Woman, Thou Art Loosed!

Leon Kass is a professor. Addie Clark Harding professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Counter-intuitively, he's also a compelte idiot. Seriously, he has written this article that's 100% complete and absolute crap, based on nothing but his own aberrant psyche. 100,000 thanks to Kieran of Crooked Timber, a terrific lefty blog, for bringing this to my attention.

I have no idea how one becomes a high-level college professor with this sort of bullshit spewing out his mouth at all times, but then again, I have no idea how one becomes a high-level college professor. Perhaps it's really decided by an intense weekend-long Parcheesi tournament or some such thing, rather than academic discipline, intelligence and teaching ability.

His article is entitled "The End of Courtship." In it, he makes a number of bizarre assertations about "kids today." WARNING: If you are over 40, you really should refrain from writing articles bashing the social mores of "kids today." It's never going to come off as you intend - as a stern warning about the future. Instead, it makes you seem like a bran-chewing, cane-waving, youth-hating, bitter, angry, old crank. But, to steal a phrase from Dom Irrera, I don't mean that in a bad way.

Today, there are no socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony.... People still get married — though later, less frequently, more hesitantly, and, by and large, less successfully.

Hmm...That's interesting. Marriages today are less successful than in past years. What's that based on? A higher rate of divorce? But is divorce a good measure for the success of marriage? Particularly in past generations, when divorce was more stigmatized than it is today, didn't a lot of unhappy couples stay together, out of obligation or "for the children"? And don't a lot of couples who were perfectly happy for a decade or more eventually grow apart and get divorced? Is marriage even the sort of thing we should quanlify in terms of "success"? It doesn't sound very scientific to me to make those sorts of value judgements about other people's relationships.

I mean, let's take the movie Far From Heaven, exploring what must have been a semi-common circumstance in 1950's suburban America. A woman is trapped in a marriage with a gay man who isn't attracted to her, but remains together with him for the sake of their community standing and their children.

Situations like that occur even today, but probably less than they did in the 1950's, because people are more willing to divorce today, and gay men are less likely to enter into such marriages in our slightly more open modern society. So doesn't that conflict with Kass' blanket statement that marriages are, on the whole, less successful today than they once were?

And where are the numbers? Leon's a professor, yet there's no statistics of any use in his entire piece! Way to cite precedent, Teach!

Now the vast majority goes to college, but very few — women or men — go with the hope, or even the wish, of finding a marriage partner. Many do not expect to find there even a path to a career; they often require several years of post-graduate "time off" to figure out what they are going to do with themselves. Sexually active — in truth, hyperactive — they flop about from one relationship to another; to the bewildered eye of this admittedly much-too-old but still romantic observer, they manage to appear all at once casual and carefree and grim and humorless about getting along with the opposite sex. The young men, nervous predators, act as if any woman is equally good: They are given not to falling in love with one, but to scoring in bed with many.

I'm thinking that Leon never got any in college and therefore thinks that no one was getting any back when he went to college. Guess what, pal? THEY WERE.

Because how else to explain this type of thinking, from a guy who spends every day on a college campus? Guys are horny, sure, and they like to sleep with a lot of random women, if possible. I think it's been that way since, approximately, the dawn of mankind. Though it goes against the stereotype, L.K., some girls are actually horny and like to have indiscriminate sex! Did I just blow your fucking mind?

Hasn't Kass seen Carnal Knowledge? That was made over 30 years ago, and it's about this exact syndrome Kass describes as a modern problem.

You could read this entire article in an "ornery old man" voice and it would sound the same. "Kids today don't want to fall in love, they just want to go to bed. Why, in my day, brushing up against a female classmate in a hallway was considered third base, and we all wore underwear made of hair and steel wool to remind us our private parts were evil."

And "nervous predators"? What the hell is that? If you act too nervous when you're trying to hit on a girl, she'll reject you immediately, Leon. Maybe this was your problem. It's the smooth, confident cats that get all the action.

But most young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused; hoping for something more, they are not enjoying their hard-won sexual liberation as much as liberation theory says they should. Never mind wooing, today's collegians do not even make dates or other forward-looking commitments to see one another; in this, as in so many other ways, they reveal their blindness to the meaning of the passing of time. Those very few who couple off seriously and get married upon graduation as we, their parents, once did are looked upon as freaks.

