Sexual History Divorce Risk II: Addendum

I just wanted to put up some more data from the previously mentioned Scientific paper in response to a comment by TDOM.

There may be other factors than attractiveness involved in why older women have fewer partners. They may be busy putting working in order to put children through college, or just taking care of children may scare the men away, they may find men their age less attractive, or perhaps their sex drive declines, menopause, or their marriage may have put them off men. But being less attractive does sound good as an explanation.

The first thing that we notice from the data is that having children at home seems to only marginally decrease the odds of having two or more partners in the last twelve months. Secondly, compared to the never married, we notice that divorcee's are over twice as likely to be riding the carousel, and more than five times more likely than the cohabiting; divorcee's seem sexually willing.

What we also see is a drop off in the partner count as women get older.  Now, it's true that this may be due to female factors independent of attractiveness, and I imagine dating burnout is a factor, but menopause is not an issue, since most women enter menopause in their late 40's and the data suggests that child caring is only a small component of this decline.

But the common lament amongst the femmentariat is that men don't want to commit, or in other words, there are suitable males who want women for sex but not marriage. This implies that women are pursuing men with the "if I give him sex he will marry me" strategy. Therefore, it is not female choosiness that is limiting sexual activity but male choice.

I imagine that there are two factors at play. Firstly, amongst the pool of men that are unmarried, they can be divided into the sexually attractive and unattractive. Secondly, as the sexually unattractive males are "invisible" to women seeking a mate, this means that divorcee's must compete with remaining pool of attractive males. The relative scarcity of attractive men and the surfeit of divorced women mean that it is men who exercise mating choice. The older women are getting less hit upon.

What I find most interesting however is the data listing the odds of having five or more partners by age group. Most of the women who've clocked up five or more notches have done it by their late 20's. Does having so many when they are young destroy some ability to bond. We all know that the children from divorcees have a higher divorce rate, but perhaps promiscuity, too, somehow destroys the commitment capability.

Sexual History Divorce Risk II

A scientific paper that may be of interest to men who frequent this corner of the blogosphere is  Divorce and Sexual Risk Among U.S. Women: Findings from the National Survey of Family Growth. Published in the Journal of Women's Health, in November 2011, the statistical findings were based on the 2002 cycle of National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) involving 5800 women.

The authors of the study set out to fill a gap in the the literature with regard to the sexual behaviour of divorces and single adult women for the purposes of disease prevention. i.e the authors did not have some religious or social policy axe to grind. The paper is very interesting because it seems to be the first scientific paper to acknowledge a clear correlation between the risk of divorce and sexual risk.

Our study has several limitations. The data are cross-sectional and thus only correlative. We cannot conclude that divorce causes increased sexual risk any more than we can suggest that sexual risk causes divorce. The relationship exists, and further studies should focus on causal relationships between the two.

I think that the authors are being modest.

The study first cites other research which gives the rate of marital dissolution in the U.S to be 20% at 5 years,  33% at 10 years and 43% at 15 years. This "baseline" divorce rate is important in understanding subsequent findings. Secondly, they also cite research which shows that the probability of a divorce woman remarrying is 54%, this too, is important. Also important that the mean age of marriage for women is 25.3 years.

Now the authors divided women firstly into two groups. Those who had five or more partners and those who had four or less. (n=4 being the average number of partners a U.S. woman had at the time of NSFG study)


Then they divided the women according to their marital status. Separating women into four groups. Those who were never married, those who were co-habitating,  those who were currently divorced, and those who were currently married (including those who remarried).

What I've done here is plot the "natural divorce rate" against the statistical findings of the "5 or more lifetime partner group".

The first thing we see that if a woman has five or more life time partners, she is more more likely to be never married,  cohabiting or  divorced  than married. Now remember, the married group includes women who have remarried. So the actual number of women who have never been divorced is actually smaller than what is indicated on the graph.

Secondly, the NSFG obtained data from women who were between 25-44 years of age The authors of the paper did not list the average length of marriage in the group, but since the mean age of marriage is 25 years of age, it would be safe to expect (using the worst case figures)that 43% of marriages should have dissolved at the based upon the 'background" divorce rate.  Now, if promiscuity is not related in any way to divorce there should be no significant variation from the natural divorce rate, and yet, what we see  in the "five or more group" only 37% of women married (and this includes the remarriages) instead of 57%. (Based upon a rough "back of envelope" calculation, I estimate that roughly 20% of the "five or more" group have never been divorced) Something quite real is going on here.

It gets worse.

When you look at all the married women (i.e including those with four or less partners) women with five or more partners were 70% less likely to be married.

The study authors noted that the two groups of women did not appear to differ in any other meaningful way apart from partner count. Regardless of what anyone's position on social issues is there is a real phenomenon going on here. Number count does seem to matter. That's not to say that a woman who has had five or more lovers is unable to form a stable marriage, approximately 20-30% do, it's just how do you pick? Is it worth the risk? Do you want to put your kids through it? Now presumably, in a significant portion of marriages it was the men who instituted the divorce, but that does not explain  the huge variation in divorce rates based on partner count.

Finally, the authors were able to extract another interesting piece of data which I will call the "carousel index".

It's a quantitative measure in the decline of sexual market value. The near exponential decline in attractiveness is quantifiable.

Then and now.

Iconic photo of the 1960's. (Christine Keeler)

Some more pictures.

  



And now.

 

(Image from Daily Mail)

 Not fair, isn't it.

Heart of Darkness. Epilogue.

Mimi Alford copped a lot of criticism from the mainstream media for her autobiography. The Kennedy administration enjoys an almost divine like status on the left and any criticism of it is akin to sacrilege. Had Alford produced an expose detailing the extramarital affairs of a Republican President, the feminist yenta commentariat would have been thumping the table for his impeachment, but since the perpetrator in this case was a charismatic male Democrat, it was the "victim" who was the object of their scorn.

The media, with their typical celebrity worship and superficiality, were more interested in the lurid details of her presidential liaisons than the effect that it had on the rest of her life. Yet, it was this aspect of her biography which I found the most interesting. It's true that a book about the break up of two, otherwise ordinary people, would not have not garnered any commercial interest, and yet,  the mechanics of their estrangement is probably of more practical interest to students of male/female dynamics than the sexual persona of JFK.

In trying to understand the mechanics of their marital failure it was neccessary to try and form a character assessment of Tony Fahnestock.  Which is not that easy to do,  because with a few exceptions, either deliberately or not, she more alludes to his behaviour than explicitly states it, and when trying to look at the book from a psychological perspective, in an effort to understand him,  I was left trying to fill in the gaps based upon my clinical experience.  What we do know is that he was initially romantic, chivalrous and sexually restrained. We also learn that he was capable of decision and action but tended to avoid conflict. His tastes were simple and he had friends. It's pretty safe then to assume that he was an "ordinary guy."

Now, Love doesn't get much time in the man-o-sphere, and  yet it is what ultimately motivates most good men and gives life its meaning. For most normal men, the sex is not enough, and life devoid of love is empty. Normal men are not content enough to possess a woman's body they also want to posses her soul. That's what's so divine about love; is that the thing that you cherish most loves you back in the same way. It's a state that can exist amongst two people who feel the same way about each other. The well being of the lover is contingent upon the well being of the loved: it's symbiotic.  The problem for  Fahnestock however is that he got he loved Alford symbiotically, but she loved him parasitically; and this was his private hell. Alford's primary concern was not for her partner but for herself.

Alford may deny this, but that's because she suffers from that universal romantic notion which confuses love with affection. I have no doubt that she had affection for Fahnestock, but love is not just a feeling, it's an obligation to another person's happiness. The medieval theologians, who were frequently far more hard-arsed than the moderns, recognised that love and affection were two separate things. To them, love was a disposition of goodness toward another person and it was manifest by doing good toward other, the happy feelings of affection are therefore in a way irrelevant. They would have argued that if a person was acting in a way that could harm another,  there was no way that they could be considered as loving.

Viewed in this light, Alford could never be considered as loving Fahnestock. Sure, she had affection for him, but she acted in a way (with JFK) that was guaranteed to hurt him. And remember,  Alford's infidelity was not episodic, as a in a moment of weakness, rather it was systematic and deceptive. Had she had truly loved Fahnestock she would have acted in his best interest. For example two options which would have shown that she loved him would have been:

1) Not get into a relationship with him, in order to avoid hurting him,  and continue sleeping with Kennedy. Or,
2) Stop sleeping with Kennedy before she got into a relationship with him.

Each one of these options would have resulted in a loss to her, something she was not prepared to take, as she was out for number one.

