Ever have some task you had to do, but it’s just so huge that it’s hard to see how to begin? The very prospect of beginning seems too huge, too intimidating.
Which brings me to “Wimps and Barbarians,” by Terrence O. Moore, the Mount Everest of fisking. The essay comes with an unstinting recommendation from Sara at Diotima and appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, so it’s probably not a practical joke.
Then again, maybe Moore is a joker. How else to explain a high school principal who writes this:
I swear, just a handful of paragraphs after expressing a determination not to appear “old and boring,” the man is complaining that those darn young people dress in those damned modern fashions and listen to that awful rock and roll music. Oh, and he makes fun of them for having a teenage vocabulary. (Like, how original.)
Think I’m exaggerating?
Recognizing other barbarians by their ball caps, one barbarian can enter into a verbal exchange with another anywhere: in a men’s room, at an airport, in a movie theater. This exchange, which never quite reaches the level of conversation, might begin with, “Hey, what up?” A traditional response: “Dude!” The enlightening colloquy can go on for hours at increasingly high volumes. “You know, you know!” “What I’m sayin’!” “No way, man!” “What the f—!” “You da man!” “Cool!” “Phat!” “Awesome!” And so on. Barbarians do not use words to express thoughts, convey information, paint pictures in the imagination, or come to a rational understanding.[…]
[Heavy metal] is impossible to dance to. You can, of course, thrust your fist over and over into the air. Heavy metal lacks all rhythmic quality, sounding more like jet engines taking off while a growling male voice shouts repeated threats, epithets, and obscenities. Heavy metal lacks all subtlety, reflection, harmony, refinement’in a word, civilization.
Okay, so we’re not going to seem tired or fussy. First step: let’s attack teenage fashion, teenage vocabulary, and teenage music. That sure won’t make us seem old or boring!
Here’s another giggle-worthy bit:
Picture it: you’re a teenager in high school, a bit insecure about masculinity (as nearly all teen boys are). Suddenly, your ex-marine principal Mr. Moore gets in your face and barks “When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?” The question, full of contempt, assumes its own answer; but you can’t return the contempt, because if you do he’ll throw you in detention or worse.
Is it any surprise that teens react to this “simple” question by stammering and looking at the ground? Not to anyone who has any ability to put himself in a teenager’s shoes. But if Principal Moore could put himself in other people’s shoes, he’d know better than to rail against that Awful Music Kids Like.
Moore’s lack of irony isn’t funny (okay, it isn’t just funny); it also reveals a significant intellectual weakness, which is that Moore doesn’t examine himself or his own ideas critically. Obvious self-contradictions go by without comment; necessary premises underlying his essay are simply assumed, rather than supported with facts or even argument.
For example, the central premise of Moore’s article: Manhood is in decline. Over and over, Principal Moore laments “how we as a nation have lost our sense of true manliness.” We must return to the golden age of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, when men were men.
Of course, Principal Moore’s younger students have grandfathers who, back in the day, wore their hair long, smoked pot and listened to Bob Dylan. And the boring, old Principal Moore’s of that day tore their hair out and lamented that young men nowadays lacked all manhood.
This brings up an essential point, one completely ignored by Principal Moore: How does he know manhood is in decline? If Moore wasn’t ignorant of history, he’d know that chicken littles have been declaring “the manhood is failing! The manhood is failing!” for at least a century and probably much longer.
For example, consider this quote from Herman Scheffauer, who wrote in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1908; modernize the language slightly and it could be taken straight from Principal Moore’s article:
It is not the making of the physical “mollycoddle” we need fear, but of the mental and moral one. It is weaklings of this sort, unreinforced with the proper stamina of soul, that have brought about the hideous reign of graft and crime that seems to devastate our land.
Like Principal Moore, Scheffauer is certain that the young men of his day are failing at manhood – so certain that he doesn’t bother providing any evidence to support his thesis. Scheffauer was by no means alone in his concern – on the contrary, that public schools (and woman teachers) were failing to make boys into virtuous men was a major concern of macho intellectuals nationwide (it was partly to address these concerns that the Boy Scouts were created in 1910).
