The professor was an excitable and amiable middle-aged man, fairly chubby by North American standards. His swarthy complexion, gleaming bald head and bushy mustache betrayed his foreign ancestry — an Egyptian Coptic Christian from Cairo, long since emigrated to the New World, and long since employed at his hallowed American university, though he had never quite managed to master that standard, saccharine accent of the American Midwest. His Arab speech was deep and gravelly, yet still uniquely colorful. He could not utter a sentence so much as perform it, effortlessly gesturing and gesticulating, hopping and hawing with each sentiment he expressed. Simple questions were whispered, furtive inquiries, well-wishes were joyous spasms. Ordinary greetings, from this Middle-Eastern Santa Claus, looked to lifeless American onlookers like two long-lost brothers reuniting after a lifetime apart — except the one portly, bespectacled, mustachioed brother was obviously far happier than the other one, who invariably seemed confused or surprised. Professor Al-Santa ibn Claus’ verve was nonetheless infectious, and I would be shocked to learn he was anything but beloved by his students. Born and raised on the ancient Nile, this smiling pedagogue was a living reminder of a bygone era when the sad stereotype of the bitter Marxist academic still didn’t exist.

The young lady conversing with him — if memory serves correctly — was an undergraduate student at the university. She was an international student, a Turkish girl from Istanbul, Turkey’s largest and liveliest metropolis, geographically (and culturally) bridging two continents. Her social lineage, much like that of most Turkish immigrants to the United States (and deeply unlike that of the infamous Turkish immigrants to Germany — but I digress!), was borne from the European half of Istanbul. Turkey, though now making sensational headlines as a rising power sliding into Islamic fundamentalism, still has a significant, wealthy, secular upper-class; liberal cosmopolitans who wish Turkey could join the European Union, and who explain to non-Turks the repugnant provincialism of the reigning President Recep T. Erdoğan the same way pious American liberals used to explain the repugnant provincialism of the reigning President George W. Bush. These Turkish Europhiles and Occidentalists, concentrated in Istanbul, spawned this idealistic young woman who joyfully gushed about her future plans to work in non-profits aiding Palestinian refugees and Kurdish orphans. Like all true liberal, upper-class E.U.-peans — or, in her case, aspiring ones — her tender bleeding heart couldn’t countenance the horrors the Zionist apartheid state imposed on her downtrodden brothers and sisters in Palestine. Her English — likely carefully nurtured by her urbane parents, who likely put her in one of Istanbul’s many French, British or American international schools — was impeccable, with only the slightest veneer of Anatolian staccato modulating the same American accent the animated Egyptian could only shovel out in bursts of Cairene vim. This scioness of Turkey’s aspiring class of secular Eurocrats was the kind of girl who would soon spend nights hunched over her laptop screen in champagne-revolutionary fervor, impulsively tweeting #OccupyGeziPark.

(No such literary introduction will be given of yours truly, I am afraid. In this anecdote, I am but the anonymous catalyst for a revealing conversation.)

Rather poorly read on the contemporary Middle East, but curious to no small degree, I asked the professor about the level of social conservatism in Egypt. Do Muslims pray often? Is there a large black market for alcohol? Is there religious tension because of the Copts? In my pre-reactionary, progressive-by-default naiveté, I even asked “Are women in Egypt oppressed?” The professor answered my questions eagerly, with all the expected gesticulations and mini-dramatic-performances. The Turkish girl and I listened, rapt, as one is when witnessing such a masterful union of entertaining affectation and unornamented truth. Finally, he informed us of the state of women’s liberation in Egypt:

(I strive to convey his affable, slightly-broken English.)

“In Egypt, there is no girls living alone; single girls alone, this — it is not allowed socially! It is unapproved in Egyptian society. Egyptian girls must always live with the family if they are not married. The married girls live with the husbands, yes, but the single girls always live with the families.”

The female Istanbulite’s eyebrows leaped up in anticipation of news of an incoming women’s rights violation. “Trigger warnings” weren’t a thing back then, so far as I can remember, but even if they were, this bombastic professor would not have come with one. Asks the Turkess: “Women can’t live alone? Why? What if they’re students?”

