The importance of mentors

Definition of a mentor:

Someone more mature who takes you seriously; who is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.

A good mentor, in whatever field, respects your contribution and appreciates what you bring to the table — he is easy to please. But he also has high expectations of you. He wants you to be and do better than you are — he is hard to satisfy because he calls you to greater things.

This combination is powerful. This is what parents are for. Parenthood should be the ultimate mentor relationship. First keep the child alive, but after that, more important than anything else is to be a mentor. To call your child, every day and always, to greater maturity — to call a girl to be a woman, a boy to be a man.

In older generations it may be that parents were prone to fail at the first half, they were not easy to please — in times and places when children are not taken seriously, or when they are delegated to be raised by someone else. But today, certainly in my own experience of the world, parents usually fail at the second half. They are not hard to satisfy, because they are not willing to expect anything at all. What they really want from their children is not maturity, or growth, but good feelings — and having expectations, which the children will fail consistently to meet (because they are learning) and which occasion disappointment, frustration, perhaps conflict — it just gets in the way. But if we want to be real parents, and not just child-minders, we should acknowledge our failures, repent, and try to do better. Always remember you are raising adults, not children.

Mentorship is also what teachers ought to be for, and do. Teach specific skills, yes, but also be mentors. One virtue of the school system is to expose you to many potential mentors, more than a tutorial or apprenticeship. But it guarantees that these will not bear too much fruit: by jamming each child together with twenty others so that teachers become dominated by crowd-control, and have to apply arbitrary and capricious authority to manage it (though now lack of authority seems the greater problem); and by giving students only a few hours or minutes of time with each teacher each day, and then shuffling them along next year to a new teacher...

Nowadays, we practically have to reach the level of grad student with a supervisor to have the chance for an extended, years-long, intensive mentor-pupil relationship.

Parents need to give this serious thought. In educating our children, our priority should be to set up situations in which these mentor relationships can arise and flourish. This means intensive one-on-one time, with an adult of good character, over several years if possible — and the adult should take the child seriously, and at the same time expect a lot of him. This is good for learning skills but also for building character, maturity, wholeness, and happiness.

The example of C.S. Lewis is instructive: read his autobiography Surprised by Joy, and listen to how he talks about ‘Smewgy’ (ch. 7), and observe what an exemplary mentor this teacher was:

Smewgy was ‘beyond expectation, beyond hope’. He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude. Nor had I ever met before perfect courtesy in a teacher. It had nothing to do with softness; Smewgy could be very severe, but it was the severity of a judge, weighty and measured, without taunting. He made us a unity by his good manners. He always addressed us as ‘gentlemen’ and the possibility of behaving otherwise seemed thus to be ruled out from the beginning. On a hot day, when he had given us permission to remove our coats, he asked our permission before removing his gown. His manner was perfect: no familiarity, no hostility, no threadbare humour; mutual respect; decorum.

Thus, even had he taught us nothing else, to be in Smewgy’s form was to be in a measure ennobled.

But of course, Lewis had a mentor of even greater moment, W.T. Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great Knock’ (ch. 9), his tutor from 1914–17, the last years of school before he went to the trenches and then up to Oxford.

If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk. The idea that human beings should exercise their vocal organs for any purpose except that of communicating or discovering truth was to him preposterous. The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.

Some boys would not have liked it; to me it was red beef and strong beer. Here was talk that was really about something. Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said. No doubt I snorted and bridled a little at some of my tossings; but, taking it all in all, I loved the treatment. After being knocked down sufficiently often I began to know a few guards and blows, and to put on intellectual muscle. In the end, unless I flatter myself, I became a not contemptible sparring partner. It was a great day when the man who had so long been engaged in exposing my vagueness at last cautioned me against the dangers of excessive subtlety.

I think Lewis does not flatter himself: the respect was mutual. One can see the other side of the friendship in Kirkpatrick’s letter to Lewis’s father, upon his receiving a scholarship to Oxford:

What could I have done with Clive if he had not been gifted with literary taste and the moral virtue of perseverance? Those moral qualities which though less obvious and striking than the intellectual, are equally necessary for the accomplishment of any great object in life — I mean fixity of purpose, determination of character, persevering energy. These are the qualities that carried him through. I did not create them, and if they had not been there, I could not have accomplished anything.

