Missed the homework? Here’s that post:
Show Notes
All times are approximate…
7:22 | The book of sermons by George MacDonald is Creation in Christ (selections from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons)
10:00 | “The History of the Job Crisis in the Modern Languages”
14:41 | Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?
14:59 | Catherine MacKinnon (Wikipedia)
15:17 | Carry Nation (Wikipedia)
19:39 | chthonian
24:23 | Sexual Personae (Google Preview)
44:45 | Madonna’s new face (as discussed by George when it happened)
46:52 | Madonna’s book, Sex (Wikipedia)
47:23 | Gender Queer’s explicit sexual/sexual-identity material for adolescents (links to an article that does include some examples)
50:36 | Acton misspoke — it’s not Roger Scruton, it’s Wendell Berry about the privacy of intimacy (from his essay “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community”):
One of the boasts of our century is that its artists— not to mention its psychologists, therapists, anthropologists, sociologists, statisticians, and pornographers—have pried open the bedroom door at last and shown us sexual love for what it "really" is. We have, we assume, cracked the shell of sexual privacy. The resulting implication that the shell is easily cracked disguises the probability that the shell is, in fact, not crackable at all and that what we have seen displayed is not private or intimate sex, not sexual love, but sex reduced, degraded, oversimplified, and misrepresented by the very intention to display it. Sex publicly displayed is public sex. Sex observed is not private or intimate and cannot be.
Could a voyeur conceivably crack the shell? No, for voyeurs are the most handicapped of all the sexual observers; they know only what they see. True intimacy, even assuming that it can be observed, cannot be known by an outsider and cannot be shown. An artist who undertakes to show the most intimate union of lovers—even assuming that the artist is one of the lovers—can only represent what she or he alone thinks it is. The intimacy, the union itself, remains unobserved. One cannot enter into this intimacy and watch it at the same time, any more than the mind can think about itself while it thinks about something else.
Is sexual love, then, not a legitimate subject of the imagination? It is. But the work of the imagination does not require that the shell be cracked. From Homer to Shakespeare, from the Bible to Jane Austen, we have many imaginings of the intimacy and power of sexual love that have respected absolutely its essential privacy and thus have preserved its intimacy and honored its dignity.
The essential and inscrutable privacy of sexual love is the sign both of its mystery and sanctity and of its humorousness.
56:10 | The conclusion of Louise Perry’s Case Against the Sexual Revolution is entitled “Listen to your mother”
1:08:40 | Our episode on Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man
1:10:42 | “Some Like It Bot” (Bill Maher, “New Rules,” 14 Feb 2025)
1:15:18 | Lily Phillips
Louise Perry ($)
The Spectator (video)
1:18:51 | What Acton watched
Quotes
Book overview: hits and misses…
The Return of Carry Nation: Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin (1992)
I am a pornographer. From earliest childhood, I saw sex suffusing the world. I felt the rhythms of nature and the aggressive energies of animal life. Art objects, in both museum and church, seemed to blaze with sensual beauty. The authority figures of church, school, and family denied or suppressed what I saw, but like Madonna, I kept to my pagan vision. I belong to the Sixties generation that tried and failed to shatter all sexual norms and taboos. In my book, Sexual Personae, I injected lewdness, voyeurism, homoeroticism and sadomasochism into the entire Western high-art tradition. (85)
Losing the battle with nature — and winning the war
Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art (1990)
Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first. There are hierarchies in nature and alternate hierarchies in society. In nature, brute force is often the law. In society, there are protections for the weak. Society is our frail barrier against nature. When the prestige of state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave themselves, through drugs or depression. My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind. Romanticism always turns into decadence. Nature is a hard taskmaster. It is the hammer and the anvil, crushing individuality. Perfect freedom would be to die by earth, air, water, and fire. (6)
[...]
Every model of morally or politically correct sexual behavior will be subverted [emphasis hers], by nature’s daemonic law. Every hour of every day, some horror is being committed somewhere. Feminism, arguing from the milder woman’s view, completely misses the blood-lust in rape, the joy of violation and destruction. An aesthetics and erotics of profanation — evil for the sake of evil, the sharpening of the senses by cruelty and torture — have been documented in Sade, Baudelaire, and Huysmans. Women may be less prone to such fantasies because they physically lack the equipment for sexual violence. They do not know the temptation of forcibly invading the sanctuary of another body.
Our knowledge of these fantasies is expanded by pornography, which is why pornography should be tolerated, though its public display may reasonably be restricted. The imagination cannot and must not be policed. Pornography shows us nature’s daemonic heart, those eternal forces at work beneath and beyond social convention. Pornography cannot be separated from art; the two interpenetrate each other, far more than humanistic criticism has admitted. Geoffrey Hartman rightly says, “Great art is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography.” Hamlet itself, the cardinal Western work, is full of lewdness. Criminals through history, from Nero to Caligula to Gilles de Rais and the Nazi commandants, have never needed pornography to stimulate their exquisite, gruesome inventiveness. The diabolic human mind is quite enough. (36)
[…and the essay continues…]
Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong. System and order shelter us against sex and nature. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the chaos of sex has broken into the open. […] Historiography’s most glaring error has been its assertion that Judea-Christianity defeated paganism. Paganism has survived in the thousand forms of sex, art, and now the modern media. Christianity has made adjustment after adjustment, ingeniously absorbing its opposition (as during the Italian Renaissance) and diluting its dogma to change with changing times. But a critical point has been reached. With the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture, with the eruption of sex and violence into every corner of the ubiquitous mass media, Judea-Christianity is facing its most serious challenge since Europe’s confrontation with Islam in the Middle Ages. The latent paganism of western culture has burst forth again in all its daemonic vitality. (see the Google Books preview)
Madonna/Horrible
Madonna: Animality and Artifice (1990)
Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny — all at the same time. (50)
The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil (2014)
Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cell phones or iPods in public places: the ancient crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.
[…]
The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.
[...]
There is a ritualistic symbolism at work in sex crime that most women do not grasp and therefore cannot arm themselves against. It is well-established that the visual faculties play a bigger role in male sexuality, which accounts for the greater male interest in pornography. The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey. (259, 260-1)
The popular feminism of women who like men (and want babies)
The Modern Battle of the Sexes (1998)
If I were asked what or whom should be put into a time capsule as a legacy of the twentieth century, I would name three emblematic women: Amelia Earhart, who conquered the world of masculine adventure; Katherine Hepburn, who embodied in life and film an enormous range of authoritative female personae; and Germaine Greer at her debut and high point. These three would symbolize the new twentieth-century woman.
Having said that, I must note what is missing from this triad. All these women were childless. Here is one of the great dilemmas facing women at the end of the century. Second-wave feminist rhetoric placed blame for the female condition entirely on men, or specifically on “patriarchy,’ an overused and nebulous term that might well apply to Republican Rome or Victorian England but is historically specious and should be discarded. The exclusive focus of feminism was on an external social mechanism that had to be smashed or reformed. It failed to take into account women’s intricate connection with nature — that is, with procreation. (132)
[...]
Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of the mother in human life. Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts. There was a rational division of labor from the hunter and gatherer period that had its roots not in the male desire to subjugate and imprison but in the procreative burden which has fallen on women from nature. It is woman who bear most of the responsibility in the process of procreation. The male contribution to procreation is momentary, a mere pinprick, but the human female makes an enormous investment in the nine months of pregnancy, which could formerly not be forestalled or controlled as it can today. [...] In early history, women in advanced pregnancy or just after childbirth were extraordinarily vulnerable; they could not fend for themselves and required the protection of men. Feminist theory has been grossly unfair to men in refusing to acknowledge the enormous care that most men have provided to women and children. The atrocious exceptions have been used by feminist theorists to blame all men, when over the whole of human history, men have given heroically of their energy and labor and indeed their lives to benefit and protect women and children. [...] Feminism cannot continue with this poisoned rhetoric—it is disastrous for young women to be indoctrinated to think in that negative way about men.
When men step out of line, women should deal with it on the spot. Most men are cowed by women! Any woman worth her salt should know how to deal with men and put them in their place. Women must demand respect, and over time, they will get it. (133-4) [... several pages later…] Woman possesses the greatest power that exists. In my system, women is strong, and man is weak. Most successful heterosexual women know this and have pity on and compassion for men. They like men. They want men to be strong, and they know that the only way to make them strong is to pay attention to them. What most men are looking for is female attention and female approval. How simple men are! When women are encouraged to think that they are powerless, we are destroying their ability to recognize reality and to triumph in their own terms. (139)
The pro-choice, pro-life position — a middle way?
On Abortion (2016)
Abortion has been central to the agenda of second-wave feminism since the 1972 issue of Ms. magazine which contained a splashy declaration, “We have had abortions,” signed by 53 prominent American women. A recurrent rubric of contemporary feminism is Gloria Steinem’s snide jibe (which she claims to have heard from an old Irish woman taxi driver in Boston), “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” But Steinem herself can be credited or blamed for having turned abortion into a sacrament, promoted with the same religiosity that she and her colleagues condemn in their devoutly Christian opponents.
[...] Although I am an atheist who worships only great nature, I recognize the superior moral beauty of religious doctrine that defends the sanctity of life. The quality of idea and language in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, exceeds anything in grimly utilitarian feminism. [...] In “No Law in the Arena,” I argued from the point of view of pre-Christian paganism, where abortion was accepted and widespread. “My code of modern Amazonism says that nature’s fascist scheme of menstruation and procreation should be defied, as a gross infringement of woman’s free will… As a libertarian, I support unrestricted access to abortion because I have reasoned that my absolute right to my body takes precedence over the brute claims of mother nature, who wants to reduce women to their animal function as breeders.” (279, 282-3)
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