From the Atlantic:
At 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night, Amanda, a senior at Princeton University, got her first text message from Stephen, a 60-something Wall Street banker. He wanted her at his New York City apartment. Immediately.
“I told him it was too late—the trains just stopped running,” Amanda said. “He said he’d send a limo.”
Amanda agreed, on the condition that she’d be back on campus for her 10 o’clock class the next morning. After dinner at a fancy restaurant, sex, and some post-sex apartment decorating, Amanda was back in the limo. When she got back to Princeton, she had just enough time to change her clothes, grab her books, and run to class.
Why is this?
Consider that career life is deeply unpleasant for women. It’s, in fact, deeply unpleasant for everybody, because labor is a curse with inherent disutility. That’s what makes it ‘labor.’ Prostitution is much easier work that’s also much more remunerative than most of the alternatives. It’s much easier for Amanda to be paid to fuck a 60 year old executive than it is to get into an investment bank’s competitive recruitment program.
Before the Victorians agitated for the full decriminalization of prostitution, the common figure quoted for women in prostitution as a percentage of the population was 20%. That sounds about right to me. Since that time, the Victorians and their successors attempted to reform the morals of the lower class, to bring them up to higher standards of fidelity and monogamy.
What happened is this: the lower class overwhelmed their superiors. Now, the higher classes ape the morals of their inferiors, rather than the other way around.
If Amanda ever has children, will she send them to Princeton? When Princeton calls her, will she donate to her alma mater? Is she burnishing the reputation of Princeton by listing it on her escort profile?
Certainly not. So, we should applaud these educated, liberated women for damaging the reputations of their schools irreparably, and for making a mock of the entire project of the gender-integrated education project.
What’s happening here?
- The colleges do their best to break down any vestiges of Christian morality in their students. This begins in the classroom, and is reinforced by the extracurricular activities.
- The law makes marriage intolerably risky for men of means and good judgment.
- Colleges, in tone-deaf desperation, encourage graduates to pursue ‘careers’ that don’t actually exist in a chaotic economy wrecked by central planning.
- Prostitution becomes socially acceptable for the upper middle class as an urbane alternative to dating and marriage.
The culture can’t maintain itself in this fashion. Unfortunately, no lessons will be learned until everything goes off of a cliff. It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to reignite a fundamental re-evaluation of the feminist project, because so many people have wrecked their lives and the lives of their children on pursuing its impossible objectives.
The good news is that a hostile elite with no hearth to defend and no posterity is a weak one that can be displaced without all that much aggression. The bad news is that it also goes for the rest of the world, and, speaking for myself, I’d rather be in control of my own country than living in a country controlled by more cohesive foreigners. A leadership with no skin in the future is living for today only.
In the end, their educations just make them marginally more competitive whores, because it makes them far worse wives. A wife is not good because she is well-read (speaking as someone with an Ivy-educated mother). Or, rather, merely being well-read, quasi-educated in the fashion of our time, and pretty is not among the cardinal virtues for wives.
Glibness without loyalty, dependability, or fertility are all wonderful traits for a whore. We should look upon the Ivies for what they are: finishing schools for whores.
Woah!
“The law makes marriage intolerably risky for men of means and good judgment.”
Bingo.
I actually like the underlying concept: openness and honesty about the transactional nature of relationships. Fewer misunderstandings.
Look at it from another perspective. There are a scarce number of slots at these schools. We use these schools as a way to determine eligibility for future elite employment (mostly for the worse rather than the better).
A good number of the women at these schools waste their slots and bring down the standards for everyone else. Formally, they’re supposed to be training to become the leaders of tomorrow rather than prostitutes.
It would be better for everyone for such women to go directly into gainful employment on their backs than wasting time and resources that could be better spent on someone else.
But these institutions are entirely owned by the left, feeding meat into a leftist machine. We should be applauding their degradation and downfall.
$tens of billions in endowment money and $billions in real estate holdings will probably not be enough to salvage the quality or the reputations of the institutions themselves.
“Before the Victorians agitated for the full decriminalization of prostitution, the common figure quoted for women in prostitution as a percentage of the population was 20%.”
Where’d you get that from?
This article was making the rounds a little while ago, and seems to be corroborated elsewhere. http://www.economist.com/node/14636924
It’d probably be down your alley to figure out how accurate that figure is and the details of what actually went on with the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
I particularly enjoy your assessment that this has fundamentally weakened the elites and renders them more vulnerable to a reactionary onslaught at the appropriate time.
Your fears of foreign imperialism in the wake of our elite’s collapse is well founded, but perhaps globalization will be our saving grace, and when our own society falls, the shock waves will be such that it will scar economies across the globe and leave foreign governments slow to take advantage of the situation.
This is the reactionary opening. I’d say by 2025 we maybe want to move from the theoretical stage of reaction to the intimate planning stage (dependent on the headcount growth of the movement), in which the downfall of the current order will be plotted in regard to specific geographical locations and target governmental institutions.