As a dialectician, an intellectual disputant, I shall miss him, and he will have no successor. Clive can hold his own in any discussion, and the higher the range of the conversation, the more he feels himself at home.

It’s plain that the potential for great achievement, literary and intellectual, was present in C.S. Lewis from the beginning. But how was that potential turned actual? Through Lewis’s mentors, in the great years when he was taught by Smewgy and Kirkpatrick and grew from a boy into a man — confident, persevering, ‘at home’ in the highest level of conversation.

If you examine your own life I think you will find that, like Lewis, your periods of greatest growth in maturity and happiness are associated somehow with a mentor. Certainly I find this in my own life. Mentors are crucial. 

A difficulty with the scholastic definition of love

Father Barron — soon to be His Grace Bishop Barron, praise God — has often quoted what he calls the scholastic definition of love:

Love is to will the good of the other as other.

This is a good definition. It corrects the characteristic faults of our own time, when we are apt to think of ‘love’ as approval, or kindness, or affectionate emotion, or even physical proximity — as in the idea that ‘unconditional love’ is incompatible with excluding a person from one’s life or from a social circle.

To will the good of the other means not simply to avoid hurting the other’s feelings, but to desire him to be good, and to truly flourish. It often happens that willing the good becomes incompatible with preserving the other’s feelings or serenity. If your sister is in love with a bad man, if your son is binge drinking, if your friend is wallowing in self-pity, your love for them may require you to injure their feelings in order to upset their complacency with a bad state of life. In a word, you must tell them that the life they are living is not good for them.

The scholastic definition is an especially apt corrective as applied to marriage. It tells us, rightly, that the promise to ‘love’ one’s spouse is not a promise of perpetual amorous feelings — obviously impossible to promise — but a promise precisely to will the good of your spouse and to carry it out. This is the demanding school of marriage, in which we constantly fail to live up to the responsibility we have accepted as our own selfishness asserts itself, but each day we pick ourselves up and try again. It is a great grace when we are emotionally ‘in love’ with our spouse, and are fortified by a mighty affection and attachment. But this is not the essence of marriage.

All this is to the good. There is a difficulty I want to raise. The scholastic definition lacks a dimension which seems to me essential to love in all the forms we encounter it. That is the desire to be with the other.

C.S. Lewis broke love down into four kinds: this is present in all of them. A man loves his dog, and wants to be with it; a father loves his son, and wants to be with him; a friend loves his friend, and wants to be with him; a husband loves his wife, and wants to be with her; God loves us, and wants to be with us.

True, in life this desire to be with the other is frequently in conflict with willing their good. But this is because we are corporeal. As physical bodies, being with one person or group of people necessarily excludes all kinds of things and activities — and most importantly, excludes many other people. And the usual case when we have to mortify our desire to be with a loved one, doesn’t it arise precisely because their good requires being with someone else? A different friend, a relative, a spouse, God.

In fact, our lives consist in making choices about whom to be with, and our loves are more intense and pervasive in willing the good of the other precisely in proportion as we live more intensely with them.

Above all with God. Here we see the consummation, where both these elements are fused completely. Our highest good, is to be with God. In God, to will the good of the other and to desire being with the other, are the same thing. Here the symbol of marriage is illuminating: in the best marital love, the good of the spouses is to live with each other. The suitor who desires his beloved, not only desires her good but desires her, to be his own, and to be with her always, loves her with a love like God’s own for us.

This is the fault in the scholastic definition. It is not enough to say that the desire to be with the other is subordinate to willing their good — yes it is true as a piece of practical advice, but it is not true in the grand picture — because in God the two are one.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.

As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love.

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Proverbs 3:11–12

My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord; neither be weary of his correction:

For whom the Lord loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth.

Disney’s Pinocchio still holds up as a cautionary tale

I recently watched Disney’s Pinocchio with my daughter, seeing it for the first time since I was a small boy. It confirmed my memory, and my wife’s complaint, that it is a creepy film. There is something about early animation: Dumbo is creepy in a similar way. But with Pinocchio there is lots more than just the look of the picture.

