What do the current enthusiasms about sexual harassment in the workplace and college campi and the opioid crisis have in common?
In regard to the Pervnado of mostly liberal icons having their wicked way with innocent Good Little Girls, you can easily miss the point, as Suzanne Fields does when she writes that
I'd say that "the rules" right now are that women are free to use their "women's wiles" including their sexual power but they are also able to turn around and change their minds. That is what the whole game of "microaggressions" and "safe spaces" is all about. The fact is that women expect to be protected. Women may demand the right to be "intersectional feminists" and be gender queer black women bisexuals, but if something goes wrong they are going to expect "justice." If there are not enough women in the executive suite then women expect the rules to be changed to help and protect them.
One way or another -- sexual revolution, women in the workplace, or whatever -- women expect to be able to strut their stuff and also get protection. It's coded in the genes. The question is, half a century after the sexual revolution with its promise of pregnancy-free sex, what does it mean for women to be their sexual selves and be protected from the preverts of Gen. Jack D. Ripper's memorable obsession?
My guess is that feminists are going to be no help at all, so it is going to be up to female normals to reestablish some sort of sexual code. I have an idea that it will mean something like the old code that, when a man proposed to a woman, he was on the hook unless and until she broke it off.
But I tell you, politics and politicians and gender activists are not going to be the ones to lead us to the Promised Land. It has to be a cultural thing outside the arena of politics and government. Because politics is division and government is force.
Then there is the opioid crisis, with the white working class dying of despair. One of the chroniclers of the problem, Angus Deaton, proposes a new "social contract."
Sound really copacetic, right? Except that some people used political power to deal themselves a better deal that the market really justified, as in unions, and dealt themselves defined pensions in an unknown future, and the economy and the world changed. Right now we have government employees using their union power to deliver princely pensions. Only it is bankrupting state and local government, particularly in liberal states like Connecticut and California.
If you guarantee somebody something, then somebody else has to pick up the risk proposition. In a political system it means that the powerful get to decide who gets the goodies and who pays the price. There is only one just way to proceed. Everyone must be subject to market changes and accept that it might move against them and force them to look for another job. You wanna pension? Then save your money. You want medical care when your body starts to give out in your fifties? Then go out and get health insurance now. Yeah, we will look after you, pal, if you make all the wrong decisions, but you won't much like it. The wonderful thing about human society is that we can take care of each other. The horrible thing about human society is that most of us, including me, freeload off the rest of society, in ways we often don't appreciate.
But the one thing to avoid is a comprehensive and mandatory government program to take care of us. Because at the latest in 50 years, you will be suffering with an expensive, inefficient system that is being scammed fifty ways from Sunday, and that is impossible to reform because of the fierce opposition of the scammers and other dogs-in-a-manger.
Yeah, we all want our cake and to eat it too. And that applies to every area of human life, but in particular to sex and work. The challenge, and it is eternal, is to limit the power and the looting of the freeloaders and the folks that want to get their money back when the cards go against them.
In regard to the Pervnado of mostly liberal icons having their wicked way with innocent Good Little Girls, you can easily miss the point, as Suzanne Fields does when she writes that
Nobody wants to return to the artificial morality of the 1950s, when women were denied the freedom to be their sexual selves and harassment was often accepted as the way of life for men in power and left women powerless.Hmm. What exactly does it mean to say "women were denied the freedom to be their sexual selves?" And really, did women in offices suffer sexual harassment in those days, or was it only on Hollywood's casting couch and in Mad Men's fictional advertising agency?
I'd say that "the rules" right now are that women are free to use their "women's wiles" including their sexual power but they are also able to turn around and change their minds. That is what the whole game of "microaggressions" and "safe spaces" is all about. The fact is that women expect to be protected. Women may demand the right to be "intersectional feminists" and be gender queer black women bisexuals, but if something goes wrong they are going to expect "justice." If there are not enough women in the executive suite then women expect the rules to be changed to help and protect them.
One way or another -- sexual revolution, women in the workplace, or whatever -- women expect to be able to strut their stuff and also get protection. It's coded in the genes. The question is, half a century after the sexual revolution with its promise of pregnancy-free sex, what does it mean for women to be their sexual selves and be protected from the preverts of Gen. Jack D. Ripper's memorable obsession?
My guess is that feminists are going to be no help at all, so it is going to be up to female normals to reestablish some sort of sexual code. I have an idea that it will mean something like the old code that, when a man proposed to a woman, he was on the hook unless and until she broke it off.
But I tell you, politics and politicians and gender activists are not going to be the ones to lead us to the Promised Land. It has to be a cultural thing outside the arena of politics and government. Because politics is division and government is force.
Then there is the opioid crisis, with the white working class dying of despair. One of the chroniclers of the problem, Angus Deaton, proposes a new "social contract."
That is, the basic positive relationship between people and society, starting with a good job that pays good wages. That’s how one gets going on the American Dream.But that is what got us into the mess in the first place. Educated elitists, activists and politicians created the welfare state and work-place rules that taught the American people to believe that all they had to do was to get a good job with benefits and then they could repose upon their benefice for the rest of their days and get a defined-benefit pension to boot.
Sound really copacetic, right? Except that some people used political power to deal themselves a better deal that the market really justified, as in unions, and dealt themselves defined pensions in an unknown future, and the economy and the world changed. Right now we have government employees using their union power to deliver princely pensions. Only it is bankrupting state and local government, particularly in liberal states like Connecticut and California.
If you guarantee somebody something, then somebody else has to pick up the risk proposition. In a political system it means that the powerful get to decide who gets the goodies and who pays the price. There is only one just way to proceed. Everyone must be subject to market changes and accept that it might move against them and force them to look for another job. You wanna pension? Then save your money. You want medical care when your body starts to give out in your fifties? Then go out and get health insurance now. Yeah, we will look after you, pal, if you make all the wrong decisions, but you won't much like it. The wonderful thing about human society is that we can take care of each other. The horrible thing about human society is that most of us, including me, freeload off the rest of society, in ways we often don't appreciate.
But the one thing to avoid is a comprehensive and mandatory government program to take care of us. Because at the latest in 50 years, you will be suffering with an expensive, inefficient system that is being scammed fifty ways from Sunday, and that is impossible to reform because of the fierce opposition of the scammers and other dogs-in-a-manger.
Yeah, we all want our cake and to eat it too. And that applies to every area of human life, but in particular to sex and work. The challenge, and it is eternal, is to limit the power and the looting of the freeloaders and the folks that want to get their money back when the cards go against them.
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