Let’s Bring Back Guilt and Shame

Posted on | June 26, 2015 | 161 Comments

“I was twelve when I discovered porn.”

So begins “How I Came Out: Part 2 – My Bisexual Awakening” by Kaitlyn, a 22-year-old graduate of Pacific Lutheran University.

Please stop laughing long enough to think about this. Remember when “coming out” meant someone was actually, y’know, gay?

What’s the point of “coming out” as bisexual?

If you are actually with somebody of the same sex — which is to say, you’re in a gay relationship — then this could cause a situation at the family Thanksgiving gathering. But if all you’re doing, in terms of your bisexuality, is occasionally hooking up with partners of either sex, do you need to “come out” about that? Why?

 

Politics, really. Adding another soldier to the LGBT Social Justice Army in their Grand March to abolish normality. So if you ever had an “incident” at Scout camp or engaged in some “Wow, I was so drunk last night” shenanigans at college, it is now Urgently Important that you must tell everybody on the Internet. This is what Tumblr blogs are for.

Thanks for sharing your adolescent porn habits with us, Kaitlyn.

“Dear Penthouse Forum . . .”

Excuse my habitual sarcasm, but it’s hard to avoid suspecting that perversion was more fun when everybody knew it was wrong.

Now that every college has an LGBT club and every major city has a “pride” parade, the abolition of sexual shame has also abolished the frisson of pursuing Forbidden Pleasure. If nothing is taboo anymore — a lesbian comedian is hosting a popular daytime TV show and a former Olympic star makes the cover of Vanity Fair as “transgender” — where can anyone find the thrill of Guilty Secrets? As weirdness becomes more and more normalized in society, it also inevitably becomes more boring.

Young people nowadays can be excused if they find themselves wondering what life was like in the Bad Old Days, when fornication was regarded as a sin and sodomy was an abomination. Kids may be nostalgic for a society that required us to repress our unruly teenage impulses, when guys felt guilty for trying to get to third base with their girlfriends.

Well, we were supposed to feel guilty, anyway.

She’s your adolescent dream,
Schoolboy stuff, a sticky sweet romance.
And she makes you want to scream,
Wishing you could get inside her pants.
So, you fantasize away.
And while you’re squeezing her,
You thought you heard her saying . . .

“Good girls don’t,
Good girls don’t,
Good girls don’t, but I do.”

The distinction between Good Girls and Bad Girls was, of course, both a cruel fiction and a vital bulwark of social morality. Perhaps unspeakable depravity lurked in the subconscious of all those Good Girls whose respectable boyfriends were afraid to try to even get past second base. Certainly I was not the only long-haired rock-and-roll outlaw who suspected that most Good Girls secretly wanted to be Bad Girls. Yet the forces of repression were still strong — I grew up deep in the Bible Belt, where the Sexual Revolution didn’t win a sudden and complete victory — and the innate capacity for wickedness was restrained, so it is likely that most Good Girls believed they actually were good.

So, you call her on the phone
To talk about the teachers that you hate.
And she says she’s all alone,
And her parents won’t be coming home til late.
There’s a ringing in your brain,
Cause you could’ve sworn
You thought you heard her saying . . .

“Good girls don’t,
Good girls don’t,
Good girls don’t, but I do.”

Sneaky teenage guilt is ancient history now. Nothing is repressed in 2015. Perverts are marching down Main Street beneath the Rainbow Flag, declaring their pride in being abnormal, and anyone who fails to applaud the parade is condemned as a hater. As I’ve said, “Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of ‘normal’ as an achievement.” Feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — tends toward the conclusion that it’s wrong to be normal. These weird ideas, promulgated in university Women’s Studies programs, have been diffused through our culture to such an extent we may imagine young people feeling ashamed to confess that they are heterosexual. In the 21st century, a teenage girl’s peers would treat her as an outcast and a misfit if she were to declare her ambition was to fall in love with a nice guy, marry him, have babies and live in a 3BR/2BA house in the suburbs.