Pinocchio is a cautionary tale for children. This is so obvious it is a platitude. Everyone knows how it discourages smoking and drinking. Typically bourgeois American, easily dismissed. But what struck me watching it again was how sharp and on point the film is in arming a child against the dangers that threaten childhood. In fact, Pinocchio holds up well as a cautionary tale, and above all against one thing: human trafficking.

It is startling how well the film knows what it is about. All the elements are there.

We have two principal forms of human trafficking. The first is sexual exploitation: sexual abuse, prostitution, pornography. We think of this as a danger for girls — and a real danger it is, even in North American suburbs* — but of course boys are targets as well.

This whole world of exploitation is present in Pinocchio as Stromboli’s theatre, the stage/puppet show where Pinocchio is first enslaved. How does he get there? He is lured by Honest John the Fox, an overly-beneficent yet unsavoury stranger. Honest John tempts Pinocchio with all the enchantments of the stage and screen — fame, wealth, pleasure. Listen to his song:

Hi-diddle-dee-dee, an actor’s life for me

A high silk hat and a silver cane, a watch of gold with a diamond chain

Hi-diddle-dee-day, an actor’s life is gay

It’s great to be a celebrity, an actor’s life for me!

But fame above all, “your name in lights, lights six feet high!”

Now it seems to me as an outside observer that this is a pretty accurate presentation of a sinister element in the whole world of acting and modelling. Boys and girls with attractive looks (“that physique!” says Honest John) are lured in at a young age and then exploited for profit by their older masters, to be at some point spat out and left in the gutter. And now the pornography industry has its tentacles out there. For years (I don’t see them so much anymore), there were crudely-printed bills posted all over downtown Toronto soliciting ‘young hot’ male models for ‘solo’ pornography films. Plainly, lures to entrap young men.

The other form of human trafficking is enslavement for forced labour. In Pinocchio this is the Coachman, who takes young boys to Pleasure Island to be turned into donkeys (‘jackasses’) and then worked in the salt mines.

Here the lure is not an appeal to vanity and the desire for fame, but alcohol, drugs, and forbidden pleasures. Again it is on point — drugs and alcohol are frequently used to draw people in or entrap them in slavery. And here we have a warning against associating with bad seeds, in the form of the boy Lampwick. Lampwick is a characteristic bad young hood: he is self-important and boastful; he presents himself as your friend while revealing little actual affection for you; he delights in fighting and destruction; he talks in a show-offy slang (“oh boy, a scrap!”). Above all, he says you’re a sucker if you listen to your parents or your conscience — “you mean to tell me you take orders from a grasshopper?!”

The whole Pleasure Island sequence of the film can stand with Goodfellas as a picture of the attraction for men of organized crime and thuggery. It holds out the offer of a world where you are your own master: the rules don’t apply to you. You’re a wise-guy, everyone else is a sucker. But like in Goodfellas, a fall comes sooner or later. No one who saw Pinocchio as a child can forget the horror when Lampwick is transformed into a donkey.

These are portraits of specific dangers. But there are three good lessons for children that crop up again and again in the film.

Obedience to your father. All the dangers Pinocchio falls into involve separation from his father; all of them could have been avoided by obedience. The first thing Honest John does is turn Pinocchio away from school, where Gepetto had told Pinocchio to go. (I can’t forbear from pointing out how this unwittingly reveals that sending kids to school is itself an occasion of danger.) Stromboli cackles when Pinocchio tries to go home at night, and locks him in a birdcage. The first concern of all the villains is to keep Pinocchio separated from his father.

I am not sure the filmmakers intended it this way, but Jiminy Cricket’s scruple about snitching plays into this. When Honest John first leads Pinocchio off, Jiminy asks himself what to do and says “I’ll go tell Gepetto!” but reconsiders: “no, that would be snitching. I’ll go after him myself!” Wrong. If Jiminy had told Gepetto right away, disaster might have been averted. There is wisdom here: follow what your father tells you, don’t keep things from him, tell him before you go somewhere.

