Counter-Currents
1,442 words 
Part 1 here
1973 witnessed professional tennis’s heavily promoted “Battle of the Sexes” between 55-year-old former Wimbledon Champion Bobby Riggs and 29-year-old feminist Billie Jean King. The gallant Mr. Riggs, of course, let Miss King win. Three years later, the tennis world was rocked by a controversy surrounding a certain Renée Richards, the former Mr. Richard Raskind, who wished to compete as a woman. Bille Jean King defended the 6 foot, 1 inch Miss Richards/Mr. Raskin, but others were not so sure a male musculature could be shed as easily as Mr. Raskins sex organs apparently had been in 1975. The matter was finally decided not by the Women’s Tennis Association, but by the New York State Supreme Court, and the plaintiff competed in women’s professional tennis from 1977 to 1981. This odd little event, however, did not start any larger trend.
And then there was pornography, as there always is. My big memory here concerns the movie Deep Throat (1972) starring Linda Lovelace. I was eight years old when it was released. I never saw it, but heard plenty about it because the movie got targeted by the federal government in one of its last, feeble efforts to resist the rise in obscenity. I also clearly understood that a little boy such as myself was not really supposed to know about such a film, so I never said anything to my parents or teachers on the subject. But believe me, I heard plenty. To this day, if asked to name a single dirty movie, the first title to come to my mind would almost surely be Deep Throat.
If you wanted to see an X-rated film in those days, you had to go to a movie theater and buy a ticket. There were a few cinemas in my town which specialized in them, and their current offerings were listed in the newspapers alongside those of normal movie theaters. We boys laughed at the titles, such as Voluptuous Vixens or Willing Coeds, but never saw such pictures ourselves.
There was some hand-wringing over the growth and spread of pornography. Critics spoke of pornographers “luring” presumably innocent women into the business to exploit them sexually and financially. It never occurred to anyone that mercenary women might be voluntarily teaming up with male pornographers to help exploit lonely, frustrated men instead. After all, men were getting all the sex they could handle in the 1970s, right?
Later in the decade I did, of course, encounter pornography personally. The usual way this happened for boys of my generation would be through stumbling upon a pile of discarded magazines—Playboy, Penthouse, or similar—next to some trash cans at the bottom of an apartment stairwell. Whether this happened to you personally or whether the initial discovery was made by some classmate hardly mattered. Teenage boys would pass them around excitedly. So that’s what a woman’s body looks like!
The images were no longer as innocent as those of Bettie Page in the 1950s, but they would be classed as “soft core” today. They were simply nudes. No sexual behavior was depicted, with one curious and doubtful exception: the “lesbian” pictorial feature, in which two young female models pretended to enjoy one another’s company with great eagerness. It was all arranged for the entertainment of the male readership, of course, and the models were usually perfectly normal women, as everyone understood.
The VHS (Video Home System) tape, a consumer-level analogue video recording format, appeared in the late 1970s. It would mark a revolution in the distribution of pornography, for not everyone who might like to view hardcore material was willing to go to an X-rated movie theater in full view of God and man. Now smut could be enjoyed discreetly in the privacy of one’s own home. But this revolution came along too late for me. By the time movie rental stores started sprouting up toward the end of the decade, I already knew what a woman’s body looked like. I was moving on to other matters, such as where to go to college. We never had a VHS machine in our home, so I never rented any movies, pornographic or otherwise.
Women’s desires were not left out of the general obsession with sex. In my childhood, as still today, women were reading Cosmopolitan magazine, then edited by Helen Gurley Brown, the same who published Sex and the Single Girl in 1962. I remember noting with curiosity that women were featured on the covers of magazines such as Cosmopolitan aimed at women no less than magazines such as Playboy aimed at men. It seemed that while men were interested in women, women were more interested in themselves.
The models on the cover of Cosmopiltan in the early 1970s were heavily made-up and wore ridiculous dresses with decolletages that stretched nearly down to their navels. They scowled rather than smiled for the camera (this has long since changed, but I remember clearly what I saw in the early 1970s). Even as a little boy, I understood that the women who purchased Cosmopolitan were interested in making themselves appealing to men, and this made me wonder why the cover models wore such forbidding expressions.