And so it’s been for every generation of Americans. Principle Moore says that young men of today are disappointing compared to their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. But when the grandpas and great-grandpas were young men, they too were criticized for their lack of proper manhood.
So what’s the deal? Is it possible that manhood has been in a state of tragic decline in every generation for over a century? Maybe, but I doubt it. With hindsight, the men of the 1900s don’t seem vastly manlier than the men of the 1930s, for example. The young men (and women, who Principal Moore ignores) who fought the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s do not, to me, seem less manly and virtuous than their 1920s counterparts. In short, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to think manliness has ever been in crisis, even though we’ve never lacked for chicken littles who tell us otherwise.
But Principal Moore doesn’t address this history – in fact, there’s no reason to think he’s aware of the history of his views.
This isn’t the only case where Moore appears uninformed on his subject. For instance, one of the many villains of Moore’s piece (along with rock music, baseball caps, and female teachers) is the lack of spanking:
It’s the “of course” that amazes me, because it speaks of a self-confidence in one’s own rightness completely unshaken by decades of research finding the opposite. Is Principle Moore so ignorant of the research that it doesn’t even occur to him to attempt to support his “of course” with evidence, or to explain why the last 45 years of research on spanking has all been wrong? From an article on spanking by Murray Straus (a favorite social scientist of anti-feminists, by the way, cited often by Christina Hoff Sommers) in Society (Sept 2001 issue):
Is there an argument for spanking? Perhaps. But Moore doesn’t even bother to make an argument, or to address the fact that opposing views appear considerably more supported by research. It’s as if he believes that his contempt for opposing views, in and of itself, rebuts those views. More likely, Moore is so positive that he must be correct that he couldn’t be bothered researching what peer-reviewed studies have found about spanking. Is doing research – and, indeed, knowing what you’re talking about – too wimpy for a real man like Principal Moore? Maybe.
That’s part one of my climb up Mount Moore. In part two, I’ll get to what I really disliked about this essay..
I haven’t read the article yet, but its general topic made me wonder why nobody is ever really worried about womanhood. I’ve never read a diatribe about how women are no longer women and what to do about it. Why is this the case? My theory is that being a woman is assumed to be so bottom-of-the-hierarchy that it doesn’t take any effort at all. Manhood, otoh, seems to be at constant danger, because it’s something better than womanhood, and if we are not careful we’ll all fall down the hierarchy hill into a big soppy effeminate pile.
Why waste a well-written essay on the muddy and inconsistent prattle of the unevolved? Teenage males communicate like apes? Oh, dear. Listen to teenage girls whose communication is equally comprised of (different but still vacuous) ritual noises. Has not the good Principal Moore noticed that most teens manage to enter adulthood armed with intelligible speech and the ability to navigate a compound sentence? Not all, to be sure as the President demonstrates regularly but then, no society bats 1,000.
As for baseball caps? “Dig me!” Rather like dressing up in a flight suit.
Deploring the manners of the young is a timeless, petty and ultimately useless pastime. Deploring the infantile in adults is probably also unproductive but there is some logic to the effort.
Without reading the article, I predict that it’s “the virtues” of manly men that are up for evisceration. Hopefully Mr. Moore doesn’t openly advocate woman-beating as manly…
I’ve read diatribes on the state of femininity (sorry, can’t find a reference without completely overrunning my lunch break) – they tend to blame rising divorce rates on girls who ask boys out on dates (and even pay for them, gasp!) and therefore cannot be sufficiently submissive to their husbands or enjoy the delightful frisson of rigid gender roles. But they don’t seem to get much attention.
I have two theories. One is that classical (gentle)manhood is largely defined by properly treating and appealing to classical ladyhood; as feminism changes the notion of ladyhood, the male gender essentialists feel confused and threatened. Have any non-gender-essentialists written diatribes on declining manhood?
My other theory is that failed manhood is more directly associated with crime, particularly violent crime – a failed man is a criminal, while a failed woman is only the mother of a criminal.
