Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Sex Crutch
I’m not a prude by any stretch of the imagination. To quote Mr. Justice Daniel Snow from First Monday in October, “I’ve never been prejudiced by sex — entertained, yes — prejudiced, never.” (That line is a lot funnier when it comes out of the mouth of Walter Matthau.) I’ve not just been entertained by sex, I have the four kids to show for it.
In the 70 years since Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male we’ve gone from whispers and protected conversations with our psychiatrists to seeing our sexual peccadilloes as just another piece of fodder for our Facebook pages. There’s a lot to be uncomfortable about and the plan here is not to document them one-by-one.
But there is one particular aspect about this open sexuality that is particularly bothersome. It’s the idea of being comfortable in asserting that sex is somehow a cure for unapproved political thinking or that such thinking is a justification for rape. It ranges from Playboy’s infamous 2008 article (“So Right It’s Wrong”) that coined the term “hate [expletive]” to liberal commentator Tamara Holder suggesting there wasn’t anything wrong with Michelle Malkin that an orgasm couldn’t cure.
“I don’t know her personally, but I’m not a fan of her debating style,” Holder said, “I think that she probably needs to get laid.” Holder said that on Fox Business Channel in 2012. Four years later she sued Fox for sexual harassment. Irony is lost on most people, particularly the self righteous ones.
The right isn’t immune to it either. Since the White Supremacist Tiki Torch Parade more than one commentator on the right has linked their vile behavior to the lack of sex. First up is Kevin Williamson in National Review:
What does an angry white boy really want? “A girlfriend,” comes the mocking answer, and there’s probably more to that than mockery. The proprietor of one of the nation’s premier websites for neo-Nazi knuckleheads advised his colleagues in Charlottesville that, after the protest — which included a murder — “random girls will want to have sex with you.” I ran this proposition past a few random girls, and I suspect that the apfelstrudelführers are going to go home disappointed. There are many shades of white, and Mom’s-basement white is the least popular crayon in the box.
Follow that up with David Burge, aka Iowahawk, who Tweeted, “How much would 200 high tech Japanese sex robots cost? Seems it would save us a lot of trouble. Please support #SexRobotsForAngryNaziVirgins”
The real Nazis, you know, those people our generations only know from history books and filmed entertainment, sure didn’t lack from sex. They raped their way across Europe in both directions. They sexually abused men, women, and children in the most degrading manner possible. On the other side of the world the Japanese Imperial Army was just as infamous.
For the misguided young men marching in Charlottesville, it’s not the sex that’s missing, it’s more. Much more. It’s the intimacy, the love and, probably more importantly, the life building. It’s having a job that attracts a good woman and helps provide for a family. It’s the pride and sense of accomplishment that goes beyond the material or just the release felt by scattering your DNA to the wind. Any sex act devoid of all that is just the poor man’s opioid, a temporary fix that never fills the void.
For most men finding that one special woman is difficult enough. Add today’s culture and the changing economy to that mix and the despair becomes an unbelievably deep hole. For too many it’s a hole they’ve been flung into and not one that they’ve dug for themselves.
So stop it. The problem is not in their pants, it’s in our heads. We’re not thinking hard enough to offer more than smart-ass columns and 140-character snark. It’s time to be a serious nation again.
Published in General
Couldn’t it just be that these young men are evil?
As long as everyone in the political spectrum buy into modern sexual mores, we are toast. When social conservatives talk about how great Game of Thrones is, we are toast.
Great post!
It astonishes me that the common understanding of intimacy is so incredibly shallow and limited. It is clear to me that the vast majority of people do not build strong and deep loving relationships – they act as if they are not aware that such relationships are possible.
Life without growth often leads to misery and desperation.
Dude you just need a German midget bath house weekend to straighten out all this angst.
Talk about peoples lack of sex or virginity is meant to be insulting, rather than diagnostic. The basement dweller unable to get sex from women is just probably the most insulting thing you can say that won’t be censored on TV or Radio, and that isn’t a direct call of violence against these people. The thing is I think most people just want to say is that they hope these people die in some painful and humiliating way, but how can you say that while also condemning their violence? You can’t, so you don’t and instead you make fun of their imagined sex lives. On the other hand if these people were more removed from us say living in a desert in Iraq. Then we would just call for their death like we do with ISIS. I don’t recall anyone saying ISIS are a bunch of virgin basement dwellers, trying to get lucky by cutting of Yazidi heads. No. They are well out of the bounds of propriety and so we just call for their eradication by fire bombing, or at least many of us do. And no one really complains about it.
Good post. I agree…mostly.
And: I am definitely a prude.
But Kevin Williamson was reacting to something he saw on the website of the group in question: he didn’t make it up, Tamara Holder-style.
Also, P.J. Rourke still claims to possess his “girls say yes to boys who say no” Vietnam-era lapel pin, so it’s not truly new… just a whole lot more in-your-face?
Man, I am glad that there is someone around here more demented than I am.
Yeah, it was a sales pitch from the Nazis, maybe not so different from the “72 virgins” promise for Islamic terrorists. Whether or not it actually works (and the point is valid that empty sex doesn’t calm the rage), the promise of sexual release in exchange for violent release speaks to some frustrated young men in a powerful way.
The other side of this, the accusation that mean conservatives would chill out if they got laid, is gross. Just the same, I’ve seen quite a few commenters on this site make snide remarks about the looks of women who annoy them politically, which is all part of the same juvenile and insubstantial package.
Maybe what set me off was five days of “this is existential for the Republic” to “you know, someone just needs to get their rocks off…”
Agreed, it’s dismaying that our society has so completely lost touch with the virtue of chastity that now the most insulting, humiliating name you can call a young single man is a “virgin.”
