'Make war, not love'
Jr, David R. Carlin
OF SEVERAL HINDS David R. Carlin, Jr. MAKE WAR NOT LOVE' DATING GETS DANGEROUS Once a semester I conduct an informal survey on boy-girl violence among a class of my community college students. I...
...Increasingly, violence was described as "obscene," while objections to pornography became hopelessly out of fashion...
...If the god of war and the goddess of love were opposites, they were opposites who attracted...
...we would have questioned the theory that sexuality and aggression are opposites that repel one another...
...This is not to say, of course, that hitting girls was never done in the good old days...
...I ask how many are aware of friends or relatives who are involved in situations in which boyfriends hit girlfriends...
...And it is boyfriends and girlfriends I ask about, not married couples...
...they say they are aware of such violent situations...
...But when, in an equally unscientific way, I ask people closer to my own age bracket-people, let's say, forty years old and up-whether they were aware of boyfriend-on-girlfriend violence back in their high school or immediate post-high school years, they say no...
...It is as if they were saying that sexuality is a potentially explosive force, so we had better link it with sobriety, routine, industrious-ness-lest it run out of control...
...but victims and perpetrators were reluctant to talk about it...
...They may have abortions and sexually transmitted diseases, but at least they've become kinder and gentler now that they are freed from the aggression-breeding hang-ups that afflicted early generations...
...between sex and aggression...
...But someplace in the back of our minds we remember "Make love, not war," and we think that these negatives are perhaps balanced out by improvements in character that have been realized among sexually active youth...
...They are more likely to sleep with their girlfriends nowadays, but they are more likely to hit them as well...
...They cannot recall any of their friends or relatives telling them about hitting or being hit...
...But people of my generation tend not to express those reservations very publicly for fear that the motive lying behind our reservations is not so much concern for the well-being of the young as envy that the generations who came after us have been having much more sexual fun than we ever had...
...many, in fact, are aware of more than one situation of boyfriend-on-girlfriend violence...
...Remember the bumper-sticker slogan that was popular twenty years ago: "Make love, not war...
...Now my students rarely come from low-income/inner-city neighborhoods, where one might expect the level of violence in general to be high...
...They were caught in bed together, you remember, by the husband of Venus, Vulcan, who trapped them by throwing over them a chain-link net he had made especially for that purpose...
...Just because we didn't hear about the phenomenon in those days doesn't mean it didn't happen...
...So we pretend to be much more tolerant and understanding than we really are...
...For every violence-ridden couple my students learn about, there are certainly others, perhaps many others, they don't hear about...
...Unpacking the slogan, it implied that aggression was linked with repressed sexuality while a regime of sexual permissiveness would lower the level of conflict and violence in the world...
...It was at about this time, too, that large numbers of people began coupling objections to violence in movies and TV with indifference to explicit sexuality in movies and TV...
...so the violence they are aware of takes place among dating couples ranging in age, I'd say, from sixteen to twenty-one...
...Like most people my age, I have always had some reservations about the sexual revolution...
...Now, if we moderns had even a touch of classical education we would have been suspicious of the "Make love, not war" slogan...
...The search for a justification for the sexual revolution will have to be carried on in a different quarter...
...This was a succinct and clever bit of propaganda against the Vietnam War and in favor of the sexual revolution...
...This is not a scientific survey, of course, and it proves nothing about levels of boyfriend-on-girlfriend violence in America at large or even in the communities my students come from...
...But wait: Today's victims and perpetrators are still reluctant to talk about it...
...Well, I've concluded that that rationale won't wash...
...As I grow old and cranky, this affords one more proof of the thesis I have been expounding for years in order to annoy my children, namely, that the world has been in a state of steady decline since the end of my boyhood...
...The ancients understood, then, that there is a natural affinity between Venus and Mars...
...We are aware, of course, that the sexual revolution has brought us a vast number of abortions, soaring rates of out-of-wedlock births, and a frightening spread of sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS...
...For the ancients told a tale about Mars and Venus, who were quite a romantic item...
...It is significant, too, that they married Venus to Vulcan, the least glamorous of the gods, the homely god with a limp, the only working-class god, who earned his living by hard manual labor at the forge...
...I have concluded-again very unscientifically-that there is a whole lot more violence among dating couples today than there was in my day...
...Every semester about 50 percent to 75 percent of the class respond positively...
...No doubt it was...
...Then he invited the rest of the Olympians to gaze at the trapped couple and have a good laugh...
...instead, nearly all of them are from middle-class suburban communities...
Vol. 117 • March 1990 • No. 5
