RamZPaul discusses whether or not feminism has anything to do with the 'bad girl' epidemic of today, and how, if at all, it affects the ''AltRight." I offer my thoughts here rather than in his comment box because for some reason I cannot always get a comment to post on Blogger. The issue requires more than a couple of sentences in response, anyway.
First, I will agree with RamZPaul that 'bad girls' have always existed, because human nature has always contained the potential for bad behaviors. However, I disagree that things were 'no better in the old days.' This is an often-heard sentiment these days, though it's most often to be heard from liberals, who believe the old days to be worthy only of condemnation. After all, the 'old days' is where all the sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, bigots, prudes, and hypocrites resided, and therefore the old days have to be spat on at every turn. Popular culture constantly depicts the old days in a sneering fashion, or didactic tones. One example: the movie 'Pleasantville', which was apparently a critical success but was nonetheless a blatant piece of propaganda, meant to deride sexual restraint and morality as 'repression', something that robbed life of color and fulfillment. The answer was for everybody to learn to break the rules with gusto, and really live. The past of Pleasantville was a heavy-handed caricature of what real 1950s America was, but then when most movie viewers of today have no first-hand knowledge of life before cultural Marxism destroyed everything, few question this negative view of the past.
Feminism is, in fact, in large part responsible for much of the sluttishness which is prevalent among women today. It isn't just the younger women; it's across age groups. Even 'Christian' girls and women of my acquaintance are almost as casual about sex and as lacking in modesty as are the non-believing ones. The Church (by which I mean all organized Christianity) has failed to teach young people about sexual restraint or modesty -- but then, even if they tried, the siren call of the media and of course the wide-open public square 'educate' young people about hedonism and so-called 'sexual freedom' at a very young age. Children in grade school are more sexually savvy than most high-school students were in the 1950s.
Does that mean that there was no bad behavior and no 'bad girls' back in that pre-feminist era? Of course not; I concede that. But as with any generalizations, it's a question of percentages or proportions. The 'bad girls' in the 1930s, for example (RamZPaul uses an image of female outlaw Bonnie Parker as an illustration of the presence of bad girls in that era) were a smaller subset of girls then, and what is more important, there was a strong social stigma attached to the behavior of such girls and women. Bonnie Parker no doubt was already considered beyond the pale when she took up with her partner-in-crime Clyde Barrow. Women and girls knew then that when they adopted a certain kind of persona and lifestyle, they forfeited social respect. Nowadays, no stigma attaches to the worst behaviors among women and young girls. Look at the female celebrities who are most popular. Sluttish behavior is described as ''empowering'', and women who flaunt such attitudes are admired and rewarded. This is all the fruit of feminism, and feminists have made being a 'slut' a good thing.
The act of admiring and rewarding any behavior will reinforce it and produce more of it.
Young girls today don't see anything demeaning about, say, becoming a stripper. A young 'Christian' woman I know said that she saw nothing wrong or immoral about stripping, and that it's ''just another way of making a living, and it pays better than most jobs.'' Even prostitution is now labeled euphemistically as ''the sex industry." How is that for removing the element of morality from the equation?
Back in the old days (or the 'not-so-good-old-days', depending on your point of view) most people would have agreed with what I am writing here, where morality is concerned. Now, thanks to leftist social engineering and propaganda, of which feminism was a big part, views like those I'm expressing are judged as 'prudish' or 'old-fashioned.' Almost everybody now believes that it's better to be without any restraints at all than to be ''repressed", as they insist people of the past were.
Society is decidedly worse today by all objective measures, such as prevalence of STDs, infertility resulting directly from those STDs, marriage and divorce rates, low birth rates amongst our folk, teen pregnancy and abortion, and 'mental illness' rates. Just count the number of people you know who are on some kind of psychoactive drug. None of this reflects improvement in society over the decades; quite the opposite.
In the past, too, there was no such mass phenomenon as 'self-hating' Whites, wiggerized teens and young people, or out-of-control immigration, tolerated by a passive population. This doesn't indicate a healthier society, in comparison with the past. With all the talk about 'personal self-esteem', why don't we as a people think more of ourselves? What's needed is not phony self-esteem, but self-respect, which is a different thing. Being worthy of respect leads to respecting oneself and one's own. And women should be at the heart of raising children with the right attitudes to life and themselves. I wonder, too, if young people raised without any personal boundaries -- for example, girls who are promiscuous, who let their private space be invaded so easily, grow up to be people who think there should be no boundaries in the wider world -- that we should tolerate anything and anyone, in the name of 'openness.' Isn't promiscuity just a personal and unhealthy kind of 'openness'? It reflects our society.
I think the left has done a spectacular job of getting most Americans, especially those too young to remember, to believe the past was a dystopian place, not fit for today's ''enlightened'' people to live in. Above all, they don't want anyone to respect the past or the people of past eras. Tearing down the past, comparing it unfavorably to today's chaotic world, is part of their plan. If we have nothing left worth reviving from the past, much less preserving what remnants are left, then the social engineers can go on remaking the world in their ugly image.
If the AltRight considers it desirable to incorporate a lot of the left's social attitudes in order to succeed amongst the younger generations, then they've already compromised themselves to the extent that they cannot provide a healthy alternative to this unacceptable mess we find ourselves in. Labels: anti-morality, cultural Marxism, divisiveness, egalitarianism, feminism, libertarianism, morality, pathological tolerance, social decay