Listen to your conscience and intuition about a person. It was rather ingenious making Jiminy Cricket into a separate character so that we can see him debate with Pinocchio and then the consequences of being ignored. Jiminy spots Honest John as a crook right away, he picks out Lampwick as a bad seed. Throughout the film, his good advice could’ve saved Pinocchio if only he had listened.

Tell the truth. Everyone knows this one. If you get into danger, be honest about it. Don’t lie. Don’t lie out of fear, or shame, or injured pride. Don’t keep secrets, especially from your parents. 

The great thing about these lessons is that they’re not just rules, they are protective. The film shows, pretty accurately I think, how disregarding them can get one in trouble.

A child who absorbed all this would have a pretty comprehensive protection!

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* ‘The Evils of Human Trafficking’ Pamela Alderman and Elise Hilton, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_LnQyhm5jw

George Grant reflecting on C.S. Lewis

When I returned to Oxford in 1945 I had decided to study theology rather than law, which had been my pre-war study; and I was very disappointed by the lectures on biblical scholarship of the narrowest kind on the one side & very vulgar positivist philosophy (A.J. Ayer, etc.) on the other. Somebody told me that there was a meeting in the hall of my college & I went. It was the first Socratic meeting of the year so C.S.L. was speaking. What sense! What clarity! What importance! It was just what I had come back to Oxford to hear. My breath was taken away with gladness. From then on the Socratic club was a centre for me. My wife & I courted at it as she attended and, as a student of English, had gone to Lewis before the war & attended his English lectures. It was so good to see somebody whom one might have seen behind the counter of an old fashioned butcher’s shop, speaking in his wonderful, articulate way, and without the least bit of pretension or pride. Later in life, I found I had disagreements with some of his thought, particularly as it was not very interested in the philosophical questions I became interested in. But I think I was wrong in that, because there is no point in arguing with fellow Xians who express Xianity beautifully, because the common loyalty to X is the main thing & everything else is secondary. It is important that many of us should see our vocation as trying to express Xianity with clarity, but I am sure not much good is done by arguments within that common loyalty. And, of course, one of C.S.L.’s greatnesses was to avoid polemic in this way while using it when some issue of principle was at stake.

George Grant: Selected Letters (1996) no. 282

The virtue of George Grant is he is in the lineage of Lewis but distinctly and thoughtfully Canadian. If you want to understand Canada better I highly recommend his Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1963) or the essays in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969). He really is brilliant.

C.S. Lewis on the promiscuous society

A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women. Women, whatever a few male songs and satires may say to the contrary, are more naturally monogamous than men; it is a biological necessity. Where promiscuity prevails, they will therefore always be more often the victims than the culprits. Also, domestic happiness is more necessary to them than to us. And the quality by which they most easily hold a man, their beauty, decreases every year after they have come to maturity, but this does not happen to those qualities of personality — women don’t really care twopence about our looks — by which we hold women. Thus in the ruthless war of promiscuity women are at a double disadvantage. They play for higher stakes and are also more likely to lose. I have no sympathy with moralists who frown at the increasing crudity of female provocativeness. These signs of desperate competition fill me with pity.

C.S. Lewis, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (1970).

Jennifer Lawrence, Jian Ghomeshi, and Harley Quinn: how the feminist media enables violence against women

It’s been almost a year since Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photos were leaked publicly; and similarly almost a year since Jian Ghomeshi was fired from the CBC over allegations of sexual assault. These events are two sides of the same coin. Both of these stories, and the way they unfolded in the media (according to my limited exposure), had a big impact on me. I talked and wrote about them a lot privately at the time, and have been brooding over them ever since.

Lately, living in Toronto, this has been stirred up again because we have been bombarded by hype about a new movie coming out next year: Suicide Squad, a superhero movie with a host of Batman villains as protagonists, including the Joker and his abused girlfriend, Harley Quinn.

I’ll get to Harley Quinn at the end. But let’s start at the beginning.

Jennifer Lawrence: “either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he’s going to look at you.”

When the photos of Jennifer Lawrence (which she apparently had taken herself) were stolen and then distributed online, she did an interview with Vanity Fair magazine and made a quite amazing, indeed shocking, statement. Explaining where the photos came from she said, “I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he’s going to look at you.”

