America’s Morality Police–Iran, The Qur'an, And Doctrinal Purity

Before the American-Israeli invasion of Iran, the regime had cracked down on the increasingly hostile public protests against its authority and was reported to have killed 30,000 peaceful protesters.  The Iranian people had had enough of the theocracy, Sharia law, and the punitive codes of behavior.  Women were to be completely covered, men's beards were to conform to that of the Prophet's, alcohol consumption was cause for imprisonment, and even the slightest insinuation of apostasy was punishable by death. 

Progressives in the United States were stymied.  They had always condemned the treatment of women and criticized the regime as medieval and heinous, but at the same time they were reluctant to endorse a white, privileged regime - that of the United States - in its intention to topple a legitimate regime which ruled a country of diversity. 

As importantly but far less well know was progressives' admiration of the Iranian state for their successful imposition of a strict moral codes.   The state had a right and responsibility to promote, assure, impose moral principles on its citizens, and police their observance.  

The United States under Donald Trump, say progressives, had devolved into a radical, seditious, and immoral nation which rejected transformative notions of sexual equality, racial justice, and economic fairness.  Not only were these deep state, MAGA, reactionary sentiments politically dangerous, but morally wrong.  The progressive agenda of transgenderism, black supremacy, the dismissal of religious fundamentalism, and the dismantling of capitalism were anointed, absolutely right, and morally above debate. 

Anyone who disagreed with this agenda was ipso facto an apostate, a heretical denier, an immoral, self-serving reprobate.  Nothing but a casting out, a torturous death, a purifying boiling in oil, flogging, and burning at the stake would suffice.

American progressives were clear and unequivocal about their agenda and their means of enforcement.  They intended to secure their agenda by intimidation, threat, and public censure.  Any university president who did not subscribe to MeToo campus injustice in the name of women’s rights would be exposed for his backward, hateful, and ignorant ideas, and calls for his summary dismissal would be incessant and determined.

Anyone who suggested that the black man was anything other than naturally superior, enslaved only because of barbarous collusion of European and American capitalists, and denied his right and his dignity because of the innate inhumanity of the white man would be labelled racist and marginalized to the far periphery of orderly society.  

Those who suggested that a woman’s right to choose abortion was not an absolute, undeniable right were dunned and called out for misogyny; and anyone who challenged the idea of gender fluidity and the right of every child to choose his or her own sexuality was pilloried and expelled.

Every young person recruited into the ranks of progressive liberalism was not only schooled in the catechism of right behavior, but armed with the materiel to engage the enemy.  They were taught the correct lexicon, the language of inclusivity and diversity.  Language was the first and most obvious offense of the morally idle.  Instances of retrograde English usage were to be called out and censured and correct forms and terms indicated.  

Homeless people were to be outdoor urban dwellers; prostitutes, sex workers; an insult was emotional rape; and shoplifting was irregular shopping.  Recruits were taught revisionist history – those American icons irreducibly tied to racism which were to be discredited and their names and likenesses removed from public view.  They memorized the doctrinal catalogue and the automatic responses to denial – climate change, racism, misogyny, homophobia, predatory capitalism, environmental sanctity, etc. They were taught to recognize moral escapism. 

Once ordained, these new recruits were sent out like militant, door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses. Armed with an indoctrinated sense of righteousness, they were unafraid to speak out, to be heard, to criticize and reveal moral depravity when they saw it.

In the early days of the pandemic, COVID evangelists formed vigilante groups, neighborhood enforcers of masks and six-foot spacing.  In a reprise of Eastern European secret services, they recruited, trained, and encouraged children to call out those who did not comply. It was a j’accuse moment,  the howl of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers the cry, and Stay At Home! was the injunction.  

Children were the avant-garde of the movement, Stasi-like informers of the East German state.  They were ideal recruits because they were too little and too uninformed to question the bald intrusiveness and anti-social behavior of their parents.  They were taught only to discover, point, and report pandemic deniers. It was a fearless, righteous time of humiliating public censure.