The professor continued gracefully with his energetic explanation: “Aha, yes, sometimes if the girls are students they live in the dormitory. But this is rare, very rare. Not common, I think. Girls who are studying at the university also live with the family mostly. In Egypt it is not acceptable in society for the girl to live alone. If girls will live alone in an apartment, this will be shocking, it will be disgraceful. Even sometimes the janitor in the building, or the electrician, or the neighbor, he will knock on the door or he will find the girl, and he will say ‘Hey, you! What are you doing? Where is your husband? Where is your father? Why are you living alone here? Are you having men come in your apartment? Do you meet men there? Do they pay you to come there? What are you doing there alone?'”

The Turkish girl’s eyebrows at this point were practically detached from her head, so wide were her eyes with shock: “That’s… that’s horrible! Women have a right to live by themselves if they want to! Women have a right…” More high-pitched, futile cosmopolitan protests followed, but the conversation had essentially ended there, with an unperturbed professor shrugging his shoulders and rushing off to a meeting (with a dramatized wave, a hint of a bow and a gracious “Ma’a As-Salaama!” [“Good-bye!” in Arabic] — as always) and an amused me, softly smiling outwardly, and inwardly chuckling the kind of mischievous chuckle one can only enjoy after witnessing a truly monumental yet unintentional trolling. The disquieted young lady turned to me slack-jawed for reassurances for her offended liberal sensibilities, but I too had places to be, and quickly emulated the professor’s neutral exit. “Well, I guess that’s just how it is over there! See ya later!”

- – -

I love interacting with people from cultures that an effeminate Harvard sociologist would consider “hopelessly backwards.” These cultures, though often deeply alien in many ways to our own Western/European tradition and civilization, nevertheless share large similarities with the old Western world one reads about in history books. Though I doubt this fine site’s astute readers will need the point of the anecdote explicitly repeated, I will repeat it for the sake of the stray left-wingers who sometimes stumble into our territory: in Egypt, a girl living alone is immediately and automatically assumed to be a prostitute. And, hilariously, by the standards of Islamic Egyptian society, single girls living alone in the West are invariably precisely that: whores. And, distressingly, single girls living alone in the West are invariably whores by the standards of the Western society of 1950, of 1850, of 1750, 1650… and every century of Western society all the way down to 50 BC, and earlier. Women have four lifetime sexual partners on average, says The Telegraph. I will venture a guess that this figure is far below the actual amount — nobody wants to admit to being a slut or a whore, after all, even anonymously to a researcher. Despite abysmal modern sexual mores, even four is about three more than millennia of human civilization would have considered appropriate for a properly-reared young maiden. I can hear the protests already: “Not all women are like that! Some women who live alone aren’t whores!” Averages, baby, averages — I’m not here to talk about outliers, who always exist. The strong, independent, feminist woman high off women’s liberation sleeps around like a man, and this makes her a whore by any standard of civilization.

Whore of Babylon: Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Just kidding; she’s been around since 1969, corrupting your daughters and fighting manspreading, mansplaining, manterrupting… no, no joke, Google any of one the three.

Average age at marriage for Western women only ever increases, and the divorce rate likewise only slowly climbs upwards and upwards. More fornication, more adultery, more divorce, more bastard children, more fatherless children, more broken families, more pornography — not to mention more public (and even state-backed) sexual perversion of all kinds of vile multicolored stripes. The only related metric that is decreasing is total fertility rate. To maintain a stable population, a nation’s fertility rate would have to hover around 2.1 children per women — enough children to replace the parents, and an extra 0.1 children to make up for all the people who die prematurely from accidents, war, disease, excessive masturbation, and what-have-you. A nation with a fertility rate below the magic number of 2.1 will steadily shrink in population until it disappears from the Earth. How is the West doing with fertility rates then? United States: 1.97. United Kingdom: 1.88. France: 1.98. Russia: 1.53. Spain: 1.50. Italy: 1.48. Germany: 1.42. Tiny Iceland is managing 2.08, but Portugal a dismal 1.32. Poor Bosnia is at 1.28, one of the lowest in the world. Austria, Croatia, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Cyprus and Slovakia are all below 1.50. These countries are quite literally slowly disappearing from the map. For a sobering comparison, the smoldering crater known as Afghanistan is at 5.00, war-torn Iraq is at 4.06, and the dysfunctional Congo is at 5.98. Even North Korea is managing a 2.00 fertility rate — the same country where amassing a nuclear arsenal and luxurious liquor cabinet for the Supreme Leader is more important than preventing mass starvation and widespread famine. A North Korean family could probably survive for a year on one of their Supreme Leader’s many chins, and they’re still reproducing more than Americans ostensibly living in the vast land of plentiful bounty and limitless opportunity.

Seriously, just look at this guy.

This 21st century Bacchanalia is flashy and fun, bursting with a vibrant hedonism of clubs, bars, festivals, conventions, easy sex, easy drugs, easy booze, easy desserts, easy work, constant novelty and stimulation from the Internet, the television and from Hollywood, but it will end us all. If everyone is avoiding family life and child-rearing so that they can spend more time doing what our grandparents (and great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, and great-great-great-grandp…) would have called “mortally sinning,” we’ll all be gone without a legacy before the end of the century. When one speaks of “mortal sin,” one must remember that the very English word “mortal” is derived from the ancient Latin word for death, mors. Our forefathers are looking down on us as we commit the most pathetic and protracted suicide in history. Rather grim, innit?

If you are a standard, milquetoast, liberal-by-default Westerner, this might all sound like racist, sexist and homophobic vomit. I would remind you then that, in our culture, we have multiple mainstream, high-tech systems for helping complete strangers prostitute each other. Take Seeking Arrangement, a popular service that helps young females, typically college students (the girls who, in any other era, would have been nobly raising society’s next generation), whore themselves out to unscrupulous and wealthy men for expensive gifts and money. Like Monty Python’s rude French sentry, I vomit in the general direction of this service. Prostitution is still largely illegal in the West, de jure. It seems we make some exceptions, however, when the pimps and prostitutes can satisfactorily rationalize their whoring to us — just enough to soothe our dwindling consciences and atrophied probity.

Alternatively, consider the extremely popular mobile phone application Tinder, “rumored to have upwards of 10 million daily users” making 15 million “matches” a day. What purpose does Tinder serve? Perhaps the “Tinderfessions” Twitter feed, with a mind-boggling 188,000 followers, can shed some light. Looks like Tinder is useful for supporting adultery (“Met my boyfriend on Tinder. Pro: so hot, great in bed. Con: has a wife…and 3 kids. – Emma”), taking the hassle out of fornication (“Swiped right on a girl that was ahead of me in line at Publix. Heard her phone go off when we matched. We banged 2 hours later – Chase”), helping modern-day troubadours build harems (“Been hooking up with a match for a month now. On my way to front stage seats cuz the lead singer of this band is in love with my pussy – Kas”), and most nobly of all, helping all-American sweethearts become home-wrecking, blackmailing whores: “Blackmailing a match I fucked who tried to hide the fact he was married. Can’t wait for my new Macbook Air to arrive. #ThanksTinder – Kim.” Thank you, Tinder, thank you indeed! “Mother of 3 slept over and fucked all night while their dad babysat them at home. She was Constantly cumming, and came in her pussy twice -F” Good Lord. When did the West run so low on self-restraint, virtue, shame, guilt, conscience, charity and kindness that 56 people felt a need to “favorite” the kind of morally reprehensible behavior that destroys the lives of three children? 15 million matches a day: when you hear someone say Cthulhu is digesting our civilization, this is what they mean.

Paraphrasing the admirable James A. Donald, the West of the 18th century considered women so lacking in continence that they would crawl through nine miles of broken glass to fornicate with their demon lover if not restrained by their husbands, fathers, brothers and pastors. In Egypt, a sexist, homophobic, hopelessly backwards Islamic society, girls living alone, beyond the reach of their family, are assumed to be whores. The Egyptians, I think, are not as backwards as we chauvinistically presume, since it seems their intuition about the behavior of unrestrained females has been more than comprehensively vindicated by the state of Western society today, where all girls can live alone (and do much more besides) — and where all girls are whores. Feminism failed. Modernity failed. We got women’s liberation and ubiquitous technology of unimaginable power and complexity, and the result was not a new Golden Age for civilization, but a new Golden Age for depravity.