I find this stunning! Jennifer Lawrence is reputed to be the sexiest woman in the world. Twenty-three, beautiful, famous, rich — an incredibly desirable, even powerful woman — and yet she feels, apparently, that she cannot expect her boyfriend not to look at porn while they are apart, and therefore she has been successfully blackmailed into sending him pornography of herself. She didn’t say she did it for fun — she said she did it in order to keep him from looking at other women naked in sexual positions. And she describes this as a ‘loving, healthy, great relationship.’

Does this make sense? This is practically the most desirable woman in the world, and she cannot expect her boyfriend to be faithful enough to her not to look at other women having sex. Why is the most desirable woman in the world acting so desperate?

What’s the situation here? What has happened?! This is a big deal!

What we are seeing here, and I see it all the time with people I know, is that young women do not think they can expect or demand anything from their boyfriends or that they have any weight to throw around in the relationship. The man has all the leverage. They are stuck in an attitude of ‘I have to do this or else he’ll leave me/cheat on me’, of ‘I have to do this to keep his love.’ It may not be conscious but the actions reveal it.

This is above all in relation to sex and sexual fidelity. Do young women really want to have sex with men they barely know? Do they want to have sex right away at the beginning of a relationship? To sleep with multiple men before getting married? To get an abortion if they get pregnant — rather than have the father take responsibility to raise the baby with them? To tolerate boyfriends or husbands going to strip clubs (I have heard wives complain about this without actually condemning)? To tolerate their boyfriends looking at porn, and masturbating over other women? To make their own homemade porn in the hope (realistically pretty unlikely) that it will keep their boyfriends faithful?

Do women really want to do these things? Although I see women do them all around me, I don’t think they really want them. They don’t come naturally — it often requires alcohol to induce a woman to sleep with a man she doesn’t know well. Do you know of a woman sleeping with a man she’s just met where alcohol was not involved? I can think of one, but this woman had been abused as a teenager and her promiscuity was clearly related to mental illness and the trauma of abuse. I suspect this is a lot more common than we know.

No, I don’t think women want to do these things, not deep down.

It doesn’t sound like Jennifer Lawrence really wanted to send her boyfriend those photos. Even if she had no qualms about the act itself, it was clearly a dangerous thing to do and did indeed result in bad, embarassing, painful consequences for her. (I wonder how much pain her ex-boyfriend suffered because of the photo leak? I imagine very little.)

Jian Ghomeshi: “sexual preferences are a human right.”

That was the woman’s side of the coin. With Jian Ghomeshi we see the man’s side.

When Jian Ghomeshi was first fired from the CBC he made a self-righteous Facebook post to defend himself. I diagnosed it at the time as deeply manipulative and subsequent events proved me right. But it is also deeply revealing. It is worth quoting a few lines:

I have always been interested in a variety of activities in the bedroom but I only participate in sexual practices that are mutually agreed upon, consensual, and exciting for both partners.

About two years ago I started seeing a woman in her late 20s. Our relationship was affectionate, casual and passionate. We saw each other on and off over the period of a year and began engaging in adventurous forms of sex that included role-play, dominance and submission. We discussed our interests at length before engaging in rough sex (forms of BDSM). We talked about using safe words and regularly checked in with each other about our comfort levels. She encouraged our role-play and often was the initiator. We joked about our relations being like a mild form of Fifty Shades of Grey or a story from Lynn Coady’s Giller-Prize winning book last year.

[Now,] someone [is] reframing what had been an ongoing consensual relationship as something nefarious.

But with me bringing it to light, in the coming days you will prospectively hear about how I engage in all kinds of unsavoury aggressive acts in the bedroom. And the implication may be made that this happens non-consensually. On Thursday I voluntarily showed evidence that everything I have done has been consensual.

Let me be the first to say that my tastes in the bedroom may not be palatable to some folks. They may be strange, enticing, weird, normal, or outright offensive to others. We all have our secret life. But that is my private life. That is my personal life.

There is one theme running through this whole document. And it is the principle of consent. The idea is: no sexual behaviour, not even sexual violence, can be condemned if both parties (here the woman) consent.

The really key sentence is the one I quoted in the heading. “Sexual preferences are a human right.”

