About the Decay of Bourgeois Values

‘Rape culture’ is a concept in contemporary feminism that states that it’s a culture in which women are taught to avoid situations in which they might be raped, instead of a culture that primarily concerns itself with training men to stop being sexually aggressive.

One reason why this argument has become so popular (other than all the government money dedicated to advancing it) is that this basic position is part of what makes civilization distinct. Civilized men are civilized because they observe a sophisticated etiquette regulating their sexual behavior, usually codified in law. Tribal cultures without written law still have regulations on this behavior, but it’s more informal and enforced by the group.

What’s interesting about this tack is that, like previous legal doctrines that restricted the responsibility of women, this also revokes moral agency from women who put themselves into dangerous situations. If a woman elects to get drunk, and is then seduced by a man, the choice to get drunk is not seen as a moral error within the current system, while the choice to seduce is portrayed as a special category of date rape or ‘gray rape.’

Popular film portrays the sexual party culture as a sort of test of perverse moral fiber for both genders. Men see their ability to seduce women (who would be seen as lower class in the past) as a test of their masculinity. An inability to pull girls at parties and clubs is seen as a moral weakness and a source of shame: it’s the go-to insult whenever someone wants to denigrate a man for insufficient vigor.

It’s perhaps predictable that, in an egalitarian culture, the lowest common cultural frame is the one that dominates. The lower classes have always been criminal, violent, and prone to reckless fornication. That our culture mostly flatters and celebrates violent, fornicating criminals is just the artistic expression of its democratic structure.

For women, the ability to ‘cut loose’ while still ‘following your heart’ is seen as an admirable expression of femininity, especially if it can be maintained while succeeding in a career. Moral success is pursuing Dionysian excess at night, while maintaining Protestant professionalism during the day. No one, not even God, is seen fit to judge a woman: only her heart is fit to judge whether or not her behavior is good. If her heart changes later, the culture supports her condemnation of the past decisions of her heart.

These well-educated women perceive that the law is just only when the law upholds the judgments of her heart in the moment, while discounting the decisions that her heart made in the past. Unfortunately, law does not perform its function all that well when it rests on a cluster of chaotic subjectivity.

In the past, at least in the upright-bourgeois North European cultures, the person who served alcohol to women would be seen as morally at fault, as would the woman’s family, as would the woman herself, as would the man who seduced her. By social convention and law, public saloons didn’t serve alcohol to women, and in general women drinking was perceived as low class.

Further, it wasn’t as if promiscuity didn’t exist: it was just seen as a lower class trait. Neo-Marxist class analysis usually glosses over the moral aspect of the class system, which has differing expectations for different classes.

Feminism as expressed in the university system mostly concerns itself with breaking down whatever vestigial bourgeois moral conditioning still exists in their students. This is an inversion of the previous function of higher education for women, which was once primarily seen as a way to inculcate bourgeois morality specifically into girls to make them more marriageable. There are both spiritual and material reasons as to why this was important: women with low class morals tend to regress to low class material — it’s hard to maintain a family fortune if you either never get married or become divorced.

Few people are satisfied by our current moral and legal system. It is widely criticized, yet no one seems to be capable of doing much of anything about it, because returning to the serviceable moral structure of the past is not as simple as flicking a switch, and is not simple to achieve on the individual or familial levels. Moral entropy is as powerful as the regular kind.

What’s interesting about this is that the people of the middle class, without any superiors to counteract them, destroyed themselves, indeed enthusiastically supported their own destruction, both morally and with lavish donations rewarding institutions to the extent that they promoted the moral dissolution of the old order.

Since the sexual revolution, there have been multiple right-wing attempts to either counteract it or to create alternative cultures to resist it, with varying degrees of success, mostly leaning towards failure.

The failures fall into a couple categories: the first being the idea that the state can support conservative parenting, and the other being that families can effectively resist the dominant moral culture on their own without taking a radically secessionist pose like the Mennonites, Amish, and Hasidic Jews.

The first position, the Tipper Gore-type position, places the state in a situation that runs against its nature, which is to supplant alternative sources of authority to itself. Parents and families are always going to be third banana to a political system that is fundamentally anti-aristocratic, which stands for rule by abstractly determined merit rather than rule by superior families over subordinate families.

If the entire point of the state is to supplant traditional sources of authority, to remove legitimacy from the distributed authority of patriarchal rule, it’s misguided to expect the state to support your patriarchal authority.

The police officer is supposed to supplant Dad, just as Prime Minister displaces King (minister of ministers being more important than first among fathers). The legal theorist is supposed to supplant the backwards mystic traditions that informed old laws.

The second position  of resistance is more promising, but the problem is that the resistance is necessarily disconnected and non-networked, whereas the opposition has solidarity, a license to use legal force, and the benefits of networks.

Whereas ‘backwards’ religious cultures that reject modern influences form a coherent, illegible-from-the-outside moral network with the capacity to shame and police immoral behaviors and maintain alternative standards of education, attempts that go halfway tend to meet with halfway success.

I saw two Mennonite girls at the grocery store the other day. While their floor-length dresses and white bonnets took on the character of a costume drama, the fat people in the frozen foods section took on the character of a zombie movie. They had clear skin and a modest demeanor. I don’t know anything about the Mennonites other than that they sell good produce, but at least from the outside, their aesthetics are not as offensive as that of a human whale in a sports team t-shirt with a basket full of jumbo vanilla-creme cookies.

The choice probably doesn’t have to be so stark, but it’s becoming closer to being that clear.

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