Today I have come to understand the significance of those scowls: they were the “I’m too good for you” look. For women, much of the interest in sex lies not in engaging in it but in not doing so, i.e., in denying it to men. The more men you can say no to, the higher you rate as a woman. In the woman’s utopia, she is the most desirable women in the world, and therefore rejects all but the world’s single most desirable man. This is the idea behind every romance novel. Purchasers of Cosmopolitan in the early 1970s bought the magazine with a view less to actually having sex than fancying to themselves the desperate frustration of all those pathetic bastards who found them desirable but were not good enough for them. Hence the scowls.
This also goes a long way toward explaining why the sexual revolution did not result in more sex for men but less. Women do not wish to please as many men as possible, but to have their own desires roused by an exceptional man: viz., the most attractive. The more women follow this natural inclination, as recommended by Cosmopolitan, the fewer men qualify for consideration.
The predictable effect of a magazine like Cosmopolitan being read by millions of impressionable young women is an increased tendency for them to expect, and fancy that they somehow “deserve,” a highly attractive mate such as only a minority of them can get. I am reminded of this passage from Jane Austen’s Emma in which the sensible Mr. Knightly upbraids the title character for giving another young woman dangerous ideas about her own merits:
You will puff her up with such ideas of her own beauty, and of what she has a claim to, that, in a little while, nobody within her reach will be good enough for her. Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief. Nothing so easy as for a young lady to raise her expectations too high. If you encourage her to expect to marry greatly, and teach her to be satisfied with nothing less than a man of consequence and large fortune, she may be a parlour-boarder at Mrs. Goddard’s all the rest of her life—or, at least, till she grow desperate, and is glad to catch at the old writing-master’s son.
Cosmopolitan has by now given the Emma-treatment to sixty years’ worth of American women.
Men—sancta simplicitas—are wont to assume that women who abstain from sex do so because they are pure-minded. One man who seems to have suspected the truth was François de La Rochefoucauld (1613 – 1680), French moralist of the grand siècle, who noted that “It is not always from chastity that women are chaste.” More often, the motive is the vanity to which Cosmopolitan catered with all those cover photographs of scowling sirens. As I pointed out many years ago, such vanity may have its practical uses in keeping maidens intact for their eventual husbands, but it is difficult to take seriously. The average woman must by definition be good enough for the average man—i.e., for about half the men in the world. Should she therefore have sexual relations with all of them?
Most men would probably prefer unpretentious girls who do not imagine themselves too good for everyone (which does not imply sexual promiscuity, of course), but such girls are getting thin on the ground nowadays. Helen Gurley Brown certainly never did anything to foster more of them.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
39 comments
So we should go back to the old days. Well, it ain’t gonna happen soon. So what will our demographics look like in 20 years?!? Dismal.
One thing is for sure — White Nationalists are not going to increase our numbers through reproduction.
Maybe this is Anthropology 101, but wouldn’t the Cosmopolitan strategy—and feminism’s broader legacy—essentially encourage women to hold out for the alpha male? Wouldn’t that, in theory, be a net positive for the race—assuming beauty (as a proxy for fitness) and strength were the result of these new pairings?
It’s a legitimate question. Especially on a site like CC.
Of course, this hinges on the assumption that Cosmo girls actually have children.
I suppose I’ve answered my own question. Thanks.
It’s all well and good for young ladies to aim high, but not to the point that they price themselves out of the sexual marketplace. (That’s more or less what the Emma quote was saying.) Another contemporary problem is that young ladies are getting the wrong ideas about who is desirable. If they were flocking to the intelligent and accomplished, then it would be eugenic. Lately, excitement is prioritized, and the most desirable guys are bouncers, bartenders, third-rate musicians, and especially criminals.
What you say is more or less what I figured out on my own. But still, there’s that nagging question. Didn’t the fact that the dominant men being more likely to impregnate the women in the past get us pretty far on the evolutionary journey? Maybe there is some old/new synthesis coming where the Cosmo girls have a brood of children. What we need is a new magazine that combines Cosmopolitan with Good Housekeeping and Parenting.
Now don’t ruin the fun, Beau. I know you like levity. My question is a valid starting point.
