Cobb

The Neurotic Erotic

Guess who wrote this:

In our culture, sex has lost its sacred quality. If I were mayor or president, I think I would institute some rules for the good of the American Marriage, a prohibition or two — no touching allowed until Tuesday — because longing springs from distance. It is ironic but also absolutely understandable that proximity can kill sex faster than fainting.

You might guess as I suppose many people do, that this is something from the pen of a conservative man. It's not. It's from a woman of the sort I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. I'm sure that this essay is going around the 'sphere. Try to read it with your mouth closed. Then when you're finished, imagine that this woman were actually mayor or president and could institute such rules.

I've known a couple neurotic women and well, actually I've known several. Scary.

American Sex

What is up with sex, and why is American sex different from other people's sex? Specifically, what have we done in marketing sex appeal into our consumer economy that changes what sex is, or what sex is supposed to be?

This is a monstrously huge question that we've touched on in the Weird Science thread, and maybe a little bit in dealing with the implications of Proposition Eight, but not really directly in terms of why sex matters as much as it does as a cultural phenomenon and what effect it has on the basic function of society.

Mark Steyn made quite a big deal about the birthrates of Muslims in Europe and how Scandinavians and Japanese are essentially dying out by not reproducing. When I was a kid, I came from a family of five, which was considered large but not huge. Now, the very idea of a professional with five kids is almost unthinkable, but one with two kids and one from a second marriage seems to be commonplace. We expect teenage girls and boys to be sexually active. Meaning what? How many times a week is normal, with how many partners? I came of age in the 70s when best selling advice came from Xaviera Hollander aka the 'Happy Hooker'. What of legal prostitution? San Francisco is going for it.

Speaking for myself I realized at the age of 10 that everybody is naked. I was helped by an issue of Playboy magazine which showed nurses and nuns and secretaries and schoolteachers. What resides in the sexual imagination today? What's left of it? With all of the pornography out there, is there any sexual imagination? What's the deal with safe sex?

How much should our sexual proclivities and orientations define us? Should that be political? Is sex easy or difficult - how much hesitation do we have making friendships sexual? It sex today as intimate as it used to be? Is it a sport or is it a sacred act? WTF?

Repulsion in the Orbit of Desire

I ran across this in an email passed by me:

The only thing that scares me are the men who are not out and living a lie as straight men. That scares me and every other straight woman.

I don't think I've ever heard that said before. I must admit that I'm not necessarily inside the heads of any women, although I'm getting much better. The weird thing is that I'm coming to understand the truth of something I read from Henry Miller a very long time ago, and Henry Miller is one scary dude. He said, women eventually take it all. As in dishing it out and taking it. Henry meant, as usual, something sexual. He was somewhat impressed in the fact that women do suffer through sorts of debasement that would destroy men. Miller did his damnedest to debase women, and still they remained women. And so in that strange way I have another confirmation of something I believe to be true about women's ability to give, even under hostile circumstances. Why are women illogical? Because they must be, and they know it. A woman's ability to soothe the savage beast in man is something fundamental, something very deep. I think it is something elemental to the power of femininity. The woman who flows knows this, the brittle woman doesn't quite.

Watching my daughters I am coming to understand something about a woman's relationship to her attractiveness to men which is central to her opinion of her self - of her confidence. A lady, I was instructed, puts herself in the line of sight of a man she's interested in. The man will do the rest, he only need see her. She only need be seen. And so a woman of confidence knows very well how men who see her want her. She will not be ignored. So she is to be sure that she is seen in a very specific way. Women spend huge amounts of time and effort in controlling their image and designing their orbit of desire. In the same way a martial arts master studies for years and can draw a circle on the ground with his sword, knowing he has a zone of fatality awaiting every foe, a woman architects her beauty as the central petal in a floral display creating an orbit of desire.

And it is in this way that I understand the quote above. The gay man who masquerades as a straight man is never drawn into this female orbit by desire. It must be horribly disconcerting to the woman who assumes attraction finds at bottom, indifference, distaste or repulsion.

