As touched on in the article I wrote about the anti-catcalling laws, the over-punishing of minor anti-social behavior is not the result of progressive politics even if it manifests itself in it. It is the bourgeois, suburban, fears of the uncanny and the marginalized. I referenced an The Atlantic article by Conor Friedersdorf where he pointed out that street harassment is mostly comitted by the lower classes and I further pointed out that enforcement would rest on who reported who and the afluent and attractive are unlikely to be the subject of police reports for that behavior. The anti-catcalling laws are a means by which the cultural suburbanites can redline out the unsightly people.
Bill Maher, a few years ago, did a piece entitled “Hollywood’s Grey Area” where he highlighted the dichotomy between what women fantasize about in the media and what they’ll tolerate in real life. Christian Grey, Edward Cullen, and myriad other heart-throbs are major creeps. Just like with the anti-catcalling law, its not going to be enforced on cute, rich, boys. This is not about feminism, it is about the bourgeois, suburban, branch of it. The branch of “missing white girl syndrome” and “Reviving Ophelia”. In the end, if any unwanted contact is stalking and asking anyone out is technically hitting on them and creepy then rhetoric employed for serial killers and child molesters is given to normal losers.
At that point, the people with lower sex drives and the romantic asexuals will just make no attempt at dating or romance. The people left will be the more sexual and, arguably, truly creepier ones and those are the ones that’ll become incels and join the manosphere. For the former group, the less sexual ones who don’t become incels or join the manosphere will form a culture I would describe as a Japanese. It is a culture where sex and dating feel like something the normies do in a manner akin to being a child seeing it as something the grown-ups do. Now, while they are not in the dark places as the manosphere folks; the non-dark losers aren’t exactly in a healthy place. Now, as a Christian, I have taken a vow of and support sexual abstinence outside of marriage so I don’t contend a lack of sex, per se, is unhealthy. When this is discussed, on the rare occassions it is, it is discussed as a lack of sex. Largely, because that is the simplest way to reduce it.
This is not about a lack of sex; it is about a near total and complete lack of intimacy and close friendships and very often partial or near total social rejection or exclusion. Sex is almost entirely beside the point and platonic pursuits sometimes result in the same, aforementioned, rhetorical ammunition. A number of women have complained about the effect of third-wave feminism on making men meeker and less masculine. A major LinkedIn influencer I follow, Shay Rowbottom, famous enough for me to name, complained about how feminism is against the macho men (one assumes she is attracted to) and, poisoned by wishful thinking, believes guys with soft masculinity are beta-males afraid of their own “domminance”. She wants to reverse some of feminism so the otherwise hot jocks will stop being nerdy beta-males. Her analysis was dead-wrong and contrary to the available psychological science but it is a sentiment shared by many women.
I mention that to say that such has nothing to do with what I am talking about. This is not about feminism making men less masculine. It hasn’t done that. I have a soft masculinity and am a “beta-male”. I prefer chess and philosophy to football and beer and feminism has nothing to do with that. This is rather about turning who were formerly just losers into creeps and thereby chasing them out of the metaphorical sundown town and into a cultural ghetto without access to the second step on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Recently, I was researching Paul Dirac, a fellow Aspie, and was amazed he managed to get married. In the old days, Aspies and other losers were slower to win romantically and in similiar areas but while slower, it was not impossible and almost inevitably happened. Paul Dirac would never have gotten married, today.
There are plenty of etiologies for this but the one I will focus on is that of the Freudian “Pleasure Principal”. The natural inclunation that, absent other factors, people naturally do what they want. It is an absolute lack of courage or concept of virtue among a people with no moral values outside of Rawlsian negative liberties. They weren’t Etonians raised on Shakespeare or mountain folk raised on the Bible; they were consumerists raised on Disney, Nick, and The C&W. (Even if they got some religion and literature, it was not most of what they got) A cultural canon which afforded them no values and so the values they defaulted to were the values of political liberalism: Rawls’ thin-good. Ergo there were no values to stop them from seeking the pleasure of a world with all fun people and no ugly people and they naturally used the philosophical tools of negative liberties, which the rhetoric of creepieness provided, to get what they wanted.
While the Gospels may preach mercy and Shakespeare may warn of the dangers of power, the show Victorious, the Speak Now album, the Twilight Saga, nor most of the media my generation was raised on gives them any reason to accept the unsightly or tolerate any heterogeniety in their purview. The end result is a ghetto culture of social isolates living according to social morés that preclude them from offending their social superiors. Ironically, it is the beginning of a thick-good borne of the Rawlsian thin-good. That type of social caste system, increasingly legally enforced and enforced by institutions, is ultimately going to be anti-liberal. The virginity revolution, as I term it, is a part of the birth of new Hegelian Paradigm. After the abolition of virtue ethics and amnesia of the Western Canon, a deontological system of ethics that includes a caste system is based on largely on the comfort of rich people and is evolved from the Rawlsian thin-good. Miserable to live through, facinating to watch!
The Autistic Resistance 