  Fornication was a crime in many states, however, and it might have therefore been one in Wyoming.  Additionally, Wyoming imperfectly adopted the Common Law upon statehood, and for that reason court's may have felt they had the authority to address cohabitation, which normally would result in a marriage by fiat (Common Law Marriage).  At least right around the time of statehood there was a statute that addressed this topic in the "statutory rape" context, but the fairly shocking provisions of it were that the ages addressed were 10 years of age for a girl, and 14 for a boy.  I.e., a 14-year-old boy was expressly prohibited by law from having intercourse with a ten-year-old girl, and would be tried for rape if he did.  Apparently the scriveners of the law in the Dakotas, which is where we obtained our first set of statutes, felt differently about very tender ages than we might.  Having said that, the bill in the legislature last year which provided:

20-1-102. Minimum marriageable age; exception; parental consent.

(a) At the time of marriage the parties shall be at least sixteen (16) years of age except as otherwise provided.

(b) All marriages involving a person under sixteen (16) years of age are prohibited and voidable, unless before contracting the marriage a judge of a court of record in Wyoming approves the marriage and authorizes the county clerk to issue a license therefor.

(c) When either party is a minor, no license shall be granted without the verbal consent, if present, and written consent, if absent, of the father, mother, guardian or person having the care and control of the minor. Written consent shall be proved by the testimony of at least one (1) competent witness.

Surprisingly, this bill was met with opposition.  Before that, ages below age 16 were allowed with the Court's consent, and amazingly, there had apparently been a few instances of that occurring over the last decade.

The change, anyhow, was in my view, a good one.  Most people would agree.

Up until 1941, Wyoming had a set of "heart balm" statutes providing for common decency, common sense, protection of the common good, and which were fundamentally grounded in the laws of society and nature.  In that year, just months before the Japanese would cause the balance of human decency to be to exaggerated towards oblivion, the 1941 Wyoming legislature eliminated them, stating:

The remedies heretofore provided by law for the enforcement of actions based upon alleged alienation of affection, criminal conversation, seduction and breach of contract to marry, having been subjected to grave abuses, causing extreme annoyance, embarrassment, humiliation and pecuniary damage to many persons wholly innocent and free of any wrong-doing, who were merely the victims of circumstances, and such remedies having been exercised by unscrupulous persons for their unjust enrichment, and such remedies having furnished vehicles for the commission or attempted commission of crime and in many cases having resulted in the perpetration of frauds, it is hereby declared as the public policy of the State that the best interests of the people of the State will be served by the abolition of such remedies. Consequently, in the public interest, the necessity for the enactment of this article is hereby declared as a matter of legislative determination. 

1941 Wyo. Sess. Laws ch. 36 § 1.

Horse shit.

The thing about the "heart balm" statutes is that they heavily weighted the importance of the male/female relationship in a legal and cautionary way. The causes of action were varied, but all of a similar nature. There was 1) breach of contract to marry (breach of promise), 2) alienation of affection, 3) criminal conservation, and 4) seduction.  This mean that there were real consequences for failing to seriously undertake the relationship from the onset, and in failing to take care of it.  Rarely noticed on this, the penalties fell more often on men, than women, but protected both.

What were these causes of action?

We'll take a closer look.

The proposal.

• Breach of promise.

Breach of contract to marry, or as it was more often called, "breach of promise", was a unilateral broken engagement. The non-breaching party was entitled to receive damages that included the benefits were that were to be had from the marriage and specific injuries to the plaintiff, including humiliation and psychological injury.

In the view of us moderns, this seems Victorian and quaint, but it was anything but.  Prior to birth control, relationships between men and women were, we might say, deadly serious.  While the social standards, based on Christian concepts and morality, meant that sex before marriage was frowned upon, and while it was also the case that a high percentage of people, particularly women, did not engage in sex before marriage, things began to break down when couples engaged and people knew it.  This does not mean to suggest that people behaved like they do now, as they certainly did not.

Engagement periods seem to have lasted a year or so, although there wasn't any set period.  One period etiquette book provided:

There are exceptions to the rules which govern engagements, as well as other things; but as in other cases, the exception only proves the wisdom and justice of the rule. There have been happy marriages after a few days' or even hours' acquaintance, and there have been divorces and broken lives after engagements which have existed for years. The medium, therefore, may be considered the best plan to pursue; namely, an engagement which is neither too short nor too long, but just sufficient to make a broad and easy stepping-stone between the old life and the new. The result of a very short engagement depends upon the strength and genuineness of character in the individuals, while the haste with which they have consummated so important a step says but little for their wisdom or prudence. A hasty and ill-advised marriage is a bad beginning in life. A very long engagement, on the contrary, is an eternity of that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, and it is much harder for the engaged girl than for the engaged young man who is "a laggard in love". She has to wait usually, while he works actively, bringing himself into new relations, obtaining new experiences, and in many ways living a life which she can not share, and which is more than likely to interpose a barrier between their mutual sympathy and confidence, and cause them to drift apart from each other.

Gems of Deportment and Hints of Etiquette, Martha Louise Rayne, Detroit: Tyler & Co., 1881.

There was more to it than that, however.  Close contact of this type was going to lead to something with some people.  Therefore, with a broken engagement, the female participant would be potentially at least slightly tainted in some fashion, either regarded as "ruined" or regarded as an obviously difficult and unmarriageable person.  There was a flip side to this, which we'll address below.

Additionally, in an era in which women had limited career opportunities, getting engaged set a woman on a certain financial course whose sudden end could be devastating economically.  It was assumed, naturally enough, that during the engagement she'd sworn off other suitors, many of whom would have moved on in the meantime.  Indeed, amongst the very old even now you'll frequently read stories of very elderly "first loves" reuniting, showing that whatever went wrong early on had forced them into other paths, even if they obviously retained affection for each other.

• Seduction

The flipside of breach of promise, this tort sounds obvious, but in practice it was less so.  The tort allowed an unmarried woman's father - or other person employing her services - to sue for the loss of these services when she became pregnant and could no longer perform them.  We recently saw an example of this being played out on the Canadian World War Graphic History blog in an entry concerning Lieutenant Colonel Charles Flick.

As that entry noted, Flick and one Kate O'Sullivan engaged in some sort of sexual act.  What occured isn't clear, but it seems pretty clear that Flick seduced Kate, or perhaps raped her.  In any event, Flick, then an officer in the British Army, was sued by Kate's father. As the blog notes:

In June 1898, London tailor Daniel O’Sullivan sued Lieutenant Charles Leonard Flick of the Honourable Artillery Company “for damages for the seduction of his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Kate,” with whom Flick had had an illegitimate daughter. The above letter was entered into the court record by the plaintiff’s counsel. As a result of pregnancy and alledged assault, Kate O’Sullivan had been unable to assist her father’s tailoring work. The jury found in favour of the plaintiff for £150.

Seem harsh (assuming it wasn't rape)?  Well, it really wasn't.  Kate, at age 25, was reaching the upper limit of her marriageable age at the time, and now she had a daughter to take care of without Flick.  Whether Flick tried to make it right (which was common) by marrying her or not, we don't know They didn't marry, however.   Mr. O'Sullivan was left, therefore, with the financial burden of his daughter, who could now no longer work, and his granddaughter as well.

While this may all sound pretty harsh, it reflected an economic reality that still exists.  Seduction continues to exist as a legal principle, even if we don't recognize it.  It exists in the form of child support laws, which achieve essentially the same thing, but through the partial intervention of the state.  At the time, it was up to people to take care of this on their own, which was not a less just system.