Just flip it and its ludicrousness shows itself:
Maybe having something as dramatic and obvious as menarche makes this less of a problem for women. Or maybe it’s because so many people continue to call us “girls” even when we’re clearly adult, that the distinction isn’t as important.
Either way, I’d have to guess that I just picked it up from my surroundings — people (family, school) and the media (including books). But then, I’ve thought more about this than when I was half my age.
Why is this such a big deal?
Can you answer that question about your gender off-the-cuff, or does it leave you “speechless”?
“When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?”
Moore seems to think that there’s one event that teenagers can point to, when it’s a variety of events and situations that aren’t evident as they happen.
I can’t point to one event. But at 33, I realize the influences (mostly male) that have positively affected me as I’ve matured. And they never treated me with disrespect, yelling, or physical violence, which Moore seems to conflate with authority.
I wonder what Moore would think of George W. Bush? Here’s a man who never was challenged as he grew up, who acted like one of Moore’s barbarians well into adulthood, and who was handed everything to him all his life….including his present job. Would Moore consider Dubya “virtuous”?
How about a police officer who routinely abuses his authority, who attacks defenseless people, and seems to target female protesters for abuse? Is this a virtuous man, or a barbarian?
How about a lawyer and civil servant who made lewd comments to women frequently, and who opposes the policy that that helped him into his position. That is, is Clarence Thomas a barbarian?
If you managed to read the whole thing, you’re made of sterner stuff than me (maybe the article is meant as a test of manliness). Not that that stopped me from commenting on it.
I think his use of the word “barbarian” is right on target — his description of youth culture sounds like something you’d hear from some 17th century explorer talking about the ignorant culture-less savages he found in America or Australia.
“When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?”
I would have said, “Wait–are you saying you needed to take lessons?”
But, I got in trouble a lot.
Stating the obvious here: Worries about manhood are sexist (because a not-man is a woman) and homophobic (e.g. the use of the word “effeminate”). God forbid we should be a nation of women and faggots.
Cleis – then again, the balanced (heterosexual) man wouldn’t fear or hate homosexuals – he’d realize that they’re no threat to him or his sense of masculinity.
The barbarian is at his core an insecure bully, and uses homophobia and hate of sexual minorities (among other groups) to mask his insecurity.
HEAVY METAL?!?
No, complaining about heavy metal in winter 2003 does not make you sound tired and fussy. Complaining about Hip Hop in winter 2003 makes you sound tired and fussy. Complaining aobut heavy metal makes you sound like a guy who was tired and fussy in 1989, and is now sadly in early stages of dementia.
“Is there an argument for spanking? Perhaps. But Moore doesn’t even bother to make an argument […].”
I think the article, taken as a whole, argues very strongly in favour of spanking Moore as hard as is humanly possible. Gotta knock some sense into the boy somehow, ya know.
The article can’t be taken seriously, so herewith a little snarkiness:
Since the 1950’s sperm count and consequently male fertility has been falling at an alarming rate.
Hmm. Maybe there IS a manhood crisis.
In the days of my youth
I was told what it means to be a man
You never know what lessons are conveyed in heavy metal music.
One further jape: the link between corporal punishment and physical violence arguably supports Moore’s point, since fighting is stereotypical male behavior.
I would assume, given that he objected to heavy metal rather than rap or hip-hop that Moore’s school was predominantly white.
well, I wouldn’t mind more general displays of maturity from society as a whole, so yeah, I’d love a return of manhood. or, more accurately, adulthood. virtues such as courage, wisdom, responsibility, and morality (nice and nebulous terms, eh?) are gender neutral as far as I’m concerned. I certainly wouldn’t find a cowardly, infantile, amoral dunderhead attractive.
of course, virtue includes tolerance, and he obviously misses that point, since he gets all huffy at “teen culture.”
but that’s probably taking him more seriously than he deserves. so now for the cheap shot:
“you ever notice how those most worried about ‘protecting masculinity’ have the least to protect?”
I was in Budapest, and those Hungarian barbarians are so weird. Like, they have no conversations, just yawps like, “Budapesti vagy?” “Nem, egri vagyok.” and occasionally “Hol van a kurva kavem”. Not knowing Hungarian, I didn’t understand them, so I can only assume their conversations convey to feelings or thoughts. Me smart.
