The [you know what] thread -- male version

So does "living by Christian standards of virtue" include calling people you disapprove of nasty names (regardless of the relative level of crudity you personally assign to the words 'slut' and 'skank')? I don't recall Christ ever doing that. Nor do I recall him demeaning women, especially over something as trivial as their fashion choices. Did Christ hang out with the prostitutes and other outcasts because it fed his ego to feel superior to them? I doubt it.
Your "traditional moral code" looks decidedly amoral to me.

I'm going to temporarily shut down this thread to avoid porn spammers and their ilk, at least overnight.

Actually, I would say it is not 'technically precise', since 'slut' (besides the archaic 'slovenly woman') means, according to American Heritage Dictionary, 'a sexually immoral woman, a prostitute'. (Which does seem to be a bit more of an insult than Rod thought it was.)

Last I heard, wearing revealing clothing OR having a tattoo, neither one, constitute sexual immorality or engaging in prostitution.

You may think it indicates that, but that would be an inference, not something generally considered to be 'technically precise'.

I was very fortunate to be a virgin when I married, as was my wife. I became a Christian in my college years, and my new perspective on morality preserved me. But before then, as a high schooler and as a college freshman and sophormore, if the opportunity had presented itself I would have taken it. I simply never was able to "go all the way." I now consider myself very lucky (or more accurately, I'm grateful for having been preserved by someone looking out for me, despite myself).

But this was in the 1980's, and the pressure was already there. In my high school, many of my friends slept around. In college, the students who were not sexually active were topics of laughter. Everything in the environment pressured you to go ahead, including off-the-hand comments from professors.

Now, it's much, much worse. I can scarcely believe it when I hear about what young people have to deal with today. It's almost a miracle some high school students and college students are able to preserve themselves at all. And I greatly fear for my daughters. They're still young, and haven't yet come into much contact with today's youth culture. But I see it coming.

That's one reason I continue to read this blog: solace. It's good to know that I'm not alone.

You also face one of the hottest questions in American life today: Do you believe that sex outside of marriage is a sin? Not illegal or something, but a SIN.

The word that comes to mind for promiscuous males is "player." Or "Daddy."

What disturbed me most about your comments on the other post is that you would prefer she fake it so that you could feel better about what? Her wearing a white dress? Her refusing to bear the burden of "purity" alone? Obviously the unwed pregnancy rate and abortion rate would not be what it is if she actually believed in the ideal. I'm glad you will try to teach your sons that the double standard is unacceptable. May I suggest you do so by teaching them that they have value, that the women in their lives have value, that sexual intercourse has value, and that no matter what outside forces may say to the contrary if they value all three enough to protect the intimacy of sexual intercourse with a lifetime commitment of love, respect, and mutual submission they will experience a depth of knowing and being known that cannot be matched.
To rombald--Whose daughters should have had fathers who converted to Hinduism when your sons are being "nice and nonexploitative" (as if that's even possible)?

Until "The Left" realizes the decay and death that "they" have caused, nothing will ever change. You cruise by Cosmopolatin magazine at the market and sexual promiscuity is on the cover. Vanity Fair, Vogue et al, sexuality is inside the covers. TV chanel after TV channel, sexual promiscuity from show to show.

In our schools from K through PhD, sexual promiscuity is the thing to do. Freely, openly "safely."

Until the populave is shown the Humanism driving the western world, and how evil it truly is, not one thing is going to change except the number of shattered people living "progressive" lives.

Hey whadda ya know, I'm not censored here. I meant: until the populace is shown the Humanism driving the western world, and how evil it truly is . . .

As someone who had "complications" :-) in my sexual development and spirituality, I can wholeheartedly agree with much of what Rod writes about the various landmines that a boy must navigate on his way to sexual and spiritual adulthood. Of course, being the ungainly, plump, unendowed, unathletic boy that I was, I had tremendous (and crippling in many ways) envy for the boys who seemed to have it all.

It was only in my 30s, when I started a process of spiritual recovery and reconciliation) that I had the rather surprising (and healing) insight that many of those boys/men who seemed to have it all were victims of their own success and just as hamstrung in ways of thinking about and valuing themselves, thinking about and valuing others, and experiencing sex, as I was. And my twisted thinking had for so long denied these people their humanity because my envy denied that they could have meaningful problems or struggles in their lives. After all, they were beautiful, they had everything I seemed to lack -- how could they have problems?

