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Post by hibernicus on Jul 28, 2012 19:01:55 GMT
A few points in relation to Tobias and Benedict - Tobias first: You still have not clarified what you were saying in your original post, which can be interepreted in more than one way. Benedict apparently understood you to say that the sixth and ninth commandments do not really matter and should therefore not be preached, as some of your language would suggest. If this is what you mean, please make yourself clear and we can discuss it on that basis. If what you meant was that the sixth and ninth commandments are true and important but have been given disproportionate attention, please make this clear and we can discuss that. The first two commandments do sum up all ten; unfortunately I can think of examples of people who have sincerely tried to live by them while breaking some of the others (usually from restrictive ideas of who is my neighbour, or mistaken views of who God is and what He wants - legalism or presumption would be examples). It is certainly the case that dress does not necessarily create or suppress sexual attraction (and conspicuously modest dress can even create forms of attraction that might not otherwise have existed - in one of Agatha Christie's novel Hercule Poirot laments at some length that the post-First World War change from ankle-length to knee-length skirts means that women's ankles are no longer concealed and therefore no longer sexy) but if there is no connection at all between the two then the fashion industry has been making much ado about nothing for centuries. The extent of sexual activity is notoriously difficult to measure but it is pretty certain it does change with changes in sexual mores. For example, in his book THE ABOLITION OF BRITAIN Peter Hitchens cites surveys from the late 50s/early 60s in which about 50% of British men questioned and 75% of women claimed to have been virgins at marriage. Admittedly self-reportage really can't be checked, but there is circumstantial evidence that there really has been a change - deriving from a variety of factors, socio-economic as well as religious. The real problem with rigorous modesty codes of the type found in both Islamic and traditional Latin-Mediterranean society (and among the Victorians) is that they create a Madonna-whore dichotomy. The woman who observes the modesty code is seen as entitled to respect (how far she actually gets it is another matter) but if she departs from it in even the slightest degree (e.g. wearing a short skirt, going out without a suitable male escort) she is seen as "fair game" and entirely to blame for whatever men do to her; this mindset is one reason why the Victorians have come to be associated with sexual hypocrisy. Some of the commenters on the American posts display a similar mindset.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 28, 2012 19:28:50 GMT
A couple of points in relation to Benedict: (1) Many trads do indeed seem to see the Amish or Hasidim as models to be emulated. They see that the world is becoming more hostile to Christianity (which is clearly the case at lest in terms of lip-service), they see how liberal attempts at religious inculturation often lead to absorption by the world, and they conclude that the answer is total self-segregation based on rigorous boundary maintenance (very strict dress and modesty codes being an example). I might add that I have come across secularists who are all too willing to agree with this view, and who will maintain that religious believers can only expect toleration of their "absurdities" if they are willing to adopt the sort of economic self-sufficiency and self-segregation as the Amish. As THAT particular endorsement shows, such measures are the reverse of evangelisation - and I need hardly add that a completely secularist society would be unlikely to allow people to self-segregate in a sort of human zoo, but would almost certainly intervene to impose its standards on them.
(2) In relation to habits; one argument I have seen that does appear to have some force is that there are circumstances in which the use of religious habits can be seen by those to whom the religious minister as an assertion of a certain type of superiority complex (e.g. when missionaries are operating in a society foreign to their own). Fr Timothy Radcliffe, for example, has made this argument in relation to Dominicans operating in the present-day Third World. It seems to me to have some force, and not to be easily dismissed out of hand (though I would like to hear the other side argued, and his view might support modification/simplification of the habit rather than total abolition). The Opus Dei numeraries might make a similar argument; that since the Opus Dei charism is the consecration of everyday working life, for the numeraries to wear habits would set them off from the "everyday" in a manner that would weaken the nature of their witness. It MIGHT (I stress MIGHT) also apply in terms of ministry in very poor working-class areas (though the Missionaries of Charity and the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal wear distinctive habits and it doesn't seem to weaken their appeal).
