NBC News photo
This blog is about the notion that loss of self-control by males regarding the pawing of young girls is a breach of “propriety.”
As I write this, the press is roiled over the Roy Moore pedophile question, with many media (and Republican “moderates”) demanding that “Judge Moore” step down for the allegations that he was guilty of “sexual improprieties” while a mature man of 32. But this riveting case may mask a larger problem: the invasion of women into the male sphere. In this posting, I look broadly at the Roy Moore problem.
I have watched aghast as a parade (or “avalanche”) of male miscreants have been outed by indignant ladies and a sympathetic press. Why am I amazed? It is the salience of [pedophile] sexuality as a political issue in an era of anti-Freud propaganda.
(See https://clarespark.com/2017/10/27/moral-chaos-of-womanhood-the-harvey-weinstein-scandal-and-lolita/, https://clarespark.com/2014/03/02/roy-porter-and-the-anti-psychiatry-movement/ and https://clarespark.com/2012/02/19/the-romantic-repudiation-of-freud-co/. It is a major claim of Freudians that sexuality and aggression are primary human instincts that must be recognized to explain neuroses, war, and violence in general.) It is true that the wave of feminism coming out of the New Left has concentrated on sexual liberation (https://clarespark.com/2012/10/03/the-sexual-revolution-2/), but most women would probably agree that males are in dire need of “civilizing” and that male sexual aggression is more of the norm than social conservatives are likely to admit.
Witness the phrase “sexual impropriety” (of which Roy Moore is supposedly guilty) as if self-control was a subset of politeness.
Most readers of this website are not looking for “politeness” but for an empirical, historical look at current controversies. As I look over my long development, I have concluded that emulation of my father the doctor is the key factor, for I went into science teaching as a substitute for a career in medicine. As a science major at the Cornell University State College of Agriculture in the mid-1950s, I had to take a semester of practice teaching to get my degree. It is that story of my alleged impropriety in the Fall of 1958 at Ithaca High School that is the focus of this posting.I was anything but a feminist in that conservative decade, but I did take myself seriously as a prospective chemistry teacher (a deviant choice for a young female, I was to learn).
My supervisor was Mr. Ming, who would take a brown bag lunch with other male science faculty. In my 1950s naiveté, I thought that they would be discussing matters of scientific relevance during their lunch break, so zealous Clare improperly showed up at their confab. Mr. Ming punished me with a bad grade: a“65” because I had an inadequate “sense of propriety,” a grade that my (male) Cornell professor changed to a “90.”
I am resuscitating this memory to make a larger point than some conservative or “moderate” commentators snowed by an “avalanche” of belated confessions: that women of my generation were politely and punitively excluded from the “male” sphere, and that this situation was of more interest to me at that time in the mid-to-late 1950s than various clumsy male gropings of adolescent-looking females seem to be today (https://clarespark.com/2017/10/27/moral-chaos-of-womanhood-the-harvey-weinstein-scandal-and-lolita/).
Or, if we dig deeper, is the entire Roy Moore flap better seen as yet another assault on Southern and Western “cowboys” by neo-Progressive liberals?
The Clare Spark Blog 