It was not so much that these street preaching vigilantes were worried about getting sick themselves; it was the shameless disregard for others that posed the greatest threat to the body politic. If we are all to reach a better, more perfect world, progressives say, one with a mild, pollution-free climate, complete tolerance and inclusivity, and a gender-neutral society, naysayers, doubters, and stubborn individualists must be gelded.  The brave, new world can never be realized while the noxious gasses of hyper-conservative radicalism are in the air.

The environmental movement is no different.  It believes in the sanctity of Mother Earth which was at the center of many ancient pagan religions.  Mother Earth is Gaya, a sensate organism with a life of its own.  She reacts to pain, to rape and mutilation and sheds the tears of Jesus Christ who asked in disbelief at the evil of Mankind,  “My God, my God.  Why have You forsaken me?”.  

Environmentalism is not a secular movement, dealing only with atmospheric computer models, the delicate measurement of ultra-violet light penetrating the ever-thinning ozone layer, the build-up of toxic and nuclear waste, fracking, and clear-cutting.  It is a religious movement with a profoundly spiritual core.  It is no more fractured by the various issues confronting it or by its multiple enemies than religious fundamentalism.  Whether one joins the fight for clean water, clean air, toxic waste clean-up, alternative energy, or forest preservation, the fight is for Mother Earth, the preservation of her sanctity.

It is as though environmentalists actually want the planet to heat up.  This is understandable enough given the time, effort, and money they have invested in the cause. Environmentalism has become a secular religion no different than the Bible Belt evangelism Southerners had witnessed as children.  In fact when they heard speeches given at the National Conference on Climate Change and replayed at length by NPR, churchgoers were reminded of the sermons given every day in the hot, airless churches in the Mississippi Delta. In those days the pastors were was speaking of carnal lust, abandonment of God, and the fiery breath of the Devil, but they sounded very much like the wild-eyed evangelical Climate Changers of today.

Religions, whether secular or spiritual, have a field day with existential uncertainty. Church coffers are replenished every Sunday, and the cash registers of Climate Change International ring like music on a merry-go-round with every fiery sermon about the end of the world.

One has a moral right – an obligation, a duty – to call out, censure, punish, and remove those who flaunt the truth.  While today’s American secular evangelists have no insignia or official identity cards, they are no different from their Iranian religious counterparts.  They march to the same drummer of conformity, true belief, righteousness, and absolute authority.

The Surge Of A Late Bloomer - From Daddy's Girl To Man-Hate And Back, A Freudian Tale

Allison Marks was a daddy's girl. She adored her father and he fawned on her in return.  The two were a couple from birth in a relationship that went far beyond father-and-daughter to something limitless and unique. 

 

Of course the phenomenon is nothing new. Not only is it common but the core of Freud's work.  The proto-sexual attraction of a young girl for her father forms the basis for a normal heterosexual life.  Freud wrote:

The young female, has both love and hate for her mother.  She is dependent upon her from birth, but increasingly jealous of her as she develops her own sexual maturity, first expressed in erotic desire for her father.  This triad - mother, father, daughter - is the Holy Trinity of sexuality, and cannot be dismissed or denied.  

Modern psychologists like Ambrose Beardsley of Duke have lamented the increasing number of fatherless homes.  Whether women choose single motherhood or have it imposed on them by abandoning husbands, daughters grow up without this masculine influence 'and fall prey to distorted notions of female sexual exclusivity'.  It is no surprise, says Prof. Beardsley, that the notion of a gender spectrum without the natural polarity of male-female or father-daughter, has become popular.  

'Nothing could be more aberrant'. he went on to write, 'suggesting that not only is sexuality fungible but the nuclear family is outdated and heretofore irrelevant'. 

Given the fact that Allison grew up in a normal home and had been raised in a traditional way; and moreover had formed a particularly intimate bond with her father, it was surprising that she became a radical feminist, i.e. not simply one who promoted the cause of women, but one who saw men as the predatory enemy of women.  Men were the oppressors, and today's men were no different from Saudi sheiks who locked their wives in windowless cells, and let them out for their sexual pleasure and nothing more. 

