Notice the depravity in sexual behavior has been known for many years as having an inverse relationship to political and economic freedom. As humans we seek satisfaction, gratification, and when we cannot achieve this end materially (economic) we turn to our words and demand it (politics) and when that becomes impossible we turn to physiology (sexual gratification) as it can be done with no political or economic inputs.
cough
What do you people think?
I was about to say “Brave New World!!!”, then I clicked on the link.
But yeah, sounds definitely plausible. Instant gratification is taking over.
There is almost zero economic or political freedom in most of the middle-east. And not much in the way of sexual freedom.
Iran is clamping down on all three at the same time. I don’t see any dictators handing out sexual freedoms.
My guess is that you don’t have to condition people to sex. Like you don’t have to condition them to economics. Even though, perhaps a repressed culture, such as America, uses economics and sex in a strange and neurotic manner.
Perhaps you need to condition them to various political systems, but not sex or economics.
My OP was directed at a free society. You are right, but they have been conditioned into a religious ideology, defeating the purpose of subversive control methods.
Israel got caught in 2003, I think, hijacking a few TV stations in Gaza and broadcasting pornography 24 hours a day. It turned out that it was the Israeli military in an attempt to discourage the Palestinian youth from enrolling in the PLO…So some dictators do provide sexual “freedoms” for you. Some freedoms turn to vices and those emotional lusts, be it greed, sex, honor, will enslave the will of the person.
In City of God, Augustine says, "The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices."
EDIT: Two seconds after i closed this window this link came up http://www.writingcave.com/a-bomb-that-turns-you-homosexual/ Seeing as how it relates to this post: hahahahahha
Very good quote from Huxley. I can think of a good historical parallel: Italy under Fascism.
It is well known the Fascists were obesessed with “moral integrity”: Mussolini personally awarded prizes and medals to large families, homosexuals were exiled to penal colonies amid much fanfare and the Catholic Church was adulated and courted at every turn (for example cardinals were given the same rights and honors as members of the Royal Family). But under this facade the reality was completely different: Mussolini himself had a legion of lovers and fathered at least five illegitimate children to five different women, prostitution, already legal, boomed to unheard of proportions (it was such a big business brothel owners could afford to bring in “exotic girls” from such faraway places as China and Japan; French and German prostitutes were always in huge demand) and, far from repressing “immoral behaviors”, the secret police actually encouraged them. The reason is very simple: it gave the secret police much leverage against “respectable” members of the society. A famed lawyer with a known extra-marital relationship or a high ranking military officer who was known to be a homosexual were easily controlled: just do as we say or we’ll destroy your life. In a move typical of totalitarian societies and well represented in V for Vendetta each branch of the government took great delight in snooping what the other branches were up to. The police (Ministry of Interior) snooped on the army (Ministry of War), air force intelligence (Ministry of Air) snooped on Party big brasses and so on.
I think the success of tyrants in suppressing sexual activity is vastly exaggerated. At most, the forms of human sexual expression alter and become more perverted but the unilateral imposition of alien sexual norms is necessarily doomed to failure.
For this reason, I think that sexual mores are a poor indicator of social freedom. The real indicator is the strength of private property rights and the absence of forcible monopolies on law and security.
That said, I do think that public immodesty (particularly, of women) is an indicator of a lack of strong property rights and, hence, social freedom. The reason is simple - provocatively-clad women are more likely to be the target of sexual crimes. The fact that a woman is parading through the public square in provocative clothing either means she or her husband/boyfriend/father is very wealthy or powerful and can afford bodyguards and reprisals against anyone who gets an itch or it means that the taxpaying public is paying for this protection for her. In the West, it is the latter. Women or their sponsors do not bear the protection costs of walking the street in provocative clothing. Hence, we see an explosion in this sort of behavior.
Even worse, I believe this is playing a major role - in America, at least - in the consumer debt bubble. Men and women naturally want to show off their physical excellence in sexual competition for the best mates. This leads to a kind of “sexual arms race” within each sex - this is natural and healthy. What is not natural is for this arms race to occur out on the streets, in the public thoroughfare. The single man or woman no longer has to compete solely with his or her peer group to outshine the competition and get the best mate, he or she must compete with everyone. The poor and lower-middle class are the decided losers in this arms race. In order to keep up with the BMWs, Lexuses, Oakleys, Coach bags, Charles Davis boots, Vera Wang dresses, A&F lifestyle wear and so on, the poor and lower-middle classes exhaust their credit capacity and end up either working themselves to the bone for the remainder of their adult life to pay off a few years of partying when they were young or filing bankruptcy - which is no longer the cakewalk it used to be and usually just turns into a court-supervised version of working to the bone for the remainder of your adult life.
