Ms Horin, in passing, on fatherhood

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/bookish-boys-grow-into-gentle-men-but-their-early-years-can-be-brutal-20090522-bi84.html?page=-1

In her Sydney Morning Herald column last Saturday, Ms Adele Horin wrote about the experiences of boys growing up after the feminist revolution, and I was surprised to read, in her second-last paragraph, what I’ve highlighted here in bold type:

But encouraging sensitivity and empathy in boys, and the softness every mother knows is at their core, is essential if men and women are to enjoy happy partnerships at work and home. I can't offer a prescription. I know fathers are integral through example and instruction. Anti-bullying and anti-homophobic policies, and playground policing are important. I know schools should extend their guest list of male role models beyond sporting heroes.
(my emphasis)

I was surprised to read this (for reasons which I’ll explain in a moment), and decided to record it for future reference because Ms Horin is sure to contradict herself on this point sooner or later. Because is Ms Horin not a supporter of same-sex parenting? And if so, then how does she expect boys being raised by ‘two mums’ (though really, same-sex parenting not only destroys the parenting role of the excluded sex, but also destroys the maternal or paternal role of the members of the same-sex couple by turning them into androgynous ‘co-parents’, so it’s absurd to speak of ‘two mums’ or ‘two dads’) to receive the kind of “example and instruction” in which she recognises fathers as “integral”? And presumably there will be symmetry for the case of ‘two dads’ raising a girl. And it’s interesting also how the particular attritubutes that Ms Horin focuses on here, namely “sensitivity and empathy”, are ones which, conventionally, one might suppose a mother would be able to foster. But of course, as Ms Horin implicitly recognises, a mother might be able to teach her son sensitivity and empathy, but she can’t very well teach him how to exhibit those characteristics in the manner befitting a man.

Now if confronted with this huge difficulty, Ms Horin might try to wriggle out of by saying something like ‘er, well, I suppose the ‘two mums’ will have to bring in male friends as role models’. But having recognised the necessity of the opposite sex, why would she then deny a child the kind of stable and enduring first-hand exposure to the opposite sex that only married mother-father parents can offer? Can a string of ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’ with no avowed commitment to the child and no ongoing day-to-day domestic contact with him or her ever replace a father or a mother, respectively? Of course not.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Gregory VII, Pope, Confessor, A.D. 2009

Ms Horin on sexual ethics and sex education

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/sex-thugs-and-rotten-role-models-its-not-right-if-shes-not-enjoying-it-20090515-b606.html?page=-1

I’m getting round to this a bit late, but I thought that I’d better say something about Ms Adele Horin’s Sydney Morning Herald column of two Saturdays ago, especially since it seems to have gone unchallenged in the Herald’s letters pages of the days afterwards. In this opinion piece she discussed what she identified as the thitherto unmentioned aspect of public discourse on the N.R.L. ‘bunning’ scandal. What is that neglected dimension, you wonder? Until reading Ms Horin’s article I thought that the neglected dimension of the whole tawdry debate was sin—in particular, that in all the legalistic discussion over whether or not consent was given, little consideration was given to whether or not the act might have been intrinsically evil, evil regardless of consent (and where this possibility was raised it was usually dismissed, though Mrs. Devine had a good article from two Thursdays ago, redressing the imbalance). But it would seem that I was quite mistaken; silly me: you see, the missing dimension is actually pleasure. And so in an article containing much that was incredible (so much so that I wondered at several points whether Ms Horin was parodying her own libertarian inclinations), one reads the following particularly remarkable suggestion, which I’ve highlighted in bold type:

… if the aim of mutual sexual pleasure cannot be a legal standard, surely we can work towards making it a social norm. It's time to give pleasure its due, in our school sex education programs and in public discussion, in homes and in cheap hotels, and in whatever exotic or sleazy locale sex takes place.

Though it seems inordinately difficult for some men to get to the first hurdle and understand the concept of consent, that should not deter us for having higher expectations of men: that pleasuring a woman should also be uppermost in their mind, not simply using her.

School education programs, where they exist, generally do a good job on biology, on contraception, on disease and on relationships, and even on understanding the importance of consent. Condoms are rolled over fake penises. A terror of AIDS and STDs is drilled into young minds. But when I once asked an educator whether sexual pleasure was discussed in class, especially girls' pleasure, she looked aghast. It would be too controversial for Australia, though not, apparently for schools in Europe. But this is where a conversation about sexual pleasure has to start - in schools. Consent should not be the start and end point of a boy's sex education. This approach is selling girls short. […]
(my emphasis, and please do read the whole article in case you fear I might be taking her out of context)

So there you have it: as if parents shirking their duty (a duty which I and, if I recall correctly, Church teaching regard as virtually inalienable) to educate their own children in conjugal matters is not bad enough, Ms Horin wants to go that one step further and immerse youngsters—or should that be drown them—completely in hedonism (as if our culture hasn’t already saturated them with it by the time that they reach high school) by imparting that education from a pleasure-attentive perspective. Thus we see the last traces of a natural-law understanding of sexual ethics expunged and replaced with crude preference utilitarianism. (Unfortunately Ms Horin seems not to be sophisticated enough a preference utilitarian to recognise that the correct word for someone of her school of thought to be using is ‘preference’, not ‘pleasure’—because some people, namely sadists and masochists, prefer pain to pleasure, especially in these matters. No doubt the ‘BDSM’ crowd is deeply offended at Ms Horin’s hedonormative, algophobic bigotry!)

I see this article of Ms Horin’s as a sort of small milestone for Australian culture. I have seen this sort of thing advocated in mainstream newspaper letters pages, but until Ms Horin’s article I had never seen a mainstream media commentator advance such indecent suggestions. But that’s Ms Horin for you, ever the ‘early adopter’. What a sicko.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Gregory VII, Pope, Confessor, A.D. 2009