Long skirted (and trousered) teenage age girls wearing "dog collar" ankle bracelets in 1953. 1953 was the year that Hugh Hefner launched on his mission to encourage depredation on young women, an effort so successful that the boundaries of improper conduct toward has expanded downward to teenagers and now can hardly even be found.
The issue is the rupture between sexuality and marriage. Separated from motherhood, sex has remained without a locus and has lost its point of reference: it is a kind of drifting mine, a problem and at the same time an omnipresent power.
After the separation between sexuality and motherhood was effected, sexuality was also separated from procreation. The movement, however, ended up going in an opposite direction: procreation without sexuality. Out of this follow the increasingly shocking medical-technical experiments so prevalent in our day where, precisely, procreation is independent of sexuality. Biological manipulation is striving to uncouple man from nature (the very existence of which is being disputed). There is an attempt to transform man, to manipulate him as one does every other "thing": he is nothing but a product planned according to one's pleasure.
At the end of this march to shatter fundamental, natural linkages (and not, as is said, only those that are cultural), there are unimaginable consequences which, however, derive from the very logic that lies at the base of a venture of this kind.
It logically follows from the consequences of a sexuality which is no longer linked to motherhood and to procreation that every form of sexuality is equivalent and therefore of equal worth. It is certainly not a matter of establishing or recommending a retrograde moralism, but one of lucidly drawing the consequences from the premises: it is, in fact, logical that pleasure, the libido of the individual, become the only possible point of reference of sex. No longer having an objective reason to justify it, sex seeks the subjective reason in the gratification of the desire, in the most "satisfying" answer for the individual, to the instincts no longer subject to rational restraints. Everyone is free to give to his personal libido the content considered suitable for himself.
Hence, it naturally follows that all forms of sexual gratification are transformed into the "rights" of the individual. Thus, to cite an especially current example, homosexuality becomes an inalienable right. (Given the aforementioned premises, how can one deny it?) On the contrary, its full recognition appears to be an aspect of human liberation.
There are, however, other consequences of this uprooting of the human person in the depth of his nature. Fecundity separated from marriage based on a lifelong fidelity turns from being a blessing (as it was understood in every culture) into its opposite: that is to say a threat to the free development of the "individual's right to happiness." Thus abortion, institutionalized, free and socially guaranteed, becomes another "right," another form of "liberation."
The now dominant mentality attacks the very foundations of the morality of the Church, which, as I have already said, if she remains true to herself, risks appearing like an anachronistic construct, a bothersome, alien body. Thus the moral theologians of the Western Hemisphere, in their efforts to still remain "credible" in our society, find themselves facing a difficult alternative: it seems to them that they must choose between opposing modern society and opposing the Magisterium. The number of those who prefer the latter type of opposition is larger or smaller depending on how the question is posed: consequently they set out on a search for theories and systems that allow compromises between Catholicism and current conceptions. But this growing difference between the Magisterium and the "new" moral theologies leads to unforeseeable consequences, also precisely for the reason that the Church with her schools and her hospitals still occupies an important social role (especially in America). Thus we stand before the difficult alternative: either the Church finds an understanding, a compromise with the values propounded by society which she wants to continue to serve, or she decides to remain faithful to her own values (and in the Church's view these are the values that protect man in his deepest needs) as the result of which she finds herself on the margin of society.
Thus today the sphere of moral theology has become the main locus of the tensions between Magisterium and theologians, especially because here the consequences are most immediately perceptible. I should like to cite some trends: at times premarital relations, at least under certain conditions, are justified. Masturbation is presented as a normal phenomenon of adolescence. Admission of remarried divorced couples to the sacraments is constantly demanded. Radical feminism — especially in some women's religious orders — also seems to be gaining ground noticeably in the Church (but we will speak about that later). Even as regards the question of homosexuality, attempts at its justification are in the making. Indeed, it has come to pass that bishops — on the basis of insufficient information or also because of a sense of guilt among Catholics toward an "oppressed minority" — have placed churches at the disposal of "gays" for their gatherings. Then there is the case of Humanae vitae, the encyclical of Paul VI, which reaffirmed the 'no' to contraceptives and which has not been understood. Instead it has been more or less openly rejected in broad ecclesial circles.
At first sight it seems that the demands of radical feminism in favor of a total equality between man and woman are extremely noble and, at any rate, perfectly reasonable. It also seems logical that the demand that women be allowed to enter all professions, excluding none, should transform itself within the Church into a demand for access also to the priesthood. To many, this demand for the ordination of women, this possibility of having Catholic priestesses, appears not only justified but obvious: a simple and inevitable adaptation of the Church to a new social situation that has come into being.
In reality this kind of "emancipation" of woman is in no way new. One forgets that in the ancient world all the religions also had priestesses. All except one: the Jewish. Christianity, here too following the "scandalous" original example of Jesus, opens a new situation to women; it accords them a position that represents a novelty with respect to Judaism. But of the latter he preserves the exclusively male priesthood. Evidently, Christian intuition understood that the question was not secondary, that to defend Scripture (which in neither the Old nor the New Testament knows women priests) signified once more to defend the human person, especially those of the female sex.
Against "trivialized" sex
But it is further necessary to get to the bottom of the demand that radical feminism draws from the widespread modern culture, namely, the "trivialization" of sexual specificity that makes every role interchangeable between man and woman. When we were speaking of the crisis of traditional morality, I indicated a series of fatal ruptures: that, for example, between sexuality and procreation. Detached from the bond with fecundity, sex no longer appears to be a determined characteristic, as a radical and pristine orientation of the person. Male? Female? They are questions that for some are now viewed as obsolete, senseless, if not racist. The answer of current conformism is foreseeable: "whether one is male or female has little interest for us, we are all simply humans." This, in reality, has grave consequences even if at first it appears very beautiful and generous. It signifies, in fact, that sexuality is no longer rooted in anthropology; it means that sex is viewed as a simple role, interchangeable at one's pleasure.
