So this is how the world ends, apparently. Not with nuclear annihilation or global pandemic, but with way too many people getting laid without the imprimatur of either the state, the resident deity, or both.
Kevin Drum links to Crooked Timber's take down of Leon Kass' latest paean to the syphilitic days of old, when sexual activity was policed more strictly and nothing bad ever happened. There are plenty of other good posts lambasting Kass for essentially putting forth what is the old "Why buy the cow when the milk is free" argument. From Kass:
The change most immediately devastating for wooing is probably the sexual revolution. For why would a man court a woman for marriage when she may be sexually enjoyed, and regularly, without it? Contrary to what the youth of the sixties believed, they were not the first to feel the power of sexual desire. Many, perhaps even most, men in earlier times avidly sought sexual pleasure prior to and outside of marriage. But they usually distinguished, as did the culture generally, between women one fooled around with and women one married, between a woman of easy virtue and a woman of virtue simply. Only respectable women were respected; one no more wanted a loose woman for one's partner than for one's mother.
I want to focus on this because the other critiques have already said much of what needs to be said about Kass' argument. What I find missing from most of the other posts is a criticism, or even a mention of what amounts to an insult to men.
The standard, and I believe correct, reaction to Kass is that he betrays a reactionary zeal and a desire to see again the days when women were treated as chattel and given some small recompense if they opted for the "good girl" path. Men can come and go (sorry for the pun) as they pleased, but good girls didn't sleep around.
This argument, that men have no ability to evolve and are exclusively held captive to their base desires is consistent with a particularly distasteful brand of feminism, that which sees the male as the root of all evil and considers hetero-coitus to be nothing more than rape.
Kass' conclusions are not the same as the radical feminists' (Kass wants society to revert to a false past when marriage was more enforceable and, frankly more oppressive, feminists want to take out one the prime variables in the equation), but they each come from a common supposition.
I fail to see how marriage is either an unqualified evil or an absolute good. What Kass calls the "destigmatization of bastardy" is described as a changes that "hamper courtship and marriage." Kass also blames " the general erosion of shame and awe
regarding
sexual matters." Why on earth would he try to saddle something as basic as sex with the dual damnation of shame and awe? Because for Kass the only way back from what he insists is the general hell-in-a-hand-basket way of the world is for sex to be stuffed back in the dark corners from whence it came.
Obviously, this is a way of saying that women have become just too damned independent to "need" men anymore and one can see Kass (who, incidentally or not, is the Chairman of the President's Commission on Bioethics) warning the faithful that sooner rather than later, men will be made obsolete by the slick combination of technology and loose morals.
So on one side, the critics are right, Kass fears being put out to pasture and thus wants women back in their box. But at the base of his mania is a deep disgust with maleness and the baser aspects of life. He sees men as so debauched that women must be enlisted to exert control:
Once female modesty became a first casualty of the sexual revolution, even women eager for marriage lost their greatest power to hold and to discipline their prospective mates. For it is a woman's refusal of sexual importunings, coupled with hints or promises of later gratification, that is generally a necessary condition of transforming a man's lust into love.
What Kass is describing, and I believe, secretly longing for, is what we used to call the "cock-tease."
Kass then writes a tacit endorsement of that old classic The Rules.
[O]nly by holding herself in reserve does a woman gain the distance and self-command needed to discern what and whom she truly wants and to insist that the ardent suitor measure up.
That's right, girls, save yourself for marriage because that lying bastard you're dating is only capable of thinking with his gonads.
Kass' complaint comes down to that marriage, or rather everyone's prospects for marriage (am I tho only one who thinks this guy sounds like Charlotte from Sex And The City) has been "sacrificed on the altar of pleasure
now." Note the "now."
It is Kass's contention, then, that marriage is a reward to women for keeping their virtue and to men for screwing disposable tarts. I suppose that somewhere in here one could find a rationale for legalizing prostitution. But then again, there might also be a quiet call to bring back the stocks and public stonings.
In real life, it is marriage--bad, ill-informed marriage--that eats pleasure, and not just sexual pleasure. A marriage that is gone into because of societal or familial, or any outside pressure leads to the death of the pleasure of life. When a marriage doesn't work, nothing does. But that doesn't matter to Kass. He is not talking about making good marriages, so that they last, but simply making more marriages, regardless of whether they work or not.
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