The bad fruits of the sexual revolution...

.... summarized in one paragraph by the always readable, always thought-provoking Theodore Dalrymple, from an eight-year-old essay, "All Sex, All the Time," that I recently stumbled upon:

Thanks to the sexual revolution, current confusions are manifold. In a society that forms sexual liaisons with scarcely a thought, a passing suggestive remark can result in a lawsuit; the use of explicit sexual language is de rigueur in literary circles, but medical journals fear to print the word "prostitute" and use the delicate euphemism "sex worker" instead; commentators use the word "transgressive," especially in connection with sex, as a term of automatic approbation when describing works of art, while such sex offenders as reach prison have to be protected from the murderous assaults of their fellow prisoners; anxiety about the sexual abuse of children subsists with an utter indifference to the age of consent; compulsory sex education and free contraception have proved not incompatible with the termination of a third of all pregnancies in Britain and with unprecedented numbers of teenage pregnancies; the effective elimination of the legal distinction between marriage and cohabitation is contemporary with the demand that homosexual couples be permitted to marry and enjoy the traditional legal rights of marriage; and while it has become ever more difficult for married but childless parents to adopt, homosexual couples now have the right to do so. The right of lesbians to artificially aided conception by the sperm of homosexual men has likewise been conceded on the principle of non-discrimination, and 60-year-old women naturally enough claim the same rights to in vitro fertilization. Sexual liberty has led to an increase, not to a diminution, in violence between the sexes, both by men and by women: for people rarely grant the object of their affection the freedom that they claim and practice for themselves, with a consequent rise in mistrust and jealousy—one of the great, age-old provokers of violence, as Othello attests. Our era admires sexual athleticism but condemns predatory conduct. Boundaries between the sexes have melted away, as men become women by surgical means, and women men, while demands for tolerance and understanding grow ever more shrill and imperious. The only permissible judgment in polite society is that no judgment is permissible.

In related news, this past summer an Oregon woman eagerly trying to be a man became pregnant (through artificial insemination, of course), setting off a flurry of "Pregnant Man!" headlines. It would have been darkly funny if it weren't so desperate and disturbing:

Beatie, who was born a woman named Tracy Lagondino, had reassignment surgery to appear as a man outwardly, but he never surgically altered his reproductive organs, he said in the article. He only had chest reconstruction and began taking testosterone, Beatie said, meaning he still has ovaries and a uterus.

Now Beatie, who said he was able to get pregnant using artificial insemination, is expecting a baby girl with his wife, Nancy. He said he was 22 weeks along. The baby is due July 3.

But Beatie's case, while uncommon, is not unique. Another transgender man has given birth before, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center obstetrician Dr. Lisa Masterson said on "Good Morning America" today.

"A transgender man can be pregnant because he has the same organs as a woman," she said, adding that Beatie should have no problem having a baby.

But Masterson said there are some health risks with this kind of pregnancy.

"It's really important that he doesn't take any testosterone early on in the pregnancy and later on," she said. "That can cause male-type characteristics in the female baby."

And, of course, the last thing a woman trying to be a man would want is a baby girl with male characteristics. Oregon is a truly befuddling state: men can become pregnant but they cannot pump their own gas. Back to Dalrymple:

And so now, when I meet lesbian patients who have used a syringe full of a male friend's semen to impregnate themselves, they challenge me to dare to pass judgment on them. For who am I to judge what is natural or unnatural, normal or abnormal, good or bad? Transsexuals, in my experience, exude a triumphalist moral superiority, conscious of having forced the world to accept what it previously deemed unacceptable. Perhaps, if they haven't read John Money, they have read the eerily similar opinion of Havelock Ellis, that sexual perversions (which he called "erotic symbolisms") are what most distinguish man from the animals, and are his supreme achievement: "[O]f all the manifestations of sexual psychology, . . . they are the most specifically human. More than any others they involve the potently plastic force of the imagination. They bring us the individual man, not only apart from his fellows, but in opposition, himself creating his own paradise." They constitute the supreme triumph of idealism.

Here is the gnostic reversal of good and evil in the realm of sex, the technique that Sartre and Mailer employed in the realm of criminality, transforming Jean Genet and Jack Abbott into existential heroes. Of course, it is true that human sexuality is different from that of the beasts, but surely not because men can desire intercourse with chickens while chickens cannot reciprocate. We must go to literature, not to sexologists, if we want to understand the difference.

It isn't necessary, of course, for people to read the original sources of ideas for those ideas to become part of their mental furniture. But the ideas and sensibilities of the sexual revolutionaries have now so thoroughly permeated our society that we are scarcely aware any longer of the extent to which they have done so. The Dionysian has definitively triumphed over the Apollonian. No grace, no reticence, no measure, no dignity, no secrecy, no depth, no limitation of desire is accepted. Happiness and the good life are conceived as prolonged sensual ecstasy and nothing more. When, in my work in an English slum, I observe what the sexual revolution has wrought, I think of the words commemorating architect Sir Christopher Wren in the floor of St. Paul's Cathedral: si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

Read the entire essay.

Comments

[Stohn]

Still waiting for positive results from revolution.....

[Charles E Flynn]

In addition to the 239 other articles by Dalrymple at City Journal, there is this gem at the New Criterion:

Exposing Shallowness

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/demello-dalrymple-2647

[LJ]

-Edmund Burke's lapidary warning that "it is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free"-

Theodore Dalrymple paints a very clear and un-retouched picture of the ways things are without much more than the above nod to where it will take us. That is not a criticism; it seems clear it was not his intent to project into the future.

While he points out that there is a uniqueness in our current culture insofar as sex and morality have been systematically and intentionally disconnected, I think that Edmund Burke's axiom is the future, perhaps even the present in some ways and there really is nothing new under the sun.

Could this all be reversed without the total (and painful) renovation of society? Yes. Is it likely? No. It is not possible to de-link sexual morality with the rest of our moral determinations although this is what has been attempted. A general moral breakdown is well on its way and it is by definition chaos, effecting everything including economics and politics. Something will act as a catalyst, such as another Depression, and we will be shocked at the rapidity of the collapse of the remaining morality into chaos and the equally swift filling of the vacuum created with, at minimum, an authoritarian power, and more likely a totalitarian power.

History demonstrates this sequence over and over, and we need not necessarily attribute the loss of freedom to God's specific judgment, although some folks believe we are overdue for chastisement. I think however, man's own nature creates this scenario over and over without needing God's interference to make it happen. We are our own punishment in large measure.

[Jackson]

Since Carl is a most capable of dissector of nonsense in his own own right, I can see why he's attracted to Dalrymple's work. D also ruthlessly cuts through today's fashionable, poisonous cant. For instance:

“The punk ethic, as far as I can tell from my brief researches, consists of the following: an utterly conformist non-conformity and an insensate individualism without individuality, allied to brutal and deliberate bad taste - ugliness, be thou my beauty. Commitment to non-conformity is, of course, a conformity of its own; and bad taste requires no discipline, or hardly any, to achieve. To be accused of lack of commitment to these 'values' therefore seems to me to be a compliment rather than the reverse, and not something to feel insulted by.”

Found on http://blog.skepticaldoctor.com/

P.S. Charles, that essay you cite is a great one.

[MenTaLguY]

...some folks believe we are overdue for [God's] chastisement. I think however, man's own nature creates this scenario over and over...

I am not really sure there is a distinction or conflict here. The nature of God's chastisement is such that, effectively, he causes sin to be its own punishment.