THE SUPREME COURT TODAY ORDERED THAT ALL
STATES MUST ISSUE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE LICENSES

Being normal is old-fashioned and old-fashioned is oppressive. Therefore, the Good Girl is now stigmatized for her virtue, because feminists tell her she should be “empowered” (Yes Means Yes!) to express her sexuality, while no one can condemn the Bad Girl, because that would be “slut-shaming.” Traditional morality having thus been totally inverted — calling to mind Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” — the teenage girl finds herself thrown to the wolves and expected to perform her “empowered” sexuality with that most horrible and hideous beast, the teenage boy.

And it’s a teenage sadness
Everyone has got to taste.
An in-between age madness
That you know you can’t erase . . .

“Good Girls Don’t,” as Doug Feiger sang in 1979, and it’s astonishing how this “in-between age madness” has gotten even more out of control now than it was in the Seventies, when more or less everybody in high school was on drugs. Let it be noted that Fast Times at Ridgemont High was actually based on a true story, a 1981 book by Cameron Crowe:

As a freelance writer for Rolling Stone magazine, Crowe went undercover at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California, and wrote about his experiences.

If that now-classic teen movie exaggerated reality for comic effect, many of us who lived through that era — before the AIDS epidemic, before mandatory “safe sex” lessons in public schools — nonetheless recognize the reality behind the laughs. There were a lot of real-life human tragedies amid all that sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Hearts were broken and lives were ruined, and the only thing that could possibly make sense of it all was the music on the radio.

You’re alone with her at last,
And you’re waiting til you think the time is right.
Cause you’ve heard she’s pretty fast.
And you’re hoping that she’ll give you some tonight.
So, you start to make your play,
Cause you could’ve sworn you
Thought you heard her saying . . .

“Good girls don’t,
Good girls don’t,
Good girls don’t, but I do.”

It’s a miracle any of us rock-and-roll kids survived that era. You might think we would have learned enough from our experience to prevent a revival of that deviant culture, but it seems that many so-called “grown-ups” learned all the wrong lessons from their decadent youth.

“Well, we managed to make it through all right,” these alleged adults seem to have concluded, “so let’s just let our kids figure it out for themselves.” Then one day you log onto the Internet and find a young Lutheran’s bisexual confession: “I was twelve when I discovered porn.”

Sex, Shame and the Dark Side

Kaitlyn’s kinky confession echoes “Belle Knox,” as the Duke University Women’s Studies major Miriam Weeks called herself in her video porn career. She appeared on The View in March 2014:

The 18-year-old . . . was raised a devout Catholic in a loving home in Spokane, Washington.
Miriam’s Catholic father Kevin and mother Harcharan, reportedly have been ‘floored’ by their daughter’s decision to turn to porn to fund her $60,000-a-year education at the elite school.
Miss Weeks said today that her parents were not aware of her decision to enter the porn industry but are now ‘absolutely supportive’ of her choice.
She added: ‘We tell our children through school and socialization that sexuality is bad’ before adding to the shock of the panelists that she had been watching online porn alone since the age of 12.

“Good Girls Don’t,” but good girls are a scarce commodity in a hypersexualized society where feminists adamantly insist that every girl has a right to be bad (Yes Means Yes!) while at the same time feminists denounce the bad girl’s male partners as sexual oppressors who are products of “rape culture.” Young people are understandably confused by this cacophony of demonic voices telling them they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. It seems that many teen girls do, and then wish they hadn’t done it. Pressured into playing the Bad Girl, they find themselves overcome with inexplicable feelings of shame.

“Dubious claims about ‘rape culture’ are an attempt to create an all-purpose scapegoat for the emotional dark side of promiscuity,” Robert Tracinski wrote in February 2015:

College campuses have long since been taken over by a culture in which casual sex with acquaintances is considered normal and where slightly outré sexual experimentation is strongly encouraged, all of it spurred on by alcohol, which figures prominently in most of these cases. But it’s clear that some young women are not psychologically prepared for this. They have casual relationships and hookups, but then feel regret and emotional trauma when the experience ends up being emotionally unsatisfying or disturbing. Then they are encouraged, by the feminists and “rape culture” activists, to reinterpret the experience as all the fault of an evil man who must have coerced them.
It’s a system which systematically preys on and exploits the emotional vulnerability of young women in order to use them as publicity fodder for an ideological agenda.

