Naked Nomads

...Single men, in his view, are society's chief menace: they are frustrated, disoriented, and potentially violent...

...Those girls could go right to the top.' " Mr...

...First, the sweatered priest often leads a primarily unmarried band of followers in what seems a modern version of a tribal hunting party: the raid on public offices to demand concessions is followed by a presentation of symbolic trophies to the press, before an honor guard of spear carriers...

...Anyone who has had experience with these single men (charming, dedicated, and talented though many of them are) will share Gilder's misgivings about a social order, likea vastly expanded priesthood, in which monogamy is discouraged...

...Both women and men are integrated into the social pattern, and hardly anyone loses out...

...Demon Rum can be a cruel master...

...We are an equal opportunity employer...

...I think they're wrong...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1975 29 them they they have no significant sexual • Utc vt,f ia...

...Since that time he has treated his body as though it were a precious vessel...

...Even in the Canadian North, there's a limit to the investment anyone would make for the sake of monogamy, and a shrewd planner will stop short of advocating the capital investment that would be required to induce Gloria Steinem to settle down for the winter as the wife of a crane operator (we might do a little better with Germaine Greer...

...The town planners of the new Nortt have recognized what Gilder has formu 28 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 197...

...Plunkitt: On May 16 my boss, the Rt...

...The American people are not in fact following the lead of the radical feminists, and statistics seem to show that the sexual adventures of which we hear so much arise primarily among the relatively small group of the population to which the writers belong...

...The Thomas Paines of sex depend on the theoretical assertion that the release of sexual repression benefits the soul, and that free sex releases repression...

...a few have attained national celebrity...

...Partly, of course, this is a product of the Zeitgeist...

...Mills in his concern...

...More to the point, he is a scientific drinker, drinking only quality stuff rich in malts and various grains...

...The mining investor of the 1890s suffered no great loss whenever a couple of the boys in the Malemute saloon plugged each ()the, stone cold dead in a challenge over whore whose last name neither knew...

...The activist priest brings to his beliefs on social policy the same religious certainty that accompanies divine revelations...

...Single and divorced men have fewer women to choose from as mates, because the sexually powerful among their sex dominate female attentions...

...Turnipseed: There, there...

...Gilder bolsters his case of differentiation of the sexes by brief quotations from anthropological studies...

...Tyrrell, Jr.'s health...

...Swear off the jug, Mr...

...Gilder's book deals with their consequences...

...Indeed, it is to this psychological impact that he attributes much of the increase in crime in recent years, and the rising incidence of homosexuality and impotence...

...Yet there is an interesting difference between the other religious leaders and the priests in street clothes, and between the religious social leaders and the political or community leaders...

...To meet and deal with one of these men is to meet a leader strikingly different from the natural members of the group seeking redress...

...Led by many who demand high rank for themselves as social theorists, our living countrymen are the first to believe that they, as a whole and collectively, discovered sex...

...I quote it in its rather odd entirety so that you will get the full flavor of your editor's recent activities and perhaps understand Mr...

...Mills wants to warn your colleague against the treachery of spirituous drink...

...We might indicate the trend of such planning, and the reasons for it, by noting the new American frontier that is taking shape in a way that should provoke cries of anguish from the sexual liberationists, but doesn't...

...or, where the sexuality is not in fact repressed, the explosion of feelings of guilt...

...They don't praise him for being a humble ,male chauvinist, even though I think he's altogether too humble...

...To be plain about it, this novel doctrine puts free sex on the same ethical plane as free speech, and its supporters, including a number of our most popular writers of sex manuals, urge that free sex should be defended like free speech because of its contribution to individual enhancement and social progress...

...Several years ago Mr...

...The book itself, though quite small, is packed with repetition of what is after all a single apothegm, however brilliantly stated and clearly seen...

...No group offers such concrete corroboration of Gilder's view of the social threat of singleness than those celibate urban priests who, having lost interest in the rituals and traditions of their church, devote their tremendous unrestrained energy to the accomplishment of social policy objectives...

...rThe by George Bootblack Washington Stand Plunkitt Dear Dr...

...The fact that he portrays his sex as naked nomads and pitiful incompetents wins him no merit badges...

...They won't marry you because they feel sorry for you, George...

...In new towns, deliberately designed and carefully planned by sociologically trained architects and engineers, forces of workers are mining and shipping ores under climatic conditions as extreme as those of Siberia...

