Tag Archives: Modesty

News

New study finds that feminism does not empower women in relationships

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From the Daily Caller. (H/T Kelli)

Excerpt:

“Girl power” might have brought women and girls victories in academics and sports but, as a recent book out of the University of Texas reports, an unintended consequence of women’s success has given men a leg up in the game of love.

Based on research published in their new book,“Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying,” Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, sociologists from the University of Texas at Austin, have found that with women becoming more educated and professionally successful than ever, it has become extremely difficult for them to find a committed man.

Financially secure and with less incentive to marry, more and more young women are playing the field longer and lowering the value of women in general — leaving their sisters, (usually older and hearing the tick-tock of their biological clocks) out in the cold.

If he can get to the “business” with just one or two dinners with Martha, why would he commit to 20 dates and “maybe” Mary?

Regnerus told The Daily Caller that in the sexual economy women act almost like a cartel. At one time the price of sex was extremely high, but with the demise of the shotgun wedding, the invention of “the pill” and a population of willing women, the “price” of sex has plummeted.

“People’s individual choices matter in part because they contribute to collective norms, collective possibilities,” Regnerus said. “So this is why I say there is no such thing as truly discrete sex because it becomes a data point in what you expect from women or from men in subsequent relationships.”

According to Regnerus, it is largely women who decide the going rate for sex.

“So if you think of a collective of men and a collective of women, the men come to learn what is expected of them in order to access sex, because they want it a little bit more than women …Women have to decide, more than men, how much it is worth so to speak … but she is not deciding alone,” he said.

In this model, phenomena such as the “one-night stand” act to lower the price for all and as women get older the value becomes more consequential.

“When you are say 27, 32, I assume most women wouldn’t want to give it up just for dinner,” Regnerus said. “They are at a different life phase where they want to cut the crap and say, ‘If this is going nowhere, then goodbye.’ But the problem is they are being under-bid and men are reaching further down the age range.”

The article goes on to cite Jennifer Roback Morse and Carrie Lukas, who are two of my favorite women in the whole world when it comes to this issue. I have read Dr. Morse’s “Love and Economics” and “Smart Sex” and Mrs. Lukas’ book “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism”, and I highly, highly recommend them all to men and women. Carolyn Graglia’s “Domestic Tranquility” and George Gilder’s “Men and Marriage” also pretty good, with lots of insights on how feminism changes the dynamics of marriage.

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    Commentary

    MUST-READ: Dr. Leon Kass on the end of courtship

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    This essay has 3 parts, and it was sent to me by ECM.

    Part 1 of 3.

    Excerpt:

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

    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.

    Once female modesty became a first casualty of the sexual revolution, even women eager for marriage lost their greatest power to hold and to discipline their prospective mates. For it is a woman’s refusal of sexual importunings, coupled with hints or promises of later gratification, that is generally a necessary condition of transforming a man’s lust into love. Women also lost the capacity to discover their own genuine longings and best interests. For only by holding herself in reserve does a woman gain the distance and self-command needed to discern what and whom she truly wants and to insist that the ardent suitor measure up. While there has always been sex without love, easy and early sexual satisfaction makes love and real intimacy less, not more, likely — for both men and women. Everyone’s prospects for marriage were — are — sacrificed on the altar of pleasure now.

    Part 2 of 3.

    Excerpt:

    The ubiquitous experience of divorce is also deadly for courtship and marriage. Some people try to argue, wishfully against the empirical evidence, that children of divorce will marry better than their parents because they know how important it is to choose well. But the deck is stacked against them. Not only are many of them frightened of marriage, in whose likely permanence they simply do not believe, but they are often maimed for love and intimacy. They have had no successful models to imitate; worse, their capacity for trust and love has been severely crippled by the betrayal of the primal trust all children naturally repose in their parents, to provide that durable, reliable, and absolutely trustworthy haven of permanent and unconditional love in an otherwise often unloving and undependable world. Countless students at the University of Chicago have told me and my wife that the divorce of their parents has been the most devastating and life-shaping event of their lives. They are conscious of the fact that they enter into relationships guardedly and tentatively; for good reason, they believe that they must always be looking out for number one. Accordingly, they feel little sense of devotion to another and, their own needs unmet, they are not generally eager for or partial to children. They are not good bets for promise keeping, and they haven’t enough margin for generous service. And many of the fatherless men are themselves unmanned for fatherhood, except in the purely biological sense. Even where they dream of meeting a true love, these children of divorce have a hard time finding, winning, and committing themselves to the right one.