What follows with logical necessity is that the whole being and the whole activity of the human person are reduced to pure functionality, to the pure role: depending on the social context, for example, to the role of "consumer" or the role of "worker"; at any rate to something that does not directly regard the respective sex. It is not by chance that among the battles of "liberation" of our time there has also been that of escaping from the "slavery of nature," demanding the right to be male or female at one's will or pleasure, for example, through surgery, and demanding that the State record this autonomous will of the individual in its registry offices. Incidentally, one must realize that this so-called sex change alters nothing in the genetic constitution of the person involved. It is only an external artifact which resolves no problems but only constructs fictitious realities. Nor is it by chance that the laws immediately adapted themselves to such a demand. If everything is only a culturally and historically conditioned "role," and not a natural specificity inscribed in the depth of being, even motherhood is a mere accidental function. In fact, certain feminist circles consider it "unjust" that only the woman is forced to give birth and to suckle. And not only the law but science, too, offers a helping hand: by transforming a male into a female and vice-versa, as we have already seen, or by separating fecundity from sexuality with the purpose of making it possible to procreate at will, with the help of technical manipulations. Are we not, after all, all alike? So, if need be one also fights against nature's "inequity." But one cannot struggle against nature without undergoing the most devastating consequences. The sacrosanct equality between man and woman does not exclude, indeed it requires, diversity.
In defense of nature*
The interchangeableness of the sexes, viewed as simple "roles" determined more by history than by nature, and the trivialization of male and female extend to the very idea of God and from there spread out to the whole religious reality.
Christianity is not "our" work; it is a Revelation; it is a message that has been consigned to us, and we have no right to reconstruct it as we like or choose. Consequently, we are not authorized to change the Our Father into an Our Mother: the symbolism employed by Jesus is irreversible; it is based on the same Man-God relationship that he came to reveal to us. Even less is it permissible to replace Christ with another figure. But what radical feminism — at times even that which asserts that it is based on Christianity — is not prepared to accept is precisely this: the exemplary, universal, unchangeable relationship between Christ and the Father.
I am, in fact, convinced that what feminism promotes in its radical form is no longer the Christianity that we know; it is another religion. But I am also convinced (we are beginning to see the deep reasons of the biblical position) that the Catholic Church and the Eastern Churches will defend their faith and their concept of the priesthood, thereby defending in reality both men and women in their totality as well as in their irreversible differentiation into male and female, hence in their irreducibility to simple function or role.
Besides what I shall never tire of repeating also applies here: for the Church the language of nature (in our case, two sexes complementary to each other yet quite distinct) is also the language of morality (man and woman called to equally noble destinies, both eternal, but different). It is precisely in the name of nature — it is known that Protestant tradition and, in its wake, that of the Enlightenment mistrust this concept — that the Church raises her voice against the temptation to project persons and their destiny according to mere human plans, to strip them of individuality and, in consequence, of dignity. To respect biology is to respect God himself, hence to safeguard his creatures.
Feminine radicalism announces a liberation that is a salvation different from, if not opposed to, the Christian conception. The men and above all the women who are experiencing the fruits of this presumed post-Christian salvation must realistically ask themselves if this really signifies an increase of happiness, a greater balance, a vital synthesis, richer than the one discarded because it was deemed to be obsolete.
It is precisely woman who is paying the greatest price. Motherhood and virginity (the two loftiest values in which she realizes her profoundest vocation) have become values that are in opposition to the dominant ones. Woman, who is creative in the truest sense of the word by giving life, does not "produce," however, in that technical sense which is the only one that is valued by a society more masculine than ever in its cult of efficiency. She is being convinced that the aim is to "liberate" her, "emancipate" her, by encouraging her to masculinize herself, thus bringing her into conformity with the culture of production and subjecting her to the control of the masculine society of technicians, of salesmen, of politicians who seek profit and power, organizing everything, marketing everything, instrumentalizing everything for their own ends. While asserting that sexual differentiation is in reality secondary (and, accordingly, denying the body itself as an incarnation of the spirit in a sexual being), woman is robbed not only of motherhood but also of the free choice of virginity. Yet, just as man cannot procreate without her, likewise he cannot be virgin save by "imitating" woman who, also in this way, has a surpassing value as "sign," as "example" for the other part of humanity.
Pope Benedict XVI, writing in 1984, at which time he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. I rarely quote at such length, but here, having found this quote after I started this lengthy missive, I have to say. . .yes, . . .exactly.
This is one of those posts I started a long time ago and then didn't get back around to finishing it. And as something didn't feel quite right about the post in terms of it having mushy reasoning, I at one time abandoned it, and then formulated my thoughts on it and determined to finish it. Indeed, in logging back around to look at it, I'm surprised how much text was actually here, but I doubt I'll be using all of what I had written by any means (it turns out that I mostly did).
We are constantly reading about sexual scandals involving adults and teenagers (more on that in a second). Something, it seems, is clearly going on, but what? The other day the "what" occurred to me, in the wake of the latest scandal, and so I determined to overhaul this thread, but now with out some trepidation, as it's inevitably the case that a lot of what I'll have to say here isn't supposed to be said at all anymore . . .and that's a lot of the problem.
