Lars Walker on Annette Funicello

Mr. Walker makes an interesting point.
Through all her career she was never – so far as I’ve been able to tell – involved in a scandal. The bikini movies were a little risque by the standards of the day, but she never did anything that crossed the line. Her image remained wholesome.... The question occurred to me today – what would have happened to her if she’d been born later, and had come to fame in our own time?

That’s not a hard question to answer. She did appear again, in a sense, in the person of Britney Spears. And Lindsey Lohan. And Miley Cyrus.

Why was Annette able to live a life of dignity, while these younger women, born with the “advantage” of a culture that claims to promote the dignity and rights of women, have quickly made public jokes (and dirty ones) of themselves?

Not to say the younger girls didn’t have lots of “help.” Hollywood is certainly a field well-strewn with pitfalls. Money and fame at an early age are dangerous drugs in themselves, even before you get to the pills and powder.

But Hollywood was no convent school in the 1950s, either. Anybody who worked there in those days will tell you the predators were out in force, and there were ample opportunities for partying.

Annette, I think, benefited from Puritanism. She benefited from a double standard. She benefited from repression, and hypocrisy, and all those awful social constraints we despise the Fifties for today.

A girl in Annette’s position, if she wanted to be a “good girl,” actually had social resources available to her. America was in her corner, back then.

93 comments:

Miss Ladybug said...

If I have a child, a girl especially, I would certainly not encourage (and would possibly attempt to dissuade) any interest in pursuing acting/singing as a profession, especially as a child. "Normal" seems to go right out the window when that happens these days...

Grim said...

In a way, I'm glad I don't have a daughter who would have to grow up in this world. But in another way, I really regret that I never had the chance to meet the kind of daughter I'd have had. It would be hard, I think, but it would be worth it.

E Hines said...

Our daughter pursued an entertainment career at College of Santa Fe for a couple of years. She actually became a pretty sound singer, but it would have been a hard row to hoe; she developed the skill but had no actual talent.

She also taught dancing for a while, until the objections of a then-fiance got to be too much. She was, after all, in the course of her teaching, dancing with [ahem] other men.

Her parents, though, mean bas*ds that we are, made her also learn a marketable trade so she could live while she...pursued her bliss.

Today she's making a solid living with a husband (not the control freak above, but as it turns out, an actual musician) and two kids, and she enjoys music.

Daughters are worth the effort.

Eric Hines

Tom said...

I wonder how many great female talents we've lost because of this.

Cass said...

Two words: Marilyn Monroe, in continual psychotherapy and died of a drug overdose. Or Ava Gardner: an unstable alcoholic addicted to dysfunctional relationships. Or Lana Turner, whose 14 year old daughter intervened in yet another beatdown between Mom and her mafia, wife beating scumbag husband Johnny Stompanato and ended up on trial for murder. Or Liz Taylor who was at the center of several scandals (one involving an alleged threesome between an actor - forget who - and JFK).

Wholesome times, those 1950s.

You can cherry pick 2 or 3 famous examples to prove whatever point you wish to about today or the 50s. That's the problem with anecdotal reasoning - there's no perspective to balance it out because we're bored by normality and remember the sensational over the mundane.

Annette Funicello has a wholesome image and that's something we've lost today. But I'm not convinced the times are to blame for out of control starlets then, or now. Surely we bear some responsibility for the direction our lives take?

Grim said...

I'm hoping Mr. Walker will show up to defend his own ideas, but I don't think he's arguing that no responsibility is borne by the individual. What he's arguing is that a young woman who wanted to be "good," and remain good, had some institutional support then that is lacking now.

He's clear that Hollywood in the 1950s was no "convent school," as he puts it, but that there was an option that may no longer exist (at least for those young women who pursue a career in acting or singing at that level).

I think it's an interesting perspective, because institutions do shape character in some ways. One way could be by supporting people who make the right kinds of choices. I'm trying to decide if I can think of any counterexamples from our own age: young women near the top of acting or singing who don't give in to the negative parts of the Hollywood culture.

The closest I've been able to come so far are from the sub-set of media that is explicitly conservative -- gospel music, say. But I'm not very up on contemporary pop culture, so the fact that I can't think of a good example doesn't mean there aren't plenty of them.

Lars Walker said...

What Grim said.

Cass said...

I'm hoping Mr. Walker will show up to defend his own ideas...

I'm not sure they require a defense, since they're not being attacked, but rather discussed. That generally entails some back and forth and even the introduction of other ideas :p

There are a number of differences between the media environment now and that of the 1950s. Funicello, for instance, married her manager. And back then, the lives and images of stars and starlets were carefully managed - so much so that the public never glimpsed the seamier side of many a public image.

That's nearly impossible today with Twitter, the Internet, the 24/7 infotainment cycle and a gazillion other outlets. My point was that back then, an awful lot of dysfunction never made it into the public consciousness.

We didn't, for instance, know that the President of the United States was passing around a 19 year old intern as though she were some sort of sexual chew toy.

I think we all benefited from that to some degree. So in that sense I'm in agreement with Mr. Walker. But I am not necessarily persuaded that we can attribute Ms. Funicello's wholesome and untarnished image to double standards, repression, and hypocrisy when it's so easy to point to other women in her situation who don't seem much different than Britney and Miley (even without the 24/7 exposure and trashy mores of today).

And Taylor Swift seems to be doing quite well despite her lamentably wholesome image.

Eric Blair said...

I have to agree with Cass. We always hear about the train wrecks, but those who live their lives without drama get less publicity.

Lars Walker said...

Well, who are the success stories today? Who are the young female stars who are living lives without drama? My point is, they have every incentive to get into trouble, and if they try to live morally they will not only be ignored but reviled. Reviled. Traditional sexual morality is taboo. Live that way, you pay a price.

Texan99 said...

I mostly agree with Cass. I wouldn't attribute the healthy qualities of a career like that of Ms. Funicello to long-lost social capital like double standards, repression, and hypocrisy. I'd attribute it to the positive goals that led, in the hands of imperfect people, to errors like double standards, repression, and hypocrisy. In her time, there was a market for dramatic productions involving the wholesome virtue of pretty young women; in these times, there barely is. That's a loss.

There was also a gain associated with the loss, which is the advanced understanding that when a male and a female engage in extramarital sexual activity, there is not a magic process by which the female is sullied and male is just fine. If we really want to cure the modern ill, it might be a good idea, not to return to 50s styles, but to concentrate on how to persuade men that they personally pay a social, moral, and practical price for treating women as a casual source of impersonal sexual gratification.

Maybe someday we'll have popular art extolling the virtues of chaste young men, but we don't have it now and we sure didn't have it in the 50s. Our cultural choice to admire the chaste young women without thinking through what it meant to apply such a different standard to the men is in part what brought us to where we are today.

I suppose I tend to react this way to suggestions that women (but not men) were really better off when they were more downtrodden. The kind of repression that leads to chastity ought to come from persuasive moral education, respect for personal autonomy, and freely accepted self-control, not from double standards, hypocrisy, and terror of being left completely alone to deal with an unplanned pregnancy.

Grim said...

Maybe someday we'll have popular art extolling the virtues of chaste young men, but we don't have it now and we sure didn't have it in the 50s...

Are you sure that's right? I can think of several examples of film characters built around a notion of male chastity, expressed as intense loving fidelity to a particular woman. In fact, it's so common that I'd have to call it the standard model: the good man, even as a young man, loves his true love fiercely.

The last time I remember seeing this form celebrated fully was in the 1980s: films like The Princess Bride and Ladyhawke made use of it. This is chastity, in the masculine sense of the term. It used to be very common, and the long-lived popularity of these movies shows something of the power of the image.

Grim said...

In fact, I would suggest that this standard model underlies Casablanca. A big part of the damage that makes Richard Blaine so sympathetic is that he has been hurt by this intense longing for a particular woman.

So when he does cruel things, like his rejection of Yvonne, we understand he is not trying to be cruel: he's sending her away because she isn't the right girl, and he can't make a life work with her. When he and Ilsa commit adultery, we don't blame either of them because we know they really belong together.

All that makes Casablanca very edgy, sexually, in the context of 1942. It hardly registers now that Blaine shouldn't have been sleeping with Yvonne, or that the adultery is especially worthy of notice -- people now write openly in magazines of slipping off to see their ex when their husband or wife is away for a while.

What made the performance powerful was that it could draw on this standard model, then quite normally accepted, and show how he was adhering to it in the breech.

That was what made him sympathetic rather than wicked, so we could see him (and Ilsa) as good people caught in tragic circumstances, and struggling to do what was right even though they sometimes fell down. "What was right" was never spelled out in the film because it was assumed by the culture.

Texan99 said...

There is such a thing as the ideal of marital (or quasi-marital) fidelity for a man with vigorous and healthy sexual appetites. There is no such thing, in the recent past, as the ideal of a young unmarried man who chastely avoids sexual activity that's on offer from interested young women. In the last century or so, he'd be treated as either a joke, a closeted homosexual, a head case, or an obscure and archaic religious lesson. By the end of the story, he'd almost certainly have undergone a life lesson that thawed him out--or else he'd have hung himself.

One big recent exception is the Twilight series, but it required an extreme plot device in which he basically has to choose between avoiding premarital sex and killing his girlfriend, something to do with his being a vampire. A weird setup, but it was interesting how strongly it appealed to young female readers. A guy who wants to be chaste! He must have supernatural powers!

Texan99 said...

Rick Blaine is not a chaste hero, even if he has a modicum of sexual self-control that helps drive the plot. He is not married to Ilsa in Paris, and though he doesn't know then that she's married, he knows she's married when he sleeps with her again in Casablanca. How would the story have sounded to us if he had chastely rejected her in both cities? Just think of the plot device that would have had to be dreamed up to explain it: the Germans start shelling at the strategic moment? someone gets tuberculosis? The heroine is run down by a taxi on her way to the assignation? Frankly, could the Casablanca plot work if Rick's renunciation were not necessary to save the victims of concentration camps? If Ilsa's husband were just some schmo, would Rick have hesitated to run away with her?