“convey to feelings or thoughts” should have been “convey no feelings or thoughts”. Yeah, me real smart.
Posted by Evan at January 29, 2004 04:07 PM :
“When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?”
I would have said, “Wait–are you saying you needed to take lessons?”
But, I got in trouble a lot.
Evan,that’s a great response, and exactly the kind of stuff I am trying to teach my sons and daughter. I think we can all learn something from Moore, namely that just because somebody writes it down don’t make it true. What I find so objectionable, well, make that most objectionable, is that Moore as principal thinks he should be teaching my sons anything other than math, science, history, etc. It is most definitely MY job to raise MY children to be the kind of Humans I think they should be. It is not the school’s job to make my sons men. And I most definitely don’t think I want my sons to grow up to resemble Moore’s definition of a real man.
two asides:
I feel sorry for Moore. He has the opportunity to connect with people who are just forming a world view — I love talking to teenagers, and I love having a teenager in my house. It’s fascinating to watch them develop interests and opinions about something other than Pokemon. Teenagers are the bomb. (That’s one of my favorite sermons — everyone’s always trashing teenagers, so I stick up for them. They are a much maligned creature.) But it more pisses me off that he labels all teenage boys as Barbarians. But wait, aren’t Barbarians arguably the most manly of men?
Secondly, my husband, who is 41, regularly starts conversations with “Dude!” Does that mean he’s not a real man?
Echidne–there was a huge movement to that effect, both prior to and after WW2. Many believe that the “go back to the house” feminine mystique thing was a post-war phenomenon, but it actually began much earlier. After the war, however, it took on a new tone, as the American Freudians (Helene Deutsch is notable here) absolutely pathologized femaleness. Also notable is a column that ran for years in the Ladies Home Journal–“Can This Marriage Be Saved?”–wherein the diagnosis was often that she wasn’t feminine enough and had emasculated her husband. There’s also an article from Esquire, I believe in the early 60s, that goes on and on about how women aren’t really women any more. (Actually, there are a lot of articles in popular magazines about this stuff–women are blamed much more than men, both for the supposed lack of femininity and the resultant lack of masculinity.)
It’s all depressing. But it clarified something for me–that I really don’t know of anything that I’d want to teach a son but not a daughter, and vice versa.
I swear to you that when I read this article I thought it had been ghost-written by Dave Barry and was meant as satire. It’s pretty depressing to discover that it was meant to be taken seriously.
As others have pointed out by way of music, Mr. Moore is entirely out of touch with modern teenagers. He used the word “phat,” which I haven’t heard from teenage lips in a good while; he complained about heavy metal as being the most popular form of music when it’s popularity is in decline; he mentioned baseball caps, but a quick jaunt through a mall shows plenty of teenagers who are still part of the “barbarian culture” he talks about.
I think my favourite part is his assertion that teenagers, especially teenage males, don’t “use words to express thoughts, convey information, paint pictures in the imagination, or come to a rational understanding.” Let’s examine a piece of dialogue I once overheard…
Okay, so maybe I’m not the best person in the world at capturing dialogue, but that’s more or less what I heard two teenage guys saying in the mall one afternoon. I’d say that that contains dialogue used to conjure images, process ideas, and arrive at (semi-)rational conclusions. Clean up the language and abbreviations and that could same bit of dialogue could easily have been spoken by older men.
Did someone say spanking?
((reads more carefully))
Oh, wrong kind of spanking. Darn.
I don’t know, PDP, that was a pretty excellent rendition! How did you get close enough to hear it all?
They were sitting at the table behind me. (And thanks for the compliment!)
There’s a simple explanation. Terrence O. Moore was born in 1880 or so, and invented a time-machine around the time he was twenty. He set the dial for the year 2000 (logical enough) and tried it out. Problem is, he got stuck in the future, poor soul.
This explains why all the behavior he thinks of as ideal was considered the model of masculinity for the Edwardians: the notion that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, for example, hasn’t really had much currency since the advent of WWI.