Freaks? Seriously, Leo? I know several people who coupled up in college, and some more who have remained with their college sweetheart well after graduation (including my brother), and I've never once thought of this nor heard it referred to as "freakish."

And, do most young women today strike you all as sad, lonely and confused? Maybe that's how they all act around Leon. I wish that's how all women my age felt, really, cause then I would have more in common with them, and could start up casual conversations more easily. I mean, I know sad, lonely and confused, people, believe me.

Basically, Leon's entire premise is wrong. He thinks kids today are sad, dejected, and hopeless about the future, but he thinks that's because they're having too much casual sex. Um....no. I think maybe young people feel a bit hopeless today because their country is run by a bunch of twisted, sick, greedy little trolls who are killing off any chance they'd have of making a comfortable living, enjoying the Earth's beauty and serenity into their old age, and not dying in some poorly-armored Humvee in Tikrit.

Kass might have an opinion on this if he'd bothered to do any research. But, no, he's an important academic, so any random guess he makes is bound to be true, right? "It's cause all these girls are dirty, dirty sluts!," spoke the sage sociologist.

Our hearts go out not only to the children of failed- or non-marriages — to those betrayed by their parents' divorce and to those deliberately brought into the world as bastards — but also to the lonely, disappointed, cynical, misguided, or despondent people who are missing out on one of life's greatest adventures and, through it, on many of life's deepest experiences, insights, and joys.

OHHHHHHHH, I HATE THIS BULLSHIT!

Why oh why would anyone attempt to categorize someone else's life in this way? According to Leon Ass (oh, I mean, Kass) anyone who isn't married must be lonely, disappointed, cynical, misguided or despondent. Well, okay, I am all of those things. But that's not every single person! Some single people are perfectly happy not being tied to one other person for their entire lives.

I'm not saying single life is better than marriage or anything. Because that would be stupid. Because what the fuck do I know what's better for anyone? I barely know what's best for myself. Leon, on the other hand, apparently has been named the arbiter of all taste and judgement for America, and he has declared that marriage is essential, and you all better start having it right away or he's gonna get really peeved.

Here is a (partial) list of the recent changes that hamper courtship and marriage: the sexual revolution, made possible especially by effective female contraception; the ideology of feminism and the changing educational and occupational status of women; the destigmatization of bastardy, divorce, infidelity, and abortion; the general erosion of shame and awe regarding sexual matters, exemplified most vividly in the ubiquitous and voyeuristic presentation of sexual activity in movies and on television; widespread morally neutral sex education in schools; the explosive increase in the numbers of young people whose parents have been divorced (and in those born out of wedlock, who have never known their father); great increases in geographic mobility, with a resulting loosening of ties to place and extended family of origin; and, harder to describe precisely, a popular culture that celebrates youth and independence not as a transient stage en route to adulthood but as "the time of our lives," imitable at all ages, and an ethos that lacks transcendent aspirations and asks of us no devotion to family, God, or country, encouraging us simply to soak up the pleasures of the present.

Folks, we're getting a rare insight here into the mind of Leon Kass, wrongheaded asshole. Could this look be instructive when dealing with other wrongheaded assholes...gaining a look into how their minds work? Well, I intend to try.

This list speaks volumes about Leon's attitudes towards the opposite sex. He feels women should be subordinate to men, and finds any advance that gives them more power or status in a relationship harmful. He feels sex should be approached with "awe and shame," as if we were Nazis and the vagina is the Ark of the Covenant. He feels that those who have children out of wedlock, who cheat on a spouse, who get divorced or who have abortions deserve to by ostracized as social punishment. He feels that sex education should be strongly biased against sex, ordering kids not to fuck against every biological and social impulse that they have, and if that doesn't work he turns around and blames the parents. And he thinks pop culture should be mandated to devote people to family, God and country.

What a disgusting man. Can you believe relics like him still exist? OF COURSE he's upset about America in 2005. He's hoping for Saxony circa 700 A.D.

That "awe and shame" line ought to let you know where this guy's coming from. There's nothing shameful about sex, unless you're really bad at it. (Leon, I'm looking in your direction). Or possibly if you have some sort of rash or discoloration down there.

The change most immediately devastating for wooing is probably the sexual revolution. For why would a man court a woman for marriage when she may be sexually enjoyed, and regularly, without it?

Um, cause he likes her?

I know several married guys, and I don't think a single one of them waited until they were married to enjoy a little wax & tax.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry...Is Leon saying that the only reason to marry someone is to finally get the chance to have sex with them? What happens if they're not really that good at it? Or what happens when you reach that inevitable point where you start to get tired of having sex with each other? I've never been married, but it would seem to me a successful long-term relationship should be based around something other than two people who really, really want to fuck but can't until they've had a wedding ceremony.

Contrary to what the youth of the sixties believed, they were not the first to feel the power of sexual desire.

This is the one sentence in the whole essay with which I entirely agree. There is an annoying Boomer attitude about sex, as if it was so much better back then, and no one will ever have any sex even approaching the free love they enjoyed back in '68. They kind of do this with drugs, too, even though I'm willing to wager the pot and acid people do now is way more potent than whatever they were grooving to at Woodstock.

Many, perhaps even most, men in earlier times avidly sought sexual pleasure prior to and outside of marriage. But they usually distinguished, as did the culture generally, between women one fooled around with and women one married, between a woman of easy virtue and a woman of virtue simply. Only respectable women were respected; one no more wanted a loose woman for one's partner than for one's mother.

I'll say it to you again...The man who wrote this is a professor. A real one. At the University of Chicago. This is some ignorant, Victorian shit.

Leon has what we in the psychological field would call a Madonna/Whore complex. (Okay, okay, I'm not in the psychological field, but if Leon can say he's a sociologist, I should be allowed to imitate a psychology expert for a few paragraphs). He can only see women as paragons of virtue or cheap harlots, and he feels that women should be punished for violating codes of proper sexual behavior.

Why isn't it the responsibility of the man to behave properly around women, Leon? Why is it that there are two types of women - the marrying ones and the sluts - but only one type of men? What's with the antiquated double standard?

The supreme virtue of the virtuous woman was modesty, a form of sexual self-control, manifested not only in chastity but in decorous dress and manner, speech and deed, and in reticence in the display of her well- banked affections. A virtue, as it were, made for courtship, it served simultaneously as a source of attraction and a spur to manly ardor, a guard against a woman's own desires, as well as a defense against unworthy suitors. A fine woman understood that giving her body (in earlier times, even her kiss) meant giving her heart, which was too precious to be bestowed on anyone who would not prove himself worthy, at the very least by pledging himself in marriage to be her defender and lover forever.

How can a sociologist be this ignorant? I'm serious. He should immediately lose his tenure for this claptrap. It's embarrassing. All this talk of "fine women" and "virtue," as if those terms meant anything at all. And besides, the sorts of marriages to which he's referring, in ye olden times, were determined by class and social status. They were business transactions between wealthy families.

Notice that his virtuous woman was notable not just for abstaining from sex but for "decorous dress and manner and speech." Oh, how lovely, like something from an Edith Wharton novel. Drssed nicely, cultured and cultivated. You know...RICH. And then the men would go out and randomly fuck the poor, and therefore non-virtuous, whores.

What a charming worldview! Why wouldn't we want to return to a society that functioned this way, celebrating the glories of the virtuous, wealthy (and white) women and then banging some cheap slut in an alley for the cost of a farthing and a moldy biscuit?

I don't want to say that none of the things Kass describes are real-world situations. The sexual revolution of the Sixties and the sex-intensive pop culture today absolutely do have an impact on our minds and our society.

But this rant, the first in a promised (and needless) series of three, is brutally insane. The guy clearly has a great deal of hang-ups about women and sex, and to call his viewpoint as held back from the 19th Century is to be a few hundred years too kind. How many men of his generation still hold these sorts of ideas about the women around them? That they are solely responsible for being virtuous, that they become useless and disposable once they have lost their virginity, that they have no right to desire independance from a man or a monogamous, long-term, committed relationship, and if they remain single, it is a result of despondance and cynicism?