When this thread first started out, I read an article in the Irish Times (you don't read the Irish Times?) regarding the Irish Boy Scouts.
Frankly, as will be seen, the trend noted above is part of the problem.
But I haven't paid any attention to Irish Scouting nor would I have any really good reason to.
Nor am I going to, and that isn't really the point of the this post. The reason that I"m noting it here is that the Irish Scouting Board apologized for leaders molesting boys, the details of which I'm otherwise completely clueless about.
Hold that thought.
Some years ago the American Boy Scouts (oh, I'm sorry, the gender neutral BSA) had a similar scandal. That lead to an effort on its part to clamp down on homosexuals in the organization which lead to a counter reaction in which that topic isn't supposed to be discussed at all. And there will be more on that in a moment (although probably not the way you think).
And then, not all that long ago the Equestrian world was shocked by the news that Jimmy A. Williams, a championship show jumping hall of fame trainer, is alleged to have committed rapes upon young (more on that in a moment) women in his charge.
And this follows the news we've all heard about the doctor who was molesting young (yep, more on that in a moment) women associated with gymnastic training.
And of course this past month or so there's been a slow burning revelation about a Catholic Cardinal who was molesting, its' pretty clear, seminarians, which was followed by revelations about Priests in Pennsylvania who did the same. That tends to turn the focus on the Catholic Church, and unfairly, as its known that the abuse rate is as high in Protestant denominations as it is in the Catholic Church and according to at least one source that admitted frustration with trying to get into it, the statistics are likely similar for the Orthodox Jews, but its such a closed group that learning about it is nearly impossible.
Finally, there's constantly news about teachers, usually female teachers, taking to bed their teenage male students. Indeed, the molestation rate, or however we'd term it, is believed to be the highest in this demographic. I.e., it's believed that teachers form the largest group of adults who are acting "inappropriately" towards their teenage (and again,, the teenager portion of this is hugely significant) chargers than any other group. It's just not portrayed that way. And, while I have no statistics on it, my strong suspicions are that male teachers acting this way towards female students and perhaps male students is every bit as high as females acting that way towards male students. . . probably a lot higher, I'd guess. Indeed, in the area of things of this type that I'm vaguely familiar with on a local basis, I can think of two male teachers that got in trouble locally for this in regards towards actions towards male students, one male teacher who was known to be acting this way towards female high school students and who never got in trouble for it, and one instance that wasn't illegal but close enough that it would give a person the willies to think about.
Gross, eh?
Yes.
But what does that tell us?
Probably more than we might suppose.
And maybe not what we think, or what we'd like to think.
And definitely not what we're supposed to think, as socially, we're not supposed to go where the evidence would lead us. No, we are not.
Okay, lets' break this down a bit then, in the spirit of following the evidence wherever it might lead, not matter how uncomfortable that trip may be. Indeed, on this trip a person finds themselves being essentially the protagonist in Babylon Berlin off on a trip through the icky.
So what do we read and what does it tell us. Or, what do we actually know, and what does that tell us. And, in the spirit of historical inquiry, what does history teach us about what we're seeing today? As we know, those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, etc.
We read about these scandals from time to time, but when we do, what we tend to read about is a bit misleading. Maybe more than a bit misleading. What we tend to read is that some organization has a problem with male members molesting, usually, male children. And that's almost always universally inaccurate. Indeed, it would appear to be wholly untrue.
In reality, if the statistics are looked at, what we actually find is that adults in authority have a problem with molesting or engaging in sex with their teenage charges. Yes, there are males who prey on true children, but the bigger story is the other one, and as it is bigger, and much more widespread than reported, it's both missed and perhaps overall more disturbing.
Unnatural, i.e., psychologically depraved, attraction towards children is pedophilia. Whatever the rates are of pedophilia, there's not a lot of reason to believe that its really climbing statistically. Whatever it is, it's wholly abhorrent, but it doesn't seem, at least based on what we know about it, to be really changing that much. To the extent that it is, my guess is that its tied to the Internet, which allows people with that icky attraction to more easily engage in it and become more fully prey to it, and because there are now a lot of people who are on the social margins who repeatedly shack up thereby exposing children of one father to the avarice of another male who is a predator.
That last item is another topic entirely, but it also fits into the category of stuff you are just not supposed to say, but which is pretty clearly established. We see a lot of women who are on the social and economic margins having children and then taking up with subsequent men, often serially, who behave pretty much like animals in every sense. That used to be illegal in most places, but now its so common its accepted and not even supposed to be mentioned.
But this is a thread about mentioning things that aren't supposed to be mentioned.
But its not a thread on that particular shacking up topic.
So we move on to the real topic, which is the fallout of the Sexual Revolution and its encouragement of Hebephilia and Ephebophilia.
Eh?
Hebephilia and Ephebophilia are, basically, the terms for creepy attachments to teenagers. Hebephilia is the creepy attraction to young teenagers, barely past their childhood. Ephebophilia is the creepy attraction to older teenagers. It's all really creepy and acting on it is illegal. But it is different from pedophilia.
Now saying that begins to sound apologetic, and that's not where we're going at all. But its important to note that in order to understand what's occurred. Indeed, we'll be able to see that if there's any positive to this tale at all, and there's precious little to be positive about, the same trend and set of developments that gave us this situation and those related to it actually did have a trend line at one time that was extending down to children during the 1970s, when people recoiled from it and went the other way, which is evidence that as far gone as things are now, there's still hope that people will recoil from this as well.
Anyhow, what we're dealing with, in terms of this specific behavior, is the icky adult behavior towards teenagers.
Some time ago, on a completely different topic, I was pondering a thread on teenagers which would have posed the question on whether the demographic category of "teenager" is a recent development. Nope, its' not. It's always been with us.
And there's real reasons for it. In terms of human development, both psychological and physical, and particularly in regards to psychological development, teenagers are neither children nor adults. When adults yell at a teenager to "act like an adult", that teenager isn't going to, as he or she can't. Teenagers aren't adults.
Indeed, not only is a real category, but it turns out to be the case that the "teenage years" stretch out into the 20s. A pretty good theoretical social case can be made, but isn't going to be broadly made that the same protections and restrictions that are afforded to teenagers really ought to be extend out into the mid 20s. Again, that isn't going to happen, but it is worth noting that to a very limited legal extent, it has been. A person cannot, for example, buy a handgun until age 21. A person can't buy alcohol in any state any more until that age, a change that came about during the 1980s. For the most part, up until mid World War One, the English speaking world discouraged the enlistment of soldiers younger than age 21. These are all things that recognize a psychological reality. A person could well wonder, therefore, why it isn't against the law for a person to depict the nudity of a subject below that age, rather than age 18, or why it isn't illegal for a person over 21 to mess around with somebody who is 20. A good social and biological case for taking that approach could easily be made, but isn't going to for reasons we'll get to below.
As we know, in our society (but not in all European societies) the legal bright line is age 18. Obviously, the question can be asked why, but not in the way that some would ask it, based on what we've stated above. In other words, the question isn't "why not 17 or 16" rather than "why not 19, 20, or 21". And moving that line upwards would in fact reflect a social and psychological reality. In the modern era, 20 year olds are in fact not treated as full adults and to a certain extent, they aren't.
Which is also, interestingly enough, pretty much how this was treated a century ago.
So what, the question may be asked.
Well, this is important to this topic because of a trend line that developed from antiquity in to the 1940s and the trend line that developed since then, which has lead to a really messed up situation.
And that takes us back to marriage.
I've discussed the history of marriage here before, but to briefly note it here, as its important to the topic, the state sanctioned and approved marriage is really a vestige of the Reformation and it was designed to repress the Catholic Church. Prior to the Reformation, nobody needed a license to get married in Western society. This doesn't mean that marriages had no controls on them at all, but it does mean that the controls were all religious and social.
It also means that at the time of the Reformation and immediately before it, marriages were preformed in churches and the Church regulated who could marry. So marriages, at that time, were regulated solely by Canon Law and social custom. Even that had been somewhat of an evolution, however, as in European society it wasn't until the second half of the Medieval period that all marriages started to be performed in Churches.
Prior to that time, most marriages were not performed in Churches and were simply acknowledged by the parties contracting them and perhaps acknowledged by social custom. Exceptions usually involved royalty, whose marriages were not only conventional but also in the nature of treaties between nations requiring more thought and acknowledgment. It was the abuse of this system, mostly by men seeking to disavow a recent marriage, that caused the Canon Law to come about requiring marriages to be performed by a a cleric and with witnesses. That way it was harder to disavow the existence of a marriage.
This is important to this topic as the development of the law and customs in this area were driven by what was occurring rather than defining them. Prior to the requirement that marriages had to be performed by clerics, couples alone could contract marriages and that was often done with the influence of the family for economic reasons, resources being very tight. And it also meant that were things went wrong, and they will, humans being human, there was a social means of handling the results. Not to put too fine of point on it, but society bordered on being lethal to people violating the rules and not for surprising reasons. So there was not a lot of misconduct that was openly going on, and when it was learned of, the social pressure on the appropriate results was pretty focused in a singular direction. Where clandestine trysts produced a result, as they will, among a demographic that is biologically capable of producing the result, forces normally operated in a singular direction. The economics of the day allowed for very little other choice, no matter how embarrassing that might be for those involved. And all that produced a climate in which a teen might be capable of contracting a marriage in nearly any of the teen years, but at the same time not one in which we might imagine this to have been really common.
And in fact, the average marriage ages starting in the Medieval period were not much different than they are now, post the arrival of Christianity.*** Pre Christianity it had been common in Europe for brides to be in their early to mid teens. After Europe was Christianized, however brides were normally in their early 20s, not their teens, and their grooms a little older than that. Ages tended to rise and fall a bit due to economic conditions or other factors, and after the Black Plague they in fact fell to the late teens. Be that as it may, marriages in the early teens were extremely uncommon, even if legal. Women, moreover, with the advent of Christianity had to consent to marriage and could not be forced into it, as already noted.
By the 1600s, this had developed to where existing parish records in newly Protestant England showed the average bride was 24 and the average groom 28. These figures are probably pretty representative of conditions for the late Medieval period and the early Renaissance period all over most of Europe. By the time of Shakespeare's authorship of Romeo and Juliet, the relationship described in the play was in fact regarded as scandalous in England, and it was commonly believed by that time (and correctly) that motherhood prior to age 16 was dangerous and that no woman should marry before age 18, with age 20 being regarded as the female ideal, and 30 regarded as the male ideal.
That's right, in Elizabethan England, the general thought was that a man ought to wait until age 30, and would probably marry a 20 year old woman.