I imagine when he found out about her infidelity, what knocked him out completely, was the realisation that he'd been taken for a fool as Alford was manipulating the situation to her advantage. But what really put the twist to the knife in his heart was the realisation that she was acting as if he did not matter, whereas he was acting if she did matter...... completely.  He loved her but she enjoyed being in his company.  Her delight in him was for her own pleasure, her love was solipsistic.

Fahnestock was a man who thus could not trust his wife even if he wanted to. He could never be sure of her love to him especially (as it appeared to him) that she denied him her body whilst giving it to another man.  So it escapes me why he married her, especially when Alford description of him is that of a man of resolute action. The only reason, I feel, that adequately explains his actions is love. Reading about their early days together, Fahnestock seemed totally awestruck by Alford and pedestalised her. Even though she betrayed him, he loved her and still wanted to make a go of it. Even though he was angry, his disposition to her was one of goodwill. He wanted her to be happy, to have a good reputation, to have a wedding: he wanted to keep her. In going ahead with the wedding he had forgiven her even though he could not trust her.

This was his first fatal mistake. It's one thing to forgive, but another to forget, and infidelity is one of those things that is very, very,  hard to forget. Fahnestock could never be sure if Alford is being true to him and was always insecure in his relationship with her.  Therefore by his insecurity he radiated beta. But on a more fundamental level he was choosing to marry a woman who was incapable of the gift of the Magi. They individually, approached the marriage from different psychological perspectives.

What Fahnestock should have done is dumped her. Any love he had for her could have been expressed in trying to break of the engagement discretely, and in a manner that could have preserved Alford's reputation. Some Christian types may argue that it was his duty to forgive her. But it needs to be reminded to these types that it is possible to forgive a person but not marry them.  A man must choose his mate not just on infatuation but on a hard-arsed assessment of her long term potential. Fahnestock ignored the warning signs.  But then again he was in his early twenties, a nice guy, and he loved her.

His second fatal mistake was his approach in dealing with their problems. He ignored them. Whilst this may keep the peace in the house, it is a defacto abdication of the natural order. The husband is the head of the household and must give it direction,  and in the absence of any direction,  the wife will assume it with a corresponding contempt towards her partner. Once again, a beta behaviour.

So it's no surprise to students of game that after twenty-six years of marriage, it was Alford who initially was so desperate for marriage that initiated the divorce. 

I recommend Alford's book to the students of Game. Not only because it so superbly illustrates the automatic female willingness to submit to an alpha male, but because it also illustrates  the consequences of infidelity and the fate of the beta male. At the end of her book, she credits JFK, the man who treated her as a concubine, with more veneration than her "good provider husband" of twenty-six years. She still thinks being his mistress was the special formative event in her life.  Such is the power of alpha.

I can't but feel an overwhelming sadness for Tony Fahnestock. Here was a man trying to do good and suffered for doing so.  Even Alford seemed to express a certain pity towards him:

He was right in a way.  I didn't know exactly what I had wanted, but I knew I had to take a step toward change. I knew that Tony wasn't solely to blame for my unhappiness or the ruin of our marriage. It was my fault as much as his. I had not made his life happy. But I also knew that I had reached an endpoint to the misery we created for each other.

..............................................................................................................................................................

Mimi Alford dated for the next sixteen years and was married again in 2005. In her book,  she describes the marriage as happy.

Meditating on events, I cant help but be melancholic when it comes to the life to Tony Fahnestock. He seems to be a good representation of a type of man that has done particularly badly in love since the sixties. In the clamor that arose after Alford's revelations, no one seems to have taken notice that he was an unwitting victim of the affair. The female commentariat seem more interested on what it was like to be part of JFK's harem or have devoted themselves to protecting JFK's memory. Alford was particularly savaged for desecrating the Camelot memory by Barbara Walters; herself, an adulteress.

Alford doesn't write much about what happened to Tony Fahnestock afterwards. However a little bit of searching on the internet revealed that he had married again, this time to a New York socialite, Andrea Henderson. She has kept his dignity and refused to comment on the affair.

Tony Fahnestock, who was divorced in 1989,  died in 1993 from cancer.  Alford was not allowed to attend the funeral.

I hope he found both love and peace.

Heart of Darkness. Part IV

Alford tried to be a good wife to Fahnestock after the marriage, but even she recognised that "tone" of their relationship had changed after her revelation. Although she pretty much obeyed Fahnestock's demand that she never mention JFK, she still managed to keep some "mementos'  from the relationship which she hid through the apartment. (This little fact says a lot about her commitment to Fahnestock at the time of marriage.).Still, her conscience or self-interest at fear of discovery must of bothered her, and so, unhappily, she got rid of the evidence of her previous life.

She describes the first thirteen years of their marriage as happy, but a prevailing pattern had developed; whenever some emotionally charged issue came up, it was swept under the carpet.  Even when their prematurely born son died, the issue was not talked about between themselves.

I'm not one for psychobabble, but a marriage is meant to be  both physically and emotionally intimate, and I agree with Alford here, in that this state of affairs was a precondition to their eventual marital disharmony. A woman without an emotional bond is a woman with a void, and it's a void that will get filled with something else.

I would be a mistake to think that Alford was completely duplicitous towards her new husband. Through a combination of will power and events she was able to suppress memories of Kennedy and was able not to think about him for long periods of time. Yet, quite unexpectedly, the memories would return:

And yet on crisp spring day in 1969 when I took the afternoon walk with the baby in the carriage, I passed a hair salon on Massachusetts Avenue advertising Frances Fox hair products in the window. It had been six years since I'd given the President his regular hair treatments, but suddenly I was overcome with emotion. I looked both ways down the street to make sure no one was watching me (ridiculous, I know) and, carrying Lisa in my arms, walked into the store to see which products they sold. I wasn't planning to buy anything. I just wanted to luxuriate in the warm memory of President Kennedy, if only for a few minutes. I picked up the bottles and turned them over in my hands. I carefully set them back on the counter and walked out. I felt so guilty about what I'd done, I tucked the incident away, deep in my mind.

Six years later, five minutes of alpha.  The emotional infidelity lingers long after the physical has stopped. Perhaps this is part of the reason that those who have been promiscuous have a greater propensity to infidelity.  Memories of intensely happy, sexually charged episodes serve as a serve as an escape from drudgery or a reassertion of happier times. Times we may wish to recreate.

 Fahnestock, at this stage, was working for the pigmen at Goldman Sachs, and was by her account, a "wonderful provider husband". They were materially and socially successful and and yet they were slowly drifting apart. When conflict or confrontation came up, Fahnestock's response was to shut down and withdraw to his summer holiday house. This meant that Alford started making more and more of the decisions, especially after they bought a new house and started renovating it. Fahnestock was becoming beta. ( Why he chose this course of action is open to speculation, as he was a very successful man of finance. I suspect it was his chivalrous upbringing which pedastalised females and emphasised the lack of conflict with them. But this, of course, is a speculation.)

Their marriage was becoming progressively more stale. Though she does not explicitly mention it, it does appear that she had gotten out of shape during marriage and made demands which Fahnestock tried to satisfy but did not make her happy. The lack of emotional and physical intimacy led her to a fling with another man, something she instituted.

Alone in the hotel room that night, I realized how much I yearned for physical affection and connection. So I made a bold, spontaneous gesture that surprised both of us. I climbed into Bill's bed instead of mine. It seemed like such a natural culmination of all the encouragement we'd shared during our months of training. I had turned thirty-nine two days before, and Bill was my third lover.


I had no regrets the next morning as we rode the train.........The guilt wouln't fully take hold until I was on the plane back to New York, and facing the prospect of seeing Tony again. As the reality of my infidelity sank in, I couldn't avoid one obvious fact: After years of accumulated silence with Tony, my marriage was crumbling.

It was interesting that when she confessed her infidelity to her sister, they were surprised that she had been as faithful to Tony for so long. (People on the "Social Reigister" obviously have different morals to myself).  Still, her infidelity with Bill provided her with psychological comfort:

Sometimes I would daydream about a life with Bill, though he never even held out that as a possibility. [Ed: Bill sounds alpha] Whatever fantasies I had harbored about us ended when I accepted a full-time job as a manager of a local tennis and squash club and ever so slowly, drifted away from the world of runners and back into my unhappy marriage.

Eventually though, the she found the lack of intimacy in the marriage unbearable. The man whom she was so desperate to marry in 1963  was the man she no longer wanted to be with.

"I want a divorce" I said
"What?" he asked.
"I think you heard me." I wasn't saying anything more. I waited for him to respond.
"Are you sure?" he said, "You've never known what you wanted, but if that's it, then that's what you'll get", I think you're going to regret it."