What's more, Rick manages to sneer at his erstwhile partner for being the kind of woman who explains her tawdry past with the hook line "Mister, I met a man once." It's obvious her sexual purity is a lot more important to him than his own is. If he's sworn off women, it's because he's afraid of opening up, not because he's chaste--that would seem merely quaint.

It's true that he gets a grip on himself and makes the right choice. It's hard to imagine a modern male hero doing that. Just think! Renouncing a present pleasure for ethical reasons! You'd have to introduce a plot device that explained how it was necessary to keep the meteorite from destroying all life on earth.

Grim said...

I'll give you the last decade or so, but definitely not the last century. The young unmarried men presented as virtuous that I know of follow this pattern (as for example John Wayne in Stagecoach, but you can take of innumerable examples):

1) They are unattached to any women, pursuing whatever private business they have.

2) They meet a woman whom they realize that they love.

3) They court her for a while with kind acts and courtesy, and ask to marry her when she seems to have come to love them too.

Which, actually, is exactly how Richard Blaine appears in the Paris flashback if you think about it. It's only after he is broken that the corruption slips in; the story is about his redemption.

It's not just cowboy films and Casablanca, either: think of the war films in which the young man devoted to his sweetheart back home is an absolute commonplace. (Also note that in Stagecoach the woman Wayne's character comes to love is a prostitute: her own background is treated very sympathetically, and she herself presented as worthy of love. That in 1939!)

Grim said...

He is not married to Ilsa in Paris, and though he doesn't know then that she's married, he knows she's married when he sleeps with her again in Casablanca.

What's the evidence that he slept with her in Paris? He certainly kissed her.

I'm not very sensitive to the kinds of cues that are supposed to tell me that sex has occurred in these early movies, so it's certainly possible. I'm wondering if is necessarily the case, though, or if one might be permitted to imagine that his genuine love and interest in marrying her was in accord with the form.

Grim said...

Maybe because I'm thinking of John Wayne as the example, there's another good example of playing off the standard model in his Angel and the Badman. Here the idea is that the character is genuinely a bad man: in his case, a gunfighter and thief.

That he regards women as playthings is thus permitted, but the movie's plot is built around his salvation to the true form of chaste love. It is when he finally does fall into true love with a woman that his whole life reforms: he becomes an honored member of the church, lays down his guns initially against his will but in service to the wishes of his beloved, marries, becomes a farmer and submits to the law.

This is a story about the redeeming power of chaste love for men. It plays closely off the standard model, too, because it shows them as 'bad men' precisely because they don't adhere to the model.

Texan99 said...

I can give you the John Wayne/Rick Blaine point only if we assume that marriage is completely irrelevant to chastity, and that no more is required than a serious attitude toward the relationship. But that's not the Annette Funicello standard. Also, slutty women aren't allowed to reform: once sullied, always sullied, even if they meet a fresh, virginal young boyfriend and want to start over with a new life.

Oh, and Rick and Ilsa? Totally involved sexually, within the limits of movies at that time to be explicit on the subject.

Men in traditional movies are sometimes reasonably chaste in relation to a new woman they've just fallen in love with. There's never the least indication that they have no previous sexual experience with other (unimportant) women. A truly virginal and inexperienced man requires special exposition and plot devices to explain his unusual condition (he just got out of the seminary; he's tied to his Mom's apron strings, he's been living in a bubble, he was raised by Martians and just got to Earth.).

Cass said...

...they have every incentive to get into trouble, and if they try to live morally they will not only be ignored but reviled. Reviled. Traditional sexual morality is taboo. Live that way, you pay a price.

I don't wish to be argumentative here, but I am not seeing the evidence that this is actually the case. Can you point to several famous young women who are train wrecks? Sure. Do you (or I) know why they're train wrecks? No, not really.

Simply asserting a causal relationship between two things does not establish its validity. Let's flip the question on its face: can we point to young women being ignored and/or reviled simply because they live morally?

I can't think of one.

As I said previously, I think there's some benefit to a system where dysfunctional behavior is discouraged to the point that it remains on the fringes. I have (in fact) made that very argument here at the Hall. Usually I get pushback about the freedom to make mistakes, or about how harmful it is for young people to be punished for following their beautiful and completely understandable sexual urges.

Oh wait... I am pretty sure I haven't actually heard that argument made wrt to women :p I generally hear it's young men who should be free to follow their bliss without the shackles of conventional morality and small-minded judgment. I'm being sarcastic here, but I'm doing so to illustrate a larger point. Grim, Tex, Elise, and I (and others) have gone round and round about whether there should be different rules or standards of morality for men and women.

Tex, Elise, and I think that moral is moral, and thus a uniform standard is best for society. Grim has argued passionately for the recognition of what he believes our innate differences to be.

But when those different standards limit individual freedom based on identity, that's problematic. It's hardly unprecedented for societies to create two sets of rules (or even more) but my sense is that such divisions are tough to justify unless you happen to be in the class of people whose freedom is maximized.

RonF said...

Don't forget that in the here and now we have YouTube, cell phone cameras in almost everyone's hands and a 24-hour news cycle that must be fed. Personal pecadillos could be covered up when there was no objective proof they happened.

Cass said...

Men in traditional movies are sometimes reasonably chaste in relation to a new woman they've just fallen in love with. There's never the least indication that they have no previous sexual experience with other (unimportant) women. A truly virginal and inexperienced man requires special exposition and plot devices to explain his unusual condition (he just got out of the seminary; he's tied to his Mom's apron strings, he's been living in a bubble, he was raised by Martians and just got to Earth.).

Bingo. It's never terribly persuasive to lecture one half of humanity about the transcendent, shiny value of chastity.... for women, that is, while calling the young man who follows that standard gay or unnatural or a wimp.

There's a very sick mindset lurking there.

Grim said...

Also, slutty women aren't allowed to reform: once sullied, always sullied, even if they meet a fresh, virginal young boyfriend and want to start over with a new life.

Cass said:

Bingo.

I realize this is "Bingo" in the sense that it conforms to your objection to the earlier society. The problem is that you're just wrong about this.

That's exactly the Stagecoach scenario: the woman is a prostitute who meets a young, unsullied man (this is different from the Angel and the Badman case). She wants to start out a new life with him, after he invites her to marry him, and the last scene shows them riding out happily together for just that purpose.

I realize this is the standard complaint, but the complaint isn't accurate. The culture did have room for just this thing, even in 1939.

Grim said...

By the way, the sentiment that she should remain sullied (or is lower than other, purer women) is portrayed in the film -- but not at all sympathetically. The characters who behave that way are always portrayed as negative characters.

If you really want me to, I could dig into my files of old cowboy movies and come up with a dozen more examples of the type. I probably shouldn't spend my time that way right now, but the film Stagecoach is taken as archetypal of Westerns of the period for a reason. We know this figure as Inara from Firefly -- though a prostitute, a good person whom the hero of the series is not at all wrong to love, and with whom he would only too gladly start a new life if he knew how. She has a robust history in early Westerns.

Texan99 said...

I'm pretty sure I can come up with 10 counter-examples for every one you can produce.

Your new, fresh, young virginal guy is at most a nice guy with a non-specific or ordinary sexual history. I'd be amazed to find more than a tiny handful of examples in which the script really provided evidence of virginity.

The general pattern is:

(1) Demonstrably virginal young man: pathology explained by plot device.

(2) Demonstrably virginal young woman: acceptable as chaste heroine without explanation.

(3) Nice young man with moderate or unspecified sexual experience: acceptable as chaste hero without explanation.

(4) Nice young woman with moderate or unspecified sexual experience: acceptable as comic or racy heroine.

(5) Man with ordinary sexual history: hero with no particular sexual overtones one way or the other.

(6) Woman with ordinary sexual history: her loose sexual practices are going to support a plot device that gets her in a jam.

(7) Man with profligate sexual history: his loose sexual practices are going to support a plot device that gets him in a jam.

(8) Woman with profligate sexual history: she's a total prostitute who will require an extraordinary redemption, not to mention a guy with a superhuman ability to buck social prejudices and accept her changed role in life.

Now, has a movie ever been filmed that bucked this trend? Sure, I'm talking about a trend, not an ironclad uniformity of practice.

Eric Blair said...

I think too many movies are being watched. After all, they're movies.

Texan99 said...

Or too many comments being read?

Grim said...

Ah, but these are good movies. Well, the old ones that have lasted, in any event.

In any case, Tex, I still doubt the strength of your argument. Demonstrable virginity is a high standard to ask for in either men or women in film or literature because sex is a private matter. I think of Malory:

"So Sir Bors was confessed, and for all women Sir Bors was a
virgin, save for one, that was the daughter of King Brangoris,
and on her he gat a child that hight Elaine, and save
for her Sir Bors was a clean maiden."

He does fairly well, but not as well as Galahad, who was a pure maiden. The story tells us that, but only because we need an explanation of why Galahad was fit to win the Holy Grail. So also we hear the story of Joan the Maid, and tales of saints (both male and female: Aquinas' family supposedly locked him in a chamber with a prostitute to try to get him to avoid his chosen vocation, but it didn't work).

So there are examples on both sides, even if male chastity normally takes the form not of pure virginity but of pure devotion to one woman. What you are calling "unspecified" sexuality simply means that the sex remains where it normally belongs -- in the private, indeed the intimate, space. If the story does not pry, it was because we used to have the sense that these were things you didn't pry into without a good reason.

That is another change, really, in the last few decades. Gratuitous sex scenes now seem to be the norm: in the latest episode of the Vikings series, they decided to have the husband and wife engage in a conversation central to the plot while having sex, when they could have done it just as well over dinner.

