Bent Notes

eharmonycom settles a lawsuit by agreeing to post homosexual profiles.

So much for free markets, respect for individuals’ moral codes, the definition of family that served humankind quite well for 10.000 years and still serves all other species well, and sanity generally.

You have to ask yourself why the person bringing the lawsuit didn’t take the entrepreneurial route and set up a matchmaking site for those who see things his way.

Freedom is dying before our eyes without so much as a whimper.

Quite by coincidence, today’s blogosphere offerings bring us two items on the same theme.  Mike S. Adams at Townhall tells the tale of the young woman who, only after being referred by a Christian counselor with religious porblems with the young woman’s lesbianism to a counselor who had no such problems and did a fine job according to the young woman, decided to sic the leviathan state on the Christian counselor.  Bookworm gives us an account of a similar situation involving a San Diego fertility clinic.

Bookworm does an admirably effective job of spelling out the distinction between situations in which market choices prevail and those in which monopolyy conditions set the parameters.

And for heaven’s sake, you didn’t croak because you had to drive to another office for your fertility test, okay?

Alice Walker’s daughter on the deterioration of their relationship and the dark, barren nether regions of feminism.

When looking for moral clarity, you can’t do better than Dennis Prager.  Today, he lays out the scope of magnitude of the California Supreme Court’s recent decision on gay “marriage.”

The always-brilliant Heather MacDonald looks at the manufactured rape crisis on American campuses. 

She makes a point toward the end of her piece that is well worth examining: The same leftist mindset that wants to entrench the V-Day / take-back-the-night / Vagina-Monologues / crisis counseling center set of assumptions is the very same mindset that also holds pornography symposia and condom classes and publishes campus sex magazines.

How’s this for thought-provoking?  “The Torah’s prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible.”

This lengthy article, in a Catholic journal, interestingly enough, is full of great insights.  Here’s one: Judaism was the first religion to have a creation story that wasn’t sexual.

It was most interesting to come upon this Myron Magnet piece in City Journal after my four days at Indiana Black Expo.  Magnet is one of the most rigourous and clear-eyed observers of the upheavals in American society in the last fifty years, and here he applies that scrutiny to the question of why we have the simultaneous phenomena of an expanding black middle class and a huge black prison population.  It’s long, but I invite anyone who starts into it to read the whole thing before drawing any conclusions.  And if anyone feels the need to get the same message from someone of another pigmentation, may I suggest the works of John McWhorter or Shelby Steele.

To read one of the five most poignant, superbly written reminiscences you will ever come across, go here.

A commenter asked, under my post on Anna Nicole and Hefner, what my point was.  In its largest sense, it’s this:  along with the particular obscuring of basic truths about human nature, and, indeed, the nature of the universe, that a large swath of us have bought over the last fifty-plus years, what other stuff that just ain’t so have we swallowed?  Put another way, how do we get our moral and intellectual rigor back?

In late 1953, Hugh Hefner got the first issue of his specifically-men’s-interests magazine off the ground.  Typical of such enterprises, it was done on a shoestring, at his dining-room table.  Because the centerfold picture was a four-year-old photo of the by-then-really-famous Marilyn Monroe, with the promise that subsequent issues would feature such shots of more recently-photographed nude attractive women, the advertising revenue started pouring in, and by the end of the decade, he was ready to launch the nightclub chain and venture into television.

It’s inaccurate to call him an uninteresting person.  Over the years, his magazine’s interview section gave us insights into such history-making personalities as George Lincoln Rockwell, Miles Davis, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Daniel Ortega.  He gave us the Playboy Jazz Festival, which has made for some of the richest moments in American culture.  He championed such hard-to-pidgeonhole creative geniuses as Lenny Bruce and Shel Silverstein.

But at the core of the empire he built was this impossible notion of “sexual liberation.”  Once the first few years had passed, with the va-va-va-voom-type centerfolds, the magazine’s “pictorial” sections came into a mid-sixties vibe of these fresh-faced twenty-year-olds who came across like your best bud’s sister.  Or maybe cousin.  In any event, they were smart, clean, fragrant, personable gals who happened to be supremely attractive.  They were posed poolside, at dining room tables, on stairways, by the hi-fi, out on the patio, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to invite you, the “reader,” to join them in some oh-so-casual carnal frolic.