Honestly, though, someone made THIS guy a Principal? Of a High School? I pity his students: it’s no fun knowing that your Principal hates you.
Oh, and I notice that he uses a 1943 C.S. Lewis lecture as a source for this quotation about ‘wimps’.
“Modern education and culture, however, have conspired to turn modern males into what C. S. Lewis called “men without chests,” that is, wimps. The chest of the wimp has atrophied from want of early training. The wimp is therefore unable to live up to his duties as a man:
‘We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.'”
Lewis’s essay, taken from _The Abolition of Man_ is likewise concerned in part with the decline of manliness and education. You can draw two lesson from this:
1) Manliness has apparently been in shocking decline for a long, long time.
2) Moore considers Lewis a good model of the kind of man he’d like his students to be. Lewis, while a lovely Christian humanist who wrote wonderful books, was also an Oxbridge don who spent much of his adult life unmarried and living with the widowed mother of his best friend after his best friend’s death. When he was 65, he married a long-time female friend who was apparently dying of bone cancer; the marriage lasted 3 years, but he may not have expected it to.
In other words, Lewis’s sexual and emotional relations with women were hardly orthodox.
You can also draw a third conclusion: Moore’s a principal who doesn’t cite his sources in a published essay. I find this more shocking than most of the behavior he decries in his essay.
Plus there’s the whole pedophile thing with Lewis, but who’s keeping track?
Yep, ideal man.
Yes, and Lewis was bloviating about the “wimpiness” of men right in the middle of the largest and deadliest war of all time.
Orwell also commented about the physical condition of British soldiers, but told the reader that the hale, hearty English soldiers of his youth lay buried in the Flanders mud, dead before they could beget the soldiers of WW II.
And speaking of soldiers, there’s no comment on today’s soldiers, the ones who made “Mission Accomplished” a reality. I don’t know how many “wimps” are currently in country in Iraq or Afghanistan, but if you looked through American troops’ duffle bags, I’m sure you’d find plenty of Korn, 50 Cent, and other musicians Moore would decry as Barbarian Music.
C.S. Lewis a pedophile? Are you sure? That would sadden me, since I’m fond of Lewis’ books (both the Naria series and the apologetics), despite their sexism. What are you basing the claim on, if you don’t mind my asking?
Ooops, my error, I was mistaking him with Lewis Carroll. I thought Joanne’s description of him was kind of odd, now I know why.
Good — I have to heave a sigh of relief too.
Lewis may have been one of any number of persuasions (heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual or asexual) but I’d be really unhappy to think that the creator of Reepicheep and Aslan was a pedophile.
He just didn’t fit the mould of macho-man, is all.
Joanne
“When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?”
Just to be snarky, I would have answered:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth….”
(I did have to memorize them as a kid, after all…)
yes, the problem with people like that, pbg, is that getting snarky with them really just annoys them and they make your life harder.
Jesus was a longhaired radical black (or at LEAST thuroughly arab looking) socialist jew. but “da man” really hates to be reminded of it
sadly, it’s not enough to BE right. you have to be right, DO right, and be NICE about it.
It makes me sad, because I’m too much of a ethicist to give up on humanity but far too lazy to actually go about trying to reform such unpleasant people.
so, it’s a change of subject, but I’d love some advice: any ideas how to actually CHANGE someone’s world view short of massive deprogramming efforts?
Not sure how to do that, karpad, other than continued rhetoric and hoping that you posess some semblance of truth in your own worldview and that those who listen to you will be able to recognize the truth.
In any case, if Moore had asked me “When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?” I would have said something like “What the fuck kind of question is that? It doesn’t even make any sense.” Then I would have gut-punched him into submission and left. Well, maybe not, but a guy can dream can’t he?
So if manhood hasn’t been in continuous terminal decline for a century, what facts are generating this belief in the minds of men like Moore?
I think it’s that they’re spending too much time with teenagers. They look at teenage boys, and they don’t see men.
Well of course they don’t. Teenage boys aren’t men. They’re boys. Follow up on those boys for another 10 or 15 years, and you’ll see the results of a process called maturation.
It’s easy to forget that the high school students of, say, 20 years ago talked in teenage lingo, too. But the world today is not full of men in their late 30s who talk in early 80s teenage lingo in their business lives. (“Dude” was at its height then, IIRC.)
C.S. Lewis was not “bloviating about the ‘wimpiness’ of men right in the middle of the largest and deadliest war of all time.” He was discussing the education of children. But to the extent that he thought wimpy men were already out there, he was right. Remember Neville Chamberlain and the appeasers of Munich?
well, manhood has actually been on the decline since the days of Socrates. I’m frustrated in that I can’t find the exact quote, but a contemporary of his was complaining throughout the general “kids these days” whining.
which included, among other things, general spoiled wimpiness, use of inapproprate language, disrespect of their elders, and following of strange and stupid fashions.
no, manhood isn’t in any sort of decline, and never has been. it’s a perception of old fogies in general, as everyone remembers the hardships they endure, but rarely do they recall how much they complained about them at the time.
no one EVER liked walking 15 miles through the snow uphill backwards both ways. and just because pops can’t remember that he complained doesn’t mean he didn’t.
of course, this concept of “manhood” is more or less entirely an invention of the Victorian era anyway. prior to that, everyone was expected to tough out everything.
man, is there ANYTHING the victorians didn’t screw us up on? sexual identities, racist psychology, robbing us of our christmas orgies…
And the Victorians didn’t even have good literature…
That C.S.Lewis stuff is weird – would Britain by his logic have been supposed to model its education on that of Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan?
Orwell also probably wasn’t all that original either, IIRC there already had been that much quoted story (urban legend?) that the average height of Frenchmen was reduced by something like an inch due to the Napoleonic Wars. And of course in 1945 Hitler said something to the effect that the German people wasn’t entitled to survive because it had failed him and all the good ones were already dead. What is odd is that such “decline through heavy war losses” statements are on occasion made by the same people who claim that wars are a good thing that prove their nation’s superiority and improve their physical fitness etc…
“Yes, and Lewis was bloviating about the “wimpiness” of men right in the middle of the largest and deadliest war of all time.”
Maybe, but you have to remember that things looked somewhat different while the war was still in progress with a lot of the slaughter yet to come (and quite a bit of the slaughter that had already occurred yet unknown to the general public). Also, looking just at Britain, as Lewis apparently was, World War 1 was deadlier (and from a US POV, both World Wars paled compared to the American Civil War).
Hey, wait a minute, PDP, Anthony Trollope is great!
And I’d like to reiterate that fears about manhood’s decline generally fall back onto criticisms of women–they are blamed for robbing men of their true role, or they’re not feminine enough (broken fem-o-meter?), or they’re wearing pants (literally! [gasp!]). check out some articles from Esquire in the early 1960s, for example, or the Ladies Home Journal, in the 1950s, but also in the first 20 years of the last century, especially between the wars.
carla, I’m sure PDP was being sarcastic, since Oscar Wilde and many others. I mean, all we have to do is look at League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the awesome comic, not the craptacular movie) and find a reading list of great Victorian novels right there.
You’re probably right, Raz; I think the Sarcasm Detector had a faulty goomzeon this morning. (We’ve been teaching my six-year-old stepson to identify sarcasm, said ability being a necessary trait within the sound of my voice, which results in conversation bits like, “That’s sarcasm, right?”)
Karpad I think this is what you remember.
From http://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
Attributed to Socrates (469–399 B.C.) by Plato, according to William L. Patty and Louise S. Johnson, Personality and Adjustment, p. 277 (1953).
HOWEVER: Malcolm S. Forbes wrote an editorial on youth.—Forbes, April 15, 1966, p. 11 prompted by this quote. In that same issue, under the heading “Side Lines,” pp. 5–6, is a summary of the efforts of researchers and scholars to confirm the wording of Socrates, or Plato, but without success. Evidently, the quotation is spurious.
Echidne, there’s been huge, vast quantities written on the decline of womanhood (mostly about masculinization, but also from mature sensibleness to silliness & vacuity) since at least the mid-to-late nineteenth century (The New Woman) and the push for women’s rights (not just voting, but divorce, owning property, birth control, custody of children, participation in sport, etc.) heating up then. Don’t you still hear about ‘the femi-nazis’ dragging our girls away from the One True path of devoted motherhood & wifely submission?
