Who Is IOZ?: You Mean, Coitus?

Monday, March 07, 2011

You Mean, Coitus?

Now on the other hand, when Ross Douthat does know what he's supposed to say about a subject, the results are as cute and funny-looking as a little boy in a suit and tie; adorable, and yet, obviously, wrong. An insignificant change in the self-reported sexual activity of American youth presages a return to an era that never existed! Douthat is right that "social conservatives" aren't America's natural party of pessimists, but shit, they clearly constitute a natural party of fantasists; their intellectual ancestry less Edmund Burke than T.H. White; their natural geography less Middle America than Middle Earth.

47 comments:

Charles F. Oxtrot said...: So Rossie is trolling for a conservatively-minded (re sexuality, that is) woman who wants to engage in commitment-backed pre-marriage sex, eh? He must have had poor luck at the Church Social.; 11:05 AM
Anonymous said...: AAAAAAAAhahaha pre-marital sex.; 11:51 AM
Anonymous said...: Bla bla bla... I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If you don't let your kids play with themselves, they will grow up to be sociaopathic perverts. It is inevitable. There is nothing else. And we have to stop that horrible torture they call "circumcision".; 11:59 AM
LA Confidential Pantload said...: Sexual idealism? Fuck me. Say what you will about the tenets of Planned Parenthood, Dude....; 12:02 PM
Professor Coldheart said...: But there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the

I stopped reading at this point. Did I miss anything?; 12:07 PM
Anonymous said...: to prof. coldheart:
You have an iron stomach. I stopped at "New York Times" :)

No, really, the entire discussion about sex in mass media is one of the sadder jokes of superficiality of all time.; 1:13 PM
la Rana said...: Well there's not a literal connection dude.

I always get the sad feeling that Ross thinks casual sex is bad because no one ever wanted to have casual sex with him. I mean, when you read this, do you think prescriptive morality or desperate apologetics?; 2:11 PM
Anonymous said...: Douthat is a closet case married to a woman. It will take at least ten years for him to undo this and embrace his inner homo.; 2:11 PM
RedPhillip said...: @ Anon, 2:11pm:

No offense to any straight buddies here in the House of IOZ, but deities forbid that Douthat ever come out. I don't want him in my tribe. He should get him to a nunnery, or some such. Wherever there is an enforced vow of silence. (A basement where he's kept gagged and his hands in puppy gloves comes to mind, but I don't want to feed or clean up after him. Guess he'd starve and die gagged in his own waste -- which is fitting, in its way.); 2:56 PM
paul h. said...: I'm confused, are you really saying that there's been no change in sexual mores/behavior in the past 40 years, it's just all been business as usual, people have always engaged in this behavior, etc?; 3:33 PM
Leonard said...: Whenever I see his name, I think to myself "doubt that", with "doubt" pronounced the Canadian way ("doot").

And I also consider the horrific taint of any conservative working for the NYT. For them to employ you is, in effect, a huge RETARD sign plastered on your ass. You're the goto guy for weak arguments. You're the tame opposition. You're the very best conservative that money can buy.

In this case, a hilarious attempt to ground conservative social policy in Science! And not just any science -- an opinion survey! Well, we takes what science we can get, especially when we are the very best conservative that money can buy.; 3:52 PM
fish said...: Almost as bad as when bloggers start discussing what is funny.; 4:16 PM
Anonymous said...: I'm confused, are you really saying that there's been no change in sexual mores/behavior in the past 40 years, it's just all been business as usual, people have always engaged in this behavior, etc?

Not that you can't go back a lot further than this, but Henry Miller was writing about nice girls doing ass-to-mouth in the 1930s.; 4:42 PM
Anonymous said...: Lulz, I just read the fucking thing.

But they also see Planned Parenthood’s larger worldview — in which teen sexual activity is taken for granted, and the most important judgment to be made about a sexual encounter is whether it’s clinically “safe” — as the enemy of the kind of sexual idealism they’re trying to restore.

