Sexual Suicide

...Feelgoods, Black Panthers, white rats, answer men, evangelical lesbians, sensuous psychiatrists, retired baseball players, pornographers, dolphins, swinging priests, displaced revolutionaries, polymorphous perverts, and Playboy philosophers-all bouncing around on waterbeds and typewriters and television talk .~Jmws, making 'freedom' ring the cash registers of the revolution...

...From this Gilder does not argue that women might not abandon family life to replace men in the job market...

...2) Abolishing all public measures, such as minimum wage laws and investment subsidies, which make machinery appear to be cheaper than labor...

...The country was indeed built by people uniquely given to hard work...

...To the women's liberation movement all jobs have some hitherto unnoticed inner worth...

...Indeed Four Reforms, shorter, even better written, more (somehow) available, is in ways too obvious to belabor a continuation of the position papers sections of Unmaking, leavened by seven years reflection, and tempered, his detractors will say, by his status as kept conservative of the media...

...Buckley's most important book after The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966), which, though a near-perfect exposition of the conservative in politics, and containing a cornucopia of deliciously sound suggestions about how to make things better (or at least work), passed into and out of the book stores with nowhere near the serious evaluation it merited...

...The past decade, Gilder writes, has been "a period when every group of complainants and protesters, however well situated--from Ivy League students to suburban women-are decked out in the heroic vestments of the civil rights movement: 'the (student) (woman) (junior professor) (professional baseball player) is the nigger of the world...

...Mead comments that this lack of enjoyment was "not because public rewards given males are denied to them--influence, power, wealth, are all open to women---but because the sensuous creative significance of the female role of wife and mother is so undervalued...

...Gilder accomplished his primary anthropological research among the Ripon Republicans of eastern Massachusetts...

...It has little latitude for the pattern of impulsiveness, aggressiveness, and immediacy, arising from male insecurity without women---and further enhanced by hormonal activity...

...If the problems were merely poverty and unemployment, miraculous relief could be achieved by the application of a few rather simple remedies: 1) Providing through the public employment service complete computerized regional job information, so that anyone looking for a job could see where openings exist for his particular skill or lack of it...

...This reviewer, a conservative of libertarian persuasion, will of course parcel out the gold stars and black marks other than will his brethren further into the traditionalist mold...

...But Cavett's judgement is ridiculous...

...you have nothing to lose...

...It takes no ideological straining to reach this hypothesis: when men are asked why they work, much of the time they will simply pull out a picture of their wife and kids...

...We have The Alternative April 1974 19...

...Gay liberation, pornographic glut, and one-night trysts are all indices of sexual frustration...

...For it is destroying the cultural preconditions of profound love and sexuality: the durable heterosexual relationships necessary to a community of emotional investments and continuities in which children can find a secure place...

...If for no other reason than style alone--and there are those who slide out of considering Buckley's ideas by dwelling on his language and cooing about his syntax--Four Reforms is a gem...

...But the other proposal, arising out of his just and decent and worthy concern for the aged and his belief that young people make better students after a breather between high school and college and would be better people by participating in the tending of the oldest living generation, passes too quickly before us, as if there were no question therein of compulsion...

...4) Extending complete health insurance to the entire population, because poverty and unemployment are closely associated with illness and disability...

...I can think of only a handful of his recent essays, as for instance that to the Conservatives of New York remarking Agnew's fall, which match it for pure grace...

...Women domesticate and civilize male nature...

...all usually disclose a failure to achieve profound and loving sexuality...

...If that which is somewhat optimistically called "the conservative movement" has any cohesiveness at all, an iffy proposition, it is a negative glue: we are agin' 'era---the liberals, their gargantuan state, their reflexive dogoodism, their tricky moralisms, their with-it causes, their lapping after this fashionable minority and that...

...Knowing only the discontent they felt with the female roles, the modern feminists have placed all their hopes for amelioration in an assault on traditional male roles, which they seek to adopt, or, if that is impossible, to destroy...

...We have here Mr...

...Perhaps it is the conservative temperament (which, not so incidently, William Buckley lays no claim to) that occasions this reluctance to offer workable suggestions...

...Buckiey does not propose that all young people have to spend this year "in public service," only--only...

...Sex," his book begins, "is too important a subject to leave to the myopic crowd of happy hookers, Dr...

...The remaining question, and one of faint interest, is whether the book is the prescription for society or just it's autopsy...