The thing I find interesting is that many of what people criticise about ‘primitive, uncivilized, barbaric, backward’ culture’s treatment of women is often quite close to the way that Western culture treated them in what is looked back to nostalgically as The Good Old Days, up to the late 19th Century & even up to the 1920s/1930s in some instances.
“Our civilization is going to ruin. The young people have no respect for their elders and sit in the pubs all day”
According to Bucky Fuller (I Seem to be a Verb), this inscription is found in a fresco on the walls of the Great Pyramid.
(see link for a google-source, which was the best I could come up with and not very reliable-looking at that, although it seems to be an actual Buckminster Fuller book.)
Part two?
Hello, part two?
I didn’t read moore’s article, just the comments. But i think he has a point.
Wonderful movie, secondhand lions, set around 1960, has robert duval teaching haley joel osment how to be a man. When I read my great-grandfather’s diary, it’s clear men today aint what they was. We are transitioning into a post-scarcity economy, and that is changing what it means to be an adult and to be a male. This process is measurable over the last 100 years at least, and accelerating.
Several things going on at once:
a)Society really is changing.
b)As we age (individually), perspective changes.
c)In each generation, some become men, and fathers, and others are culls who don’t pass on their cultural heritage.
I’ll probably be in the latter group. I’m a loser, and my role models are the men and women who were winners, my ancestors,
but if i dig deeper, there were brothers, cousins, who were losers too, all part of a larger pattern.
aa,
Again I ask how what you’re saying is any different than what people were saying 100 years ago. Or 200 years ago. If this were true, humanity is becoming weaker & weaker. And we were stronger as a species & society thousands of years ago.
i jumped into this web page by error, but this heavy metal comment mr. moore expresed in his essay reveals his intellecutal weakness indeed. I mean, im 20 years old, and even I know that heavy metal demands high technical skills to be performed, such as a very complicated musical structure. just to mention an example, there are many classical musicians, who have spent most of their lifes studing and practicing, and still find themselves un-able to play and Yngwie Malmsteen piece. so, i´d like mr. moore to know that his a complete ignorant, and that he cannot criticize something so recklessly, with out knowing a bit about the subject, in this case heavy metal. i accept the fact that there are a lot of bands out there, which call themselves metal bands, that are nothing but posers, but on the other side theres a bunch of young people out there, that are considered by the best of the in music as virtuous musicians, who are playing in meavy metal bands, and im sure they can teach mr. moore a little bit about melody, rithm, harmony, refinement, and in general, civilization. and I wonder myself, can a socalled “civilizated” person issue such an ignorant opinion about a subject he is completely ignorant at?. by deduction we observe that mr. moore is not civilizated at all.
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Mr. Moore is the same principal that forced his school’s basketball team to forfeit a game due to the fact that a girl was playing on the opposing team of a small school. As a supposed professor of history, I continue to find his lack of understanding of gender history amazing and terrible. He continually suggests a need for “chivalry” but ignores the fact that chivalry dates back to a time when women were chattle, knights had sexual access to anyone in their domain, and indeed the whole purpose of chivalry was to express “courtly love” for another man’s wife. Ooo! Let’s go back to those more “manly” days, please! The fact that I actually know this man in person makes me despair.
bullies should be executed, if they like hardness v others, they need i ve them,
I would like to point out though that Mr. Moore might have a point about the music that teenagers listen to, both male and female. Most current hard rock (death metal, hate metal, etc) have not only sexist overtones, but often objectify women and advocate violence.
This is also the case with hip-hop and rap music. I mean how as a mother can I not take offense to a generation that calles women ‘ho’s and men “pimps” and think this is a good thing? I could give many specific examples of lyrics that state that “women are good for my sexual gratification only.” And though there are female rap artists that advocate “men as sexual object” they are the exception rather than the rule.
So, I can see how music can play a role in a person’s world view and the morals that he or she espouses.