The Great Sexual Taboo

IT’S THE GREAT taboo of our time. It’s eating away at half the population. It’s a political issue waiting for some brave political entrepreneur to grasp. You know what it is.

"I want to spend more time with him, and do stuff like go shopping or see a movie. That would make it a friendship for me. But he says no, because if we do those things, then in his opinion we'd have a relationship--and that's more than he wants. And I'm confused, because it seems like I don't get the 'friend' part, but he still gets the 'benefits.'" It finally dawns on her: "I'm really unhappy about that. It's hard to be with him and then go home and be alone."

Those are the words of “Heather” in Unprotected by Anonymous, MD reviewed by Danielle Crittenden. The patients of Anomymous, MD, are hurting, but what can she do? She can advise them on eating disorders and substance abuse. She can opine about the evils of tanning beds. But there is one subject that she cannot be judgmental about.

You see, young college women all over the nation are hurting themselves because of their “sexual choices.” Unfortunately, when it comes to sexual choices, “few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.” Boys, of course, are instinctively avoiding the modern university, as the male/female ratio keep dipping towards 40/60. In the rebellious way of the male, they naturally rebel against the advice of their betters. But girls are different.

They are following the best advice that modern psychology can offer. They are enjoying their sexual freedom, experimenting, discovering themselves. They can't understand what might be wrong. And yet something is wrong.

The fact is that, whatever they may think they want, most girls do not do well with sexual freedom, sexual experimentation, sexual self-discovery. That is because the sexual life of a woman is not a journey of practice and creative experimentation. The sexual life of a woman is for real.

This is the great question of our age. We have decided that we need to transcend the simple world of rules and traditional roles. People cannot attain their full potential as human beings unless they transcend the rules in original, creative work. In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir asserted that the same applies to women. But what about sex in the life of this “independent woman?”

A woman.. needs... not only to satisfy her sexual desires, but also to enjoy the relaxation and diversion provided by agreeable sexual adventures.

That’s easy to write, but the Beaver understands that this is more easily said than done. She writes for pages about the difficulties of the sexual life of the independent woman.

But we have proceeded in the past half-century on the assumption that there is no problem here, that women can indulge in “agreeable sexual adventures” like any man. And more than that, we have erected a taboo around the question. You are not allowed to discuss it.

This question of women’s sexuality and the agony of the young woman trying to experiment just like she is supposed to is, I suspect, the key political question of the age. If conservatives can understand the question and speak to women about it so that we show that we understand and they feel that we understand, then it’s Katy bar the door.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

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Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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