Texan99 said...

What color did a groom traditionally wear on his wedding day to signify that he was not a virgin?

Grim said...

When you say "traditionally," you mean since Queen Victoria? Normally I would mean something much older than that; although I suppose we could begin to call it a tradition now, it's become one in the fully modern age. It was originally a matter of fashion, not associated with claims about purity but with the fact that it was done by a popular Queen.

(The article also notes that it is only since WWII that this has become popular with women outside the very wealthy elite, and that it was previously expected that the bride would continue to wear the dress after she was married at certain occasions -- Queen Victoria did, and so did the wife in Shane, with a non-white dress, on the celebration of the 4th of July. Anyone thinking that the dress implied sexual purity is thus fairly new: otherwise a wife wouldn't continue to wear it after being wed, for one thing.)

In any case, what men usually wore on their wedding day was something to indicate that status that made them acceptable of taking on the burdens of family life: their military uniform, or another uniform that indicated their profession or position, or some formal attire that indicated at least that they understood and could abide by the rules of their society.

That left their sexual history "unspecified," as you put it, but that's how it ought to be. And that was also the case for the women, until fairly lately -- really, as a popular tradition instead of an elite fashion, it dates to living memory.

Cass said...

Well, I didn't say "Bingo" to the quote you cited about being sullied, so I'm not sure in what sense I can be said to be wrong :p

I said Bingo to this:

A truly virginal and inexperienced man requires special exposition and plot devices to explain his unusual condition (he just got out of the seminary; he's tied to his Mom's apron strings, he's been living in a bubble, he was raised by Martians and just got to Earth.).

IOW, it's not only normal for young men to do what young women are told is wrong and immoral, doing it's part and parcel of what it means to be a normal male and if you haven't done that wrong-and-immoral thing, there's something wrong with you.

Think about that for a moment. It's pretty stunning.



Cass said...

What you are calling "unspecified" sexuality simply means that the sex remains where it normally belongs -- in the private, indeed the intimate, space. If the story does not pry, it was because we used to have the sense that these were things you didn't pry into without a good reason.

That is only true of men. For ages, it was a ritual to inspect the sheets the morning after a wedding and there had better be blood on them or else the woman (but not the man) had some 'splainin' to do.

Everything you're saying about not prying and not judging has been the case for men (but not for women) throughout most cultures and most of human history.

Can you find a movie or a book or twelve with fictional examples that are otherwise? Sure, but then Art has never confined itself to the expected or the social norm.

What we're talking about is the cultural norms of human societies throughout history, and they overwhelmingly do prize female chastity and punish females for doing what men are expected to do.

I understand the reasons for those cultural norms - no man wanted to have another man's child foisted upon him deceitfully. And there were no reliable ways to prove paternity back then.

But that's no longer the case in the modern era. In a way I'm kind of surprised that states don't require both STD and pregnancy tests in order to get a marriage license. There are some fairly strong public health arguments that would support such measures - not the least of which are judicial decisions obligating a married man who is not the actual father of a child to pay child support.

Texan99 said...

--Grim: Re the question about the color men traditionally wore to signify their less-than-virginal status, shall we say the inquiry is restricted to some period within 30 years of the hey-day of Miss Funicello's career, back in the Golden Age? I'm not sure it's possible to come up with any age in which there was such a signal, whether or not there was such a signal at the time for women. In any era or culture I'm familiar with, either people cared about the bride's status but not the man's, or they didn't care about the virginal status of either one. For a man, the only disqualifier is his having a living wife, with proof of true-blue legal marriage and no funny business about annulments (a la Henry VIII or Mr. Rochester).

--Cass: no woman ever has been thrilled to find out her groom has a love-child she didn't know about. She just had less assistance from society in branding men with a sexually active history so that they had a hard time "passing" in polite society. At most, if a man had been indiscreet enough about his sexual activity to produce children by women of enough social status to force open acknowledgement, that story probably got around eventually. But if his status was high enough, it wasn't much of a social impediment. The aristocracy produced such children left and right without getting drummed out of the clubs.

Grim said...

Tex:

I think that's Mr. Walker's point, isn't it? There was a period of time in which there was a double standard, and it was just about the time that she was operating in Hollywood. Because the culture at that time prized young women being unsullied, there was social and institutional support for a young woman who wanted to remain unsullied. Now there might not be.

That was his argument, which I thought was interesting. But perhaps it's just as interesting that this really was a phenomenon of her age: that before the wealth of post-WWII America, the standards were surprisingly different.

Cass & Tex:

Regarding what is 'overwhelming' in human culture and history, obviously that's a lot of ground to cover. But I have been re-reading Herodotus lately, and he talks a lot about the sexual mores of all the peoples of the known world in his day. A surprising number of them really did not care about female chastity, assuming Herodotus' reports are accurate -- although he was widely traveled, in many cases he is our sole source so we can't check him against anything.

Still, he writes of many different cultures in which men and women marry, but still carry on having sex with whomever they want (in more than one such culture, there was a custom of putting up a pole before the entrance of the home to indicate that sex was ongoing and no disturbance was wanted). He writes of one culture that didn't marry at all, but simply allowed men and women to have sex however they liked, and then brought the resulting children to a meeting and assigned their care to their mother plus whichever of the men they most resembled.

Now, I raise this for two reasons: first, to indicate that the matter is more complex than we usually treat it as being; and second, because we might ask whether we'd really prefer a system like that after all. It strikes me that there are advantages to a system that enforces chastity, and I think you agree.

What you want is for it to enforce chastity on men as well as women. I agree with that too! I just think that there is a traditional model of male chastity that was commonly in force, which was the model of loving fidelity to a woman. This model -- we used to call it "True Love" -- is celebrated both in art and in our culture, although it's a very high standard but rarely achieved outside of art.

The question was whether the culture prized it, though, not whether they achieved it. It's worth looking at the art to see that they did prize it, and I think they continued to prize it highly until the last two or three decades.

In The Princess Bride, for example, is there any reason to doubt that Wesley is a virgin? It isn't specified, but there's no plot device to explain it besides True Love. That's enough. Indeed, what more could you ask?

Texan99 said...

Lars got some pushback from Cass and me because he seemed to be identifying the double standard as the source of a good thing that we all (probably) agree we've lost. As you've probably gathered, we're not crazy about the double standard and question its real contribution to the lost good thing. I'm sure the double standard can be defended, if not to my satisfaction, but what strikes me as odd is how strong a reluctance you have to acknowledges that it exists, or existed, at all.

You mention some cultures that are lackadaisical about the chastity of both sexes. I agree with you--wasn't I just saying that you can find examples where no one cares about the chastity of either men or women, or where no one cares about the chastity of men? What's rare is a culture that cares about the chastity of men as much as women. What's totally unheard of is to care about the chastity of men more than women. Right or wrong, that's a double-standard on the whole. And it's not really that complex.

The loving fidelity of a man to a woman is a terrific thing. It's just not chastity, as you will readily see if you try to apply it to women in reverse: is she chaste if she sleeps around until she meets her true love? You're just describing the commonplace male habit of free-and-easy sex with non-marriageable women, followed by a change of heart when the guy meets the One. Which is not a truly terrible thing, don't get me wrong--it beats heartless lifelong sex--but it's also nothing like chastity. It's not what the culture has ever prized in women, in other words. A "male chastity belt" would be a joke.

The Princess Bride is written in purely asexual fairytale style; it studiously avoids speculating about anyone's sexual activity beyond the occasional kiss that even a 9-year-old can tolerate. So I agree it's not an example of a double-standard, because it avoids the subject altogether. To see the point I'm making, you have to refer to a story that actually takes account of sexual behavior in both men and women. Our culture is not defined exclusively by stories in which extramarital sex simply doesn't exist.

Cass said...

You're just describing the commonplace male habit of free-and-easy sex with non-marriageable women, followed by a change of heart when the guy meets the One. Which is not a truly terrible thing, don't get me wrong--it beats heartless lifelong sex--but it's also nothing like chastity. It's not what the culture has ever prized in women, in other words. A "male chastity belt" would be a joke.

I was lucky enough to meet my husband when he was still very young. And he thinks sex should be special. I think there far more men like this than listening to them talk would lead one to believe.

I've seen what happens on the Internet to a man who tries to be decent, or thinks sexual morality applies to both halves of humanity. Conservative men gang up on him and call him a fag, a wimp, a p***y. It's such an ugly thing to witness that it has made me wary of reading the comments of conservative sites unless I'm pretty sure the conversation won't veer towards the subject of sex.

It seems very odd to me that Lars complains about young women being reviled for being pure when I've seen men being reviled when they try to champion some higher standard than acting like a Bonobo on Viagra? That wasn't meant as a personal dig, by the way. Mr. Walker may simply never have been to some of the sites I'm talking about but they are all mainstream and very popular conservative sites.

So it's not just the Left that does this - many on the Right have some very sick values in this area. It's just that the Left seems to want women to be wild and men to be neutered, and the Right seems to want it the other way 'round. It really puzzles and depressed the heck out of me.

I worked hard to ensure that my sons grew up strong, but also grew to love and respect women. And they both found lovely wives who are like daughters to me. Boys need a very strong moral foundation in today's world. I can't for the life of me understand why the right obsesses so much over the sexual behavior of girls and is apathetic-to-openly-hostile to the sexual behavior of boys. Very weird.

Cass said...

The Princess Bride is written in purely asexual fairytale style; it studiously avoids speculating about anyone's sexual activity beyond the occasional kiss that even a 9-year-old can tolerate.

Bingo again :p

Though if it were remade now, they'd probably have Buttercup wearing a Victoria's Secret thong with "Juicy" splashed in big red letters across the derriere. And Wesley would spend the entire movie making jokes about his "sword" and hooking up.

