In the News recently:
Monday Morning Links
Why Monogamy Matters
I was surprised to come across this article in the New York Times a few days ago. An excerpt:
The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity. Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.
This is what’s at stake, for instance, in debates over abstinence-based sex education. Successful abstinence-based programs (yes, they do exist) don’t necessarily make their teenage participants more likely to save themselves for marriage. But they make them more likely to save themselves for somebody, which in turn increases the odds that their adult sexual lives will be a source of joy rather than sorrow.
Monday Morning Links
Why the Obama Administration is wrong about DOMA
As many
of you know, last week, President Obama’s administration struck down the 1996
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which barred any federal recognition of
same-sex marriage. While President Obama
has always insisted (and continues to insist) that he favors only civil unions for homosexual couples, with the support of
Attorney General Eric Holder, the president’s administration has deemed DOMA unconstitutional.
Citing
the popularly touted reason that DOMA unfairly discriminates against homosexuals,
Holder described the administration’s decision as ‘appropriate, and unique, but
not unprecedented’.
However,
the language of Holder’s opinion on DOMA I think reveals a misunderstanding
concerning the reasons it was originally passed; reasons that show it is a
legitimate and ultimately constitutional legislation. The traditionalist’s
stance against gay marriage has been once concerned with an understanding and a
protection of the nature of marriage, as outlined and explicated in a great deal of articles and papers. A summary of the defense of
traditional marriage isn’t necessary here; what is crucial is that this defense does not choose to discriminate against a
certain group of people. Unlike discriminatory laws and attitudes such as the
ones that prevented African-Americans and women from being able to vote and
participate in the public forum, laws that defend traditional marriage seek to
arrive at the essence of What Marriage Is.
Just as
any just law rules against certain actions (people who steal are sent to jail)
and not against certain people (we don’t punish people who are born with a
natural inclination towards theft), so does DOMA rule against actions and not
people. As such, it does not discriminate against homosexuals at all. I feel that this is what
Holder and the Obama administration miss when they describe DOMA as
discriminatory. Rather, DOMA takes a rigorously defined understanding of
marriage and restricts the federal government from challenging this definition.
Monday Morning Links
Adorno and the Erotic
To extol Adorno to a degree worthy of his philosophical genius would be an impossible task. From Negative Dialectics to The Jargon of Authenticity to The Dialectic of Enlightenment (and many others), Adorno’s works all display his characteristically penetrating insights into and critiques of modern life under late capitalism.
Of none of Adorno’s books is this truer than Minima Moralia, which consists in a collection of aphoristic “reflections on a damaged life.” Although much of the work is concerned with broader social themes, Adorno manages to say quite a bit about marriage and sexuality in this philosophico-literary tour de force. One passage in particular stands out, which is now presented for your intellectual edification:
Inter pares. – In the realm of erotic qualities, a revaluation seems to be occurring. Under liberalism, well into our day, married men from high society who were unsatisfied with their strictly brought up and correct spouses absolved themselves in the company of female artists, bohemians, sugar babies, and cocottes. With the rationalization of society this possibility of unregimented happiness has disappeared. The cocottes are extinct, the sugar babies probably never existed in Anglo-Saxon countries and other lands of technical civilization, while the female artists and those bohemians who exist parasitically in the mass culture are so thoroughly permeated with the latter’s reason, that those who flee in longing to their anarchy, to the free accessibility of their own use-value, are in danger of waking up to the obligation of engaging them as assistants, if not at least recommending them to a film-executive or scriptwriter they know. The only ones who are still capable of something like irrational love are precisely those ladies who the spouses once fled on excursions to Maxim’s. While they are as tiresome to their own husbands, due to the latter’s fault, as their own mothers, they are at least capable of granting to others, what all others have withheld from them. The long since frigid libertine represents business, while the proper and well brought up lady represents yearning and unromantic sexuality. In the end, the ladies of society garner the honor of their dishonor, in the moment when there is no more society and no more ladies.
(The full text of Minima Moralia can be found here: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm )
Continue reading Adorno and the Erotic
“Where Have the Good Men Gone?”
The Wall Street Journal ran this superb article a few days ago, which has (unsurprisingly) become one of its most popular pieces online. While I fully recommend reading the entire article, I included below a few excerpts that particularly struck me.
“They [guys: males who are not boys or men but something in between, as Hymowitz describes them] are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home.”
Though I’d never thought about this before, it seems to me that many of my male acquaintances at Princeton fall far closer than I’d like to the former category.
“Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles–fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity–are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.”
How true.
Monday Morning Links
Of Rabbits and Sex: Anscombe’s Valentine’s Day Poster Campaign
By now most of you will have
noticed the leporine figures gracing lampposts all around campus, and many of
you may be thinking to yourselves, “What on earth are these posters for?” Such is the state of puzzlement that
these loveable lagomorphs may induce.
Once one reads the text of the
posters, however, the matter clears up forthwith. “Not everyone is doing it,” the poster proclaims. But not doing what? The answer: “3 out of 4 Princetonians
had 0-1 sexual partners last year.”
Yes, since Valentine’s Day is once more upon us, the Anscombe Society
is yet again embarking on its annual, campus-wide poster campaign to spread the
good news: being chaste or abstinent isn’t a weird thing. Far from it!
But what have rabbits got to do
with sex? Well, rightly or
wrongly, the rabbit has a reputation for promiscuity in our society, a kind of
infamy that has sedimented into various English idioms (“breeding like rabbits,”
e.g.). But something like this
view of copious copulation also holds of college students. By each other, as well as by the outside culture (Hollywood doesn’t help
here), college students are often seen as promiscuous, hyper-sexualized beings,
and college is likewise taken to be – rather hyperbolically – one giant
orgy.
Of course, this is plainly false – and, indeed, rather absurd. As our
posters boldly announce, “not everyone is doing it.” But what this wildly misguided idea of college life produces
is a condition of what Deborah Prentice, a Princeton psychology professor, has
termed “pluralistic ignorance.”
Professor Prentice’s groundbreaking work has examined the logic of
pluralistic ignorance in relation to alcohol consumption at college. In short: If I think that everyone else
drinks on campus, and everyone else thinks that everyone else drinks on campus,
then what results is a situation in which everyone takes drinking to be the
norm, while few people in fact are drinking. Commonsensical stuff, really.
But the hook-up culture is a
perfect analogue to this. I think
that everyone else is having sex; everyone else thinks that everyone else is
having sex; so what results from this is that sex becomes normative, and anyone
who dissents from this cultural orthodoxy is just a religious fanatic, plain
weird, or worse. This is why the
hook-up culture is primarily a culture,
a climate of thought rather than a set of actions. It’s not that everyone is hooking up all the time (though
many do), but rather that (a) it’s perceived
that this is so, and that (b) this perception produces a scenario in which
students can feel obliged to conform to the putative campus norm.
This situation is extremely
unhealthy. At the most, it
promotes an ethic that runs athwart human flourishing; at the very least, it
stifles students’ sexual agency. With the weight of the hook-up culture bearing down upon them,
students with “traditional” sexual values and lifestyles are either forced to
be silent about their beliefs, marginalized, or pressured into sexual choices
that, free of the campus culture, they would not otherwise make. So it’s not only the human good that’s
at stake, but also the very freedom that students have to shape the course of
their own lives. Extremely
unhealthy indeed.
Self-determining creatures that we are, before us always stands open a
plurality of sexual paths. And
while it’s no secret which path Anscombe would suggest leads to the greatest
human delight and fulfillment, we believe that students should at least not be
forced to adhere to such a procrustean and promiscuous cultural code of
conduct. We’re not rabbits, after
all.