Sexual preferences are a human right. In this context, what does this mean? It means a man in his forties has the right to insult, slap, beat, and otherwise abuse young women in their twenties if they will agree to it.

This is just crazy talk. It is always wrong to insult, slap, or beat your girlfriend, or any woman for that matter. It does not matter if you can get her to agree with it — in fact that tends to make it worse in that you are managing or manipulating her into agreeing to her own degradation and abuse. And if she initiates it or asks for it — doesn’t that suggest that something has gone wrong for her, maybe she has been abused before, and the last thing she needs is for another man to do that?

But in all the media controversy in the following days and weeks, what was never questioned was this principle. Sexual preference is a human right, and all that matters is consent. In essence, the whole world of public discourse accepted the moral principles which this sexual predator laid out above. There was no moral disagreement, no disagreement over principle, only a disagreement over the factual question of whether the woman had consented. Apparently some hadn’t. If they had, there would be no story here. Just a man living out his human right to abuse women

This is the flip-side of the Jennifer Lawrence story. We see here the man’s perspective: ‘I have a human right to do whatever I want to a woman sexually.’ And from the woman’s perspective: ‘I have to provide what he wants sexually or else he will leave me or cheat on me.’

The ethic of consent is no protection

Arising out of these stories, the business of consent has become the great moral crusade in relation to sex and violence against women. It is being taught to elementary-school-age kids and plastered all over college campuses and vented in the media endlessly. Consent, consent, consent.

Here is the problem. Even if you accept no moral principles governing sex, if you want to protect women from harm consent alone is not a sufficient ethic.

I didn’t hear a single voice in the mainstream media criticizing Jian Ghomeshi’s interest in violent sex in itself. It was always taken for granted that this is fine so long as it never crosses the line of consent. Well, what that means is you are breeding a generation of men who enjoy abusing women. Violence is a more and more significant theme in pornography, and apparently most men nowadays routinely look at internet porn. (And now we have the film Fifty Shades of Grey introducing it to the mainstream, and to women.) The self-proclaimed feminists in in our midst apparently have no problem with men practising violence against women. This generation of men who love to insult, slap, and abuse their girlfriends or, like Ghomeshi, the women they work with — is it realistic to think that they are going to be scrupulous about consent? Is it realistic to think that none of this harms the women involved?

Is it realistic to think women sending photos of themselves over the internet will be protected by a scruple about consent?

The media outrage over these stories was focused on consent. The lesson we were supposed to take was that it is wrong to hit a woman, or to distribute her photos, without her consent. But that was only on the surface. The real lesson being transmitted was: these activities are inherently okay. It is normal and okay for a woman to send pornography to her boyfriend. It is normal and okay (as was described numerous times by women involved with Ghomeshi) for a young woman to go alone to the home of a strange man in the middle of the night. It is normal and okay for a man to ask you, or tell you, to let him abuse you during sex. It is normal and okay to agree to it.

Oh, but you can say no. And men are supposed to listen if you do.

I’m raising daughters, and I ask anyone else with young girls in his life — apart from all moral questions, does this seem like a formidable protection for them as they enter adult life?

Isn’t it actually, a practical guarantee that they will put themselves in dangerous situations?

And be hurt, and suffer, whether they talk about it or not, and swell the ranks of women who seem to think the only way a man will love them is if they let him do whatever he wants sexually?

Feminists don’t care about protecting women

If the feminists in the media cared about protecting women, about women growing up healthy and happy and unharmed by sexual abuse, about women knowing that they are valuable and desired, they would slam on the brakes and turn the Sexual Revolution in full reverse.

It is obvious, incredibly, shockingly, painfully obvious, that the Sexual Revolution has been terrible for women. What it amounts to is elevating men’s instinctive (and even non-instinctive, perverse) sexual wants into a morally superior right, and then holding women to that standard. It is a victory and vindication of male appetites. If men could have their way — I mean apart from being strictly trained in a religious code — they would have sex with women early and often, and not be required to make any commitment, not put anything on the line, just go on enjoying their own life their own way but with a lover or live-in girlfriend or assembly-line sexual encounters. Before the Sexual Revolution they had to exercise some restraint in their own self-interest, because they could get a woman pregnant — and then unless they escaped they would have a big problem on their hands. So there was a natural check on male appetite. But with the assumption of contraception and abortion it became possible for men to act on their appetite for sex without any restraint at all, because they could expect the woman to contracept or to get an abortion if she got pregnant.