His words hung in the air, more a threat than an attempt to change my mind. He was right, in a way. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, but I knew I had to take a step toward change. I knew that Tony wasn't solely to blame for my unhappiness or the ruin of our marriage. It was my fault as much as his. I had not made his life happy. But I also knew that I had reached an endpoint to the misery we created for each other.

Twelve months later they were divorced. This is an important passage from the book, especially for students of Game.  If you look at Alford's life, the times when she appears most happy is when a man "directs her life". Not in the sense of "bossing" her around, but rather in giving her life direction.  She was happy serving the president, she was happy in the initial stages of their marriage when her and Tony were setting up their life according to Fahnestock's  direction. She becomes unhappy only after that leadership vanishes.


(to be continued)

Heart of Darkness. Part III

Fahnestock's response to his fiance's confession was to go silent and go to bed. Alford was staying over at his place, however it was the early 60's, and the custom was for them to sleep in separate rooms. During the night, Fahnestock, who had never pressed her for sex, without saying a word, came into her bedroom;

Saying nothing, he yanked back the covers, climbed into my bed, and, without a word, initiated our first sexual encounter. I was so desperate to keep him I didn't resist.  It was forceful and clumsy-and I had no idea how to behave [Ed: ?], neither how to express my sorrow at hurting him nor how to offer my love to heal the pain. He left the bedroom as abruptly as he had entered it...... It was sex but there was no love.

Later on Alford describes the event as sexual violent. [Ed. Rape?]

Fahnestock decided to go ahead with marriage on the condition that her affair with Kennedy was never mentioned or that his name was never bought up in conversation. She had to bury her previously life in order to get married. But it is interesting to see her psychological reasons for agreeing to marry Fahnestock on those terms.

I felt relieved as he pulled back on the road. I took what he'd said to mean that if I obeyed him, then the wedding would go ahead. There would be no scandal, no disgrace, no tearful explanations of why the wedding had been cancelled.

She was scared about her social standing, not the harm she had done to Fahnestock.

For a long time I'd like to think that he was protecting me by demanding my silence, but I've come to realise that he was only protecting himself and his own ego. My revelation had embarrassed him. He must have hated the fact that the President had claimed me before he did. He must have felt humiliated that I continued to see the President after we met. He must have felt he would never measure to someone so charismatic and powerful. Perhaps he event felt I was mocking him.

However she writes; 

If our roles had been reversed, I know I would not be so forgiving.

Her own attempts to understand Fahnestock are more an reflection of her own solipsistic though patterns than his. I suppose it never occurred to her that he loved her passionately and that her affair was a betrayal of his love. The woman who he had intended to pledge the rest of his life to was screwing another man during the most emotionally intense period of any relationship.  Indeed, the tone of his interrogation of her in the previous post suggests that he was concerned more about when the affair was happening than the fact that she was a virgin. He lapsed into silence only after she told him that she was still sleeping with the President whilst they were engaged.

I imagine that Fahnestock was a normal guy of the times with normal young male desires. The fact that he didn't press her for sex means to me that he was probably living by some chivalric code and trying to be some sort of honourable man. He probably "snapped" the night when he found out the affair, but it's hard to wipe away an upbringing overnight, and  I can only speculate as to why he decided to marry her after her became aware of her alter life.  When I was young and I was strong in the way of romantic beta, and putting myself in his position, I imagine that the reason he decided not to call off the marriage was,  despite the betrayal, because he loved her.  He knew what the consequences would be if he called off the marriage; her reputation would suffer more by any hushed revelation to close friends and family than his.  In other words, Fahnestock had very little to lose by calling the marriage off  and everything to gain, except losing her. So the only explanation for his actions which makes sense to me is that he went through with the marriage for her benefit. Fahnestock, from her description of him in the book, seemed a man of both decision and action, and I have no doubt that he would have dumped her if he had decided on that course.

I imagine that his demand (that she never raise the subject of her affair with JFK) was his attempt to blot out the memory of her infidelity. I think he wanted to love the pre-confession Mimi back, and I imagine that he was hoping,  that with the passage of time, the memory of her infidelity would fade. I think it was his way of "forgiving" and taking her back.

And yet, wanting to forget is not the same as being able to. 

Tony, for his part, was completing his Army tour of duty, which kept us apart for a big chunk of time before the wedding. But even when we were together, as much as I might try to deny it, the tenor of our relationship was different  We had always been light and playful with each other, as if we didn't have a care in the world. Now I felt a creeping unease with him, as if he was constantly scrutinizing me and finding me wanting.

and;

Tony was never able to trust me from completely that day, and for good reason. Nothing could erase the depth of his hurt. He carried that baggage for our entire marriage. It was forever woven into the emotional fabric of our lives together and I could sense it. The anger and jealousy never completely disappeared.

Alford believes the Fahnestock's insistence that the subject of JFK never be raised was the cause of their subsequent marital disharmony. She feels that had they had the chance to "talk about it" and "seek therapy" and bought the secret out into the open, things may have been different.  In one of her most callous passages she writes:

If we could put this behind us, perhaps years later we could marvel over--even laugh about--the time when Tony's wife had an affair with the President of the United States when she was very, very young.
 [Ed: And engaged to Tony]

How do you laugh about infidelity? How do you laugh about betrayed love? Initially, she went along with Fahnestock's demands and describes their early marriage as reasonably happy, however later on, conditioned by modern psychobabble, somehow she suggests that Fahnestock's response to her infidelity was pathologically abnormal. In this woman, the whole moral calculus is inverted. Contrition, which is a precondition of forgiveness, consists in recogonising the wrongness of the act. Nowhere do I get the impression that she regrets the affair. She didn't want Fahnestock's forgiveness, she wanted his happy acceptance of her infidelity which she equated with forgiveness. She perhaps wouldn't have felt the same way if she loved Fahnestock in the same way that he loved her. His love was symbiotic, her love was parasitic.


In the early stages of their marriage, Alford did try to be a good wife, however it wasn't only Fahnestock who could not forget. She too seemed never able to shake off the memories her past; of her "five minutes of alpha."

(Photo of the wedding can be seen here. Scroll down.)

(to be continued)

Heart of Darkness. Part II

Whilst many people who read Mimi Alfrod's book will be interested in her liaisons with JFK, I must admit that it's this  aspect of the book that hold the least interest for me.  The fact that JFK had numerous affairs really doesn't interest me that much. I can separate the politician from the man. Lincoln, on being told that Grant was drunkard, disregard the information on the grounds that he needed a fighting general and not a moral but militarily impotent one. No, what interests me about her book is the insights she gives with regard to alpha behaviour and the psychology of love and infidelity.

Minim Alford led a double life.  She was part time college student, part time presidential mistress and was, like JFK, able to compartmentalise her life.  Long after she had started her affair with the President, she met a young man, Tony Fahnestock who eventually became her boyfriend. He had known her for barely eight months before proposing to her, so besotted was he. He came from the same social circles that she did and and both families seemed to be happy with the match. In her autobiography,  she states that she was "in love" with him. But it was a peculiar type of love, since whilst engaged she continued to have sex with JFK.  It is also true that the situation did seem to trouble her conscience, and she claims that she was hoping to end the relationship with the President. Still, two months before her marriage she was still sleeping with him.

As winter melted into spring, I began seeing Tony practically every other weekend, either at Williams or at Wheaton. We didn't have an intimate relationship at this point. He never pressed me for sex.

While his gentlemanly behavior was quite attractive, this situation did pose a bit of a conundrum for me. I was physically attracted to Tony and I had learned the pleasures of sexual intimacy from President Kennedy. This created a yearning in me for something more than necking in dorms and cars.  But pushing for sex with Tony would have raised questions; girls like me didn't do it back then. I might have to explain why it wasn't my first time, and that wasn't a conversation I wanted to have.

When I wasn't spending weekends with Tony, I was spending them with the President. Tony wasn't curious-or suspicious-about my other life in Washington. Why would he be? When we had started dating, I had already spent a full summer at the White House--and I had warned him that I continued to be needed at the press office even while I was at college. He not only accepted the lie, he was impressed by it.

The man was doomed. Reading between the lines in her autobiography, Tony Fahnestock seems to have been a regular  preppy gentleman of the times. He honestly loved and trusted her completely, and behaved towards her in the chivalric way of the West,  so besotted was he by her. When Fahnestock proposed to her, it was with a custom made ring, made up of sapphires  and diamonds from his grandfathers cuff links and stick pin.  A ring chosen from family heirlooms is act of profound significance. It all the more emphasis the contrast between the purity of his love for her with the terrible situation he was unknowingly in.