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Post by norwegianblue on Jul 28, 2012 21:51:28 GMT
nm
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 4, 2012 9:47:57 GMT
The point on the Amish/Hasidim is taken. But these originate in a certain time and I doubt there is anything so inherently attractive of late 20th/early 21st century dress that anyone should want to preserve it for generations. Also the Amish and the Hasidim have dress codes for men as well as women. I think the model many trads actually admire is the Islamic model.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 4, 2012 10:59:17 GMT
Muslims have dress codes for men as well. (I believe the male body is not supposed to be exposed between the knee and the navel). I am not sure how strictly these are observed, however - probably less strictly than the female variety, but there will be differences between Islamic societies. I have repeatedly seen a certain type of trad praise the Amish, but they do it for their insistence on economic self-sufficiency rather than for their dress codes. I have heard of trads praising the Islamic dress code for the same reason that some self-proclaimed "Islamic feminists" do - that it liberates women from the tyranny of the sexualised male gaze and allows them to be perceived as individuals rather than sex objects. This BBC report on the current epidemic of sexual harassment in Egypt would not seem to bear this out. Note how the pests quoted towards the end of the report justify harassing women in Islamic dress by claiming some minor feature of their dress showed they were not "really" modest. (In fairness, if you read the full report you will see quotes from some Egyptian Muslim men denouncing this attitude.) The point about sexual harassment being partly driven by the hostility of poorer men towards upwardly-mobile women and desire to humiliate and degrade them in order to assert their "proper" place is one I have seen made about the Islamic modesty police in Iran and some other countries - the modesty police are recruited from the poorer classes, the "offenders" are likeliest to come from the more westernised upper and middle classes, and enforcement is driven at least partly by vengeful class resentment. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19440656EXTRACT The day I met Marwa, she was wearing a long headscarf pinned like a wimple under her chin, and a loose flowing dress with long sleeves over baggy trousers. But dressing conservatively is no longer a protection, according to Dina Farid of the campaign group Egypt's Girls are a Red Line. She says even women who wear the full-face veil - the niqab - are being targeted. "It does not make a difference at all. Most of Egyptian ladies are veiled [with a headscarf] and most of them have experienced sexual harassment. "Statistics say that most of the women or girls who have been sexually harassed have been veiled or completely covered up with the niqab." Harassers are getting younger, campaigners say In 2008, a study by the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights found that more than 80% of Egyptian women have experienced sexual harassment, and that the majority of the victims were those who wore Islamic headscarves. Said Sadek, a sociologist from the American University in Cairo, says that the problem is deeply rooted in Egyptian society: a mixture of what he calls increasing Islamic conservatism, on the rise since the late 1960s, and old patriarchal attitudes. "Religious fundamentalism arose, and they began to target women. They want women to go back to the home and not work. "Male patriarchal culture does not accept that women are higher than men, because some women had education and got to work, and some men lagged behind and so one way to equalise status is to shock women and force a sexual situation on them anywhere. "It is not the culture of the Pharaohs; it is the culture of the Bedouins," Mr Sadek says... On the Qasr al-Nil bridge in central Cairo, a hotspot for harassment, I met a group of teenage boys hanging out near street stalls blaring loud music. When I asked them about a recent case of mass harassment in which women at a park were groped by a gang of boys, they told me the girls brought it on themselves. "If the girls were dressed respectably, no-one would touch them," one of them said. "It's the way girls dress that makes guys come on to them. The girls came wanting it - even women in niqab." One of his friends told me the boys were not to blame, and that there was a difference between women who wore loose niqabs and tight ones. A woman who wore a tight niqab was up for it, he added... END OF EXTRACT Given that some of the nuttier forms of American Catholic trad-dom arise in the old Rust Belt, where traditional male roles have been undermined by the loss of industrial jobs, I wonder if there is a similar impulse at work in some of these calls for strict modesty regulations for women - a desire to reassert male power in the home as a compensation for humiliation elsewhere. When I read the comboxes on American political sites (this is a useful way of exploring forms of American angst that don't get into the mainstream media, but you need a strong stomach) I occasionally come across rants about how the decline of the American economy is due to a conspiracy by professional women to ship off traditionally male jobs to China so that said women can buy cheap imported consumer goods, enjoy service jobs and live SEX IN THE CITY lifestyles. This sort of mindset is not of course unique to Catholic trads; you find it among some evangelicals and macho atheist-libertarian types as well. I get the impression that a sense of male rage and dispossession and desire for revenge on women underlies some of the nastier aspects of American popular culture, which I will not discuss further here; it's the flip-side of the rage and bitterness against men that underpins much American feminism. I also suspect the sense of having been economically dispossessed by forces beyond their control underlies much of the palaeo-trad vogue for the Amish as models - a desire to return to a simpler life where there is a clearer correlation between your work and its results, and between how hard you work and what you get in return. It's not just an introversionist desire to be purer -than-pure; it's a desire to shut yourself off from a cruel world, like a wounded animal hiding in its lair.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 4, 2012 13:14:44 GMT
I have just read Hibernicus' last post and I couldn't agree with him more. The point about the modesty police is well taken, and it appears that the sort of 'Rust Belt' commentator is in much the same background.
The whole point, the whole context of this thread, is that the trad reaction against women's fashions of the past five decades or so is less to do with women's appearance as an irrational reaction against the feminist movement. It not about how the women actually look (if that were the way, they would look at how they look themselves, something men don't tend to do that often), it's about what the appearance of women suggests.
It would be interesting to apply Marxist analysis here.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Sept 4, 2012 14:05:59 GMT
We probably have the women in the all encompassing body covers in mind, but many Moslem women go around with their heads covered but otherwise look extremely fetching.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Sept 4, 2012 14:12:42 GMT
Is there a universal male culture which presumes women, in whatever guise including a nun's habit, are asking for sex?
It seems to be a more commonplace take on Fr Groeschel's unfortunate comments about some forms of sexual abuse of minors (which were well wide of the mark).
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 4, 2012 20:36:17 GMT
There certainly is a type of male fantasy which attaches itself to women in uniform, including nun's habits, precisely because the uniform is meant to divert attention from the woman to the function and sexualising it reasserts the viewer's sense of virility (and correspondingly implies that women, whatever their outward appearance, really just want to be sex objects). There is a long tradition of pornography involving nuns' habits in Latin countries (some self-proclaimed "artist" recently pasted up nun pictures of this type around Temple Bar- I pulled down and tore up a few) and according to the news reports some of the participants in Berlusconi's parties dressed as nuns. (What a charming person to have Church support - unfortunately the other side have their own defects.)
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Post by Deleted on Sept 4, 2012 23:56:55 GMT
To get away from the dresses and modesty and all that stuff I was wondering what ye make of this? I have to say that I do like this lady, she seems as mad as a box of frogs but I'd still share a pot of tea with her and give her some cake. Her name is Ann Barnhardt. She attends your beloved Latin Mass, veils, shoots, all sorts of loveliness, and had this to say on women voting; barnhardt.biz/"But here’s what I wanted to share with you – and this will be of particular interest to all of you readers who only read me because you hate me so much. I know you’re out there, and remember, the first step out of addiction is to admit that you have a problem. You all will want to screen capture this, or PDF it and save it on a thumb drive which you then bury in a mayonaisse jar. This post will absolutely, positively disqualify me from ANY public position or office anywhere on earth for the duration of my life aside from self-employment. Mr. Cowbama and I were talking about the evil of government regulation and how it almost always does far more harm than good when Mr. Cowbama thought he had me in a check-mate. He smugly said, “So you think the 19th amendment should be repealed, then? You think giving women the right to vote was a bad thing?” Quoth I in retort, “Oh, HELL yes.” Mr. Cowbama wasn’t expecting that! Will it ever happen? Nope. But it sure is fun to dream. Do you know when things really started to go – literally – to hell in this country? When women were given the right to vote seperate and apart from their husbands. What a flipping disaster. This is when the war against marriage and the family began in earnest – and it has taken less than 100 years for both institutions to be almost completely destroyed. And it all started with the damn suffrage. Here’s the deal. Up until women’s suffrage, a man was the head of his marriage and his household, and his vote represented not just himself but his entire family, including his wife and his children. When men voted, they were conscious of the fact that they were voting not just for themselves and their own personal interests, but they were also charged with the responsibility of discerning and making the ultimate decision about what was in the best interests of their entire family. Wow. Isn’t that nuts? Men being . . . responsible? As soon as the 19th amendment was passed, men were effectively castrated, and in many, many cases disenfranchised by their wives. No longer was the man the head of the household. No longer was he responsible for his wife. Now the wife was a “co-husband” at best, or a flat-out adversary at worst. The notion of a man making the final decision about what was best for his wife and family per his God-given vocation as husband and father was now over. Now all he was good for was bringing home the bacon – but even that wouldn’t last. Women are made with a healthy, innate desire to be provided for and protected. I know this because I am a woman, despite the pair of enormous brass balls I have to carry around. Those are merely an anomaly. Please ignore them, and no, you may not touch them. I just polished them last night. Back to the point, women want someone or someTHING to take care of them. For this reason, women tend to lean socialist, and are generally in favor of the expansion of government when the government promises to “provide” for them. If you have read me for any length of time you could probably write this next paragraph yourself. Satan has used this healthy feminine dynamic, perverted by suffrage, to systematically replace men with the government as the providers in society. A woman no longer has any need of a man. Marriage no longer serves any practical purpose. A woman can whore around and have as many fatherless children as she pleases, and Pimp Daddy Government will always be there to provide. Men have learned well from this, too. Men can also slut it up to their heart’s content knowing that the government will take care of their “women” and raise their children for them. Fathering children no longer binds a man to a woman in any way. Men didn’t vote to societally castrate themselves, and never would have. No – in order for this system to have come about, women’s suffrage was an absolute necessity. Women themselves voted the system into place which objectifies and devalues both them AND their children. Next, the issue of disenfranchisement. I believe that the 19th amendment actually DISenfranchised more people than it enfranchised. Many, many married couples quickly found themselves voting against one another. The man would tend to vote for the more conservative platform, and the woman would vote for the more socialist platform. When this happened, the effective result was the nullification of BOTH individuals’ votes. What this did was massively reduce the voting influence of the married household, and magnify the voting influence of the unmarried – and the unmarried tend to be younger, and thus more stupid, and thus vote for big government. It was all part of the plan, kids. All part of the plan. I’ve probably ticked even one or two of you conservatives off with this post. Here is the question I would ask you: Why? Why are you ticked off? If you’re a woman, the reason you are ticked off is because you put yourself and your desire to assert your will above the well-being of society in general. I don’t feel that way. I would give up my vote in a HEARTBEAT if it meant that right-ordered marriage, family and sexuality was restored to our culture. I would rather that my little female namesakes grow up in a world where they did not have the right to vote, but were treated with dignity and respect, were addressed as “ma’am”, had doors held for them, and wherein men stood up when they entered the room. I would rather they be courted properly and then marry men who would never, ever leave them, and would consider it their sacred duty and honor to protect and provide for their wives and their children because he LOVED them. Oh, HELL yes. I’ll give up my vote in exchange for that any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Why wouldn’t you? For you men who don’t like my position, you’re just a slave to political correctness. It’s the same thing as the rap music. No one will criticize rap music because it is forbidden by the P.C. culture to criticize a non-white cultural phenomenon. To do so is “bigoted”. It’s the same with this. The P.C. culture has convinced you that if you criticize anything that has to do with women or the feminine culture that you must be a Taliban. Don’t fall for that garbage. That manipulation is why fifty million babies have been murdered in this country over the last 38 years. Men knew that abortion was murder, but they punted on it and eventually legalized it because they didn’t want to be accused of being “misogynistic”. Cowards. So there you go. Print it, save it, PDF it. Because I acknowledge the reality and consequence of female suffrage, am able to see beyond my own immediate self-interests on the matter, and have the stones to say it all publically, I am permanently disqualified from . . . pretty much everything outside self-employment. What a world. " In response to her question, yes of course I would give up my vote if it meant that society would return to some kind of normality. Do you think that she has given men too much credit or is she on the mark? No men will be harmed in the answering of this post, even if they agree with her. ;D
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 5, 2012 7:52:22 GMT
I think Ann Barnhardt is madder than a box of frogs. Some of her interractions with posters are priceless.
