Perhaps in all the pages on this tread I missed some crucial point that you are focusing on. I thought you had asked Coggins for some clarification on his sweeping cartoon about the 60s. My picture of that time and its effects is one of a kalidiscope of different things happening with a variety of results. Some results were bad some dubious and some good. A whole history of race relationships hit a fundamental turning point and our whole society was shaken by waves of reassing convention. The reassessment of race relations opened doors to reassessing relationships between the sexs. Opportunities for women started to be opened. One could characterize the sixties as these changes but their opposite also found new ways to come out. Some sexual attitudes in the sixties were a sort of male focused expectation of service from women. Some fuel for the femisnist movement came from reaction against male versions of the sexual revolution.
If a person wants to try and tie the change of the sixties up into amusing oversimplifications such as Coggins enjoys I suggest an alternative. The 1960 could be seen as the point our society escaped the traditional sexual structure of keeping large numbers of women in the prostitution business and as a result defining male sexuality as predatory and mercenary and womens role as either fallen or unfallen, sexual or pure. With an escape from the structure of social expectation created by widespread prostitution considered normal in society women could understand themselves as sexual with out always being sure they were not being confused with that other group of fallen ladies. Men were reminded that relations worked upon respect for women instead of power of purchase.
I rereflect that in my small western town the official downtown whorehouses closed their doors in the 1960. I think my town is cleaner and fundamentally better as a result. Perhaps my town was a bit slow in this change from the situation some decades earlier where any and all small medium or large towns had established houses of prostitution. They were closed more and more about the country. The last I know of along the Coer de lane river in Idaho closeed in the 1980s.
In the first place, you should stop playing word games and come clean, up front, regarding your ideology and general world view so that we can get an orientation to your overall philosophy. Phrases such as "his sweeping cartoon about the 60s" and "amusing oversimplifications" sounds pretty much like the traditional leftist intellectual smarm that usually hides a lack to knowledge or serious analysis of the material. Given that a large number of some of the best minds in 20th century social criticism and political philosophy essentially agree with my view of the sixties in an overall sense, It would be of little interest to me to point out ad nauseum to Huck that his views of the matter are hardly non-controversial.
Now, the civil rights movement was a product of the fifties, not the sixties, and only reached its culmination in 1964. What the sixties and early seventies brought was the rise and colonization of the civil rights movement by the Black Power movement, or Black cultural nationalism. The change in attitudes regarding race were certainly welcome, but it wasn't the Left that either fomented or oversaw those changes. Indeed, it was the sixties Left that corrupted and destroyed the original integrationist movement at its core.
The statement "
The 1960 could be seen as the point our society escaped the traditional sexual structure of keeping large numbers of women in the prostitution business and as a result defining male sexuality as predatory and mercenary and womens role as either fallen or unfallen, sexual or pure., could probably best be understood as academic leftist psychobabble, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, even though it is, in essence, unintelligible.
The idea that the sixties released mass numbers of woman from the "prostitution business" is simply extraordinary. Figuring out what this is even talking about is the first task. Once that fails, we move on to the very obvious truth that it was the sexual revolution, radical feminism, and the rise and legitimization of pornography that has expanded the world wide trade in flesh to levels unprecedented in the history of the planet. Huck must have missed the extensive links and quotes I provided on the porn driven global sex slavery industry. This wasn't' created by Judeo/Christian sexual mores or "traditional family values" but by philosophies in aggressive and diametric opposition to them. Here is the rise in unwed births (in this case to white woman) between 1965 and 2000:
Births to Unmarried White Women
(as a percentage of all births)
1965 4.0%
[(1968) Levy v. Louisiana]
1970 5.7%
1975 7.3%
1980 11.0%
1985 15.0%
1990 20.0%
1995 25.3%
2000 27.1%
In 40 years, unwed motherhood among whites went from almost nothing to almost 30% of all live births. Now, if Huck knows what he is talking about in the slightest, he knows that similar births to Black woman are hovering near 70% now, up from about 23% in the same era. Now, what ideologies, ideas, philosophies, and policies (with those policy's incentives and pressures) created the conditions for cultural shifts such as this, and in what era did they gain prominence?
Let's continue our tour of an abstract from a U.C. Berkeley Sociology course description:
With an escape from the structure of social expectation created by widespread prostitution considered normal in society women could understand themselves as sexual with out always being sure they were not being confused with that other group of fallen ladies. Men were reminded that relations worked upon respect for women instead of power of purchase.
Confused? You're in good company. Widespread prostitution was considered "normal" in post sixties North America? This, folks, is the product of the mind, not of a serous thinker, but of an ideologist who has allowed his mind to be colonized and savaged by highly tendentious theoretical cobwebs that are more interested in the triumph of an ideological vision than in a search for truth. The entire analysis is so utterly and shockingly detached from reality and serious critical reflection that it makes one's eyes water. This is what happens when complex historical phenomena are subjected to thorough ideological revision and forced through a process of ideological cleansing before analysis even begins. Huckleberry doesn't care about reaching for the truth; he doesn't need to, as he already has the truth tucked neatly into his little leftist/feminist/Cultural Marxist search light that he can then use to illuminate any question of the human condition. That's what ideology is for; its what you
conform history to, not a methodology with which to explore and understand history.
I
rereflect that in my small western town the official downtown whorehouses closed their doors in the 1960. I think my town is cleaner and fundamentally better as a result. Perhaps my town was a bit slow in this change from the situation some decades earlier where any and all small medium or large towns had established houses of prostitution. They were closed more and more about the country. The last I know of along the Coer de lane river in Idaho closed in the 1980s.
[/quote]
What the??? There are whorehouses all throughout North America. Some of them are called "gentleman's clubs". Some "escort services". Others have little pink lights around the windows and say "massage". A number of them are also underground operations and feature Shanghaied girls from Mexico, Latin America, Asia, and whatnot, existing as sexual slaves. The sixties ended prostitution? Have you taken your temperature lately?
Ever been to Amsterdam or Copenhagen, Huck?
What's truly shocking is that Huck isn't even cognizant of any need to even make an attempt at making his ideological template fit actual historical evidence.