Editor’s note: This commentary is by John Klar, a Vermont grass-fed beef farmer, and an attorney and pastor who lives in Westfield.
[I]n the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, our society is alive with “#MeToo” discussion about sexual assault. College campus and military rapes have steadily increased in recent decades, along with an exploding pedophilia industry. It is high time our nation had a more blunt conversation about this scourge.
But then the blame starts. The anti-male comments and memes are everywhere, and if someone dares to interject that this is stereotyping and unhelpful, they are attacked as justifying rape or as “part of the problem.” I will argue here that our declining morality in America is revealing itself through immoral males (and females), but is not being caused by maleness. The rush to label all whites as privileged and all men as predators is so profoundly counterproductive to useful conversation as to be a sort of unconscionable assault of its own.
Moral relativism, in vogue in America for decades as the moral bedmate of secular humanism, teaches that there is no absolute truth: that morality is thus malleable and varies from culture to culture. By this view, cannibalism is not immoral except to those “judging” such a culture from the outside using its own separate but no-more-valid mores.
But now in our rape culture, maybe we should reassess that idea of absolute truth and the Judeo-Christian traditions we have so gleefully abandoned in the name of “liberty.” Maybe it is an absolute truth that rape is always wrong.
Secularism, dominant in America, has long been on the attack against faith traditions like marriage and monogamy. In our Huxleyan world, marriage is eschewed — abstinence from sex is ridiculed; abstinence from marriage is counseled as wisdom. Why have commitment when one can have “friends with benefits”? Our youth blur the definitions of sex, gender and orientation while they trade nude photos of themselves on the internet.
Secular humanism teaches that we are not immortal images of a holy God, but atoms cobbled randomly and purposelessly together to form living machines that die and have no accountability beyond this world. That is, it teaches us to reduce the human to the animal, to the inanimate, to the reduced objectivity of flesh which underlies the sin of objectifying another person’s body for personal sexual gratification.
And so our boys are taught in school that sexuality is a bodily function that can be satisfied without all those trappings of guilt. Our culture sneers at monogamy while AIDS and herpes thrive. Pornography, staunchly defended in the name of liberty and free speech, seeps into most children’s lives from little corners of the computer screen. Popular horror movies are steeped in sexuality and sexual violence, but one is laughed off as a prude for suggesting that such things have no useful place in the human heart. The amount of brutal violence that our children encounter in action movies, thrillers, sitcoms, murder “reality” TV and interactive video games is a barrage that affects the soul: the psychological, intellectual and spiritual dimensions that comprise the human consciousness. But when these brainwashed zombies go out and kill, our society blames the guns rather than undertaking the more complex task of assessing in the mirror where our “culture” is leading us. Is it the “gun culture,” or is it the “entertainment culture” that glorifies sadism?
Even more so with sexual objectification. We have experimented on a generation or two of our youth, and now the country is shocked that the problem of sexual predation has been exacerbated. How many boys entering college in 1952 envisioned women as future wives to be respected and revered, many of the men themselves virgins taught to stay that way until wedlock? Now we have young men entering college and the military who are quite experienced, do not burden themselves with long-term complications like commitment, have no concern for judgment by a higher power, and have been conditioned to see their sexual desires not as something to discipline but as a healthy urge they are to embrace and enjoy. In our society of instant gratification and increasing narcissism, is it any shock that they feel entitled to female flesh as much as to any other commodity? That their minds are fixated on physical pleasure rather than a deep and committed relationship? Sexuality itself is cheapened and tarnished by such promiscuity, as sex is exponentially more profound in a monogamous and committed relationship. (But our society did not teach them that …)
Many are blaming maleness as the cause of men being what this culture has conditioned them to be. Yet Harvey Weinstein is scum not because he is male, but because he is immoral. If we are to seek solutions, let us analyze the proper cause of the problem. Our secular society scorns that which is chivalrous and moral, while criticizing men for not being chivalrous and moral. Our culture wants it both ways — moral liberation and moral restraint at the same time — and it doesn’t work that way. The roots of sexual predation are linked not to DNA and gender, but to a society’s choice of its moral truths. When it comes to rape, men are not “born that way”: rapists have been inculcated.
