Posted on 08/10/2012 6:52:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
Sex is always interesting, but mix it with politics in a presidential campaign and it becomes downright sensational. First Amendment guarantees of free speech get lost in the protest when gay couples meet to make out at Chick-fil-A. Instead of ordering the spicy chicken sandwich, these men and men and women and women spice up their relationship with rage against Dan Cathy, the born-again president of Chick-fil-A, for saying he supports "the biblical definition of the family unit."
The focus on the controversy is silly, but in our media-saturated world, it's the way things play out, with lots of loud posturing and little reflection. So much public debate and discussion is joined over gay political matters that conflicts and concerns over cultural changes in heterosexual relationships are left to the popular culture to pursue, which happens with a passion, for better and for worse.
I frequently have been struck by the sad state of affairs in (and have often written about) young women's coming of age as depicted in "Girls," the new HBO series in which romance is dramatized in the dreariest and crudest ways. This is surely the low point of sexual liberation, circa 2012. Glib remarks such as Gloria Steinem's bitter gibe that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" have morphed into satirical drawings of schools of female fish pedaling unicycles (probably in pursuit of male fish).
The knight in shining armor is long gone as a fairy tale. It was always fantasy, even though it captures a young girl's innocent desire to be cared for when she leaves the home of her parents. The story never followed the couple after the wedding, living happily ever after, because everybody soon learns that life is more complicated than that. Wish fulfillment stories with happy endings are fun to read, even to tell, but rarely forged from reality. They're the stuff that dreams are made of. Pleasant dreams.
Today our cultural stories offer a different tale. The latest one is based on direct observation, but it goes back to classical myth, captured wittily in a New Yorker cartoon of two young sophisticates sitting on the banks of a river in ancient Greece. As the boy stares at his reflection in the water, the girl asks pathetically, "Tell me, Narcissus, is there someone else?"
The sad state of contemporary male-female relationships is best told with a sense of humor, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily funny. The latest entrant in the popular culture to render this idea humorously is the movie "Ruby Sparks," which creates a contemporary myth of Narcissus in which the male star is a boy/man, the kind who seems so much with us these days. Calvin Weir-Fields, played convincingly by Paul Dano, is a novelist who loves himself to the point that he has to create a woman out of his imagination before he can fall in love. Fortunately, he's a novelist trying to shape a work of fiction, but the woman he creates on an old-fashioned Olympia electric typewriter becomes so real that he can relate to her only when he likes the way she acts toward him -- so he designs her behavior as a postmodern Pygmalion. When he loses creative control, he loses her, and the relationship is over.
While gays concentrate on seeking monogamous relationships and, in the ouch words of Kinky Friedman, exercising "a right to be as miserable as the rest of us," young heterosexual men such as Calvin seem to be avoiding that specific trap. As a result, many women in their 40s are sad and single without children or with fatherless children. In the 1970s, 1 in 10 women passed childbearing years without having a child. Today it's 1 in 5. More than half of women younger than 30 have what we used to call an "illegitimate" child. The New York Times calls it "the new normal."
Although "Ruby Sparks" looks superficially like an old-fashioned romantic comedy with the witty dialogue of a '30s movie starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, it quickly darkens to reflect an edgy sensibility. A young woman goes up against an educated and talented young man who has been psychologically wounded by a woman's assertiveness. You could say it's our Everyman, a morality tale.
"Ruby Sparks" gives us a funny narrative that offers shape, form and poignancy to the new heterosexual male in a story that lacks the vulgarity and glibness typical of Hollywood's movies and sitcoms about "relationships." Calvin, who was challenged by a real woman, prefers to imagine her literally instead of engaging in a living, breathing relationship. Underneath this fictional story is a homegrown truth: Men have become the second sex, and this is the masculine mystique. Betty Friedan might cry.
Sad but true: men today care less about the future of their family and more about drinking, video games, and getting laid.
My mother tells the story very fondly of my birth and how my grandfather, a very traditional Sicilian Catholic man, absolutely fawned over her like she’d laid a golden egg. To him, it meant the family name would carry on for another generation, and since he’d only had one son, my father, having a progenitor was as important to him as just having a grandchild.