*sigh*

Texan99 said...

I agree with you entirely that a young man is likely to encounter a lot more razzing for chastity than encouragement. Maybe 150 years ago that wasn't the case. By the time the pill came along, things had already changed quite a bit, and of course it's been a huge change since then.

I'm sure there are still lots of parents out there who try to warn their sons against unwanted pregnancy and venereal disease, but about chastity and purity for their own sake? Got to be rare. Perhaps it was a broadly held a social convention in, say, the early 19th century, but now it's more a special view entertained in religious households that are aware they standing athwart history yelling "Stop!" Or just households like Cassandras, where the sheer human decency of the subject got a lot of attention, but I'm afraid her household is not really the norm, and her sons are very lucky.

I don't think many young women are being raised to think much of chastity or purity, either, outside the aforementioned unusually religious households, but they still pick up a bit of the social message that says sexual boys are normal but sexual girls are the fair subjects of contempt.

I can still remember as a very young teenager a social milieu in which it was embarrassing not to have any sexual experience at all. One risked being considered a prude, uncool (in one sense), chilly (in another), and just generally not grown up or ready for prime time. By the time I was in college, virginity was unheard of for men or women, but there was still a big difference between the sexes when it came to what level of sexual experience was considered off the charts.

Grim said...

The Princess Bride is written in purely asexual fairytale style; it studiously avoids speculating about anyone's sexual activity beyond the occasional kiss that even a 9-year-old can tolerate. So I agree it's not an example of a double-standard, because it avoids the subject altogether. To see the point I'm making, you have to refer to a story that actually takes account of sexual behavior in both men and women. Our culture is not defined exclusively by stories in which extramarital sex simply doesn't exist.

This is one reason I've cited a number of other examples. Malory is a good example: he takes sexuality very seriously. I mentioned Sir Bors and Galahad, but we can also talk about Lancelot. Now Lancelot is fiercely loyal to one woman, but one who happens to be married to someone else. The effect of the story is to praise his chastity, but not his adultery; he is denied the Grail as an adulterer, but praised for his devotion and loyalty. Guinevere is treated almost precisely the same way: her adultery brings harm and shame, but she is praised by Malory as 'a true lover' who 'therefore ended well,' and finishes her life as a respected Abbess after the death of Arthur.

I think this old root continued to be at the base of Western attitudes about ideal male sexuality until even my childhood. If it became more and more frequently seen in fairy tales, that is because fairy tales are where we put the things that are most true. Things like true love, which we believe in even though we almost never see them. (The Princess Bride was really written for adults, by the way; read the introduction to the book, and you'll see what I mean. It's an interesting piece because it comes out of Hollywood, by William Goldman, and it's clear in the introduction how hurt and angered he is by the sexuality of his own time. The book and the movie aren't about telling a tale for children, but about reminding adults of the things they used to and ought to believe in.)

Ladyhawke actually does specify the sexual loyalty of its protagonists (in the commentary on how wolves and hawks mate for life, so that even when reduced to animality the two were loyal to each other).

As for chastity belts, I don't think there's credible evidence that these things were really used by women, either. This is another one of those myths people have about the middle ages. It's an interesting enough subject, but I question (as do many) whether the technology of the time even could produce a device you could actually lock on without it leading to infection and death. There don't seem to be any examples, and the mentions of them in period literature seem to be symbolic (like putting on the Breastplate of God, you might speak of the Belt or Girdle of Chastity).

However, there does seem to have been something like a male chastity device in common use in the 19th century, when people were worried about masturbation and the 'depletion of bodily energies.'

As for what people say to each other on the internet, there's a lot of nastiness on the internet. But I've advocated for years that men be loyal and faithful to the women they love, and nobody's ever called me any names over it. I think I've surely made clear many times what I think of men who toy with the hearts of women.

I do know that our culture puts far too much emphasis on sex, and not nearly enough on love. We teach them how to use condoms, but not how to seek a good heart.

Texan99 said...

One of things that's so delightful about you, Grim, is that you can take the story of Galahad as representative of our culture's values.

Grim said...

Why, thank you.

Cass said...

Grim:

There's no doubt you have argued that men should treat women with courtesy and respect here at the Hall. But you have a fairly self-selecting readership.

One of the things that dismays and depresses me so much is that when I see men say absolutely awful things about women in comments sections on conservative blogs (or see the blogger himself say them), they are almost never corrected by other men.

Men seem to think it shameful to stand up for the values they're so eager to push on young women. I happen to think they're mostly the right values for both sexes, but if they're right for their own sake (and not only right for women) then why in the heck aren't right leaning men willing to fight for them on friendly territory?

What I come away with is that either men don't really believe self restraint is a good thing... for them, that is. And they justify this by saying, "Well men are different and therefore should be excepted from the standard we say is right."

Grim said...

It's true that I have been blessed by a particularly excellent readership, although over the years we have run a few people off. :) But that was always done courteously, and by simply challenging them until they couldn't bear to continue to argue. (A weakness apparently neither you nor I possess. :)

I do try to teach the younger men I know what the right way is, but my influence is only so wide! Still, for what it's worth, in life as on the internet I maintain and defend these standards. But it is an act of kindness, a great gift, to the men. The ideal is the ideal of love, which is worth everything else, even though it means ordeals of fire and deep water.

douglas said...

"But when those different standards limit individual freedom based on identity, that's problematic."

Alas, Mother Nature is a sexist. The downside of fornication is not equal in effect, like it or not, that is the fact of the matter. Also, men and women are different- they both have sex drives, but they aren't nearly identical, and they aren't driven and fed by the same things precisely. Part of men controlling their sexuality, I think, has to do with admitting it's a powerful and dangerous creature to be treated with respect- and men rib each other about such things as a matter of course. Put aside the sexual nature of the talk- men say many things to each other, in friendship, that women would never dream of saying to each other. Do many men take this too far, or not have such boundaries at all? Yes. Are there more of them today than in the recent past? Again, yes.

Also, I think that we should remember that the cases where women are marked and shunned for sexual conduct that men might not be has more to do with the failure of those people to apply 'Hate the sin, love the sinner' and it happens to men in other ways. Also, it's partly that I don't think men shame as easily as do women- or at least, not in the same ways. It's a complex issue, and any simplified model has it's errors, which you all keep pointing to in each others models, but that doesn't make them completely incorrect either.

I don't think I'm being terribly clear here, but it's a confusing and complex subject.

Texan99 said...

Oh, but Douglas, no one denies that Mother Nature distinguishes between men and women. Mother Nature also distinguishes between white men and black men, but that's a very different matter from the justice of slavery. Letting biological differences dictates a differential punishment for the same sin requires enormous attention to whether the difference is being used as a convenient excuse for which group isn't getting the short end of the stick in a double standard.

Cass said...

Douglas, I wasn't terribly specific in my reference to men saying awful things about women.

I meant two kinds of comments - the merely disrespectful ones, and actively hostile/entitled ones.

One recent one I can't get out of my mind was, "All women are whores". I've lost track of the variations of that meme I've heard conservative men repeat and agree with. The last time I saw it (just recently), I waited for someone - anyone! - to object.

Didn't happen. So I asked the obvious question: "Is your mother a whore? Your baby sister? Your daughter?"

I don't know where these men get their contempt for women (and for themselves, if you read between the lines) but it sickens me. And it sickens me even more to read screed after screed about female sexual behavior but nary - EVER - a one about the male sexual misbehavior, without which the female could not occur.

It's a peculiarly one-sided outrage that rings false to my ears.

Cass said...

Left one out: "Your wife?"

Grim said...

My expectation is that such a man probably only has an ex-wife, to which characterization he would probably assent.

As I said, it's a great gift to the men if you can teach them how to love. I have a great deal of disdain for men like the ones you are describing, Cass, but also a certain pity. They are miserable creatures in both senses of the term.

Cass said...

I have sympathy for them, too Grim. It doesn't surprise me (nor even particularly bother me) that some men are bitter and filled with hate. There are women like that too.

But you'd be quite wrong to say these men only have ex-wives. Many of them are married, as are the other commenters who venture not even the gentlest of remonstrances to such statements. I can't imagine allowing such a statement to go unchallenged. You don't have to hit the guy over the head by a 2 by 4.

But not to say anything at all? I don't understand a person like that.

douglas said...

"Letting biological differences dictates a differential punishment for the same sin...."

Were we talking about punishments? Then I would change my statement, though I thought what was being discussed was social mores.

Tex, Mother Nature does make some men with light skin and some dark, but the functions of the men in both cases are roughly the same. In the differences between men and women, that cannot be said. That child bearing works as it does certainly plays a part in this I think. I'm not saying it's fair or right, but that it may arise from a basis that has a logic to it.

As to the statements some men make, I can only say that some of them don't think it means much what you say, and so don't even take themselves that seriously, and others are prone to hyperbole. They are surely deserving of repudiation in any case, but to be honest, I don't go to those comment threads, apparently, and if I had found a place like that, I'd leave, having no interest to even hear it. I'm not sure saying anything is effective- an anonymous commenter on the internet isn't usually persuasive to people like that. It would have to come from a person they respect at least a little.

When you asked the question (I assume you actually commented?) what was the response? This might be helpful to an analysis of why they do what they do.

Also, it occurs to me that I could likely easily find places on the internet where women say rather unkind, stereotypical, and even vulgar things about men. What should I think of that? To be honest, my reaction would be one of bemused dismissal.

Texan99 said...

We were talking about a double standard that, to my way of thinking, led very much to severe punishments of loose women and nearly none for loose men. And not for reasons that can be explained by differences in biology. It's true that a great part of the difficulty for an unwed mother is the pregnancy itself, so I don't blame society for that "unfairness," which is merely biological. But the mother got the heat for the pregnancy for no better reason than that she was the one with the obvious baby in tow, while the father often had skipped away unscathed, even in cases where it wasn't hard to identify him. If the woman had a high enough status, he might be required to marry her, but otherwise she was simply SOL. And this was true when it was impossible to make a case for the woman having been any more careless or sexually profligate than the man.