In her book, she gives a rather remarkable passage as to her psychology of infidelity;

And yet, being with the President and having his undivided attention was like taking this incredibly potent self-esteem drug. And that's a hard habit to kick. Despite the humiliations and uncertainty, I remained enthralled charisma and glamour of traveling with his entourage. My college life of dorm rooms, cafeteria dining, fraternity parties,  homework and moviegoing paled by comparison with Air Force One, Caribbean resorts, the Secret Service, and limousines.

Whilst Tony loved her, she was lounging poolside with the President. Also interesting was her psychology for accepting Fahnestock's marriage proposal;

There are many reasons why people say yes to a marriage proposal. Love ought to be the first reason, and mine was. But so is the need for security and certainty. I had just turned twenty that May and felt, as young people do, that I was dealing with so many unknowns. Where would I be working after the summer? How would this end with the President? Where would I live after Marnie and Wendy went back to college? When would I ever find a catch like Tony again?
In marrying Tony I was opting for security.

There was a lot of blatant self interest in her decision, and I got the impression that she loved him as a parasite loves a host; for what it can provide. People think love is a feeling, it is not. What love is, is a delight in the good of another.  The "love" she felt was probably an infatuation, a hedonic experience  and not a love that obligates itself toward the good of another. True love, wishes the good to the beloved, what she wanted was the best of both worlds for herself. Her primary consideration was her own well being.  Had she loved Tony for Tony's sake she wouldn't have been sleeping with President. She liked Tony, she liked the Presidential mistress role and she was optimising things for herself.
Kennedy was using her, she was using Fahnestock and Fahnestock was the patsy.

When Kennedy found out that she was engaged he acted as if it did not matter (Students of game will recognise this as alpha behaviour). Indeed, three months before their marriage, after another rendezvous in New York,  Kennedy's response was:

He took me in his arms for a long embrace and said, "I wish you were coming with me to Texas." And then he added,
"I'll call you when I get back."
I was overcome with a sudden sadness. "Remember Mr President, I'm getting married," I said.
"I know that," he said, and shrugged, " But I'll call you anyway."

Such is the way of amoral alpha. Kennedy did give her some wedding gifts. He paid for an expensive dress, which he wanted to see on her first (Ed: and presumably had sex with her after the modelling. I imagine Tony would have appreciated that as well.), two gold and diamond dress pins, and a signed photo of himself (Skittles man).

Alford found out about the assassination whilst on a weekend away with Fahnstock. Initially she was able to maintain her composure, but later in the evening, when the two of them where alone and watching television, she saw the President's coffin being lowered from Air Force one in the company of an close aid of the dead president, an aid whom she knew well. Suddenly she began sobbing violently. Fahnestock was perplexed by her response;

"What's happening to you?" he said.
"There's something I have to tell you."
"What?"
"The President........"
"What?" He interrupted.
"It's more than you think......"
"What?"
"I'm not as innocent as you think"
"What?"
"There's a reason why I quit school"
"What?"
"You have to let me finish please."
I stopped crying and tried to gather my thoughts.
"I was closer to him......"
"What are you telling me-that you slept with President Kennedy?"
I don't know how he made the leap from my distress to my infidelity but I nodded yes, relieved that I didn't have to say the words out loud.
Then Tony's tone shifted into a harsh interrogation.
"Since when?" he asked.
"Last year."
"Even after you met me?"
I nodded.
"Even after we were engaged?"
I nodded again.
"How many time?"
"I don't know. A lot."

Then there was silence.

Oswald's bullet had tore a hole into Fahnestock's heart.



(Passages quoted from the book have been done so on the "fair use" provisions of copyright)

Heart of Darkness. Part I

A digression.

It's well known the JFK was a man who honoured his wedding vows in their breach. He was a notorious philanderer and the the passage of time seems to have exposed the majority of his lovers. Very few people, with the exception of hard core Democrats, think of him as the saintly knight of Camelot, and therefore Mimi Alford's biography, where she recounts her sexual liaisons with him, seems not to have changed people's opinion of him too much.

I quite surprised that none of the man-o-sphere has taken much interest in her story. With the exception of Sibling of Daedelus, who really isn't part of the manosphere, Ms Alford's story has flown under the radar, which is a shame, since the the book is a powerful exposition of the power of hypergamy, animal instinct and the dangers of "five minutes of alpha".

Were I American, I would be a Republican with all the anti-Democrat sentiments that it would engender. But I am a realist, and though the Kennedy administration was rotten to the core it possessed style in spades.  In front of me is a copy of Life's "In Camelot", and even now the administration possess a degree of glamour that with the passage of time has grown. Compared with the frumpiness of subsequent administrations, the Kennedy's were "Hot". I think people need to remember this when they read her biography. As a young nineteen year old virgin, unexpectedly summoned to work in the White House as an intern, Ms Alford (then Ms Beardsley) was keenly aware of the glamorous universe she was about to enter.  The center of that universe was JFK.

Ms Alford, has recounted her first experience with JFK on his wife's bed. What's interesting about the story is two things. Firstly, just how little effort JFK took in "seducing" her. He simply walked her to the bedroom under the pretext of a "house tour", walked her over to the bed, and started having sex with her; so powerful was his socio-sexual status. The entire "seduction" must have taken only seconds. People may think that it was his presidential status that conferred this power, but its hard to imagine Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter getting away with the same.

Secondly, in her description of the event, she describes an almost involuntary magnetic attraction and sense of powerlessness as he starts to have sex with her. The feminist harpies of the media have tried to reframe the event as a rape, but Ms Alford has been adamant that JFK would have stopped if she said no: The thing is that she didn't want to say no. Media depictions of the event tend to portray Ms Alford in a passive light during the incident, but in her book she's not so passive:

Then he reached up between my legs and started to pull off my underwear. I couldn't believe what was happening. But more: I could not believe what I did next. I finished unbuttoning my shirt dress and let if fall off my shoulders. [Ed] He pulled down his pants and then he was above me.
He paused briefly when he felt some physical resistance.
"Haven't you done this before?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, and he resumed, but more gently.
"Are you okay?" he kept saying.
I nodded, propped up on my elbows.

Once things got going she was an active participant with the power to say no at any time. She was actively unbuttoning her shirt dress. Remember this was a nineteen year old virgin from a WASP'y family on the "Social Register" with a good upbringing; not some trailer trash. The whole story serves to illustrate the fact that a woman's sexual response to a suitable mate is unconscious; she goes into sexual autopilot. Such is the power of alpha.

The talk shows have apparently been full of stodgy wives who have reported that she should have said no the President, and I agree, but there for the grace of God go I. I imagine if I were nineteen, alone in a bedroom with Keira Knightley or Megan Fox and they started unzipping my trousers, I would have a very hard time saying no.  She was taken by surprise, her defences were down; it just happened.  I really can't blame her at all for what transpired and her failure of moral virtue. I think Kennedy was a bastard for doing what he did, especially when he found out she was a virgin. But he was so narcissistic that he didn't care, not that Ms Alford minded, it seemed to thrill her that the most powerful man in the world desired her. It intoxicated her.

No, where I find moral fault in Ms Alford is in what transpired later. After the shock of what had happened had worn off Ms Alford was not sure what to do. Her answer came some days later when she received a phone call inviting her  back for a swim with the president (i.e meaning sex). She correctly identified this a juncture in her life. She had a choice.  Had she refused she would have returned to a life of normalcy, missing out being part of "Camelot" with all its associated glamour, something she did not want to do. She wanted to be part of the "in crowd" and the price of that was spreading her legs. It was a price she was prepared to pay. By all accounts, with few exceptions she had a satisfying sexual time with the President. A time she does not appear to regret.

Being this is Lent, and I'm Catholic, I can't but see the similarities with the tempting of Christ by the Devil on the mount and Ms Alford's own temptation. Some men are tempted by power, some by money and others by the pleasures of the flesh; she was tempted by the Camelot glamour and of being the object of the presidents desire. On deeper reflection is a an appeal to her pride and it was a temptation she failed. For as the Master said, "What does it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?"  In taking the path that she did, a part of her soul died and the consequences were to be felt for the years to come. I still don't think she realises how dead she is.

Observations on American Women.

During my trip the U.S., a person who frequently came to mind was Roosh V.  I often found his observations of America and the American sexes similar to my own.

I'd planned to do these series of posts whilst on the trip but  I'd often wonder  how to convey to Americans the difference between them and the rest of the world without appearing to be either snarky or ill informed.  I came to the conclusion that most people would impute bad motive to me and so my advice to Americans is for them to travel, something that Roosh V advocates.  Nothing beats first hand experience.

Still, I'd thought I make a couple of comments the men and women of America as they appeared to me.

Firstly, a bit about my standards. I evaluate women on two parameters, both physical beauty and that essence which we call femininity. In order for me to find a woman attractive she must possess both features. Sure, if your standard is "bangability" then your standard is different to mine and its a standard that America can cater to. On the other hand, if your standard is feminine beauty then you've got a real problem in the U.S. It case of Pamela Anderson vs Audrey Hepburn: America has lots of Pamela Andersons.

When making generalisations about a culture, what a man is concerned about is the both median and standard deviation of the societal parameter in question.  Aspergy types tend to forget this and tend to emphasise  exceptions in an attempt to disprove the rule. Still generalisations are to sociological observations what the median is to statistical measures; a valid measure. Exceptions do not render them invalid. To me at least America has a reasonable amount of "bangable" women but very few feminine ones. Compared to Europe, where a man can honestly get whiplash from some amazingly beautiful and graceful women, American women were, well....... meh. American women are comparable to Australian ones in physical beauty but are less feminine.  To quote my wife, there is a "butchiness" about them that you don't see anywhere else I have traveled.  Even in that bastion of prolification, England, there large pockets where a man could find both femininity if not beauty,  in the U.S. femininity was rare. ( Note, do not confuse feminine beauty with moral virtue). The problem was least evident in the South, but compared to global standards, U.S women are in a class of their own. Even German women appeared more feminine.  It's not that the American women weren't well mannered, it just that they weren't "girly".

I've often thought the Roissy's criticism of the over-forty-year-old's was a bit harsh, but after coming back from the U.S. I think his opinions justified. In Las Vegas, for example, nearly every stylish woman I observed who appeared over forty, was both thin and spoke with a foreign accent.  Most of the older local women looked tired and seemed to have given up on trying to be attractive. Strangely enough though, quite a few of the older women (over 60's) I met, particularly in the South, still managed to maintain a significant degree of grace and femininity. It would appear that the failure of femininity in the U.S. seems to have begun in the generation that come of age in the mid 70's.

There were some notable exceptions however.  Whilst most coloured women were just like the rest there was a small but significant portion of them who were surprisingly feminine, elegant and graceful. The best dressed black women blew the white women away in both grace and style.

Of Swine and Pigmen.

Whilst in New York my family and I decided to make a visit to the financial district.  We passed Trinity Church on the way to Wall St and some remnants of the Occupy Wall St crowd were there.  They were fenced in a very small area calling out to passers by. They were the usual nose-studded rent-a-Socialist types who looked like they need a wash. They seemed pleasant and friendly enough, still a visceral contempt stirred inside me. Not because I had any problem with them protesting against the corruption and idiocy of Wall St but because their solution was  even more idiotic and corrupting. Should these guys ever get into power, I thought, my family and I would be considered the near equal to the pigmen as objects of their rage.

Socialists, like lawyers are the natural enemy of the medical profession.

We moved on and spent the morning exploring the financial district. The architecture of the district was quite spectacular though I was surprised at just how small the district actually was; somehow I always imagined the centre of the financial world to be physically bigger. Still, the joy in appreciating architecture is in the details. As I wandered around the district I walked past a street sign, on it was written Maiden Lane.

I remembered that Maiden Lane was the name of the holding company that the Fed set up to receive toxic assets after the collapse of Lehman Bros.  Though I was not looking for it, the thought of Maiden Lane triggered an association with the Fed  which in turn led me to the conclusion that it must be close by.  I pulled my guidebook out of my bag and soon realised that all I had to do was walk about a hundred meters and I’d be there.

I have an interest in Architecture and recognised the Fed building immediately, but before I could say anything to my family, my son pointed it out as a building that looked like Gringotts, the bank in the Harry Potter novels. To the casual passerby there was little to indicate that here was one of the temples of global finance, if not the epicentre. There was very little in the way of signage on it  except for a small plaque, but observant onlookers would have noticed that there were something peculiar about this particular building. Unlike other buildings in the immediate vicinity, two policemen appeared to be on permanent guard duty and there were more than the usual number of CCV cameras (discretely positioned) monitoring it.  Here at the temple of Bernanke, I thought of GBFM and his secretive tapings; except here the tapings weren’t so secretive.

It was an imposing building that did not want to be noticed, still, in the spirit of GBFM, I wanted to get my photograph on it’s steps.  The two policemen eyed me as I approached them. They were OK with me getting a photo on the steps and then ignored me. I wanted a record of being at the Lion’s den.

There was a slight incline uphill as we walked away from the building and approaching us from a downhill direction were three men in the early twenties. They were walking three abreast occupying  the whole of the sidewalk and it was apparent from their appearance that they expected people to get out of their way: they were not moving for anyone. It’s not that these people were thugs; they were worse. They were immaculately dressed and their overall bearing gave them the appearance of being “financial types”. From the expression on their faces they conveyed the impression of uninterrupted and effortless success, of supreme arrogance, self-assuredness and power. They were pigmen.

They wore an expression that I’d seen before. On surgeons who’ve never lost a patient, on men who’ve broken hearts but never had their hearts broken, on the fabulously gifted who’ve never known loss or hardship. Men who knew incredible success and no loss: they were invincible.

My wife could see that we were going to collide with them and she stepped off the sidewalk onto the road. However the expression in their faces stirred both a simultaneous sense of revulsion and instinctive defiance in me; I was not going to yield.

As they rapidly approached I braced myself for impact; they giving no hint that they would move. A the last possible moment, seeing that I wasn’t moving, they attempted to make an opening, with the pigman to right of me trying to get between me and the wall. However, it was too late and our shoulders collided. It was quite a heavy blow, which affected him more than me. I turned around expecting to be abused by them and steeled myself for their onslaught but they continued their march downhill, not even turning back. It was all over in an instant, as if nothing had happened.

It was an event of no significance and yet if felt like it was. The sky was grey, the mood somber and the Fed sinister.

Still, somehow it felt like an omen.

The Class Divide.

Another one of the impressions that America left me with was with regard to the class divide. Compared to Australia, I certainly felt that there was a far more overt stratification in society. The effect was most marked to me in both Los Angeles and Charleston. Now, I don't have a particular problem with societal stratification (provided that people can live decently) but one of the things that struck me about America was that there appeared to be a subtle caste like structure in place, with the workers being the inferior class of human beings. I want to emphasise that it was a subtle phenomenon.

To give you an example of what I mean; in many places when I struck up a conversation with some sales member or supermarket cashier, they initially seemed taken aback that I wanted to speak with them in a normal social way. The impression that I got was that they were somewhat unsure as to why a customer would want to speak to them on a social level.  I found many of these people to delightfully warm, helpful and quite conversational. However, I could not help but form an impression that many of them did not get spoken to unless someone wanted something from them.

Don't get me wrong, this sort of stuff happens in Australia as well. For one of my summer jobs I worked as a cleaner in the local mall and noticed that people treated me differently whilst I was in uniform and when I wasn't. The thing is, the effect seemed more pronounced in the U.S.

The other thing that I noticed was that people who appeared to be wealthy wanted to be recognised as being "apart" from the rest. Once again, I've noticed this phenomenon in other parts of the world and at home, but it appeared to be far more overt in the U.S. (The other place where I noticed similar behaviour was in Eastern Europe, where the wives of the biznis men behaved in a similar fashion) Apparently wealthy women would barge in front of you, not acknowledge your existence and bark orders to the sales staff and I can tell the difference between prole rude and snob rude. These were snob rude.

Overall I got the impression that in the U.S. there seemed to a subtle  "successful caste" and "prole caste" and that the successful caste wanted to emphasise the difference.  Now in Australia,  as commentator Horst noted, we do have an entrenched culture of "tall poppy syndrome" with the effect that the rich or successful are far less likely to assert any superiority. As a popular local beer commercial emphasised, "Australians sit in the front seat of the taxi" apparently both an allusion to our society's egalitarianism and by implication the un-Australianess of doing so otherwise.  Like all popular myths, it is just that. But I have to admit the class divide seems much smaller over here.

This egalitarianism has both negative and positive effects. On one hand, it does tend to enforce a cultural equality, on the other, it suppresses any form of excellence. (Which is usually appreciated and rewarded outside of Australia). America, on the other hand, seems to have a culture which accepts and rewards success almost to a degree that Australia doesn't. On one hand, it seems to attract the best and brightest to your country, both for their benefit and for the benefit of America. On the other hand, it does seem to create a bigger class divide.

Tipping

One of the big differences between the U.S and Australia is the practice of tipping. Now in Australia, the practice is becoming more prevalent than it used to be but it still not common, so I was quite interested to see how the custom influenced the service I received. These are my thoughts.

Firstly, I managed to get into conversations with some of the waiting staff and they informed me that their official wage, which was paid by the employer, was somewhere in the vicinity of 2-3 dollars an hour. Now look, I know that these people can earn quite a bit in tips, but there is something fundamentally wrong with paying a person that rate in a first world country. For a forty hour week, that equates to an official salary of 80-120 dollars a week. Now I understand that people who work in high end restaurants can earn quite a bit, but its those people in the roadside diners that worry me; in many of those places there didn't seem to be much through traffic.

As far as I was concerned "tipping" was not really an option since if I was unhappy with the service (an inconvenience) the person would have a significant portion of their wages docked. There seemed to be an asymmetry in cost to the waiter in favour of the customer. This would be alright if all customers are reasonable but some are not.

The net result was that a lot of the waiting staff were working quite hard to get that tip and laying on the charm quite thickly; so thickly that it appeared at times contrived, especially when the waiters appeared tired. Staff were quite attentive but once the bill was paid and the money was "extracted", staff sort of disappeared. Something that doesn't seem to happen at home.

Once again, I found the whole experience a bit off-putting in the end. Eating out felt like a simple commercial transaction.(Except in the South) You could never be sure if the waiting staff were being nice to you because they were genuinely nice or that they were being fake in order to earn some cash. I felt that the whole system of tipping compelled the waiting staff them to what we in Australia call, "kiss arse" in order to earn a living. It was a sort of trade-off in dignity for the dollar.

It's one thing to tip a man when he doesn't need it and its another thing to tip him when he does. In the first instance there is no compulsion to give, in the second there isn't as well; and yet there is. In the first instance your giving a man a bonus, which in no material way harms him when he does not get it. In the second, your providing him with his living wage which to a degree is obligatory.

The other issue at play is the independence of the waiter. The customer is not always right, he is not always nice and sometimes can be a pain in arse. The waiter should be able to refuse his business if a certain minimal standard of behaviour is not shown towards him. The whole tipping system subordinates the waiter to the customer. The whole system seems to enforce a subtle attitude of "the man with dollar must be kowtowed to". Subtle, but pernicious.


I understand that many people think that tipping provides an incentive towards superior service but compared to Australia, where the waiters are paid at least a minimum wage ($15.50 an hour), I did not notice any real improvement in the table service.

The Fat of the Land.

Prior to traveling to the U.S. we had been told by many that the U.S populated by huge numbers of “fatties”. The truth be told, my own  impression was that the U.S was just as fat as Australia, and on that measure I did not feel too far from home. Still there were some subtle differences. The average young U.S. man seemed less lean than the average Australian, whilst the average U.S. woman seemed slightly leaner than the average Australian. Subtly, Your fatties looked less healthier than ours  Compared to Europe, both countries have serious problems with obesity.

Obesity, is of course, a complex problem being a product of genetics, diet and energy expenditure. What I want to concentrate on here is the food. Now, I’m not particularly into organic foods and don’t mind some pesticide or applied fertilizer; I don’t approach food like a biochemistry assay and I’m not a gourmet. What matters to me is taste and quality, and I like to know that the animals were treated well before they were slaughtered. However after eating in the U.S. I did get the impression that “junk’ food was the staple and fresh produce was a premium product

Quite a few U.S. bloggers have lamented the state of U.S nutrition and I’m the emerging “Paleo” trend. I initially thought that their commentary was a bit over-the-top  but after my travels I want to fully endorse them. Never have I eaten so badly as I have in the U.S.

Firstly, the supermarkets. I actually like visiting supermarkets whilst  traveling in foreign countries, as it gives a good index to the cost of living compared to Australia and it also gives a good idea of what locals like to consume. Comparing Australian to U.S supermarkets, I would say that:

1) In the U.S., processed food (meals in a can, frozen dinners, breakfast cereals, chocolates etc) were much, much cheaper than in Australia.
2) With regard to cost, fresh fruit and vegetables were on par.
3)However on average, the quality of the fresh fruit, meat and vegetables seemed lower than at home. Whole Foods was very good but not superlative.
4)Big supermarkets tended to have a good selection of foods.
5)Smaller supermarkets tended to resemble the supermarkets in Eastern Europe, with a very large selection of processed food and a small selection of fresh produce.
6)Alcohol was much cheaper in the U.S.

With regard to restaurants, food, in mid level, “sit down” , non-chain type of restaurants was generally quite good. Expensive restaurants all over the world generally provide good food. Where the the food was quite bad was in the roadside type chain restaurant and chain-diner.  While the portion sizes in most roadside diners and chain restaurants were generous, the quality of it was extremely poor. It was fatty, but in a bad way, and it all seemed to possess an underlying bland factory processed taste. In Las Vegas I discovered that scrambled eggs and pancakes came out of a bottle. Much like the man who fed himself on McDonalds for a month, I was beginning to fell unwell by the end of my trip. My children were actually craving vegetables by the end of the trip. ( BTW, what is it with orange cheese?)

What I found very hard to find was food that was cheap, reasonably healthy and tasty. In Australia, for example, its really easy to find stores which sell fresh tasty rolls and sandwiches, using fresh ingredients and crusty breads, even in small regional centers.  In New York, I ended up grabbing a sandwich at the Deli section of Whole Foods or Pret-a-Manger, not because I wanted to, simply because everything else that was “grab and go” was utter crap. Aside from the huge portion sizes, obligatory melted cheese  and complementary fries, nearly all of the food had that same factory processed taste.  I never thought that I would eat better in London than in New York.

With regard to regional variation. I quite liked the food in the South and can’t rave enough about Jestine’s Kitchen in Charleston. The food there was calorie laden, and probably ‘bad” for me, but unlike most food I had tried, it was incredibly tasty. I know that the South is  “different”, but then again, I got the impression that most American “specialty”  restaurants were quite good, it was the mainstream day-to-day stuff that was bad. That’s the problem. It’s a problem because people make food decisions not only on taste, but on time and economic factors. A tired mother working two jobs trying to keep afloat in the U.S. economy has to buck the economic and time pressures she is under if she wants her family to eat well.  A certain amount of time and economic affluence is required to eat well.

It not only that, what we put into our bodies is just as important as how it tastes and can’t but help feel that part of reason for feeling unhealthy by the end of our trip was because of stuff I ate. Like my kids, I developed a craving for “healthy food”. As mentioned earlier in our post, I notice that the American obese looked more unhealthy than the Australian. Just as grain fed beef tastes different to ranch cattle, was the Australian obese “healthier” than the American because of  dietary composition?

Overall, I got the impression that whilst good food is available in the U.S., it is a relatively difficult to find premium product. The other impression that America left me with, was that the quality of food was being driven down to the bare minimum by the sole metric of the capitalist imperative: the minimal acceptable quality which generates a profit. Compared to the Italians and the French, the Americans on average have much much lower acceptable standards when it comes to the quality of food.

Arbeit Macht Sie Frei.

My first impression of America, upon landing in LA, was just how tired everyone looked. From first day of our visit to our last, this overall perception of worn out people was everywhere in the US. It was obvious that everyone was working quite hard, but it was also obvious that they had been working quite hard for a very, very long time.

The other thing that surprised me is just how many people were working two jobs. Now it’s quite common in Australia to see young people working two jobs to get ahead, but what surprised me is just how many older people (40’s and above) were working two jobs. It appeared that a lot of the older people were working to stay afloat, and not to fall between society’s cracks; there seemed to be  this invisible whip continually lashing them. Americans, in my opinion, were very hard workers.

What also surprised me is just how many older people were working in the “hamburger flipping” type of industries ( A phenomenon that is beginning to appear in Australia as well).   In Australia, and in my experience of Europe, these jobs are considered workforce “entry level jobs” and are still the province of younger people, whilst in the U.S., the majority of the service staff that I met were above the age of thirty. They were all working what I would consider anti-social hours and all of them looked worn out ..... and trapped.

The overall impression it gave me, was of a worn out society that was barely holding itself together. I must confess it shocked and saddened me. Everyone seemed overworked. Everyone also seemed grimly resolute to the task. It appeared to me, that to most Americans, this was the only way things could be.