Today, as a newlywed, I too hope to bring a boy into the world to carry on my name and my cultural and spiritual upbringing, but I married a woman 6 years my senior and very much hear her biological clock ticking louder than she. Will I have a child at all? Only time and the Lord will surely know, but it speaks to a larger cultural issue, as I see it.
Women have been pushed out of traditionally-held positions of homemaker and into the cutthroat world of business wherein many do very well but others find themselves in a sort of malaise forced upon them by a culture they were born into (feminism). My wife was born in the early 70s and was raised by a very strong woman as breadwinner. She was also an only child, so her predilections have always been toward a more self-serving role than, say, me, who had a younger brother growing up.
I very much pine for the days of a more traditional family being the norm again. Not specifically women being “barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen,” but more traditional as in actually having a mother and a father.
The militant feminists, the militant homosexuals, and a culture of masculine exclusion are destroying what it means to be a man, what it means to have a family, and what it means to promote generational foundations and exigency. It’s now more popular to sort of wade through young life, find someone you like having sex with, marry, have a kid, find out the fairy tale is over, throw up your hands in frustration that the Hollywood idea of marriage is actually a farce, divorce, and go back to living a life of sloth and debauchery.
Marriage is hard. I’m married just over a month and can already say that it’s going to be a tough row to hoe, but that challenge is enough for me to face life and tackle it together, with my partner, my wife.
There is not much in the modern young woman to recommend her as a prospective wife and mother. Many want to “marry up,” and the sad fact is that the number of wealthy young men is rapidly decreasing in this horrible economy. Young men are living with their parents, rather than with girl friends.
“The new heterosexual male”
Maybe it’s just me, but younger men seem to actually LOOK less masculine these days. Many of them look so feminine they could almost pass for girls. I commented on this to my husband, and he agreed.
I don’t know if it’s hormones in the food, or what....but if you look at old photos of young men, they didn’t have this androgynous, nearly feminine appearance.
Big Sis ... treated male staffers like lapdogs
It’s become commonplace to look at pictures of the WWII generation when they were in their early twenties and say, “They look like they’re already thirty!”
Young people in those days ate less, grew up fast & took on responsibilities early in life. It showed.
Of course, it’s all men’s fault that women are single and childless. Couldn’t have anything to do with the choices women made and the ideology that they adopted. The article’s a load of misandrist tripe.
I dont know if its hormones in the food, or what....but if you look at old photos of young men, they didnt have this androgynous, nearly feminine appearance.
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Oral Contraceptives In Your Water Supply
by Ray Lovegrove
Every day all over the world, millions of women take the oral contraceptive pill. The substances in the pill may be altered a little by the body but for the main part, pass through the bloodstream and eventually into the urine. Urine ends up in water supplies and eventually back in the drinking water - so what has happened to those hormones during this process? Well, much of the hormonal material is still present but very diluted - so diluted in fact, that it is hard to say what effects it is having. Hormone replacement therapy employs similar hormones and these also get into the water supply. This issue is beginning to cause concern for a number of reasons.
http://www.insiderreports.com/storypage.asp?StoryID=20009617
As early as 2002, the UK Environment Agency warned that fish stocks in British rivers were showing signs of gender ambiguity as a result of high levels of estrogen in the water. A survey of 1,500 fish at 50 river sites found more than a third of males also displayed female characteristics.
“Research by Dr Jayne Brian and Professor John Sumpter at Brunel University’s Institute for the Environment, showed estrogenic chemicals are affecting the reproduction and gender of aquatic life and warned of the affect on the reproductive ability of humans. “
Getting laid? These people are vicious, we are not voting for getting laid, we are voting for vicious rape. These people like to hurt, they are sado masochist “psychos”. THey have these “nice kiss in” (which in reality is going blind and scary and creepy), and they make these nice little poems and cloth lines, and, then, passive aggressively make women feel fat and everybody else inadequate and what not.
And puppy dogs come back for more. It does not stop, the bait is out there, and they will whore themselves with pain and humiliation if they get a piece of the punitive legislation, a piece of the tax pie that hurts people, a piece of the action on hurting, even if it means associating with muslims and what not.
This trashy Marxist political poetry is also translated into Civil Rights and political correctness for the same criminal and perverted profile of Karl Marx. In movies people are seeing “comedies” with gays punching babies, and the evil is spreading fast and wide.