...Bad sex drives out the good, and the worst of all--philandering and homosexuality-are exalted...

...Yet, from the other side of the globe in the South Pacific aborigine, he stumbles upon some--shall we say--strikingly similar phenomena...

...In Sexual Su/c/de George F. Gilder refutes this allegation with a move that must be familiar to any reader of murder stories: he produces the corpse-civilized society, or what is left of it...

...When a society deliberately affirms these failures--contemplates legislation of homosexual marriage, celebrates the women who denounce the family, and indulges pornography as a manifestation of sexual health and a release from oppression-the culture is promoting a form of erotic suicide...

...Presuming that womanhood has no intrinsic worth and judging the career world from their own exalted social position, these feminists have joined the crusade to move American women out of the home and into the market place apparently to find creativity and self-expression behind a sewing machine...

...His assumption is derived from the women's liberation movement's false system of antitheses, by which Playboy philosophers and right-thinking feminists would be considered diametric opposites...

...But the root of the problem is not economic but ideological...

...The feminist's initial error is one common to reform movement...

...5) Reforming the tax system to reduce its burdens on the poor...

...However, in its efforts to root out masculinity the women's movement has become sadly lost...

...Single men are 21 times more likely than married ones to be incarcerated in correctional or mental institutions: "Together with the disintegration of the family," these unsocialized males "constitute our leading social prob18 The Alternative April 1974 lem...

...It is because we have been so determined that not a penny of public aid shall be given to anyone that doesn't need it that our poverty programs absorb such huge funds without making much dent in the problem...

...Reduction of property and sales taxes comes first to mind...

...Count on Mr...

...Buckley's new book to gain him fewer new friends on the Right than he deserves...

...Probably I am thinking wishfully...

...3) Stimulating the economy, when necessary, by broadly based tax reductions rather than by public works (unless the public works are needed for excellent reasons apart from their contracyclical effects...

...Payment of a modest personal exemption to all persons before computation of income-tax liability would be a cheaply administered way of supplementing low incomes without destroying work incentives...

...count on it as well to rekindle libertarian-traditionalist bonfires...

...Men," Gilder writes, "commit over 90 percent of major crimes of violence, 100 percent of the rapes, 95 percent of the burglaries...

...On the contrary, "most people enjoy their real gratification not in the office or on the assembly line but in the domestic and sexual arenas...

...All of the above could be accomplished at moderate cost relative to amounts now being spent and without further increases in the public bureaucracy...

...But, in truth, women have everything to lose, and the women's liberation movement, it seems, is dedicated to losing it...

...Four Reforms is good news, and bad...

...At this juncture in history, with a Republican Administration using the massive apparatus of what once was the civil rights movement to enforce some of feminism's more pernicious doctrines, Gilder's one-man stand against the sexual revolution is a courageous and civic-minded act reminiscent of Horatio on the bridge...

...Sure, Mr...

...Never mind, they are these: he calls for a single, six-year term for the President and proposes a year of service to the aged by youths following high school, as precondition for matriculation at college...

...when we strut out with an idea for an alteration in the way things work, especially if, God forbid, some liberal should have come to a similar conclusion, we are sliced off from Four Reforms A Program for the Seventies by W'flliam F. Buckley, Jr...

...The crucial process of civilization," Gilder writes, "is the subordination of male sexual impulses and psychology to longterm horizons of female biology . . . . Modern society relies increasingly on predictable, regular, long-term human activities, corresponding to the female sexual patterns...

...Radical lesbians now follow Gilder around and, in the customary fashion of "liberators," try to disrupt his appearances on television talk shows...

...Dick Cavett finds linking together such various organisms incomprehensible, and he recently went to great lengths on his chatty television show to advise Gilder that the linking of such organisms must discredit Sexual Suicide...

...Buckley has mercifully confined to his Introduction, "two proposals, or reforms, which I prescind from the others" for reasons he doesn't care to reveal to us, reasons which I hope are owing to his unsureness about them...

...How does he do it...

...Yet, rather than being antithetical, these two groups---for whom love is free and ethics situational--are closely allied in the struggle for several crucial objr They are, as the other principals of Gilder's list are also, all agents--or, in the case of the dolphins and white rats, unwitting dupes--of the sexual revolution...

...As to the single six-year term, space precludes a rebuttal...

...The intellectual minority's compulsive discounting of family values leads to its snotty refusal to understand the majority's persistent opposition to gun control, busing, welfare, and the liberalization of abortion, drug, and divorce laws...