This particularly hostile feminism did not come quickly or early in her sexual journey.  In fact, all through college she looked for her father in every boy she dated.  She would settle for nothing less than a man who loved her implicitly, who treated her with kindness, and who would do anything for her. 

This was confounded by an unexpected raw sexuality - a desire that pushed aside notions of honor and fidelity and led her to the beds of bad boys. 

Whenever she found herself on the curb, left there by men who used her and tossed her aside when they were finished with her, she hated herself for abandoning her principles and most of all her love for her father.  Every time she howled and moaned under some predatory male, she felt she was betraying her  father and said a heartfelt act of contrition to appease her conscience. 

 

So, it is not hard to imagine her confusion - a loving, dutiful daddy's girl, the used woman of a hundred men, the Freudian image of sexual psychosis - and not be surprised at her turn to feminism. 

Freud of course never anticipated feminism, and while he had treated many women with lesbian tendencies in his practice, he never anticipated that it would become a cause celebre and a viable alternative to heterosexual sex; but he had intimations of such aberrance:

Any dynamic relationship conditioned by birth, upbringing, and sexual desire can go awry.  The daughter who admires and loves her father unquestionably can be challenged by his behavior.  A sexual adventurer, a 'man about town', displays his polyvalence.  His daughter is not the only girl for him, and when she realizes this, her love and trust may well turn to hate

As hard as Allison tried to find a man like her father to love, she could not, and in the meanwhile fell prey to the unscrupulous but infinitely desirable men who showed her interest.  Freud also understood this 'good girl-bad boy' phenomenon.  Although girls were brought up to be prim and proper, they were drawn to the most virile, aggressive, and dominant males.  These were the men who would give them children, male children who would thrive and prosper.  

The perfect storm could not be worse for her.  She was looking for a father who never really existed - a daughter's willing suspension of disbelief when it comes to father-love is classic - was born with a preternatural sexual desire, and was caught in the most studied sexual trap ever. 

Of course that academic perspective was irrelevant in real terms.  The here and now demanded some kind of reconciliation or at least compromise, or she would spend many years floundering between sexual excess and romantic idealism. 

Payback, that was the idea; and so it was that Allison turned her considerable charm on seducing vulnerable men, enticing them with sexual favors and romantic attention, and then leaving them high and dry - a dose of their own medicine.  Not only would this table-turning feel good, a blow in the name of female honor, but it would be a reversal of fortune for men. 

The movie In The Company Of Men the Aaron Eckhart character deliberately seduces a deaf girl in his office, and treats her with the love, attention, and kindness she has never known.  He knows that she will fall in love with him and when she does he plans to leave her cold - his misogynist payback for all the times women have been deceitful, dishonest, and disloyal. 

Allison knew that the duplicitous former lovers of the Eckhart character are not unique, and that their duplicity and self-interest was natural and unplanned.  She, Allison, would use the same seductive wiles and self-interest to deliberately unman, disown, and dismiss men. 

After many such turns she wondered what this had gotten her.  Such activism was unproductive.  She still felt that a partnership with a worthy male was possible, and that easing up on the gas might be called for - a little more give in the machinery. 

She hated herself for even thinking that such a Mr. Right existed.  Nothing in her pantheon of progressive ideas even suggested that this could be true, that he could be out there.  Romance, selection, compatibility, partnership were all fictitious elements of a pre-deconstructionist era.  Society with all its inbuilt historical prescriptions was responsible for sexual idealism, and that any good progressive should dismiss such notions out of hand. 

Yet, there it was.  She couldn't help herself.  She canvassed every social event, every casual apres-ski gathering, every gallery opening, every afternoon at the dog park for potential mates.  She vetted them by template - posture, attitude, voice, easy or forced smiles, stature and that indefinable quality, appeal - but nine times out of ten came up empty.  Either her algorithms were faulty or good men had disappeared. 