One of the most interesting conversations I had was in the bowels of the Hoover dam. Whilst being taken through an access tunnel, our tour guide asked us we were all from. Two groups were from Australia and another from France. We got into a discussion about vacations and explained to him, that on average, Australians get four weeks paid leave a year. I think the French said that they got five. He clearly looked pained at our responses. He told us that he only got one week and that his employers were trying to take it away from him. He was clearly an intelligent man and wanted to travel but was unable to do so due to his work commitments. It dawned upon me at that time that perhaps one of the causes of American insularity is the simple fact that many Americans simply do not have time time to leave their country, trapped by the obligations to their employers.

Now in Australia, I see a lot of small businessmen who work just as hard and I have seen that look of work-weariness before. I know the toll that it places on human beings. My experience has taught me is that everyone seems to have a work threshold, that once crossed, becomes socially and personally destructive. A man is not only a means of production, but he is also meant to be a husband, father and a member of the community.  A healthy man balances all these duties, and healthy society gives him room to balance them. Men devoting all their times to work have no time to devote to the other obligations in their life.  Men working long hours become harsh and irritable, they make mistakes, they opt for quick snacks instead of proper meals, working hard for their families, they don’t ever spend time with their them, eventually finding themselves alienated from the ones they have devoted themselves to.

It appeared to me that whilst America had fully internalised the Protestant work ethic it had neglected any concept of the right to leisure. Labour laws,  in the end, are a reflection of society’s values. In America, it appeared that leisure was perceived as either an opportunity cost amongst the go getters, or an frivolous luxury amongst the miserly. And amongst those who would like to take some time off for a rest, it appeared that American culture offered them no legitimacy. It was a society that seem geared toward the primacy of work and production and you were either with the program or you were not.

What I Saw in America.

My family and I have recently completed a nearly four week holiday in the United States. Over the next few posts I hope to write about the impressions that the country left on me; not all of them positive. I found it difficult to articulate these impressions for a while and upon return to Australia, picked up G.K Chesterton’s book on his experience of the U.S. He visited it in the 1920‘s and 30‘s,  and surprisingly, I felt that many of his observations still hold true to today.  Whilst he was very polite in his writings about the U.S., I could not help but form the opinion that the country disquieted him, seeing in it something that was toxic to the ideas of Christendom.

Americans, I have found, find it very difficult to take criticism of their country objectively and tend to impute malice towards the critic. And it is true that there are a lot of malevolent critics of America. I am not. Sometimes its very difficult to see the problems from “inside” and that what’s needed is an outside view, and that’s what I’m trying to provide. I am convinced that one of the big problems of the U.S is it’s cultural insularity. Roosh V is on the money when he urges people to travel and I think it is its very important that young American men of the Right ( who will be its future advocaes) get out and see the world. Not so much as to remake the U.S in the image of another country, more to be able to compare how other people live; in many instances better than in the U.S.

Nearly all of the Americans that we met appeared to be fundamentally good and decent persons, and in many ways, better than a lot of the Europeans and Australians. If I had to generalise however, I would say that the higher up the food chain an American was, the less I tended to like him. Prole America in its failures seemed more human that corporate America in its success. What distressed me the most however, was the erosive destruction of the American people by an economic system that seems to be literally grinding them into the dust.  After visiting the U.S. the “we are the 99%” movement is very easy to understand.

As a result of this trip I feel that I understand Roissy a lot a better, especially with regard to American women; they really are different compared to other women of the world. My appreciation of Ferdinand Bardamu has also grown, as I feel he is quite accurate in his critiques of American society.

Service Announcement.

Just a brief note to my readers that I will be not posting for the next five weeks, as I'm off to "the home of the brave and the land of the free."

I'd like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a safe and prosperous New Year.

Romantic Adultery

One of the curious feature of our decarnalised view of romantic love is that its intellectual underpinning permits a lot of moral evil to fly under the radar. One of the themes raised in Dalrock’s post, concerned the subject of porn. In the movie, Fireproof; one of the justifications that the “heroine” uses to leave her husband is because of his consumption of it. The movie presents her grievance in a sympathetic and justified light and several commentators on Dalrock’s blog felt that this position was both unjust, and that divorce was a disproportionate response in any case. As commentator Grerp put it:

I don’t like porn. It’s dehumanizing, and the industry grinds already broken people up for its own profit. But it sounds like Caleb was only dabbling in it – which is worthy of a trip to the confessional, rather than divorce court. Clearly Katherine was dissatisfied with the bargain she’d made and wanted a “Christian” excuse to get out. Porn use was it.

It’s the “Christian excuse” part of the comment that warrants further elaboration. I think that Grerp’s comment is rather perceptive in that in that many Christians equate porn to a type of adultery.  I imagine it all harks back to the biblical view that looking at a woman with “lust in your heart” is equivalent to adultery and therefore suitable grounds for divorce.

In my post, Anaemia, I argued that traditional Christianity had decarnalised sex, and I imagine that part of porn’s opprobrium is due to the fact that it is inherently and explicitly “fleshy”, It’s not about plot, it’s not about feelings, it’s all about the sex. Porn is all about “carnality”  But what’s really interesting is that this “decarnalised” view of sexuality raises a curious dichotomy.

Theses comment from Grerp:

The thing that annoys me about these sorts of narratives[Ed:Fireproof] is that they are crafted in such a way that it is hard to make a specific judgment because the info isn’t there, but they stand in for a reality that would not be hard to judge. So we don’t really know much about Caleb’s porn habits, and it appears that Katherine didn’t actually sleep with the doctor. But IRL she probably would have slept with him and we would know what Caleb’s real proclivities are. In a similar way, Harlequin romances are chock – absolutely CHOCK – full of single mothers who aren’t single mothers. Or aren’t single mothers of their own doing. They’re the aunts who’ve suddenly inherited children and are trying to do the right thing or widows whose husbands have suddenly died. Or they had to get divorced because he became a raging monster/drug dealer overnight, etc. This sort of narrative allows readers who might disapprove of single motherhood to still enjoy reading the rescue of a single mother by a handsome, well-funded hero who’s always wanted to be a father. Read enough of these things and you start thinking that all women are mere victims of circumstance. And from there it’s only a short leap to believing that they all have a right to be rescued. (To be fair, within the genre, this is changing somewhat. Now you have single mothers who are choosing to be single mothers, whether by sperm bank or ONS, because they are *independent women who can take care of themselves* but who might still like to have a white knight take care of some of the peskier problems of life. Fully entitled to the rescue that’s not a “rescue,” though.)

and

Another thing I’ve noticed about romance novels that is still more troubling is that the female characters in them have become more realistic – older, fatter, more career oriented, sexually experienced – while the male characters have become hyper masculine. This Batman-obsessively-pursuing-Liz-Lemon narrative is obviously total wish fulfillment (read: delusion) on the part of female romance readers.

My reply to Grerp:

Isn’t a Harlequin novel a female version of porn? I mean for most guys porn is a fantasy, but so are romantic novels for women. The whole idea of the romantic novel is to get the female reader to identify with the heroine and have a bit of fantasy adultery. True, that female porn places far less emphasis on those “yucky” anatomical bits and much more emphasis on “feelings”, but in the end both partners consummate their affections as assuredly as Linda Lovelace did with her lovers. Both “art forms” have fantasy adultery as their end point.

The question is why does our society look down with opprobrium on men who look at porn but at the same time not give a second thought to women churning through the Mills and Boon? It appears that as long as artistic depictions of adultery don’t involve any genital display, then its O.K.

Most religious folk, myself included, will intuitively recognise porn consumption as a moral wrong, and it still attracts a degree of opprobrium from non-religious polite society, but why is there no condemnation of decarnalised fantasy adultery?  Porn, being so overt, is easily recognised as a moral evil, The problem is, that a lot of poison can fly under the radar if its not recognised as such and because romantic love is desexualised some of the more pernicious effects of the romantic novel are not recognised.  To quote commentator Grerp:

My view is that there isn’t anything wrong, intrinsically, with a love story. People have been telling, and hearing, and reading love stories for thousands of years, and readers who read them aren’t wanting to commit adultery any more than people who play video games really want to kill someone. The problem is that a steady diet of even the “clean” romances will set you up with overly high expectations regarding relationships between men and women. The fact that romance novels have become more ubiquitous and regularly read indicates that something is wrong between the sexes and that women are getting their emotional needs met outside of human interaction.

I think she has a very good point. Just as porn seems to influence sexual expectations, so does the romantic novel influence the female expectations of a relationship, and yet our society seems relatively indifferent it.