No Sell Out

Barry wrote:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our setereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce [a former girlfriend] or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

Like many blackfolks in my generation who inherited no real understanding of how politics actually works, Obama spent a lot of time with academics and posers. This contributes to my theory of how his exposure to America, and particular the need any putative leader has to deal with *all* of the people tracks his positions towards the right. Obama seems much less baked to me, as time goes on, especially in light of his vacuous voting record. It definitely heralds change if he wins. The problem is that one cannot be truly sure what HE clings to. He has triangulated in a campaign which is exactly the same thing as growing wiser with a greater appreciation for the complexities, and in almost every case his flops have been towards McCain's moderate conservative positions.

Higher Than Politics

This morning I was listening to Dennis Prager and he was moaning and mocking respectfully as he always does. Then he said something that was interesting in trying to understand how the Left gets their drawers in a bunch, especially those who find it easy to hate the middle of America aka flyover country. He said that politics is their religion - that they have no higher comfort. He then went to say how comforting it is to know that he has a higher calling and can let politics go when it gets too crazy and mentioned that he'll be celebrating high holy days which are upcoming shortly in the Jewish calendar.

He's wrong. The opposition does have a higher calling. It's sex.

Aldous Huxley said that an intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex. What then is a person who finds sex to be the most interesting thing of all? The context I'm thinking of is one that suggests that if we all agree that everything we do in politics is to secure our pursuit of happiness, what exactly is the end game? What provides happiness? If governments are instituted among men to secure such things, what things are we securing.

This is something that Prager does talk about a good deal and I remember agreeing with him as he spoke about it some time this past spring.

I haven't seen the Vagina Monologues, but I can already tell that I don't like Eve Ensler. I just caught her video on the TED website and cringed at her example-making and her illogical inversion of the notion of security, especially her terms of embracing suffering. Then again I know she's not speaking to me but at me abstractly in the third person 'omnicient' in that passive-aggressive way liberals often express their anger. The girl who wears an 'I love my vagina' T-Shirt in high school was the heroine of the day.

Without going into the details of what has gone off the rails with feminism, and what we know is wrong with multiculturalism and identity politics, it is curious to see the dovetails between those ideological movements and the pursuit of sexual happiness. I asked the question without much response in The Sybaritic Side of The Culture. Is the end of human invention and civilization result in all of us basically 'reverting' to our true natures of enjoyment of sex, drugs and rock and roll? Or perhaps a better way to put it is this? Is there something more Godlike in sacrifice?

Perhaps an unspoken yet well understood trope of our culture wars - our divisions of Left and Right, between cosmopolitan and drylongso is over the same old matter of the Puritan work ethic all over again. After all, you can't get conservatives to swoon more obsequiously than when they describe some soldier's noble sacrifice. And there's nothing liberals love to do more than mock that as an utterly meaningless waste of a life.

I'm willing to put God as a higher purpose, or more accurately to state that we find our higher purpose and therefore the most true essence of our humanity in our search for God. And while it is abundantly clear that we American Christians have a gigantic black hole where the ritualization of sacred sensuality should be, it's not so clear that non-believers have a lock on transcendent sex. That is precisely the difficulty I have with those who make no distinction between sexual restraint and sexual repression - which is where I see most feminists and their supporters coming from.

I am approaching the age at which sensuality is academic, and every year that goes by finds me less and less anxious about it. I thoroughly enjoy the privilege of married life which obviates the tremendous pressure of single life. It would take some doing for me to get back in the mindset of embedding so much meaning into sex, meaning that would come close to justifying how much of it permeates the motivations of so much of our society. I've been laughing at single people's goofball relationships almost as much as skateboard blooper videos, and now I'm to the point at which I want to derisivley smack people for their idiocy. And I warm to them in the realization that they're looking for romance to provide a purpose. I am brought to pity. Remember Cobb's Rule: There's Marriage and there's everything else; everything else doesn't count. There's a statistical industry for you social scientists... How much despair in America is not created by Bush and the Republicans, but by the fact that so many people can't find happiness? A great irony if ever there was one - you'd think that those who seek to find redemption in their personal and sexual relationships would be, like stoners with the best herb, too happy to care about the intrigues of PNACians. Alas, there is not much purpose in romance, and so they must put passion into politics.

I understand and respect anyone who fights against the repression of women. There are not enough warriors in that battle. No society that disrespects women can long survive, much less sustain liberty. But I fear that many who mock conservatives on sexual matters equate abstinance and restraint with stupidity and repression, and in their verve to liberate the naughty bits of people around the world, have mistaken profligacy with liberation. What did I hear the other night? Yesterdays sluts are today's 'empowered women' and today's sluts are all celebrities. If you could fuck your way to freedom, nobody would need armies.

