The post we’re critiquing isn’t about anything, so here is a picture of a kitten looking at some ducks.
I meant to blog this the other day, but it’s been a crazy week. But it is Friday now, so let’s take a few minutes this morning to lovingly mock Anthony Esolen, who, according to Rob Tisinai, is a literature professor at Providence College and a new inductee into NOM’s Ruth Institute Circle of Experts. His first entry makes no sense whatsoever, but it has so many words! He is just more evidence that our opposition has literally nothing to say, but we can tear it apart over coffee anyway:
Lust perverts language itself, calling sex “safe” or “protected,” and cohabitation “honest,” and relationships “mutual,” which are nothing but forays into a jungle, where the strongest and most cunning survive.
I think this means that sex is bad, honesty doesn’t exist and that Anthony Esolen has had some really crappy relationships in his time.
Several weeks ago, Saint Valentine’s Day at my school came and went. There was no dance. There was no concert. There was no ice cream social. There was no party for trading little gifts. There was no showing of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or Marty or Goodbye, Mr. Chips or Casablanca. There were no foolish and innocent flirtations on the way to class.
He knows there were no dances and no concerts. He also knows that nobody had any ice cream. And nobody gave each other gifts. And moreover, he knows that, the entire day, nobody on his campus flirted with anybody.
But there was some small notice taken of the holiday. A group of women, as has been customary for several years, rented space at a local theater to stage there what they are not allowed to stage at our Catholic college, the dreary, hapless porno-twaddle called The Vagina Monologues.
One man’s dreary, hapless porno-twaddle (read: something he’s too patriarchal, repressed and just annoyingly scoldy to understand) is another’s profound cultural statement.
So it’s come to this: Even lust now is gray and dispirited. The girls celebrate Valentine’s Day by putting on a series of vulgar and angry skits, to instruct the boys in how rotten they are, and the boys, most of whom have no particular desire to treat girls badly, roll their eyes and go along with it, or file it away with all the other petty resentments of our lonely contemporary existence.
Or maybe some people just like performing in/going to see The Vagina Monologues. And remember, this was the ONLY THING happening in Providence that night. And there was definitely no flirting!
Of course, there isn’t a feminist on my campus who will admit to these young women that if they really want to be protected from violence, they should marry a decent man and stay married to him, because such married women are less likely than any other group of Americans to be the victims of a felony.
Or women can just make their own choices if that’s not so offensive to the loon hiding in his office on campus writing meandering screeds to the internet for Maggie Gallagher’s Machine of Perpetual Whining.
Nor will they call for a return to chivalry, because that would imply an exchange of gifts,from man to woman and woman to man; and gifts are incompatible with the squint-eyed reckoning of those who see all human relationships in terms of dominance. It’s why they will never say to them, “You know, artificial estrogen is a class one carcinogen,” or, “For physiological reasons that are perfectly understandable, induced abortion puts women at a much higher risk for breast cancer.”
Does anybody else have any idea what this piece is about yet? He must be some literature perfesser, considering the fact that he can’t write.
Doubtless the same people who affirm that women ought to enjoy special protection against physical violence—for men, after all, are both the main perpetrators of violence and the most frequent victims of it—were cheering the recent decision to plunk female soldiers into the ranks of the infantry and send them against young men at the peak of a man’s physical prowess, armed to the teeth, and on fire to kill, maim, loot, and rape.
The men in our armed forces are going out to loot and rape? What century is this? Then he gets to a weird part about how lust is bad because
We should have known better. It’s never easy for men and women to admire and love, not just one exceptional member of the other sex, but the other sex generally. The triumph of undirected eros—old brute lust—has made that situation worse, and wrought a new sadness in the world. Men and women now have almost nothing kind to say about the other sex. It’s not that they don’t love one another. They don’t even like one another. The girls, I’m told…
“I’m told.” Dude, we had already figured out that you don’t know any real girls. But now that you’ve admitted it…
That said, I know lots of feminists and other liberals, and really, I don’t see any of them hating the opposite sex or anything like that. This is right wing fever dream fantasy, and nothing more. He sees demands for mutual respect as “hate” apparently.
see the boys as threats—the creatures who will hurt them, drug them, and have their way with them, cajole them into bed and then dispense with them; and the boys see the girls as manipulative, hot-and-cold, quick to accuse and blame, and, frankly, emotional roller-coasters after the high winds have struck and left the soul a looped and tangled mess.
The first part is what he’s heard, the second part is what he feels? But this is all because sex is bad.
As I said, we should have known better. The great poets of our heritage could have taught us. Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”is a tour de force of young love; it’s from him that we derive the great rhetorical question, “Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?” The beautiful lad Leander, struck by the beauty of Hero, becomes a “bold sharp sophister,” coining one chop-logic line of reasoning after another, all to win Hero over to his will—even though he is still too innocent to know exactly what that will desires. He will find out, though. He toys with Hero as with his sister, yet something in his animal nature leads him to suspect that “some amorous rites or other were neglected.” So he presses her to his bosom; she, as if afraid to be thrown to the floor, strives against him (in both senses of that preposition), and the more she strived, The more a gentle pleasing heat revived, Which taught him all that elder lovers know. And now the same ’gan so to scorch and glow, As in plain terms (yet cunningly) he craved it; Love always makes those eloquent that have it.
Victor Davis Hanson writing erotica under a pen name? The literary Gay Patriot with a regular teaching gig? It goes on for several more paragraphs like this, and no one deserves to be put through that.
Here’s where he drops the faux-intelligent nonsense and just gets really weird and shame-y about sex:
It must be so. Beasts copulate; but men and women are meant to marry. They perform the marital act; they know, when they unite in that act, that it is, or it ought to be, the seal of a love that, to quote another of Shakespeare’s sonnets, “bears it out even to the edge of doom.” We are the creatures aware of time, and oriented toward eternity. We know that the act of marriage brings into the bond of love the past generations, whose history we bear in our loins, and the present, and the future, in the child that may be born of the act. We cannot copulate! We cannot forget, when we unite, that we are doing what our parents did, and their parents; we cannot forget that we are saying, with our bodies, “We now may beget a child, to whom we will be devoted together for the rest of our lives.” We can only tell lies, and in doing so mimic the beast, or rather “improve” upon the beast, since we add the power of our unleashed brains to the beast’s frank provocation or aggression.
As Rob points out, the verbose, awful writer calling himself an English professor just said that every time he has sex, he thinks about his parents. Gross, dude.
For lust longs for the innocent mindlessness of the beast; and, to grasp that mindlessness, will pervert language itself, calling sex “safe” or “protected,” and cohabitation “honest,” and relationships “mutual,” which are nothing but forays into a jungle, where the strongest and most cunning survive. There is no way to make such a place habitable. The only choice is to leave it, and return to a land of love, humility, gratitude for the excellence of the other sex, and marriage.
And the Greek Chorus replied, “Maybe somebody needs to get laid?”
So there you have it. A new member of the NOM brain trust, talking to himself in 20,000 words or less about absolutely nothing. Yeah, our opposition has gotten really, really lame.
