Laura Wood on how to revive marriage

A reader named Joel says to Laura Wood, The Thinking Housewife, that for conservatives to insist on sex within marriage, at a time in history when the age of marriage keeps increasing, means to tell people they shouldn’t have sex until they’re 35, a demand that results in young urban people rejecting conservatism out of hand. He says that younger people “chafe at preachy conservatives who lecture them on how they should live their lives, yet refuse to address the necessary social institutions to live such lives.” Laura, who like Odysseus is never at a loss, replies that she has addressed the necessary social changes, such as bringing back discrimination against women in employment, which would have the multiple beneficial effects on society of scaling back female employment and encouraging women to marry at a younger age, while also improving the income of men and their ability to support a family.

In a follow-up entry Joel says that Laura’s proposals to encourage marriage at an earlier age, while good ideas in themselves, are not electorally viable. To which Laura replies:

Go ahead and stay within the confines of what a corrupt electorate will approve. You will go mad and watch Rome burn as you do.

And as for the difficulties of marriage, Laura’s reply is: just do it.

- end of initial entry -

Alan Roebuck writes:

Apropos Laura’s conversation with her commenter Joel, just a few days ago I posted the following at Mangan’s:

Dennis,

You said:

“Perhaps any suggestion that sexual frustration or lack of marital prospects had anything to do with the Hasan case is repugnant to [Auster.] After all, even now most conservatives refuse to recognize the baleful outlook of young men in this country—but why that is, I’m not sure.”

As a traditionalist conservative, I’m interested in the challenge issued by Gamers that we Tradcons do not have enough sympathy for all the young men who cannot achieve normal sexual happiness by marrying. You say, in effect, “At least we’re giving men a technique for obtaining a measure of happiness; you guys have nothing to offer young men except allegiance to a traditional system that no longer exists.”

So what would I say to a young man contemplating the current sexual dystopia? I’d say this:

“Young man, you have to make a choice. You have enough awareness to know that the current social order of America is radically unjust and disordered, so you’ll have to decide whether to play according to the false and degenerate rules of the current liberal order, or to seek out a remnant of a better order. If life is primarily about getting what you want, then by all means, master the rules of Game. But if you want to live better, you need to seek out people (especially women) who reject the current disorder, and who acknowledge and seek to live according to a better order, one that reflects truths about man, society and God.

“These people are usually called ‘fundamentalist Christians,’ but why would you trust a label given by the people who are busy destroying our nation in the name of their false and often evil ideals? Indeed, many people who seek to live in accordance with better ideals are not ‘fundamentalists’ according to any sane definition of the term, and some of them are barely Christians at all. But they do exist, and they can be found if you make the effort.

“Looking just to get laid is the outlook of a sissy boy. If you want to be a man (and of course you should), you need to reject the childish hedonism in which liberalism wants you to wallow.

“And think of it: if enough young men do as I’m counseling, then the liberal order will start to collapse for lack of enough competent people to maintain it. And then you’ll have the last laugh.”

LA replies:

That’s an excellent statement.

However, are we to understand from Mangan’s comment that he believes that Hasan committed the mass murder out of sexual frustration? If so, it shows how the material reductive point of view that Mangan has embraced tends to become an ideology, a single formula to answer all questions. Perhaps Mangan also believes that Muhammad wrote the Koran and created the Islamic religion out of sexual frustration. (Hmm, but how could that be, since Muhammad had an ever increasing number of wives and female sex slaves? Perhaps Mangan believes the Omar the Second Caliph conquered the Mideast and Egypt out of sexual frustration. Hmm, but how could that be, since Omar was also getting plenty? If the founders of Islam and the Islamic empire were not driven by sexual frustration, why should we believe that any particular jihadist embraced jihad out of sexual frustration rather than out of, uh, you know, belief in Islam?

The biological dimension of human nature and of human culture is very important. But once people adopt the Human Biodiversity Ideology which tries to explain all human phenomena in biological terms, they become essentially useless in a political and intellectual sense, because no polity has ever been based solely or primarily on biology, and no useful intellectual understandings of social and cultural phenomena have ever been based solely on biology. In the strongest terms possible, I urge those who are interested in HBD not to treat HBD as their all-inclusive world view. They could start by not reducing jihad to sexual desire.

November 20

Gintas writes:

Sexual frustration?? Sometimes an exploding cigar is just an exploding cigar.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 19, 2009 07:01 PM | Send