We are getting a taste or outright living in the valley of the evil and gehonim. The Germans were in it with Hitler, same principles under communist “I love the whole world, so I can hurt anyone” BS poetry of hypocrisy, and other antihypocratic people.
THe narcissistic male is imbued with himself, never feels wrong or ashamed, he is a piece of dangerous passive aggressive excrement, with many different sorts of closets and issues.
These people do not get out of the closet, they rush into the inferno of denial and they only care about saving their own necks except when it is to satisfy the evilness around.
SExual appeasing is a direct Kinsey model of revolution, it has been viciously used for unscrupulous sales and exibitions, and it promotes its appeasement, pimping and terrorist appeasing.
911 is just the beginning under “these religions of peace, of “make love” looks instead of be love for real. They are modern day pharisees who pray the nicest in the churches and hurt viciously and extort in private or subliminally.
Like I said before, they are angry we did not side with Hitler, hence they are throwing their patriotic uniforms and have decided to hurt america and its good inheritence they mock.
The muslims are perfect for them, ironically, because they know these types like to be treated like garbage, and it works with Obama who bows to them the more they call him a “house negro” or other deragotories.
It's probably due to about 1,000 Calories per day too much. It makes us a couple of inches taller than our immediate ancestors, true. But it also makes us 40-50 lbs heavier, and it ain't all muscle.
Modern boys probably have a layer of subcutaneous fat that didn't used to be there, no hard edges. Yesterday's 5'9" 150lbs. is now 6', 210. and in all too many younger fellows,a big-butted 220-230! (Not counting the weight of the tattoos.)
Civil War: Average Union Recruit: 5'8" 140lbs!
BTW, extra fat means earlier puberty!
Exactly
Men are the way they are because that’s the way women want them. This wonderful mythical man from days of yore would quickly be labeled “A nice guy” by today’s woman and be ignored or taken for everything he has in divorce court.
But I guess that’s why God created Asian women and cats
Yes. Girls today are heavier, and are going through puberty at a younger age.
That’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve been wondering about. It makes sense, really.
I have an old photo of my father, along with the rest of a big group of young men he went overseas with, standing on the town courthouse steps. It was about 1943, and my dad was 19. Not a single one of those guys could be mistaken for Justin Bieber or the dude who played the vampire in those “Twilight” movies.
Not a single one of those guys could be mistaken for Justin Bieber or the dude who played the vampire in those Twilight movies.
I wonder how the droves of androgynous Twilight Bieberish fagboys are effecting my modern Marine Corps quality of recruits?
I think it our soft lifestyles that makes us age slower and stay looking younger longer.
On Nick at night they were playing All In The Family - the one where Edith goes through menopause. It struck me that Archie & Edith were a couple in their 40s. If you saw two people who looked like them today you would swear they were in their upper 50s if not 60s.
Same with Meathead & Gloria, even though they were a couple in their early 20s, by today’s standards they look in their mid 30s.
Watch the Newlywed or Dating game from back then, it’s the same, everyone looks about 10-15 years older than their age compared with people today.
Maybe it’s the sun also, if the “the sun is more active thus blocking more cosmic rays thus the real cause of global warming” people are right, it could mean people look like they are aging slower because of fewer cosmic rays are hitting them and it takes longer for aging skin damage to show.
Chick-fil-A Introduces the Next Hot New Trend in Marketing
http://www.forbes.com/sites/philjohnson/2012/08/10/chick-fil-a-introduces-the-next-new-trend/
I'd advise any young woman to read it if she can keep from laughing and crying. It's written by a well-meaning, I suppose, young man who is so comically in the throes of his own narcissism that he can't see the heartless immorality of what he's actually up to. Please, bring me back some Dobie Gillis.
At least he writes one article that recommends giving up porn. I think that's at the heart of most of this narcissism and emotional emptiness--and is probably what "Ruby Sparks" is REALLY about...the images that men fetishize at the expense of a real sexuality.
Except every now and then they remembered that their lives were sort of empty without a man.
I remember at one departmental meeting when one of the women asked (in front of the men in the department of course), "where have all the good men gone?"
I smiled sweetly back at the speaker and replied, "Why Amy, that's an easy one - The good men are already married to the good women."
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