    […]That the cause of courtship has been severely damaged by feminist ideology and attitudes goes almost without saying. Even leaving aside the radical attacks on traditional sex roles, on the worth of motherhood or the vanishing art of homemaking, and sometimes even on the whole male race, the reconception of all relations between the sexes as relations based on power is simply deadly for love. Anyone who has ever loved or been loved knows the difference between love and the will to power, no matter what the cynics say. But the cynical new theories, and the resulting push toward androgyny, surely inhibit the growth of love.

    On the one side, there is a rise in female assertiveness and efforts at empowerment, with a consequent need to deny all womanly dependence and the kind of vulnerability that calls for the protection of strong and loving men, protection such men were once — and would still be — willing to provide. On the other side, we see the enfeeblement of men, who, contrary to the dominant ideology, are not likely to become better lovers, husbands, or fathers if they too become feminists or fellow-travelers. On the contrary, many men now cynically exploit women’s demands for equal power by letting them look after themselves — pay their own way, hold their own doors, fight their own battles, travel after dark by themselves. These ever so sensitive males will defend not a woman’s honor but her right to learn the manly art of self-defense. In the present climate, those increasingly rare men who are still inclined to be gentlemen must dissemble their generosity as submissiveness….

    The problem is not woman’s desire for meaningful work. It is rather the ordering of one’s loves. Many women have managed to combine work and family; the difficulty is finally not work but careers, or, rather, careerism. Careerism, now an equal opportunity affliction, is surely no friend to love or marriage; and the careerist character of higher education is greater than ever. Women are under special pressures to prove they can be as dedicated to their work as men. Likewise, in the work place, they must do man’s work like a man, and for man’s pay and perquisites. Consequently, they are compelled to regard private life, and especially marriage, homemaking, and family, as lesser goods, to be pursued only by those lesser women who can aspire no higher than “baking cookies.” Besides, many women in such circumstances have nothing left to give, “no time to get involved.” And marriage, should it come for careerist women, is often compromised from the start, what with the difficulty of finding two worthy jobs in the same city, or commuter marriage, or the need to negotiate or get hired help for every domestic and familial task.

    Besides these greater conflicts of time and energy, the economic independence of women, however welcome on other grounds, is itself not an asset for marital stability, as both the woman and the man can more readily contemplate leaving a marriage. Indeed, a woman’s earning power can become her own worst enemy when the children are born. Many professional women who would like to stay home with their new babies nonetheless work full-time. Tragically, some cling to their economic independence because they worry that their husbands will leave them for another woman before the children are grown. What are these women looking for in prospective husbands? Do their own career preoccupations obscure their own prospective maternal wishes and needs? Indeed, what understanding of marriage informed their decision to marry in the first place?

    […]This brings me to what is probably the deepest and most intractable obstacle to courtship and marriage: a set of cultural attitudes and sensibilities that obscure and even deny the fundamental difference between youth and adulthood. Marriage, especially when seen as the institution designed to provide for the next generation, is most definitely the business of adults, by which I mean, people who are serious about life, people who aspire to go outward and forward to embrace and to assume responsibility for the future. To be sure, most college graduates do go out, find jobs, and become self-supporting (though, astonishingly, a great many do return to live at home). But, though out of the nest, they don’t have a course to fly. They do not experience their lives as a trajectory, with an inner meaning partly given by the life cycle itself. The carefreeness and independence of youth they do not see as a stage on the way to maturity, in which they then take responsibility for the world and especially, as parents, for the new lives that will replace them. The necessities of aging and mortality are out of sight; few feel the call to serve a higher goal or some transcendent purpose.

    The view of life as play has often characterized the young. But, remarkably, today this is not something regrettable, to be outgrown as soon as possible; for their narcissistic absorption in themselves and in immediate pleasures and present experiences, the young are not condemned but are even envied by many of their elders.