Indeed, the system was working for a good while. Then tastes changed. Around 1880, let’s say, a mechanical engineer who just graduated from Harvard would’ve been quite a hot prospect. Every blushing maiden out there would’ve been lucky to end up with him.
Now, it’s different. High intelligence works against you, because everyone knows that nerds are uncool. The new hot prospect is a small-time dope dealer with an 85 IQ and an extensive arrest record.
I see what you’re saying, but do quality white women really go for 85 IQ dope dealers and have children.
I really never liked this idea that “women are nature’s eugenicists.”
It always seemed incredibly self-serving to me for the feminists. There is something off about it.
Take a look at the modern world, where women have been sexually liberated to a maximal extent, and see what choices they freely make. Are they nature’s eugenicists in your observation?
Women have instincts that got us to where we are… for good and ill.
I’m just thinking out loud about this.
Maybe evolution needs an intervention. Who says it only goes upward? At times it could be beneficial for survival to devolve to a lower level. It could be the conditions of the modern world that’s driving what we are seeing take place.
As he eventually concluded, it’s a moot point regardless because these couplings are just resulting in sex, not procreation. Many of the women involved then continue to hold out for what they perceive as their best option and it never comes back before their child bearing years pass, resulting in them being a genetic dead end or having to settle for a worse mate than they could have attracted at their peak. Even if we grant the dubious premise that women select for actually eugenic traits, it still ends up with a clear dysgenic outcome when we factor in contraceptives.
Women are not good judges of character. They’re looking for a tough guy: OK, in theory. But actually being tough, and seeming tough to a woman, are two very different things. Women are therefore attracted to violent psychotics, chaotic men who are a danger to all around them. “But he’s going to protect me!” He’s more likely to batter you, love.
There’s a big trend for women on dating apps to want “beards, tattoos, muscles , yes please!” But this is a simulation of masculinity: A woman’s definition of what being a male is, a cartoon like parody from the closeted, cosseted, child like mind of a female. Masculinity reveals itself in many ways, not just a beard and muscles. Many geeks and nerds, for example, are highly masculine in their behaviours- the inriticacies of computer systems, for example, typically don’t interest females – yet this may not be displayed physically, they are very much following masculine behaviors. Which also help society — where would be without the nerds ? So, no, giving women a choice about this kind of thing isn’t eugenic .
Another point about this female eugenics thing : it’s a remarkable feature [of the White race] that genius level individuals can come from utterly ordinary backgrounds. The examples of this are too many to reel off here. Many, many of our race’s finest examples had very humble origins indeed: it seems that brilliant White genes seem to pop out unpredictably, in all sorts of places. This happens much more so from Whites than it does other races, typically.
Therefore even if a woman made a sensible, eugenic choice of mate, it’s not guaranteed the offspring will actually be brilliant.
“Lately, excitement is prioritized…”
Not only lately, Beau. That started right away, too.
While all of the above was happening, one of the founding mothers of new feminism (old feminism = suffragettes) was Gloria Steinem, who very publicly dated negro jocks like footballer Jim Brown. This made her a revolutionary twofer: She got points for destroying traditional family values and race-mixing.
Gloria Steinem, at 90, has spent half a half-century being well-rewarded for the destruction she helped unleash. Her working-class female victims weren’t so lucky. They are forgotten.
I had no idea she was up to that, in addition to her other pursuits. Yuck!
Yup, yup. Dalma Heyn and Barbara Seaman are other examples of feminists who encouraged adultery and promiscuity.
Heyn: “I am now more than ever interested in the extraordinary power of transgression for women. And extramarital sex is the single most emphatic form of transgression against a historical framework that has defined and confined women, and still does.”
Much insight here, especially the observation on the pouty look on models’ faces. Great gems from Austen and La Rochefoucauld, the latter of whom is the author of “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.”
The modern day term for this is “resting bitchface”. Kim Kardashian West is a prime example.
I also believe many women adopt this kind of look because either smiling, or frowning, causes wrinkles. (Imagine being so narcissistic you wouldn’t even smile lest it eventually ruin your simply perfect visage)…
In fact, I notice nowadays a lot of “bitchy” behaviour in women generally; you’ll see women share things on social media like “Yes, I’m a bitch. So what?” And “World’s Nastiest Bitch” and other things like that, some of which allude to mental health problems “Hazard: you are entering crazy person zone” or “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best”. These sometimes go with a picture of Marilyn Monroe, who Zillennial females seem to have retconned as some kind of intellectual giant era defining philosopher (she was, in fact, a drug addled hooker).