As bad as this is for college students who are “not psychologically prepared” to deal with the emotional consequences of sexual hedonism, this is happening to even younger girls. Consider this story:

An x-rated video of Vine star Carter Reynolds leaked Sunday that purportedly shows him pressuring his ex-girlfriend for oral sex, raising issues of consent and spurring Internet backlash.
The video is filmed from Reynolds’ point of view, with his pants pulled down and his erect penis exposed. His ex-girlfriend, Instagram celeb Maggie Lindemann, tells him “I don’t think I can” and repeatedly stresses “I am really uncomfortable.” Reynolds tells her to “do it,” and “just pretend (the camera) isn’t there.” Lindemann eventually curls up and stops looking at the camera. It ends with Reynolds saying, “Oh my gosh, Maggie.”
The duo has had a tumultuous relationship, with several breakups, the most recent of which was in May. Lindemann is 16 years old, and Reynolds recently turned 19, leaving issues of consent and statutory rape on the table depending when and where the clip was filmed, as well as child pornography issues depending on how old Reynolds is in the video. . . .
Fans and fellow social media celebs have taken to social media in anger over Reynolds’ actions.

Who are these teenage Internet “celebrities”? How is it that a 19-year-old boy gains a sort of cult fame by uploading iPhone videos, and then finds a girlfriend who is herself a “social media celeb”?

 

This kind of do-it-yourself adolescent notoriety is altogether commonplace in the 21st century, and there is no adult supervision to the process whereby kids become “famous for being famous.” So it was that Carter Reynolds, while still a high school senior in North Carolina, got more than 1,600 retweets by declaring “school can suck it” in January 2014. We fast-forward to June 2015, when Reynolds has exploited his Internet fame to get himself a famous Internet girlfriend, and now she’s the one who is commanded to “suck it.” Meanwhile, who is Maggie Lindemann and why is she so famous? She’s a pretty brunette from Texas, but if she has any actual talent or intellectual ability, you wouldn’t know it from reading her Twitter account, where more than a quarter-million followers await such of her delphic utterances as, “the cutest” (June 15, 351 retweets) and  “I regret you” (June 16, 570 retweets). After the leaked video of Reynolds trying to coerce her into a video performance of oral sex made headlines, Lindemann tweeted:

I’m ok and have positive people with me. Trust that this is being handled and I’ve been told I cant comment on it at this time. Love you.

That message got more than 3,000 retweets and 12,000 likes.

Something has gone terribly wrong in our culture, you see. Fame has been cheapened to nothing, and sex is even cheaper. These shallow pseudo-celebrities are made by the Internet and then broken by the Internet before most people have ever even heard of them.

Kids log onto the Internet to worship at the digital altar of their idols, crude vulgarians who seem to have no qualifications beyond their narcissistic craving for admiration. When it is predictably revealed that Carter Reynolds is a selfish creep — really? who could have imagined this? — we are subjected to pious lectures:

“Couples do stuff like that all time.”
That sentence just about sums up Vine star Carter Reynolds’ psuedo-apology on Twitter after footage of Reynolds pressuring his then 17-year-old girlfriend into sex leaked onto the Internet. . . .
Despite the widespread prevalence of intimate partner abuse, it’s one aspect of rape culture we tend to ignore, partially due to the widespread victim blaming that survivors experience.

