Failures . . .

Feminism has long advocated for the idea that women do not need men and, more lately, that a toxic masculinity makes men even more unnecessary to women.  The news at Cornell must have shaken that idea a bit.  Women do need men.  They need real men and not impulsive children who do not know how to behave.  Even more than this, we all need men, responsible men, stand up men, who have learned how to act in public and in private.   A real man does not take advantage of a woman when she is drunk.  That was the rule long before feminism decided that women did not need men but somewhere along the way we stopped teaching this rule to men.  That is a sad indictment of society as a whole and the state of the family.

It is the failure of the home.  Sadly, too many boys are raised in homes without a positive male role model and either live in a vacuum without a man at all or with a poor example of what it means to be a real man.  Men do not act violently against women.  This is a failing of the home and a consequence of divorce which too often removes a male role model from the boys (or girls) in the home.  It is also a consequence of single parent families without a husband or father in the picture at all.  I am not pointing fingers but I have known of too many women who had children by several men -- none of whom has any active role to play in the lives of her children.  We have institutionalized this problem and made it appear to be normal.  It is not.

The boys so accused are not the dregs of humanity but the super achievers who are attending an exclusive university with so-called privileged backgrounds and checkbooks which brought them there.  It would be easy to condemn those from the wrong part of town or lacking any social standing but these are not the boys who apparently thought it was alright to take advantage of a girl who was vulnerable and whose judgment impaired.  That she was in that position was bad enough but that boys thought it okay to take advantage of her in that position shows how stilted and distorted our values have become.

It is the failure of a society without a common sense of morality and virtue.  When we organize society apart from commonly held values and a sense of what it means to excel, we are left with competing values or, worse, no values at all.  A common religion once taught such common values and a diversity of religions which should share in the ideal of monogamous marriage and fidelity within marriage, of children and the nobility of parenthood, and of the value of discipline and self-discipline should, theoretically at least, support this.  The track record, however, is not as good as the theory.  The sidelining of religion and the diminishing role of religion in life overall have both had their effect in accepting and tolerating a manhood which is simply a large size child with desires and wills that refuse to be ordered.

It is the failure of freedom.  We have made the goal of individual freedom so sacred that we justify and allow the worst abuse of that freedom.  Pornography is not wrong because it exposes nudity or portrays the sexual act between men and women but because it places both within the context of abuse, violence, exploitation, and every perverted idea of what sexual pleasure is or how to achieve it.  Porn is a mirror into the corrupt soul and we have insisted upon freedom in the extreme to make available even to children learning the rudiments of sex and their roles as men and women.  Little children cannot escape pornographic images or video and their understanding of themselves and others is framed less by any conversation with parents or religious figures or physicians than it is the secret images of the screen.

Our unsocial social media and the often crude and violent lyrics of contemporary music only aids in the reduction of men and women to their most base and crude selves.  Without positive role models in the home and without a religion promoting the roles of male/female and husband/wife built upon mutual respect for each other and those roles, our sons and daughters are left to exploit and be exploited without a counterbalance to the unrestrained pursuit of self.  What is there in our media that would insist that gang rape of a drunk woman is wrong in every circumstance and in every context?  If there is even a hint of doubt about the uniform condemnation of this in our media, then that media is corrupt and is corrupting us and making us more children than adults. 

As Christians we should know this better than most.  The elevation of human life and virtue is not in the pursuit of self but in self-control, living upright and decent lives with respect for others and a refusal to exploit another for personal pleasure.  There is a false sense of Christianity in which God is setting us free to pursue ourselves and our wants and desires but this fake version of the real faith is not being condemned as it should.  We are not simply our desires.  We are much more than this.  It is what distinguishes us from animals whose instincts define their behavior.  We are not them.  We are or ought to be governed by principle, by a sense of right and wrong, and by a willingness to pursue what is good and right and true and for the common good even when that conflicts with our wants or desires as individuals.  Christianity cannot guarantee that any will act in accordance with those morals and virtues but it at least provides a solid counterbalance to the desires that do what is right in their own eyes and in the moment.  It is not that this kind of thing never happened before or in the past when a sense of Christian virtue and responsibility was more universally held.  It is that without Christian virtue and responsibility there is even less to restrain us from our basest desires and the pursuit of want over goodness.  That none of these boys stopped this travesty from happening is another element of the weakness of our backbones in the face of what is tempting.  Indeed, this is one more example that what failings we have will not be improved by feminism or more competition between the sexes but by the triumph of constraint over desire and the life governed by conscience which has the power to make us do what is right even when it is not what we want.