Taking it for granted that teenagers fuck is a "worldview"! Forget Henry Miller giving some broad the dirty sanchez, has this chin-free motherfucker ever read Aristophanes?; 5:03 PM
Anonymous said...: I read the fucking thing too. And now I want to kick that fat fucking fat fuck of shit in his fucking nutsack until his beady fucking eyes fucking bleed.

Please stop fucking linking to that fucking motherfucking sack of motherfucking shit. Thank you.; 5:43 PM
Anonymous said...: Is this, then, all that is left of our future (aka THE CHILDREN)? A new race of doughy, blathering pundits all of the Douthat/Matty Wiggles/Jonah Goldberg variety?; 6:24 PM
Michael Dawson said...: I don't know about you all, but when I get sexual idealism, I kinda like stepping into the bathroom...; 6:53 PM
The Mathmos said...: Potent lulz in this thread.; 8:29 PM
Michael J. Smith said...: Not that you can't go back a lot further than this, but Henry Miller was writing about nice girls doing ass-to-mouth in the 1930s.Cf. Pietro Aretino/Giulio Romano, I Modi. I don't recall whether ass-to-mouth was one of the series, but it's pretty diverting and inventive. The series, I mean, not ass-to-mouth. Though there's nothing wrong with that either.; 8:58 PM
Heywood Jablome said...: A doughy, goateed, talking vagina could write a better piece than this.

This man is obsessed with forbidden pleasures. He is oddly defensive of this woman's actions. What does he see that we don't?

Yes, IOZ is right that their natural geography looks like Middle Earth: a bunch of dickless midgets in awe of manly hero types and no women to ruin their fun.; 10:00 PM
Anonymous said...: Re a-to-m, I can just imagine Audrey Hollander reading these comments ... I mean like put your money where your mouth is, fellas ... uhh ... what I meant to say was ...; 10:45 PM
Soj said...: All hail the Crimson King!; 11:36 PM
Shards of Narsil said...: Don't mean a thing if they ain't got that Ring.; 10:25 AM
paul h. said...: Does anyone post here who doesn't just agree with everything IOZ says and imitate his style of writing? ... anyway, Henry Miller and Aristophanes (and, I don't know, Joyce's letters) aside, these have nothing to do with OVERALL cultural mores; yes, there was, e.g. plenty of buggery in ancient Greece but 100-way anal gang-bangs weren't a mouse-click away and perfectly acceptable for "sexually liberated" people ...; 11:33 AM
Heywood Jablome said...: what was a mouse click away in Ancient Greece?; 12:07 PM
LA Confidential Pantload said...: It's just a click away
It's just a click away
Click away, click away

- "Gimme Anal," Rolling Stones; 12:19 PM
Anonymous said...: As the Anonymous who brought up Henry Miller, let me suggest that you're falling into the common trap of confusing cultural mores with written history. I mean, the whole reason Miller was scandalous was that he wasn't some libertine. He was a perfectly normal boring married guy who was getting ass-to-mouth from nice Jewish girls, and the only strange thing was that he was writing about it.

Is there something new about being one click away from Three Holes, Nine Dicks? Certainly. But that's not the same thing as there being something new about three holes taking nine dicks. People fucked before the 1960s! There is nothing new under the sun! Don't be Ross Douthat!; 12:31 PM
Leonard said...: People read this blog because they like IOZ's style. Some might agree with him, too. But you can find writers to agree with anywhere. Even the NYT! You cannot find good writing just anywhere. Do you Douthat?

