USA Today has come out with a laundry list of celebrities and pols recently accused of taking advantage of their power for base carnal gratification: “Weinstein aftermath: All the men accused of sexual misconduct.”
While the piece is not recommended reading (who wants to fill his mind with these obscenities?), and while some of the accused still deny the accusations, the phenomenon of seemingly invulnerable social elites (most of them hard leftists) precipitously careening to pariah status is a spectacle to behold.
But what lessons will be derived from all this?
Probably not many, because the battle against the Creepocracy is being fought mostly in the name of feminism and progressivism. The victims and the creeps are often on the same ideological grounds. Concerning the former, it seems that many (not all) of them were all-too-willing to go along with the creep for the advancement of their careers, but to point out that this constitutes a form of prostitution would earn one the label “victim blaming” in today’s milieu.
Because the creeps are mostly pop-culture progressivists, the attempts at reparation and apology they have made are often couched in the same liberal language of indirection and deflection that are used to circumvent traditional moral norms and reduce grave sins to mere indiscretions or “mistakes.” Learning curves can be difficult, you know, and I’ve learned big-time now that I’m caught, and now I know that it’s wrong to be creepy. That’s just not who I am. I’ll get counseling and be all better.
One hundred Hollywood luminaries — including Harvey Weinstein and Woody Allen — went out on a limb defending serial pervert Roman Polanski back in 2009. Polanski’s defenders were not only predatory (and maybe some non-predatory) males, but also women, including Meryl Streep, who has lately pontificated on the vices of Mr. Weinstein. One wonders whether it’s a question of “style.” (Excusing rapists is soooooo 2009, but the style has now changed. It’s been almost a decade; we’ve come a long way, baby!) Or is it more than style? Is it just hypocrisy?
What’s the solution to the Creepocracy? How do we crush it?
Well, let’s take a brief and chaste look at the problem. A woman wants to get a career in Hollywood (journalism, politics). A powerful man, who happens also to be salacious and vile, is in a position to hire her. He uses his power to extort what he wants out of her. Rinse and repeat.
Now, the progressivist, who is a sexual libertine, sees no problem with men being pigs and women being accommodating, so long as it’s all “consensual.” This somehow renders the thing, if not altruistic, at least mutually beneficial. But is that what such intimacy is intended to be, merely mutually beneficial?
Let’s do a thought experiment.
Suppose we could surround the act in question with certain protections so that it is not only mutually beneficial (as in one party equally using the other for pleasure), but actually altruistic — that is to day, “loving” in a higher sense, by willing the good of the other? We would strive to remove jealousy for other (multiple) “partners” by insisting on fidelity and exclusivity. We would make it so that the act could not be either a vehicle for career advancement or the victimizing of a person in need by someone more powerful. We would attach to it certain pledges of mutual care and grave responsibility for the good of the other. That way the “love” that constitutes physical intimacy would be joined to a higher love, one not only in the emotions (those come and go!), but also in the will. That kind of love includes more than just “having and holding”; it includes faithfully and exclusively doing so — and that among all life’s difficult circumstances.
To examine the question further, we would have to consider the obvious finality of the act in question, which would lead us to conclude that it is intended to produce human offspring, vulnerable little creatures who need a loving and protective environment in which to be reared and educated. The altruism of the partners must, to be genuine, be extended to their progeny.
If we were to take these radical steps to protect vulnerable young starlets from predatory producers, or idealistic young pages from lecherous legislators in DC (where consent laws are shockingly libertine), or young ambitious writers from prurient publishers, we would have invented… marriage.
But God did that already, didn’t He? So why don’t we study what He has to say about it? And let’s go to the institution He founded to learn the full truth about marriage in these days of mass confusion.
Only Christian manhood (marked by chivalry) and Christian womanhood (marked by feminine virtue) will carry the day. That’s it. There is no other recipe — legal, bureaucratic, or ideological — for crushing the creepocracy.
