Objectification

Self-objectification distinguishes us from our forebears. You might say we're in an era of hyper-self-objectification (someone probably has). Social media gives anyone the opportunity to package and broadcast oneself as a crafted image, to imagine themselves as a work of art.

Popular makeup and hair for women has gone from the attempt to fake youth to unmasked artifice--it doesn't matter if you notice it; you're supposed to notice it and it's supposed to convey a message--not about sexual availability entirely or even mostly but about identity, signalling aspirational class and aesthetic sensibility, philosophical, even political affiliation--blue hair.

The average woman long ago adopted open sexual objectification, what used to be reserved for the disreputable (it is said lipstick originated among ancient Egyptian prostitutes, not to recreate youthful lips but to mimic the vagina and advertising fellatio), again, as distinct from its role in enhancing sexual attractiveness.

Broadly the trend toward popular self-objectification it goes well beyond sexual signalling, is often asexual or even ironic, parodying sexuality or sexual vigor.

What remains is the vanity, the vanity of the individual indulging the experience of objectification, which is not necessarily dehumanizing, or, the fact is "dehumanization", literally interpreted, isn't necessarily unpleasant. The high-concept fashion adopted by the serious (or obsessive) self-objectifier is an attempt to transcend physicality and biology, to de-humanize.

I thought to contrast "dehumanization" with "commodification", with the latter as a negative, but it occurs to me it that people are enthusiastically commodifying themselves, and in a wold of money worship the only concern is to be too cheaply priced a commodity--which doesn't mean people aren't selling themselves cheap. Self-commodification, quite literally, is widespread. Online an attractive woman can package and sell her image to men she never has to see. She's taken the sex out of prostitution; indeed, she seems to have transferred the degradation in the sexual transaction to the John, who is legion, anonymous and sexually frustrated.

Nobody is supposed to believe the thick eyebrows presently in vogue; they're taken up like a style of dress, off the rack. Likewise sexually enticing but outlandish effects--thick eyeliner framing rather than accentuating the eyes, ridiculously long lashes; sharp-angled effects in hair and makeup mimic the mechanical, the designed object or, I like to think, the palette, which is how the individual sees himself.

The world champion objectifiers of women are of course drag performers. Naturally the trans movement, which seeks a political identity for pathological self-objectifiers, places them in the forefront. The feminists are right about one thing: men tend to objectify more than women. What they won't or can't see is that, naturally, women seek out this very objectification--and who do they go to? Gay aesthetes. Men. No one objectifies women more than fashion designers.

The enthusiastic adoption of objectification is changing the way we live. Now the humblest specimen can find someone who will objectify her--and it is far more often her. Notable however how many men seek it now too--trans men are the biggest self-objectification whores on the planet, turning the same masculine tendency toward objectification upon themselves, belying the feminist notion it's inherently degrading. It is the highest honor.

That doesn't mean it doesn't cause trouble for women. It's dangerous. To be honored in this way can be fatal. The feminists are wrong here as they are everywhere else primarily in assigning to biologically-determined human behavior a socially constructed origin. As if the guys decided to play this trick on them one day--but of course the whole silly idea of a "patriarchy" existing as a social construct or pathology has this problem of origins. Patriarchy was born of primitive necessity, a necessity we haven't really shed, despite conventional wisdom.

The way women live now contradicts feminist theory identifying the objectification of women with misogyny.

Women seek out objectification--and they aren't alone. The profusion of self-objectification through media is human nature meeting the open-ended indulgence of capitalist technology. Indulging vanity is Who We Are now.

Predator, Prey

None other than the New York Times has exposed, it would seem, the hypocrisy of early #MeToo leader Asia Argento. Only now I learn her struggle: she was compelled to fake orgasm to get Harvey Weinstein's face out of her vagina, just like Rose McGowan before her, except Argento maintained a consensual sexual relationship with Weinstein for years afterward. When she saw McGowan building a career and heroic identity out of enduring precisely the same thing and calling it rape (who knew?) she wasted no time reacquainting herself with her trauma.

Her accuser's story is about as un-harrowing as her tale of Weinstein (presumably he didn't have to fake his orgasms, but I'm not sure how that affects the balance), and the belated timing of his sexual trauma is as suspect as hers--she suddenly discovered her victimhood after Rose McGowan made it profitable; a month later, he discovered his, which she had just made profitable. A Hollywood hypocrisy cascade.

The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She became a leading figure in the #MeToo movement. Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight. 

But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18... 

