Playboy Meets Ms.
October 11, 2016
What? This man guilty of vulgarity! What a surprise!
STEPHEN BASKERVILLE writes at The Daily Caller:
This election will be remembered as a metaphor for our civilization. Though many people dislike both candidates for diverse reasons, one underlying subtext has now emerged into the open that shows there is still a very clear difference: the power of sexual indulgence to determine our politics.
The consequences of uninhibited sexual freedom are now as explicit as a pornographic movie. Both candidates are not only products but pioneers of the Sexual Revolution, and together they personify its political dynamic.
On the one hand, Trump epitomizes the personal hedonism of the Sexual Revolution – the side dominated by men. (He is not the first, but his case is the most politically critical – more than, say, Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton.) This side of the Revolution came first chronologically. Playboy magazine and its imitators came on the scene in the 1950s. This represents sexual freedom for its own sake, with no pretense at any larger principles.
Shortly after, we began to see the political side of the Revolution. This began with the “free love” of the beat and hippy generations, which transformed unlimited sexual freedom into a political statement: an act of rebellion against all authority. This soon transformed itself into the more aggressive and authoritarian feminism.
Read the rest of Baskerville’s article “The Sexual Revolution Triumphant” here. He ends with this:
Trump has one chance, and so do the rest of us. The only way his apology will come across as sincere is to directly confront the sexual decadence of our culture and start showing us that he understands the full consequences of his own foolishness, not least in handing political power to sexual radicals.
That would mean putting aside his third wife. Fat chance. Trump has lived a long life of unrepentant hedonism. The locker room talk is the least of it.
As for the feminist, the latest confessionals of the traumatized female victims of Bill Clinton, who is the third character in this cast of liberated candidates, suggest that she may ironically meet her undoing the same way she met her success: on the coattails of her man.
To the woman also he said: I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions: in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee. [Genesis 3:16]
MASSACHUSETTS, UNITED STATES – JUNE 11: Class leader Hillary Rodham of Wellesley College talking about student protests which she supported in her commencement speech. (Photo by Lee Balterman/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
