A theory of Viagra

(Note: Many comments have been added to this thread.)

I have previously written:

The way many women dress today, with half their breasts exposed, is an expression of total disrespect for men. Men are left with three possible responses. To grab the woman, which is illegal; to ogle the woman, which is socially unacceptable; or to affect not to notice the woman at all, which is emasculating. A culture that normalizes such female behavior—i.e. not only not noticing or objecting to it, but prohibiting any objection to it—is extremely sick.

To expand on this idea, let us consider a situation we see constantly on television today, particularly on the cable news stations, in which a male guest or host is speaking with a female guest or host (though more often the woman is the host or interviewer) on a political talk show or news program. The man is dressed properly in jacket and tie. The woman is wearing a top with an absurdly plunging neckline revealing half her upper chest and often more besides. It is highly revealing, highly provocative, and totally inappropriate for any forum in which serious matters—war, economic recession, constitutional crises—are supposedly being seriously discussed. Yet, though the woman is exposing her body in a way that is impossible not to notice, and though her exposed body undercuts the very idea that this is a serious news program, the man is not supposed to notice it, or to appear as if he notices it. And, I believe, so profoundly acclimated are contemporary men to feminist mores and liberal expectations generally that the man in fact doesn’t notice it and is entirely cool with the whole set-up. And so the man in sober jacket and tie and the woman with ludicrous acres and declivities of flesh revealed go on talking about terrorism, or the economy, or the next president’s cabinet appointees, with the man’s eyes never even for a micro-second wandering below the woman’s face. Not only does the situation emasculate the man, but the man, by submitting to it instead of telling the woman that she is not dressed appropriately and ought to cover herself (as, I’ve heard, Muslim guests on TV shows have occasionally told female hosts) emasculates himself. He emasculates himself sexually and as a male figure deserving of respect, because he is suppressing his normal reactions both as a man and as an authority figure. Thus have contemporary men turned themselves into passive drones, eunuchs of the gyneocracy.

Carol Iannone speculates that this ubiquitous self-emasculation of men, this psychological turning off and suppression of their normal reactions to women, has affected them to such a degree that when it’s actually time for them to release their normal sexual response, the response is not there, they can’t do it, they need help. And thus the Viagra craze.

- end of initial entry -

Gintas writes:

Who says you don’t have a sense of humor? “A Theory of Viagra”, indeed.

There’s no doubt that women’s sexuality is heavily used to get men’s attention in advertising, but they can’t do anything about it except buy the advertised product. I think that’s the point there. (It’s a perfect lining up of all the planets when the product is Viagra.)

That a woman would use her sexuality to get a man’s attention, but then he can do nothing, not even buy a product, suggests to me it’s a power play. It’s the woman triumphing over the man, emasculating him. I’m sure Camille Paglia would approve.

Robert B. writes:

You do know that this is not the first time this was an issue—other “decadent” societies also allowed such dress/behavior. The late Roman Empire was such, but so was the “Anciene Regime” of France and even in England:

http://www.nlr.ru/eng/exib/moda/

LA replies:

Yes, of course, there were periods in the past when women had very revealing dress—but that was in society, at social occasions, occasions where women were to be admired sexually as women and men were expected to respond to them as men. So there was no emasculation there. Such highly revealing dress has never been worn by women in non-sexual, highly public jobs such as government office or reporting and discussing politics and interviewing public figures on TV, where any response to the woman in sexual terms is out of the question.

Robert B. replies:

We do live in a decadent and debauched society. Women’s dress is a part of that.

In the past, women’s decadence was not allowed into the public space of work, diplomacy, etc. because women were not allowed into those positions as their proper place and station was taken into consideration—except the Paris Salons. Here they dressed as pictured and here they were taken at least semi seriously. But again, the Paris Salons represented a period of decadence.

Mark J. writes:

On a possibly related topic, recently here in the Twin Cities there was a story about how the police ran an undercover infiltration of an anarchist group that planned to disrupt the GOP convention last summer in St. Paul. A photo of the accused anarchists accompanied the story in the paper.

Laura W. writes:

The revealing dress you mention is not typically a power play by the woman involved. After all, she has been taught all her life there are no substantial differences between men and women. She doesn’t become aroused easily by the mere appearance of a man, so she assumes a man is the same with respect to her appearance.

The overall effect is as destructive of femininity as it is emasculating of men.

This sort of revealing dress in professional settings is a last-ditch effort by women to salvage their femininity. They are living daily lives of masculine aggression and drive. They are pressured to destroy their inherent selflessness and desire to serve. They make their breasts appear overblown, near-to-bursting balloons as a way of diverting attention from what they have become. I believe many professional women are bordering on mild schizophrenia, so divided are they between male and female.

But, isn’t this what men have wanted? I think the Viagra craze is mostly caused by Viagra marketing, but if men are forced to take artificial stimulants to enjoy their time in bed, it’s not surprising. It’s tragic for all involved. Women have destroyed their integrity and sexuality to provide their men with more cash. It’s a weird reversal of prostitution. They are buying love, but it’s not the real thing.

LA replies:

“She doesn’t become aroused easily by the mere appearance of a man, so she assumes a man is the same with respect to her appearance.”

Is it true that women are not aware of the attraction they have for men? Isn’t the truth the exact opposite, that women are very much aware of that attraction and do their best to be attractive to men? However (and now I’m veering back to agreeing with you), it also seems to be the case that today’s women, in their de-sexed female schizophrenia, block out the truth of female attraction to men, even as they exploit it and seek to gain power from it.

But then there’s another side of this, that what primarily drives women in the way they dress is not to attract men, but to maintain their standing among their fellow women.

Laura W. replies:

It’s a cliché, but I do think most women work so hard on their appearance to meet the very exacting standards of other women. They certainly don’t want men to care for them first and foremost for their appearance. In my experience, many truly do not understand just how much more easily men are stimulated by visual cues. They haven’t had this knowledge drilled into them since childhood as women once did.

Laura continues:

I really think your notion of this as a power play is, while true for a minority of women, generally wrong. Look, I know professional women who dress like whores. They just want to look good and be liked. That’s what’s offered in the stores and they want to feel like a woman when they’re doing a man’s job. They are desensitized to its effect on others.

LA replies:

I’ve never heard your theory before and it makes a lot of sense. Professional women—and women in general in our feminist, uprooted society—are living a life unnatural to their sex, a life that that de-sexes them. So to compensate for this de-sexualization and to win back a feeling of femininity, they opt for a perverted excess of femininity in the form of whorish dress. Further, when the whorish dress is the fashion in stores and it’s hard to find other options, that only increases the tendency.

Laura writes:

It’s also worth noting just how uncomfortable many women are in these clothes. Who is that beautiful actress who comments on movies at Turner Classic Movies with Robert Osbourne these days? The poor woman is obviously so conscious of her exposed cleavage she can’t rub two thoughts together. It’s very distracting to know other people are looking at your chest.

Laura replies to LA:

You got it.

I know one woman who is now a top vice president for a major corporation. Every step she takes up the ladder seems to be accompanied by a further degree of hypertrophied femininity. This summer, she was falling out of her tops and it was difficult to carry on a conversation with her because her anatomy got in the way. She is not power hungry by nature (which is not to say all women are not power hungry.) She thinks this is the way to win acceptance from others.

LA replies:

Does it win acceptance? Are women such pathetic conformists that they have no thought other than to conform in order to win approval, even if the particular behavior they’re conforming to is obviously foolish and makes them uncomfortable? Have they truly got no mind of their own?

In fact I’ve said the same myself many times—that women’s fashion is a kind of cosmic force, transcending the individual, and that when it comes to fashion, women have no minds, they just follow.

I remember (I don’t particularly want to remember) Madeleine Albright. Here was a woman, the U.S. Secretary of State, who was not, shall we say, comely. She would appear in public, sitting on chairs on public stages, in short skirts that would reveal her thighs that no person would want to see. It evidently never occurred to her that this made her look undignified and foolish in the extreme. She kept wearing the same outfits. That’s an example of women mindlessly following fashion, even to their own detriment and often even to their own conscious discomfort.

Hannon writes:

This book, “Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates.” is a fascinating look at how “females choose their mates,” including but not limited to humans. Yes, it is probably a reductionist text, but when I read it when it first came out I found the author’s ideas thought-provoking. The key idea in the book doesn’t mean men are powerless in the mating game—women simply have the option of choice in Western culture that men do not. We approach, they decide yea or nay, either right away or sometime in the courting process, including “nays” after mating. So right at the beginning men are in the weaker negotiating position, which means that emasculating them in the manner you outline may be more detrimental than we think. But if women truly are in the driver’s seat in selecting their spouse or partner, wouldn’t we expect women to be more conservative in their manner and dress? Looking attractive is one thing, but why such exaggeration?

Women who are by appearance and behavior aggressively over-sexualized—and have little else to offer—have attained a type of power that is wasted from the start because it does not constructively occupy themselves or other individuals, relationships or society. Yet there is a “payoff” somewhere, or it would not be such common practice to advertise a personal fondness for sex so loudly. In this process men lose the power they would normally exert through natural masculinity, and they lose again because the very foundations of men and women relating to each other have been corrupted and eroded.

Mark Jaws writes:

You are exactly right. Young men are afraid to show their admiration for attractive women. Back in the day when I was a young buck in NYC my friends and I were always willing to offer those delicate little compliments to the young and alluring female passersby who caught our eye. Not today. In fact, last year over the course of the summer I conducted a little experiment gazing out my second floor window in Arlington VA where babes abound but testosterone is in short supply. I observed only six out of 100 men doing double takes on the attractive women. How pathetic is that?!

If science cannot figure out a way to clone Mark Jaws, I am afraid American manhood will be in deep doo by century’s end.

LA replies:

It seems to me there are at least two factors leading men not to express their attraction to women in public as they once did. One is of course feminism; the man is not supposed to approach the woman. Thus in no movie for the last 15 years has the man initiated the kiss; only the woman does. It’s a mandated form of political correctness as rigid, and as untrue to reality, as the official denial of God in the Soviet Union. The other factor is the extremely revealing female dress, which is a more recent development. When a woman is already revealing to the whole world parts of her body that normally would only be seen by her husband or boyfriend, then, instead of triggering greater male interest, comments, and so on, it inhibits it. I’m not sure I can say exactly why this is so, but here’s an attempt at an explanation. Women’s excessively revealing dress destroys what we might call the “sexual public square.” In older society, men could feel and express their attraction to women, such expressions had a relatively safe social meaning as well as a more dangerous sexual one, it didn’t instantly mean, “I want to go to bed with you.” But when a woman is dressed in such a revealing, whorish way as to suggest that she is prepared to go to bed instantly with any man she chooses, that in-between social space—the space between the situation of two people having nothing to do with each other, and the situation of two people going to bed together—is lost. The man is left with two options: either to tell the woman he wants her, or to affect not to notice her—the very self-emasculating behavior I described at the beginning of this entry.

The upshot is that whorish female dress destroys the normal relational space between men and women

Laura replies:

This is an amazing comment of yours. I’m so impressed by the subtlety of your thinking on this.

Hannon writes:

As I was writing the message I just sent you I was thinking “I wonder if Laura W. will write something for this entry. It’s bound to be good.” And as soon as I sent my email and checked back at VFR, there it was! I was especially intrigued by this statement of hers:

“They haven’t had this knowledge drilled into them since childhood as women once did.”

Does she mean by this that younger women today don’t get the explanation from friends or family about why men are referred to as wolves? I’m not disagreeing, since younger females seem to exhibit an inverse proportion of vanity to awareness, but it seems like a startling statement. I would like to hear more about this idea.

Mark Jaws replies:

The problem with your theory is that young men are not even gazing at the attractive women who are appropriately dressed. I think there is an excessively exaggerated fear of being viewed as “sexist.” It is maddening.

LA replies:

There’s also the fact that in hyper sexualized society, all innocence is lost.

I haven’t worked in a corporate environment for some time, so I’m not sure what the rules are now. But when I used to work in offices, I might say to a female co-worker, “That’a beautiful outfit,” or, “You look great today.” Not as a come-on, but simply paying a compliment. Is that possible today? Has feminism gone so far that men cannot compliment women’s looks without its becoming a federal case?

Hannon writes:

In your reply to Mark Jaws I think you have something. The disconnect is this: men see a woman dressed like she’s hot to trot and think “Hey, she’s hot to trot.” But that is not what the woman is thinking; it is simply what she chose to wear that day in this post-modern age. I suspect this is a very common pattern and source of disharmony. [LA replies: If what you say is true, then the women are very much to blame. They have no excuse not to be aware of the way they look and its impact and implications. And this also would back up what I said to Laura, that when it comes to fashion, women allow themselves to behave as mindless herd creatures.]

Possibly apropos: you may recall the famous experiment where a male subject is shown a photograph filled with naked women, but one is wearing bra and panties. Guess which one he thinks is the most desirable? [LA replies: I never heard of that experiment, but it makes complete sense.]

Lastly, it could be that my own question, “Why the exaggeration?”, is answered by competition between women.

LA writes:

Laura’s theory is so insightful and well expressed that I want to repeat it:

This sort of revealing dress in professional settings is a last-ditch effort by women to salvage their femininity. They are living daily lives of masculine aggression and drive. They are pressured to destroy their inherent selflessness and desire to serve. They make their breasts appear overblown, near-to-bursting balloons as a way of diverting attention from what they have become.

Latte Island writes:

I agree with you and your commenters, but I’ll add that the workplace itself puts pressure on women to dress immodestly. A long time ago, when I worked in New York City, I found it difficult to find clothes that were both professional and modest. People I didn’t know very well would often comment that I “dressed like a lawyer” and so on, merely because I didn’t want to let it all hang out at the office.