...The unstable patterns of priestly behavior—which Gilder describes as characteristic of single men in general—are joined with two other painfully trying characteristics...

...The "sexual revolution," he argues, can be liberating for some people, particularly those men who, for reasons often connected with power and wealth, are most attractive sexually...

...The investors want to safeguard the money they have put into the acquisition of heavy, complex machinery, and the transport of that machinery, sometimes by air, to the remote North...

...I am referring to those settlements in northern Canada and Alaska which are cut off from highway access to the main body of Americans as rudely as were Dodge City and Tombstone...

...not the ones you want...

...The accounts are intended to improve debater's points, but they are neither good fiction nor effective parable...

...To the official, who stands warily in the background and hears the "concession" which he was all too ready to give anyway described as though it had been wrung from his beleaguered body by superior force, this exercise seems less motivated to redress wrongs than to offer a proof of manhood...

...Thus, for all their panting for the virtues of free sex and open marriage, the advocates of free sex remain remarkably silent when new towns, new settlements, and new housing developments emerge, basing their physical arrangements on the expectation that monogamy works best...

...Monogamy," he writes, "is egalitarianism in the realm of love...

...Or to claim that men in the North are basically different from men further south...

...Wilbur D. Mills, and many other legislators and members of the press corps received a copy of the following press release from your editor, a Mr...

...Tyrrell became attracted to the or- ganic foods movement and then to various health foods...

...Although these tasks remain crude, rough work, they are now largely mechanized, with a capital investment per worker vastly higher than that pro...

...and that they are more prone to disease, insanity, and all forms of criminality...

...They have a venerable profession, and their record during America's participation in the war eloquently bespeaks their friendliness toward America and the American way of life.' "Tyrrell is seeking the support of all concerned Americans and urges them to write their Congressmen and Senators on behalf of his petition...

...but this is what they think they believe...

...legalized abortion and contraceptives, which open the avenues of comfort and ease to the unwed...

...Gilder is particularly concerned about the psychological impact of free sex on single men, which he believes has disasNaked Nomads by George Gilder Quadrangle $7.95 trous effects for society...

...It is therefore fitting and proper that Gilder, for one, should assert a contrary case, marshalling some facts and much conjecture and wit to suggest that free sex is in fact exceedingly expensive...

...Or at least (even in those modern urban circles where it is unfashionable to say so) most people still believe that monogamy works better than any other sexual order that has yet been devised, a statement covering a large sweep of history and geography...

...But if they are to be answered, it cannot be by the inflation of an apothegm...

...Regrettably, Gilder's book will probably fail to persuade people in 1975 that the problem of sex in society cannot be solved by the simple nostrum of Egalitarianism...

...Something of the same calculus has to be performed on American marriage away from the frontier...

...You never heard of a St...

...yet we face a hierarchy of ideas in which the newest is necessarily best...

...They don't want to be the bearers of virtue, as Lynda Nochlin, a Vassar teacher, scornfully puts it...

...I do not mean to suggest that sweatered priests are the only white leaders who affiliate themselves with the causes of the poor and the nonwhite...

...By free sex, they mean such practices as so-called open marriage, involving consensual and other nonexclusive extramarital couplings...

...I say this despite my suspicion that most of those who mouth great paeans to liberation or libertinism do not really disagree with Gilder's basic view that monogamous marriage is essential to social stability and to most human achievement...

...Now the remarkable feature of Gilder's short book is not that it is particularly well written or that it is persuasive to the unpersuaded, but that it should have had to be written at all...

...Bui it's a much more serious matter when Labrador dragline operator with five mil...

...I think she's wrong...

...But when monogamy breaks down, then many—particularly single men and older women—do lose out...

...Tyrrell's diet is not only an organic orgy, but it is mostly liquid and highly digestible...

...As evidence of the persuasiveness of this belief, let me point to an undeniable fact: ours is the first generation to pride itself on welding sex to egalitarianism...

...Othet large forces of men are constructing mammoth hydroelectric projects in the wilderness of the Labrador back country...

...Priests in sweaters are found in the front of tenant movements and movements for community control of schools and other municipal institutions...

...It is, in these terms, "chauvinist" to suggest that there is some reason for the ancient habit of differentiating roles on the basis of sex...

