Everywhere I look there is bad journalism - poor thinking married to good sentences. I'll shut up soon about the public-media response to Hugh Hefner's death, but the latest is that he is now responsible for violence against women. He invented it. There is no evidence to suggest that it existed before 1953, it seems, or that it is on the decline.
That's just good science meeting the implacable truth of history. Unfounded corollaries that suggest causality can be a writer's best friend. I know, dear readers, I know. One does not have to support the ideas or methods of Hefner to recognize the bad blame that marches on unquestioned in our contemporary quest for justice and equality.
The spectrum of sexuality is used to discuss and protect those who deserve its continuum of understanding but ceases to demonstrate any overlap in characteristics once we veer dangerously into maleness. Accusation can be freely applied to anybody that chooses to be on the unfortunate side of sexuality. The male heterosexual exists alone by a poor series of decisions. Only substandard thought can possibly fix them, best accomplished with vague gender guilt.
We all stand against extremes, of course, and what could be more extreme than maleness? One day we might all hope to meet in the middle of sexuality, where we can discuss and enjoy the sameness of our differences. I'm certain that if we dig back far enough in human history we'll find that it was man who first caused sexual division and sexual reproduction within our developing species. They are always so obsessed with its playful mechanisms.
Adam averts his gaze; inviting the tempter in to paradise.
Few things are more suspect to the modern mind than those who would indulge in the binary nature of sex. The imaginary division between sexes is a fire on the mind of vile humanity. It should be stopped, mocked, and roiled with chemicals, academic columns, and surgery. Some, in their ignorance and insensitivity, have even had the temerity to suggest that sexual reproduction is where human offspring used to emerge. They draw innocent little babies into their web of sexual bigotry.
Men do this.
It starts with them looking at women then results in them telling stories from a male perspective. Those monsters. Had they been speaking for women all along then we might not have these problems. Or, if we had only fixed on asexual reproduction then we might not experience any of these first-species problems, either.
Of course, before women learned to hate men they naturally hated their own mothers. Then, popular academic opinion filtered its way down through Cosmopolitan magazine and changed all of that for the better. A barely grasped portion of post-modernism nearly ruined the 1980s. You can't launch liberation with mothers and daughters on opposite sides of the battlefield, reading different magazines.
Every reader needs a common enemy.
The only way to correct the situation, it seems, is to embrace in full the female response to maleness. That alone must de-flaw the evils of gender. What could possibly be more right than a reaction to wrong?
Every crime needs its punishment.
I don't know how to feel any more. These articles have me so guilt-ridden that I no longer notice or desire women. They've caused me to ignore the healthiest specimens of my own species. A 50 year old man should not have to feel this way, unless of course he's just a gamete driven animal.
Post-script: I'm not claiming victimhood, at all, only noting half-satirically that being human offers little escape from sexual division, and that some associated suffering is inevitable for all. Injustice should be fought with the shared tool of understanding, equally, not with the dull blade of convenient accusation.
A study was done among a number of college students at different universities and it was discovered that only about 40% of college kids, male and female, could adequately define the meaning of the word "consent." When I first read this article I was amazed and yet not entirely surprised. My thoughts immediately went to the many problems that this paucity in understanding causes.
In the last few days - while reading the moralistic responses to the life of Hugh Hefner - that same study has allowed me to realize that this misunderstanding creates alternate problems for some. None of the journalists who freely sermonized on the damaging moral evils of Hefner seemed to notice or care that his empire was built upon the foundation of female consent.
It's one thing to be enraged at an outcome in which a woman who was abused never granted their consent, it's quite another to claim the same harm ensued when they did.
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