    Part 3 of 3.

    Kass used to be on the President’s bio-ethics council when Bush was the President and they had pro-lifers on the council.

    Commentary

    Research to help you understand the “hook-up” culture on campus

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    This study is from the Institute for American Values. It was done by Elizabeth Marquardt, a political and religious liberal.

    The PDF of study is here.

    If you download the 88 page PDF, the first few pages are an executive summary.

    I’d been exposed to this research before when I read Dr. Miriam Grossmann’s book “Unprotected”. (Boundless review here) I just got Dr. Miriam Grossmann’s new book “You’re Teaching My Child What?” and I also got Elizabeth Marquardt’s new book “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce”. I guess that Grossmann is also liberal politically and religiously. I read these kinds of books so that I can constrain my choices based on the knowledge of the damage that sin causes – I can’t choose to be bad if I convince myself about how much it costs before the choice arises. Knowledge binds the will. And I want my will to be bound by knowledge. I want to take emotions and the desire for happiness here and now right out of my decision-making.

    Anyway, there are a couple of things that really struck me about this IAV study on hooking-up.

    First, this one from p. 15:

    A notable feature of hook ups is that they almost always occur when both participants are drinking or drunk.

    A Rutgers University student observed, “You always hear people say, oh my gosh, I was so drunk, I hooked up with so and so…” Perhaps not surprisingly, many noted that being drunk helped to loosen one’s inhibitions and make it easier to hook up. A number of students noted that being drunk could later serve as your excuse for the hook up. A Yale University student said, “Some people like hook up because they’re drunk or use being drunk as an excuse to hook up.” A New York University student observed, “[Alcohol is] just part of an excuse, so that you can say, oh, well, I was drinking.”

    A Rutgers University student commented, “If you’re drinking a lot it’s easier to hook up with someone… [and] drugs, it’s kind of like a bonding thing… and then if you hook up with them and you don’t want to speak to them again, you can always blame it on the drinking or the drugs.”

    Other women observed that being drunk gives a woman license to act sexually interested in public in ways that would not be tolerated if she were sober. For instance, a University of Michigan student said, “Girls are actually allowed to be a lot more sexual when they are drunk…”

    A University of Chicago junior observed, “One of my best friends… sometimes that’s her goal when we go out. Like she wants to get drunk so I guess she doesn’t have to feel guilty about [hooking up].”

    Some reported that drinking had led them to do things they later regretted. A University of Virginia student said, “My last random hook up was last October and it was bad. I was drunk and I just regretted it very much.”

    And this one from p. 30 on the effects of hooking-up on their future commitments:

    A few women did see an unambiguous connection between present relationships and future marriage.

    […]Many women either saw little or no connection between present and future relationships, or their understanding of this connection was curiously flat. A student at New York University said, “[The present and the future are] connected because I will still have the same values and principles that I have now, but I just won’t be single anymore.”A number of women said that the present and the future are connected because whatever heartache or confusion they experience now gives them lessons for the future.

    A University of Michigan student said, “Early relationships prepare you for marriage because it’s like, oh, what type of person do I want to be with? Oh, I’ve had these bad experiences. Or, I’ve learned from this relationship that I should do this and I shouldn’t do this.”

    A sophomore at Howard University said that “I am kind of learning from a lot of the mistakes that I have made.” At a further extreme, some women saw their future marriage as the reason to experiment widely in the present. A Rutgers University student said,“I think hooking up with different people and seeing what you like and don’t like is a good idea. Because eventually you’re going to have to… marry someone and I’d just like to know that I experienced everything.”

    Although it is admirable to take risks and learn from one’s mistakes, these women would probably find it difficult to explain how having your heart broken a few or even many times in your early years — or trying to separate sex from feeling, as in hooking up — is good preparation for a trusting and happy marriage later on.

    And on p. 42, we learn what women think marriage is and isn’t for:

    For instance, in the on-campus interviews one student complained, “[With] marriage…you have to debate everything… Why do you need a piece of paper to bond a person to you? …But I know if I don’t get married I’ll probably feel like… [a] lonely old woman… If anything, I’d get married [because of] that.”

    This student went on to say that she would be satisfied to live with a man, but added that, if the man was committed to her, he would offer to marry her, and that this was the kind of commitment that she wanted. A student at the University of Washington said,“I don’t want to get married right after I graduate from college. I just think that would stunt my growth in every way that there is. I would like to be in a very steady, committed relationship with a guy.”

    And on p. 44, we learn that they like co-habitation, which increases the risk of divorce by about 50% (but they don’t know that):

    In the national survey, 58 percent of the respondents agreed that “It is a good idea to live with someone before deciding to marry him.” This belief often coexists with a strong desire to marry, because it was embraced by 49 percent of the respondents who strongly agreed that marriage was a very important goal for them.

    […]Women we interviewed on campus reflected a similar range of attitudes about cohabitation. Some women thought that cohabitation was a good way to test whether one could spend a lifetime with a potential partner. In such cases, women often cited fears of divorce as the reason for trying cohabitation first. A senior at the University of Washington said, “I kind of don’t really see marriages work ever, so I want to make sure that everything’s all right before [we get married]. I don’t see how people can get married without living together because I know like I have a best friend and I live with her and we want to kill each other, like, every few months.”

    Other women felt that, in an age of divorce, cohabitation was a preferable alternative to marriage. A student at New York University said, “You see so [many] people getting divorces… I just don’t see the necessity [of marriage].” She went on to say, “I think that I don’t have to be married to [the] person that I’m with…. You know like… Goldie Hawn [and Kurt Russell]? They’re not married.”

    But let’s get back to the drinking and the hook-up sex…

    Once a woman abandons femininity for feminism, then sex is all that she can use to get noticed by a man. Men are like hiring managers, and courting is like a job interview for the job of marriage and mothering. If a woman tries to get the job by having sex with the interviewer, he isn’t going to hire her since sex has nothing to do with the job. There are children involved, you know – he has to think of them when he makes the hiring decision. But women have been taught to think bad things about men (they’re rapists) and marriage (it’s slavery) by feminists – so they don’t even try to understand men, or to respect men, or prepare their character for being a wife and mother. They just don’t understand that hard work is needed to understand men and prepare for marriage.

    In a previous post, I explained how feminists wanted to get women to drink like men, have sex like men, and to abolish courtship and marriage. Under the influence of feminism and Hollywood celebrities, women began to choose men to have sex with without any consideration of morality, religion, marriage, etc. They thought that sex was an easy way to trick a man into committing to them without having to treat him like a real person, or to take the demands of marriage and parenting seriously. (They have been taught to value education and careers over husbands and children, you understand). This results in a cycle of binge-drinking, one-night-stands, cheating, co-habitating, breaking-up, stalking, aborting, etc., until the woman’s ability to trust and love anyone but herself is completely destroyed. And yet these college women somehow believe this is “adventurous”, that it makes them feel “sexy”, and that the experience of being selfish and seeing the worst kind of men sinning somehow prepares them for marriage and motherhood.

    Often, a young unmarried woman’s biological father was NOT selected by her mother based on his ability to make commitments and moral judgments. He was selected because he was good-looking and would not judge the mother morally, nor impose his religion on her. But those very things that young unmarried  women today seem to dislike most about men, because they fear rejection on moral and religious grounds, are exactly the things that make men good husbands and fathers. They don’t want to be judged or led spiritually, so they choose immoral, non-religious men. Then they blame the men for acting immorally and irreligiously, and pass on their man-hating and man-blaming attitudes to their daughters, who are often raised without fathers thanks to poor choices by the mother.

    Every young unmarried woman who chooses a bad man, and then has a bad experience with him is pushing away marriage with both hands. The more she destroys her ability to trust, love and care for others, the less she is able to be happy and effective in a marriage. Young unmarried women often choose bad men (men who are not interested in marriage or children) because they cannot be bothered with the demands to care or nurture a husband and children. They think those tasks detract from their selfish pursuit of education and career. Naturally, these relationships with bad men fail to result in good marriages. And that is why young unmarried women are voting to raise taxes and to empower government to replace men with social programs. They want to protect themselves from their own self-inflicted wounds – at taxpayer expense.