Oh, give me a break! You’re telling me that no one had the slightest inkling that Carter “School Can Suck It” Reynolds might have profound antisocial tendencies? The parents of Maggie Lindemann had no reason to be concerned when their underage daughter hooked up with Reynolds via the 2014 “Magcon” tour? Why should we heed sermons about “rape culture” by the same “journalists” who otherwise act as publicity agents for the fame-junkie culture that turned a no-talent dimwit like Carter Reynolds into a celebrity? Whatever happened to shame? Whatever happened to making achievement and virtuous character the basis of respect? Stipulating that the rock-and-roll idols of yore were generally a bunch of sex-crazed drug addicts, at least they bothered learning to sing, play instruments and write songs. When did Carter Reynolds ever do anything that would cause anyone to think he was worthy of admiration? And did it not occur to any of his admirers that a famous idiot like Carter Reynolds might not have much respect for the idiots who admired him?

Let’s not be naïve about the habits of such people, OK? Don’t lecture me like I’m a fool in need of your enlightenment. We all know exactly what Carter Reynolds was doing when he tried to talk Maggie Lindemann into doing an amateur porn video. He was attempting to derive the maximum power from his unearned fame, to demonstrate to himself what a big deal he is, and to obtain actual proof of this, which he could then show off to his buddies: “Look, man, here’s Maggie doing it for me.”

How often must this lesson be repeated? Anytime a guy gets a naked picture or sex video of a girl, he’s going to show it to his buddies. Everybody knows this by now and, although many states have passed laws against “revenge porn,” such laws won’t stop a guy from showing his girlfriend’s nude selfies to his buddies. Therefore . . .?

Don’t do it, ladies, and don’t associate with guys who expect you to do it.

Let us not pretend, however, that guys are not also being damaged by the perverse sewer of our hypersexualized culture.

True story: A guy I used to know had a life nearly anyone would envy. Grew up in a fine family with a big suburban home, swimming pool in the backyard, everything. His folks were respectable Christian people, and my friend was intelligent and talented. By the time he was 30, he had established himself in a professional career, married and had a home of his own. My wife and I used to visit my buddy and his wife at their house and marvel at their good fortune. We lost touch with them after a while, but after about 15 years had elapsed, I looked up my old friend and was shocked to learn what had happened. He and his wife had gotten into “swinging,” he got involved in drugs, so his marriage ended in divorce and he lost his house and his job. He became addicted to both crack cocaine and Internet porn, had a complete nervous breakdown and, at the time I looked him up again, my buddy was quite literally living in his mother’s basement, trying to put his life back together.

Blame Satan or Blame the Patriarchy?

Nobody is bulletproof. Nobody is immune. Start ignoring the rules of normal life — those old-fashioned “oppressive” rules — and you never know what kind of evil you’ll find waiting to ruin your life, wreck your mind and destroy your soul.

People who deny the reality of supernatural evil in the world often pretend to believe that there are no consequences to their own selfishness, while simultaneously promoting ideologies that scapegoat other people collectively for everything wrong in the world. Instead of blaming evil on Satan, feminists blame it on the patriarchy, and do not realize how their non-falsifiable belief system turns man-hating into a religion. Why bother seeking any deeper explanation of Carter Reynolds’ thuggish behavior, when you can recite jargon about “intimate partner abuse,” “rape culture” and “victim blaming”? Everybody sings in unison from the Feminist Hymnal, including an 18-year-old Texas girl named Hayley, who recently explained on Twitter:

“I can’t hang with straight men because I’m too clumsy to be around things as fragile as their masculinity.”

See how obvious this is? Your masculinity is fragile, “straight men,” as any teenager in Texas could tell you.

This same young Texan posted her “coming out” notice on Tumblr:

I’m gay. This isn’t a joke. The past year I have really started trying to figure out my sexuality. I was always afraid of my feelings for girls because of seeing how my family and other people started treating and thinking of my lesbian sister. I was bullied and harassed severely in the 6th grade because of rumors of me being a lesbian, and that experience really damaged me and made me want to be the farthest thing from it, thus I repressed the feelings more and more. However, I started dating guys but in every single relationship I was in except for one, I found myself completely repulsed by almost anything sexual in nature . . . Even being romantic felt like I had to force it because I felt like it wasn’t fair for the partners who felt strongly towards me. I was just unaroused and attracted to it at all, and some of those relationships ended for the exact reason that I couldn’t give guys what they wanted . . . and it made me feel guilty and like something was wrong with me, and that’s what people told me, that something must be broken in me. For a while I thought and identified as asexual because of this lack of attraction, but because of the pressure of the environment and society I’m from, I tried to smother every romantic or sexual attraction I actually had, almost totally exclusive with women. And in college I hope to explore my heart’s desires at last. The past few months I have done a lot of introspection and realized it wasn’t sex and romance I was repulsed by — it was that I was put back by it with MEN. I’ve tried to convince myself I’m straight. I’ve tried to keep it all to myself. But I don’t think I will ever be happy until I can be true to myself . . . and the people around me. I know many people will think down on me because of this now. But I cannot keep sacrificing my own wellbeing to try and please others. . . . Thank you for listening, and I hope that you will try to understand.
This is the only social media I’ve come out to and it will probably stay that way for a while. I haven’t specifically come out with any of my friends either, only talked to a few how I was questioning. I’m mortified of coming out to my parents. After YEARS they’ve finally accepted my sister for being an open lesbian, but still see her as lesser as a person . . . I’m their “star child” and they care a lot about reputation. I can’t help but feel that I’ve failed them. It’s just . . . it’s hard.

Teenagers now publish their “coming out” stories on Tumblr even though they’re “mortified” their parents will find out. This suggests that (a) parents generally have no idea what their kids are doing on the Internet, and (b) the kids take this for granted. And we might further speculate that (c) what kids are doing on the Internet has a lot to do with the increasingly weird sex culture.

 

Think about it: Kaitlyn at Pacific Lutheran confesses she started watching Internet porn when she was 12, which was also the same age at which Miriam Weeks/”Belle Knox” started watching Internet porn. Maggie Lindemann hooks up with Internet celebrity Carter Reynolds and he’s trying to make her do a porn video. It’s possible to perceive a clear pattern here and, when I think of my old buddy whose life was wrecked by “swinging,” drugs and porn addiction, perhaps you can see why I’m intrigued by how young Hayley explains her lesbianism.

She “started dating guys,” but found herself “completely repulsed by almost anything sexual in nature” because she “couldn’t give guys what they wanted.” And what did these guys want? She doesn’t say, but might we suspect that what they wanted was for her to enact their porn-inspired fantasies, to be an insatiable love-slave who just can’t get enough?

“Oh, yeah, baby! Do me like that!”

Rather than being grateful, as any man should be, for the pleasure of a woman’s companionship, these guys become obsessed with sex as a performance and are inevitably frustrated that female human beings they meet in real life are nothing like the pornographic fantasy women they’ve been watching in Internet videos since they were 12 years old.

The War Between the Sexes has degenerated into utter savagery, as guys and girls alike are burdened with impossible expectations of themselves and each other. Would you be surprised to learn that Hayley from Texas, the “star child” whose parents “care a lot about reputation,” has a history of eating disorders and self-harm?

I can’t express to you the deep, passionate level of hatred I used to feel about every little piece of myself physically and mentally. You’re talking about a girl who felt so s***ty about herself that she’d obsessively weigh in, starve for days, purposely throw up food, and run 1.8 miles every day to rid herself of imperfection.

She went through “hospitalization following hospitalization,” she explained. “No matter how much weight she lost, she still managed to hate herself even more.” She got better and realized, “You can’t constantly call yourself names and dwell at yourself in the mirror and expect yourself to be happy with yourself.”

Why? What causes this “deep, passionate level” of self-hatred in young women? Feminist scholars, rather predictably, blame the patriarchy, throwing around terms like “objectification” and “trauma” to describe how girls learn to hate their looks so much:

Dr. Erchull and Dr. Liss, along with alumna Stephanie Lichiello, recently had a paper titled Extending the Negative Consequences of Media Internalization and Self-Objectification to Dissociation and Self-Harm published in the October online first edition of the journal Sex Roles. Their findings suggest that self-harm and dissociation, both outcomes associated with the literature on trauma, are related to self-objectification and media internalization. They suggest that objectification could be considered a form of insidious trauma or microaggression.