This behaviour is all to say, “I’m great, I’m fantastic, I’m number one, nobody ever said ‘No’ to me in my life, but I sure as hell said “No” to everybody! Yaass slayy #Queen”.
“Didn’t the fact that the dominant men being more likely to impregnate the women in the past get us pretty far on the evolutionary journey?“
Cads were lynched, came under legal sanction, or were forced to “make a decent women” out of young women they impregnated.
We didn’t evolve from scum monopolizing women.
Great piece. I was a teen in the 70s. My mum used to read Cosmopolitan, which was quite saucy. I worked for a while at Woman’s Realm magazine, as a sub-editor. The big joke was that, while Cosmopolitan taught a woman how to have an orgasm, Woman’s Realm taught her how to knit one. Playboy is a real anomaly. Soft-core pictures of ladies, sure. But you know who wrote for that magazine? Names include Hunter S. Thompson, Ray Bradbury, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Margaret Attwood and Norman Mailer. Although, strictly speaking, that wasn’t the reason why me and my little mates had a copy hidden somewhere under the mattress.
The highbrow interviews and all that were to satisfy a legal technicality, keeping it from being classified as obscene.
Is that so? Every day is a schoolday. There was another one in the 70s called Forum, and it was almost all text. Probably for the same reason.
And yet you’d think they could include any old trash if it was all a pretense. Maybe somebody actually cared about the interviews – the one gay employee maybe? 😛
Surely the literary window-dressing was deisgned to propel the magazine into the homes of the upper classes. Deconstruct the moral majority with high class hookers in every posh privy. Propaganda at every level.
Cosmopolitan would sometimes have T&A pics when I was growing up in the 80s-90s. I remember flipping through the pages of one when I was around 13, and feeling like I discovered some secret treasure. Other magazines like Redbook would have them as well.
A few years later I’d look at some articles to try and get some idea of what women were into. Most of it was totally non-sexual, but every now and then there would be goofy sex advice. One article I never forgot was finding out what kind of “sex animal” you are. All the women I’ve talked to about these woman’s magazines agree that they’re nonsense, but they still liked it, which explains a lot about women.
No man should take this stuff seriously.
I knew it.
That is Rene Russo on the Cosmo cover.
There was some hand-wringing over the growth and spread of pornography. Critics spoke of pornographers “luring” presumably innocent women into the business to exploit them sexually and financially. It never occurred to anyone that mercenary women might be voluntarily teaming up with male pornographers to help exploit lonely, frustrated men instead.
(cough) OnlyFans (cough cough)
Most definitely. OnlyFans is an evil Satanic plot to destroy the world.
I’ve heard onlyfans is the top donor to aipac.
True.
https://nemosnewsnetwork.com/jewish-owned-porn-streamer-onlyfans-spews-630-million-in-dividends-on-owner-radvinsky/
Radvinsky is a Ukrainian Jew? Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s related to Rabbi Zelensky.
Re: “But do scumbags/criminals/low lives get “quality women”?
Actually, they get women that hardly any men would turn down if they showed interest in them, and certainly not if they undressed before them.
As Roger wrote, and of which all adults are aware, men value beauty and youth. Such men get young, pretty women. So by that occurrence, yes, such men get “quality women”. And by my observation and experience, they get women who sexualize themselves early, get treated well by such women, and even have their women accept mistreatment.
And no, women aren’t nature’s eugenic breeders. They go for what’s trendy, powerful, thrilling, entertaining, and fashionable in a current day if not trained and steered in the right direction. Hence fathers and husbands used to have authority over their wives and teenage daughters and could veto suitors for daughters of whom they disapproved.
Boomer fathers allowed their daughters to run with the scum of the earth, as I witnessed up close in the 1990s.
Read: “Sexuality in a Sick Society” by Dr. William Pierce.
Any man who points out sexual anarchy in the current day might be called an incel, even if he had sex on his last lunch break.
Absolutely correct: the vast majority of young women would be better off marrying a man chosen for them by their fathers.
