Quote: (01-27-2013 07:41 PM)Ovid Wrote:
Quote: (01-27-2013 06:08 PM)speakeasy Wrote:
This is a problem that I think men are plagued with in the West. It's ingrained in our culture that "hitting" on a woman is some sort of violation of her personal space and well-bring. That it's wrong. Stopping a woman in the street that you are sexually attracted to is "creepy" and she will view you as such for "bothering" her. Male sexual desire is shamefully lascivious and a man that is sexually forward with a woman he doesn't know ought to be condemned as disrespectful to women and he's little better than a Neanderthal. This is why so many men in the Western world are afraid to approach a woman cold. These fears don't exist in Brazil or in Italy or Africa. They get into our heads from the time we are young, that women are disgusted by forward behavior from men. It can take years to shed that belief and still more to actually believe it at the gut level.
This attitude is, I believe, derived from Protestantism, specifically the austere Calvinistic, puritanical form it took in England, Scotland, and the New England colonies in North America. It boils down to prudery, and has been a defining feature of social relations in the English-speaking world for centuries. Nowadays, the overtly religious aspects have been largely forgotten, but the social habits remain to haunt us.
First post.
By my reckoning Protestantism has little to do with it.
The reconfiguring of behaviour is a consequence of the development, or transformation, of morals. That transformation cannot be attributed to Protestantism, or, to be rather more specific, the
original transformation cannot be attributed to Protestantism. Protestantism most likely did have an influence, yet it was merely a negligible contributory factor
along the way, not the original determining one. The transformation of morals (and here we are concerning ourselves with how those morals affect our everyday social behaviour)
occurred when the weak inverted the logic that said Aristocratic = Strong = Good = Joyful and so on and so on into a logic that said Meek = Lowly = Submissive = Good.
This transformation, transfiguration even,
was the revenge of the lowly masses against the ruling classes and this subtle change reached its defining moment in Jesus Christ (although the road had begun much earlier with the Jewish religion) . The peasants subverting the reasoning of those above that had withstood for millenia and, ultimately,
introducing the concept of guilt. Attaching this notion to all formerly aristocratic traits (strong, beautiful etc)
the strong slowly ceased behaving as they had done. This moral code forced on them from below prevented them. To put all of the above in a succinct summary - the strong gradually turned into the guilty and weak, the weak gradually became the strong and the good.
The extent of this revolution in values is seen today. The cultivated man, the refined man, is seen as
the one with depth, the type who deliberates, the type who contemplates. The more developed type. He follows this inverted moral code (abstracting each and everything and therefore paralysing himself into inaction). The man of gloom. The man stifled and bound by his own developed inverted moral code. This man, in his exalted highest state, his most stereotypical manner, is
the man of neuroses. Imagine Woody Allen on his worst day. Think of beta.
By comparison, the contrast, what some might say is neanderthal, but, typically, is the aristocratic man of old, the type who see's and takes, who acts and thinks after, the man of action (as opposed to Dostoevsky's
Underground Man - the man of thinking).
The man of action is seen, might we dare say, as the simpler man. For him 2 + 2 always = 4. The alpha. This character is, by the standards of the moral code, primitive. More than that,
by this moral code he is guilty.....but.... his notions of guilt, his tendencies towards feeling guilty, are either non existent or resisted. He doesn't give a damn. By the moral code he is always mistaken when he sees Strength and mistakes Strength to actually be Strength. He mistakes Meekness for Meekness. The beta is convinced his meekness, his weakness, his forgiveness, is actually an abstracted strength, free from guilt. The alpha sees beyond this, he is re-affirming the aristocratic ideal, for him weak is weak and nothing else. Strong is strong and nothing else. Abstraction has no role to play.
This revolution in morals, I'd wager to say, is where the attitude
derived from. Protestantism, like all of Abraham's religions and their deviations, merely helped it on the way.
Some aspects are damn obvious. In almost any group of friends there are, like the original poster said, some guys, or just a guy, who doesn't 'get' the chicks they ought to (even though they might well be good looking, have status, etc).
Sell your cousin, offer your liver as collateral, because as sure as Monica Bellucci is beautiful and swimming shorts are for swimming those guys who aren't getting laid are all (never say all) neurosis afflicted, deliberating, what-if wishonastarmother*uckers.
Contemporary morals aren't conducive to game. They invert gut instinct and are an attack on the senses. A dude of introspection is not a man of action. A man of action doesn't have the depth that a man of introspection has. The man of action gets the pussy.
The midway point man, like myself, who is probably inferior to both, being neither one nor the other, a mongrel, might well struggle with authenticity. But, that's another issue for another day, is it not?