...But its repetition, onwhich Gilder founds his rhetorical method, must strike my benighted countrymen as perverse, outdated, or cranky...

...Gilder further argues that the new welding of sex and egalitarianism actually has very inegalitarian and hierarchical -implications...

...Strong drink lightens the spirit and takes off the chill, so to speak...

...vided in the frontier mining towns of the nineteenth century—and this investmeni has several implications...

...P.S.: Senator Kennedy joins Mr...

...He puts forth a panoply of statistics, showing, e.g., that single men are more likely to be unemployed than married men...

...Likewise older women whose husbands take the cue from emerging mores and leave their wives for younger, more attractive bed-mates, have nowhere to turn...

...Is anyone prepared to argue the point...

...I am not referring now merely to a demand for "equal rights" for women, whatever that may mean...

...lated, and which I think most people only pretend not to accept...

...The pride occasioned by their ingenious invention may, as my informant suggested, suffuse all young people at all times and in all places, but I would claim for the present generation of Americans a unique distinction in the field of sexual discovery...

...You are taking an unduly negative position toward one of nature's most benign forces...

...His major argument is that free sex requires men and women to be freed from the bonds of monogamy, and that such freedom actually tends to destroy men, with disastrous results for society as a whole...

...Turnipseed...

...Every big city agencydealing with poverty and race has become familiar with them...

...It is no accident, he points out, that polygamous societies—such as the Islamic world—have the most hierarchical distributions of power and wealth...

...The factual basis on which the benefits of free sex are established is, to put it mildly, rather sketchy...

...Perhaps, as a third possibility, one shouldn't bother to make a case for monogamy...

...The press release read: "For Immediate Release "(Bloomington, Indiana)—Describing American immigration authorities' refusal to process three female employees of Annie's Saigon Bar as one of the "most blatant acts of male chauvinism and arrant bigotry displayed by America in many years," R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., editor-in-chief of The Alternative magazine of Bloomington, Indiana, announced today that he, the magazine's publisher, and the magazine's managing editor, intend to sponsor the three young women and to see to it that they are brought into the country with the rest of the South Vietnamese refugees...

...Monogamous domiciliary investment is far costlier than the installation of single men's barracks and a few two-story "saloons," but the added investment pays for itself, even over the limited fifteen-year life typical of some of these northern mining towns...

...We live in a period in which all people are not only equal but interchangeable...

...Tyrrell, Jr...

...There is no doubt in my mind that almost all advocates of free sex also advocate the alleged right, now being debated in Episcopalian circles, of women to perform the holy sacraments...

...Tyrrell is asking for the support of all 'serious civil libertarians' in his attempt to bring the women to America...

...Cordially, Kenneth Turnipseed, Press Secretary to Wilbur D. Mills, M.C...

...The overwhelming majority of the population accepts it...

...The danger, rather, arises from the self-perpetuated immaturity of a settlement made up almost entirely of single men...

...I daresay that there is almost total overlapping of those who believe that women should be allowed to become Episcopal priests and those who believe that Roman Catholic priests should be allowed to marry...

...One wonders, then, whether an effective literary case can be made for monogamy and against sexual freedom, or whether we partisans will fall back in the end on religious insights...

...One probably does better to read the original works, with their overwhelming data on the differentiation of sexual roles...

...But for large numbers of others, the new morality has brought not release but new, and perhaps deeper, frustrations...

...Better he should spend the nigh arguing with his wife over a bac four-spade bid, than spend it hand wrestling his union brother in the saloor for the right to go upstairs first...

...but it is not chauvinist to believe that a newly popular idea is better simply because it is new...

...It means one to a customer...

...not today...

...His arraignment of bachelorhood for men and for society is serious (although some of his fictional entries detract from the seriousness without adding to the wit), but Uiider has made iio effort to examine why marriage appears defective to so many American women today, nor what they currently expect from it...

...In fact it is a competence which he possesses in several different languages...

...In the present mood of their spokespersons, women are insulted by the suggestion that they should be motivated by anything other than self-advancement...

...The uncloistered nuns who offer immediate, first-hand nursing and home care for sick poor families feel just as deeply as the priests, but stop far short of militant, politicized partisanship...

...Tyrrell, Jr...

...He drinks only for his health, though I have often seen him make the educative gesture of drinking "to" the health of others...

...To save that initial investment, the planners encourage them to make another investment...