A person may logically ask what this has to do with anything, but the answer is quite a lot. The Church had an enormous influence in impacting what was an existing human institution, marriage, and fixing it with a certain dignity, which is not to suggest that it did not have dignity or that it was unrecognizable before. Really young female marriage ages basically disappeared, but remained legal, and average marriage ages approximated the current modern norm.*** At the same time concubinage disappeared and was regarded as horrific in nature. The status of women in turn was enormously elevated as concubinage, prostitution and forced marriage were discouraged or outright eliminated. Natural sexual relations were a fact of life and in Catholic and Orthodox Europe it was accepted that people would fall, human nature being what it is, but that those who did fall could always be reconciled with the Church and forgiven and, when the results of the fall resulted in children, as they sometimes did, there were ways to accommodate that, with one of the ways, if both parents were unmarried, was a marriage before the child was born. You can find frequent historical examples of even very devout figures falling, few of which resulted in marriages, but that marriages occurred and that occasionally one or both of the figures was young did occur.
All of this is significant as it means that, starting approximate in the 1st Century and then going on from there, there was a standard that recognized normal male/female relations and regarded the proper place for them as being in marriage. Departures from that were not approved of, but in the instances when that occurred, there was a vehicle to address it. In spite of what people now might like to believe, women, moreover, were removed from chattel status in much of Europe and elevated to have full discretion in the eyes of the Church, the most important institution in society, as to who and when they would marry.
This wast eh standard from the early 1st Century until the mid 20th Century. Prior to that period, marriages were certainly recognized and indeed elements of what I've noted occurred in many societies. So the standards are ancient, even if there were big departures from them prior to the onset of Christianity.
So what occurred?
It's hard to state and and here we'll confess to not being able to really fully formulate it. But it seems that an attack on all of this set in right after the Second World War, and not just on this set of standards, but a lot of other ones as well. Here we'll try not to stray too far away from the main topic, but we must almost wonder if the changes are somehow the result of World War Two.
Well, let's go with what we do know and what the results were.
Going into the Second World War, there remained a widely held set of standards on human sexuality and the relationships between men and women. It was recognized that sex produced results and the only proper place for it was in marriage. Any sort of sexual conduct that varied from the natural norm was regarded as abnormal. It was known that all sorts of conduct deviated from this, from homosexuality to prostitution, to affairs, and beyond, but all of that was regarded as improper. The standard was known even to those who departed from it, and where departures occurred, they were generally kept secret if at all possible.
And among those standards was the one that had developed in the Middle Ages and which was pretty hard and fast by the 1600s. Age 18 was regarded as the adult onset, but not an age at which marriage was encourage. While it was the "age of consent", that consent was discouraged outside of marriage. And below that, consent could not be given.
Rather obviously, vestiges of all of that remain, but also rather obviously, the standards have changed a lot, and that has given us equestrian trainers and gymnasts doctors who can't keep their hands of teenage girls, and Boy Scout leaders who molest boys.
Seem extreme?
That's because it says something that comports with the evidence, but which we're just not supposed to say.
So let's follow that evidence a little further.
Going into the Second World War that was the standard and it was the standard during the war. But the second global mass killing in a little over 20 years seems to have broken a lot of somethings. By 1943 American aircraft were frequently painted with images of women that were pornographic and which would have been regarded as shocking, and even illegal, back in the US. They would certainly have been regarded as obscene.**** And while it was almost never mentioned in accounts regarding the war and in any early histories of the war, its well known and finally now covered that the war caused an explosion in prostitution of epic proportions wherever any of the armies were.
Earlier wars featured such things as well, of course. But World War Two encouraged them on a vastly larger scale. Even World War One, which was a huge war, had not impacted social structures behind the lines to anywhere near the same extent, except in Russia which completely collapsed. And that plays an element in this story as well.
Stepping back two decades, a primary result of the Great War was to destroy much of the old order in Europe. Communism and Radical Socialism and existed as radical movements prior to the First World War, but they had not been successful to the extent that they'd been able to take over the governance of a country. World War One changed that. The Communists came to power in Russia and briefly flowered in Hungary. Socialism became much more powerful all over Europe. Germany was governed by a Socialist Party that moved very rapidly towards the democratic middle following the war, but which had been nearly as radical as the Communist Party prior to the war.
The reason that matters is that as a political movement, before it came to power anywhere, radical socialist movements of all types were extremely hostile to conventional sexual relationships between men and women and pretty tolerant of homosexuality. In most of those movements the organizations took Marx's instruction that "all wives are to be held in common" very seriously. The behavior of members of these movements in these regards is pretty shocking, in the revolutionary stage.
Interestingly, once in power the most radical of these movements reversed course in this area extremely rapidly. The Soviet Union, for example, became pretty puritanical in regards to this sort of topic, and so did Communist China and all of the Asian Communist movements. Having walked up and peered over the abyss, it seems, they ran back in the other direction.
This was less the case in Social Democratic parties which otherwise moved quickly to the center otherwise. They did not espouse the overall overhaul of centuries of conduct in this area, but they did basically regard t he existing structures as simply constructs that could pretty much be ignored.
All of this combined set the stage for what would follow first World War One and then World War Two. In some areas of democratic Europe sexual licentiousness really rose following World War One. During World War Two prostitution exploded everywhere that servicemen were, with it exploding in Europe to an enormous degree. In occupied Europe, both during the war and following it, women prostituted themselves in all sorts of ways that would be regarded as horrific now, but which had an impact on things that were to follow.***** And pornographic magazines gained a foothold during the war with the soldier's magazine Yank, pornographic calendars marketed to soldiers, and of course now celebrated images of naked nor nearly naked women on aircraft, which remains celebrated today as "nose art".
In other words, things were posed for the descent into Playboy and the Sexual Revolution.
Coming out of the Second World War Western Europe was a continent that had in significant ways, failed. That doesn't mean that each and ever one of its institutions had failed by a long shot. And it isn't unique in that failure. The United States, which of course occupied about half of North Ameircan, could be said to have failed in the 1860s. But war has consequences and (much like the American Civil War) huge numbers of people had been made rootless and the basic nature of nations and societies were very badly shaken up. This manifested itself differently in some places than others, but it had an impact everywhere. Oddly, perhaps, Germany, the country that had gotten the ball rolling in Europe, turned back into conservatism pretty quickly, basically becoming, in the form of West Germany, the conservative nation that it probably should have become in 1919-1920, and which would have kept World War Two from occurring and which would have actually preserved socials orders in the way that the Nazis destroyed. In much of Europe politics played itself out desperately as forces of democracy struggled in the West with those of Communism (and ironically in the East, which had Communism forced upon it, democratic forces struggled to emerge). European nations with empires saw them fall away, while in the East a Communist empire that refused to admit it was one struggled to expand its reach everywhere.
And in the United States and those parts of the West that were not economically destroyed by the war, new forces started to operate which changed the domestic scene at home.
I've written on this before and this too is one of the many stories of popular history that is simply incorrectly told. People like to say that World War Two brought women into the workplace and they wouldn't go home, so a new economic and social reality was born, but that's bull.
In reality, the role of women in society is vastly more complicated than that and human resources are, quite frankly, much thinner than we imagine. What really occurred is that the first half of the 20th Century saw the vast expansion of domestic machinery, a topic we've blogged about before.
As we pointed out before, women's role in the economy was at least as great during World War One as it was in World War Two. Indeed, ironically, it can be argued that it was greater as the story of women in the workplace during World War Two is really a North American, British, and Soviet story, not a Western Society at large story. In World War One, by contrast, all the combatants employed women in production. Ironically, during World War Two, the Germans resisted employing women until the desperate end and there was not much use of women in industry in Western occupied areas (there was in the East, however, and in the form of slavery and near slavery). And following the war, in spite of what people claim, there's no evidence that women viewed their futures with different aspirations than they did before.
But, as we've previously noted, the war itself brought about the end of the Great Depression. The end of the war brought about the end of the production drought of the 1930s, and that caused a flood of new domestic machinery to flow into American homes.
The social impact of that was so vast we won't deal with it here, but we don't need to either. We ahread have in a prior thread:
I'm noting this here because what that did mean is that it put a lot of the young female population of the country quickly into a different economic and social regime than their predecessors did. And that was new. Not only was it new, but it was a situation that the nation hadn't really completely faced before on this scale.
Which isn't to say that it hadn't been developing before. The expansion of economic fortunes for hte Middle Class mean that starting in the 1920s women began to enter colleges in numbers. Women had attended college before that, but not at enormous rates and in concentrated conditions. Following World War One this really began to change.
Indeed, almost everything a person associated with women, and even society, during the 1960s really started in the 1920s. Where this would have progressed to can't really be determined as the Great Depression really arrested these trends in a big screaming hurry. Here too, as with other developments we've mused about, we have to wonder where this would have gone had the Great Depression not interrupted, and in some ways we have to sadly wonder if much of hte negative fallout we've written about from the 60s just wouldn't have occurred earlier. All the elements were in fact there. Illegal drug use made its first real widespread appearance in the 1920s and combined with the illegal use of alcohol, due to Prohibition. The camera had entered its modern film form just before World War One and was spreading everywhere like wildfire, which meant, with the additional arrival of movie film, that pornography was spreading wildly at the time. Indeed, as production codes and standards of legal public decency had not been anticipated by the law, movies and illustration frequently featured material that any later audience, including contemporary ones of today, would regard as clearly pornographic but which were inserted in common materials. Many very early silent movies of the era contained materials that were outright pornographic even by directors who were major forces in the industry and would be for decades. At the same time, however, institutions that upheld standards remained very strong and were much, much stronger than they are today.
Of course, the 1920s were followed by the 1930s. Given as institutions upholding social standards were stronger in the 1920s, we have to wonder if the ultimate development of things would have worked out better than they did, but in fact the Great Depression arrived and set everything back on its heels of every type.
In the 30s the focus on just getting by was so strong that, contrary to the way people imagine it, people weren't attracted much to vice. Not that it didn't occur, but the struggle just to get by was the focus of the day. And then came World War Two, as we have noted.
Following the Second World War most people just wanted to get back to their lives. But as we've also noted, with the flood of new production and the jump back to the prosperity level of the 1920s followed by the rapid surpassing of it, thing were truly different. And one of those differences was that young people were suddenly much more on their own in ways they hadn't been before, for reasons we've addressed before. And also in ways we haven't, but we need to (even though it takes us far away from the main period of attention on this blog).
People simply leaving home doesn't turn an entire society into libertines, but it does impact society. By and large, however, American society of the late 1940s wasn't all that much different than it had been in the early 1930s, in terms of view. Those views are often not really grasped accurately now, and the era wasn't anywhere near as conservative as imagined, but they hadn't changed all that greatly. But what had changed was a societal tolerance of things on the margins, and that was going to have an impact.
In 1953 Hugh Hefner issued the very first issue of Playboy, guessing right that views had changed enough due to World War Two that smutty magazines, if slickly presented, no longer had to be sold in back alley shops in brown paper bags. Slickly presented and arguing that it was a mainstream magazine, and coming into production in an era of greatly increasing liberal rulings from the United States Supreme Court, Playboy in extremely short order managed to get itself on the magazines stands of even local grocery stores.^ That's amazing in light of the fact that there were still city ordinances in many cities that outright prohibited the sale of such material or, if allowed, which sought to restrict it to the red light districts. Those restrictions were soon wiped out by the courts and the fraud of Playboy became rapidly influential, to be seen even in the change in public entertainment.
