As [Cristina] Nehring observes, our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect. The difficult scramble up the meritocratic ladder tends to discourage wild passions and death-defying flings. For bright young overachievers, there’s often a definite tameness to the way that collegiate “safe sex” segues into the upwardly-mobile security of “companionate marriages” — or, if you’re feeling more cynical, “consumption partnerships.”
[yap yap]
Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess. (Though such excess is more appropriate in the young, it should be emphasized, than in middle-aged essayists and parents.) But most Americans, particularly those of modest means, would benefit from greater caution and stability in their romantic entanglements.
You see, ambitious women control their libidos, because sex leads to babies and babies lead to the end of careers, or at least their derailing. But the poor masses don't have those checks on their sex lives and therefore are more likely to have sex and therefore babies. The moral of the story is that Ross Douthat wants America to stop all the immoral screwing. It never seems to occur to him that the people he's chastising don't care what he thinks, but who can blame him when he has received so much praise and money for being a shallow, sex-obsessed, puritanical busy-body?
h/t to Downpuppy
7 comments:
Ugh. His writing is so needlessly wordy and fussy, it's almost incoherent. "Purged of eros"? "Irrepressible passions"? The need to pee when your bladder is full is irrepressible. Two people committing adultery is not. They did not succumb to the inevitable. They made a choice.
Only an idiot like Douthat could turn the subject of sex into class warfare. I'd have to re-read his work three or four times to try and understand why he thinks poor people should have less sex than rich people, but I'm not in the mood to torture myself today.
Post Title == Dog Bites Man.
"he has received so much praise and money for being a shallow, sex-obsessed, puritanical busy-body"
Well, that is the reason he was hired. (I guess Ben Shapiro wasn't available.)
Too true, Ken. It would be nice if professional Christians actually acted like Christ.
Clever pseudonym, it's useless trying to make sense of his stuff. I wish he'd just concentrate on controlling his wife like all the other domestic tyrants out there, and leave the rest of us alone.
So Educated Elite (like Ross) should have more passion, and their wives more babies, while the Lower Orders should just simmer down. I wonder how many babies his wife has had so far? Or does she suffer from constant migraines?
Nobody anywhere seems to have noticed that he closed with 2 jokes.
Probably a sign that humor isn't his thing.
Douthat has done what Thomas Sowell often does. Although both are very highly educated themselves, somehow it's only liberals who are the "elite", or, as Sowell calls them, the "intelligentsia". Isn't that clever young Mr. Douthat just PRECIOUS?
Maybe fundamentalists are so cranky because they aren't getting any on the rhythm method. A careful woman would leave a one week per month window open, and slam that sucker closed the rest of the month.
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