Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.
And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.
Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions. Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine. The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture. This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.
This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text. And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.
If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.
This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time. Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.
This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.
At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.
That's a phenomenal observation.
And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it. That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't. It's been wholly destructive.
We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe. Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.
Lauren Bacall, 1943.
The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did. La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s. But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.
Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s. Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage. Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm. Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.
Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology. That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.
Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell. Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex. It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was. That really started to break down during the 1940s. I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.
From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions. This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is. The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.
Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong. Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it. Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.
By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile. There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.
Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution. I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.
And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.
We've lost a lot here. A massive amount. And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality. And we're still slippping.
Fr. Joseph Krupp provides a really interesting discussion on courting (dating?), engagement and marriage.
It starts at about 24:30. The material before that is on a completely different topic.
The comments by Fr. Krupp before that are interesting, albeit, as noted, on a completely different topic. Those aren't the reason that I linked this in here, but I am fairly amazed that he hasn't gotten himself in trouble for saying such things as he says in the first half of this video podcast.
The first in print use of the term "Dear John Letter" appeared in a UPI article entitled Hollywood Girls Gain Weight on Tour in Africa.1 It was clear from the use, which was a quote from one of the increasingly corpulent Hollywood Girls that the term was in the common vernacular at the time.
We've touched on the topic of wartime marriages and breakups several times before, but my ability to link them in is restrained, as I can't find them all. We haven't done one on wartime romantic relationships in general. As our Fourth Law of History details, War Changes Everything, but like a lot of things surrounding World War Two, this topic is subject to a lot of myth. According to one scholarly source:
Marriage rates rose in 1940-41 and peaked in 1942, only to slow down during the war and rise to even higher levels in 1946. Divorce rates followed a much smoother pattern, increasing from 1940 to 1946, then quickly declining in 1947.
World War II and Divorce: A Life-Course Perspective by Eliza K. Pavalko and Glen H. Elder, Jr.
Frankly, looking at it, the Second World War didn't impact divorce nearly as much as commonly believed. If it is taken into consideration that World War Two came immediately on the heels of the Great Depression, and that the ages of US troops in the war was higher than commonly imagined, it makes sense. Consider:
While the Great Depression did lower marriage rates, the effect was not long lasting: marriages were delayed, not denied. The primary long-run effect of the downturn on marriage was stability: Marriages formed in tough economic times were more likely to survive compared to matches made in more prosperous time periods.
Love in the Time of the Depression: The Effect of Economic Conditions on Marriage in the Great Depression, Matthew J. Hill.
Indeed, that short snipped is revealing.
There were a lot of marriages contracted before soldiers went overseas, and some people did marry very quickly, which is probably balanced out by a lot of people who were going to get married anyhow getting married before they would be husband deployed. Also, according to The Great Plains during World War II by Prof. R. Douglas Hurt, there was an increase of pre deployment pre marital contact, although the book relied solely on interview data for that claim. Having said that, a Florida academic, Alan Petigny, has noted that "between the beginning of World War II in 1941 and the inaugural issue of Playboy in 1953, the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled".2
That the war had an impact on behavior in regard to relations outside of marriage is well documented. Prostitution was rampant in every area where troops were deployed, with it being openly engaged in locations like London. Examples of illicit behavior aren't very hard to find at all. The length of the war no doubt contributed to this. Nonetheless, traditional moral conduct dominated throughout the 1940s and after it, with the real, and disastrous, changes really starting in the early 1950s.
That "Dear John" letters weren't uncommon makes a lot of sense, however. The majority, but not all of them, would have been written by single women to single men, i.e., by girlfriend to boyfriend. Those relationships were not solemnized and largely unconsummated, if we use those terms. The war was long and accordingly the separations were as well. Young women in many instances would have aged a few years, as the men would have also, but in conditions that were dramatically different than the men. The women were, to a large degree, temporarily forced outside their homes, if they fit into the demographic that would have remained at home, but in conditions that were considerably more stable than the men. If they went to work, they could have remained at one employer for years, whereas the soldier boyfriend may very well have constantly been on the move. Workplace romances certainly aren't uncommon now, with around 20% of Americans having met their spouses at work (Forbes claims its 43%). Some large percentage of Americans have dated a coworker. Given the long separations, a young woman meeting a man at work, or perhaps at church, or in her group of friends, was undoubtedly a common occurrence during the war, as it was never the case that all men were deployed, even though a very large number were.
FWIW, the Vietnam War is associated with the highest rate of "Dear John" letters, even though troops deployed for only one year in the country. This undoubtedly says something about the change in economic and social conditions from the 1940s to the 1960s.
On a personally anecdotal level, I think I've met three people, now all deceased, who married during the war prior to the husband deploying. One of those marriages failed, but the other two were lifelong.
The 20th Indian Division completed a withdrawal to the Shenan Hills. The 17th Indian Division was conducting a fighting withdrawal.
The Japanese were accordingly engaging in a very successful offensive in northeast Burma. The war in that quarter was far from settled. Be that as it may, as that was going on, the Western Allies were advancing in the Pacific ever close to Japan itself, which Japan was proving unable to arrest. The Japanese situation, therefore, was oddly complicated in that in order to really reverse the tide of the war, they would have had to taken Indian entirely, and then knocked China out of the war, neither of which was realistic in spite of its recent battlefield successes.
We don't think of helicopters in World War Two, but they were starting to show up, and in one of their classic roles.
US and Australian troops linked up on the Huon Peninsula.
Fighting in New Guinea, while going in the Allied direction, was proving endless.
The Finnish parliament, in a secret session, rejected Soviet peace terms. Secret or not, the Finnish rejection hit American newspapers that very day. That the Finns and Soviets were talking was very well known to everyone.
The papers were also noting the German invasion of Hungary, and there were rumors that Hungary was going to declare war on Germany, which proved far from true. The Hungarian situation must have caused some concern, however, in Finland.
It was the first flight of the Japanese kamikaze rocket plane, the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka (櫻花)
The first flight was an unpowered test.
It might be noted that there's a real logic failure with this design. If you can build a powered rocket suicide plane, you can build a rocket powered drone.
The ice jammed Yellowstone broke over its banks in Miles City, Montana.
The Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit was founded near Conyers, Georgia.
Footnotes:
1. The "girls" were Louise Allbritton, an actress who would have been 23 years old at the time, and June Clyde, who would have been 35.
Allbritton married a CBS news correspondent in 1946 and retired from acting. She remained married until her death in 1979. Clyde, who was a pre code actress and dancer, was married (1930) and also remained for the rest of her life. She passed away in 1987.
2. World War One, which was comparatively short, does not seem to have impacted behavior and marriage rates nearly as much, but it did cause a very notable boom in overseas "war bride" marriages anywhere American troops were deployed, including Siberia.
There were, of course, war brides as a result of World War Two, but that's another story.
In this article, I draw upon critical feminist and intersectional frameworks to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages White heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs) and marginalizes others as a function of family structure and relationship status. Specifically, I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy. Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family. But it is also a hidden or unacknowledged structural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States. Through several examples, I demonstrate how—since colonization—marriage fundamentalism has been instantiated through laws, policies, and practices to unduly advantage WHNFs while simultaneously marginalizing Black, Indigenous, immigrant, mother-headed, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) families, among others. I conclude with a call for family scientists to further interrogate how marriage fundamentalism reproduces family inequality in American family life and to work toward its dismantling. A deeper understanding of how these complex and often covert mechanisms of structural oppression operate in family life is needed to disrupt these mechanisms and advance family equality and justice.
Marriage is a human universal. It's not "white", and indeed "white" doesn't really exist either. When people say "white" they mean Western European culture, maybe, or maybe they mean American European culture. Or maybe they just don't know what they mean and are in fact simply reinforcing the language invented for the more recent form of slavery that existed in North American until 1865.
Anyway you look at it, when you wonder why people go in and vote for Trump, well, stuff like this has an awful lot to do with it.
Now in regard to the matters about which you wrote: “It is a good thing for a man not to touch a woman,” but because of cases of immorality every man should have his own wife, and every woman her own husband.
The husband should fulfill his duty toward his wife, and likewise the wife toward her husband.
A wife does not have authority over her own body, but rather her husband, and similarly a husband does not have authority over his own body, but rather his wife.
Do not deprive each other, except perhaps by mutual consent for a time, to be free for prayer, but then return to one another, so that Satan may not tempt you through your lack of self-control.
This I say by way of concession, however, not as a command.
Indeed, I wish everyone to be as I am, but each has a particular gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.
Now to the unmarried and to widows, I say: it is a good thing for them to remain as they are, as I do, but if they cannot exercise self-control they should marry, for it is better to marry than to be on fire.
To the married, however, I give this instruction (not I, but the Lord): A wife should not separate from her husband—and if she does separate she must either remain single or become reconciled to her husband—and a husband should not divorce his wife.
To the rest I say (not the Lord): if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she is willing to go on living with him, he should not divorce her;and if any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he is willing to go on living with her, she should not divorce her husband.
For the unbelieving husband is made holy through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy through the brother. Otherwise your children would be unclean, whereas in fact they are holy.
If the unbeliever separates, however, let him separate. The brother or sister is not bound in such cases; God has called you to peace.
For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband; or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?
The Life That the Lord Has Assigned.
Only, everyone should live as the Lord has assigned, just as God called each one. I give this order in all the churches.
Was someone called after he had been circumcised? He should not try to undo his circumcision. Was an uncircumcised person called? He should not be circumcised. Circumcision means nothing, and uncircumcision means nothing; what matters is keeping God’s commandments. Everyone should remain in the state in which he was called.
Were you a slave when you were called? Do not be concerned but, even if you can gain your freedom, make the most of it. For the slave called in the Lord is a freed person in the Lord, just as the free person who has been called is a slave of Christ.g You have been purchased at a price. Do not become slaves to human beings.
Brothers, everyone should continue before God in the state in which he was called.
Advice to Virgins and Widows.
Now in regard to virgins, I have no commandment from the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.
So this is what I think best because of the present distress: that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he is.
Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a separation. Are you free of a wife? Then do not look for a wife.
If you marry, however, you do not sin, nor does an unmarried woman sin if she marries; but such people will experience affliction in their earthly life, and I would like to spare you that.
I tell you, brothers, the time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having them, those weeping as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing, those buying as not owning, those using the world as not using it fully. For the world in its present form is passing away.
I should like you to be free of anxieties. An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord.
But a married man is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided. An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord, so that she may be holy in both body and spirit. A married woman, on the other hand, is anxious about the things of the world, how she may please her husband.
I am telling you this for your own benefit, not to impose a restraint upon you, but for the sake of propriety and adherence to the Lord without distraction.
If anyone thinks he is behaving improperly toward his virgin, and if a critical moment has come and so it has to be, let him do as he wishes. He is committing no sin; let them get married.
The one who stands firm in his resolve, however, who is not under compulsion but has power over his own will, and has made up his mind to keep his virgin, will be doing well.
So then, the one who marries his virgin does well; the one who does not marry her will do better.
A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whomever she wishes, provided that it be in the Lord.n
She is more blessed, though, in my opinion, if she remains as she is, and I think that I too have the Spirit of God.
We've had a variety of posts sort of ballpark on this topic, more or less, recently. Most of them have come up in the context of comparing "then and now", one of the purposes of this blog
This entry is so well done, I really can't riff off of it much. What Fr. Franco states is so well stated, that I should just leave it alone, so I'll mostly do so.
To the extent I won't, it should be noted I guess that things in the Western World are so existentially screwed up right now, it's frightening, and it's expressing itself in corrupted ways in our culture and our politics, which are an expression of our culture, so much that it threatens to destroy it, and perhaps even us. A certain getting back to the basics, or roots, seems to me to very much what is needed to be done, which one party in this contest seeks to do, but doesn't understand how to do it, or what the existential truths are, and the other seeks to eliminate it and create a bold new world which it won't succeed in doing.
I was unaware of the Rituale Romanum's "Exhortation before Marriage discussed in this text. I wish that hadn't been removed, and I wish it would return.
Pastoral scene, pre Soviet Ukrainian village. Not a lot of homsexuality, transgenderism, etc. going on there.
Those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups," Francis told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it".
"But in general, I trust that gradually everyone will be reassured by the spirit of the 'Fiducia Supplicans' declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: it aims to include, not divide," the pope said.
We all see things through thick lenses of our cultures, and the history of our cultures. This was true even of the authors of the Gospels, which sometimes come through on certain items in their writings.
I think Fiducia Supplicans demonstrates this.
For that matter, to use a bad secular example, I think Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges did as well, which is not to say that the documents are analagous. They are not.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have generally believed that the Obergefell decision overturning tens of thousands of years of understanding on the nature of marriage would be met with rapid universal acceptance, rather than turning out to be the metaphorical shot heard around the world that gave us Donald Trump in short order.1
The Supreme Court, in Obergefells, and the Papacy, in Fiducia Supplicans, are reacting to the same development seem to have made the assumption of thinking that what happens in European cultures is what happens, or what even really is of major concern, all over the world. That just isn't the case in this instance.
A pretty good case can be made that "homosexuality", as Western Society regards it, doesn't even exist, although certainly same sex attraction and sexual conduct does. They are not the same thing. Therefore, when the Pope says "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it" it might in fact be the case that the opposite is true. That is, the "special case" is Western Europeans, for whom homosexuality exists, and is not a "something 'bad'", or at least a significant number of Western Europeans, of which North and South Americans are (once again) part, have now been schooled or accepted that it isn't bad.
In most, of the world, homosexuality is regarded as a European thing. Again, the conduct occurs, but not the gender characterization. And in no society, does it occur with the frequency it does in Western Society, which is also the society which as become the most libertine, albeit only in the last seventy years, particularly in regard to sex and manifestations of sex, including outward manifestations of sex.
We've dealt with that before, but now that It's come back up in this fashion, it's worth looking at again. Pretty much everywhere this conduct occurs, it's strongly associated with a variety of factors, one of which, in its broad manifestation we now see, is a wealthy society that has lots of idle time. Put another way, it's a factor of resources and availability to them.
This is true of a lot of human disorders that are closely related to elemental needs and what we tend to universally see is that when we have a society that is heavily deprived of an elemental needs, a disordered desire for it, combined with disorder conduct, pops up in a minority (never a majority) of the population.
Food is a good example.
Scarcity of food will result in a massively strong desire to eat. In some people, that leads to desperate acts under desperate situations. Cannibalism, for example, comes to mind in regard to the Donner Party, or the residents of Leningrad. People took measures they normally wouldn't.
Not everyone did, however.
At least in the Soviet examples, which repeated in various fashions from 1917 through early 1944, most people didn't. People would starve instead.
Conversely, in food situations where there's a surplus of food, the entire population will tend to gain weight, but not everyone tends to become excessively overweight. Modern dieticians will yell in horror at this, but overweight, and truly grossly obese are not the same things. Grossly obese happens for a number of reasons, including people having a makeup which is extremely efficient in order to avoid famine, but it's only in an unnatural situation of surplus calories that it manifest itself.
As a scene in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee presents it:
Sergeant Chillum: Don't look to me like them gut-eaters has been feeding them very good.
Wiley: Did you ever see a fat Apache?
Sergeant Chillum: I ain't yet.
This scene depicts the pick up cavalry formation taking the kidnapped children and feeding them, but the point raised, accidentally, is a good one. Native Americans lived in a state of nature, and in that state, they were in good shape and not packing around extra weight. No culture in a state of nature does.
When things become disordered, such as in famine, some people will do something that can be argued to be disordered, eat other people. When there's too much food and no real need to work too hard, physically, to obtain calories, everyone puts on weight, but some will very much to their detriment.
So what's this have to do with homosexuality, let alone Fiducia Supplicans? Well, quite a lot, really.
Just as, in a balanced state of nature, or close to one, people don't get fat, and don't turn to cannibalism, in a balanced state of nature, they don't turn to the range of sexual deviations that they do in an unbalanced one.
Edgar Paxon's Custer's Last Stand. While it might seem odd to see this posted here, the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors who won this battle, and one just days before it at Rosebud, were never more than a day's ride from their families. Women were of course present in the Native camp at Little Big Horn, as the battle was brought on by the 7th Cavalry's attack on the village, but at least one native woman had been present at Rosebud as well. Native raiding parties might separate from their families for a period of days, but not months.
In a state of nature, people live in pretty small communities and there's pretty much a 1 to 1 sex ratio. Men would only be separated from women for very brief periods of time. A war party, for example, might separate for several days, but not months. The Great Raid of 1840, for example, which is regarded as the largest Native American raid every conducted, just lasted two days. Add in travel, and the warrior bands were gone longer, but it probably wasn't much more than a week, if that long.
Hunting parties are also often cited for periods of separation, but in a healthy native state, the separation was often just a matter of hours. Women were usually close enough to a really large hunting party that they could partake in the processing of the game. There were undoubtedly exceptions, but by and large, this was the rule.
Taking the war example again, consider this from Ethiopia's mobilization order of 1935 when Italy invaded:
Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.
Emperor Haile Selassie
Married men, take your wives. Not married? Find a woman who isn't married and taker her.
It's only once you begin to mess with the basic human living patters that the opposite is true. Industrialization, which we'll get to in a moment, really brought in a major disruption from the normal living patter, but there are preindustrial examples that are notable. War provides a pretty good example again.
Major military campaigns in antiquity relied on theft of food, which is not ordered, and which is well known. If the fighters were separated from women, they also rapidly descended to disorder. Early military campaigns (and some recent ones) are famously associated with "rape and pillage", and by men who would not ordinarily do that.
Another example of adjusting to desperate times might be taken in Muhammed authoring his troops, who were ready to go home as they were tired of being without their wives, to have sex with their female saves taken in war. This is widely denied by Muslim scholars today, but it seems to be fairly well established and in fact the practice has been resumed by Islamic fundamentalist armed bands and its the origin of Muslim sex slave trading, which is an historical fact. That this is basically an example of licensed rape can't really be denied.
Conversely, in Christian societies the "marital debt" was taken very seriously up until recently, and it was taken so seriously in the Middle Ages that a wife of a man who wished to go on crusade could veto it simply by citing the marital debt. That's fairly extraordinary, but telling, in that she could simply declare that if her husband departed her needs in this category might cause her to fall into sin, and therefore, he couldn't go. Moderns like to look down on such things today, but in reality that was a very natural and realistic view of human sexuality.
Same gender attractions play in here too, but within bands of men kept away from women for long periods of time. The most famous example of that may be the Spartans, who were fierce warriors trained from young adulthood, in the case of men, to be soldiers. However, the warehousing of men, and boys, away from women brought about widespread homosexual conduct as the living conditions were, rather obviously, completely abnormal.
So too are much of our current living patters.
Industrialization separated men from women and parent from child in a major way, recreating the abnormality of living conditions noted above on a society wide level.
And that's deeply unnatural.
It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that men left their homes every day, working long hours, and were separated from their wives and children for what amounts to well over half of their adult waking hours. And this was not only true of industrial laborers, but also of their white collar bosses. In many industrial societies, moreover, this was amplified by the fact that men further segregated themselves, or were segregated by society, even on off hours.
It was essayist Henry Fairlie who noted:
Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family and churches. But in the city today, work and home, family and church, are seperated. What the office workers do for a living is not part of thier home life. AT the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of hteir work hours on thier off hours. They rush form the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool to work at their play with the same joylessness.
Fairlie wrote this in 1986, well after the most aggressors conditions of the Industrial Revolution had slackened, but he did note in The Idiocy of Urban Life what that had been like. Men left early in the morning and walked, on average, seven miles to work. They worked their all day, and then returned home after twelve hours of labor. Well over half their day had been spent away from their family.
By the 20th Century that had, in many heavily industrial regions, created a new pattern of living he didn't address, and one which lasted well into the 1970s. Men left for work in blue collar jobs, worked all day with other men, and at quitting time, they hit the bars. Men in the American Rust Belt, for instance, commonly hit a bar every night on the way home, spending a couple of hours drinking beer in an all male company, save for the barmaids whose tips went up as the beer flowed. Rough and tumble places, these were not the equivalent of charming English or Irish pubs of the same period. The maleness, if you will, of their work was all the more amplified by the nearly universal membership of men in organizations that excluded women.
Not surprisingly, this all encouraged conventional sexual vice. Some men, a minority but nonetheless an appreciable nature, took the jousting with bar maid and waitresses further, with some of the women reciprocating. When Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells sang about the "wild side of life" it's easy to wonder why they were hanging out in bars, not really appreciating that a lot of men in particular simply did. Indeed, the term "family man", conversely, had real meaning.
Not to dump this exclusively on blue collar workers by any means, philandering conduct was common in the white collar world as well, to such an extent that it became instantly recognizable to people who went to see 1960's The Apartment, the entire theme of which plays out through the vehicle of cheating married executives using their younger colleagues' apartment.
Indeed, when I was young, I can recall my parents openly talking about professionals in town who had affairs and mistresses. This certainly didn't include anyone in my family, which was 100% Catholic and meant it. That conduct was clearly not approved of, but my point is that it occured. While never discussed in this fashion, in the context of what we're discussing here, the mistresses were sometimes targets of opportunity, so to speak. Secretaries and assistants. Indeed, I heard a lawyer of the generation prior to mine, once relate of the generation of lawyers two generations older than hers, that quite a few of the paralegals of that old, now largely dead or very old, were effectively mistresses. One such assistant had mysteriously had a child out of wedlock when that was pretty rare, and it was widely known who teh employer father was.
There's a lot more that could be explored here, but the point is that the contra natural working conditions give rise to departures from morality and nature. Even now, or particularly now, you'll hear a close female colleague of a male be referred to as his "work wife". I've even heard a person refer to herself that way. Work wives have no marital debt, but hidden by the statement is the vague suggestion or fear that they might be providing such a service, illicit thought it would be.
Homosexuality, in large part, comes about, I strongly suspect, due to something similar.
In an earlier thread, we noted that there are in fact cultures that not only have low incidents of homosexual conduct, but none. As we earlier posted:
Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies". They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.
A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team. Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."
The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation. Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification. You'll have to read between the lines on that one.
Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur. It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.
In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptane of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.
But what would be the conditions that bring it about in our culture?
We're not even supposed to ask that now, but for most people who have same sex attraction, it's a pretty heavy cross to bear. We should be looking at how it comes about.
Well, what we know is that if we separate men from women, particularly in their formative years, we'll get it at a higher rate than when that doesn't occur.
Going back to war, that fountain of all problematic things, we can look back as far as the Spartans to find this. Spartans, faced with a constant threat of war, took up separating men from women large-scale and raising boys in barracks. It also had a notable degree of homosexual conduct.
Hmmm. . . separate young men and keep them separates just as things begin, for lack of a better way to put it, turn on, and . . . .
The Spartans were a notable early example of this, which in turn tends to be exaggerated. It's not likely that every single Spartan male was a homosexual. It's also not the case, as is sometimes suggested, that Ancient Greece was wildly homosexual. Indeed, Plato abhorred it and regarded it as contrary to nature and proposed the Athenian assembly ban homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate sex in general.
Going forward in time, when we really start to see references to the acts (but not a claimed "homosexual" status) comes with the first semi modern navies. It was a constant concern, for instance, of the Royal Navy, which perhaps might be regarded as the first modern navy. A great navy, it was not necessarily recruited in the most charming way and many sailors were simply press-ganged, a type of conscription, into it against their will. As press gangs favored hitting bars in ports, many of the men conscripted into the Royal Navy already lacked a strong attachment to home and family, and ports were notoriously associated with prostitution. Anyhow, a lot of men away from sea for months, or years, at a time, and a lot of them being fairly young. . . well the problem rose again.
It replicated itself in large modern armies as well, interestingly often among the officer class. In European armies where the officer class was made up of minor nobility as a rule, the men in it had entered as the only other real employment option, if they were not set to inherit the estate, was the clergy. In some European armies officers were strongly discouraged from marrying, which in part reflected the fact that their pay was very bad, as their countries knew that they could rely on family money. While it didn't occur universally in every such army, in some, such as the pre World War One German Army, there was a strong streak of hidden homosexuality.
English private schools, which were widely used by the upper class, were notorious for homosexuality for the same reason. Homosexual conduct became so common in them that homosexuality used to be referred to elsewhere as "the English Disease". Private schools were segregated effectively by class, and very much by gender. Unlike the charming portrayal in the Harry Potter series of works, boys went to boys schools and girls to girls school. Quite often, over time, parents enrolled their children in the same schools they'd gone to. Overtime, a closeted institutional homosexuality, or at least its common occurrence, crept in.
It could be legitimately asked how on earth any of this relates to our current era, but it does in more ways than we might imagine.
In most Western societies today, we make no effort, for the most part, to separate men and women in anything, formally. But as we've already detailed, we do send men, and now women, out of their families and into an unnatural environment on a daily basis. People often meet their future spouses in periods of time when young people are constantly together, such as in school or university, but as soon as they are established, we pull them apart.
Starting during World War Two, moreover, a false academia combined with the corruption and destruction of the war, gave rise to the Sexual Revolution. We commonly think of that as arriving in the 60s, but in reality it probably really started in the 1940s with the publication of Kinsey's false academic narratives. That was the first shot, so to speak, and the publication of Playboy the second one. While Playboy was opposed in some localities into the 1980s, by the 1950s it was so well established, in spite of completely rejecting conventional morality, and in spite, moreover, of publishing photos of women younger than 18, that the ground had been massively lost. The pill followed in the early 60s, work patterns changed due to the introduction of domestic machinery, and sexual morality took a beating. Once its natural purpose was obscured, and then lost, which really basically took all the way into the 1990s, the widespread acceptance of homosexual sex was inevitable.
None of which means that a large number of people will take it up.
But what does mean, that some people, in some circumstances, will. And the unnatural conditions that we live in, amplified by societal moorings having been cut by the Sexual Revolution, help bring that about. And as society has chosen to simply embrace everything that deviates from the norm, and natural, as it applies to ourselves, those afflicted have almost no place to go, but deeper in, no matter how destructive that may be.
All of which is a good reason that people in this circumstance need blessings, if blessing are properly understood.
And which would, therefore, support Fiducia Supplicans.
But none of which suggests that the Church's view on sex is what is causing a decline in attendance in Europe, and that a wider acceptance of homosexuality as normal, as some would urge, would actually do anything. This all is a problem in the West, to be sure, but the underlying evolution of thought that some have, that this is all natural, is not supported by the evidence.
The evidence supports the contrary.
Which gets us back to our original point. African and Asia, for all of their problems, have lived closer to nature, longer, than we have. But that is rapidly changing, and in much of Asia in particular it already has. People who like to imagine that there is such a thing as broad progress, for which there is no good evidence, would argue that this is all progress, so that everything we have noted as a byproduct of the evolution of industry in the West will necessarily happen everywhere else. But that's not necessarily the case at all.
And indeed, in the West itself there seem to be an awakening of tradition, and a desire to return to a more rooted lifestyle. Ironically, evolutions in technology may bring that about. We know that populations are declining everywhere in the Western Northern Hemisphere, which is seen as a disaster but which in fact may emphasize this sort of return to the village.
Footnotes:
1. Obergefell is an incredibly weak decision which, if it were to reappear in front of the United States Supreme Court today, would be reversed. My prediction is that it will be within the next decade as it devoid of solid legal reasoning.
When it was handed down, it was my prediction here that it would cause massive social disruption and resistance, which in fact it has. Pollsters like to point out that the views on same gender unions have moved greatly since it was handed down, which is true, but what they seem to miss is that it was basically the last straw on the part of traditional social conservatives, as well as (Southern type) populists on forced social change. The latter group had long ago accommodated itself to divorce, to people shacking up, and begrudgingly to homosexual conduct but it wasn't about to be told that homosexual unions equated with marriage. In very real terms, Anthony Kennedy, whether he realizes it or not, has always been Donald Trump's running mate.