The fallout from “a sexual battery” was so traumatic that it hindered Mr. Bennett’s work and income and threatened his mental health, according to a notice of intent to sue that his lawyer sent in November to Richard Hofstetter, [Anthony] Bourdain’s longtime lawyer, who was also representing Ms. Argento at the time.

Bourdain killed himself after being cuckolded by Argento, who was photographed cavorting with a younger, shinier supportive male--a journalist she met through the #MeToo movement.

A more cynical person would see Argento (daughter of Italian horror movie director Dario Argento) as adept at getting what she wants from men, and as comfortable trading career capital for sex as with trading sex for career capital. Morally there's no distinction--unless we're allowed to consider young women are more vulnerable than young men here, which we aren't. But I'm sure the sex is a lot better when you're on top, so to speak, whoever you are.

Leah McSweeney in Penthouse, under the title Toxic Femininity:

Born in Rome, Asia Argento was raised in a family of famous Italian artists. Her father, Dario Argento, is a director and screenwriter best known for his innovative and influential horror movies. Her mother is the actress Daria Nicolodi, who starred in several of her husband’s films. Beyond this, Argento has a lineage of family members who were musicians and composers, including her maternal grandfather, Alfredo Casella.

Ms Argento didn't land in Hollywood off a Greyhound bus. Which makes me wonder: where are the stories of naive girls arriving in Hollywood to be taken advantage of who don't go on to have careers? All the prominent and not-so-prominent actresses with tales of lechery seem to have made careers for themselves--that are winding down due to age or stalled, and they've all come forward after the coast was made clear by two clearly mendacious characters, Rose McGowan and Asia Argento.

On October 10th of last year, journalist Ronan Farrow published a bombshell New Yorker article in which 13 women made allegations against Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein, sharing accounts not only of sexual misconduct and harassment, but also rape.  

Credited with initiating the contemporary #MeToo movement, the article detailed what it called Argento’s “rape” experience with Weinstein, one very similar to Rose McGowan’s own experience with the producer. Wrote Farrow: “Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, said that she did not speak out until now—Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would ‘crush’ her.” Argento went on to tell Farrow, “I know he has crushed a lot of people before. That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old, some of them are older—has never come out.” 

...Argento and McGowan describe Weinstein giving them oral sex, and both say they faked an orgasm in hopes of getting the experience over with as fast as possible... 

Argento went on to have a consensual relationship with Weinstein for several years. The New Yorker article is what thrust the Italian actress into America’s cultural conversation. Before this, the American media knew little about her.

Sometime after Argento and Weinstein were done with their totally non-transactional relationship the aging actress happened to Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain met Argento on the set of his wildly popular CNN show Parts Unknown when he was filming in Rome. Argento, a single mother of two and Italian celebrity, ended up a guest on the show. In February 2017, not long after they met on camera, the New York Post confirmed the two had started dating. One quick scroll through the couple’s individual social media accounts reveals that Bourdain was completely smitten with Argento, posting photos of her on the regular with heartwarming comments.

Bagging Weinstein and then, in her sexual decline, Bourdain, suggests as a sexual adventuress Argento has been very successful. An old Saturday Night Live bit featured a South American baseball star whose limited English led him to answer every interview question with "Bas-e-ball has been berry, berry good to me"; when asked about his big new contract he says it with more emphasis "...berry, berry good...". The Hollywood sexual market has been berry berry good to Asia Argento. It probably was pretty good to Rose McGowan until it wasn't anymore, and #MeToo is likely more about that than anything else.

Taking their participation in that market and selling it now in a different market, as something else, makes this the political-social equivalent of dodgy financial practices like mortgage-backed securities full of bad loans. The clearly deranged McGowan et al are the moral Goldman Sachs of Hollywood, making money at both ends of the deal. Is there likewise a political-social bubble? How does that end?

Bourdain was openly supportive of Argento’s involvement in the #MeToo movement as she rose to be one of its most prominent and vocal crusaders. Bourdain never held back when standing up for her or any part of the #MeToo movement, even defending McGowan and her feminist activism. The #MeToo movement had accrued a strong new male ally in Bourdain...

Bourdain gushed publicly over Argento, and when it came to her career, he was her biggest supporter. This is what you do when you love someone and believe in them. He wanted her to succeed because he adored her. His influence led to her new role as a judge on the Italian version of X-Factor, and he hired her to direct an episode of Parts Unknown when the series filmed in Hong Kong...

But in the days leading up to his suicide, things between the couple seemed to get rocky.
On June 5th, three days before Bourdain’s suicide, paparazzi photos of Argento and the young French reporter Clément, 28, were published in the Italian gossip magazine Chi. The photos showed the two holding hands, kissing, hugging, and dancing in a bar in Rome.

Argento fought to have the photographs pulled. Bourdain was mysteriously no longer following his girlfriend on Instagram. Argento then posted an Instagram story of herself in a Sid Vicious shirt that said Fuck Everyone, and captioned the image: “You know who you are.” Three hours later he killed himself. And she deleted the image off of her instagram story.

Bourdain not only had to endure his public cuckolding by a younger man but the financial shakedown from the jailbait. But there would be no respite in death. The apparent cruelty of her behavior was an immediate problem for brand #MeToo. His still warm body would be thrown under the bus by McGowan on behalf of Argento, too grief-stricken to hoist it, I presume

As numerous eloquent tributes to Bourdain were published, Argento decided she was too grief-stricken to continue speaking publicly, and handed the torch to Rose McGowan. The former Charmed star penned a letter to the public on behalf of Argento, which McGowan’s publicist, Nathaniel Baruch at Brigade Marketing, promptly emailed to Rolling Stone. 

McGowan’s letter opens by saying Argento is now a victim not only of rape but of suicide. “Sitting across from me,” she writes, “is the remarkable human and brave survivor, Asia Argento, who has been through more than most could stand, and yet stand she does. She stood up to her monster rapist and now she has to stand up to yet another monster, suicide. The suicide of her beloved lover and ally, Anthony Bourdain. I write these truths because I have been asked to.” 

You know how to tell if someone is a flake? They use weird, unnecessary phrases like "these truths".

McGowan then discusses Bourdain and Argento’s alleged “open relationship” in an obvious attempt to justify the photos with Clément. It’s too bad Bourdain isn’t here to confirm her statement that he and Argento were “free birds” who “loved without borders.” 

McGowan reminds the reader to “NOT do the sexist thing and burn a woman on the pyre of misplaced blame,” and then says that Bourdain allegedly reached out to a doctor for help with his depression but did not take his advice. (How the fuck she knows that information and why she chose to disclose it remains a big fat question mark.) 

McGowan also states that both Argento and Bourdain suffered from depression, but “she did the work to get help, so she could stay alive and live another day for her and her children,” while Bourdain’s depression usurped him. “His decision, not hers,” McGowan writes. “His depression won.”

Bourdain's battered corpse was actually thrown under the bus a second time--Argento is saying he advised the payoff, implying she might not have. I wouldn't be surprised if Bourdain, whose lawyer handled the scandal for her, paid that hush money.

These women are monsters. Bourdain left an 11 year old daughter and estranged wife who were notably silent during this humiliation--ironic, considering all the mileage #MeToo has gotten out of the idea of "silent" female victims.

In with the Incel Crowd

I'm not surprised by the lack of sympathy for incels. It's to be expected.

It isn't like sexual failure is a moral failing now--it's worse than that, because it's evolutionary failure, the ultimate failure. The same logic behind nice guys finishing last is behind our disdain of them. Avoiding association with the evolutionary loser is an evolutionary strategy itself.

As so much politics is about contrasting one's group as the winners against the other's losers, and much or most of what defines a loser now is sexual failure, which is evolutionary failure, politics at least mimics evolutionary competition between groups and provides great cover for coherent ethnic groups to wage evolutionary warfare under the guise of politics. Even, amazingly, under the guise of liberation and political progress, as "oppressed" minorities. An awful lot has flowed from white westerners unilaterally (and loudly) disarming in the age-old evolutionary struggle between groups. They say it's all good--but they would say that, because "it" triumphs; see my earlier comments about disdain for nice guys in the evolutionary struggle.

Sexual morality, until recently, was largely about providing some shelter from the evolutionary torrent for the nice guys. That newly released torrent is now sweeping them away in the sexually liberated West. This has the power to shape us into a new people, is shaping us into a  new people, determined by biology on the steroids of a degenerate culture. From certain criteria--say those we observed before through traditional mores--the new traits we acquire will be dysgenic. Overall it can be expected to be highly miscegenational.

To assign the incel's bitterness to psychological pathology is absurd. Nothing could be more clear, coherent and natural than the rage of someone selected, by evolution and society, to die off. As the rest of the world appears to be screwing its brains out. Acceptance is only achieved by checking out and self-alienating.

In Toronto recently a man drove a van onto a sidewalk full of women and killed ten people after declaring himself a "soldier" on behalf of incels. He would seem to be an extreme case and was described as developmentally challenged. In photos he has the under-bite and hapless stare normally associated with mental retardation, but was smart enough to be a software developer and may have had Asperger's.

He succeeded at least in forcing incels into the news cycle, and media outlets into revealing their biases in their hot-take analyses.

Conventional thinking can only appreciate the incel problem as one of sex and individual rights.
But maybe it's more fair to say it's a problem of reproduction and group decline.

For the left it's viewed as a question women's rights, which will not be abridged either by sex redistribution schemes or a return to sexual morality. Any legitimate grievance must be civil rights based. Judging incels by that standard they are seen not only as unworthy but as appropriating sacred civil rights language. The Guardian:

They borrow a lot of language from the equality/civil rights agenda – society “treats single men like trash, and it has to stop. The people in power, women, can change this, but they refuse to. They have blood on their hands,” read one post the morning after the Toronto attack. Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. Yet at the same time, they hate victims, snowflakes, liberals, those who campaign for any actual equality.

The right arrives at the same place by way of libertarianism. There is a sexual market with winners and losers, not to be disturbed by the bleatings of those losers. The Federalist:

Those ideas, unusual though they are, fit into a pattern of statist rhetoric followed by many other groups who, failing to achieve their aims in life, seek to use state power to force the result they desire. Their reaction against the results of the Sexual Revolution is little different from communists’ reaction to the Industrial Revolution, but the methods by which they would achieve their aims—state coercion and, now, terror—are identical. Incels are merely statists of sex.

The misery of the incel is the measure of our personal liberty, apparently.

Incels at the Gates of Sexual Utopia

Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism. In short, I was in the shit
.—Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

Sexual innocence has gone to market.

In the absence of moral restraint. sexual competition becomes a laissez faire market, with similar disparities in success. But while a few people getting rich will still benefit their economy generally, it's hard to see how fewer people getting laid--and married--can benefit the reproductive economy of a nation.

Despite the tendency of the sixties generation to congratulate itself (or any generation, for that matter), sexual liberation owes far more to technology than to political action. Women first had to be liberated from toil. Only then could sexual equality become an issue. And corporate America was eager to liberate them from that toil, selling them labor-relieving products as consumers and hiring them as employees--to lower the cost of their labor.

 In one sense feminism can be seen as the rationalization of industry's capturing of female labor from the home.

 Or at least the rationalization of that process, driven by that constant of any economy that still brings us slavery and child-labor, the need for ever-cheaper labor.

It is to the modern free market, and its ruthless efficiency in wringing productivity out of labor, that women "owe" their sexual freedom.

The more liberal the less egalitarian the market. From here on the unfettered market of sex will proceed with the same inexorable logic, producing a surplus of the sexually stranded. The Marxian alienation of the factory worker is nothing compared to this.

Unmodified sexual competition is a return to nature, transplanting the primitive world into the midst of modernity; a return which will likely disabuse us of yet another cherished myth, that of the primitive idyll. It is every man (and woman) for himself. The regulation of sexual behavior through monogamy and chastity were civilizational advances we haven't bothered to replace, but are merely leaving behind.

Sexual shame has been routed, electronic entertainment reaches ever higher degrees of technological sophistication, and the ensuing profusion of sexual imagery and titillation is already desensitizing us. Ever more stimulation is required; already we show signs of exhaustion. It may all end in a sexually spent society.

At this rate sexual liberation may eventually destroy sex.

In the meantime, we'll have to deal with its surplus army of sexual desperados.

Sex and Betrayal

The public humiliation of Aziz Ansari marks the "me too" sexual inquisition's escalation into prosecuting romantic and sexual disappointment.

Women are compelled to sexual excess at the same time they are absolved of any responsibility for their safety. Birth control enabled widespread sexual license, which has in turn engendered crises for both masculinity and femininity, leaving women largely degenerate and miserable. Maybe it was inevitable feminism would seek to sever female agency from womens' romantic and sexual frustration.

Ansari has defenders and hasn't lost any work, and his significance might be that the inquisition stops short at least of anonymous revenge porn leveled on a prized diversity-celebrity. I'm actually rooting for intersectionality. For Ansari, the problem of where he goes to get his reputation back remains, and what's been done to him is a travesty. Imagine how bad it would be for him if his reputation wasn't already implicitly needle-dicked Indian weirdo.

Feminism tries, despite itself, to perform the traditional female role of protecting women by regulating sex. That feminism depends on sexual liberation, as feminists insist, is an obvious problem. Clearly sexual liberation harms women, vulnerable women the most. Feminism can't drop its commitment to liberation for various reasons, the most shameful of which is commerce, which is increasingly based on individual license and consumption.

So feminism makes lemonade, after a fashion. All that misery is fed back into the narrate-o-matic and comes out as toxic masculinity, which must be corrected, by ever more feminism.

We're liberated from biological responsibility but not from our biological psychology. We're a historical novelty with all this sex and so little reproduction, people indulging the physical and ritual aspects of thwarted reproduction to the point of boredom.

Sexual liberation has liberated women, no one more so, but liberation doesn't equal happiness. Women were promised something, something absurd and unrealistic, by the sexual revolution, just like men: they would have their cake and eat it too. They would be set loose from sexual morality and no harm would come to them. Keeping in mind a woman's idea of "harm" is broader than a man's. Feminism adopts this to politicize emotional harm. Feminism recognizes but won't admit that women are more vulnerable emotionally. It just keeps reinterpreting that vulnerability as oppression.

What to do with a movement that thrives on the fruit of its failure?

First they came for the leering studio heads and I did not speak out...

Google's Eric Schmidt is the latest to fall to the sexual inquisition. It isn't who they're going after now, but what. Guys with anything to be pilfered away by the current frenzy had better not even think about cheating. Sort of takes all the point out of success:

Schmidt is a known womanizer despite being married for 37 years to Wendy Schmidt, who said in 2012 they started living separate lives because she felt like “a piece of luggage” following him around the world. 

News outlets have been sniffing around Schmidt’s former flames looking for a Harvey Weinstein-like bombshell, a source close to Schmidt told The Post. But sources say there’s nothing there. 

“They haven’t found s–t. Because there is no sexual harassment. There has never been any issue. They have had nothing. People have looked into it and people have not found anything,” the source said. 

The source added that if something foul was afoot, Google would have canned Schmidt completely. 

“Why would they keep him on the board, then have to do this all over again?” the source asked. 

Another source close to Schmidt said that any rumors of sexual harassment were “totally not true.” 

But the insider could not deny Schmidt’s well-documented romantic past and said the techie’s entanglements were “consensual” and that there are “no complaints” against the exec or “settlements” from the company.

This seems a notable escalation. At this rate I predict someone will go down early in the new year for refusing to give oral sex.

Ironic that it's as if feminism, despite itself, was ultimately all about this: getting that cheating bastard. Feminism is women trying to do what they've always done, regulate sexuality, against the current of the same sexual revolution that spawned it. The sexual revolution is untenable, but no one wants to admit it.

Doubly ironic is the purge's origins, in my opinion at least, in the "pussy hat" movement protesting President Trump as a sexual abuser. I believe it to be a necessary, if not the ultimate, cause of the current hysteria.

 Once Harvey Weinstein's brother or other rival leaked the story of his behavior to the media a fire was lit. The pussy hat movement had swept through the culture like Santa Ana winds, turning the landscape to tinder. Weinstein's behavior had long been no secret, after all. There's a reason it took off now, and that reason is Donald Trump. Ashley Judd's just-short of unhinged performance at an anti-Trump rally makes sense now, knowing she was one of Harvey's objects of desire. The actress was channeling big time.



Sadly, men as a group will forever be atoning for men as individuals.

Another thing to remember is the non-hysterical part of the hysteria: for every one of these fellows knocked off his perch there's someone looking to take his place, usually orchestrating it.

I believe children are the dystopian future

"We need to be allies to children. Children do not have the capacity to articulate their feelings, they do not have power over their own beings to come to the rallies...they are not in control of their own destiny. They need to see you, transgender children need to see you, transgender children, even those who are not out yet, need to see you, they need to know that you are there and that you will fight for them and that they can talk to you. Immigrant children, and children, I work with children, I work with children who are homeless in the city, I work with children who face food insecurity in the city, I work with children who come up to me every day and tell me they're hungry, I work with children who do not have a bed to sleep in at night and it is the last goddamn thing that breaks my heart that the one thing in this world that keeps these children going, their parents, they now fear will go away." 

The above is from a vigil the day after Donald Trump's election at Portland's downtown riverfront park. Children as political allies is somehow not controversial, at least where the epic struggle for bathroom equality is concerned.

The swiftness with which children have become props in the transgender rights movement demonstrates how little resistance there is, still, to cultural Marxism. Concern for children, real, feigned or imagined, naturally finds its way to the forefront of social manias such as the transgender fad we're experiencing now. It recalls the the satanic abuse panic of the late eighties/early nineties that reached its nadir with the McMartin Preschool trial. But in that earlier case concern for children was the catalyst; now it the putative concern for children comes not as a catalyst but as one component, of questionable validity, of a movement dominated and driven by grown men carving out their own grievance identity.

The trans movement's conspicuous concern for children seems of a different order than the earnest if naive parents and police who--perhaps sublimating broader, and I think legitimate, fears about children and modern decadence--were led to believe in a vast network of satanic cults operating out of America's preschools (whatever Pizzagate is, and it does look at the least bizarre, it probably doesn't lead to your neighborhood daycare), but, to the naive who actually think they're protecting trans children against some onslaught, perhaps it's no different.

Now that generation of kids who were the subject of their parents' coddling and concern in the eighties and nineties--coddling that did nothing, by the way, to halt our slide into decadence--are parents. The social milieu of the post sexual revolution has beaten out of them, as much as it can, any residual traditional morality or resistance to the miasma of popular culture that exists today (google searching the literature on moral panics yields an entire literature devoted to ascribing all of it to moral paranoia of the sexually hung-up in outdated Kinsey-ian thought-language) with the time-tested tools of ridicule and pseudo-scholarship. This started long before Reagan, whose election was in some part a reaction to social decay and as we see now did nothing to slow, much less arrest, its progress.

But you can't obliterate human nature; there's probably a genetic, biological component to a parent's concern for the moral behavior of children. Why would biology program us, amidst all this biological yearning to pass on genes, to be indifferent toward whether or not our daughters are sluts and our sons are gay? Where does a parent now, surrounded by propaganda demanding that feeling in his gut at the sight of psychological disorder is just his own psychological disorder? For the most part he smiles and pretends that nothing is wrong, all the while hoping it will not touch him, not touch his family, and that his children will be more or less "normal"--most people still are, after all--and, maybe even bear him healthy grandchildren.

But what do you do when the only place to sublimate your fear of a thing is in the service of that thing?

Sexual Perversity

Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism. In short, I was in the shit.
—Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

Sexual innocence has gone to market.
In our liberated era, sexuality is increasingly valued, and modesty increasingly devalued (once was a person was a deviant if overly sexual; now if insufficiently so).
Sexual competition is now a laissez faire system, and sexuality is a commodity in a newly deregulated market. Sexual vigor and success combine to make the universal product, inherent in all products.
Sex is the value added, to be attained by purchasing the right car, clothes, beer, etc. Sex sells the products that promise to produce more sex. Sex is the Alpha and Omega of our new consumerist order.

Despite the tendency of the sixties generation to congratulate itself (or any generation, for that matter), sexual liberation owes far more to technology than to political action. Women first had to be liberated from toil. Only then could sexual equality become an issue. Political agitation always follows opportunity, just as patriotic rhetoric follows power. Activists need their heroic mythology as surely as militarists.

It is to the modern free market, and its ruthless efficiency in wringing productivity out of labor, that women owe their newfound liberty. Material progress and the advent of free time made women's liberation possible. I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest women owe their equality to masculine technological ingenuity, but not so long ago this would have been considered the raving of a crackpot, and perhaps still is in some quarters.
(I recall an essay by legendary L.A. Times columnist Jack Anderson, years ago, where he perused newspaper advertisements from the early half of the twentieth century, expressing disdain at the prevalence of ads for various innovative, time saving products for homemakers: washing machines, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, etc.--my how far we've come, seemed to be the gist of his import; here it was right before him, but it was too soon to recognize and acknowledge the true vanguards of women's liberation--household appliances)

Our new freedom is at once more liberal and less egalitarian, freer and more fascistic; unhindered sexual competition will make gilded age capitalism look like a support group. Sexual competition is nature's dismissive, mocking retort to humanity's endless prayers to equality and fraternity. We conquer man-made morality only to submit to nature's tyranny. The wheel of history turns: repression begets revolution begets repression.

Sexual competition now follows the amoral logic of the market, because sex is the market, always has been; we now see that all human economic activity is a complex superstructure built upon this substrate of sex. From here on the unfettered market of sex will proceed with the same inexorable and indifferent logic of any open market, to points unknown.

Unmodified sexual competition is a return to nature, transplanting the primitive world into the midst of modernity; a return which will likely disabuse us of yet another cherished myth, that of the primitive idyll. It is every man (and woman) for himself. The regulation of sexual behavior through monogamy and chastity were civilizational advances we haven't bothered to replace, but are merely leaving behind.
Sexual shame has been routed, electronic entertainment reaches ever higher degrees of technological sophistication, and the ensuing profusion of sexual imagery and titillation is already desensitizing us. Ever more stimulation is required; already we show signs of exhaustion. It may all end in a sexually spent society; ironically, sexual liberation may eventually destroy sex.

Procreation has already been cut adrift; is passion next? How will love be possible in the coming world? Will love itself become an artifact, a short lived thing in the span of history? Is it now revealed as no more than a dream? Romantic love, we hardly knew ye.

Now the very notion of a common sexual morality is illiberal. By unspoken assent it has become sufficient to ridicule one who speaks of such things as a prude; which under the new order is synonymous with enemy of freedom.
But this is all the bigotry of the present for the past, for morality as a personal matter is a modern invention. Subjective, individual morality is as meaningless as the conceit of a close personal relationship with God. It is no morality at all.

I don't know if it spells disaster; I don't pretend to know where it leads. I only know it represents something altogether new, a profound--and unprecedented--devolution of moral authority from communities and institutions to individuals, manipulated by a ubiquitous and sophisticated electronic marketplace. This we've come to accept without consideration, by default really, as the unavoidable result of a morally unassailable expansion of personal liberty (an increasing personal liberty accompanied by a decreasing political representation, as matters of war, immigration, and the terms of our governance are increasingly surrendered to corporations and political parties inured against the popular will--but that's for another time).

It does seem that something has to give, eventually. Perhaps when the professional classes and the wealthy have reached levels of illegitimacy and serial relationships previously confined to the poor. They have already acquired a taste for low culture that seems to presage a taste for low living. People are now expected to demonstrate their egalitarian piety by disdaining discernment, particularly in matters of a sexual nature. To be modest is to not be in on the joke, outdated, alien, not one of us. So, we are all vulgarians now. Or outcasts.

We have decreed the ideal of modesty nothing more than bourgeois prejudice; worse, it's a sucker's investment in the failing concern that is sexual morality, akin to putting one's money in savings while everyone else is getting rich on junk bonds. Morality, and community, always depended on the vast majority buying into it, at least in principle, but now the compact has been broken. We already have a hard time remembering its terms.

It's one more fight I haven't taken up, despite being sympathetic to defenders of tradition, who seem entirely more honest, brave even, in their willingness to stand their ground before the groundswell that lifts their opposite number. I too suffer from the cowardice of that craven sellout, the "liberal on social issues conservative", which is not a conservative at all, and a very dismal liberal at that. It is a cop-out, like calling yourself an agnostic.
I must confess, this is nothing more than a surrender to the way things are. Of the few things I'm certain, one is that sexual mores are not the means of patriarchal tyranny that some feminists would have, or mere accident, as the general apathy that is overtaking us implies. The prevalence of sexual morality in advanced societies is enough for me to prove its necessity to civilization.

Two modern historical anomalies uncomfortably exist side by side: the sexualization of children, and the idealization of childhood.
Many have pointed out that our time's extended, idealized childhood is a fairly recent invention. This too may prove short-lived. One consequence of the commodification of sexuality is that children are disabused of sexual innocence sooner and, like the rest of us, more thoroughly.
For a time we behaved as if there could be two separate societal spheres, one of adults and one of children. This was always a contrivance to get us past the transition from a communal morality to one determined by the individual and manipulated by the marketplace; now few even feel the need to offer the cliched and callous retort to those complaining about sexual content on television: just change the channel.
Now we know that children, and childhood, will not be insulated from the consequences of sexual revolution; the very notion that they should be is diminishing, surrendered to a "progress" we are incapable, and mostly unwilling, to arrest. The most profound result of sexual liberation may be the destruction of sexual innocence.

Is childhood to be surrendered to this new ideal of productivity, progress, and personal liberation? Are we now giving childhood back, not to the privations of a harder time, but to the libertine, dissolute excess of ours? Who will be left to mourn childhood when none have lived it?

An unspoken anxiety grips the populace. We are alarmed at the sight of tarted up thirteen year-olds (particularly if they are our relatives), yet we lack the will, acting alone now without the structure of community morality to support us, to offer a resistance. No one wants to be a prude; it has gone beyond a source of embarrassment to become a source of suspicion. The imputation is that one who complains about sexual morality would surrender other freedoms, or is secretly attempting to chase women out of public life, even as the debate, like that surrounding abortion, is inordinately waged by women on each side. Women remain more vested in chastity and sexual modesty than men ever will be, contrary to some feminist dogma.

Sublimation is still necessary, now more than ever, so we turn our fearful angst on the few remaining among us who are unquestionably out of bounds, the rapist and the child molester.

The New York Times reported earlier this week on a series of highly rated shows produced by Dateline NBC, filming police stings of alleged sexual predators seeking out minors online.
The stings are the creation of a website named Perverted Justice, that had been acting on its own for years before being picked up by Dateline. The sting operators pose as children in online chat rooms, waiting to be propositioned by adults.
For nearly three years, and even a couple of episodes into Dateline's involvement with them, the group did all of this without notifying the authorities (now they work in conjunction with the police). Originally they merely sought to identify online predators and then cause them as much harm as possible by publishing their names and informing on them to employers, family, friends, and neighbors.
Among the many problems inherent in this, the website had no means of confirming the identities of their targets.

A contra-site, corrupted-justice.com, was created to counter Perverted Justice, and claims among the concessions it's managed to extract (from their website):

1) We demanded that they cease performing their "busts" without the prearranged involvement of legitimate law enforcement, and;
2) We demanded that they dismantle the "Follow Up Forum" - The primary tool used by their members to harass and terrorize those who had been accused only by anonymous vigilantes and had never been dealt with by legitimate law enforcement.

The "Follow Up Forum" seems to be a large part of the appeal of the site, publishing the lurid details of online chats; previously used to destroy alleged pedophiles who stood accused of no crime, now the site limits these to persons already convicted. Among the charges leveled by Corrupted Justice are that PJ has used minors in its sting operations, that it has in the past lured predators into residential neighborhoods and to public places without notifying police (and I can't help thinking that these close calls only made more careful predators), and of course that their methods constitute entrapment.

In the past I've seen a few of the Dateline programs, and I must confess that I was nearly as appalled by the actions of Dateline as I was by the alleged child predators. I have to ask myself, am I letting my natural revulsion toward sanctimony color my judgment of a worthy and necessary mission? I think not.

What appalls me isn't the sense that the innocent are being persecuted, though I'll never feel comfortable with the curious folk at Perverted Justice or the producers of Dateline NBC running about determining who is a criminal and who isn't (one PJ participant dismisses charges of entrapment by pointing out that civilians cannot be guilty of entrapment--accurate, but hardly reassuring to know that there are situations where civilians are more empowered than police); it is more the sense that they are in fact engaged in punishment, and that their motivations, imbued with an immature zeal, lead them to extremes. Extra-legal punishment, existing outside of the law, is an erosion of the law, and the law, not the posturing antics of the self appointed, is what truly protects us.

The aggressive pursuit of sexual deviants is designed to make us feel less powerless before the gut-wrenching pace of society's progress toward an uncertain moral abyss. Family and community once protected children from these people, who have always existed; but what is different now is the independence, and sexual precociousness, of our children, and the way we live. We are understandably on edge.

In the past activists have tried to create special category crimes with diminished rights for the accused. Feminists have done this with rape, lobbying to restrict the rights of the accused and expand its definition; law and order conservatives have long expressed impatience with constitutional restraints in general. The willingness of so many to surrender so much to the "war on terror" comes to mind. We get into trouble when we refuse to live with the limitations the law places on us
Often accompanying demands that the constitution be suspended is the insistence that we are in the throes of an epidemic; sometimes, as in the case of nationwide pedophilia panic of the early nineties, outright hysteria is allowed to take hold (in no small part because so few are willing to be seen as defending heinous criminals--leaving little resistance to an already powerful, emotion driven movement) resulting in fantastical claims and the persecution of innocents. Often there is a hostility toward patriarchy, and an underlying misandry. Perveted Justice's founder, a 27 year-old man who--shockingly--lives with his mother, has this to say, "I have a low opinion of men in general. The most heinous crimes in our society are committed by males."
Always suspect those so ready to denounce their kind.

What is striking about the Perverted Justice website is its strutting, self-congratulatory nature. Enthusiastic amateurs engaged in what should be police activity should always give us pause. And to think I began here bemoaning the collapse of sexual morality.
Something else I couldn't help but notice: the vigilantes of PJ resemble the child molesters they hunt (they post photos of both). There is an awful lot of venom, braggadocio, and chest-beating going on; but above all, as always, vanity.

The same issue of the Times reported on a public shaming of Chinese prostitutes and pimps (what does a Chinese pimp look like?) that drew a significant backlash from citizens who were concerned about the abuse of state power, and its troubling reminder of the Cultural Revolution.
One land's low ebb is another's high tide.