However, if the overwhelming power of “male supremacy” explains this, why is it that self-hatred is producing so much self-hatred in girls now, at a time when female students comprise 57% of college enrollment and there is more real sexual equality in Western societies than at any previous time in history? And why are some girls driven to these self-destructive behaviors while the vast majority are not? Did I mention Haylee also suffered from trichotillomania? This is a rare “disorder characterized by the compulsive urge to pull out one’s hair,” according to Wikipedia, and “may be triggered by depression or stress.”

Sibling Rivalry and Non-Random Coincidence

While the “star child” Hayley was dealing with these various problems, what was her older lesbian sister doing? You can read a 2012 online petition in which a lesbian in Missouri describes how she made “friends online with” Hayley’s older sister and the two lovebirds then spent two years “talking every single day, texting, chatting, and Skyping for hours on end.” Parental opposition stood in the way of their meeting in person:

In fact, we’ve tried multiple times to visit one another, including my 18th birthday, my high-school graduation and my senior prom. But every time, the only issue we’ve come across is Amy’s father, who has vehemently opposed her traveling up to see me.

The father was the bad guy, you see, for not letting his daughter (17 at the time) run off to Missouri to be with her lesbian beloved, and this was posted in a petition at Change.org! Is anyone surprised that, while the elder sister was engaged in this kind of behavior, Hayley was showing symptoms of extreme stress? Around the same time her older sister made her online lesbian love connection, Haylee says she “was bullied and harassed severely in the 6th grade because of rumors of me being a lesbian.” Yet while she has “done a lot of introspection” about her own sexuality, Haylee doesn’t seem puzzled by the remarkable coincidence that, while less than 3 percent of U.S. women are lesbian or bisexual, both she and her sister identify as lesbian. Haylee was “completely repulsed . . . unaroused and attracted” by males, and this is entirely their fault: “I can’t hang with straight men because I’m too clumsy to be around things as fragile as their masculinity.”

Maybe “straight men” in Hayley’s hometown have some particular problem with “fragile . . . masculinity,” but is it not also possible that there is something particularly “fragile” about Hayley and her sister? Given the pattern we have seen, wouldn’t it make sense to ask if early exposure to pornography might have had something to do with this? Go back to 2009, when Hayley was in sixth grade being “bullied,” while her older sister, 14 or 15 at the time, was evidently trawling the Internet in search of lesbian love. Then remember what Kaitlyn wrote in her bisexual “coming out” notice: “I was twelve when I discovered porn.”

Human behavior follows patterns, and those who subscribe to the “born that way” theory of homosexuality can speculate about genetic factors as explaining why two sisters in a small Texas town would both become lesbians. My own speculative theories, while certainly not denying the possible influence of hereditary traits that manifest themselves as tendencies, would seek the cause in family dynamics and disruptive factors in normal childhood development. The problem with trying to discover the etiology of homosexuality is that social science has declared such inquiries off-limits in recent decades. Everyone now must simply accept homosexuality, and never are we supposed to scrutinize too closely these “coming out” narratives in an attempt to identify non-random factors in the LGBT equation. We must all applaud the pride parade or else be condemned as haters.

#LGBT Everybody's got a letter in that acronym except 'N' for NORMAL. #Pride2015

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 25, 2015

My sexual preference is my wife. Other than that, I invoke my right to remain silent. #Pride2015

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 25, 2015

Shorter Supreme Court: SHUT UP AND BAKE THEM A F**KING CAKE, YOU BIGOTS! pic.twitter.com/VF1308YhNt

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 26, 2015

“Pride goeth before destruction,” the Bible says, but I wasn’t thinking that way in 1979. No, I was thinking about rock-and-roll.

“It’s a teenage sadness everyone has got to taste . . .”

 

Comments