But this would only work if women cooperated! And this required a Sexual Revolution. The Sexual Revolution was primarily a victory of getting women to approve, justify, and try to cooperate with or emulate men’s natural appetites. To get women to try to fit themselves into what men want.

And now, today, men feel their sexual appetites and selfish behaviour are beyond criticism! Like Jian Ghomeshi they get self-righteous and pouty if you disagree, or expect some restraint, or don’t give them what they want. They feel entitled to look at porn (which is a form of cheating); to masturbate (doesn’t a woman want her man, especially her husband, to give her 100% of his sexual energy? isn’t that what she wants to give him? so why is he getting himself off apart from her?); to have sex when they want and how they want and with as little commitment as they want. And women, apparently — look at Jennifer Lawrence — feel obliged to cooperate with this. It’s feminism.

What Jennifer Lawrence does not realize is that she is incredibly valuable and desired. She could ditch her man and have ten thousand men lined up to pursue her. And not just Jennifer Lawrence, but every healthy young woman is desired to an astonishing degree, and can exercise a great deal of choice and discretion. Men want women very badly. Women used to know this. And if they know this they have incredible power over men, and can expect things from men and get them. This may be harder now, because the Sexual Revolution has made men feel entitled, but you can easily eliminate those douche-bags. If you refuse to sleep with a man early in the relationship, or even until marriage, if the man wants you enough and is not a worthless fool, he will accept it and he will work hard to marry you. And there will be men out there who do want you enough. They will work hard, earn more, buy you a house, put the kids through school, quit drinking, in order to be with you. You just have to expect it.

Chris Rock understands this: why does a man work hard to get a Porsche or a nice house? To get a woman! “If a man could get laid in a cardboard box, he wouldn’t buy a house!”

These sad stories about Jennifer Lawrence and Jian Ghomeshi are the natural result of making the Sexual Revolution a plank of feminism. We can expect to see much more of this, and worse, and to see it taken even less seriously in the media. Already I have read talk about a rehabilitation of Jian Ghomeshi.

The Harley Quinn connection

I could talk here about Fifty Shades of Grey, but why bother? Anyone with a shred of common sense can see what is wrong with it.

No, let’s talk about Suicide Squad. It has been filming in Toronto since April so I have heard a lot about it, seen pictures, now seen the trailer. Judging by the hype it looks to be the new big thing in superhero movies. I enjoy superhero movies, but I will not see this one. Why? Because of what they will do with Harley Quinn.

Harley Quinn is the Joker’s girlfriend in the Batman comics. She is an abused and mentally ill wreck, sometimes suicidal, and the Joker manipulates and abuses her himself. As far as I know she has not been in a theatrical film before.

Judging from the photos and trailer, I know what they are going to do with Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad. It is a very horrible and dangerous thing. They will unite two qualities in Harley Quinn: she is mentally ill and abused; and she is sexy. Indeed I expect they will make some very intensely sexual and arousing scenes centred on Harley Quinn.

They do this all the time in film nowadays. If I’m wrong about Suicide Squad it’ll be something else. And it teaches men two things:

1. By making her abused-ness and crazi-ness part of her sexual appeal, it teaches men that abuse and the mental illness associated with it are themselves a turn-on.

2. It teaches men to seek out the vulnerable, abused, mentally ill women for sexual relationships. 

What it teaches women I don’t want to think about. But clearly we are encouraging more women to be abused, and for already abused women to be manipulated and taken advantage of and perhaps cyclically abused.

My advice

If I could offer one piece of advice to every young woman, it is this: refuse to sleep with a man until he marries you. This will do two things: first it will eliminate all the lazy, selfish, and worthless men who will just waste your time. Second it will motivate the serious man who really wants you — motivate him to his own good and yours. He will probably try to get his life and career on track so that he can marry you decently. And you will not be kept waiting for half a decade. He will make things move faster than that.