Thanks.
Here’s a quote from Dr. Pierce:
“When a father had some authority over his daughter, and a husband over his wife, another male approached either at his peril. Not only did female dependence carry with it the need for protection, but it also stimulated in the male the desire to provide that protection. The entire community was behind the man who drew his sword or his gun in defense of his womenfolk.
Today, when a wife may be more of a roommate than a mate and it is a rare father who has any authority at all over his teen-aged daughter, both the compelling urge and the legal right of a man to protect his women seem much less clear-cut. In response to an interloper he is more likely to telephone his lawyer than reach for his shotgun. Again, because of that he is less a man, and he knows it. So do his women.”
We can also recognize from this quote that “cold approaching”, approaching women who men don’t know from a hole in the wall, was historically frowned upon, considered anti-social, unlike the public pressure presented on social media in which Internet tough guys and gals in which they exclaim, “Polls show most men haven’t approached women!”
I don’t see any problem with cold approaches as long as they’re done tastefully. A guy could do that even in the Victorian era, as long as he knew how to navigate the ritual, especially which gestures constituted a “go ahead” signal, and always kept it polite. The game of romance is always changing, and a guy who doesn’t keep up with the rules is at a severe disadvantage. Daygame is better than nightgame (too many drunks and too much noise), or dating apps (hardly worth the time and effort), or finding someone at the office (lately you’ll get sued nine ways from Sunday). Furthermore, our parents aren’t finding pure maidens for us to marry these days. So what else is a guy to do – send smoke signals?
I actually am not opposed do it in the current day considering the atomization of our society, which doesn’t have people meeting in the ways Gen X and previous generations did. That is, through everyday life, from one’s town, introductions through family and friends, religious institutions, school, and work.
Even though I have posted about sexual regulation and social norms under these articles, I speak about them for normal societies, not present conditions. So if men cannot meet how previous generations did, then approaching is warranted.
Though I’m a pro-social sort of guy, I’m not for following rules and norms when the majority aren’t. I am reminded of my youth, in which I thought that I must not ever ask out young women who had boyfriends. But then I realized damn near every ordinary or attractive woman always had boyfriends, and they were likely not going to marry any of them! They were rotating polyandrists! And women don’t like womanless men. So I figured in order to get a girlfriend, I’d have to steal one! Though I think men should stay far away from wives, engaged women, or women who seem as if they are actually headed for marriage with boyfriends. Other women are fair game, even if they are in (worthless) “relationships” (there’s a reason Devlin and Baskerville put quotes on that word).
I don’t believe in being a classic gentleman in sexual anarchy. And Roger wrote in his book, sexual liberation “actively punishes the virtuous and rewards the vicious”! Two times in my late teens I held back on advances from very attractive women because they had “boyfriends” they never married. In fact, almost no women I know married their college or high school “boyfriends”.
The latchkey-kid 90s in NYC that I’ve mentioned in my posts under these articles, I consider that an era of Darwinian mating.
I’m married with children, but if I were a single man today, I’d politely approach as much as necessary. Being a timid guy hasn’t worked for some time.
Maybe so, but it’s not in the nature of Whites to behave in that way.
If people took inventory of all the couples they know, they’d see none or almost none formed from “cold approaching”. However I don’t blame men for trying it in the current day.
By the way Roger, will you be getting to sexuality in the 90s? I wish I could share stories of the utter debauchery and deviance of that latchkey-kid era to show how far downhill we slid, but I think it would be inappropriate for here.
If anyone is interested in learning about the social problems that made their way to the children of the white middle, and, yes, upper classes in the 90s, they should watch the film Kids, an example of art imitating life.
Yes, an essay on the 1980s and -90s is forthcoming, but it will not deal with childhood in that era because I was no longer a child then. An essay like that deserves to be written, but you or someone else of that generation will have to do it. Thanks for the movie recommendation.
This makes my think of the Charlene song, “I’ve Never Been to Me,” released in 1977 (then again in 1982).
I have a lot of sympathy for people living through that time. They weren’t all just libertines at heart. Many were simple souls trying to find their place, as people long to do, but in a new sparkling paradigm with unimaginable pitfalls well concealed to sell the product.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment