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Cosmopolitan was not the only magazine whose covers caught my attention as a child. There were also celebrity gossip magazines dishing all the latest on Liz and Dick (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton). Another celebrity couple I particularly remember from childhood is Gregg Allman and Cher, then recently divorced from Sonny Bono (this will have been in 1975 when I was eleven). Pictures of Cher and Gregg out in public together were considered a big scoop, and clearly fascinated many people, although I did not understand why. Now I do.
Celebrity worship is widely mocked and deplored, but usually without noting one of its more obvious features: it is almost entirely a female phenomenon. It was not really “people” who were fascinated with Liz and Dick or Cher and Gregg, it was women. Many seemed to take a greater interest in these celebrity couplings than in their own marriages.
The explanation is that the wealth and fame of the persons involved correspond to aspects of female sexual desire largely absent from its male counterpart. Men may find a beautiful actress or model attractive, but her wealth and fame do not help constitute that attractiveness; they are a mere effect of it. For women, it is different. Liz and Dick are interesting and attractive not merely because they happen to be good-looking, but precisely because they are rich and famous. The female celebrity worshipper thinks, “What do I and my stupid, mediocre husband matter in comparison with these glamorous people I can only worship from afar?” For women, the best romance and sex can only take place at the top of the hierarchy of wealth, fame, and status. Their own love lives are dull and uninteresting by comparison. Celebrity gossip, in short, is a kind of sexual fantasy for women, a partial equivalent of what pornography is for men—although it does not carry the same opprobrium.
Apart from this illusion created by the female sex instinct, of course, Liz and Dick are not really all that special, just a rather ordinary man and woman who happen to have become rich and famous working in the entertainment industry. But women’s sexuality prevents them from seeing what was obvious to this author as an eleven-year-old boy.
Celebrity gossip is not the only female counterpart of pornography. An even clearer example is “romance fiction,” pioneered by Harlequin Enterprises. In the 1970s, these cheap, escapist novels were often called simply “Harlequin Romances” after their principal publisher. As Warren Farrell noted in 1986:
Harlequin Enterprises is an old company, but until the early seventies it was only moderately successful. In 1970, the net earnings from sales of Harlequin Romances were $110,000. By 1980, they were over $21 million. An increase of 20,000 percent.
Romance fiction continued to be a growth industry for many years thereafter, with various subgenres developing and Harlequin facing increased competition. Among women as among men, the explosion in sex-talk in the 1970s was accompanied by a turning away from actual sexual relationships and a retreat into fantasy. Of course, this means that the quantity of actual sex on offer to men began decreasing during this decade, directly contrary to what was popularly supposed at the time. And the distinction between married and unmarried sex is completely immaterial here. Men cannot marry women who are retreating into fantasy instead—any more than they can fornicate with them.
Self-help and advice books on relationships were big in the 1970s, as they still are today. They, too, were aimed almost exclusively at women. This is ironic, since women generally understand men better than men understand women. Men have far greater need of advice on dealing with women than the other way around. But there was no real market for “relationship advice books” aimed at men in the 1970s; the dumb, horny sex preferred looking at girly magazines that taught them nothing practical about dealing with flesh-and-blood women.
One “relationship” book whose title I remember spotting in a bookstore when I was young was How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man. Until I searched for it on the internet recently, I had forgotten that the author was Zsa Zsa Gabor: she of the nine husbands, she who boasted of being the world’s greatest housekeeper, since she had divorced seven different men and kept the house every time, the possible GOAT—or “greatest of all time”—at the sport of rotating polyandry.
The title of Miss Gabor’s learned tome certainly gives one a clear conception of how she viewed men. Ideally, a woman should be able to “catch” the man who suits her fancy, “keep” him for just as long as he continues to suit her fancy, and “get rid” of him the moment he ceases to do so—presumably to free herself to “catch” a new one she likes better!
There are, of course, men who view women in precisely the same way, as existing simply for their pleasure. Many are what is known as “psychopaths,” and they tend not to enjoy a lot of respect from more serious-minded men. Indeed, many men sternly denounce cads and playboys in the strongest terms. “A woman is not a plaything,” they will earnestly observe, “but a human being, and any man who is not prepared to treat her as such would be better advised to keep away from women.” Thank heaven women never demonstrate such an attitude toward men!
Oh, wait. That is exactly the attitude expressed in the title of Miss Zsa Zsa’s advice book, isn’t it? Was this famous Hungarian starlet ever tested for psychopathy?
Perhaps I am taking the whole thing too seriously. I see her title was classed in the “humor” category, and the chances Miss Gabor ever set pen to paper to produce the book to which she lent her name (no doubt for a handsome consideration) are almost nil. Still, the point stands that some women do regard men in a way exactly mirroring the attitude of the worst male cads. Such a woman might well think nothing of divorcing seven men in succession—and fighting to keep the house and everything else she could each time.
Another relationship title for women that I remember from my youth is Men Are Just Desserts. I see now that it was published in 1983, so it falls outside the strict chronological limits of this essay. But it still typifies a new female attitude toward men that became common in the 1970s. I never read the book, of course, but can make an educated guess as to its contents. The 1970s were the verdant spring of feminism, when women were first being urged to enter the workforce. Their lives were no longer going to revolve around their husbands and families, as in the dark days of the past. They would have exciting, high-paying careers of their own, involving no dependence upon often unreliable husbands.
But, of course, most women were still heterosexual. They still wanted a “relationship” with a man, so they would have one, naturally, but it would no longer be their bread and butter. It would only be dessert. Relationships would be carried on for pleasure, and no longer form the principal story of women’s lives. The book Men Are Just Desserts from 1983 was a slightly belated expression of the new thinking that had become common during the previous decade. (Women’s actual move into the American workplace was most rapid during the period 1983-93 in any case; the 1970s witnessed lots of talk about careers for women, but reality changed far more slowly. cf. Allan C. Carlson’s Third Ways, page 48 for details.)
My thought on seeing this title was, “What is going to happen once men realize women view them as nothing more than ‘desserts?’ Will men continue to view women the same way, treating them with undiminished consideration? Would I myself want to marry any woman who viewed me as a mere sideshow in the story of her own life?” How different all this is from the 1950s, when there could be virtually no excuse for a girl not keeping a date with a high school classmate!
Male traditionalists who think the sexual revolution was some sort of unequivocal gain for men and loss for women are thus profoundly deluded. Men have declined precipitously in the respect we enjoy from women over the subsequent decades, as books like Men Are Just Desserts and Zsa Zsa’s scholarly study serve to indicate. In many female minds, we have been reduced to a kind of combination dildo, sperm donor, and automatic teller machine. Such is the seemingly paradoxical result of a shift from a monogamous society of male-headed families to a polygynous one where women are left free to do as they please sexually. But anthropological observation backs this up. Primitive societies are generally polygamous, with as many as sixty percent of men unable to pass on their genes, yet the women in such societies tend to respect and admire men less than women in strictly monogamous societies.
18 comments
Being married to Zsa Zsa and later her sister Magda may have been the reason why the great British actor George Sanders committed suicide. His suicide note read merely: I am bored and I have lived long enough.
From Wiki: “While Gabor’s parents were Jewish,[64] she was a practicing Catholic.[18][65]”
I wonder how many cryptojews were in Catholic school with me during the late 70s & 80s.
Women throughout most of even Western history – let alone that of the rest of the world – were controlled by men. That’s what the modern women rail against – the patriarchy. Women, even ones with high IQ, and especially pre-menopausal ones, tend to be fickle and to make poor romantic selections. This has been a running theme in literature for millennia. Nothing like today’s sexual world existed in the past, except perhaps in very primitive times. Civilization requires some degree of stability, including in ensuring the orderly reproduction of the species. Hence, over time, any sort of savage alpha male free-for-all gave way to the discipline of the patriarchy.
We need to restore the patriarchy (perhaps with some eugenicist incentives built in). But one thing I don’t think many prowhites understand is that this restoration almost certainly will not be effectuated by us (absent a figurative “Act of God” racio-fascist revolution in which all sorts of new arrangements suddenly become possible via sheer coercion; I don’t see this possibility as simple rightwing fantasy, but I also don’t see it on the horizon). If it happens at all, it will be done under the aegis of a hardline religious reformation. Even today, white Christian women not members of heretical (ie, “progressive”) churches tend to be the most marriage oriented, the most wiling to ‘settle’ for a good (as opposed to maximally sexually exciting – ie, deviant or dysgenic) man, and the most interested in bearing children. It’s possible that in the evolutionary course of things, such women will gradually breed up a new type of white woman, one genetically more desirous of hearth and home than ‘excitement’, and then a new cycle of white fertility will commence.
But I don’t think there is time for this, especially not in the face of the white-do-gooder-created Third World Population Bomb, and the domestic traitor-induced Great Replacement. The fate of the West is far more likely an immigration-driven race replacement intensified by a continuing and ever-worsening two-sided fertility crisis, in which white females continue to under-reproduce, while alien arrivals, especially ones under the patriarchal discipline of Islam, actually increase their fecundity due to white taxpayer-supported, socialist welfare subsidies.
Counter-Currents is right to see the racial crisis as a comprehensive one – a crisis to which every aspect of the disordered modern world is contributing, and therefore one in which our response must be to analyze and critique “everything under the sun.” But its hostility to Christianity per se (as opposed to the Faith’s modern, racially destructive, and, I would argue, incorrect forms) is radically wrongheaded (and this even if, metaphysically, it is Christianity which is untrue [nb: I’m not actually asserting the truth or falseness of Christianity]). The collapse of the West is fundamentally a result of the widespread loss of a sense of transcendence, which only religious faith can resupply. To save our people, we need a Christian revival, but it must be of a new iteration of the Faith, one which morally allows (ideally, encourages) whites to take the specific actions -including coercive and even violent ones – necessary to ensure our racial perpetuity. This may sound outlandish when considering the Christian softies of today, but the Crusades are one historical precedent for such a fighting Occidental Faith.
The one thing amerikan goodgoy gun owners are not cut out for is any kind of crusadering in the name of transcendent ideals. An aristocracy of the trenches, Bill and Gary from the suburbs are not. In Dmitri Moiseev’s solid book on the Italian phenomenon, one ideologue of the pre-Salo phase of the regime (not Giovanni Gentile) said fascism was the first political religion of the twentieth century. Maybe if downsliding christianity loses its potency with Whites as a revolutionary fighter impulse, the symbol of an archeofuturist fasces can replace the cross as a new racial axis around which stateless Whites can mobilize their energies.
Without belief in personal immortality premised on righteous conduct (as Muslims have, and whites once had), only a few will make the sacrifices necessary to ensure our people’s future. We need many.
Men Are Just Desserts was penned by one Sonya Friedman. Between her, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan that’s just the tip of the iceberg of a whole lot of Jewish brainwashing of American women in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
Harold Robbins was a noxious thing I became aware of in the 70s, finding a cheap already yellowed and brittle paperback in a barn where my friends and I were searching for Playboys. I opened it at random and saw something like “Shaft would never wear underwear under his tight jeans, so when Daisy pulled them off his still-flaccid dusky velvety cock was right there, all 9 inches.” This was not illegal samizdat porn for the raincoat brigade, it was mainstream stuff aimed at the normal middle class US population.
Now that you mention it, I do remember the name “Harold Robbins,” although I never paid any attention to him before. Checking out his Wikipedia article just now, I see he is described as “one of the best-selling authors of all time,” and that his birth name was Harold Rubin.
It does seem that all or most women agreed with the idea of men being unimportant. I was born in 67, my big sisters had Cosmo, which I read, and all this crap of independent women and casual sex was just presented as fact. By the time I was in college in the mid 80’s I thought no man would want me if I didn’t get a “career”, a thing I felt no real attachment to. And when the man I was engaged to – I had a ring and everything – found out I was pregnant, he pressed me to get an abortion. I will tell you it broke whatever was left in me. Today I am married 27 years and have two good kids, and Jesus Christ is the only reason.
I was hoping you might mention the more recent iteration of Harlequin; Fifty Shades of Gray. Where the chick is willingly beat up (essentially) for hot sex with a rich guy. About 15 years ago a 60-something woman in my office was telling everyone how obsessed she was with those books and I told her to her face it was just porn. She was shocked.
I was thinking the same thing when reading this essay. If women are going to trash men for being DC/Marvel and WWE fans, then men have every right to hate on those stupid fifty shades books. I forced myself to read a sample years ago and the writing was absolutely horrid, at an amateur junior-high level standard at best. And no one has heard of the author ever since hollywood shit out a few adaptations for gullible women to fawn over.
“About 15 years ago a 60-something woman in my office was telling everyone how obsessed she was with those books and I told her to her face it was just porn. She was shocked.“
Are you this naive at your age? I don’t ask this in a mean way.
When I was a nice-guy high-school senior in the late 90s I slept over a new friend’s latchkey-kid, usually unsupervised home (I had no idea about the details of his psychological makeup yet, but he was for sure dark triad). I woke up in the middle of the night to his crying and pleading caused by him slapping her around and yelling at her. They had sex that night too. He once showed a haggle of us a video of them in the act.
Other young women who came into that house throughout that year voluntarily passed themselves around like sex dolls amongst some of the boys who spent time there. And yes, within the same night or day on some occasions.
That home was normal parents’ nightmare. Deviant inclinations of feral teenagers took place there.
I think normal people cannot relate to the degradation for which some women volunteer or reluctantly endure for high-status, physically atttactive, or “cool” males. They cannot relate to porn come to life or life that resembles porn.
Read: “The Question of Female Masochism” by Roger Devlin.
I’m not sure how pointing out that it was pornography makes me naive.
My nephews, who it sounds like are your age, have told me that heroin-fueled orgies occurred in their high school years in their friends parents homes. This is in the richest part of the city, and the kids went to the most exclusive high school. For that and for your story, yes, I am grateful to be naive.
“Are you this naive at your age?”
That’s a total non sequitur. What are you talking about? Are you saying it’s not pornographic just because you’re aware of something more lurid?
Also, honestly, what is it with your age group? Are you all so “extremely online” that you’re that oblivious to tone and nuance in the written word? I ask in all sincerity. It’s a really off-putting tendency that is just a quick read-through of Emily Post’s Etiquette away from being fixed.
Very true. Each generation (going on for longer than my own lifetime) has been dumber than its predecessor – and especially, less literate (ie, able to comprehend writing). Part of this is genetic decline: the dumb have been outbreeding the smart for much longer than modern feminism has been around (though feminism astronomically accelerated this dysgenic decline, as so many smart women, especially of my generation, chose high-paying careers over having children). Part is demographic colonization by modally less intelligent groups, compounded by their higher fertility. But part is also ‘screens’ – first movies, then TV, then computers, then the internet, and, finally, the catastrophe of smartphones and moronic social media.
The problem with the younger generation is that they are much more informed than any previous one, but they haven’t had their minds properly, rigorously trained (as even simpletons had, to some extent, in times past simply by being forced to read or listen to Biblical passages). They are less adept at processing and understanding the quantities of information promiscuously available to them. What’s so annoying about them, however, is that they are both clueless as to their general intellectual inferiority, and yet, utterly cocksure in what they think they know, or even in the few areas they do know – as though being more familiar with, say, ‘apps’ than I am somehow makes them wiser (instead of the opposite). God help the West when Boomers like me are gone. The ensuing collapse could be rapid as well as hard.
The homeschooled may become the intellectual aristocracy of the rising generation.
This (i.e. rudeness and arrogance) is the bee that’s in my bonnet lately, I’ll admit. That’s because I’m convinced that it is one of the biggest self-defeating Achilles’ heels of the movement. Doctrinal purity is seen as the most important thing, but once you get there, you’re there.
Knowing how to act is seen, I believe, as some basic-bitch, unaristocratic, cucky Christian holdover that needs to be excised from the “chariot Chad’s” life if he is to successfully raid villages and save the White Race, as it were. What toxic drivel. (Not going so far as to say that represents the OP to whom I originally commented; this is in reply to the broader topic of your post.)
Sam Dickson, when interviewed and asked about which books he’d recommend, suggested Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. His reason: “Yes, I know people will laugh, but our people would profit from learning how to get along with others.”
I couldn’t agree more. Our guys have got to recognize that there are certain things you say, and especially say in a certain way, from which there is simply no coming back; you have burned a bridge and ostracized an ally with whom you will likely never be reconciled. This is a mistake that must be avoided.
The skeptic will respond with “yeah, buts…” condemning oversensitivity, but that’s not it at all. No, the sobering thing is, there is nothing about you that is special enough to make others endure your disrespectful treatment, no matter how inflated an image you have of yourself and your contribution to the cause.
It takes a long time for many people to realize that “romance” fiction is the female counterpart to male pornography, and some simply refuse to believe. I only learned this by reading Warren Farrell’s Why Men Are the Way They Are, published in 1986. The sexes are complimentary, and there seems to be virtually nothing in either to which you cannot eventually find some counterpart on the other.
Weave: April 17, 2025: I was born in 67, my big sisters had Cosmo, which I read, and all this crap of independent women and casual sex was just presented as fact…
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I’m a ’47 model myself, so grew up in the more innocent pre-porn era of the ’50s. Photoplay magazine for photographers was it, with airbrushed nipples and pubic areas of professional models — then Exquire magazine, then Playboy, then all the rest that proliferated porn through the ’60s and ’70s until now when kids are exposed to it on their so-called smart phones.
A memory I have from one of my tips to Russia was seeing Cosmopolitan magazine on the racks there with all the exact same fashion, inter-racial, anti-male and “social reform” crap that had been available to American females, except with Russian language typography. I was appaled but understood Jewish media control by then and made the connection to (((who))) was behind corrupting Russian females. It was the same with Russian television: American programming dubbed with Russian language.
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…[W]hen the man I was engaged to… found out I was pregnant, he pressed me to get an abortion. I will tell you it broke whatever was left in me. Today I am married 27 years and have two good kids, and Jesus Christ is the only reason.
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I don’t know about the Jesus thing being the only reason you got away from the jerk who wanted you to kill your baby, to end up in a successful marriage with two good kids, but congratulations!
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