The sexes

A common claim among dissatisfied men is that American women are the worst. European women, it is said, are are more feminine, less self-centered, and less concerned with their careers than their American counterparts.

The differences between the sexes I discussed a couple of posts ago come out in the differing uses of “starter husband” and “starter wife.”

Changes in sexual mores resulting from the lesser practical importance of marriage in a radically commercialized and bureaucratized society make the situation described in the last post quite a bit worse.

The single most suggestive thing I’ve read about the sexes is this press release from some neurologists. Basically, it says that intelligence in men mostly matches up with gray matter in the brain and intelligence in women with white matter. So when men and women feel the uncontrollable urge to put the word “brain” in quotation marks when speaking about the opposite sex there’s something to it.

Within living memory it was possible to talk about the sexes in an intelligent and civilized way. As proof here are some pages from The Viking Book of Aphorisms, edited by W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger. The collection was published in 1962, the year before sex was invented (according to Philip Larkin). It’s hard to imagine it could have come out much later than that.

What’s with the sexes these days?

Questions about sex and the sexes are never really answerable, but people do notice things, and some of them seem illuminating, so an occasional comment is in order.

I have another piece on the Windsor decision, this one at Crisis Magazine. It deals with the increasing radicalism, mindlessness, and intolerance of mainstream progressive thought.

That’s the title of my most recent piece at Crisis Magazine. It discusses recent developments in connection with the trend toward a single universal regime of contract and regulation in which no point has privileged independence.

I have a snappily-written piece up at Crisis Magazine that discusses “gay marriage,” “woman priests,” and (best of all) the New World Order.

I continue my assault on equality, with a piece on feminism at Crisis.

A correspondent, who had read my previous comments on women in Islam, asked whether I thought he was hysterical to say Islam enslaves women. He lives in a part of England where Muslims have recently become more of a presence, finds the routine sight of women in niqab shocking, and can’t understand why intellectual Western women take it in stride as an addition to multicultural richness or whatever. What, he asked, could ever serve as a wake-up call?

A note related to my recent entry on homosexuality:

Various correspondents have proposed or at least asked about Christian justifications for homosexuality. Here’s a sort of canned response that seems to address most concerns:

I don’t view the issue as basically a question of authority. We need a definite way of life, and that requires authority, but legitimate authority is normally rational. It asks for what is best and promotes what is best, and those things can be discussed. For me, at bottom, it’s not even a specifically religious issue. It’s more a matter of natural law.

A reader writes to complain about the tendency of many conservatives to adopt “Islam oppresses women” as a major reason for opposing Muslim assertiveness and expansion. Doesn’t that approach (he asks) play into a feminist analysis of society, and end by supporting feminist solutions generally? And as a factual matter, can it really be true that Muslim society is fundamentally a system whereby men oppress women? Doesn’t it have other more basic problems, and wouldn’t there be more give and take on that particular point?

The untutored or perhaps commonsense view is that there’s something out of order about certain sexual acts. They’re “unnatural,” as people once said, or “intrinsically disordered,” as the Church says today.

Nowadays of course educated people think that’s all ridiculous. After all, no one says sodomy or whatnot is miraculous, so it evidently complies with the order of nature. And all intentional actions are unnatural in some sense, since they change what would happen if we let things go their own way.

Rod Dreher sent a note asking how trads should argue with “gay marriage” proponents, and posted my reply at Beliefnet.

I commented very briefly on Kay Hymowitz’s not-so-pleasing account of the “new girl order“—the Way Young Women Are Now. Now she’s come out with an even less flattering account of today’s single young men. Guys will be guyz it seems. The positive part of the KH essay is that “How to make your girlfriend think her cat died naturally” actually is a good title for a slightly shocking fake-advice-mag humor piece.

Continuing disputes over homosexuality and what to do about it have prompted me to tidy up and organize various short things I’ve written on the topic and add a provocatively-titled introduction. Anyone interested is urged to read and comment.

It seems that sexual morality has two aspects:

• Social: promotion and maintenance of a system of stable, reliable and productive relations between the sexes, and
• Personal: bringing sex into relation to other concerns and connections, so the experience makes sense and its implicit meaning can be meant.

Neither aspect makes sense given an understanding of human action that reduces rationality to satisfaction of desire and formal standards like maximum equal freedom. Hence current confusions.