Playboy, which I've dealt with here before, ostensibly claim to present the idea that there was nothing wrong with sex outside of marriage and girls wanted it too, but that was an obvious fraud. What the magazine really represented was the idea that men were entitled to sex and that young women were big boobed morons and weirdly sterile. Any guy, the magazine basically stated, could and should be having as much sex as they demanded from giant titted twits who would never get pregnant. It was an amazingly juvenile and pagan view. As it was slickly presented, however, it gained rapid acceptance. By the mid 1950s popular movie actresses began to take on the Playboy appearance and affectation in that they more and more were presented as dumb and large chested. Actresses like Marilyn Monroe (Playboy's first, and unwilling, centerfold) and Jane Mansfield came on the scene and took the movie screens where the much more sophisticated women actresses of the 30s and 40s had been before. To a degree, the trend has never been reversed.
Following this came the introduction of the pill in the early 1960s and the turmoil of the same decade. A male expectation created in the 1950s that all young women were willing and sterile developed into a demand of a type by the 1960s. Not all heeded the demand, of course, but the corrosion had set in and as Hayes Production Code fell in the 60s as well the race was on for an ever more debased culture.
Indeed, in the 1970s the trend had gone so far that there was a brief period where it extended down to children before the shock of that resulted in public recoil. In the late 1970s there were several instances of highly sexualized advertising portrayals of actual female children before people reacted with anger. Contemporaneously at least one major actress was introduced in a film in the form of being a child prostitute, which also caused public concern. When Roman Polanski was learned to have raped a 13 year old he was acting in accordance, in some ways, with a view that was not all that far off from what the entertainment industry was circulating openly at the time.
The public did react back to that sort of behavior in the 1970s, but only by retreating the margin back to adults, more or less. And what had happened in that period is that a society that had a centuries long set of values that reflected nature accurately and which had been tested by centuries of behavior basically loosened it to societally optional so that by the 1990s it had basically fallen apart.
The problem with falling standards however is that there's often no standard to replace them. And that's where we now are, and where we get back to the scandals of today.
Prior to 1953 it was universally held that sex was an act that had consequences and that those consequences meant that it should be contained in marriage. It was always known that people violated the standards, but the standard was still widely known in every respect. Following 1953 that began to erode to where we are today, in which the fact that sex has consequences is largely denied and instead regarded as a near form of entertainment that can be demanded of basically anyone in any form.
If that is the case, the argument for restraining those impulses when they're aimed at teenagers is difficult to argue in that it's the only standard that appears to exist, other than that children should be left alone. Everyone agrees the standard exist (almost) but hardly anyone can explain why it exists. And that's the real problem.
There are only three ways to actually justify the 18 year old bright line, and one of them is lame, and the other two go to where people dont' want to go, as they impose additional standards. But people should go where the evidence leads.
Those reasons are:
1. A line has to be drawn somewhere; or
2. The line is set for moral reasons; or
3. The line is set by the natural law.
Okay, let's look at those.
If the line is just a custom, it had to be drawn somewhere, then its really purely arbitrary and crossing htat line is a bit like violating the speed limit. Yeah, the law says 65 mph but is 70 really that bad? Only if you get caught.
Clearly, that's not what most people think, and what most people think has something to do with #2 and #3. But that seems to be all the more of an argument than people ever really get to quite often.
Quite clearly, if its merely an arbitrary legal bright line, it doesn't mean much, and much of these scandals are just manufactured. And it could be noted that the 18 year old bright line in English speaking countries isn't universally apply (although it nearly is). At least one European country has or had a 16 year old bright line. Further, we also know that is legal, if not very wise, to marry in a lot of places at age 16 or even younger, and if that's legal creeply diddlying doesn't seem very well supported by logic.
So most folks would argue that its illegal for other reasons, even if they're not sure what they really are.
Which takes us to #2. It's wrong as its morally wrong.
Frankly I feel its wrong because it is morally wrong, in addition to holding the views that I'll get to in number 3. But if you feel its morally wrong, you are agreeing to an external moral force being present that is outside of yourself and even outside of human kind.
Some will occasionally argue to the contrary. I.e, they'll argue that its morally wrong but they don't need to accept that morality being external to our species. But that frankly makes no sense at all, and just takes us back to #1. If we have just all agreed that it's immoral, that's just an arbitrary or perhaps an experimental agreement that society has come up with. If that's the case, it can evolve, just like the concept that women deserved respect and sex should be constrained to marriage "evolved" in the wider society to women being big boobed twits available on demand to, apparently, everyone is available on demand to everyone sexual apatite's, no matter what they are, at any time.
And the wider problem is that the widespread sense of this being moral nature is, in fact, widespread. Things that are widespread in a species can't easily be explained this way. You can try to, and some do, on a scientific basis, but that fails pretty badly here as we've already acknowledge that it was once widespread to view women as chattel to be acquired as early as possible, before somebody else did.
So, it's its a moral imperative, then it fits into a set of moral imperatives. Those same moral imperatives hold that any sex that isn't fully consensual is wrong. And they also hold that any sex that doesn't acknowledge the natural nature and purpose of sex is wrong. And that would put almost all modern entertainment depictions in the category of vile, and the contemporary supposedly accepted view of what anyone can do in this area as wrong. In other words, that takes us back to the standard that has been supposedly abandoned (even though we apply in it the case of the well known), and in full.
Which is what the outrage actually demand of us, even if we don't acknowledge that.
And indeed that's why we are seeing the moral outrage in regards to some institutions, but not others.
As we have already noted, teachers actually make up the largest number and highest percentage of abusers in this area. But people don't scream for that to be addressed. Why not?
Well, we don't really expect teachers, at least any longer to be upholding morality. Indeed, we discourage them from doing so. So we accept that their individual failings are individual failings, and indeed, we always have.
And that also takes us other groups. With the leaders of Boy Scouts groups, here and abroad, we still retain, even if while society is attacking it, the concept of the Boy Scouts everywhere being an arm of "muscular Christianity", even though it no longer is. Therefore we instinctively expect Scout leaders to uphold those values, even while we don't expect society at large to do that.
And this is even more the case with the leaders of Churches and why we find that so shocking. In society at large, the current set of values is "anything goes" and even if people don't necessarily believe it in their heart of hearts, we're officially told that anything that makes a person feel good, sexually, can be done and really ought to be acted upon. Therefore, we have prominent actors and other figures "coming out" and trying even to change their sex (something that cannot really be accomplished) and are required to celebrate it, but we react in horror when those who represent the old standard on a moral basis have surrendered to the current libertine one.
And that's really what we're seeing here. That also in no way excuses it. But when we look at some of what is termed abuse, we're seeing the same exact conduct that prominent members of the political left and the entertainment industry tell us that we must embrace. When it slips down to people younger than age 18, we are on a slippery slope whether we like to admit it or not, as we're basing on belief on a set of morals that I'd argue we should embrace, but which society argues doesn't apply to anyone. If this conduct is okay towards somebody who is age 18, in the general society, arguing that it isn't okay when directed at somebody 17 or 16 is largely intellectually bereft.
We none the less know it is wrong, which takes us to #3.
While many are pretending otherwise, by and large we know what is and isn't wrong, including in this area. And what we know is wrong is that certain appetites and desires, no matter how deeply ingrained in an individual, are wrong in a larger external sense. And we know, no matter how much we might like to pretend otherwise, that sex means something, and means something large. The entire thing related to nature, and nature itself is highly external to ourselves.
Indeed, nature doesn't care about us one whit. Which is why the modern angst about what people perceive themselves to be is so tragically amusing. Nature knows what you are, and that's what you are. There are disordered departures from the natural norm, but that there is a natural norm is, and it is what it is. And part of that norm is that there is male and female, and that the relationships between them have deep impact upon those engaging in them, and if there are departures from that, they're messed up.
In other words, once we departed from there being male and female, and that relationship producing children, we licensed the horrors we are seeing here. Indeed, not only where they licensed, but any argument against them is weak in some fashion as it can always be eroded down to some level, unless a very strict argument based on nature is maintained to the contrary (which is quite capable of being maintained).
Put simply, when people started arguing mid 20th Century that anything goes, between men and women, it had to be ultimately be accepted that anything goes at all, no matter what it was, and people would begin to act upon that, even those who very much shouldn't and should know that they shouldn't. And in fact, we've gone a very long ways in that direction. If we're horrified by how far some things have gone, well. . . we have to see how far we participated in that argument ourselves. Anyone who bought off back when, and who accepts today, the Playboy Ideal, is pretty much arguing for unrestrained molestation now.
The old standards really mattered, and were really based on something.
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*Again, exactly. On a related topic: It's All Natural! Except for us.
**Our thread on this topic only went back to 1700, so the information on the Middle Ages is new to the blog, but amazingly consistent with the earlier information.
***The jump in marriage ages with the arrival of Christianity is really pronounced which raises the question of why women were married younger prior to Christianity's arrival. That has everything to do with the status of women in Christianity and the Christian view of marriage.
While there are exceptions, for the most part women in pre Christian societies were largely regarded as chattel. As they had no real say in who they would marry themselves, they instead were basically treated as commodities for which there was real competition. While it sounds insulting, the best comparison might be to something like horses. If a person needs a good horse, you can wait until one is finished and buy it, but the price is going to go up and the buyer will have to risk loosing the horse to competition before the purchase. The same was basically true for women. So the supply and demand pressure put an emphasis on acquisition as soon as practically possible.
That likely enhanced the pressure through death. A 15 year old wife is a lot more likely to die in childbirth than a 25 year old one, so the nature of the institution no doubt killed females off at a higher rate than later marriage ages did, thereby oddly reinforcing the nature of the economic pressure. Polygamy, where practiced, and concubinage, had the same effect by locking up resources. In some instances this then encouraged slavery and slave raiding, which was common with Scandinavian Tribes and very common among the Arabs who raided for female slaves into the Atlantic.
****In his memoir A Sort Of Saga Bill Mauldin, who had a really rough New Mexico upbringing, discusses evading the police in New Mexico for painting images of that sort on spare tires covers for cars, at a point at which he himself was a teenager. The point is that it was regarded as a criminal act. It wouldn't be now.
*****Mauldin again provides an example. During his time in Italy a Stars and Stripes friend of his related that both he and Mauldin, who was married, acquired teenage (underage) Italian girl friends while they were there. And Mauldin's behavior in regards to prostitution didn't stop once he left Italy. On a less dramatic level, what's depicted in Rossellini's film Paisà and in Johnson's film The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit is fairly accurate in this area.
^While we would never see this now, when I was a kid Playboy was one of the magazines that was in the rack at the grocery store where magazines like People are now. We never touched them, but the fact of the matter was that by the 1960s the magazine was so common that it waited there for impulse buying purchase.