There is another benefit! It makes it easy to break up. This is one of the biggest lies of the Sexual Revolution: everybody thought love and relationships would be freer if we could have sex without those moral restrictions. Wrong. What sex is for, biologically (in addition to making babies) is to attach parents to one another like glue — that’s in our evolved biological nature, because having two parents who are attached to one another and stick together makes it much more likely for the children to survive and thrive. Sex does this whether we believe in free love or not. Biologically, emotionally, it makes us more attached to our sexual partner. And so when you have sex early on in a relationship, what you’re doing is gluing yourself psychologically to that person long before you know if you this is a good person to be glued to.

This plays into sad stories like the Jennifer Lawrence one. She could have just broken up with that a-hole instead of spending four years with him and putting herself in harm’s way to try and hang onto his fidelity. Instead she could have dated a man who would be faithful to her. But once you sleep together, especially for the woman, it is so psychologically difficult to break up. It is emotionally on par with a divorce. This is a terrible way to date!

Just quit doing it. Since men have been getting the sex easy and cheap for so long, women don’t realize they are valued. But they are — to a man, a woman is the most valuable thing on this earth — I am serious! And if you stop giving away the sex they will very quickly see that. And you will not have to bribe them with porn, or go along with nasty sexual perversions. Please, please — it does not have to be this way. You can have better than this. 

On the excommunication of sinners, even those in 'good faith'

“But of course there is also the good of the Church to be considered. The sin may be such that it is impossible for authority to take no action without at the same time encouraging others to commit it. To excommunicate the sinner, in however good faith he is, may be the only way of declaring effectively that what he persists in doing is in fact a sin. If he is not excommunicated, but continues to live publicly as a member of the Church, his example may come to be widely followed. Others may say to themselves that this thing is apparently permitted, that therefore it is presumably not wrong, that therefore they may do it too. Thus the good of the Church as a whole and the purity of her ethical teaching may require the excommunication of one who is himself not consciously--as he sees it--doing anything wrong at all.”

Robert Mortimer, Western Canon Law (1953), ch. 5

The Great Divide

The great divide in politics—politics taken broadly to include any decision communally taken—is this. People who are honest and realistic about trade-offs vs people who will pretend there are no trade-offs.

Here as in other things, reading the medieval scholastics can teach you something about politics and even about the modern world. St Bernardino of Siena once preached about usury and tried to answer the pragmatic claim: “people need loans, and loans will not be given without interest, therefore we have to have usury.” Taking the objection seriously, he asked what kind of people need loans, and after running through the list found only two types who were morally justified: the really poor, and people in an emergency who needed quick cash. But, he said, the poor are only further impoverished by loans. They don’t need loans, they need alms. And as for people in emergencies, they too only impoverish themselves by borrowing at interest. They should bite the bullet and sell their property. It will be harder now but they will be better off in the long run than if they borrow at interest.

St Bernardino here is a perfect role model of a good politician, indeed of Prudence itself. A person who is ready to look candidly and realistically at trade-offs, not blink in the face of hard truth, and judge what will really be in anyone’s best interest.

And this is the great divide in politics. Because there are people who willing to pretend we can get away without any trade-offs at all.

And in every political debate isn’t there one side like this? I have my own list of examples but you could probably supply your own.

Once the great divide is stated one thing is obvious: in a modern democracy the dishonest side will always win. The person who raises objections and difficulties, who points out unhappy consequences — that person is tiring and depressing compared to the person who says we can have it all without paying for it. And the realistic person can (and nowadays will) always be smeared as a victim-blamer, ‘privileged’, mean, etc. The special device seems to be to claim that the realistic person wants people to suffer the trade-offs — as though St Augustine wanted unbaptised babies to go to hell. Also, we can always kick the can down the road —the consequences will come later so who cares; excessive government spending might bankrupt the country or destroy the currency but with luck we’ll be dead by then, etc.

Above all, most people do not know how anything actually works outside a very small range (myself included), and in ignorance wishful thinking will reign.

So I conclude that being honest, realistic, and discerning in this way, is, in worldly terms, hopeless.

But we must do it anyway.