A flag, then, for a first-class thread. Kudos not just to the OP, but to all involved in an intelligent and thoughtful discussion. With a few
exceptions, most of you seem to realize that the subject is a difficult and nuanced one, and that the stock answers from religion, 'family values',
psychology, the social sciences, biology and even economics don't fit very well.
It's great to see the PPM Forum working the way it's supposed to. This thread is, in my view, the best here to date.
On the topic itself, I'm afraid I have little to add. When it comes to human behaviour I tend to look for solutions in economics and evolutionary
biology, but the OP has identified an area -- human female sexual behaviour -- where all bets are currently off. Human sexuality is protean. It has
taken varied forms in different cultures and periods of history. Now this shapeshifting beast is being radically remodelled by technology and the
chaotic, ongoing revolution we call global society. In particular, some consequences of the new-media explosion -- for example, the rise of celebrity
culture and the massification of porn, which has gone from a niche industry operating out of backstreet holes and corners to a multibillion-dollar
commodity within arm's reach of everybody -- are having profound and complex effects on sexuality.
Oddly enough, no-one on the thread has yet mentioned the most important factor in this reinvention of sexuality: the altered power balance between men
and women. The worldwide and growing empowerment of women began with their absorption into the workforce in huge numbers in Britain, the USSR and
America during the Second World War. It was assured in the 1960s with the introduction of reliable contraceptive methods that were under women's
rather than men's control.
The
chap who blames the feminists and the
lady who agreed with him may have a point... but only up to a point. I
think feminism was a necessary and inevitable product of its time. It was a
result, not a cause of female empowerment and the sexual
revolution. The feminists were simply thinking thoughts that needed to be thought and expressing in words what needed to be expressed about the
consequences of that revolution. I know a great many feminists, and not one of them is a slut; the young women who parade their all-too-public private
parts on television are certainly not feminists, whatever their claimed sexual politics might be.
I expect a few of these girls will use the fig-leaf of sexual liberation to cover up their own native lubriciousness, but I don't suppose many really
bother. It is the people who sponsor, produce and air the TV programmes who use feminist rhetoric to jusify what they are doing. But liberation is not
their goal. There is a good old-fashioned word for their work: it is called pandering.
On competitiveness: it is a given among both men and women. We just compete for different things. Men compete for status; women compete for men. At
the moment, the competition among women is vicious and unceasing precisely because female human sexuality is caught up in the confusion of change;
no-one really knows what the ground rules are in this new feminized, overmediated, porn-saturated world. And not only have the rules changed, the
prizes have too: men aren't the same as they used to be.
Actually, this is a great time to be a man. Women have never been so available, so aware of what men want, so competitively eager to provide it for
them and so willing to sell themselves cheaply. Happy days indeed for serial fornicators and sexual predators. No wonder
bad guys are getting the most girls.