Of course, it is not possible for the poor to compete with the middle-class and wealthy for mates. Until recently, they never tried and people of every station in life were able to find suitable mates without going bankrupt. But, alas, we are enlightened. We’re so much smarter than our old, fuddy-duddy forebears!
Clayton -
"The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices."
There is some corruption in this. One is ‘freedom is slavery’. Two, that there is any such thing as ‘wicked’ – which for Augustine meant anything other than chastity. At least as he defined it. One must also know that Augustine was particularly driven by ‘vices’ and later by the guilt about them. Thus either/or mentality. But the life of the monk is usually slave of suppressing the vices and a retreat from the proximity to them (or having them as secret). Which is right back where he started.
It’s more like slavemasters and slaves define morality to appeal to their lot. Which winds up with slaves being told they are virtuous for certain actions of obedience and chastity. And then telling themselves the same. Though, people can be told that sex makes them free. So they don’t worry about other types of freedom. I suspect ‘sex’ is the last thing for most leftists, having given up on the idea that man is unselfish enough to handle any other freedoms.
Sorry, but in this case, Orwell had it wrong and St. Augustine had it right. Society today promotes total sexual freedom without consequence, not repression of it like in 1984. This has the effect of making the populace dependent on political leaders for their new “freedoms”, and to alleviate the responsibilities that would otherwise go with them. Welfare, taxpayer funded abortion, and even legally mandated child support, are all forms of redistribution, since they all rely on the system to keep the free stuff flowing.
When you subsidize something, you will always get more of it. In this case, the Nanny State subsidizes “wickedness” in every form. It is impossible even to believe that it is well intentioned anymore, since those running the political machinery openly display the same vices.
What I mean is not the 1984 sense, but the idea that a slave is free if he is a Christian or acts good. Nonsense.
It is the nanny state themselves which define vices as slavery. And so create the dichotomy which puts themselves in power.
You can’t stop yourself from using drugs, so we must have a drug war. Since the drugs are a ‘slavery’, not us.
Far be it for us to refuse either the vices and the slavemaster. And far be it for us to have sexual freedom and also choose wisely when to have sex.
I think this talk about subsidizing ‘wickedness’ is what I call Fundamentalist Christian Mutualism.
Mutualists say that the government subsidizes capital, ergo capitalism is statist privilege. And immoral.
Fundamentalist Christians say that the government subsidizes sex, abortion, or other behavior, ergo that behavior is wicked and statist.
Put the two together and it is Fundamentalist Christian Mutualism.
Ess, you are so off base on what this post was intened for. Your classifications are absurd.
If you cannot control your own habits, ie. through moderation and reason. You are said to be a ‘slave’ to that vice. It doesn’t need to extend into your religious hatred and hatred for the state. No one here is a fan either (I’d assume).
Tyrants will eat your political voice and economic choice and encourage you to look at pornography and to divorce and things like this.
It needs no distinguishment from church or to the state. It could be your wife getting you off too much, then withholding and watching your blood boil. It could be a drug dealer fronting drugs to encourage you to pay him more money. You are a slave to your own habits.
In your case, ego.
Clayton -
I read your posts and really enjoy them, but couldn’t follow this one. It seems you are saying that immodesty in women shows a lack of respect for property rights. Women using their bodies in the way they want without having to be scared of violation of their person in whatever way would seem a good indicator of property rights, so long as your accept self-ownership.
“Women or their sponsors do not bear the protection costs of walking the street in provocative clothing.”
The costs of wearing provocative clothing are and should be very low. There’s no reason to believe there is externalization of costs because it assumes (1) the state does a good job protecting people’s property rights in general and (2) in this case, women from harassment and rape. I don’t believe either of these are the case.
Rape and harassement are looked down upon to the extreme in general, and this is one of the reasons we see rapes occuring mostly in families where shame is strongly attached so people won’t speak about. There are still a huge amount of rapes in the streets but this doesn’t have to do with provocative dressing; people attack those who look like victims and are weak. A huge amount of women who were raped once were raped again because of the shame and scared that it brought upon them. People don’t attack the strong, generally.