...If Mr...

...Unmarried himself, as he constantly reminds us he is, Gilder tends to romanticize the monogamous way of life...

...has been overworking and would like to take a sabbatical to Bethesda Naval Hospital, Mr...

...and the wide acceptance of the belief that each person's body and sex habits are His or Her Own business, exclusively...

...nor are they the only religious leaders involved...

...While Gilder and I agree that monogamy is better for society, we live in an era when women want to know how much better, and at what cost to the picture they have been given of themselves...

...Bernard rescue dog lugging a gallon of milk around its neck, did you...

...We would love to have these women in the office,' Tyrrell said...

...The whiskeys he favors are laced with corn, and, for energy, sugar...

...If Gilder wants women to demand that single men marry thew._ he will, I think, have to persuade them that men are at least slightly better than the useless sad-sacks he depicts...

...We cannot, however, ascribe all of the lack of persuasiveness in Naked Nomads to causes outside the book's jacket...

...that they are five times as likely to be convicted of rape...

...Gilder's bitter incrimination of the singles life is unilluminated by a discussion of marriage, and while I agree that society has an interest in marriage, it does not follow from the blues of bachelorhood that there is not grave difficulty in wedlock...

...Mills' solicitude for Mr...

...It is a mode of rationing...

...Second, the priestly leadership on a specific issue is likely to evaporate without warning, wheeling to pursue a wholly different social goal, in collaboration with another group, perhaps in another part of the city...

...They insist on building houses suitable for family homes, shopping centers, schools, meeting rooms, and recreational centers...

...This differentiation appears over and over again in widely separated cultures...

...Not having made an attitudinal survey, I have no data to support a second hypothesis, namely that these same people believe that priestly celibacy is not normal...

...It could be eradicated only by the political wielding of a cultural authoritarianism whose toll in human freedom remains uncounted by those who insist that sexual differences are "merely" physical...

...Sobriety is the only enduring high...

...Dear Mr...

...it must set the problems of marriage against the problems of singlehood...

...His assurance over values is accompanied by a personal intensity that may reflect the far side of repressed sexuality...

...Tyrrell, Jr...

...Only such a belief enables the newly-experienced to escape the repulsive realization that survivors of similar ecstasies have turned into the stodgy dullards he recognizes as his parents...

...One way to explain black poverty," according to Gilder, "is to point out that 39 percent of black men are single, compared to 27 percent of whites...

...It is ironic that because Gilder hopes women will choose virtue, he is labeled by Time magazine the number one male chauvinist of our time...

...that can be taken care of quite readily...

...simple divorce...

...I suggest you give this matter some more thought, Mr...

...I am talking rather of the demand that all persons be allowed equally to enjoy sexual experience on whatever terms they may prefer, and that government—the establisher of equality—must protect and advance the cause of sexual equality with the same zeal with which it is charged to establish and defend equality in other spheres...

...GWP 30 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975...

...A second, highly suggestive way in which those who vocally disagree with Gilder's evaluation of the singles life betray their actual acceptance of his proposition arises in connection with sex in the religious life...

...To be persuasive, a contemporary argument for monogamy must measure both sides, not merely one...

...lion dollars in diesel electric equipment al his fingertips burns out a shaft bearing tc demonstrate his machismo and his skill tc the nearby crane operator who is his riva for the hand of some peripatetic pros titute...

...These are energetic working girls,' said Tyrrell...

...Once Gilder has cleverly stated this proposition, it seems to me self-evident...

...Unfortunately, duodenal ulcers are likely to result from the attempt to ignore the pretentious bombast about wifely slavery, male chauvinist outrages, and the beauties of liberating men by assuring Better a Labrador machinist should spend the night arguing with his wife over a four-spade bid, than wrestling his union brother in the saloon for the right to go upstairs first...

...Personally I have never met an alcoholic who did not have wonderfully dilated arterials, a voluptuous blood flow, and superb laxation...

...They—the planners—want no part of the new (and very old) sexuality . They perceive that the threat to male stability does not arise from sexual deprivation...

...E:slues, next year the sexual freedom fighters might do better...

...When he runs out of pithy remarks and brief quotations, Gilder offers small fictional accounts, largely of unhappy and feckless single males...

...Mills would be glad to use his good offices, not only at Bethesda but at any of the other numerous hospitals frequented by Congressmen in this area...