Seriously, Ann Barnhardt is an example of what is out there in traddieworld and if traddie world is allowed drift the way it is now, more of this sort of thing will come into the open.
By her opinions I suspect she's pixie, but I know enough about American traddies to know I could be wrong - and not necessarily because she's something more outlandish.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 5, 2012 14:48:41 GMT
;D Yeah she cracks me up, her zeal for Christ is admirable, it just needs some guidance and direction. I don't think she is involved with the SSPX, she's a convert from Protestantism. I thought of her when I read the posts earlier about disenfranchised men in America and their attitudes towards women and feminism etc. She's tougher than any of those men I'd say! I also fear she has given men way too much credit in the past and not taken into account the state of the world as it is today. There have been too many decades of people not having to take responsibility for one another so even in her biggest dreams that restoration of men instead of Pimp Daddy Government looking after us would never happen, we'd be more vulnerable than ever. The Garden of Eden has long gone. Despite the rhetoric, or perhaps because of it, she has a cult following among a certain sort of man over there and has gone viral with her financial advice. Indeed, the post on weird new movements regarding harnessing the intensely faithful is timely. I thought it was rude of Archbishop Martin to describe the new seminarians as traditionally minded and fragile, however if he has come acrosss believers as full of spunk as that lady maybe he has a point. I'd still buy her a cup of tea though, her chat is priceless. ;D
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 5, 2012 15:33:37 GMT
The husband's moral authority over the family was so weak that, when the wife got a vote, she immediately "castrated" him by voting for the opposite candidate! Goodness.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 5, 2012 20:42:52 GMT
I wouldn't describe her as fragile - quite the opposite. The comparison to Mattie Ross in TRUE GRIT - right down to the prose style, if any of you have read the novel, which is very funny - is so apt I'd almost think it was a parody, but it seems to be quite serious. (The comparison is the complete lack of self-consciousness about her opinions.) She may agree with a lot of Bishop Williamson's opinions, but she certainly is not his ideal type of woman. I wonder what sort of a life her husband has/had? The underlying Protestant cultural mindset is very strong - a very extroverted type of Evangelical certain the truth is perfectly straightforward and perfectly obvious (to her at least) so there's no need to doubt or to defer to anyone. BTW there are bigger fruitloops in traddiedom. Have you come across Solange Hertz, Louise?
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Post by Deleted on Sept 5, 2012 21:04:36 GMT
I wouldn't describe her as fragile - quite the opposite. The comparison to Mattie Ross in TRUE GRIT - right down to the prose style, if any of you have read the novel, which is very funny - is so apt I'd almost think it was a parody, but it seems to be quite serious. (The comparison is the complete lack of self-consciousness about her opinions.) She may agree with a lot of Bishop Williamson's opinions, but she certainly is not his ideal type of woman. I wonder what sort of a life her husband has/had? The underlying Protestant cultural mindset is very strong - a very extroverted type of Evangelical certain the truth is perfectly straightforward and perfectly obvious (to her at least) so there's no need to doubt or to defer to anyone. BTW there are bigger fruitloops in traddiedom. Have you come across Solange Hertz, Louise? It was the new Irish seminarians who were described as fragile, definitely not Miss Barnhardt! Sure she gave her home address to a man threatening to kill her for her views on Islam. She is single but as I said before she has a bit of a following Ann Coulter style so I doubt it's for lack of opportunity. Despite the loopiness I admire her courage and straightforward faith. Her writing always cheers me up. I'll have a look for Miss Hertz now, I've not heard of her.
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