Online book club of “Radical Womanhood” written by Carolyn McCulley. We are currently on chapter 7. If you would like to go back and read about the prior chapters, please click on BLOG (on the home page), then choose the BOOK CLUB on the far left. You will see excerpts from all the chapters. If you would like to read the entire entry, just click on the chapter’s title.
Ok, this is a great chapter title, huh?? This chapter is so on target for where we are in our culture. It is an interesting thing how culture affects our thought processes and worldview. But, most of us don’t give our culture much thought. It is amazing to see how the American culture has changed over the last hundred years. Shocking, really. If you can imagine it…the refrigerator wasn’t invented in 1909. The Titanic hadn’t sunk. The first world war hadn’t begun. That all happened less than one hundred years ago!
This chapter goes in depth about our culture’s attitude towards sexual promiscuity and women’s attitude towards the new “porn positive” wave of feminism. It used to be, feminists wanted you to value them for their brain…almost appearing a-sexual to reach that goal. They (rightly) viewed pornography as degrading to women. This last wave of feminism, the “porn positive” wave has made sex outside of marriage normal, acceptable, and preferred. The strangest thing to happen, it seems to me, is that the feminists have turned a corner in their sexual “freedom” and made Playboy cool. It is now liberating to flash the cameras on Girls Gone Wild. It seems to me, that these women, feeling they are being empowered sexually are turning themselves into a cheap one-night stand.
To think that to be attractive in this culture, you have to have implants in certain places, lipo in the others, and botox all over your face will tell you we are not embracing a “real woman” reality. Ariel Levy writes, “…only thirty rears ago, our mothers were burning their bras and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the Bunny logo as symbols of our liberation. How had the culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time?” She goes on to say, “My argument is that women have forgotten that sexual power is only one, very limited, version of power and that this spring-break variety of thongs and implants exhibitionism is just one, very limited version of sexuality.”
The casual attitude towards sex comes with a high cost. One in four (26%) young women between fourteen and nineteen (the hookup generation), have been affected with a sexually transmitted disease. That would be 3.2 million teenage American girls. How did we get here? Havelock Ellis, who wrote many books on the Psychology of Sex was a major proponent of sex education in schools. He said, “it (sex education) may well transform life and alter the course of civilization. It is not merely a reform in the classroom, it is a reform in the home, in the church , in the law courts, in the legislature.” And that is truly what it has become.
As the writer states, the right-left split in American used to be over economic issues, such as the redistribution of wealth. Today, the split tends to be over issues of sex and reproduction; abortion rights, homosexual rights, no-fault divorce, the definition of the family, fetal experimentation, stem cell research, cloning, sex education, pornography.” Sexual liberation itself has become nothing less than a full-blown ideology. “Sex positive” feminism hinges on the idea that sexual freedom is essential to women’s freedom, and it opposes all legal or social efforts to control or limit sexual activities. They embrace the entire range of human sexuality, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered sexuality.
God has given us a better way! Instead of being degraded by the “porn culture”, in God’s magnificent plan for women…women are cherished, cared for and loved in a caring and monogamous trusting life-long relationship. So, when your beauty fades with age, you are not living in fear of losing your man. You have built a relationship on commitment, love and trust. He loves not the fleeting twenty year old beauty but, the true beauty that comes from the inside and only grows more beautiful through the years. Which would you rather have?
We have friends that live nearby, that were always inseparable. They were in their late 60’s, early 70’s when we became friends (I thought they were in their 50’s!). They biked on the weekends together. We saw them at the French Market and Starbucks every Saturday. They were always laughing and having a ball. Then, he got cancer last year. He went through treatments and then it came back. She stuck by him. She hurt with him and cried with him. She was his rock and he definitely was hers. He died this January. They had such a beautiful example of love that is fun, exciting, fresh. I wish everyone had known him…he was quiet, but when he said something, he was hilarious. She is “miss personality”, always cracking jokes. She said at his funeral, “isn’t this just like him to up and die on the coldest day of the year!” If you knew the two of them, you just knew he loved that she still talked about him like that, instead of with the “reverential hush of the dead”. What I am trying to get across, , is this…God’s plan is so much more beautiful than anything the world can come up with. Do you think my friends wish they had been more liberated? Do you think they wish they would have been sexually promiscuous instead of committing to each other, raising children, and going through all the tough times together? The flash and the dazzle burns out so quickly. The commitment, joy, friendship, love and respect are what real life is all about.
Thursday:
