Down at the Dance Hall

Emily offers a thoughtful defense of Emotional Chastity here, with an emphasis on friendship and swing dancing.

And more swing dancing! Great post by Ryan. "What he could have done had he perhaps known less about dancing and more about dancing with people, was listen to her." Check out his post on Emotional Chastity as well: "Often there is an unstated emphasis on the boy in the situation, as if the girl needs to be protected from his boyish nature, and he needs to be protected from himself. This is a terrible assumption. Not only is it unjust, and it has something of the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy."

I enjoyed this piece at kassierutherford.com. And here is dancing again: "I had disagreed with his belief that marriage is like partnering in social dance, where the follower totally surrenders their will to the leader for the benefit of the movement. As a classically trained ballet dancer, my experience with partnering is that each member of the dance is equally responsible for the other partner. There is a constant give and take, with a clear, choreographed goal in mind. Each dancer is responsible for making that goal happen."

Clearly, I haven't been doing enough dancing.

Lucy at roadkillrhapsody.com has two very insightful pieces as well about how chastity is taught and, perhaps most significantly, overemphasized in some portions of the Latin Mass community. Here and here. "It doesn’t matter which way sex dominates your life – either by the having of it or by the not having of it – any kind of dominance is bad. We expect non-Catholics to learn that sex is a part of a package which includes marriage and babies; we ourselves need to treat chastity as part of a bigger package which includes charity, humility, and all the other virtues; for as long as we isolate chastity from the other virtues, we reinforce the message that sex interests us more than anything else does. Nothing says ‘sex-maniac’ like a guy who won’t stop talking about how to not think about it."

"Silent, upbeat, with a handful of carrot sticks: who wants to be a New Rules Girl?" I spent a fair amount of time thinking about The Rules while I was thinking about Emotional Chastity; there's a lot of overlap. Confession: I never leave the house without lipstick. I'm not always wearing it, but it's always in my purse. "Whereas in 1998 I bought The Rules and genuinely tried to follow them, these days I read The New Rules and find them unintentionally hilarious. The sheer brutality and meanness of the thing is mind-blowing, and there’s little else to do but laugh. Amongst other things we get: a page devoted to quotations from “college-aged guys” explaining why they won’t date fat girls."

Related: another delightful review of a popular dating book. "Throughout the book, there's an undertone of emotional immaturity and consequent insecurity, of assuming that the reader is not only the center of her paramour's universe but the entirety of it, and that nothing less is acceptable. If he has multiple or conflicting responsibilities, dump him; If he is too shy to telephone to ask for a date -- email is explicitly deemed unacceptable -- then don't go out with him; If he's not pressuring you for sex constantly, dump him...the only question asked about a man's role in a relationship is whether or not he's immediately and fully accessible, or at least if he appears to be so."

Aaaaand finally, despite my iron-clad and thus far unbroken New Year's resolution to Stop Being Combative on the Internet, I got called a feminist today, in spite of my endless protestations to the contrary (but who cares about what I actually think?) in an otherwise perfectly civil discussion over at DarwinCatholic. What's Tina Turner got to do with it. as the saying goes.

This, Crude, is for you.

Feminism: you can define it in many different ways, but the most accurate would probably be ‘destroyer of worlds’. All that harping on and on about equality between the sexes, fair pay, recognition of labour, universal suffrage, and an assortment of other ridiculous so-called ‘rights’ that no real female needs or cares about is quite clearly a veiled assault on men, and therefore the world at large. 

Feminism has gone too far, indeed, so far has it gone that it has insidiously infiltrated every institutional orifice like a omnitentacled being from Japanese octopus porn. It is a parasitic beast which silently permeates the organs of its hosts, burying beneath their flesh, nesting in society’s innards before it bursts forth like the larvae of the botfly, screeching and demanding stuff. And astride this fearsome creature sits Harriet Harperson, chieftain of the feminist militia and bête noire of any human with a penis. 

Does this viewpoint sound like you? Are you lacking direction in your life, possibly because you sit at home wondering how you can possibly convert all of the hatred and fear of ‘the other’ that you have inside you into serious political action? Don’t resign yourself to a life of merely raving drunkenly at passers-by just yet, for we come bearing good news. Mike Buchanan has started a "pro-men" party that aims to get rid of feminism once and for all - and it’s coming soon to a dank, stinking room above a sub-standard regional pub near you any day now.