Flick, by the way, went on to a career in the British Army, serving overseas, and ultimately in the Canadian Army.  He was an opponent of Japanese internment in Canada, so no matter what his early story was, he wasn't entirely a terrible person.

• Alienation of Affection.

This occurred when someone interfered with the marriage, causing a spouse to lose affection, mostly often through seduction, but not always.  Indeed, meddling third parties could be liable for interfering with a marriage, including objecting in laws or even clergymen.  In the Wyoming case of Worth v. Worth, 48 Wyo. 441 (1935) a daughter-in-law suited her in laws on just such a claim, recovering the amount of $35,000 in damages.  The damages in such cases were for emotional distress and mental anguish, shame, humiliation, and economic loss, including financial contributions toward the marriage and potentially punitive damages.

The elimination of this tort created a situation in which unrestrained interference in marriages can and frankly does arise.  Amongst women, it tends to come up in terms of the "support" of female friends, many of whom have broken relationships themselves, or in some instances feel that a friend married beneath herself.  I've seen this happen first hand, with the women who don't have to live the consequences harping on tehir friend to divorce.

The flipside of this is that men do the same thing, but it tends to be over other issues, with those issues often being sexual.  In spite of they hypersexualized era in which we live, or perhaps because of it, it's frequently the case that couples enter a marriage badly damaged in this area and ultimately that impacts the woman much more.  Women with multiple sexual partners before marriage are almost statistically incapable of living out their marriage.  Women who have abused, on the other hand, tend to withdraw from the "marital debt" at some point leaving their husband's stunned.  In that case, the men will tend to get the advice from their fellows that they should dump their wives for a more willing, and often younger, partner, or they'll simply begin to engage in adultery and excuse their conduct.

• Criminal Conversation

Criminal conversation was similar to Alienation of Affection, but involved sex, so the last item noted here had arisen..  It was the tort of sexual intercourse outside marriage between the spouse and a third party, with each act being a separate tort, and the liable party being the third party.  Damages included emotional harm, mental suffering, loss of support and income, and loss of consortium.

Not surprisingly, this tort changed over time to something radically different, and it then allowed an unmarried woman to sue on the grounds of seduction to obtain damages from her seducer, if her consent to sex was based upon his misrepresentation.

The unifying thread in all of these is that they took marriage, and beyond that, the male female relationship extremely seriously.  For want of a better way to put, they took sex very seriously as well.

One of the things that the Sexual Revolution proved was that people were incredibly naive about sex, but not in the way that the revolutionaries imagined.  In fact, the pre revolutionary condition proved to be the wise one, as it grasped the nature of sex.  While perhaps not the best way to set it out, we'll quote here an item from Quora, which is always a somewhat dubious source of anything, which was on a thread on whether premarital relations should be illegal, which in a few countries they still are.  Some commentator noted:

Sex absolutely, deeply and irreversibly transforms

You

Physically, Emotionally, Mentally and Spiritually.

It transforms abusers and the abused,

It transforms actors in porn,

It transforms friends who do it casually,

It transforms one-night standers,

It transforms johns and the prostitutes,

It transforms gays and lesbians,

It transforms the masturbater,

It transforms viewers of porn,

It transforms people who only do it orally,

It transforms those who use protection,

It tranforms unmarried couples,

It transforms married couples,

Sex is a language of the body.

And it is a langualge that has a definitely fixed meaning.

It communicates an absolute message.

It says I AM YOURS, FREELY, COMPLETELY, FAITHFULLY and FRUITFULLY.

After sex, you will either be made or ruined

Physically, Emotionally, Mentally and Spiritually.

We can think that nothing in us has changed,

But we will never the same as before.

We can tell ourselves that sex is pleasurable and healthy exercise,

And that we will be worse off denying ourselves from the pleasure it gives.

But, we will still have trivialised the message our body has communicated.

When we add meanings to the fixed message of sex,

The message of our mind is not aligned with the fixed message of our body.

We are no longer integrated. We have lied.

Sex in forms that detract from its fixed message is an abuse of the body.

It is cripplingly addictive, simply untruthful, absolutely unfulfilling and very ruinous.

If you have not done it. Don’t begin.

If you have done it, learn from this and do your best to cease.

Be hopeful. Every Saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.

Remember, the purpose of sex can only be properly fulfilled within and after

Marriage.

Written almost like a poem, the writer is absolutely correct.  Psychologically, biologically and chemically, sex changes everything.  It binds the people, whether they wish to be or not.

Indeed, in the area of odds and ends, one of the commentators on Catholic Stuff You Should know once noted this in that he was with a group of friends who wished that he could still see women the way he had, before.  He remembered having done that, but the change was too profound to allow him to do again.  That's likely nearly universally true, at least for men.

On a scarier note, in an interview I heard some time ago from a very orthodox Catholic source, a person who assisted with exorcisms noted that in some cases the possession had come about during intercourse, the metaphysical nature of it being such that license existed due to the marital act for the possession to transfer from one person to another.

Now, people like to wink and note that even amongst members of Apostolic faiths, premarital sex is common. But prior to birth control, it was much less so.  It was not, however, nonexistent.  Part of the breach of promise recognized this.  But part also recognized that once couples head down this road, there's no real coming back, ever.

Ever.

And that, in no small part, is why "no fault" divorce works an irreparable and unconscionable injury to marriage, the married, and men and women in general.

It should not be allowed.

Before we look at that, or rather before we carry on directly, however, we'll take a big diversion. The reason is that we happened, in an unrelated fashion, upon something tagentially related to this topic and started a post on it, but then decided that it would really be better set out here.  

And that involves two videos from The Catholic Gentleman blog.

Normally I'd be very hesitant to post a video of this type, probably out of cowardice as much as anything else, but these are so well done, if not really titled correctly, I'm making an exception.  

They're really insightful.

Having said that, I'll retreat into cowardice a bit.  The mere title, "What women don't understand about men", can raise hackles and eye rolls.  And the fact that it's linked in from something called "The Catholic Gentleman" will immediately provoke cries of "rad trads" and patriarchist, and the like.

Well, actually, this is much more in the nature of informed evolutionary biology.

And, to note it again, they're mistitled.  That's because these two videos could just as easily be "What men don't understand about women, and what women don't understand about men, and why that's the case.

Now, these do take this topic on from a semi religious prospective, but only semi, which is really interesting in that this is from The Catholic Gentleman blog.  They creep right up on, and even cross deeply into, evolutionary biology, again in really insightful ways, and frankly if the religious aspects of these videos were omitted, they'd still be highly valid.  In the first one, in fact, the religious elements are hardly mentioned.

Now, a few warnings about these insightful videos.

About half of the first one is about sex, sort of, but not completely.  Rather, it's more accurately on how men perceives their relationship on a primary basis, which is heavily based on sex, which is part of the reason that they're so insightful.  It also means that they touch on a topic gently, but much more graphically, than has ever been discussed here before.  

Crud?  Yes, but more accurate in some ways than we care to imagine once certain lines are crossed.

But the times call for it.

Put simply, and grossly simplifying it, we're an animal whose evolutionary biology is really odd, and that's not a societal thing.  Of all the mammals, we belong to the group that has the highest degree of sexual dimorphism.  And of every animal in our group, the primate, we're at the top of the scale, indeed, over the scale, on it.  It defines a lot of who and what we are as an animal, and how the two sexes react with each other.

This is not, I'd note, unique to this analysis. The first time I recall reading this was actually a discussion on Homo sapiens evolution in The National Geographic decades ago.  The thesis to explain it is that in one of our homo ancestors, quite a few ancestors ago, the dimorphism began when the species intelligence advanced, resulting in an unusually long period before we're mature adults.  That meant that our mothers, or rather their mothers, had the responsibility of dealing with and taking care of the infant and child human for a long time. . . years in fact.  That caused the dimorphism.  Females evolved accordingly in one direction, and that direction emphasized security and relationships.  Males evolved in another, and those involved a set of things we have otherwise discussed here, but also, and we really haven't discussed hit here, sex.  The National Geographic author's assertion, and it seems well-supported, is that the evolutionary trade-off is that human males became basically ready, if you will, all the time and traded intercourse with human females, who are receptive, unusually, in varying degrees all the time. Females received food and protection.

That is, we'd note, a gross over simplification, somewhat.

As we're a very complicated species, with our big brains, it became more involved than that, but the basic elements remained.  Humans do look for lifetime mates.  Males are highly oriented towards connecting love of their mate, ultimately, with intercourse, and if it's absent, severe problems typically begin to arise.  Women place little importance on that, however, past the initial stage of the formation of the couple, and instead place an enormous focus on relationships and feeling safe. Women really don't understand that for a married couple, or perhaps we should say one in a real union, that for the male, if the physical aspect of it is absent, he'll feel frustrated, insecure, and unloved.  Men really don't get that women can simply omit this to some degree, or even entirely, and not feel the same way at all.  On the other hand, men don't grasp that if a woman feels insecure, it's relationship threatening.

The first video does a really good job of explaining that.  If you want to look into it, and do to my autodidactic nature I did, you can actually find a pile of stuff supporting what they're saying.

The second part of the first installment is on how men yearn for respect and equate love with respect.  Women do not.  Women expect support.  You can find lots of stuff on this as well, although you need to be careful.  One thing that is mentioned barely here, but which showed up in a net search, is that a female insulting a male, well, in a physical fashion in this arena can actually be devastating. There's an entire Reddit thread where a married man mentions this occurring in an argument which seems to have largely resolved on its primary point, but which seemed overwhelmingly likely to result in a divorce, even though the woman had repeatedly apologized.  Even other women were counselling, "dump her".

A couple of notes, before moving on, one that's touched on in the video, and another not.  The video makes a really good point, which has to do with male adolescence and how males develop. The context of it is in regard to transgenderism, and the point is made that the sort of crisis that males go through at a certain age, as things turn on, would be wholly absent for those claiming to be transgendered.  Without that, however, you really aren't male.  And no doubt the reverse would be true for whatever it is that women go through.

Men Did Greater Things When It Was Harder To See Boobs

BY: AMY OTTO

JUNE 23, 2016

7 MIN READ

Amy Otto, from The Federalist.

Not nearly as touched on, but a major problem, is that not only are men highly oriented in this direction, but at the point at which its realized its like flipping a switch that men can't get back from. This is mentioned in the excellent podcast Catholic Stuff You Should Know.  Men really can't' get back from where they started off, once they go down this path (and yes, I'm not going to fill it all in).  It's sometime wondered "how" Catholic Priests can endure their celibacy, and it should be noted that St. Paul advised that unless the person had the grace and call to do it, they shouldn't attempt it.  Most Priest who are truly called not only have that calling and grace, but they've likely never gotten to the point where the breaker was switched.  Once it is, enduring the celibacy would be difficult in the extreme, and we note that in fact not all have endured it.

The second video is on three different topics.

The first is how men handle insecurity and stress, which often is very aggressive, or at least some form of aggression.  The other way tends to be through addictive behavior.  

The prior set of statues took the relationship so seriously that it was somewhat difficult to contract in the first place, had very serious implications from day one, and was very difficult to break.  By being difficult to break, it protected first children, but then it protected the married men and women themselves.

This is not to say that all marriages were always rosy, but truth be known, the majority of marriages that break up do so due to transitory matters.  That's why divorce originally required proof of something serious.  Critics of the old statutes claimed that this forced people, and they usually mean "women" by people, to make up lies to obtain a divorce, and lying did indeed occur.  Missed in that is that the fact that lying was occurring mean that what was being claimed, such as mental cruelty, didn't really exist.  It was all just a matter of feelings.

That it is a matter of transitory feelings is borne out by the evidence.  At a bare minimum, it's reported that 27% of women and 32% of men regret their divorces, or are willing to admit that they do.  Given the nature of such reporting, we can probably easily assume that the real percentages approach at least 40%, if not higher.

Taken out of that, of course, are the percentages of those who divorce who simply kill themselves.  Suicide being a risk due to divorce is very well established, although statistics associated with the percentage that take this tragic route are hard to come by, with men being nine times more likely to kill themselves following or during a divorce than women. That last statistic is particularly interesting, as there's something about men that causes them to take that approach at a much higher rate than women, although suicide is an increased risk for men and women due to divorce.  Men, it is well known, tend to lose their social structure upon marrying, and it tends to devolve, over time, down to their wife.  Again, looking back to old wisdom, the Old Testament informs:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

They do indeed, and this does indeed become the case.  It's really easy to find examples of a wife's family essentially becoming the family of her husband, but it's much less common the other way around, in spite of what many people assume.  Men getting divorced tend to lose their entire families as a result, their wife, their children, and their wife's family, with nowhere to go. The failure is so existential, they'd simply rather die.  Women suffer to, but the classic "going back to her parents" is an option for them.  Men don't "go back to their parents". They go back to new dwellings alone.

Suicide is now so common with divorce that its frequently discussed in various divorce related circles, including legal ones.  Interestingly, the tragedy frequently is followed by the comment that if a person is edging towards this during the divorce in an open way, it should basically be disregarded, as that's manipulative. At some level, that's an incredibly self-interested set of views.  Self-slaughter if never the right answer, and from a Christian prospective, it's a mortal sin.  But the people who state "I feel guilty because my spouse killed himself" often really should feel just that. They abandoned their vows and the other person fell into despair, so  yes, you should feel guilty, and moreover, you in particularly should not "move on" into another relationship having helped kill, quite literally, your prior one.

All of this is also why the death rate associated with men is also falsely low.  Some go home and kill themselves sooner or later, but some simply drink themselves to death, or purposely engage in a lifestyle that will shorten their lives.  Some just die, broken-hearted.  Indeed, a bona fide medical condition, takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome,” occurs in a certain percentage of otherwise healthy people, killing 5% o those who obtain it, and causing long term health effects for 20% of those who aren't killed by it but survive.  In extreme cases, a related psychological condition results in a mental collapse in which a healthy person just gives up the will to live and ceases all efforts to do so, resulting in death coming within the span of a week unless people catch it and intervene.

Oh well, right?  We've moved on to the brave new legal world where the facts are made up and the answers don't matter, and just have to live with it.

No we don't. There are things that can, and should, be done. But what can be done?

• Be honest about the relationship between men and women.

It's ironic that in the age of freely available information, and great advances in society, that what people have learned is the mechanics of sex, but nothing about its existential nature.  This is a root part of the problem.

And I'm using the term "sex" advisably, not "marriage".

If the defenders of Catholic annulments are to be credited, the reason that so many are granted is that people just don't grasp the nature of what they're getting into.  As noted above, I'm pretty skeptical on that, but there's at least something to that.  Women don't seem to realize that once they become sexually active with a man he can't go back to the status quo ante.  They also, in many instances, don't realize (and again, Reddit is full of this stuff) that once the vows are exchanged and the presents opened, they can't really expect a return to the days of care and cuddling. For that matter, once children are born they're not getting back there either.  They will have achieved exactly what the New Testament provides, literally:

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.

He's not going to get over the "clinging". 

If the authors of The Catholic Gentlemen are correct, women need to grasp this. But there's a lot that men need to grasp as well.  And before we depart on this topic, we'll note, at least in undamaged women, and a lot are damaged, the psychological union that this creates exists too.

When I was looking up stuff for this post, one of the things I just ran across was a post by a woman who had initiated a divorce. Still convinced that she was correct in doing so, she was baffled by why she was repeatedly thrown into lamenting the divorce and the loss of her husband.  Of course, the Redditors came in with all sorts of "grieving" statement, and in a way they were right. But the reality of it is that she tried to cut something down that was within herself and killed it so it didn't die a natural death.  As that attempt at murder, and indeed it’s a type of self-murder given the nature of marriage, is ineffective, her DNA was telling her what society could not.  Her divorce is false. She wasn't the person she was before she attempted to divorce.

It's here where the videos linked in can do a real service.  Societally, we lie about sex all the time and have damaged people enormously as a result.  What we've essentially done is to encourage people to get on the perversion and decay train, and a lot have boarded it.  Then we're surprised by the result.  To give an odd example, everyone was surprised when "America's Dad" Bill Cosby turned out to be a serial sexual pervert.  But why? We knew that he hung out at the Playboy Mansion and everything associated with Playboy ended in perversion, long term.

This obviously goes beyond marriage, of course, and gets towards being honest about our psychology as a species, which we aren't.  We can pretend that the old standards went away, but the old DNA is still there.

• What can be done under the current law

Part of the reason, indeed a lot of the reason, things have gotten so bad is that divorce lawyers, have failed to really examine the law much, with rare exceptions.  

They should.

Quite frankly, it'll probably take conventional civil litigators to do it.

But what can be done?

Domestic lawyers really don't look at the law much.  They have just gotten used to "this is how things are done". An example of that is Wyoming's "no fault" divorce statute, which isn't really no fault. The Wyoming Supreme Court required proof on irreconcilability in a case for the first time this past year, which means it took somebody fifty years to wake up to the fact that the law requires the proof, although the case was very unique, however.

• Going back to the old law

We remind people of this:

People constantly imagine that when a mistake is made, and absolting hte old law here was a mistake, you "can't go back". 

Of course you can go back.

There actually is a movemen in the nation to move away from no fault divorce.  But to get back to the old law society will have to go a bit further back indeed.

It should.

Divorce laws requiring fault should be reestablished, and the "heart balm" statutes brought back. It's those latter causes of action that, as far as I'm aware, which nobody has preposed to restore.

They should.

• A societal reaction.

Finally, in order to really take this on, there needs to be a societal reaction, and this makes people very uncomfortable.

Very uncomfortable.

Part of the reason that we have so much divorce in our society is that we've allowed the conditions creating it. We've badly damaged the psychological makeup of our society over a seventy year period by losing what we knew about sex and the relationship between men and women. That's hard to come back from, but it needs to occur.  It'll have to start occurring on an individual basis.

Even when I was a college student in the 80's it was still the case that people living together without being married was frowned upon, even if it was no longer really societally prohibited.  Doing that on a non-married basis toys with the programmed in nature of sex and the relationship between the sexes in a  major way.  Indeed, in many societies earlier on, to do that was simply to create a married relationship that the couple was then stuck with.  Even in early Christianity, as is so often forgotten, there was no marriage ceremony early on.  The couple simply agreed to be married and moved in with each other.

Couples that "live together", as its now politely called, are creating a proto marriage whether they wish to or not, at least within themselves.  If this is not going to be frowned upon, it ought to at least be acknowledged for what it really does.

Beyond that, and it would have to start there, the easy separations that have come into being should not be so easily tolerated.  Couples break up and divorce, as we know, but it really doesn't have to be accepted by a party that didn't wish to, and if they didn't wish to, they should stand their ground in their status.  And this is true, in my view, of religions annulments as well.  To go against these, in Catholic terms, is regarded as absolutely shocking and subject the person who does it to attack.  Well, proclaiming that you view the other party as engaging in a fraud won't make a person popular, but standing for what is true often doesn't.¹

Footnotes:

While I'm aware that it will be a very unpopular thing to say, another aspect of this would be not to tolerate the divorce industry.

Like almost everything that plagues our society, there's a strong industrial element to all of this.  The corruption of marriage in the first place, by which we mean the corruption of the relationship between men and women, was brought about in no small part due the pornography industry, which is a subset of the sex trade industry.  As it took root, the entertainment industry, the medical industry and the legal industry became highly involved with it.

Law in American society has become an industry, and as noted, it's very tied up in it.  Law, like medicine, was a profession, but the corrupting influence of money has very much corrupted it.  Divorce litigation is its own industry.  There's no reason to respect it, or those involved in it, including lawyers involved in it.

Related Threads:

Et Ux*: A legal and societal history of marriage

Shockingly young! Surprisingly old! Too young, too old! Well, nothing much actually changing at all. . . Marriage ages then. . . and now. . and what does it all mean?

Courting

Throwing out the puzzle and keeping only once piece.

Today In Wyoming's History: February 2: Common Law Marriages

July 29, 1968. Humanae Vitae

The 1976 Wyoming legislature

Reinstated the death penalty and brought in no-fault divorce.

What a bunch of boofadors.

Oh yeah. . . that's also the year we turned out Gale McGee for Malcolm Wallop around here.

Well, that was two years before Coors introduced Coors Light, and you could still drink and drive legally in the state at that time.  We must have been doing too much of it.

The Political Left, having recently rediscovered democracy, now rediscover's shame. A blog entry by Robert Reich.

Marjory Taylor Greene, left, Howler Monkey's right (By Steve from washington, dc, usa - howler monkees doing their thing, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3963947).  One of these examples is shameful, and it ain't the one on the right.

This is an interesting and in my view largely correct, insightful blog entry by Robert Reich:

The death of shame

It also comes, I'd note, on the same day that a Wyoming Republic commentator made what are somewhat similar comments, calling a member of the GOP Central Committee a hypocrite in no uncertain, and indeed highly crude, terms, although if true, they'd be deserving ones.

And hence, I guess, my comment.

While I think that what Reich is complaining about is in fact shameful, which starts with Marjorie Taylor Greene acting like a Howler Monkey during the State of the Union Address, how the crap can anyone on the hardcore political left sincerely make this claim? The hard left in the country has spent the last 50 years totally dismantling any concept of shame in absolutely everything whatsoever.

And that's a lot of the reason why we are exactly where we are.

Do we have no shame?

Of course not. We were told that nothing is shameful.

And indeed, this tracks well into the purpose of this blog, looking at then. . .and now.  And, moreover, we often fail to note this trend, i.e., descent, in literature, as we assume that everyone in the past was living in the sewer or wanted to be like us, in the sewer.

That's truly not how it was.

I'll admit that I am torn in how to present this post.  When I started drafting it, I found I went into detail on where shame has exited.  I hadn't intended in the first place that the thread be a catalog of things formerly shameful, and now no longer shameful.  And in looking at it, I don't think that's the correct approach.  Maybe I'll expand on individual items later.

But what I will note, is there are a lot of things that were once regarded as highly shameful, in the arena of personal conduct, that no longer are, and in some instances, left-wing social engineers have gone so far as to impose shame on anyone commenting on them, or not engaging in them. Shame hasn't really left in that sense, it's been transferred.

Taking what is a short arch of history, but a long one in terms of individual lives, since World War Two, and really, since the late 1960s, a massive effort has been expended on this by the left.  Even as late as the early 1980s, for instance, many things that are now not shameful, were.  

Sex outside of marriage, particularly for women (or girls) was shameful.¹   Having a baby out of wedlock was shameful.²  Homosexuality was shameful.³   Men dressing in women's clothes or affecting a female appearance was shameful. Prostitution was shameful⁴ . Avarice was shame, including avarice in these areas.⁵

Even into the 1970s, being divorced conveyed an element of shame.⁶   Living with the opposite gender and not being married was shameful. 

Well beyond that, having a child and not supporting the child economically, even to the point of your own well-being being impaired, was shameful.

While it was definitely changing during the 60s, putting yourself on display, i.e., being an "exhibitionist" was shameful.

Pornography, even after Playboy, and its consumption, was shameful.

All this started getting ripped down in the late 1940s, it accelerated in the 60s and 70s, and it's gone on to really stretch the balloon in our present age.  The results have quite frankly been a disastrous assault on nature.

Now, I don't wish to suggest that every conveyance of shame was warranted or a good thing. There were some really bad results.  The high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s were partially due to it being simply too shameful in many people's minds to bear a child out of wedlock, with the shame being imposed both on the young woman, but also on her family.  That this has ended is a good thing.

But the Me Generation's deep dive into themselves, and "if it feels good, do it", as the ethos, has been hugely destructive.  The KIA, MIA, and WIA of the Sexual Revolution has caused a limping society.  The focus on "me" lead to a focus on "mine", destroying community and boosting greed.

And in no small part, it's lead to where we are in things like Reich has complained about, and not just in this post.  It's all sort of the same package.  If the whole world is about me, me, me, and my needs, needs, needs, I really don't need to care what anyone else thinks or even reality.  The difference, therefore, between Marjorie Taylor Greene howling for attention and a transgender advocates demanding that a man be viewed as a woman, as he wants to be, are really thin. Likewise, the difference between a AoC and Elon Mus isn't all that much.

Also, really thin is the difference between individualized self-expression, including pantless individualized self-expression, and Harvey Weinstein pulling the latter off of somebody else.  It all just goes together.  In a way that they likely couldn't recognize, Hugh Hefner, Harvey Weinstein, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are all fellow travelers on the same destructive cultural bus.

Reich cites to shame being a necessary social engine, and it is.  But you can't partially restore shame, really, as it has to be based on a larger something.  You can't just say "bad", and it's bad, because it's bad.  Bad things are bad, but due to something else making them bad. 

We've been seeing a lot of this recently, interestingly, and some of that's a good sign.  The Me Too movement is an effort to restore shame where it had once been.  At least up into the 50s, if not beyond, men who expected women to put out were called "wolves", and to be tagged that was shameful.  While the name was no longer around by the late 70s, early 80s, the same conduct was still not admired at that time, but Hefner and company were ripping it down, and in deed, raping it down, basically.  Hollywood, where actress self prostitution was pretty common all along, was interestingly the first to really say "enough", on an individual level, and try to reverse it.

But you really have to restore the metaphysical basis for why that's wrong, to really get anywhere.

Young people, left without the guide rails of the culture that was torn down, have partially restored it as well, although groping for a basis for it remains.  And in some odd ways, as we recently addressed, even the transgender movement, deep down, is an effort to reach out to get back to a less material, less perverted, time.

So here we now are.  Having become comfortable with a Quasi Judaical Dictatorship that's suddenly betrayed autocracy and restored democracy, the left finds itself now championing what it had become comfortable omitting, and here at last, its rediscovered, shame.

So is this a "everything was better in the past" post?  No it isn't.

But shame exist for a reason, and excising it wholly was a mistake.

Footnotes.

1.  People will instantly claim that there was a double standard, and to some degree that was true, but not to the degree that people commonly imagine.  It is true that it's becoming public knowledge that a girl had sex outside of marriage would tarnish, and often severely, her reputation, and if it was a case of multiple men, it would put her in a category that would be difficult to ever get out of, but men who were multiple standard violators likewise got tagged with a permanent, indeed lifelong, reputation they couldn't get out of either.  They had greater leeway than women, but not absolute leeway.

2. As noted in later in the thread, this probably partially lead to the high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s.  It also, however, lead to a lot of children being given up for adoption in a process in which the pregnant girl often absented herself, or her family absented her, for a period of time so that the pregnancy would not be discovered.  I know at least one person who experienced, this, later going on to a very respected adult life and the pregnancy not being discovered until after she had died.  As there was a high demand for healthy infants to adopt, and frankly white healthy infants (and there still is), this often worked out well for the adopted as well. Again, I personally know one such person whose mother was a college student when she became pregnant and the father never knew.

Indeed, that latter item is surprisingly common.  You'd think the distressed young woman would have always told the father, but often, they didn't.  This is because they didn't want, quite often, to be faced with the choice of marrying the individual, which also often occurred.  Such marriages usually happened quickly before the woman "showed".  In cases in which the women were in their 20s, they often just didn't want to be married to the man in the end, and for teens, their families didn't want to put them in that spot, quite often.  And of course, date rape wasn't really a concept at the time, and therefore in cases in which that resulted in pregnancy, not wanting to marry the man made sense.

3.  This tended to have an arresting influence on open displays of homosexuality, and it also led to quite a few homosexuals simply suppressing it individually, or even refusing to acknowledge it in any sense.

4.  It still mostly is, of course, but there are ongoing efforts to break this down.

The degree to which prostitution is shameful, although not really being a prostitute, tends to change by era.  In rough and ready frontier areas, the institution tends to exist pretty openly, and it also tended to very much be associated with certain armies, sometimes by compulsion.  That doesn't necessarily mean that the individual shame associated with it evaporates, but rather the tolerance of it is pretty open.  In other eras, there's very low tolerance for it.

There tends to be a myth that prostitutes were the founding women in a lot of regions of the frontier, which is just flatly false.  I've heard this myth associated with one local, now long deceased, historian, but as I've never read his work, and for acquired bias reasons I'm unlikely to, I don't know if that's really true.  Be that as it may, the most typical fate for prostitutes was early death, due to the lack of protection from disease.

5.  But not just in these areas.  Being "greedy" has been something that's always been around, but which wasn't tolerated in the way it now is until after the Reagan Administration came in.  

Americans have always had a very high tolerance for the accumulation of wealth, but not to the present level.  Simply being wealthy is not a sign of avarice, but having wealth was at one time very much associated with a social expectation of charity. Quite a few wealthy people still exhibit that trait today.

"I pay my taxes", while something nobody likes doing, was actually something the very wealthy used in their self-defense at one time, as the upper tax rate was extremely high.

6.  Fault, of course, had to be demonstrated for divorce up until nearly everyplace, or maybe everyplace, adopted "no-fault divorce".

Divorce is really regarded as being routine today, but even into the 1970s it was a mark against a person.

So Ukraine is fighting a war for democracy against Russia, thereby fighting for all of us. .

and folks like Robert Reich wonder why we aren't providing government housing and free lunches to children all over the country.

A sandwich and a HMARS. These are not the same.

Well, that's fairly easy.  "Provide for a common lunch" is actually not a logical equivalent to providing for the common defense.

Indeed, as hard as it is for people to accept it, that really isn't an obligation of the Federal government,  providing an army to defend the country is, and if we can fund somebody else to fight a war, so we don't have to, all the better.

And if a foreign war is in the national interest, existentially, as it's a contest between our values, and those of something we're deeply opposed to, well, we should support them and only the Federal Government is well situated to do so.

The added part of this is that by and large, social programs tend to become social rights and then social failures.  In much of the country the school districts in fact provide free lunches, which morphed into free breakfasts, which as morphed into a societal right for people to refuse to feed their children, as the districts have to.

Genetics I: After all the propoganda, this is what actually matters.

Graphical representation of the idealized human diploid karyotype.

You can be what you want. ..  you just can't want what you want. This determines what you want.

From Lawrence of Arabia.

In in the film Lawrence of Arabia, there's a point at which Sharif Ali confronts Lawrence with his having said, earlier in the film, that "you can be anything you want". Set out above is Lawrence's cinematic answer.

And its correct.

When I was young, I had to study genetics.

The reason for that was that I was a geology student, and while those who aren't familiar with the discipline may imagine that you study rocks all day, in actuality its an incredibly diverse field of study.  Biology was a big element of geology, but paleobiology.  That involved genetics in a major, major way.  As a geology student, you learned that genetics is destiny and a controlling, immutable, factor in reality.

In fact, quite frankly, I think you end up learning that more deeply, in some areas, than biologist do.  You become deeply aware of evolutionary biology, which is its own field really, and which is something that has an overarching impact on everything else, and I mean everything else, more than anything else in the physical world.

You are what you are, to a major degree, due to evolutionary biology.

You also became aware that this wasn't accepted by everyone in society. At that time, it wasn't accepted by Protestant fundamentalists, and it still isn't.  I recall being in a paleontology lab when a person came into it as he wanted to debate our professor, Don Boyd, about evolution.  Evolution is applied genetic paleobiology.  The person who came in, however, armed with a misconstruction of the Old Testament, had further armed himself with pseudo science to support his position that evolution wasn't.  It is.^[1]. 

That sort of experience left a person with not only a solid grounding in biology and paleobiology, and a really solid grounding in science itself, but also with an expectation that there were people out there who didn't accept scientific reality.

None the less, I'd never have guessed the extent to which this has become true in the 35 years that have passed since the event noted above.  And not just with "conservatives" or the right wing of politics, as is so often claimed, but with the left as well.  Indeed, it can be maintained pretty clearly that both sides of the political spectrum have their own major problems with different areas of the scientific fields, with the right really having one right now with medical science and certain of the physical sciences, and the left having one with the topic of human evolutionary biology.^[2].   Each side would prefer to just make things up in these areas, or certain portions of these areas.

The depiction set out above, as noted, is a graphical representation of the idealized human diploid karyotype.  This particular examples shows the organization of the genome into chromosomes, further showing both the female (XX) and male (XY) versions of the 23rd chromosome pair.

This is what really determines the basic nature of what you are.  It controls far, far more than what you might imagine or care to imagine.  It makes you essentially identical, in so far as any remote observer might care to note, with any member of homo sapiens sapiens back to the dawn of our species, whether that be 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago.  Indeed, you share so much of this with closely related subspecies, like Neanderthals, or preceding species, like Denisovans, that it isn't even funny.  That's why, in fact, in terms of paleontology these "species" can only be regarded as a "species" if you are a "splitter".  If you are  a "lumper", and thereby a member of that scientific group that holds that the classic definition of a species is the prioper one, that being if a male and female individual can breed and produce a viable offspring (capable of breeding itself), they're one species.  Frankly, this is the correct view in my opinion, and the opposite view is only held, in my opinion, as developed species that we've genetically altered over times, such as canines, are viewed instinctively by us as more than one species because of what we've developed.  In other words, we think dogs and wolves are different species only because we can't imagine wolves and labradoodles being in the same species.  Genetically, however, the better argument is that they are.^[3]. 

Okay, so what is this about?

Well, to kick it off, Demi Lavato just a week ago or so announced that she's "non binary".  She even wants to be called "they", rather than she.

No, she's not non binary, she's a woman, and that makes her a she.

Let's note here that sexual inclination, or no inclination at all, doesn't define your biology.  Your biology defines your biology.  If you have a female biology, and she does, you are a women.  If you have male biology, you are a man.

That, we'd note again, has nothing to do with your individual desires, irrespective of what they are and regardless of their origin.  Almost every living human being alive has some desire to be something other than what they are, at some level.  Not all of that is biological by any means, but some of it is.  People struggle with desires to be thinner, stronger, taller, or free of physical impairments of all sorts all the time.  Wishing doesn't make it so, and you can't insist that other recognize these features as non existent.  Indeed, doing so is a lie, and if you are doing it regarding yourself, you are lying to yourself, which is a very bad think to do.

An organization that's in this end of the social spectrum, and this is a societal and cultural deal, not a biological or physical one, argues on its site that while most human beings are male or female, some are not, and they're non binary, and moreover that this has always been true.

It hasn't always been true, and in additional that confuses society and culture with science, which are not the same thing.

What's always true with 100% of mammals, absent extremely rare conditions which are generally regarded as a species of biological defect (which doesn't make a person so afflicted bad), is that humans are born with either male reproductive organs, or females ones.  Moreover, this difference in our species is not only significant, its massively significant.

We'll have another thread that will no doubt anger some that we were going to quote from, in advance, here, but instead we'll just take it on directly, and maybe quote there, what we'll type here.

We're primates, which is pretty obvious, and as primates we are members of the animal group that has the highest sexual dimorphism than another mammal. Great apes, of which we're a member, are very pronounced in that regard, and our genus, Homo, is through the roof on it.  Like it or not, and there's plenty of evidence that lots of people don't like it, and that it's a problem in various ways (more on that in other upcoming posts as well) that's a fact.  Evolutionary biology teaches us that early on in earlier Homo progenitors there came a time when our brains got big, the off spring needed long nurturing, and things really got rolling in all sorts of ways.  The males ended up stronger, much stronger, and aggressive for a reason.  The females were weaker and frankly much more maternal than the males.  Because of being tied for years to their children, they depended upon the foodstuff support from the males, and the result was that humans evolved disparate, but constant, sexual drives, that tying the males to the females on an individual basis.  Indeed, psychologist are now well aware of what St. Paul was early on, that sex fused a man to a woman in an irrevocable psychological way that made promiscuity particularly perverse.

This isn't really on that topic, but again it is.   There are men, women, and that's biologically it.  Generally that's psychologically it as well.  "Non binary" or "transgenderism" doesn't really exist but rather reflect present sociology, which is more cultural than physical.

What does exist, however, is a wide ranging human mind that's now set outside, very much outside, of its eco niche.  And as we've become richer and richer, over time, we've naturally, because of our original evolution, come to focus on our genitals, as odd as that may seem.

But another way, of you are Oot Gronk, Cro Magnon, and a man, your daily focus is probably on finding things to hunt and kill, or pick up and eat, and avoiding bears.   Sure, the babes have your attention and you're likely in a natural marriage with one.  And for her, the focus will be on the kiddos and also on finding something to eat and hoping that Oot doesn't get killed by a bear.

In that environmental regime, think resources are going to keep everyone focused on the thin resources and overcoming them.  Indeed, if you ever have the experience of being in thin resources, which most people in the Western world don't anymore, in this real existential sense, you'll find that the level of pondering of sex is pretty low.  Contrary to what people tend to imagine, for example, about old fashioned basic training, which was pretty much all male, is that this topic isn't on anyone's mind and if there's focus on anything inappropriate, it's probably on beer at the 1-2-3 Club.

Indeed, studies on men who are left in really isolated environments where they need to be focused shows that by and large, they don't think about women at all.  I haven't read anything on women, but logic would hold that they probably don't much either.  Those studies tend to show that men who are busy don't tend to start thinking about women until there's women around, and at that point they still don't think about them that much if they're really tied up in something on a continual basis.

You really have to have an element of leisure, or at least down time, until these things start to come up much.  And while that time comes up in our original aboriginal state, it does in a  pretty concentrated fashion and in one in which people are really still pretty focused.  As an example, its' been noted that Native American societies had really low birth rates, far below European Americans at the same period, and one of the early features of European/Native American contact was that women were attracted to European men (or European American men) as they were comparatively wealthy and much less restrained in regard to abstention (we're trying to be delicate here).

Leaping forward, we'd first note, as we have before, that the current set of definitions in regard to sexual orientation categories is really recently, dating back only a little over 100 years ago.  This doesn't mean that acts based on the non typical orientation didn't occur, but the identification categories now made are social categories, not scientific ones.  And its also not really until societies have enough wealth to have leisure does an expansion of culture, and cultural specialization, arise. That's also about when we really start to notice this phenomenon.

That suggests that the phenomenon itself is a cultural and psychological one, which I'd note doesn't mean right off the bat, as some will assume we're leaping to, that I'm asserting this is a mental illness. But it is worth noting that as a phenomenon its much more recognized among people of European extraction.  General Asian cultures regard its as solely a "white" matter and wholly cultural in origin, although certain the same things happen in every Asian culture.

Okay, what's all this suggest?

Well for starters it suggest that people are leaping to conclusions that these things are real in a scientific, i.e., biological, sense, which isn't very well supported at all.  Indeed, the opposite its true although it does seem that some people may be more genetically predisposed to them than others.  But its still the case that all humans are male, and female, that's flat out it.

It also suggest that the modern definitions perhaps should be reconsidered as the least.  Indeed, it tracks back to a really long, probably overlong, thread we did awhile back which brings up the point that maybe these definitions are actually completely in error and, ironically, those backing them may actually be backing a set of concepts that originated with definitions that served to categorize these things as mental illnesses.

If that's the case, and there's pretty good evidence that there is, those who are awash in the new definitions should both rejoice and recoil, as it gets back to the science, which doesn't endorse the new views, but doesn't endorse the old categories either.

Basically, what that leaves us with is humans, and as a species we have a wide range of traits, and one of our characteristics sit hat there are those among us who always depart from the median, and those departures are benign or harmful in very degrees, and oddly enough, in varying times in varying degrees.  A person has to accept that. But that doesn't change you from what you basically are, which means you're either a man, or a woman not both or neither, and you really can't choose to be the other.

And you really shouldn't, for that part.

Oh, why not, you may ask?  Isn't crafting your own reality nifty and guaranteed to have a better chance of making you happy?

Nope, it isn't, on lots of scores.

All of this is presenting an interesting set of unanticipated modern problems, again only of that type that a really rich society can have. And they're problems that could be avoided.

To start with, denying concrete scientific realities is simply dangerous in its own right, and we know that.  Indeed, we see that all the time with people who have ignored scientific realities in regard to diet and substances, with any number of tragic results occurring nearly daily.

Here, although we often fail to realize it, we constantly see it in regard to attempting to take on our psychological desires medically or pharmaceutically, which tends to produce widespread suffering.  Indeed, I'll note one that people often don't think about in this context, which is directly related, that being pharmaceutical birth control.

Pharmaceutical birth control was first introduced in the early 1960s.  For the most part, so far, designed to hormonally alter a woman's natural cycle, it should be pretty obvious that ingesting hormones to defeat a natural system is going to have some pretty risky results, and yet we've been happy to accept them, we think, for over 50 years now.

And yet in that time these substances have been shown to cause an increase in cancer and stroke, two risks that, I'm pretty sure, would cause them to be banned by the FDA as a class if they were just being introduced. They're also demonstrated to have an impact on female psychology in a way that isn't really understood, with it being shown that women taking them judge long term male mates significantly differently if they're on them, than if they are not.^[4]. 

Societally it can be argued that they've been a disaster as they've broken down the social order to an enormous degree.  This is a point often raised by social conservatives and particularly by religious conservatives from those branches of Christianity that oppose pharmaceutical birth control, which are principally the Apostolic faiths.  Irrespective of how a person identifies with these groups, however, the argument is solid as the change in overall behavior has decoupled the original link between men, women, sex and longevity or relationships by severing its natural procreative purpose from the picture, all while leaving the basic instinctive pattern, including the imprinting it causes, in place. 

Given that example, and numerous others, a good case can be made for the position that medical and pharmaceutical treatments that go to address natural biological makeup are a really bad idea.  Indeed, in some other areas we've already concluded that.  Nobody, for example, would now advocate the psychosurgery that Rosemary Kennedy was subjected to, for example.  And yet that was an accepted treatment at the time, much like gender reassignment procedures have suddenly become in the last few years.

Added to that, as that's occurred, there have been developments that have led to concern and pushback.  Indeed, just while in the US procedures are expanding down to the child level, in Europe they're being banned on the basis that childhood expressions of identity in this area tend to be subject to being false where as the procedures themselves can be devastating for the recipients.  

Indeed Reddit, where seemingly everything is located, has a subreddit simply made up of people trying to reverse their gender reversal. This is yet another thing I discovered by accident (like the completely disgusting subreddit that is made up of Hentai representations of World War Two naval ships) but it has a surprising level of participation, which given the generally low levels of the overall population who undertakes a reassignment in the first place, should at least give a person pause.^[5]. 

And all that points out that if a person is uncomfortable in their own skin, there's likely a greater reason for it than the one they perceive.  A person can medicate themselves out of a greater reality, and can have a surgeon cut out a greater reality either.  The risks of trying that are vast.

And in someway they're dishonest to oneself and to society at large.

An example of that is provided by cosmetic surgery, which is concentrated in the female portion of the population and which is more over fixated on breasts.  All kinds of women go through surgery they don't' need to have unnatural large breasts when there's no point to such a surgery, in a healthy woman, at all.  Inserting foreign bodies in a healthy body is a bad idea in and of itself.  Moreover, given yourself a visual reproductive advantage, which is what is the underlying goal, is destructive to society overall, given the really odd idea to everyone that everyone needs to look like one of Hugh Hefner's visual prostitutes, and further promoting an idea that visual attractiveness is so important over everything else that surgery is warranted to achieve it.

Indeed, on that last point, all of this gets back to the idea that we ought to be sex focused, and sex focused on a way that has nothing to do with reproduction.  This isn't healthy societal focus.  Indeed, it tends toward trivializing the entire topic.

People who advocate for those in this area commonly tend to point out historical figures, often with some wide liberties taken, who had these tendencies. Its often noted that they had really productive lives and that their tendencies were never acknowledged, even by those who had them.  This isn't always the case, of course, but there's something significant in that.  They may not have acknowledged them in part because our modern understandings of these things are wrong, i.e., people can't be put in a box like that, and also because these people were busy, i.e., a lot of the time they had something else that really was taking up their time.

Indeed, that was even the case in the entertainment industry more than it is now, where plenty of experimentation with all sorts of things seems to go on constantly.  Entertainers seem to have more time to engage in themselves than other people do in general, so it shouldn't be too surprising that these things surface more there, but as noted, plenty of people who were supposedly "closeted" may very well not have been, or if they were the same thing would apply; they were just really busy.  

Beyond that, however, a lot of the time on any social movement, we're just flat out wrong.  People with strong roots in the evolutionary biology sense of things, or with very strong roots in history or the history of philosophy, tend to be very aware of that, but regular people and even extraordinary people just living their lives often are not.  Cutting edge developments seem like they must be true as they're happening now.  Over time, this leads to a lot of things that seemed to be new and true turning out to have been new and false. As noted above, the entire current conceptualization of sexuality outside of biology and evolutionary biology basically goes back to Freud, who is now regarded as wrong on darned near everything.  Everything we're currently obsessed with in this area now, on a societal basis, may very well turn out to be as well.  

Indeed, the fact that it may very well turn out to be is in part demonstrated by the lengths that people have to go to ignore the problems this creates.

The other day I read an editorial by a top preforming female athlete noting that she couldn't compete against "transgender females". Why?  Well, if you grow up male most of your body remains male, no matter what you do with your reproductive organs later on.  In other words, they're stronger as that's the way nature made them.  This is accordingly creating an unfair problem for "born females" if you will, who shouldn't have to accommodate themselves to this.

Likewise, the back and forth in the military is surreal.  We'll have a future post coming up on the topic of women in combat, but for the time being we'd note that there are those in the service who have transitioned from male to female, in the current vernacular.  As the essence of military service is serving in war, how does the United States government plan on accommodating this ongoing medical treatment requiring status in time of war, and should it have to?  And if those who have done this are captured from our service, which doesn't recognize male/female divides (although as we'll show it should), what then.  Are the Chinese or North Koreans going to accommodate it?

Finally, ignoring nature is done at your absolute hazard, and we've gotten away with about as much of this as we can.  This lesson should be obvious, but we live in such surreal times that "progressives" can fixate on nature while arguing that humans can create their own reality.  We're part of nature, however, and we can't get away with that indefinitely.

At some point in the future, and probably more quickly than we care to even think of, all of this current experimentation is going to come back to haunt us.  It's already haunting some now.  But believing that sociology is ever accurate is a pretty foolish assumption in the first place, and ignoring nature is an even more foolish one.  We ought to step back, and maybe step out.

Footnotes:

1.  Okay, I want to note right here that I won't entertain an argument that discussing evolution is contrary to the Christian faith.  It isn't.

Right now, on the edge of town, there's a large billboard by some obviously conservative Protestant organization that states we're created, not evolved, with the classic crossed out traffic symbol in use.  

People who take this point of view also tend to take the view that the Bible establishes that the world is around 7,000 or so years old, which is wrong.  The Bible doesn't state that and the world is way, way older than that.  Additionally, people who take this view are highly literal in their reading of the Bible in some things, and tend to ignore it completely in others.  For instance, almost everyone who is going to take the strict reading of the word "created" is also going to hold a solo scriptura view of the New Testament, even though the New Testament never defines the canon of scripture anywhere whatsoever, and therefore if you are at an intellectual dead end immediately.

Anyhow, nowhere in the Bible does it say how God went about creating things, only that He did.  It borders on arrogance to assume God couldn't create the current biological world through evolution.  For those who would pose the question why would he do that, why wouldn't he.  Presuming to know the mind of God for such things assumes more than can be assumed.

As a member of one of the Apostolic faiths, I'd note I'm part of the majority wing of Christianity that doesn't have doctrine in this are and doesn't feel it has to, as it doesn't have to.  The view of the Catholic Church is that science illuminates the Divine Creation, so following science is not antithetical to the Faith, properly understood in both venues.  I'd argue that insisting that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution is made up, is a problem however as it makes Christians look ignorant and creates the dummy argument that Faith, Reason and Science can't be reconciled, when in fact they aren't at odds to start with.

Anyhow, I'll state my view.  Evolution is a fact.  

2.  For absolutely baffling reasons, its impossible to discuss vaccinations in certain right wing circles now as the science on this, which is now ancient, isn't accepted. It's not clear why it isn't accepted, but its concentrated just in that demographic.

Conservatives for some time have been hugely skeptical on climate science, which is a bit different as the climate is hard to figure.  I'm noting it here, however, as it goes from scholarly skepticism at higher levels to sort of a rational that if my livelihood depends on it, the science must be wrong, at another level, which may be how a lot of skepticism works on everything, I suppose.

As will be seen here, however, progressives are outright rejecting biology in favor of an extraordinarily recent social set of concepts.  Never mind that it just doesn't fit the science.

3. Indeed dogs make a really interesting examples as they must be the species that's more genetically engineered by human than any others, leading to examples that bear so little resemblance to the wolf, or even to other dogs, that its not funny.  At the end of the day, however, all dogs are "mutts".

A friend of mine who is a big Labrador Retriever fan tends to scoff at the dog I have, a North American Retriever (Double Doodle) as they're a "designer breed".  But in fact, all dogs are.  As I point out to him, the only "purebred" dog is the wolf.

4.  This has been shown to be real, and widespread, but why isn't understood.  For whatever reason, however, women who aren't on them tend to make different value judgments about different character traits than women who are.

It'd be tempting to regard this as selection bias, i.e., women who are on them are one group and women who are not a second. But that doesn't work as women who go off them change their mental calculations, so something else is at work here.  Moreover, it seems that women who are off them make much "safer" calculations.  I.e. the mates they choose are more likely to stick around, be stable, etc. etc.

Psychologically, it'd be tempting to believe that being on them just recalculates the mental dice as women are weighting sex more than long term stability, but that doesn't seem to be it.  The analysis still applies to women who marry while taking them. What's going on here simply isn't clear but something's going on.

5. Overall, all of this goes to show that the Internet is full of traps for the unwary.

I've already noted here the Tessa Fowler incident in which I went to look up wildlife photographer Tessa Fowler, about whom an article was published in the Tribune. Instead of finding her web page, however, I instead found that there's a second Tessa Fowler who is a naked boob model.  That's not who I was looking for.  My guess is that wildlife photography Fowler receives a lot less viewing than boob model Fowler, and that a fair percentage of people who find the wildlife photographer were looking for somebody else, which is the opposite experience I had.

Since that time, much more recently, I ran an item here about the May 24, 1941 sinking of the HMS Hood.  A search on that revealed that some really odd characters draw Hentai drawings of WWII ships as large chested women, and that they'd done a cartoon rendition of the Battle of the Demark Straits as the Bismarck, and Prinz Eugen, as two badly drawn women feeling up a topless HMS Hood, also so depicted.  That is truly perverse.  Lots of men lost their lives on the Hood, and for that matter the Bismarck.

The aforementioned subreddit was discovered following a history tweet by an individual who turns out to be one of the people reversing a reassignment. Usually reddit commenters stay more or less in one area of comment, but obviously not everyone does.

All of this may seem irrelevant/amusing, etc. but I think it's actually directly related to the phenomenon being discussed.  Prior to the Internet people with all sorts of latent sexual desires that don't reflect hte majority of such things probably often went through their lives with those desires never really surfacing.  Now they are in part because they're there for the exploration without restraint in the privacy of a person's home.  If biology is incapable of fully explaining how these departures from teh mean develop, culture and acculturation clearly help fill in part of the puzzle.  Medical doctors have widely reported the spreads of diseases in young people, for example, that formerly were fairly rare and associated with certain deviant acts. The fact that they're now more common means that the acts are more common, and the Internet is likely playing a role in that.

Related  Threads:

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

But what if we are wrong?