ClaytonB
Member
- Joined
- Oct 30, 2011
- Messages
- 10,791
Rabble: *makes angry down-with-patriarchy noises*
Me: Too bad, whine-and-moan all you want. Take your medicine.
Since the 1960s, women have been dressing in public in increasingly revealing attire. It varies from place to place, but the norm has been spreading and increasing for a long time, nationwide. As this has gone from being something that only certain more adventurous women might do on a beach in southern California or Florida, to something that you basically can't avoid in any given strip mall in the US, at pretty much any time of year, we're running into the real contradiction underlying this shift.
When a woman undresses in the presence of a man, this is an implicit offer for something intimate to happen. This is why, if a woman accidentally exposes herself to someone, it is very shocking for everybody. Her reaction will very clearly show that she is definitely NOT intending to signal what she just accidentally signaled, namely, that she is interested in intimacy. As the general state of female undress has increased, a juvenile male may look at this as a great bounty... look at all that free soft-porn everywhere, and you didn't even have to look it up on your phone, so you can't get yelled at by a Mom or a Pastor for it. Wow! But when you think a little more deeply, you'll realize that there is a hidden power-play here. This story is actually in the Bible itself, the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife. Joseph was a slave of an Egyptian official named Potiphar. Apparently, Joseph was a handsome hunk so Potiphar's wife took a hankering for him, in the style of the classic Harlequin pool-boy romance. When she propositioned Joseph for sex, he understood immediately how much danger he was in, and rejected her offer. She was determined to have him -- after all, no slave was going to tell her no -- so she seized his cloak, forcing him to flee the house naked.
Women dressing in flatly immodest ways, on an industrial scale, is really the story of Potiphar's wife. If my own wife enters my bedroom dressed in revealing clothing, well, the message is obvious. On a biological/social level, the very same "offer" is being made by immodestly-dressed women in public -- whether they mean to or not -- but with the the catch that it's really not an offer. You are like Joseph, the toy of Potiphar's wife... she may undress before you, but you may not touch, in fact, you may not even look, unless she commands it. Whether women realize it or not (most don't), this kind of immodest dress is a power-move. "I'm the master, you are the slave, I will partially undress before you and you will avert your gaze, or my bodyguards (police) will beat you and drag you to the dungeon." And now we have finally pierced through to the puppet-masters pulling the strings behind the entire charade. The woman in yoga pants, her buxom breasts spilling out from her sports bra in the checkout line, is simply a useful idiot. Beyond catching a little extra male attention (cheap self-esteem boost?), she has not once thought through the entire implications of what she's doing. The real actors behind it all are the joyless men, the violent men, who run everything -- the State, the police, the club owners, etc. These men have mastered the art of white-knighting or, stated another way, getting away with violent bullying through pretending to be the white knight. This is why female immodesty -- which, biologically, feels like it should be a generally beneficial thing for men -- feels oppressive. It's "look but don't touch" -- or, really, "look but actually no, don't even look, and definitely don't make an advance" -- but instead of being done in the privacy of a strip club booth, it's being played out in your grocery store checkout line.
I can already hear the rabble hyper-ventilating about how her wardrobe doesn't make her complicit in her own rape, etc. etc. That's all completely beside the point, it's a total red-herring from the discussion. Obviously, the woman dressed in little more than a camisole at the checkout counter isn't actually offering anything to anybody. But the point is that her obvious intentions (to "dress sexy" without being harassed about it) and her equally obvious non-verbal language (invitation to intimacy) are, in fact, contradictory. It's like a woman in the office actively flirting with a man, only to report him to HR when he invites her on a date, as "sexual harassment". This has nothing at all to do with "No Means No" or any of that nonsense, it's a power-move, plain and simple. When all the BS is stripped away, it just means this: "You are a peon." Nothing more, nothing less. It's not even about sex, it's about power. Feminists have argued that cat-calling is, similarly, a power-move and I can agree up to a limit, so long as we agree that there is some fuzziness at the boundary of what exactly defines permissible flirting versus crass cat-calling.
OK, but what about the guys who actually do benefit from all of this? If you have low morals and either good looks or money (or both), the "non-offer offers" of many scantily-clad women are a good deal more sincere than the discussion around this topic often suggests. Yes, most men will be swatted away by a sufficiently attractive yoga-pants-clad woman in the checkout line... but not all advances are unwelcome, by all such women. That is to say, many of them are advertising and, for those men with the right assets and who know how to navigate the social dynamics of approaching a woman who you're unsure if she's open to advances or not, will find that there is, of course, a bounty of attractive, single women out there who don't want to spend the night alone.
Well, the problem is that the men who play along with this insanity are more useful idiots who are just further empowering the shadowy puppet-masters behind it all. We use the words "prostitute" and "john" to refer to a very bright-line legal definition of when a sexual transaction has occurred. But it's really a sliding scale. I recall seeing an Instagram several years back with a typical basic club woman explaining what she expects from a man on a first-date. She laid out how expensive her plate should be, her drink, what gifts he should give, and so on, and gave a dollar total. That is de facto prostitution... morally, it is prostitution. It doesn't matter if this kind of thing is very popular, or that a large part of college-age youth are doing it. It's still morally prostitution, and it's wrong for all the reasons that formal, legally-chargeable prostitution is wrong and destructive. And to be clear, both parties are equally morally guilty, here, I'm not putting this on the women's heads alone. In fact, spiritually, it is men who are the guiltier party (1 Tim. 2:14). In summary, if you're playing the bar-fly game, as a man, you're part of this problem. Stop whining-and-griping about how women dress and how toxic they are, rather, stop participating in the problem yourself.
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