Artemis Jones, sensing her classmate's frustration wooed her to the lesbian life she had enjoyed since Vassar.  She had come out early and often, an insatiable Bernal Heights dyke, first to cruise, first in bed, first to head for next in line.  The lesbian life was one freed from expectation, upbringing, presumption.  Yes, she had grown up with penetration but that male-centered wish had been long marginalized, and easily satisfied if and when the urge became irresistible thanks to plastics and AI-facilitated fitting. 

Allison thanked her friend for her solicitude, but preferred to sow her own furrow. Despite her political man-hate and vicious calumny, she wanted to be laid and laid properly.  Not to say that Artemis and her bull dagger and femme friends didn't come brightly and completely; it was just that the old nostrums simply had staying power.  It had to be Daddy or no one. 

Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew had always been an apocryphal story.  Kate, a vixen, a harridan, a shrewish, frustrated women falls for Petruchio, a suitor who has been looking for such a determined, independent woman all his life, and the two consummate a love made in heaven.  She gives up her shrewishness and he his sexual wandering in Shakespeare's only true love story. 

A woman like Allison, feminist to the core, would give up every testy, nasty criticism of men if only the right one would come along; and thank her lucky stars, he did.  Out of the blue, unvetted, unanticipated, but there he was right out of a Julia Quinn novel.  He swept her off her feet, dazzled her with his charm and sincerity, excited her with his pursuit and confidence, persuaded her with his wit and intelligence. 

Could this be?, she wondered.  Was this possible?

Again she hated herself for such treacly, anti-progressive notions of romantic love; but the feelings welled up from an unadulterated place, and she had to, not just wanted to, give herself completely. 

Freud would have had a field day with Allison Marks - a woman who inevitably and predictably returned to her psycho-social roots.  No woman born with a natural, ineluctable father-love and a fierce love of men could persist in feminist circumspection indefinitely.   

And so it was that the nuptials were announced in the New York Times: 

Miss Allison Fielding Marks of Harpers Ferry, New York, and Palm Beach wedded Burleigh Cabot of the Boston Cabots, heir to his family's colonial and post-Revolutionary legacy and senior partner in Brandon, Burdon, and Loch, Wall Street investment bankers.  Miss Marks graduated from Miss Porter's School of Farmington and Vassar College and is Senior Vice President of Abelard Freres.  The couple will reside in Miami where both will take up their professional assignments

All is right in the world, reflected Allison on her honeymoon on St. Bart's.  A long journey not without pitfalls and errors, but ended properly, as it should be, without politics or strings.  True romance? Perhaps, depending on one's perspective.  Freud and his Austrian Jewish colleagues aside, what did anything matter but outcome, the bottom line?  

Toxic Femininity - Why Has This Universal Paradox Been So Ignored?

Much has been made these days of toxic masculinity and how men are congenitally predatory, abusive, and dismissive of women - ogres, troglodytes, prognathous throwbacks to grunting Neanderthals.  Combined with whiteness, toxic masculinity becomes a poisonous potion, a virulent viral plague.  Feminism is too weak to counter such ape-like grossness.  Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir only hinted at the ugly nature of men; and it took another generation to fully expose their innate, foul brutality.  Men were now the enemy. 

Buy what about women?  For centuries throughout world literature, women have been portrayed as duplicitous, untrustworthy, libidinous, and ruinous.  Desdemona was not the weak, innocent victim of Othello's jealousy. She was at least complicit in the case.  She was an independent woman, unique for the times, a woman who defied her aristocratic family and married the black Moor, Othello, no shrinking violet and certainly inquisitive about the sexual nature of the virile, heroic field general. 

Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Volumnia, Lady Macbeth, and Dionyza were defiantly strong women who thought nothing about plotting the murder of those who threatened them. Lady Macbeth told her weak, dilatory husband to man up, show her what he was made of and get to the business of killing the king.  

Tamora, Queen of the Goths, in a vile moment of vendetta and wronged woman pique sends her sons to rape and mutilate the daughter of King Titus Andronicus.  Dionyza, watching Pericles' daughter left in her charge grow up to be more beautiful, charming, and graceful than her own daughter, and over the feeble objections of her weak, uxorious husband, plots to have her murdered. 