I have no particular dogma or drum to beat on this topic, just a hope that those who smoothly navigated the landmines and arrived "intact" can fully know and be grateful for the precious gift they received, that those of us who sustained injury but are recovering are grateful for that recovery, and that those struggling with (or denying) their injuries will be graced with healing.

Just a point of clarification:

Third, even if she were a prostitute, instead of a married lady, I seem to recall that Jesus himself had mercy for fallen women, including his dear friend Mary Magdelen, and urged others not to throw stones.

...and then immediately said to the woman they were about to stone and said, "Go and sin no more."

Just since that's half of the story that usually gets conveniently omitted...

Richard

"I don't change my judgment of her cheap morals and her bad manners, but I do wish I hadn't used that word."

So you'll use "nicer" language in the future to express the same hateful medieval opinions?

Then you haven't really learned anything, have you?

The important word in any discussion of sexual relationships is "respect." Calling a woman"cheap" and accusing her of "bad manners" just because she hasn't repressed he sexuality sufficiently to suit your prudishness isn't very respectful.

I reflect the comment above by Reader John that this discussion is so far reaching that one could type all day....

I'm glad that you brought up the male perspective. I think at surface level it is equally true that neither men nor women have a supportive community any longer that takes their celibacy until marriage as a 'norm' and therefore something to support. But I also think that scratch the surface, and women will have more support in this area if they can get over the initial resistance to it (internally and culturally). The double standard lurks just under the insidious egalitarianess (is that a word?) of what Francis Beckwith above called 'the unconnected self of the sexual revolution'.

The sad thing is, we all pay the price for it in brokenness and a lack of deep knowing of how to be in relationship to each other.

Hermit: The important word in any discussion of sexual relationships is "respect." Calling a woman"cheap" and accusing her of "bad manners" just because she hasn't repressed he sexuality sufficiently to suit your prudishness isn't very respectful.

Blah blah blah. You're not going to get me to say that sin isn't sin by appealing to modern manners. The essential difference here is that you don't believe sexuality should be repressed to fit a certain code -- to do so is "prudishness" -- and I, as a Christian, do. A man or a woman who behaves in a sexually loose way, or advocates doing so, loses respect in my eyes. There's no changing that. Just as my assertion of a certain standard of sexual morality you find too restrictive causes you to lose respect for me. Big deal. Let's move on. Let's discuss standards of sexuality as they apply to male behavior -- that's why I started this thread.

I became a serious Christian in my 20s, and changed my behavior (let the reader understand).

That change in behavior evidently didn't include using insulting names for women on your blog.

You don't claim to be a gentleman, so I can't fault you for not acting like one. But you do claim to be a Christian, so perhaps you ought to start acting like one.

One of the more interesting aspects to this state of affairs (no pun intended) is that while the range of acceptable sexual expression has been expanded by the State/media apparatus, the acceptable range of POLITICAL expression has become radically narrowed. Indeed, any kind of self-restraint or self-imposed restrictions on personal conduct is becoming increasingly (and deliberately) discouraged....I seriously doubt that this is coincidence.

It's happened before. Any conservative who is historically-minded (and there shouldn't be any ones who aren't--it's practically a prerequisite) ought to take a gander at the experience of the French "Second Empire" of Napoleon III (1852-1870). Porn, and lots of it, along with a mainstreaming of a culture of prostitution among the middle classes (apart from the very rich and very poor where it is always universal) served as the "bread and circuses" that helped the regime avoid a lot of political unrest as civil liberties and civil society were progressively eroded.

It all ended in tears of course. When the shock to the system happened , in their case a complete defeat in war, the society that was left proved unable to withstand the postwar turmoil. The Third Republic, for most of its existence, was extremely fragile.

"What it fundamentally comes down to is whether or not there is any such thing as honor, and if so, whether it has anything to do with sexual behavior"

I hate to break it to you, but a smug feeling of superiority is not the same as honor, but I guess that's what passes for it in conservative circles these days. And pecking through the paper looking for people to disapprove of isn't the most honorable of activities.