Where They At?

Where are all the good brothers at? Where they at?

I'm going to answer this question seven ways using seven different men I know who are all good brothers and seven different songs you know.

Byron: One Love
This tune is from Whodini. The same people who asked 'Friends, how many of us have them?' also procliamed, 'One love, one love, you're lucky just to have just one.' Byron was shy and goofy in high school. He graduated with good grades and a good sense of humor, and a virgin. He never had a girlfriend and never really tried to get one. Not even for show. He always took love seriously and said that one day he'd find the right girl, and that was all he had to say about it. He is not, was not and never will be on the market for romance. He found that one girl, married her 20 years ago and never looked back. In fact, he never looked up, down, sideways or any other way for any other girl.  If you ask Bryon about love and the dating scene, he'll turn his head at you like a puppy. Women and men who shop for the perfect mate to him sounds like people who shop for the perfect refrigerator.

Daniel: Control
You're Janet Jackson. All of 21 years old talking about how you are going to have everything in your life and you don't even know how to have a baby. Daniel dismisses you without hesitation. He is the man. He wears the pants. He will work from sunup to sundown seven days a week. He will sacrifice and work his fingers to the bone. Driving a bus. Walking the postal route. He will buy a decent house and a decent car and decent clothes. All you have to do is not ask for diamonds and pearls. Do the kitchen work, the kid work and the bed work, and he will marry you and fulfill your every need. The problem is that you confuse need with desire. Daniel doesn't make a lot of money and he never will. He just wants to be the man of his house. If you want a man who will fly you to Hawaii, then he wants a Victoria Secret model. They are both dealbreakers, so why can't you just be satisfied? Daniel is an honest, decent man who just wants to be a man. You want 'more'. That's why he's not having anything to do with your ass.

Zachary: Climbing Up The Ladder
Zach is all about success. You don't understand why but everybody knew it when he was just a kid. All he dreamed about, all he talks about, all he ever wanted to be was that thing. Zach doesn't eat to enjoy the food, he eats to fuel his body so he can spend more time doing that thing that one day is going to get him to that place. In other words, you will never be first in his heart, his mind or his soul. Get used to it. Zach isn't cruel. It's not that he doesn't understand your needs. The problem is he will always think of you and the things that are important to you, second. He is singleminded about him and absent-minded about you, so half the time he will need to be reminded.  It's not that you aren't perfect, he needs you to be able to understand him - to balance him and make him a whole person. But you will always be second fiddle to his dream. Get used to it. He's a perfectly good brother who doesn't read Essence magazine. You are too high maintenance. Zach is either a dreamer or a visionary. That depends on you.

Milton: Why You Treat Me So Bad?
Milton has been burned. Milton is fundamentally a good brother, but he is not even ready to trust. It makes him look more pathetic than he actually is. On the one hand, he doesn't want or need to be patronized. On the other hand he is desperately trying to be the man he once was. See Milton only knows one way to love - completely with all of his heart and soul. So in one way, he's never going to get over that bitch. In another way, he needs you more than you know. All you have to do is be 100% sure that you love him. Milton, will eat you up. He will devote himself to you - he wants to say all the perfect things and utterly sweep you off your feet, but if you even sniff another man's second-hand cigarette smoke without choking he's going to give you the evil eye. He gives total devotion. He demands total devotion. With Milton, it's do or die. Why do you keep pointing out his obvious faults? Nobody's perfect.

Larry: Never Give Up on a Good Thing
Larry is not a good brother, per se. He is a de facto good brother. Why? Because Larry has a great woman, a woman who truly loves him and works harder than the average bear. So Larry realizes he's probably not worth it so he's not going to risk anything so he does all the right things at the right time (at her prompting) and keeps his head above water. You are not going to get him because even though he wants you, you cannot outdo his woman. One day Larry's charm is going to wear off and then people will see right through him. He's an actual good brother because he's holding all the right cards, but that's luck, not principle.

Harry: I'm Too Sexy
Harry is Larry's twin brother, except Harry actually does got it going on. The problem is that Harry is not even ready to settle down and quite frankly you can't compete with the hoes. Harry is eventually going to turn into the model citizen, but right now he's young and full of himself, plus he's already heard everything you could possibly say. He's bored, in fact, and there's a chance that he'll never settle down at all. You know it, he knows it, everybody knows it. It ain't fair, but there it is. Prostrate yourself, or be a bitch. You never know what's going to work and it'll drive you crazy just trying to figure it out. Give up. Or try blackmail.

Tony: It's Raining Men
Well he's gay of course. One out of seven? Don't be surprised.
--

Now to answer your question, I have been most of these men at one time or another. Well, all except Tony and Byron. Right now I'm probably Larry, meaning I'm very much into playing the stupid husband role, if you can remember that episode of the Cosby Show.

Secondly, this is a black public question. Or at least I should say that it was put to me in that way. The way I see that is through the lens of Cobb's Rule #2: There is Marriage and there is everything else: everything else doesn't count. There are no rules for relationships, it's all about people getting their jollies off whomever is willing to dole them out. Anything goes. And since anything goes, who cares what you think, and who cares what I think? The reason Marriage has lasted for centuries is because it is an arrangement that satisfies public and private needs, and there's an accumulated mass of wisdom associated with it. So everything I say about the good brother only makes sense in the context of Marriage, because quite frankly if you only want a relationship, the stakes aren't high enough to really matter in the end. People tend to bet their lives on Marriage, and that's the point. It's only when you bet your life that you get off your ass for something like exactly how you are going to treat another human being. Short of that, it's all transitory and fleeting and not worth much discussing.

To that black public question, you kinda have to ask why is the question out there? My kneejerk reaction is that the good black man becomes invisible to people who have to ask 'where they at?'. Daniel drove that bus right by you today. Did you notice him? Zachary wants to be a fashion designer. Did you think that was kinda gay? Milton is 36 years old, has never been married and has no kids. You keep thinking there's something wrong with him.

I know it sounds kinda strange, but men tend to confide in me about the subject of women. I sympathize, and I've heard these kinds of stories all the time. I think most men are like Milton and they end up being like a hard version of Daniel, and that is because most women don't know how to act like ladies. More specifically, most women don't act like they really want to be married, faithful and true. Those who do don't seem to recognize that they actually do have to compete with other women - it's all that shallow cow metaphor. The women that get it, then tend to think they're too smart to be a wife, like it's a punishment for being too fat or unsophisticated or something.

My personal opinion goes a little something like this. Women are crazy, and women know that women are crazy. Aside from predatory lesbians, there are no women who would go through what men do just to get in another woman's stanky drawers. And if women thought about just that thought long enough, I think they'd come to realize what I know to be true. Good wives are much, much happier in the long term. There is nothing quite so pathetic as an old single bitch. Well, OK an old single bitch with pictures of her toy dog on the piano instead of kids.

Men, of course, are filthy and ruthless. And men know that men are filthy and ruthless. Aside from bottom boy homos,  there are no men who would subject themselves to the business end of a dirty, thoughtless man. And if men thought about however it is what women take pleasure in satisfying us, I'm sure they'd conclude as I do. A good husband is way more secure than a rogue. There's nothing quite so pitiful as the old man in the club. Well, an old poor man in the club who knows he's going to die alone.

Where are all the good brothers and good sisters? All around. Except they forgot what the endgame was. The question should have been, how can I get her to marry me? And until that question becomes more frequently asked 'good' is just a relative term. It ain't about the person. It's about betting your life.

Bad Boy Attraction

Why do beautiful women go fro bad boys?

Two and a half reasons.
The first and foremost reason is because bad boys know that they are bad more certainly than good boys know they are good, and women like a known quantity in their men. In other words, good boys, for the most part in American society are wishy-washy, and women's instincts tell them to stay away from wishy-washy men. From my perspective, most American women think that they are crazy in some deep part of themselves, and the last thing they need is a man who is more unsure of himself than they are.

The second reason is that women pride themselves in making their men respectable, even if the only thing respectable about their man is that he could possibly be associated with her. The easier this job is, the less self-esteem some women have. I would say this rule applies more especially to single women without kids. Not very many women have the patience to go on a male reclamation project when they've got crumbsnatchers to raise.

The half-assed reason that women go for bad boys is the worst reason of all, which is that they see bad boys as better than them. That is, some women need to be dominated because they know they are no good themselves. So they throw themselves to the dogs. This is a sign of a bad daddy in baby girl's past, and we know how twisted that can get. Such women are doing eternal penance.

So there it is.

Black Sex

Destiny of the Born

I read this over at the Jane Galt abortion thread:

I am a lifelong Roman Catholic, which I realize means I have no intellectual credibility on this issue. However, when our adopted son was 7 or 8, he began watching a PBS program on abortion. We realized very quickly what he was watching and monitored the program very carefully. He watched the entire program. When it was over, he came into the kitchen, looked at the two of us and said: "If my real mommy had had an abortion, I wouldn't be." Rather amazing for a child his age. To this day, he has no question regarding what he thinks about abortion. Neither do we.

It's probably not fair for me to disagree with a child, then again if I didn't somebody else would. That is rather the point. If his mommy had had an abortion, he wouldn't be able to give his parents a post-facto justification for not aborting. But not only that, this is the child speaking from the position of the parent's child. In which case he might have simply been another child with the very same authority; the one not aborted. In either case he is the child, the chosen one, the one that exists. It doesn't matter how he came to exist, his existence justifies his statement, but the weight that the statement carries depends upon the fact that his adoptive parents accept it.

I often think of this paradox with my own children. No matter who their mother is, they would be my children. They cannot possibly be equal to any others who were not born, yet in fact they are, they are the inevitable, and because of that any abortions or secret children any women I might have known biblically are immaterial. They are that they are.

Confused?

How about this way? There is a slot in my future (as of 15 years ago) called 'First Born Son'. It doesn't matter how he comes to be or in what order of sexual encounters or failures. Once he is born, he becomes First Born Son. It's like destiny. The moral question might be, to whom and to what does FBS owe this honor? Should his right to this destiny be compromised by prior abortions? That is to say do people who are born owe some debt to the unborn? Do you? do I? Do anti-abortionists have standing to plead on behalf of the unborn, or are they too compromised because of failed matings which predated their successful birth?

Such are questions which must be answered in describing and defending the rights of the unborn.

This is something we wrestled with in Catholic school. We called it the Question of the Sperm on the Floor.

On Girly Girls

I think a girly girl is a child who is actively looking for aspects of her femininity and really enjoys such expressions. Scholar is such a child. I can't think of a more comprehensive way to put it, but I know it when I see it. Here are a couple observations, which are actually easy because I can compare her to her sister.

• She puts makeup herself and on other girls.
• She will make pointless arguments or quips merely to distinguish herself from a male's opinion.
• She will initiate 'girl' play. Tea parties, dolls, etc.
• She keeps up with the girly qualities of other girly girls.

I was quite surprised at how quickly Scholar exhibited this behavior. Before she was in Kindergarten she expressed desire for the princess dress, and coordinated hairbows etc. I think a lot of it was because she was such a cute toddler and it was something all of her caregivers responded to.

Now that she's almost 12 I find her girlyness expressed in different ways. She's heading towards cheerleaderness. She has already created a production for one of her classes. She's and expressive dresser and up for parts in her school play. I'm not so good in recognizing the more subtle aspects of what the appropriate bounds of divatude are. I need to work on that. I never really understood 12 year old girls.

What I do understand are character issues, and I'm trying to hone in on those things that are girly but not un-virtuous. For example, I know for a fact that Scholar gets into dramatic situations. She does the drama queen act, but in a way I know this to be a fundamental difference between boys and girls. I expect Boy to man up and not complain, get it done. I expect my wife to protest loudly the very moment something's not Kosher (so I can fix it), but I don't want my wife to be petty or create drama for its own sake. I am aware of the duality of Pioneer vs Princess and I certainly don't expect any of the Bowen women to have a sense of entitlement without effort, and yet I very much respect their desire not to get their hands dirty and scream when someone is doing them dirt. It's quite a balancing act.

Such spectrums are not always clear or without contradictions. But I have to disambiguate what I think is nature from what I think is nurture, and keep all kinds of nonsense away. I believe that if I concentrate on character, I'll be OK but the trick is to recognize how girls express character and personality while they're not yet women. Fortunately, I have the Spousal Unit who grew up in an all girl family.