Cal Thomas, syndicated columnist, recently (before Sept. 11) published a commentary titled "Dating violence is a product of our cultural dance with the devil". He mentioned a survey published by the American Medical Association which found that one in five high school girls has been physically or sexually abused by a dating partner. There was also suggested a link between dating abuse and self destructive behaviour by some of the abused girls, such as binge drinking, promiscuity, drugs, and the practice of taking laxatives and vomiting to lose weight. Thomas mused, "perhaps we truly are the Great Satan."
This reflection on his part needs to be enlarged upon. That assessment of western culture as "the Great Satan" was voiced by the middle eastern culture. Western culture has been "chivilrous" toward women, much more than eastern and middle eastern cultures. For a while this was good and balanced, but western culture has grown unbalalancingly "chivilrous" toward the young woman's dating and sexual autonomy of late. We need to guage more carefully how much social mobility and freedom we should give to young women in their teens and early twenties. What seems "judgmental" is Cal's weak assumption that his having treated dates with respect in his youth is a sufficient answer to the present complex of humiliations, jealousies, defrauding of men and abuse of women that is bound together with our long-standing cultural assumptions about romance that go back centuries. This is not something that happened in one generation, Cal. We live in the tail end of a long trend toward romantic culture whose emphasis on the young woman's own choice in her her being wooed or persuaded by her "date" instead of her being persuaded by her father's choice for her suitors or husband, has over several centuries of strain upon morality, both natural and religious, finally given way to a rapid cultural decline. Young women, today, without a dowery, and with little parental supervision in dating, but with support for coeducation, must assume that they must put off marriage, choose a career early in life, and/or have fun partying, and at any rate meet guys and choose them with little or no parental guidance, and given such unloving autonomy and lack of practical help, as though no one cared for them, they easily feel the pressure to give themselves in their sexual prime before a marriage commitment is legally and culturally binding. This easily creates and compounds problems of all sorts. We forget that western culture was at one time more balanced between the father "giving" and the young man "wooing". Arrangements had to be made with the family of the girl, the father especially, as our traditional marriage ceremony still recalls when it says "Who gives this woman in marriage?" And the father traditionally gave not only the bride, but also a dowery to help the new family get established. Our emphasis on education of the young woman has replaced the dowery, and not just education, but coeducation. Coeducation, unless tightly controlled, is an outrage, a mechanism of Satan, if you will, abetting the defrauding of good men, and the abusing of young women. For many it has created a great deal of relational pain, sexual injustice, and abuse.
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My Cultural Beliefs
The solution to our economic problems
is related to our sexual problems.
Listen to Gwen Stefani's
Develop a different marriage culture.
Culture, you have forgotten, is intergenerational. The cultural/economic factory made you forget, Gwen.