Stick around, young Jedi paul h, and maybe you will start to write like IOZ too. (BTW, part of Jedi training is the proper use of capital letters.) But yeah, there are certain contrary voices heard in these parts. Just not all the time. And anyway, if I am going to smack down IOZ it's got to be for something substantial. I mean, he's wrong when he says social conservatives "clearly constitute a natural party of fantasists; ...their natural geography less Middle America than Middle Earth." But this depends on what you mean by "natural", donnit? And are social conservatives more fantasists than any other faction in democratic/fantasist America? Hard to say.; 12:42 PM
paul h. said...: I also love IOZ's style, I just get a little tired of the blasé "everyone's been fucking forever, social conservatives are fantasists", as if, say, Byzantium in 800 CE or Tibet in 1600 CE or America in 1950 CE were, in the sense of OVERALL permissiveness of culture, and the overall proportion of people engaging in pre-marital sex and "taboo" sorts of sex has always been the same. They didn't call it a "sexual revolution" for nothing ... ffs; 2:26 PM
Anonymous said...: paul paul paul - have you read The Miller's Tale, fer crissakes? Do you know what the Wife of Bath's gap-teeth meant to Chaucer's times?

The amount of "Dark/Middle" Ages bawdy before Luther et al is well-documented, and they called it a sexual revolution because it was a revolution against a TEMPORARY aberration that started with the Reformation and reached its apogee with Victoria and her legacy ...; 2:35 PM
Anonymous said...: PS to Paul - the Catholics were never serious, Paul and Augustine notwithstanding ...; 2:37 PM
Mr.Fundamental said...: paul h., you dipshit with a nine toed woman, are you agreeing with the social conservatives when they shit their pants all over an op-ed, or blawg, and tell us that our society has come unglued and lost its moral bearings, and that people now fuck all willy-nilly in the streets so on and so forth? because that's the other edge of that fallacy, bubs, and I don't see fucking on the streets of my neighborhood. maybe you should just leave it alone before you hurt yourself. wave of the future! 100% electronic!; 3:10 PM
Anonymous said...: paul h., have you ever heard of Vietnam?; 3:17 PM
Anonymous said...: Everyone HAS been fucking forever! Social conservatives ARE fantasists!; 3:25 PM
paul h. said...: First let me be clear; Ross Douthat can be sanctimonious and more than a little annoying. I'm not defending social conservatism as embodied by Republican op-ed pages.

But again, one more try; I'm talking about general cultural permissiveness. (Focus especially on the words "general" and "cultural," which I think are being ignored here). Westernized cultures (whether in Japan, America, Germany, wherever) circa 1968 to the present day are truly something new, world-historically. Yes, of course there has always been bawdy 'low' culture which didn't adhere to sexual mores of the prevailing 'high' culture (or religious laws, etc.); yes, of course there have always been bohemians/artists/libertines who have flouted bourgeois morality. Yes, of course people have been doing these things behind closed doors forever.

AND YET, culture in general has changed in that there's an intensification and magification of sexual immorality (or, for non-traditionalists, "immorality", i.e. not normative according to the patriarchal norms of traditional morality, etc.) People were once more religious; people were once kept in check more effectively by traditional cultural norms; etc. This is all so obvious as to hardly need repeating, right? There has always been all kinds of coitus, sure, but let's be serious --- not as much, not as often, and not taken as publically and culturally acceptable by the ARBITERS of culture and not just 'low' culture or artists, etc.

But I mean, again, ffs; peasants in Chaucer's England were doing way more ass-to-mouth than Bennington College undergrads in 2011? Do you guys really think that? Were Tibetans in Lhasa in 1671 doing more anal gangbangs per capita as well?

Given the ideology of everyone posting here, you could spin this as "traditionalists were keeping people down for hundreds [or thousands] of years!" and still agree with me, right?; 4:27 PM
Anonymous said...: not only that, Paul ... they were doing a-to-m with whatever barnyard animals came handy ...
what is wrong with you ???; 4:28 PM
Pat said...: Does anyone post here who doesn't just agree with everything IOZ says and imitate his style of writing?

The hours I don't spend typing here I spend fantasizing that I'm home to visit my parents in the City of Bridges and IOZ deigns to plunge his truncheon deep within me. (Half kidding!)

Which, by the way, no one ever did until 1968.