I also couldn’t understand the point about attracting sexual mates on the public thoroughfare not being natural. I’m not sure where else it would occur outside of something like arranged marriages or else not letting people of different classes intermingle. I do think it’s unfortunate men run up a huge amount of debt trying to impress women, and many women do the same with their looks. This has less to do with sexual provocation than insecurity. These tendencies cannot be classified distinctly as a sexual drive because it can also be ego satisfying. The blame of people running up debt competing for financially unsustainable ventures lays on bad economic philosophy, not on low cut shirts.
How could you possibly know? Why make the hasty-generalization?
??? Why couldn’t it be subjective preferences?
Perhaps a man would rather spend $200 for an hour lapdances instead of $200 for a couple of dinners & movies and having to deal with the attitudes of a girlfriend to get same sexual satisfaction.
Sexual freedom has been decreasing like everything else. It’s only what hippies call “freedom”, ignoring traditional values, that increases.
People have poor finances because they have poor financial skills, not because they are trying to get laid.
I have to disagree with this part. The phenomenon of “shame” is a natural reaction to the humiliation, and having to relive the experience in telling it in order petition for any justice. One’s upbringing and values do not paint a target on their back-- and if they don’t speak about it, how do you conclude that this is “mostly” where it happens? Those who have no sense of “shame” of something being taken from them typically also have a warped sense of “consent” when it comes to doing the taking, which further complicates the problem. Obviously, this can go far beyond the current topic.
No, it is evidence that society has a low respect of property rights, that is, it is a symptom of a deeper problem.
The act of being scantily clad - in itself - has nothing to do with respect or lack thereof for property rights… a person should be free to be as naked as they please on their own property or on someone else’s property by that person’s permission or in any area that is not owned (commons). They don’t have a right to expectprotection, however.
See, that’s where I disagree. “Men walking wherever they want without having to be scared of violation of their person in whatever way would seem to be a good indicator of property rights…” Let’s say I get a sudden urge to just take a long, slow stroll through Van Nuys in the wee hours of the night wearing gold watches, $200 Reeboks, brand-new A&F shirt and JNCO jeans while blithely Twittering on my Blueberry and my iPod Touch hanging at my side playing my favorite tunes in my SkullCandy headphones. Isn’t there something wrong with this picture? Now, in a society with strong property rights, should I really be able to expect that I will be safe no matter what decisions I make? My choice to put myself in a risky situation - in a society with strong property rights - will have its own consequences, namely, I will end up mugged and hopefully only assaulted. It is only where inherently risky behavior is subsidized by the public police that people can engage in it with impunity.
If the costs of protection were borne solely by the individual engagin in the risky behavior, there will be less of that behavior. If I have to pay hourly overtime out-of-area roaming fees to my Private Defense Agency in order to have protection while blithely meandering the streets of Van Nuys, I’m less likely to choose to do so.
I disagree. I think that is a purely modern perception (last 60 years) created by the public subsidy of “women’s rights” in a variety of guises.
The particular point is not about how well they are protected but where they are protected and who pays for this protection.
After World War II, the State has, in fact, made “women’s rights”* a key cause in order to get women back into the workplace like they were during the war. This increases the number of paychecks that can be taxed even while the number of households did not immediately increase, thus lowering the apparent tax burden of the State. While I don’t think the government cares if women can dress how they like in public, I believe the very noticeable and abrupt shift in female clothing behavior in the last 60 years is a symptom of the wider expansion of “women’s rights” generally.
Now, I will concede that some of this shift may be a natural result of not needing outdoor clothing as much - people don’t generally walk outdoors except for pleasure. More than 60 years ago, your outer layer of clothing had to protect you from the elements. But go to the nightlcub district in your nearest city on a Friday or Saturday night and watch what happens into the wee hours of the night. You will see parades of half-naked, really hot women walking down the sidewalk from club to club with no fear of being assaulted. What you will also see is a motorcade of black-and-whites incessantly looping the blocks. The clubs are not paying to keep these women safe and the women themselves or their boyfriend/date are not paying to keep them safe… the city’s taxpayers are paying to keep them safe. I see this as a microcosm of the wider issue.
Well, you don’t set your furniture out on the sidewalk. Why not? Is it evidence that society has “low respect for property rights” because leaving a flat screen sitting on the side of the road overnight will likely result in its disappearance? You keep things inside the boundaries of your house and your property where you can use locks, alarms or even arms to keep out intruders and burglars. Similarly, I think that if you look back in history, you find that women kept things pretty much covered up unless they were in their own home or in another private setting (a restaurant, a dance invitation, etc.) It’s the same reason you put your wallet in the glove compartment rather than leaving it on the seat if you must leave it in your vehicle. Out of sight, out of mind.
So people just started being born insecure in the last 50, 60 years and for all of human history our ancestors were much more psychologically healthy? I doubt this.
Well, I don’t know and wouldn’t suggest that sexual competition is the reason for consumer debt expansion. But it is definitely a contributing factor.
Clayton -
*I put “women’s rights” in quotes because I don’t believe the government is actually making women’s rights any stronger, it is simply using the rhetorical narrative of abusive, exploitative men as a lever to reduce the rights of men and the public generally.
@AV: Re-reading my post, it comes off a bit standoff-ish… it’s not meant to be, so just keep that in mind.
Muffinburg-
It absolutely could be subjective preference. I am sure that people do like to spend money on women because they like to make the woman their with happy; or like to spend money on whores to make themselves happy. What I was saying is that the ability of people to run up a huge amount of debt when they don’t have good credit and don’t have a productive plans for their money is due to economic policy. If someone were only allowed to get money for viable ventures or if had good credit history, then there would be less people going into debt doing things like buying bling to impress themselves or the ladies.
But I do still believe that men who spend a huge amount of money attracting mates feel like they’re lacking. I am extrapolating from experiences I and other people I know have had; there is no steadfast evidence. You can say it’s always been the case that men had to waste some resources to attract women in order to show their fitness and what have you, but there is a reasonable way to do this without putting yourself in debt.
“If you cannot control your own habits, ie. through moderation and reason. You are said to be a ‘slave’ to that vice.”
Yes, that is very well true. And I am not mentioning anything against religion.
But a Christian or Muslim or atheist or whoever will not see that as sufficient to being free, even though I assume thye would consider it necessary. That’s why it is nonsense. Most people in prison cannot do many immoral things, but that doesn’t make them moral or free.
It’s also a bit silly by saying one sense of slavery is good, while vice slavery is bad. It seems to be a preferential argument. And that is why I mention the state. The state says there is Type 1 slavery and Type 2 slavery. And ‘our slavery is better, to save you from the other slavery’. Even religion might say that about secular society. “Don’t be a slave to TV, go to church and be entertained instead by a priest.”
A prison might keep you away from vice or murder or whatever, but it won’t make you moral or free. And I suppose many people at churches still struggle with vices, that is why they are in the church. To stop themselves from being at a bar or doing drugs. Or they think that guilt or fear of hell will beat this whole conflict within themselves. It is still type 1/type 2. So they are still not free from it. This cannot be solved merely by avoidance, because the mere avoidance is also a struggle. A law will not create the freedom either, because there is punishment by the law and slavery to that law. Only when someone is totally free from conditioning and dependency and the various types of forces, then can they be serious about freedom. But when there is type 1/type 2… people will skip from one form to the next and to the next and so on.
I’m not saying that anyone here supports the state. But I am saying there is something dangerous within that argument. There is something to it psychologically, true. But there is something to it that is also dangerous.
“The phenomenon of “shame” is a natural reaction to the humiliation, and having to relive the experience in telling it in order petition for any justice.”
I think he is speaking about the phenomenon of ‘shaming’, which is the cause of shame. Shame is merely a conditioning and expectation of a future result. Which is the shaming process. What you are describing is ‘embarrassment’, which is also caused by an expectation of lack of empathy. But is a different emotion. Since it is not mistaking someone else’s responsibility (being the man who rapes) for one’s own.
Shaming is popular in many oriental and other cultures. For instance, to kill the woman who is raped. Leviticus says that we should put the woman to death. Islam is adament about killing women who are raped, since they cause lust in the hearts. Other cultures abandon their own children. Probably some of the primitive tribes sow their vagina shut or bury them alive. You might have to seppuku yourself. Stuff like that.