Also, the same issue goes on the other way, although it’s not as serious. I, a polite middle-aged woman, am occasionally embarrassed when I have to talk to an attractive man I don’t know well, who isn’t wearing a shirt. Even middle-class guys don’t realize they’re way underdressed, and we women don’t know where to look. And if the guy is really young, I feel like a pervert, which I’m not, really.

LA replies:

Other female commenters have talked about the difficulty of finding things to wear that are not overly revealing. Maybe this is a stupid question, but isn’t there an infinite variety of skirts, and an infinite variety of blouses that one could get to wear with them? And aren’t there blouses with buttons up the front, so that one can button the blouse as high or as low as one likes? Are simple skirts and blouses not made any more?

Decemmer 5

John B. writes:

I don’t have a copy of it; but John Baker’s Race distinguishes civilized peoples from the uncivilized by a number of specific traits or elements (twenty-three, according to Wikipedia). One of them, as I remember (the list is not provided in the article) is that the civilized tend to keep the upper body covered. The only thing your correspondent Latte Island has to do is move to a civilized country.

Any idea where there might be one?

LA replies:

Pretty funny.

Laura writes:

As Aristotle said, “So it is a matter of no little importance what sort of habits we form from the earliest age—it makes a vast difference or all the difference in the world.” Women used to spend a healthy portion of their formative years learning about men, how they were different, what they could and could not expect from them in the way of intimacy, how to respond to their powerful sex drives, what they needed to do to get around their differences. This is one reason why the education of women seemed outwardly so unimpressive compared to the education of men. They were learning essential things, it just wasn’t the things men were learning. They seemed to be doing nothing, but they were preparing for real adulthood, not the life of a perpetual adolescent or neutered workaholic.

Women get none of that today, and, in fact, receive the reverse. From early childhood, they are told that men and women are essentially the same. Of course, women know that this isn’t quite true, and older women still reinforce the idea of differences, but women enter adulthood with many misconceptions and have had little time to meditate on and absorb the truths of human nature. What a disaster when they get married. Life was never a rose garden, and the idea that it should be is part of the problem, but women are crushed by false expectations today.

Laura replies to LA comment that began, “Does it win acceptance?”:

It’s not pathetic conformism to lack the time, talent or initiative to come up with a wardrobe on your own given that women spend so much of their effort finding and maintaining careers. It’s barely possible to maintain a couple of house plants, let alone seek out or sew interesting and becoming clothes when you’re busy going to college and graduate school, looking for satisfying jobs, climbing the ladder, etc. The culture of women’s dress is a shadow of its former glory, shipwrecked on the rocks of careerism and self. So life is less beautiful. Raw flesh is everywhere. Men and women have chosen this path together.

Of course, many European women still dress with style and appealing femininity. But, they can afford the time. They hardly have any kids. For them, you might say it’s a faux femininity.

Stephen T. writes:

I always heard that “Women dress to impress other women, not men.” I may be naive, but I believe there’s some truth to that. I once had a neighbor here in L.A. who was a total knock-out; an actress/model who actually got lots of work doing both. She dressed in a stylishly sexy way, too. She was not my girlfriend but we sometimes went to lunch together, to the supermarket, etc. It was impossible not to notice the way heads turned wherever we went. And it was interesting to note how many of those were other women. You could see the way she caught their eye and then they checked her out with a sort of instant, up-&-down appraising look. She could not fail to notice it, either, and it was obvious to me that—if she wanted it—she could draw some sense of predominating over other less-attractive women from the revealing way she looked and dressed.

Adela G. writes:

It is stupid of women to display so much flesh and then expect to be taken seriously by men. Given human nature, that will not and cannot happen. What men will take seriously is the threat of legal action if women notice them responding to such displays. So men feign not to notice or even train themselves not to notice.

The power women gain over men by such vulgar and stupid manipulations is not the power that occurs when respect is earned by an individual, but the power that comes from fear of societal and legal punishment. In other words, as always, women are unable to work in the public sphere without a net—a net provided for them and maintained by men.

Something I didn’t see mentioned here: no woman who really likes men as people, as individuals would seek and use an unfair advantage over them by flaunting herself this way.

For the last forty years, I’ve heard and read over and over again feminists complaining that men don’t “really” like women. This most recent manifestation of hostility and contempt on the part of women toward men only confirms my belief that that pronouncement was, as so much leftist tripe is, a classic case of projection.

Also, the thread reminded me of an article by Kay Hymowitz I just read at City Journal.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 04, 2008 03:48 PM | Send