Double Flee A

Buchwald was a bad scene. Ask anybody who went there. It translates to book forest, but it was more of a Jew-burning place. Anyway, some Jews were there and one of them was a hooker, some were young men, boys, fathers, mothers, the usual. One of the fathers lamented that his son never got to know a woman in the biblical sense, and then he was told that a hooker had just felt charitable and gave some guys a freebie, his son among them. He smiled at this.

I think women have a certain idea about their offspring in this culture, and men have another. An attempt at elaboration (otherwise known as "where it all goes wrong"):

At some point in my reading (which, like the blue lagoon, is broad and shallow but in this case unfairly lacking in a hot, young Brooke Shields), I came across someone's analysis of the evolution of the concept of virtue, which at some point went from being known as primarily male in nature (upstanding, noble, kind) to female (sexually abstemious). The female kind is easier to write country songs about, but it's a lot more, well, shallow, and more boring and lacking in meaningful subtext.

The upshot of this is that men who sleep around are mavericks, alpha males, winners, presidents, quarterbacks. Women who sleep around are harlots. This makes for an obnoxiously simplistic framework of thought, which stops in every direction because of the "character flaws" of the sexually active. That in itself is not a big deal, because there are plenty of people who will think about this a little more than their rhetoric-addicted, accusatory cultural cohorts, but it bifurcates the groups of people who already agree with each other, and renders them unable to communicate with their opponents in any meaningful way. The dialogue is split by ideologies, and the one that makes more sense to me is the liberal one. If they sleep around, which they and everyone else have a right to do a human beings, and it shatters your perception of them as upstanding, then what's to blame, them or you? Some people would love to tackle me right here and say that murder bothers people, too, and theft, and it's a good thing it does. Which I agree with. But sex isn't killing anybody, or taking their stuff. Sex is actually the most meaningful thing a human can do, and the doomed Jewish father in one way or another knew that. A long time ago, there were still vestiges of pre-paternalistic-monotheism floating around, and the world was able to balance itself. Now even the places rife with "sin" are reactions to the mighty power of the people of the word of the lordy, like Tijuana, with its circus-freak-like sex shows in dark, scummy bars. No wonder it feels so meaningless. To underestimate the power of religion in our lives is a pretty dumb mistake. It is stitched into everything, including the disneyfied garbage our culture paves over everything else in the world in the name of capitalism, which is killing the planet's cultural interestingness.

I always do that. Sorry. Anyway, sleep with who you like and let nature decide if it was a bad idea. There is no such thing as a soul, DNA is using us to replicate itself, and what happens to us really doesn't matter at all. Love, which there should be three hundred separate words for, is largely fake, an illusion brought on by nature to facilitate the protection of offspring from harm, and is being co-opted by the mass media to create mercantilism where it doesn't belong. Gone are the days of quilting, here to replace it are the gawdy trinkets of celebrity and the products of slave-labor at low, low prices.

The celebration of gallantry is much better than the celebration of the virginal. The gossipy, tedious "who's boinkin' who" routine that we know so well is the only thing that emerges out of the primarily "female" assessment of virtue.

It doesn't (or maybe didn't is more accurate) have to be this way. I think it's pretty clear who I blame for this state of affairs.

Men and women alike should try to hurl their children, both male and female, into adulthood. Right at puberty, just throw them out there and let the chips fall as they may. The die that is cast can't be called back to the hand, and by the time puberty rolls around, childhood is well gone. There is an overprotection going on that is unsustainable, a hothouse of coddling that is temporally grandiose to the point of absurdity. We'd be better off with children that were taught lessons of "masculine" virtue and led to make sexual decisions based on them than vice versa. Obviously. But the Britney Spears money and sex factory likes things the way they are. If sex isn't sensationalized, is left as it is, which is common and normal notwithstanding the synthetic hoopla, nobody makes a buck on porn, strippers are no big deal, and the music industry would be forced to make actual music rather than dangle a Christina Aguilera, who demonstrates the masterful control of her sphincter for the world to see, in front of misinformed, agog young people who are sheltered from the realities of reproduction till it's too late to make a good decision.

All of which is a long way of saying the way that Jewish father saw his son's getting laid as a good thing is the right way to go about things in general.

posted by dale @ 11:21 AM