Seconded. I wish that line was in my post.
The phenomenon of young men engaging in politics to get women is real. There were more than a few males who were peaceniks in the ’60s because that’s where the girls were. Nowadays we have the male feminist. I myself walked in a protest march or two 50 years ago because a certain girl was all excited about the cause.
Hey every pot has a lid.
A few years ago, I was watching Congressional testimony by some feminist, and there was this guy in the gallery behind her, surrounded by women, exaggeratedly nodding at every phrase. He had this too-sincere look on his face that was so easy to read: “If I show I’m really down with the struggle, this is going to so get me some accctionnnn! ”
It was so distracting I don’t remember the topic or the witness.
Have you been to a leftist rally lately? It’s gotten pretty grim. Somewhere along the line all the good-looking women went right.
Darn right! Real social conservatives get their brother-raping-sister-incest from 2 Sam 13.
The segment you quoted leads with “A girlfriend”, which is the first step for an adolescent* towards the higher desires you outlined. I don’t necessarily agree sex-deprivation was the premise of Kevin’s article but it certainly has been the focal point of others — which you poignantly refute.
I agree you with you and believe the overarching issue is dual-lack of a moral compass (self-guided direction) and moral pole (societal-beacon). I think a deficit of intimacy^ strongly contributes to the problem and can serve as a ‘gateway drug’ to these groups but it is not as black and white as often eluded to (which I believe was your premise).
I don’t think anyone would argue with the notion that the more socially accepted a 16-28 yr/old male is the less likely the are to seek out a violent fringe group, with the corollary that the less involved with the fringe, the more socially acceptable one is. As is often the case when you get to the margins, things can break down — if I do not have social acceptance amongst the more abundant ‘norms’, I can find the same degree of acceptance among a subset of the population (the fringe).
*Historically defined by age, we often now need to use a variable goal post defined by maturity.
^For an adolescent though this can often equate to sex or be one of their foci
To close, I re-read Kevin’s article after yours because I thought you made some good points. I don’t think I said anything new but I had a long day and used this as an opportunity to focus on something aside from work for a few minutes :).
I agree with EJHill. It never ceases to amaze me that political commentators think they can persuade lower-status people by pointing out and mocking the things they don’t have, but higher-status people do.
Many people on the left view sex as righteous and holy. It’s like a sacrament or magic spell that will make everything better. Sex is redemptive. There were lines about all war being caused by sexual frustration and lines about people needing to get laid.
Lately, the Left has been moving toward a more bureaucratic, regulated model of sex.
Where is the demented part? I’m confused.
Truth. The key to steering these young men away from national socialism is improving their socioeconomic environment; hopelessness and despair make a fertile soil for extremism.
Honest, if only sort of tangentially related question: is there overlap between the MRAs and the white nationalist movement? I ask for two reasons: one, there’s been a spate of articles about MRAs enthusiastically flocking to the alt-right, but mostly from less-than-trustworthy ideologically left-leaning sources, and two, the reporting on what the Daily Stormer wrote about Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer seemed right in line with some of the worst examples of MRA misogyny. But if you’ve got someone who identifies as both a white nationalist and a men’s rights activist, then sex and issues with women seems like it might be part of the answer to why they are angry.
It seems women are becoming more educated than men, are becoming family breadwinners, or at least the family is dependent on her wage, and that is also causing women anguish in finding “a good guy” to marry. Joyce Brothers said it years ago: for men their number 1 identity is their job, and for women it is their family.” Or something in that vein. It still is. For the girls that bought into the idea you can have it all, there is big disappointment ahead. Most either work with guilt for leaving their babies, or resent supporting the old man. This is anecdotal to what I’ve seen personally.
We need to promote boys more. We cannot continue to trash boys, for they will live up (down) to that image.
So jobs and education? I recall people on our side mocking these very solution when they were proposed for ISIS and their inspired domestic terrorists. I say just punish them more publicly and harshly when they break the law, and never miss an opportunity to punish them. It is a rolled up newspaper for dogs who pee on the rug. You PC liberal ways will just further indulge them.
I don’t think it’s as contradictory as you think. The starting points are different. Give me a young man steeped in the Western (i.e. Christian-Judeo) traditions of respect for women and I will do better than if given one who was taught that his mother and sisters were inferior and should walk behind him or take instruction from him just because of his genitalia. It’s like asking somebody to forge a sword out of aluminum cans. You have to have the right material.
The correlation between membership in MRAs and the Alt-Right is pretty strong. I think it all goes back to the way they detest PC culture.
Proof or gut feeling? Detesting PC = Nazi?
Experience.
Moderator Note:
Personal attack, grudge nursing.[Redacted.]
Suddenly, if you detest the political correctness thrust upon society by the Left you’re a potential Nazi.
I think their supposed steepness in Judeo-Christian morality and civilization makes me think far less of the Nazis. The Jihadi in Yemen never had a chance to know better so how can we blame him for what he is? But the white boy from Ohio what is his excuse for his vast moral ignorance? But let us make the case simpler what of the young Muslim born and raised alongside the young white boy? You really think the starting point is so different even then?
I think in all the cases of these amoral extremists there are two kinds of people. Those stupid followers who have been converted by charismatic leaders who can only regurgitate the arguments of their hateful causes without understanding them, and those who formulate the arguments for their cynical and evil ends. The later are unmovable except by the grace of God. The former, are probably more easily persuaded by punishment than reason. Especially given that their attachment to their cause is not rational but emotional. So only someone who can make a personal connection with them more powerful than that created by their hateful leader can dissuade them with words.