...It is precisely because we have tried so hard to enforce our work ethic that we have managed to eliminate all opportunity and incentive for many people...

...The liberal elite sees these issues in only abstract and somewhat opportunistic terms, because, instead of perceiving America to be a nation of families, it proceeds under the illusion that there are only independent, undifferentiated "human beings...

...Most Americans instinctually recognize, Gilder says, that "all these measures directly impinge on that sensitive psychological terrain, involving sexuality, children, and the family, which underlies the sexual constitution of the society...

...This is the ultimate and growing source of female power in the modern world...

...Freed" from their roles as providers, idle males will have the time to explore their other interests----such as hunting--although in urban areas there is notoriously little but human game...

...It is a wry paradox that in our own time such unfortunate results could stem from the reverence for so sturdy a virtue...

...The temptation to quote in hefty chunks must be resisted...

...They comprise 94 percent of our drunken drivers, 70 percent of the suicides . . . . More specifically, the chief perpetrators are single men...

...that they can't go to college without it...

...Gilder is similarly skeptical of the sensuous massage school of liberationist thought...

...Thus the first goal of some--and the tendency of a l l - - feminists is to sacrifice without ceremony what the New York Times Book Review has called "the nuclear family, that cradle of evil...

...Among these otherwise moderate Republicans he discovers sexual revolutionaries who share the upper class style of thought which curiously pervades the women's movement...

...Our reverence for work is a primordial remembering of the taming of the continent, with sleeves rolled up and sweat pouring down...

...R iew Sexual Suicide PERSONS WHO CONSIDER suicide morally okay frequently contend that it is an act which has a protagonist but no other victim...

...A kind of Gresham's law applies...

...So would a negative tax supplement to low earning...

...when the whole crowd is fitted with the Marxist trappings of a 'new proletariat': Women, students, children of the world, unite...

...Whenever the status quo becomes insufferable the inexorable first impulse of reformers is to further reduce whatever beleaguered traditional institution might be keeping civilization's head above water...

...The essence of Gilder's great deductive ability, as with most geniuses of detection, is his singular talent for making the proper connections...

...For most people," Gilder observes, "the one place they are least free, powerful, and individual is at work...

...by George F. Gilder Quadrangle $7.95 Once the feminists had pictured an illusory opposition, it was a simple matter to reduce all analyses into the unenlightening terms of oppressor and oppressed...

...Let us start with the bad, which Mr...

...This problem is in turn, Gilder says, largely the outcome of society's undervaluing what Mead called "the sensuous creative significance of the female role of wife and mother...

...But most men seek jobs so that they will be in a position to marry and raise a family...

...maybe it is that when on rare occasions such a suggestion is made (I think for instance of Frank and John Meyer's ideas about pollution, as outlined in an ACU pamphlet and as discussed by John Meyer in the May-June 1970 issue of The Alternative), it is universally ignored, by conservatives too...

...They can destroy civilized male identity merely by giving up the role...

...The lesbian advertising must certainly be effective, but Sexual Suicide is a brilliant, witty, and deeply perceptive book--one with perhaps enough merits to stand on its own...

...J. Whitney S t i l l m a n A NOT INCONSEQUENTIAL charge against conservatives is that they are good only at criticizing, not at proposing...

...Differing slightly from this reasoned judgement, Gilder sees society's main problem to be precisely those who are most free from that cradle of evil--unsocialized males...

...In her definitive book, Male and Female, Margaret Mead cites the case of a primitive society "where women do not enjoy being women...

...But we rarely come up with serious advocacy of change, enshrining Viscount Falkland's adage: when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change...

...He only points out that as well as an expensive daycare system to take care of the young, society will have to support a costly police state to handle the displaced males...

...So long as we stand negatively, we stand together...

...Single men comprise between 80 and 90 percent of most of the categories of social pathology, and on the average they make less money than any other group in society--yes less than single women or married women...

...Whatever, our forte is not programmatic policy-making, our strength is not in outlining useful reforms...

...Families headed by fully employed, low-wage fathers continue to be ineligible for public aid...

...Rather than show a fait accompli, Gilder produces the body theoretically, as a prognosis---one which a growing bad odor seems to confirm...

...Putnam $4.95 the fold by some segment of the Right...

...Similarly, the defense for today's assorted sexual liberation movements has been the highly publicized claim that their crimes are "victimless...