Letter #266: Like a Virgin
What If a Material Girl isn't a Girl at all?
Spong,
Great essay. I have not seen the Materialists yet but I suppose I’ll have to now. So you owe me 15 bucks.
One thing that struck me on first reading the essay was this. Whenever issues of attraction come up, I’ve noticed that people automatically decide that a material desire is a symbol of a material good. For instance, a man’s money is a symbol of his ability to support children or a woman’s physical beauty is a symbol of her health and her ability to bear. But you don’t make this mistake. Your point, in fact, is just the opposite: a material desire — money — is a symbol of a spiritual good — manhood.
Which, to my mind, is exactly right. Indeed, it’s almost certainly right because, as you point out, women still find high earners attractive even though they can make enough to support their own children. Many do support them, on the assumption that money is the material symbol of a material good, and thus they stupidly deprive their child of the father he or she needs.
This weekend I read an article in the Free Press called “Virginity is the Last Taboo.” It was not a good article: chats with a handful of virgins interspersed with vague, jargony generalizations. But it caught my eye for its assumption that material symbolizes material.
I lived through the moment when virginity seemed to lose its value. As a boy, I simply assumed I would marry a virgin, and even be a virgin when I got married. Then the sixties came and all that was over. I remember the poor lady assigned to teach “Health” (i.e. sex ed) when I was in high school. She was an older woman from the more conventional south. She showed us a movie about a bad girl who put out and then was dumped in favor of a good girl who saved herself. This, I’m sorry to say, was greeted with hoots of derision from a class of kids, like myself, who had already been through affairs, abortions, sexual experimentations and all other manner of decadence. The teacher lasted a single quarter, then quit and returned home.
Our idea was that virginity, a material state, had been a sign to a man that his child was, in fact, his, a material good. Thus, with the advent of birth control and paternity tests, virginity was no longer necessary.
But what if female virginity is a material sign of a spiritual good: femininity and its values, including the idea that her body is only given in love and for love? That would account for men’s (sometimes secret) disgust at women with high body counts. They have lost their spiritual worth: their womanhood.
This makes a lot more sense to me than some pseudo-evolutionary pseudo-psychology in which material symbolizes material.
Materialism is a prison of mirrors in which everything is a reflection of itself. We have to learn to think anew.
Love, Dad
I really enjoy this current round of essays, gentlemen. Thank you. The thing that hits so hard is also so obvious that it's easy to miss. That is this; over time we moderns have brought lif down to its most base level. Life is now entirely what we can see, what we can obtain, and those methods of obtaining it. In the process many of us have missed out on life entirely.
The continuous harping in schools of "we know so much more now" is not as true as we would like it to be. But I begin to see it as the root of attempting to de-link ourselves from the wisdom of ages gone by. If that is accomplished then we are adrift and must invent a way forward as though there is no good precedent for doing so. At the same time we have the basic problems of safety and security. Hence, life becomes what see, what i want, & how to get it.
I graduated from high school in California in 1967. I grew up in a 1950’s type environment into the Summer of Love in San Francisco. It was a sensory and moral whiplash that sent many of peers into a terrible spiral of sex, drugs and rock and roll. I kept myself from falling into the abyss as I was very career oriented, focused on my grades, and worked 3 jobs to pay tuition and living expenses. I frankly couldn’t afford to mess around. Nonetheless, it was a tough time to navigate and feminism (which I quickly realized was not about just equal pay for equal work) managed to wreck its havoc on both men and women.