Two things: As someone who has studying the ancient and medieval world, this idea that men cannot control themselves and women are objects of lust is a fairly new idea. In the ancient world men were considered to be more logical and therefore less likely to be taken at the whim of emotion. Women were considered to be more emotional and more interested in sex than men. Men were the ideal of beauty. I think it flipped during the Victorian era. I agree to whoever said that it was more Latin than Christian. Remember that Christianity was adopted by Rome and Rome was Roman before it was Christian. (And if you ask me, continued to be quite Roman long after.)

Young women have one advantage young men do not: if young women choose to be sexually pure, they may be thought of as goody two-shoes, but most everybody respects them, deep down, whether they'll admit it or not. Especially boys....

This is very true. I got married at 28 and was probably the oldest virigin in the tri-state area. I was working at a liberal college at the time and the college students there thought that I was differnt, but cool. They all wanted to be chaste, too, even the gay ones! (Of course, chastity without context doesn't work and none of them really were chaste.) My now husband, who was 36 and abstaining at the time, was congratulated by men at work for "finally gettin' some" when we started dating. "Well, actually..." he'd say. Very odd, very odd. Not cool. Weird, in fact.

Rod, keep on keeping on. Try not to get bogged down in providing justifications to people who have no intention to comprehend them.

And for those who fit that shoe: I have disagreed with Rod on every major point in this and the previous thread.

In no particular order:

1) Female sexuality for centuries was seen as the property of males. Before someone decides to go all PC on me, that is an observation, not a value judgment. Take a look at the concept of primogeniture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primogeniture , and you'll see one major influnce on that: a man just had to have a guarantee that the son born to his wife was actually his biological offspring. The Jewish practice of tracing ancestry through the mother is a similar manifestation. Pre-nuptual female virginity was not (just) a moral requirement, it was an economic and political one.

2) Wanting to avoid all of the "you don't understand Christianity, Franklin" knee-jerk reactions for this one: please consider the practical interface between a Christian (really, any religious) admonition concerning sexual behavior and the phrase "being in the world". Think, for a moment, what being disconnected from the world can mean. Try to understand that there needs to be a strong dividing line between protecting a child that is helpless and making that child into a helpless adult. And, truly meant with respect, I am simply flabbergasted at the whole implication that the Christian faith is not strong enough to protect a believer in a world of temptations, and that the blame -- an arguable term -- is to be placed on the existence of those temptations, and that the first order of business is to destroy those temptations.

Censorship, disapprobation, the whole culture/morality war thing, boils down to what I hope is a neutral summary of #2: I don't see those things as of any deliberate benefit towards me, though it is usually packaged that way; I see those things as ways for people who don't trust their own moral integrity to protect themselves from failing, and to avoid looking like failures of their responsibilities to the next generation.

These individuals see Ms. DaSilva not as a person to be wished well in her upcoming marriage, but as a thing to be discussed and an archetype to be scorned.

Oh for Pete's sake, John, your indignation only depends on whose ox is being gored. We talk all the time about people in the public eye as exemplars of this or that social trend, or stance on an issue. If I say President Bush is a disgraceful example of a politician misusing power, I don't see anybody rushing to accuse me and those who agree with me of not seeing the president as a person to be wished well in his presidency, but as a thing to be discussed and an archetype to be scorned.

I get that you disagree with me and others. Fine. But don't make your disagreement into anything more than it is, or somehow set this woman -- who after all, chose to give an interview to the New York Times to promote her point of view -- apart as somehow immune to the judgments of the public. It is childish to expect to flaunt convention, but not to be judged for so doing. It's like the artists who make plays condemning the wickedness of bourgeois capitalist society, but expect taxpayers to subsidize their saying, "F--k you."

Franklin,

With all due respect (and I have tremendous respect for both your ideas and the way you communicate them), it is an unfair simplification to distill censorship and disapprobation as "self-protection" against one's own weak moral integrity.

Granted, there have been any number of public scolds whose private behavor gives the lie to their public rhetoric and who may fit your mould, but you would hopefully allow that there are those who have been burned and now simplty try to keep others from being burned in the same way, and hopefully you would allow that there are those whose senses warned them away from getting burned in the first place and now are raising a warning?

>>>
The thing that sticks in my craw, Rod, is that you and others see her as "promoting" a point of view. I see that as a direct application of my point #2 above. I get that she represents a point of view. I don't get ascribing to her even a hint of nefarious intent.
Posted by: Franklin Evans | February 22, 2008 10:51 AM
>>>

>>>
The only thing you know about the woman in the article is that she isn't ashamed of her sexuality. You don't know anything about her behaviour.
Posted by: A Hermit | February 22, 2008 11:03 AM
>>>

These guys get it, Rod.

>>>
If I say President Bush is a disgraceful example of a politician misusing power, I don't see anybody rushing to accuse me and those who agree with me of not seeing the president as a person to be wished well in his presidency, but as a thing to be discussed and an archetype to be scorned.
>>>

The difference between Ms. DaSilva and President Bush is that we can point to specific examples of President Bush's misuse of power, but we cannot point to specific examples of Ms. DaSilva acting like a slut.

My wife took me to task long ago when I chose to characterize a woman behaving in a certain fashion as a slut. She rightly pointed out that pity would be the more appropriate response. Point taken and applied. That said, I do think it's tacky to display a lot of flesh on one's wedding day. I am grateful that neither my daughter, nor my daughters in law, provided any winceable moments at their weddings. Proverbs 31.

Franklin,

Maybe the way to understand this is to take a less controversial but omnipresent thing like alchohol and explore the journey we've had around this topic.

Alcohol perhaps has many of the same characteristics of sex. It is present in many "ritual" moments in life. There is a culture that glamorizes it; there is a set of "Carrie Nation" types who railed against drunken-ness, how effectually is a legitimate question (one suspects not very); there are a set of people who call themselves alcoholics who recognize that unlike most people they know, they cannot control their drinking behavior once they start. There are people whose religious beliefs give them a personal call to abstain from alchohol entirely.

How we talk and enjoy alcohol today is different, I think, from years past. There is more respect for its power and possibilities of misuse; the culture has assumed a bit more responsibility for the messages it sends about alcohol and the pressure it places on people to drink (and support them in not drinking); the stigma around alcoholism and the skepticism that greeted AA (witness the WB Sylvester/Tweety cartoon "Birds Anonymous" as an example) has been transformed.

It took alcoholics to talk to other alcoholics to make the change. A "Carrie Nation" approach did not work.

If you wish to say that bombastic condemnation from puffed up moral authorities will not help people struggling, I'll add my enthusiastic "Amen". But don't dismiss the power of people sharing their own struggles or the reality that there are people in dire need of hearing those struggles.

Jim, I do see your point, and I agree with you. I do have a couple of (what I consider) non-trivial quibbles with your analogy:

1) Every human can live and thrive without alcohol. With a trivial exception set, no human can live and thrive without sex.

2) The best possible lessons are learned from making one's own mistakes and being unable to avoid dealing with the consequences.

I see my primary job as a parent to stand aside and let my children make non-fatal mistakes (within bounds of reason, of course), and to be ready to save them from fatal mistakes whilst demonstrating to them as vividly as possible exactly from what they have been saved.

We are seeing the advent of a second (maybe third) generation who view all mistakes as evil, and pass from adolescence to adulthood still believing that they are invulnerable and immortal. I ask for your pardon in viewing efforts to perpetuate that approach to life as a direct threat to the lives and well-being of my children. However good the intentions of the perpetrators may be, their attitude still belongs on the road to Hell.

Jim, you are in fact advocating for a clear and unambiguous view. In thanks for your praise of my writing upthread, that should be taken as a clear right back atcha. :-)

We are saying the same thing. I'm just hoping to make clear that my criticism is motivated by those statements, not a contradiction of them. My generational comments are observations, and I am not making the mistake of ascribing them to you... at least, I hope I'm not. ;-)

BTW, back on topic:

I think the word for creepy men would be "perv" or "pervy" (short for perverted), which you already hear among teens and twenty-somethings.

The word I've heard used is "sleaze", or "sleazeball". In my experience, it was used with the same connotations as "slut".

Well, this thread has already zipped ahead! To close the book on my thoughts about Natasha Da Silva and Rod’s ugly smear of her character:

Rod repeats how amazed he was when I equated slut with prostitute; but as I said that’s right out of my trusty Merriam-Webster’s: “a promiscuous woman; esp. prostitute”.

I was never a big SNL fan, and never saw the “Jane you ignorant slut” segment. I’m surprised Rod seems to think it is softer to equate it with skank or hooch, neither of which I’d use either, but seems taken aback by ho. What’s the difference? They’re all ugly words that shouldn’t be used without support if one wants to be considered respectable. For a word that Rod seems to think is commonplace slang, I sure don't hear "slut" used much, not even in any of the PG-13 movies I've seen in the past few years. I suppose Rod's circle is much more cosmopolitan than mine if he's hearing that word frequently.

Rod also doesn’t seem to have taken in to account good old-fashioned chivalry. A man making ugly accusations of a woman about to be married who he doesn’t know anything about, apart from a tattoo, a dress and a fashion comment, should expect other men to want to step forward and defend her honor, shifting the burden of proof on to him. Chivalry may be anachronistic, but as a good traditionalist I’m happy it still rears its head at times.

Now I can actually read this thread and comment on the male side of things!

Bless,
Doug

Rod takes the conversation in an important direction when he mentions honor. What is off about this conversation so far is the degree to which it centers on defining deviance rather than defining the ideal standard. It's hard for me to imagine when I would need to have a vocabulary for sexual dissipation while rearing my sons.

It's no great virtue on my part; it's certainly not a conscious effort. But when we talk about such things we talk about the good, the true and the beautiful. We identify virtuous behavior. We make it interesting and creative. How could one behave virtuously or honorably in a particular situation?

Why talk about how exactly folks go wrong? My karate sensei takes the same approach as an instructor. He doesn't talk much about what people are doing wrong with a particular move. He just shows them over and over again the right move, and tells them to do exactly that.

My priest takes the same approach to evangelism. He talks about common ground and shared beliefs with those of different faiths, enlarging the shared space in which genuine dialogue can happen.

Perhaps it's innocent, or encourages innocence, but my gut feeling is that one (hypothetically, I'm not accusing Rod or anyone else here) can become overly concerned with the ways of wickedness, with categorizing wickedness, and become caught up with it. It's like the comment from Frederica Mathewes-Green that Rod posted a couple of months ago, about her experience of Episcopalians who stayed in their church to fight for the truth and devolved to the point of letting the desire to fight subsume the rest of their fight.

I just prefer to think the best of people, unless there's strong evidence to think otherwise. I doubt I would have reacted at all if Rod had called, say, Paris Hilton a slut. Lord knows there's enough public evidence that that poor girl has consciously embraced a sexually dissolute lifestyle.

So how about a thread about what sexual virtue looks like, rather than what sexual dissolution looks like? It's more interesting and healthy to talk about virtue than vice, isn't it? Or shouldn't it be?

Bless,
Doug

Rod: "The essential difference here is that you don't believe sexuality should be repressed to fit a certain code -- to do so is "prudishness" -- and I, as a Christian, do."

I don't believe that this is the most appropriate language for the Christian understanding of sexuality. We don't believe that sexuality needs to be repressed. We believe rather that sexuality is a part of our being that can only be truly and beautifully expressed in the sacrament of marriage.

It's bound up with the difficulty Westerners often have with the Orthodox conception of fasting. Too many folks use language like "I'm giving this up for Lent." That can be a misleading way of thinking about it.

We don't "repress" our sex; we don't "give up" meat. We consciously, and with great effort, choose to pursue the good, the true and the beautiful. We choose to embrace the living God and the true life He has given us.

Neither men nor women should ever feel that they need to repress their sexuality. They must learn to feel that their sexuality is so significant that it deserves to be expressed in a way that honors and elevates it to its greatest potential.

That's why I don't have a problem with sexy wedding dresses. It's only fashion, for God's sake. I don't accept that a bride's desire to display the sexual potency that she is committing to a lifetime joining with her groom need necessarily negate the underlying Christian context for the sacrament of marriage.

Bless,
Doug

All the haranguing of Rod over this word makes it sound like most readers are extreme feminists or were born in the 1940s. I'm not defending it in any way, but I have heard young women use the term with each other in much the same way men make sexual orientation jokes with friends.

As for men, the main point of this post, they most certainly have a more difficult time with chastity. A guy who is celibate is a cultural oddity and everyone wants to poke and prod your personal life to find out why, or if you're lucky they just assume you're mentally imbalanced and leave it at that. One woman even argued with me that I didn't love an ex because we didn't have sex.

Young women have one advantage young men do not: if young women choose to be sexually pure, they may be thought of as goody two-shoes, but most everybody respects them, deep down, whether they'll admit it or not. Especially boys. However, young men who try to be sexually pure are sent messages constantly from this culture that there is something wrong with them.

Yeah, that's an 'advantage' if you're not paying attention at all.

Of course, what is actually true is that women who do have sex are not respected at all. They have defiled themselves, they have done something that is inherently dirty, and they can never been clean again. So women who have not had sex are, indeed, respected.

However, there are no such things as sluts, there are no such things as virgins, there are just a bunch of people, men and women, who commit different amounts of sexual sin, just like there are a bunch of people, men and women, who commit different amounts of envy or covetness or other sins.

But while everyone seems to see the obvious imbalance between the men and women's treatment of that specific sin, this has now resulted in crazy people arguing that we need to treat men the same way. Um, no.

We don't talk about 'envy sluts' and 'pride sluts', we don't need to pretend that sex is some monumentally important thing that we need to classify levels of behavior and give people credit for never having done it. That is extremely unbiblical.

I've been away from my computer for much of today, but it's certainly been interesting to come back and read this thread.

One question: the NYTimes article labels the women profiled (others besides Ms. DaSilva, btw) in this way: "More vamp than virgin, many are selecting gowns that bare a generous expanse of cleavage, midsection, lower back or thigh, temptress styles that may be better suited to a gala or boudoir than to a church or ballroom."

If Rod had chosen to title the original post "More Vamp Than Virgin," quoting directly from the piece, would we be tearing him (and the times) apart for (indirectly, at least) calling Ms. DaSilva a vamp? Or would we be able to look at the social ramifications of women treating their wedding day as an opportunity to display their (alleged) hotness to any man who wants to view them that way?

Now, for men, I still think "libertine" works. It doesn't carry the creepy connotation of "roue" but implies a man who is indiscriminate in his appetites and careless not only of morality but even of the appearance of honor.

As for the answer to the question of how to raise virtuous boys (an academic one for me thus far) I think that the community really is important, particularly the community of men. Fathers are essential in this role, in making sure their sons understand that it is not acceptable for them to disregard morality in the sexual realm. But it helps if they meet other young men who are being raised the same way. Community does matter; the temptations of the flesh are strong, and we should be equally alarmed by the pressures on boys AND girls to disdain chastity.

Erin:

Casanova was a "libertine."

He was a hero to many men -- and no few women, either. Not saying he SHOULD have been, but nevertheless ...

Rod--
"You're not going to get me to say sis isn't sin by appealing to modern manners" yet you prefer "honoring ideals"
What honor if it's a lie? Saying it is better to bare false witness simply doesn't make sense to me.
Rombald--
You call it a "tough one". Yet it's obviously not tough enough to make the drastic change you said you'd make for your daughters if you had them. Is it just not as important for boys as it is for girls to remain virgins? Is failing to live up to the ideal "relatively less worse" because it's someone else's daughter? Tell me--would your (non-existant) daughter or your son disappoint you more for her/his failure to maintain the idea? And not really meaning to pick on you but is porn better in private because then women (or men as the case might be) aren't devalued quite as much as when we see them on the television with a few more clothes on?
I realize many (including my husband) would call this sexist but the male attitude toward women as property is somewhat responsible for the double standard. As long as I keep "mine" (wives and daughters) safe the rest are up for grabs, literally. As a society we consider it understandable if men have sex (not a relationship), view/use porn (not a real person), "get some" (an acquisition). After all the women these days (how dare they dress is sexy wedding dresses)aren't making it any easier for us to pretend we are virtuous and have high moral standards, at least for our daughters.

Thanks Rod!

To contention in the modern

Hi, I just became a part of this forum here and I would love to be a part of it.
Seriously, love the contribution of the community.

I thought I'd do some contributing of my own and share with you this amazing program i just got into thats making me now about $8000.00 a week and i just started.

check it out http://www.endlesscash365.com

Anyway, enjoy a superior online experience and hope to hang out with you guys more often.

Peace!