Coming from what passes for the American elite (with bumps, bruises, and only a thin layer of torn gilding), it’s really more of a fratricidal hope and a message of regret.
Part of the conscious goal of our writing is to encourage people in the elite to defect at the right time, and to move things in a better direction. Given that holding power in a collapsing structure is mortally dangerous, I’m optimistic that at least some can be convinced.
Globalization not as global as one might hope.
“and leave foreign governments slow to take advantage of the situation.”
Putin is acting quickly, China acting quickly despite internal difficulties.
“This is the reactionary opening. I’d say by 2025 we maybe want to move from the theoretical stage of reaction to the intimate planning stage (dependent on the headcount growth of the movement), in which the downfall of the current order will be plotted in regard to specific geographical locations and target governmental institutions.”
I would be surprised if, in 2025, the government as currently constituted looks even a little like it does now. I think, like Hoppe, it makes less sense to target Federal institutions and much more sense to flip local and state institutions. And to do it with stealth rather than openly.
A bottom up stealth restructuralization of things on the ground? Wouldn’t this on a local level begin by creating a critical mass of more traditional domestic formations? How would these Family structures avoid being encumbered by this very economic perdicament (in the process) they would be formed to contradict? Which within their culmination would be relied upon to produce the replacements that can begin flipping said institutuions? Could the very existence of these metaeconomic cells/families alone slowly reverse the stakes enough simply by disoccupying their own domestic structures/practices fiscally? Could these formations accumulate to the degree that said elites would begin to see the efficacy of a complete retrofitting of our macroeconomic structure; where right behaivior (preservation of family as a whole) is incentivized instead of capitalizing on their socially engineered atomization & the out of control preferentiation/wrong behavior it generates (individuated subjects)? Hence I’m arguing that of course the very intention of higher education for women is for a lack of a better term to reduce them the equivalent of a whore (metaphysically adjudicated & lesser than fit for tradiitonal marriage & monogamy based long term pair bonds, domestic formations). Their desacralized bodies as conduits for the centralization of virtually all flows of capital; which as you have suggested is in particular the point of the indoctrination at the Ivies for women & even most men as we speak. It is as if we are expected to be made into the equivalent of voodoo dolls for the handlers/usurpers of our desacralizaed ancestry. Totally subjectivized by a covert command & control structure based on a shit pile hierarchy imbeded into our subconscious through/during our institutionalization. Please let me know if any of this makes sense? Cheers!
Yeah, I get it.
It’s a hard set of problems, and I can’t claim to know exactly what’s going to work ahead of time.
Somehow it comes to mind that a young lady being picked up from Princeton dorms/apartment buildings by a limo is going to have her neighbors figure out what she’s about……
I think you made a typo, but this is otherwise a wonderful article. Don’t you mean before the Victorians advocated for the full criminalization of prostitution rather than before the Victorians advocated for the full decriminalization of prostitution. Prostitution was mostly decriminalized before the 19th century and became more fully criminalized in the 19th century, more fully criminalized in the 20th century than the preceeding century, and is most criminalized now in the USA in the 21st century. The USA has been a major advocate for other countries banning prostitution and enforcing that ban. Otherwise everything else is true.
Thanks for adding the nuance. Yes, that’s what I meant because that’s what the referenced social movement was all about.
Didn’t really get into detail with it, but I consider the impact of decriminalization to be social chaos.
I thought that is what you meant. Actually, banning prostitution is a very bad idea because it does lead to social chaos. Even St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas thought that although the acts of adultry and fornication were morally wrong being mortal sins, both men recognized that prostitution should be allowed. BOTH MEN ARE CONSIDERED DOCTORS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
St. Thomas Aquinas was born and died in the 1200s AD in the Lazio region of Italy near Rome as a virgin. His family did not want him to be a Catholic priest. so they sent him a prostitute thinking if he got sex that he would forget about being a clergy-man, but he drove her away and became a Catholic priest. He was also one of the first professors at the University of Paris. He stated that if prostitution was banned it would be bad because of the concept of harm reduction meaning that sometimes we must allow a smaller evil so a larger evil does not occur. He likened banning prostitution to having the largest most beautiful palace without a serpentine( ancient versions of septic tanks) because all yoy will do is stink up the place.
St. Augustine was born and died in the city of Hippo, the Africa province of the Western Roman Empire in the late 300s AD and died there in the early 400s AD now known as the city of Annaba, Algeria. His mother St. Monica prayed for him to give up his sinful ways and convert to Christianity. He would seduce amatuer non- whore women for sex as well as pay for professional prostitutes for sex. He and his friends studied the art of seduction and traded tips. Even his pagan father asked why he acted in such a horrible manner. He converted to Christianity, became a priest then bishop of Hippo. He is regarded as a saint in the Catholic Church and Orthodox Church. His most famous prayer is ” God, grant me chastity and continence but not yet.” He also said, ” If you outlaw prostitution in the towns, lust will overthrow society.”
Yes — and that’s what’s happened
Return college to its original state: the city of the mind. College is for learning, not for jobs. Stop sending your daughters to college.