Pile up on social conservatives

I’ve said many times that any alliance between the MRM and genuine conservatives would be a one-sided affair; we would be expected to prioritize their goals, while they would continue attacking us with abandon.  This has been confirmed with abundance in the past week, during which numerous members of the “manosphere” have launched fresh attacks on traditionalism and social conservatism.  Dalrock accuses us of working hand-in-hand with the feminists to legitimize female promiscuity.  The Social Pathologist also accuses us of spawning feminism with our alleged lack of acknowledgment of female sexual desires.  CL has been attacking Christian arguments (or rather a caricature of Christian arguments) against masturbation and pornography, coming close to blaming all male unchastity on wives who won’t put out enough.  These are all writers whose works I admire, original and insightful thinkers who have provided important witness to forgotten truths, and the sudden attack from all of them is rather stunning.  At first I had hoped that an idiosyncratic definition of “social conservatism” and “traditionalism” were being used, but it is becoming grimly clear than by “social conservatism” they mean social conservatism.  The words “social conservative” or “SoCon” have begun to be used as a term of abuse.  If only we would just die, the assumption seems to be, the disciples of Roissy could step up and retake the culture.  “SoCons” are to blame for everything wrong in the world today.

Could it be that the reason men’s advocates think they could do such a better job protecting the culture from feminism is that they haven’t had to try yet?  What political or cultural movement in the past half-century has been motivated by their ideas?  The central fact that our slanderers will not mention is that the only resistance to feminism in the past century has been from religious, i.e. social, conservatives.  We’re the ones who’ve been in the trenches fighting feminism and depravity all this time.  Not many feminists bother attacking “Game”–most of them haven’t heard of it.  All their attacks our directed at us–the Catholic Church, the evangelicals, and the social conservatives.  In fact, I’ll go further:  without the Catholic Church and the Protestants who get called “puritan” or “fundamentalist”, there would be no Right, no opposition to feminism, anywhere in the West.  Might I suggest to the rear-line generals of the MRM that some of the reasons for the things we do is that we’re the ones who actually have to worry about feminist counterattacks and about swaying the public?  It’s all well and good for the MRM to say that SoCons emphasize male fault more than female fault.  It’s we Catholics who are getting attacked as “misogynist” for our opposition to abortion, divorce, and promiscuity.  Arguments that center on female perfidy play right into this image of the “women-hating old celibates” and go nowhere.  We downplay that side of things so that our critique of female impurity and selfishness will have a chance of being heard.  Similarly, it’s easy enough on Game websites to boldly proclaim that all women are whores who respond only to “gina tingles”.  If you were actually trying to convince women to be chaste and faithful, you would have to grant them some moral agency.  It might also strike you as unhelpful to shit on the great theologians and saints of the Church for being insufficiently “carnal” when these women have already been told their whole lives that the world revolves around their vaginas.  As for male sexual sins, biblical exegesis aside, the reasons for the grave wickedness of onanism are not hard to grasp.  I would ask readers to read those two posts before saying that there is no case against it.  Masturbation is the scrap the sexual revolution throws to unattractive or introverted men.  Having (unfortunately) commited my share of sexual sins during college and then talking to several men about their sexual sins, I find the solitary vice distinct among vices for the despair it brings to those in its clutches.  They really think that they can’t stop; that two weeks is the most a man can endure without some kind of sexual release.  Like many sins, it is far easier to not start than to stop, and we do men no favors to concealing the gravity of this vice.  This isn’t ideology.  This is what I’ve seen talking to men, and where I myself might be if it weren’t for Jesus Christ and the Blessed Sacrament.

I am also unimpressed that traditionalism does a better job promoting a male-friendly culture with healthy male-female relationships than “Game”.  It is the latter, after all, that joins feminism in blaming the victim when a wife cheats; they say it means her husband wasn’t “alpha” enough.  We Christians have no trouble admitting that women have sex drives; we just don’t obsess over it like our adolescent detractors.  We don’t give a fuck if the little princesses have lots of orgasms; what we care about is that their husbands know that their children are theirs.  If women have to “repress” themselves to meet this hardly lofty aim, so be it.  In our fallen condition, everyone has to repress a little.  Any society organized around female sexual fulfillment is going to be organized ass-backwards.  Nor is it true that Christianity has some sort of lopsided emphasis of agape over eros.  In fact, I’ve demonstrated in previous posts that the moral theology of Augustine and Aquinas is already excessively erotic.  We must, however, not reduce eros to its carnal dimension; that is a far worse error than ignoring the carnal dimension altogether.  Eros is a desire for a full interpersonal communion.  As Joseph Peiper said, eros is what connects agape and sex and humanizes the latter.  When we realize that true eros desires an I-Thou union, we see that Game is actually hostile to eros because it teaches the man to regard his partner as an It to be manipulated rather than a Thou to be communicated with.

So, where is all of this leading.  It seems that the antifeminist blogosphere wants SoCons out.  We’re about to be as welcome on their parts of the web as NeoCons are on the Alternative Right.  Of course, the expulsion of the SoCons won’t mean the expulsion of all Christians; the ones with a suitable inferiority complex can stay, the ones who say that two millenia of reflection on the human condition is useless, and that we must take lessons from a bunch of cads.  Well, no thank you.  If I wanted to chuck my tradition and suck up to some modern fad, I would become a Marxist like my academic peers.  They at least have a genuinely impressive intellectual edifice built up.

If somebody wants to do a better job fighting feminism than the SoCons, I sincerely invite them to try.  If somebody wants to argue that I’m a dumb feminist patsy, bring it on, mother fucker.