“Modern,” “enlightened,” “liberal,” protestations aside, the situation in the West of 2015 is clear. Females can live alone, vote, run for office, commit infanticide, get away with murder, work men’s jobs, receive preferential treatment in universities and corporations, deny fathers their children, ruin innocent men with false accusations of rape & assault, and almost anything else they want to do — with the full support of the educational system, the media and the exponentially-expanding police-surveillance state. The dream of women’s liberation has been achieved, and then some. And then some. And then some more. And even some more after that! Females can live alone, unlike in Egypt. Females can live alone, and they do exactly what our 18th century forefathers, and 21st century Egyptian fellows a continent away intuited that they would do — they whore themselves. “Women’s liberation.” Women’s liberation is women’s prostitution. We should have known better.

If I miraculously became the Supreme God-Dictator of the West tonight, and upon finishing my gourmet breakfast of bacon, eggs and the finest Caspian caviar the next morning, I issued an edict that no woman may live alone, what would happen to the West’s marriage and divorce rates? The fertility rate? The bastardy rate? The amount of fornication, adultery, pornography and sexual perversion? The number of broken families? The number of kids shuffling between Mommy’s house and Daddy’s house on alternating weekends? (Or, more likely, just watching Mommy shuffle boyfriends while Daddy contemplates the taste of gun metal with a restraining order trembling in his hand.) What would happen to the rates of suicide, teen pregnancy, alcoholism, mass shootings, herbivore men, sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders, self-radicalization, depression, gambling, drug abuse, obesity, cat-lady spinsters, gang violence, self-harm, ethno-religious tension (and violence), juvenile delinquency, social alienation and hollow shambling wrecks of human beings one missed medication away from walking off the edge of a thirty-story building?

A metaphor for Western society: not really working out as planned.

Quite simply, if we put every woman back in the home, back next to the hearth, and gave her one son and one daughter to educate, civilize, inform, teach, nourish, protect, cultivate, cuddle, cherish and love, what would happen to our society? What if we gave her a fit, cultured, intelligent and loving husband who could teach his son baseball and read Cinderella to his daughter? A husband who didn’t spend his boyhood drugged out on ADD medications, his teenage years drugged out on cannabis, and his young adulthood drunk out of his mind? A husband who was taught to appreciate Beethoven, recognize Van Gogh’s Starry Night, recite a little poetry in French, and recognize a Biblical quote in Ancient Greek? A husband who was taught to shoot a gun, punch a drunkard, row a canoe, and hike up a mountain without complaining? Who kept a library where the television might’ve been, and who knew who his father was, his grandfather, and their fathers and grandfathers before them? Who worshiped the same God as his most distant ancestors, and lived on the very same land they conquered long ago? Who maintained and honored the inheritance bequeathed to him by his forefathers, both material and spiritual, and left it in better condition than he received it, and passed it on to his own sons and daughters? Might we see a resurgence of the stable, loving family? Might we actually see — trigger warning – a better society?

Dramatized wave. Hint of a bow. Knowing wink. “Ma’a As-Salaama!“

The post Women’s Liberation is Women’s Prostitution appeared first on Social Matter.

All three walked quickly. They maintained a nervous gait, as if trying to angrily injure the ground with each step. Hands in pockets, their backpacks hoisted high and tight so that they were leaning inwards. Their eyes never met mine, because their peculiar postures kept their lines of sight directed firmly downwards two meters ahead of them. All three had white earphones firmly implanted into their heads. All three became separate again as quickly as they had become close.

For a moment as they walked away, I felt as if I had witnessed something of supreme importance, even though I didn’t know what it was. Breath firmly bated, balanced somewhere between contemplation and bewilderment, I then finally exhaled a knowing chuckle: I had just witnessed social alienation!

Exhortations on the dangers of social alienation (or atomization, or isolation, if you prefer), are hardly limited to the Right. Slate, among other things, relates a statistic that “loneliness” has doubled among Americans since the 1980’s. The Los Angeles Times says “People who are socially isolated are more likely to die prematurely, regardless of their underlying health issues…” Social alienation – the term I will stick with – is hardly an invented problem for traditionalists and Luddites, yet its manifestations are poorly articulated by the secular clerisy and its implications even more poorly.