It was a system that tended to scare women into chastity, but not men, or not to anything like the same degree. It wasn't a complex matter: it was a simple injustice and hypocrisy. We should never indulge in nostalgia for it.

douglas said...

Well, one can hold to the idea that one shouldn't be punished any more than the other (or any less?), but the fact remains that it's easier for a man to skip out on his responsibility than the woman, and given that, it's potentially a more costly situation to put yourself in if you're a woman. I'm not trying to justify a double standard, but rather explain why it might be so- that it is reasonable even if unfair.

Texan99 said...

Oh, yes, I agree it's easier.

But lots of things are easier.

Cass said...

If we punished crimes committed by poor peeople differently because they were most costly for the poor to commit than the rich, wouldn't that be unjust?

It seems to me that the negative consequences to society of men sleeping around are just as bad as the consequences to society of women sleeping around. Of course, if we ignore this then we can say, "Well, it's more costly when women sleep around" but that doesn't make much sense to me as a basis for either public policy or morality.

Grim said...

What are you trying to justify, Douglas? It seems to me that your argument works better if you are trying to justify social pressure than any legal arrangement.

If you want to say, for example, "It's reasonable to put extra pressure on your daughters not to be promiscuous, because they are going to bear the weight of their decisions," there's a sense in which that might be a rational distinction. It wouldn't come up, of course, if other people's sons didn't go around impregnating them. But if you have a kind of brute fact about your society that young men will get to walk, while young women pay the price, it may well make sense to impress especially on young women the importance to them of 'being good.'

I'm not sure the legal standard works very well. It sounds like a case where the law ought to target the men especially, in fact, precisely because nature has let them off. If the law is to support anything like a balance between the sexes here, it can't be by supporting a single standard: it must be by trying to mitigate against the natural imbalance. In fact that's how it works out today: as people have sometimes noticed, women have freedom of choice about whether to complete a pregnancy and assume the duties of motherhood, but men are obligated to honor and support financially the woman's decision.

That seems right to me, precisely for this reason. It's a 'double standard,' but only in the best sense of the term: we have two standards because we have two quite different cases.

Grim said...

To apply it to Cass' case, I think we'd get something reasonable in terms of social pressure applied to the poor. "Don't use drugs," you could say to the poor especially, "because the costs of keeping up the habit, leaving aside any other consequences, will destroy your family." Poor communities might turn especially harshly against those who did use drugs, while rich people who could afford the drugs and their consequences might tend to shrug it off to a much greater degree.

But the law then should come down far harder on the rich than the poor if they use drugs. Insofar as the wealthy and the (also wealthy) famous are setting examples that are destructive to the poor, but cannot be restrained by the consequences or the social pressure, the law ought to make up the difference. Instead of punishing the poor man for using crack and letting the rich man off easy for his powder cocaine, the rich man ought to be destroyed by the law in the same way that the poor man is destroyed by nature. That would establish something like equality after all!

Texan99 said...

Sadly, the double standard between men and women regarding chastity does not now and never has taken the form of acknowledging their differences and concluding that society must intervene to even the playing field, by penalizing the man.

Grim said...

I think you may be in danger of being overly dogmatic, Tex. I just offered an example of just such a penalty, currently in force but reasonable:

In fact that's how it works out today: as people have sometimes noticed, women have freedom of choice about whether to complete a pregnancy and assume the duties of motherhood, but men are obligated to honor and support financially the woman's decision.

Now, I would like to see the woman's right to choose more structured around adoption than abortion. I generally (morally, not necessarily legally) oppose abortion except in cases in which it is necessary to save the life of the mother.

Nevertheless, I think the lack of choice on the part of the men is quite right, and for just this reason. It's a good standard, even if it is in some sense a double standard.

Texan99 said...

There are cultural patterns that ameliorate the injustice of the pregnant woman's weaker condition. There are none that apply a double standard to chastity in such a way as to even the playing field in favor of the women from a sense of charity or justice. That's not being dogmatic, it's avoiding a whitewashing of an ugly hypocrisy that we should simply give up wholeheartedly rather than defend.

Grim said...

I don't understand what you meant to say by your last comment. I'm worried about dogmatism because you've taken to using words like "never" and "ugly," but I'm not sure how they are meant to apply. Is this not an example of evening the playing field, not in favor of the pregnant woman but in favor of the burden borne by her once she is no longer pregnant? If she chooses motherhood, the man is bound by law to support that choice by payments for eighteen years. That's surely not whitewashing, but an outright endorsement of the woman as having a superior right of choice.

My argument is that this is proper, because it ameliorates the man's superior capacity to escape responsibility if the law doesn't force it on him. I don't see any whitewashing, nor any particular hypocrisy (let alone ugliness, except in the particular man who tries to flee his duty). Isn't society doing the right thing here?

Texan99 said...

The reason I believe the charge of dogmatism is unwarranted is that your counterexamples are apples to my oranges.

We're not simply dealing with a biological difference that inevitably will require some flexibility in treating men and women differently, if only to be fair or generous to "the weaker sex" overall. That's not how the chastity double standard works: it works by treating a woman as damaged and her parter as normal. It's possible to argue that the injustice is ameliorated by placing support obligations on some men in some circumstances. But frankly, I'd say a father had those moral obligations to his offspring without regard to whether the mother was more at fault than he in having sex, so I don't view child support as a special punishment visited on the father on account of his having sullied himself with transgressive sex. I do view the traditional punishments of sexually active women in that light: they went far beyond the minimum necessary to ensure proper care for any resulting chidlren. Even if a "fallen" woman were lucky enough to receive child support, she typically was disqualified permanently from a wide swath of ordinary life: she was ineligible for employment by "nice" people, she was nearly unmarriageable, she was a social cripple, and she was the object of widespread contempt. Her partner might have a monetary duty to his own child, at worst. His social disabilities typically were negligible.

I'm not objecting (for now) to the general traditional division of burdens between the sexes, because that's not what I mean by the chastity double standard. I'm objecting to the hypocrisy of a moral critic's applying a harsher standard to another person for the same behavior he condones in himself. That was hypocrisy in the strictest and most literal definition of the word, and it was ugly in the simple and unexaggerated sense that it took an act committed jointly by a stronger and a weaker member of society (per the reality of the day), and reserved most if not all of the resulting opprobrium or outright formal punishment for the weaker partner.

The more modern holdover from this tradition was less drastic, but it remained hypocritical and ugly: people who professed to believe that there was a fundamentally spiritual or religious ground for supporting chastity nevertheless, in practice, treated unchaste men as essentially healthy and unchaste women as dirty or devalued. They do it to some extent even today. That's not an attitude that should be defended or prolonged. Everything that was good about a society that valued chastity in women can be preserved in a society that values chastity equally in men.

Grim said...

It's possible to argue that the injustice is ameliorated by placing support obligations on some men in some circumstances. But frankly, I'd say a father had those moral obligations to his offspring without regard to whether the mother was more at fault than he in having sex, so I don't view child support as a special punishment visited on the father on account of his having sullied himself with transgressive sex.

I agree that he had those duties anyway. What's different isn't that there is a special punishment for men, but that there is a special liberty for women (today): the right to abandon her duties as mother if she chooses. Men don't get the special liberty (and shouldn't get it).

I do view the traditional punishments of sexually active women in that light: they went far beyond the minimum necessary to ensure proper care for any resulting children.

I had taken Douglas' argument to be that the point of the punishments was not to care for the children, but to dissuade other young women from following her footsteps.

Now, what I take from your remarks here is the good point that -- any such utility aside -- these same disabilities also made it much harder for her to care for the resulting children. That's a good counterpoint to Douglas' argument.

You've also done a good job of explaining what you find ugly, which I appreciate. The general ugliness that you're criticizing was also criticized by your ancestors, though: it was the theme of the Stagecoach scenes mentioned before, for example. So, in that, I think you're both right to raise it as a bad thing and a problem, but also, you had allies -- even John Ford -- who were saying just that even in the 1930s.

All of which is fair, but I don't know that I disagree with Mr. Walker's original point even so: taking that as the bad, the good of that society was that its values really did offer some institutional and social support to young women who wanted to live a good life that is absent today. If we can find a way to restore that, I would think it was an improvement.

Everything that was good about a society that valued chastity in women can be preserved in a society that values chastity equally in men.

Yes, I agree -- and have agreed with that point all along.

Cass said...

Everything that was good about a society that valued chastity in women can be preserved in a society that values chastity equally in men.

Such a society would provide even more support for young women (or just people) who want to be "good".

The problem is that, as currently defined, "good" means refraining from sex if you're female and having as much sex as possible if you're male.

Texan99 said...

"there is a special liberty for women (today)"

Today is not the context of the chastity double standard we were discussing. It survives today only in vestigial ways. There were not special sexual liberties for women back when the chastity double standard had real (ugly) legal and social teeth. That's why I say: "Let's don't get nostalgic for its return."

"The point of the punishments was not to care for the children, but to dissuade other young women from following her footsteps." I agree. The point very clearly was not to dissuade other young men (remember, there was a man in the picture, too) from following in his footsteps. That's my point. Nearly all the bitter force of persuasion landed on the female partner in the inescapably two-person sin.

This was unjust in a way that is only tangentially related to the fact that it also made it harder for an unwed women to feed her child. It's important to note that the standard had that effect, because it so clearly shows that the point of the standard was not a benign desire to improve the lot of the child. That leaves the question of what the point was, and I argue that it was an ugly point: one that ought to be squarely faced and rejected.

Yes, we had some ancestors who saw how wrong this was and criticized it. Whenever we have a very, very bad custom, there almost always are outliers who criticize it. What then? My point throughout this discussion has been constant to the point of being shrill: don't be nostalgic for this bad standard. Even back then, some people knew enough to execrate it. Today we have no excuse not to.

We can agree that it would be good for society to offer institutional and social support to young human beings who want to live a good life in the sexual area. I don't see the advantage in limiting those efforts to young women. If our ruminations on the subject constantly default to that approach, we should be giving some careful and empathetic consideration to why that is. If it's not equally important for men to live a good life sexually, why isn't it?

Grim said...

Now, I didn't mean to suggest that you were being shrill. I said "dogmatic" because you seemed to be dismissing historical examples in favor of 'nevers,' which -- when we're talking about history -- is a description rarely accurate. But of course you have every right to defend your deeply-felt position, and under no circumstances would I suggest you do otherwise.

I'm thinking a bit more about John Ford, though, and I'm wondering if he may not come in for some criticism as well. If the Wikipedia citation is accurate, he had a lifelong Roman Catholic marriage, but conducted numerous extramarital affairs.

So there may be less to praise in his depiction of the snooty mob of women running the prostitute out of town than I originally thought. It could be there was an element of self-service here, in suggesting to his wife (and others) that it was wrong of them to try to drive similar women out of town -- or, more to the point, out of his studio.

It's an unflattering portrayal of the wives of the 'moral league,' and I think we can see some good in it from our position; but there's another side to it too!

If it's not equally important for men to live a good life sexually, why isn't it?

At no point have I argued that it isn't. I think it's of the utmost importance for young men to learn to subjugate sexuality to true love. Some support for that notion would be welcome -- we used to tell fairy tales, even for adults, to help people refocus their hearts.

Texan99 said...

At no point have I argued that it isn't. No, not openly and deliberately, that would be foolish. It's more like those people with an odd mental condition who can see an apple with the right eye and name it, but when shown it with the left can't be made to notice it. It's a blind spot. When you start talking about the advantages of sexual purity, you naturally drift into thinking about sexual purity in women. No amount of suggestions from your interlocutor can really make you concentrate equally on the same issue for men--other than to point to the occasional (and quite rare) example of a Hollywood director or author who wasn't quite as one-sided on the subject as the culture in general.

I didn't think you were accusing me of being shrill. I identified unavoidable shrillness in harping so on such a simple point. I did so in this case because the responses here made it clear to me that the message was not penetrating.

You argue again that "never" is a word that is inaccurate when applied to this subject, because there's almost so such thing as "never." The word is rarely appropriate, but it is 100% literally appropriate in this rare and very unhappy circumstance: The sexual double standard never, as in never, ever, applies to sully the man for male-female sexual activity while giving the woman a pass as an example of a healthy norm. At most, some man bucking the social trend brings the disparity in treatment between men and women slightly closer to parity, for limited purposes, perhaps in a work of fiction, if not in his real life: an idea to be toyed with or explored. "No real women were treated fairly in the filming of this movie."

Grim said...

When you start talking about the advantages of sexual purity, you naturally drift into thinking about sexual purity in women. No amount of suggestions from your interlocutor can really make you concentrate equally on the same issue for men--other than to point to the occasional (and quite rare) example of a Hollywood director or author who wasn't quite as one-sided on the subject as the culture in general.

Maybe I really am blind, because I thought we had discussed that. Wasn't that the point of talking about Galahad, as compared with Sir Bors and contrasted with Lancelot? Or Lancelot, who was sinful in being adulterous but otherwise faithful and loyal -- a true lover, as Malory names him and Guinevere both -- contrasted with the genuinely sinful Mordred (or Arthur, for that matter)?

Or Aquinas, who followed the truth of his vocation even when his family locked him in a room with a prostitute?

Or even just the ordinary run of the mill men of today, who are so greatly advantaged if they can learn to love truly instead of chasing after things of the flesh?

Didn't we talk about what miserable creatures are the men who cannot put sex in its place relative to love, but who carry on with it disconnected from love for the woman? How their hearts are bitter and pitiful?

Indeed, have I said anything as vicious as that about any woman at all, regardless of her sexuality or promiscuity? Maybe I should, to balance the scales! I do regard these men who have learned hate and disdain for women as morally bent because of it.

Perhaps each of us can only see the apple through one eye! Now that would not surprise me at all.

Grim said...

Or maybe that is the problem: when I think of the difference, I think of the women as being largely victims of the bad-acting men. As such, when I talk about institutional protections and their desirability, I'm thinking of protections for the women.

What I think the men need is not protection from lewd women, but a slap upside the head. I'm thinking of them as predatory -- as the PUAs especially quite obviously are, but as many other rich and powerful men tend to be. That might explain the disparity you're trying to point toward: the reason my mind turns to women and not men is that I regard male promiscuity as a kind of predatory behavior that needs controlling, rather than a kind of temptation from which they need protection.

I do think it's important that they be chaste, ideally by learning to see the beauty of it; but failing that, by being sanctioned in some way for their harmful behavior toward women.

Texan99 said...

Maybe I really am blind, because I thought we had discussed that. Wasn't that the point of talking about Galahad . . . ? Not unless "the good of that society was that its values really did offer some institutional and social support to young women who wanted to live a good life that is absent today" means "what we should do about restoring the good qualities of that sadly lost world, now that we know its moral force was based on a terrible injustice to women, is to enforce the extraordinary and unparalleled standard of Galahad (who was Western Civilization's most famously and exceptionally chaste man) on ordinary modern men." You will not find many takers, even among men who prefer their women pure.

I honor your holding up Galahad as a standard, but you probably have never heard of a man in real life who suffered in any substantial way from falling short of that standard. St. Thomas Aquinas stood out for his willingness to buck social trends on this subject -- but only after a decade of more of living happily with his concubine, whom he then abandoned. Was he ineligible for his later prominent position as a spiritual teacher because of his past? Can you think of a woman of that time who would have been treated as mildly after a similar escapade?

I accept that you do mostly think of male promiscuity as a kind of predatory behavior that requires a slap upside the head. I'm not sure it occurs to you at all to think that the man has sullied his own purity and worth in the eyes of women, quite without regard for whether he injured a victim. Who could imagine such a crazy thing? In men, promiscuity can excite condemnation if it causes a practical problem, to address which he may be required to take practical steps, after which he'll be fine. In women, traditionally, it irretrievably destroyed their value as people, neighbors, and family members. They couldn't fix it by writing a check, or turning over a new leaf.

That's what we should leave behind without regretful nostalgia about what "is absent today." It was an unjust hypocrisy that deserved to be extirpated root and branch, with no lingering thoughts of "still, in some ways . . . "

Grim said...

I'm not sure it occurs to you at all to think that the man has sullied his own purity and worth in the eyes of women, quite without regard for whether he injured a victim. Who could imagine such a crazy thing?

Well, I certainly hope that is the case. I don't have any problem imagining it, though. Cassandra and I largely agree on the worth of these men; it's clear that they don't merit her respect at all. Nor should they. That's one thing about this discussion that I don't find at all mystifying.

"...is to enforce the extraordinary and unparalleled standard of Galahad (who was Western Civilization's most famously and exceptionally chaste man) on ordinary modern men." You will not find many takers, even among men who prefer their women pure. I honor your holding up Galahad as a standard, but you probably have never heard of a man in real life who suffered in any substantial way from falling short of that standard.

I don't have a problem with the idea that Galahad represents an ideal. One of the things that I like about Malory is that he offers us a number of variations on failures to achieve the ideal, which is helpful in gearing the ideal to the real (and flawed) characters that we are in life. It doesn't change the ideal at all, but it shows a way in which the ideal becomes livable.

That's the right way to engage mythic ideals, I think: to take them seriously, not as alternatives to reality but as the ideals of which corruptible reality are partial expressions. But that is entirely in keeping with my neoplatonic metaphysics, which has a lot to say about the purity of forms and their imperfect realization in matter.

Can you think of a woman of that time who would have been treated as mildly after a similar escapade?

Yes! Actually, it's a good example of a man being the one punished for the affair. After Isabella and her lover deposed (and probably later killed) her husband, she reigned as regent for her son. When her son came of age he put her lover to death, but the queen was unpunished.

Grim said...

One of the things that I like about Malory is that he offers us a number of variations on failures to achieve the ideal...

I should add that this isn't unique to Malory, but is characteristic of high medieval Arthurian poetry, including the French prose Lancelot, and some of Chaucer's works. They frequently draw characters that look at first like the poet just didn't have much imagination, because the cases start of so much alike -- but the reason is that the poet wants to explore the moral (and practical) consequences of different approaches to the same complicated problem.

It comes up especially in two areas, one of which is sexuality, and the other of which is feudal bonds. It's a surprising tradition, a great deal of which has been lost from the consciousness of the English-speaking world. If Malory didn't adapt it for us, we've probably forgotten it. But it's really worthwhile, even if you aren't a neoplatonist. :)

Texan99 said...

You're still confusing disapproval of a man's moral choices with enforcing a social convention that makes him a pariah and a non-person, even if he reforms himself.

I'm excited that you've found a single example to counter the roughly four bazillion examples that went the other way. You're correct, then, that "never" is in inappropriate word except in the limited sense of "so rare that the discussion and research have to go on for a week before someone can dredge up the single exception in the history of mankind." :-) A man can get into hot water by infidelity if he trespasses on a really, really important piece of property. In vanishingly rare cases, his female partner will escape unscathed. She'd better be the most powerful figure in the kingdom. It's the "Catherine the Great" exception. Roughly speaking, if a woman is so well connected that she could get away with highway robbery and murder, she'd have a decent shot at bucking the chastity double standard. Messalina pulled it off for a while, before she was beheaded.

Grim said...

Speaking of Chaucer, a relevant work of his is The Franklin's Tale. Here the husband and wife are happily married and deeply respect each other, until the husband has to go off to war and a scheming young man comes along and tries to seduce the wife. She is so worried about her beloved husband's ship being wrecked on the rocks, and the constant pestering of day in and out attempts at seduction, that she finally gives in to promising to sleep with the young man if he can make the rocks disappear. He goes and finds a magician who can (in some sense) make that happen.

What happens when the husband comes home is that the wife confesses her vow of adultery to him. He forgives her but tearfully tells her that she has to go ahead with it, because her honor requires that she keeps her word. She goes forth to do so with him in her company, but when the young man sees how upset they are over the matter, he releases her from the promise.

Now, this is art again, but art points to the forms -- the ideals, I mean. I've always found it to be one of Chaucer's best poems. It may be the ideal to which his other writings about men and women are cases of failure to reach. He loves his wife and is faithful; she loves him, but has a moment of foolishness; he forgives her, but honors the integrity of his wife's word over even his own claim as a husband. Because of the purity of their devotion to each other, the evil turns aside.

Grim said...

You're still confusing disapproval of a man's moral choices with enforcing a social convention that makes him a pariah and a non-person, even if he reforms himself.

Well, 'even if (s)he reforms himself' points to an injustice on any standard of behavior -- that's simply Christian ethics. Obviously that would be a tremendous injustice.

But 'unless and until he reforms himself,' I am prepared to make such a man a pariah insofar as I am able. That extends to the reach of my right arm, mostly, but I do the best that I can!

Grim said...

She'd better be the most powerful figure in the kingdom. It's the "Catherine the Great" exception. Roughly speaking, if a woman is so well connected that she could get away with highway robbery and murder...

Well, consider the more humble case of Peter Abelard and Heloise d'Argenteuil. Their love went against the wishes of her family, so that they married in secret and eventually had a son. Her family responded by attacking Abelard and having him castrated. After that, she took refuge in a nunnery.

But both of them enjoyed the forgiveness of the broader society. Heloise went on to become an abbess, as well as a scholar of note, and was thus an important and respected figure in the community. Abelard went on to become a logician at the University of Paris, where he wrote works on logic and theology that are still worth studying today.

Heloise is representative in art of what you might call the Guinevere standard: Guinevere also goes astray (far moreso than Heloise, I think, who may have done nothing at all wrong properly speaking -- just in terms of the mores of the day). But she is allowed to reform, on explicitly Christian terms, and likewise ends her days as a well-respected abbess.

I realize that you may think of joining a religious order as something of a punishment, and there is no doubt from Heloise's letters that she missed the sexual aspects of her younger days. Still, she was no queen, and while she didn't escape censure, she was allowed to reform. Her husband's censure was far more visceral, although he also was allowed to reform.

I think we can still say they were both treated unjustly, but I think we must also say that she didn't suffer more than he did.

Texan99 said...

As a thought experiment, see how well the Chaucer tale works if you reverse the sex of the characters.

Naturally it makes sense to treat someone differently until we can persuade him to alter his wrong behavior. The question is whether we apply the approach to both men and women. Being a modern man, even if one with old-fashioned values, you probably could treat a woman differently until she gave up promiscuity, and then never again hold it against her. And if you'd stop sounding nostalgic for an age that failed in exactly that courtesy and mercy, which it would have extended unhesitatingly to a man, you'd sound to me like someone who was no longer infected with any form of the chastity double standard.

Grim said...

And if you'd stop sounding nostalgic for an age that failed in exactly that courtesy and mercy, which it would have extended unhesitatingly to a man, you'd sound to me like someone who was no longer infected with any form of the chastity double standard.

I might never have held it against her in the first place. Most of the women I grew up with were not at all chaste, and I never held it against them. As a young man, it was somewhat pleasant to think that they might be amenable to lusty thoughts, although in fact even as a young man I was of a serious mind about a deep and permanent love being in the forefront of what I wanted.

The danger from my position is not being adequately willing to blame the woman, and thus to take her seriously as a moral actor -- a point Cassandra occasionally makes with me. I'm trying. :)

But consider also that the Abelard's example isn't all that unusual in the history either. Unwelcome suitors of daughters or sisters were often punished by the family, if not with castration than with beatings or even with death. Men who behaved promiscuously with a sister or daughter might be as well. So that's the other side of the coin -- corporal or capital punishment was often the social sanction.

So am I nostalgic for the old age? In some ways. If you put me in the 13th century there are things about it I would try to change, just as there are things about our lives today I wish I could change (and do my best to change). I honestly think there would be fewer, but I am somewhat blind here: I know the age from the things it left behind that others thought worth preserving, which is to say that I've seen its best face. We don't get that privilege with our own age.

But one thing I am nostalgic for is the presence of Malory's ideals, if not the various ways in which people failed them. If I could change one thing about our age, I would bring that back.

By the way, I can't think of any good reason the Franklin's Tale shouldn't work in reverse. The wife goes off on a journey; the man obtains a fear of her death on the rocks; a beautiful young sorceress tries to seduce him, and he heroically resists until she prys a promise out of him to lie with her if she can remove the rocks. She works some magic to make it happen (or appear to happen), the wife returns, he confesses all, and she is hurt but understands that he did it out of love for her. She tells him to keep his word, and they go to do it, but the sorceress is so moved by the example of true love that she relents.

I don't generally like Derrida's technique of reversing everything, but in this case at least it seems to me to make a perfectly plausible story. Malory could have written it! :)

Grim said...

I must leave for a few hours, but I've been greatly enjoying the discussion this afternoon. It's just the sort of thing I love to do. I hope it has been more pleasant, and less frustrating, for you as well. :)

Texan99 said...

Of course I don't think of joining a religious order as a punishment, if a woman enters voluntarily and not because the nunnery is functioning as a kind of prison-like asylum from rabid and punitive secular forces. From what I can tell, there were religious orders for religious purposes, and there were "religious orders" that preserved little more than the superficial trappings -- in other words, they were much like religion today. I have no idea what sort Heloise entered, but I think she's a decent (but again rare) example of a sexual liaison in which the man was more severely punished than the woman. Was it mostly about chastity, do you think, or about the fact that this couple were defying dynastic decisions and insisting on making personal choices about sexual partners? Something tells me Abelard wouldn't have been castrated for dallying with the barmaid.

To me the Franklin's Tale would be difficult to follow as you recast it. The audience would be saying, "Huh? The guy's having some kind of dilemma about whether to sleep with the beautiful sorceress, even though his wife is cool with it and he's bound by gratitude, honor, and a contract? What's the matter with him?" If it were a Hollywood production, someone would hire a story doctor to make the motivations comprehensible. He would have to be forfeiting his soul to a demon, or required to murder his beloved wife, or something of the sort.

I don't have a problem, as you must know, with your general nostalgia for the olden days, which I happen to share. I have a problem with your being unwilling to let go of the chastity double standard in particular, without a lot of hemming and hawing about how it had its undeniably good points, or how it is inextricably linked with customs that have fond associations for you. Slavery may have resulted in good banjo music, but if you wax nostalgic about the banjo music in front of the descendant of former slaves, while not quite bringing yourself to condemn the slavery and declare convincingly that you'd never want it to return, he'll start to wonder if you truly understand what was wrong with it.

Texan99 said...

The danger from my position is not being adequately willing to blame the woman, and thus to take her seriously as a moral actor -- a point Cassandra occasionally makes with me. I'm trying. :)

Yes, and this is very much to the point. The tradition was to treat inchastity in women, not so much as the violation of a moral code, but as damage that occurred to a chattel. Society acted as though sex ruined her but didn't ruin the man. If the man was ostracized (or maimed or killed), it wasn't because he had devalued himself, it was because he'd devalued the woman, which was a crime against whoever "owned" her, so to speak.

When a man is harshly punished for trespassing on the body of a valuable woman, he's not being punished for inchastity. Sex per se would have been fine as long as he did it with a woman whom no one minded seeing ruined. There were generally a lot of expendable women around for that purpose.

In a society where women are considered people to the same degree men are, both of these mistakes are unthinkable. Where such a mistake is not unthinkable, the society is mired deep in a fundamental error about the essential humanity of women.

Cass said...

Bull's eye, Tex.

Cass said...

re:

The danger from my position is not being adequately willing to blame the woman, and thus to take her seriously as a moral actor -- a point Cassandra occasionally makes with me. I'm trying. :)

I don't want to punish you for honesty, but do you have any idea how that sounds Grim? You're having trouble taking women seriously as moral actors?

It is really such an absurd notion that you have to work at it? And if so, why?

Texan99 said...

I've noticed that it's easier for me to get you to agree with me, Cass, than to get my point across to Grim -- even making allowances for the fact that he's gone off to do something productive offline and so isn't answering for the time being, the creature.

Probably a chick thing. :-) Still, I like the occasional confirmation that I'm not speaking Martian.

Grim said...

The tradition was to treat inchastity in women, not so much as the violation of a moral code, but as damage that occurred to a chattel.

That's something like the Greco-Roman tradition. It's not true of Celtic or Northern European traditions, the latter of which especially treated women as free and generally equal (with few exceptions, such as going to war -- not that women didn't fight, but that they didn't go).

Thinking of women as chattel is still putting it a bit strongly even for the southern Europeans, but it's entirely wrong when you're talking about that other set of traditions. It's why queens and sorceresses feature so strongly in the Celtic-influenced Arthurian myths, for one thing.

To me the Franklin's Tale would be difficult to follow as you recast it. The audience would be saying, "Huh? The guy's having some kind of dilemma about whether to sleep with the beautiful sorceress, even though his wife is cool with it and he's bound by gratitude, honor, and a contract?

I don't think that's true. The reason I said Malory could have written it is that there are several quite similar stories in Malory, where Lancelot (usually) or some other knight is refusing to have sex with a tempting sorceress out of loyalty to his lady love. This happens, for example, in the case of Lancelot's kidnapping by the Three Queens, all of whom he refuses; and again in the case of Hallewes the Sorceress. It also happens in the case of a perfectly virtuous young woman who is not at all a sorceress, whom he probably really should have married -- Elaine the Fair.

So I think it's a story that they'd have found quite natural. It's perfectly at home in the tradition.

Grim said...

I don't want to punish you for honesty, but do you have any idea how that sounds Grim? You're having trouble taking women seriously as moral actors?

That's how you put it to me, once, Cass. I remember the discussion: we were talking about some moral issue, and I was saying that I felt comfortable punishing and chiding men for doing wrong, but that I thought that it was ungentlemanly and wrong for a man to speak as harshly toward women. You responded that I could not have that distinction because it made it impossible for me to take women seriously as moral actors, as for example by entering into a contract with them.

I've thought about that discussion often since then, and I can see that it is a flaw that I have. Here, for example, I'm tending to see the issue of chastity in terms of predatory men and women who are being victimized by these predatory men. I realize there can be exceptions, of course; but I really think it's true that unchaste men are really more likely to be predatory.

Even where it is true, you've helped me see that it can be problematic. It arises out of the fact that I really like women, and so I'm likely to sympathize with rather than to blame them. But sometimes they need blame.

In this discussion, the point about the young women I grew up with is relevant. I really liked them. Insofar as their unchastity may have been improper, I couldn't see it; I would have gladly considered some of them as possible wives, forgetting entirely their past if they had only adopted chastity at the altar. I might have just as reflexively disliked the men who slept with them for fun, without a similar interest in marriage. In fact, I think in retrospect, they were just as interested in sex for fun without permanent commitment -- it's probably why I didn't end up married to any of them, because they really wanted something else.

Even now it's hard for me to see that as terribly wrong in them, although it's clearly against (say) Church doctrine. So maybe the problem is with me.

I recognize that I have a problem holding these sorts of things against women in a way that is not true with men. I don't think it's absurd to think of women as moral actors, but my judgments of them are nearly universally less harsh, and my willingness to accept excuses from them nearly universally greater. To some degree there may be a defense in truth, as for example in the case of powerful or predatory men. However, I have listened to you, and I am trying to be more careful not to always excuse women and forgive them without chastising.

Grim said...

...damage that occurred to a chattel.

I must amend my earlier objection here: there actually was a class of genuine chattel slaves among the ancient Norse. Women who are raped from this class are in fact treated in the surviving law codes exactly as you say, as damaged chattel. But this was arising from their status as slaves, and was quite distinct from the way that free women were treated. Male slaves who are damaged are treated the same way.

Texan99 said...

If not literally as a chattel everywhere, then in the sense that she's not quite the same as a human being--in the same way that you have trouble seeing her as a moral agent. We don't have a good word for what I mean, which is why I always struggle with expressions like "less than fully human."

Grim said...

Well, she's a woman. It's not 'less than fully human,' it's just different from being a man. As I said, I think I can take refuge in truth a lot of the time -- but maybe not all of the time.

So, for example, the ancient Icelandic laws we have record of -- "the Grey Goose Laws" -- treat rape of a free woman, or attempted rape, as mandating full outlawry. But they also provide her with relief at law if someone should compose love poems about her that she finds offensive. That's not like chattel even by analogy -- it's respecting her rights to a kind of autonomy based on what she finds offensive or welcome.

Now a man could be raped as well, but he was in danger of being outlawed along with his rapist because of the disgust for male homosexuality among the Vikings. If he proved on oath that it was rape, he was shamed so badly that he was regarded as a 'nothing' in the eyes of his fellows; if he failed to prove it, he was still a 'nothing' for being a homosexual. His only hope was to kill his rapist, which could partially redeem him.

By the way, just to be clear: "Not seeing her as a moral agent" is originally Cass' formula, which I've adopted even though I have concerns about it because I want to take her consideration seriously. I take it as a warning to myself, a kind of mental tendency that I need to be careful to mitigate. I suspect we all have these kinds of tendencies, or blindnesses, and it's very valuable to have learned where one is.

But I hope it says something about how I see women that I listen to you, and consider your moral criticisms very carefully. I may be less harsh, and more willing to accept excuses from you, but I am also listening to you. I may have trouble understanding you, but I take you seriously when you write and think.

Texan99 said...

It's not 'less than fully human,' it's just different from being a man.

No, no, no. That's exactly what it's not. I should return to the word chattel, if that makes it clearer, but I don't mean literally a chattel, because that distracts you and makes you object that the legal system didn't permit her to be bought and sold (in all times and places) exactly like a donkey. But she was treated like a man's possession in ways that are deeply repugnant to her humanity. If she strayed sexually, her male partner might be punished, but it was not because he violated the gender-neutral religious proscription against sexual impurity (as was clear from the fact that if he strayed with a woman who was NOT a valuable property, it was no big deal). If he was punished, it was because he had trespassed on someone's property, a valuable female object whose purity was important to her male handlers.

She was emphatically not just "different from being a man" in some benign sense. That is an evasion. It is very wrong. No one was doing her any pretty favors. No one was simply realistically acknowledging insuperable differences between men and women for biological purposes. It was nothing nearly so defensible. That is very much like saying, "Slavery wasn't an abhorent moral stain on the masters. The black men were just different from the white men."

Am I claiming that in every conceivable way her humanity was 100% denied? No, I'm sure sometimes people were very nice to her, even wrote poems, or took into account whether she found the poems acceptable or offensive. That is emphatically not the point; people can be nice to dogs, too. The point is that the chastity double standard devalued her as a human being; it turned her to a significant (if not absolute) degree into a thing less than a person. It was unjust and hypocritical, a really filthy thing. You cannot rescue it with all these irrelevancies. So what if a few women here and there had little glimmers of rights that kept their dehumanization from being quite complete? If I rob a bank, do I get to point out that I only stole 3/4 of the money?

I won't dispute that it was possible for a man also to be devalued by sex in the very limited sense that you cite. You may be right that there is a close analogy between the fate of a man who had been homosexually raped and that of a woman who had any kind of unauthorized sex. What do you suppose that proves? Only that men will devalue men who have been tainted by something they consider unnatural and disgusting, while they will devalue women who have had ordinary sex of the sort the men absolutely revel in. What could be clearer?

Grim said...

he was punished, it was because he had trespassed on someone's property, a valuable female object whose purity was important to her male handlers.

I wonder where all of this is coming from. What are you drawing on for your idea of what life in Iceland was like? A huge part of our disagreement appears, here as elsewhere, to arise from the fact that you have some very powerful ideas about the cases and motives of people that don't fit very well with the sources I've read.

Didn't we read the Saga of Burnt Njal here at one point? Maybe that was before you came to join us, but it doesn't paint a vision of life anything like the one you've just offered. It's true that Unna's marriage is arranged, with a very high bride price because she stands to inherit all of her father's wealth; when she doesn't like her husband, though, her father helps her separate from him permanently, and she remarries at her pleasure.

She recruits a man named Gunnar to help her recover that part of her property still in her husband's hands, and he does so at law with Njal's help and advice.

Gunnar goes on to marry a woman named Hallgerda, who had not liked her first husband either, so she'd had him killed. She suffered no punishment for this. When she meets Gunnar and likes him, she comes up to him and asks after his voyages. The saga records their conversation this way:

So they talked long out loud, and at last it came about that he
asked whether she were unmarried. She said, so it was, "and
there are not many who would run the risk of that."

"Thinkest thou none good enough for thee?"

"Not that," she says, "but I am said to be hard to please in
husbands."

"How wouldst thou answer, were I to ask for thee?"

"That cannot be in thy mind," she says.

"It is though," says he.

"If thou hast any mind that way, go and see my father."


Now this same Hallgerda would later be responsible for Gunnar's death, when she refused to plait him a bowstring out of her hair while he was fighting for his life. This was to avenge an offense she felt he had once given her during their married life together.

Now Hallgerda was no one special -- there wasn't any nobility to speak of in Iceland. She was proud, and free, and treated as free. She was still a woman under the law: for example, the husband provided a bride price for her, she didn't pay to be married. But that the law treated them differently didn't make her 'less human' in any sense.

Grim said...

Just to be clear: I say she suffered no punishment, but her family did pay compensation for the killing as if anyone else in the family had killed her first husband. That was the way the Icelendings handled such things. She was treated no differently in this regard.

Texan99 said...

Yes, and not all Jews died in concentration camps. Where they did so, it was a not a matter of just treating them "differently."

Grim said...

See, that's the kind of comment that makes me think that you may be interpreting the history via a dogma or doctrine rather than from the facts as we encounter them. That's unavoidable to some degree, but let me suggest that you might, at some point, re-examine your interpretive sources in light of the primary sources -- texts like these sagas, for example.

It's impossible to do history without some kind of interpretive frame, because humans need to put the data into some sort of narrative in order to understand it. But some frames are overly powerful: a very good example is Marxism, which provides a powerful frame for interpreting the facts of history. Dr. Eric Hobsbawm, who just died, made a long and acclaimed career of telling the story of human history in the Marxist frame.

That can be useful, because these strong-frame revisions provide alternative pictures out of which we sometimes find genuine insight. But it's dangerous, too, if what you are after is the truth. It justifies claims like "never, never ever," and it justifies setting aside counterexamples as "exceptions."

But history just is the examples. Where there are counterexamples, there's something about the frame that isn't quite right. I suspect you'll find continuing this conversation equally frustrating, because your frame is much too strong for the facts.

In no way do I mean this unkindly. Hobsbawn was a great historian, and he did very much the same thing. Just think about it, or even just let it rest in the background as a possibility that you might want to examine someday.