Along about the mid-to-late seventies, the tone of the “pictorials” changed.  They became more glossy.  The backdrops started looking more like those of heavy-metal album covers.  Attitude-laden poses.  Care taken to make sure the hair was blown back at a particular angle relative to the model’s shoulders.  Also more shots that approached the gynecological in their graphic specificity.

And all this didn’t happen in a vacuum, of course.  We quickly went from Bob Guccione to Ralph Ginzburg to Larry Flynt.  And then came Vivid and all that.

Anna Nicole, aka Vickie Lynn Hogan, came along in the midst of these changes.  There was nothing fresh or vibrant about her.  From the get-go, the thrust of her appeal was that suggestion of tawdriness, that strip-club background. 

Why has Playgirl never reached anything close to the circulation of Playboy or any of its competing skin mags for men?  (I just thought of a not-altogether-unrelated question.  Why has the Womens’ NBA league never garnered anything near the ticket sales or media coverage of what we without thinking call the NBA?)

I’d like to sit Hugh Hefner down and ask him for an answer to that.  I think in his heart of hearts he knows.  Men are more visual in the way they become sexually stimulated; that’s clearly the first level of the answer.  But if you dig deeper, you come to know that men are capable of completely capable of separating lust-driven intimate activity from any feelings of I’ll-be-there-for-you-type commitment.  Women can do it to varying degrees, but not completely like men can. 

And therein lies the exploitative nature of what Hugh hath wrought.  For fifty-four years, he has put women in photographically artificial situations, inviting men to create impossible scenarios involving the very real bodies of the women sitting at those dining room tables and stepping out of those showers.  It could never be in real life, but men insisted on being able to indulge in the next best thing for the price of a magazine.

It was bound to devolve to the Anna Nicole-level quality of woman.  Yes, you read that right.  I’m setting up levels of class here.  Some of those early women bought into the notion of the possibility of perfectly-healthy-frolic-without-consequence, but that was all gone by the time Anna Nicole came along.

And now we have this beyond-disgusting media circus surrounding this dead druggie Playmate, and the founder of the empire that made her career possible living out his last days holed up in his mansion surrounded by a harem of platinum-and-sylicon-enhanced twits who wouldn’t warrant the attention of the floor-sweeper at your local pizza parlor were it not for their willingness to undergo the procedures necessary to make them important to the most vile creatures among us.

I think about human sexuality a lot.  That’s different from thinking about sex, which I also do a lot.  (And therein lies the rub.  Oh, man!  I shouldn’t make puns about such a touchy subject.  Whoops!  Did it again.)

It’s such a powerful force.  It clearly has spiritual implications.

Let’s illustrate this with a simple scenario.  It’s pretty easy for the average man to envision himself in a hot tub with a bevy of exquisite babes, and everybody in a state of undress, giggling, cavorting. 

Now, the libertatian would assess the situation with a remark along these lines:  “Well, it looks like everyone is enjoying himself or herself.  It’s nobody’s business if they want to pass the time that way.”

The libertarian with a pronounced horndog streak would probably elaborate further: “It looks like they’ve discovered something very beautiful there.  Nothing violent or kinky, no one’s paying for anything.  Who is anyone else to say that all those people aren’t finding deep fulfillment?”

 Well, you have to ponder the matter for a while to see that the damge being done is more subtle and long-term in its effects than, say, violence would be.

Damage, you say?  What could be damaging about this?

 Well, it’s scientifically proven that a man can completely separate libidinous urges from the kind of warm connection that leads to the kind of bonding that entails loyalty through thick and thin and the desire for a friendship component to a relationship.  Women can separate the two to varying degrees - sometimes to a great degree - but not completely.  Somebody’s going to be disappointed after the above-depicted dalliance.

Then there’s the matter of all parties involved going their separate ways and moving on in life.  What about the partners to whom they do commit later on?  There will be the matter of whether to keep the episode secret or make it part of the life they build.

The libertarian might chime in here and say, “You can’t draw generalizations about human beings like that.  Besides, it’s none of your business how people in that situation would work things out.”

To which I would say, “The effect on the particular bonds formed in this situation have a ripple effect extending outward to relationships and marriages in general.  Once attitudes about something this powerful become lax, it’s nigh impossible to shore up the old norms.  Basic institutions of our civilization begin to crumble as a result.”

I’ve chosen a fairly straightforward example here, but it’s certainly easy to extend it to things like homosexual “marriage,” polygamy and a number of other things that seem to be vying for parity with good old marriage on our sociocultural stage.

Still, sometimes I wonder why God did make our libido such a powerful impulse.