The most recent vogue seems to be to describe problems of social alienation in relation to, or as a result of, social media and technological advances. The Slate writer in the previously linked piece only implicates new technologies as causes of social alienation. Her personal anecdote about loneliness begins with a coast-to-coast relocation, but she doesn’t overtly identify her move as a culprit. It is easy to see why technology attracts the most blame – throw a stone through Times Square and you’re more likely to break someone’s iPhone than someone’s skull (at least, you’ll break both).

Yet technology alone cannot be blamed for social alienation – iPhones and Facebook accounts do not force themselves on unsuspecting socially integrated people in the middle of the night in a dark alleyway (or frat-house, for the feminists out there). The three atomized individuals who passed by me and my street corner made a conscious choice before they began their journeys across town not to care for the bustle and noise of their homes and fellow citizens. If a fellow citizen was whistling holiday tunes, they would not know. If songbirds sang today, they would not know. If a cry for help rang out from behind a building, they would not know. Since they had made a conscious decision to notice nothing but their feet and the two meters of pavement in front of them, they would hardly know anything about their surroundings at all. Ought one not feel a chill realizing that pop music might get in the way of rescue after an accident or attack?

Where does one typically shove in the earphones and ignore reality? On airplanes? Public transport? Yours truly, who strives to be socially integrated rather than alienated, typically only turns on the iPod on international flights, surrounded by cranky foreigners. I recall one particularly interesting transatlantic flight, wherein I was sandwiched between a number of uniformed American soldiers returning from Iraq on one side, and a number of bearded Muslim scholars of some sort attired in traditional Islamic garb on the other. Yes, in such a situation, I would imagine the healthy response to be alienating oneself from the particular social situation, and inputting the earphones. Yet what does it say about Western society, then, that self-imposed isolation by technology, even while in public, is the norm? Frankly, it says that the average Westerner has come to expect to meet cranky foreigners in daily life outside the home.

I see the roots of social alienation in the political policies enacted by government functionaries steeped in the ideologies of materialism, globalism, internationalism, secularism and socialism. From small Italian city centres swarming with Bangladeshi families to sprawling German cities filled with loitering Africans, the doctrines of diversity, multiculturalism and mass immigration have never been proven so harmful yet been so devoutly implemented anyway. While the precise source escapes me, I recall one German identitarian remarking that, above everything, what bothered him most about immigrants was how loud they were compared to Germans – boomboxes, shouting matches, loud conversations; all these disrupted the rhythmic lulls of native German life. In such a situation, why not atomize? Choice of music in, “vibrant” “multicultural” life out. This has become the default situation, seemingly, from Seattle to Stuttgart.

International industrial capitalism certainly plays a role too – the modern world is unique in the way it prompts people to move from city to city, or even country to country, in search of a paycheck. A growing class of rootless cosmopolitans certainly doesn’t positively affect the average social alienation of a society. Yet, the most flagrant gestures of inward, anti-social movement do not stem from periodic relocation. It is not just that citizens fail to invest money in their local communities, or fail to establish long-term clubs or businesses or relationships due to their nomadic modern lifestyles. Rather, they have opted not to invest even their eyes or ears in their surroundings. Modernity has turned the public sphere into a 3:00am Bangkok—Kabul flight with a crappy airline, and the Cathedral reassures us this is a great improvement on our societies of old.

On a recent trip to Germany, I spent an afternoon exploring the streets of my hotel neighborhood and killing time in the cafés and bars therein. In the few free hours I had, I remember noticing an animated Greek couple, an angry Serb yelling into a mobile phone, a visibly intoxicated (and possibly retarded) Russian, a Turkish kebab vendor who couldn’t affect a German “r,” and a surly blonde German waitress, covered in tattoos, who served me my coffee. (The café bathroom had an ANTIFA sticker on the door). The stream of native Germans, whom I passed on the street, silent and unobtrusive, failed to make an impression on me. I can’t remember how many of them wore earphones.

The post Thy Name is Social Alienation appeared first on Social Matter.