Hedda Gabler, in Ibsen's play of the same name, attempts to destroy two men simply because she can in an expression of pure Nietzschean will.  Hilde Wangel encourages The Master Builder to climb the steeple and fall to his death.  

Laura, the wife of The Captain in Strindberg's The Father, drives him literally mad with jealousy and suspicion about the paternity of their daughter, has him committed to an insane asylum, and takes over control of their daughter and the family finances. 

Miss Julie in Strindberg's play treats her male servant Jean like a dog.  Raised by a proto-feminist, man-hating mother, Julie demeans and humiliates Jean while at the same seducing him as an expression of her power. 

The literary list is endless. A bibliography of books written by misogynist men? A reflection of the times when women were legally and socially owned by their husbands and would use any wiles or means to destroy them?  Or something innately insidious - a natural instinctive mistrust of men because of the servitude of pregnancy?

The characterization of women in the past has been harsh indeed; but why have modern women, presumably free from all traces of male chattel, been so insistent on taking their pound of flesh, hectoring the disappointing  men they have married?  Why have they stayed married despite all signs that point to dissolution and preferred to nag, irritate, and badger instead?

The image of the hag, the badgering, incessantly critical, unhappily married, resentful, unpleasant woman should have been long ago relegated to the archives.  Successful modern day women have either acquired enough financial capital to leave a bad marriage; or have, like Shakespeare’s heroines, figured out how to get the best out of their husbands and their marriages to satisfy their needs; but the unsuccessful women, the majority, still have not sorted out their independence nor learned from the Strindberg playbook.  Only women know whose child they are carrying, and there is no more poisoned arrow in their quiver.

Instead, women go toxic with their bickering, bitching innuendoes and never confront men on the battlefield, equal in strength, open and martial in their intentions, courageous and honest.  They are still confused, caught between their patriarchal upbringing and modern 'Be All You Can Be' propaganda. 

A confounding factor in all this is feminism itself.  On the one hand feminist jihadists are asserting their absolute strength, authority, ability, and independence; but on the other are demanding safe spaces, neutered men, congenial and protective institutional environments, limited free speech and civil rights.  What is a woman to do?  Which is she?  Strong, competent, and independent; able to negotiate the world of men easily and quickly? Or dependent, still needing shelter and accommodation?

In addition women are taught as part of the ‘male toxicity’ canon that men’s natural, biological, sexual drives – aggressive, demanding, persistent, simple, and undeniable – are wrong, retrograde, and destructive.   There is something wrong and suspicious about male pursuit.  Casanova is dead. 

Yet millennia of human history demonstrate just the opposite.  Human evolution has depended on male aggression, competitiveness, and pursuit.  While there is no doubt that such masculinity can have its excesses – the bell curve describes all human activity and ability – there is no reason to deny its reality or its legitimate place in modern society.

Therefore most women are caught betwixt and between.  They settle for bad marriages, bad jobs, and bad children and instead of doing something, complain, rage, nag, and harp and become as toxic in their own way as their wandering, dismissive, wandering husbands.  In being taught that the system itself is the enemy and that only by destroying it and remaking it in women’s image can women ever find reward, women have been sold a bill of goods.  

Women need no institutional support, no self-interested twisting of legal codes, and no patrons.  True equality can only be achieved by asserting one’s moral authority, intelligence, and individual will.  In being taught that evolutionary biology is wrong, women have been further deceived.  Rather than dealing with biological difference – as Shakespeare’s daunting heroines did – women are instructed to deny it.  Certainly no good can come of that.

The honesty of Shakespeare and his successors is absent in today's culture of identity, diversity, and inclusivity. One cannot call a spade a spade - women in this apogee of women's place can do no wrong, deserve every advantage over men, and must be respected as society's true generals - or saints.   The only spade called is male toxicity, that spreading, infectious, viral swarm of bad intention, ugliness, and hormone-fueled ignorance.