Romance or Revolt by John C. Wright

Re-posted from Romance or Revolt

John C. Wright's Journal

How could everything anyone ever knew about men and women just end up being lost?

How can a whole generation be raised without the slightest notion of why women act the way they do toward men, or why men act the way they do toward women?

It is a sober question, and a sobering one. I think we all know the answer.

The world has two stories to tell about this great mystery.

The new story is a story of revolt. In this story, there is no mystery to explain. The past is a time of darkness and horror, which consists of rapist men victimizing helpless women. The sexual revolution frees one and all to enter into any form of contract for the exchange of copulation rights as “he or she or xe or it” sees fit.

No one has any sexual roles. Instead, one has a “gender” which consists of a set of preferences as to sexual dress and behavior, which each may decide for oneself as one sees fit. On the other hand, same sex attraction is genetically selected by Darwinian evolution to increase fertility, and cannot be opposed or impeded. The male desire for many female partners, including non-consenting ones like the Sabine Women in Plutarch, on the other hand, has no Darwinian reproductive value.

In this story, only fools believe in true love. The sexual appetite is an appetite to the slaked, and the satisfaction is had when the surface appearances are met, and the genitalia stimulated. Sex is the stimulation, not the sex act itself, so any of the fifty genders may indulge.

In this story, consent is the only sacrosanct rule for determining whether the exchange of sexual gratification takes place. All sex is selfish. Love and childrearing play no part in any calculation.

The other story is old. The other story is a love story, where the men seek love by pursuing, and the women seek love by alluring.

In this story, the man takes charge because bold men take charge, and the woman plays coy and modest because that is what fair maidens do, for only the bold deserve the fair.
She arranges obstacles for him, and dallies and flirts with coy and amorous delay, teasing and tempting. She dare not be over-blunt, nor rash and rushing to wed, for she cannot distinguish the frogs from the princes without seeing some sign of princely valor and devotion.

In this story, sometimes a girl is demure, or plays hard to get, but at other times she may be merely toying with his affection. Likewise sometimes a boy is a cad and a flatterer, but sometimes he is true-hearted.

Each player in the masquerade goes threw the steps of the mating dance trying to discover which is which.

And sometimes a suitor who sees himself a cad when he thought himself true, or a girl realizes she is a flirt when she thought herself coy, because the emotion of infatuation, and the drive of lust, all too often disguises itself as true love.


And, of course, in the love story, the man picks up the check and pays for the show whereas the young lady’s contribution is too adorn herself to look pretty and to be a gay and charming companion.

The exchange is unfair, if by this we mean unequal.

But, by nature, the exchange cannot be equal: she is the one being pursued and persuaded. Her task is to encourage the pursuit by the right sort of guy. His is to pursue and persuade, and to convince himself and her of his devotion, accomplishments, and worth.

The tactics for male and female cannot be the same because the goal for each is different. If he is decent, what he wants is nubile, true and faithful wife. Blame no man if, for him, lust seeks young and fertile girls. By instinct, he seeks markers of youth and health, a curvaceous body able to bear the travail of childrearing.

Likewise, If she is decent, what she wants is a virile, strong and faithful man. Blame no woman if  her lust seeks older, established men, one wealthy enough to bear the cost of childrearing.

Nature demands different things from either parent. Hence, not the same things. Hence they cannot be sought in the same way. Hence the wooer and the wooed cannot won the complementary goals using tactics suited to the other.

When a man holds a woman in his arms on the ballroom floor, both dancers cannot lead. They dance as equals only when separated.

While dating, he picks up the check. After the wedding, she becomes wife and mother and homemaker, and she gives all she has to give in life. If he blenches at picking up a check on a date, how is he going to afford to keep a wife?

At one time, many a boy at least knew the stereotyped expectations of the elliptical and indirect reasoning of female psychology.

He might not understand the reason why girls were so illogical, emotional, strange, fickle, and practical, but he knew to expect that.

Likewise, the girl might not understand why the boy was so pigheaded, unemotional, honor-bound, arrogant, incorrigible, and idealistic, but many a girl knew to brace herself for it.

For the record, female illogic is perfectly logical once the female viewpoint is known, and male logic grows grossly superficial and heartless without a female viewpoint to check it.
In truth, both sexes are not so different in their sins and virtues, but the expressions and manifestation thereof differ wildly.

Many of us used to know that. We knew men were men and women were women.
We used to know the world was round, and East was far from West. Now, in a strange reverse of the old wives’ tale about Columbus, the children think the world is flat.

Someone has taken all the experience and hard-earned lore of the ages, half cynicism and half rose-colored glasses, which used to be carried in jokes, ribaldry, love songs, novels, and plays and heart-to-heart conversations with parents or older peers, telling the young about the thrills and danger, the deceptions and sudden revelations, the whole wild gamble of the heart known as the mating dance, and flushed it all down the memory hole.
I think we know which group in life is the culprit.

Who interprets all specialization of labor or traditional assignment of roles and responsibilities as a sinister conspiracy to bewitch and oppress the weak? Who regards women as ever in the weaker position? Who sees everything in life, including affairs of the heart, through the lens of a heartless Darwinian struggle between oppressor and oppressed?

Who pretends that liberty is found by leveling hedgerows, cutting the brake lines, severing the safety belts, smashing traffic lights and uprooting road signs, and in a word, abandoning common sense and common decency?

What sort of freedom is it to replace self-control with chaos?

Yes, it is now legal to speed down the highway and run red lights in the wrong lane, so all are “free” in that respect. It is the freedom of mere chaos: the freedom of a free for all.

But no one is free to walk away from the resulting wreckage of broken hearts and broken homes unscathed, or to have friends and family untouched by the predicted and predictable horrors of high rates of perversion, infidelity, abortion, abandonment, divorce, child abuse which flow from unchaining all sexual appetites, wholesome or grotesque.

Nor one is free to breathe the clear moral atmosphere of a society that honors virginity, marriage, motherhood, childhood, romance, chivalry, modesty, honesty, fidelity, because no such place exists, not in any land modernism rules.