(Okay, quarter.); 8:07 PM
IOZ said...: Someone oughta send paulie some Suetonius. Or, hell, the boxed set of Rome, more to the tastes of our depraved age.; 8:11 PM
Anonymous said...: paul, no, for real: From the Bible to the Greeks and Romans to medieval times to the Renaissance, there is mad assfucking, incest, polyamory, orgy enjoying, foot fetishism and such not in all the books you read in high school and college, usually presented as being totally normative. I mean, didn't you notice this stuff? Bennington undergrads doing ass-to-mouth isn't western historical let alone fucking world historical.; 11:18 PM
Michael Smith said...: Paulie pulled in a concept I haven't heard invoked since Spiro Agnew was gathered to his fathers: "permissiveness." As if people mutually amusing themselves in the flesh were an ideology that somehow needed to prove its premises. Permission, in the Paulie/Agnew world, apparently bears the burden of proof, and prohibition enjoys a rebuttable -- no pun intended -- presumption of legitimacy. It took us millennia of "progress" to get to this point. Wonderful thing, progress.; 1:00 AM
Leonard said...: This is all so obvious as to hardly need repeating, right?

Yes. But the fact that you are unsure of this shows... what? I respectfully suggest that you will enjoy your time in the Chateau IOZ much more if you have a bit more intellectual self-assurance.; 10:11 AM
Anonymous said...: "Chateau IOZ", Leonard?

Our host is not Sir Stephen's gay doppelganger, fer crissakes.

How about the more intime "chez IOZ"?

Like he says, he's just a buddy ...; 10:19 AM
IOZ said...: I'm just reddin up the chateau.; 11:20 AM
paul h. said...: Well, this thread is days old now so I'll try to sort of halfway respond but then leave it there ...

I think ultimately I was trying to make a smaller point but then was taken further afield; namely, that religiously conservative cultures (hence the examples of Tibet, Byzantium, etc., but one could also include much of 19th-20th century America) are obviously(!) actually qualitatively different than "depraved" western cultures in the sense that Douthat is talking about depravity. This "era" really did "exist", contra IOZ.

And yes, as I've said again and again, the West has been having depraved sex forever --- I'm very well aware of Suetonius, the ancient Romans, the ancient Greeks, orgies and incest, and so on throughout virtually all cultures that I can think of ... so I really don't understand why people keep citing them and then acting as if they're refuted what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is this; though every era obvoiusly includes non-normative sex acts (i.e. outside of what is proscribed by tradition, frowned upon by religious texts or high culture or laws or etc. ... though this gets trickier when you have like Dionysiac orgies which are part of a cult of Dionysus, but let's say just in 'everyday' life). Despite this, there really is something different about a culture which very actively permits and even encourages such acts; overall, on a per capita basis, there is MUCH more non-normative sex in America in 2011 than in Lhasa in 1671, and it's completely fucking insane than anyone could possibly disagree with this. When such acts are taken to be perfectly 'normal' and acceptable, this will inevitably lead to a sort of turbo-charging of sexuality at the cost of other goods, whether personal or societal, and will change behavior (adolescents having sex earlier and more often, more oral/anal, etc.).

But I guess the real deeper issue comes down to premises; is unfettered human sexuality an ultimate good? I'm guessing you guys would say yes. In which case, there have just been a "few" weird fantasists (like, I don't know, the billions of people who belong to Abrahamic religions) who have managed to suppress, but not really suppress, this sexuality. I wouldn't agree with this personally, but, I'm not some sort of Debsian anarchist grad student, or whatever; 3:56 PM
Accessories said...: I think ultimately I was trying to make a smaller point but then was taken further afield; namely, that religiously conservative cultures (hence the examples of Tibet, Byzantium, etc.; 8:43 PM
Anonymous said...: "Debsian anarchist" ????

As in "Eugene Debs" ??????

WTF ???????; 9:22 PM
Anonymous said...: paul, you're boring. go to the zoo.; 11:07 PM

Monday, March 07, 2011

You Mean, Coitus?

47 comments:

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