In Fireproof, the disaffected spouse forms a close relationship with a doctor, something which is portrayed in a sympathetic light by its Christian producers. But as commentator Brendan noted:

Men don’t want to meet the women in porn, they don’t want to have affairs with them or with other women. Porn is an aid to masturbation for men. I’m not a big fan of it myself, but it isn’t at all like flirting with a real life person of the opposite sex in a romantic/sexual/emotional way. The latter doesn’t always lead to affairs, but is pretty much always the gateway to an affair. It is treading on thin ice, and in the case if you fall through it isn’t “virtual adultery” or “lusting in the heart” — it’s good, old fashioned “fucking someone else” adultery. Porn viewing, by contrast, does not lead to adultery. Now, if Caleb were perusing personals sites, or Ashley Madison, or Craigslist or something like that, it would be comparable to what Katherine was doing. Viewing porn for masturbation purposes is not — it’s sinful, but a sin of a very different order than the kind of sin that is the natural gateway to real, physical adultery.

And that’s what I think is curious. Why is overt fantasy sexuality viewed as an obvious evil whilst real intimate(non-sexual) friendship with another member of the opposite sex whilst married, not? I think it’s because we’ve so stripped our feelings from our sexual natures, through ascetic decaranalisation, that we believe that intimate friendships in with the opposite sex are completely possible without a sexual element eventually making its way into the picture. Romantic love is ultimately completed in sexual union, and the decarnalised view of romantic love so downplays the sexual component of it that it causes people to adopt the heuristic of thinking of sex and love as two separate things. Therefore it's perfectly understandable how “Christian” producers could portray our heroine as doing nothing wrong even though she has exposed herself to the real possibility “old fashioned” adultery. Whilst her husband is considered adulterous by looking at fantasy images.

You can’t make this stuff up.

The Elementary Forces.

Dalrock recently put up another thought provoking post. He gives a commentary on a truly awful film, Fireproof. The film is about the breakdown of a marriage and its story is typical of many marriages. You can go over to his site and read about the details of the movie and his commentary, but I thought it would be worthwhile to make a few comments of my own, especially on the subject of love.

A while ago I wrote a post on the subject of "parasitic lovers". It appears to me that a lot of marriages today are an arrangement of mutual benefit between two parasites ; each staying in a relationship only as long as they are a recipient of some benefit from the host. As soon as the host stops providing the benefit they move on. Another name which I've seen to describe the phenomenon is "Hedonic Marriage".

"Hedonic Marriage " really should be seen as a "fruit" of the modern culture and it is the end consequence of viewing marriage as a sort of "contract"; an exchange of goods. I suppose it is the natural consequence of the "Me" society; a view which places the happiness of the individual above else, even above the happiness of those about them. It's inevitable that in such a culture its constituents will want to emphasise their rights whilst dismissing their obligations. It is the underlying motive behind social atomisation.

Symbiotic love, on the other hand, recognises that's its own well being is contingent upon the well being of the host. Even at its basest level, the recipient of the host's benefits recognises that if they wish to continue receiving them, they've got to ensure the well being of the host. Unlike parasitic love, it is the love that binds.

Conservative Tectonics.

I get the impression that I'm persona non grata at several traditionalist websites. I can understand their position as many of my comments are decidedly nontraditional. As I've argued before, in previous posts, part of the problem with current modern predicament is traditionalism, which paradoxically provides the "life force" for leftist ideas.  For example, the traditionalist idea of creating a social structure which subordinates women to exclusive domesticity innervates the feminist movement by reaction.  Happy women, like happy workers, are not militant except by injustice; and societal structures which rub against human nature are ultimately percieved as oppressive. Sure, there are individuals who are objectively evil and wish to destroy what is good, but evil ideas, much like weeds, can only grow in the fertile soil of discontent.

My contention, and that of G.K. Chesterton and Whittaker Chambers, is that traditional society, whilst good overall, had several "structural anomalies" which produced profound discontent. It's also my contention that traditional western society could have survived intact (albeit in different form) had it changed in a way that accommodated those pressures without compromising the foundations upon which it was built. The problem was that it didn't, and it created the pressure cooker situations from which radicalism emerged.  Of course, traditionalists deny this; attributing to outright malice the motives of their opponents. This has the dual convenience of entrenching their own sense of moral superiority and permits the avoidance of any self reflection as to their own part in the state of affairs.

Therefore the traditionalist is always always harking to reset the system to "initial conditions". The problem is that initial conditions generate the same pressures that radicalised society in the first place, and thus the seeds of revolution are re-energised again. Tradition is the midwife of modern radicalism.

And I think this is why conservatism has failed in the 20th Century; it's failed because it's hitched it's star to traditionalism. I mean, what Negro would want to go back to traditional society? What intelligent woman would? Or even your average worker? How many of them would want to return to peon's existence that was the lot of the worker in early industrial capitalism? Is it any surprise that the main advocates of traditionalism are reasonably prosperous white males?

Practical,  that is political Conservatism, has realised that a return to initial conditions is political suicide and hence has to accommodate the wishes of the electorate. The net result is that modern political conservatism gradually morphs into liberalism by incorporating many of liberalism's ideas as a matter of political expediency.  Indeed, today's conservatism would be regard as leftist radicalism by the conservatives of a century ago.  The question is, why does it morph liberal?

It's my contention that modern liberalism is the only "new ideas" generator out there at the moment. The problem is, because of the liberalism's intellectual underpinnings, it's highly likely the solutions proffered by it  a likely to wrong.  Conservatism, strongly influenced by traditionalism, doesn't generate new ideas because all the "solutions" were worked out years ago by our forefathers. There's no need for any new thinking as all the thinking has been done for us before; it's a question of defending. Conservatism is always on the back foot.

But it's worse than that. Because people don't want to return to "initial conditions" traditional conservatism becomes an exercise in defensive irrelevance. Russell Kirk may have been admired and read amongst thinking conservatives but no one else cares.  From James Kalb's recent essay:

The canonical writers weren’t much help even among conservatives. Kirk’s romantic Burkeanism never had many adherents. Weaver and Voegelin, from most people’s perspective, were off in an ivory tower. And favoring the free market over socialism has gotten some traction, but it’s not enough for an overall conservative movement.

Now, I've had philosophic differences with Mr Kalb,  and I think I'm "on the nose" with him, but being a  man of ideas and not personalities, I've got to applaud him for his this essay: Liberal Values and the Seduction of the American Right. It appears that Mr Kalb has had a shift in his thinking, and it's a shift in the right direction. Commenting on the failure of Conservatism:

We’re in a political hole because we’re in an intellectual hole. If the problem is what people think makes sense, then we have to change or at least challenge accepted understandings in a very fundamental way.

and,

So much for the good. With respect to the true, it’s evident that we need the concept of transcendence, of something that exceeds what we can say or know. The point of talking about truth is that what we say about almost anything is certainly incomplete and might be altogether wrong. That shows we need “truth” as a higher point of reference. It’s an ideal standard that we can’t altogether attain, but can’t do without.

Our debate with the liberals is not over preference choices, rather, the conservative  understanding of reality implies that certain things are, or are not, in accordance with the "truth" of reality: Things are either right or wrong. Truth is the idee fixe of the Conservative, tradition is the idee fixe of the Traditionalist. Now, it's true that there may be truth in tradition, and the Conservative is happy to embrace tradition where it is true,  but where tradition is in error the conservative will ditch tradition.  Of course, by framing conservatism as traditionalism, this immediately pushes him outside of the conservative fold. Both the Left and the Right hate him.

The task then, for the modern conservative, is to look at history and ask, "Where did it go wrong"? "How can we change without compromising our core principles"? Even more importantly; What are our blindspots?" The most effective attack is the one that is not foreseen.

The fundamental error of thinking conservatism has been its assumption of the infallibility of tradition. This is the intellectual hole which conservatism has fallen in to and has effectively rendered it irrelevant. This is why any "Right Renaissance" is not going to occur within the mainstream right but rather outside it. It won't be the academy but the in the blogosphere where the right is reborn. This is not because I'm some technological junkie, rather because the internet provides a forum where all the "odballs" can debate and thrash the ideas out. Orthodox conservatism permits no such discussion. To quote Curtis Le May, speaking of American military culture in Fifties and Sixties:

We must-but do not-have a defense organization which permits controversy, which permits the "unthinkable" condition to be debated freely, which permits the screwball idea to come forth, and which tolerates the maverick officer. The Andrew Jacksons, the Zachary Taylors, the Ulysses S. Grants, the George Deweys, the Alfred Thayer Mahans, the Billy Mitchells, are not nurtured in orthodoxy. They are not products of a party line. And we have not infrequently called on them to save our shirts.

(Curtis Le May, America is in Danger. )

It is only after the traditionalists have been nearly ground into the dust that their prodigal sons will come back to save them.