From the Easy Chair

Masculinity & Femininity Contrasted

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 86-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BT130

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BT130, Masculinity & Femininity Contrasted, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 234, January the seventh, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss a subject which we feel is very important and which does not get too much attention in our time, unless it is unfavorable. The issue of masculinity.

Now Feminism, of course, has attacked the idea of mascunlinity and has waged unrelenting war against it. Then you have pseudo masculinity in the form a macho idea, which is scarcely what we are concerned with here.

Masculinity requires attention because the masculine component is a necessity to life, a necessity to the family, a necessity within the sphere of the church and it is, today, under unrelenting attack. Where men give ground they lose ground, of course, and the community as a whole loses ground. For example, it is an obvious and well known fact that as women take over leadership within the sphere of the Church he attendance to the Church declines and there is a growing exodus from the Church and men, in particular, lose interest in the faith.

The role of men in society is a God given one. It does not mean that they are necessarily more intelligent, but the comoponents of masculinity are given by God so that the men provide headship and leadership.

Well, with that general statement, Otto, do you want to make some remarks on the subject?

[ Scott ] Yes. To an extent, it has been distorted by the recent feminist historians who seem to argue that a patriarchal society was evil, that men deliberately set out to humiliate and dominate women. And I recall, though, when I was quite young, that the historians were rather strong on the argument that men created families and protected women and were very jealous of the fact that they should raise their own children and to somebody else’s. And that rather simple observation seemed to me to make very obvious sense.

We find that family structure around the world in all cultures. And, so far as I can gather, there has never been a culture in which the women dominated society as such.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] In all... all the centuries of the human race.

[ Rushdoony ] The only exception to that is that when a society is in its last stages of decadence and collapse women do dominate.

[ Scott ] Well, in a defeated group.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] A defeated group the men lose their prestige. They lose the respect of the women. And the women go the conqueror.

[ Rushdoony ] And a society in which women have a dominant position, which means the society is on its last legs, is one in which the family collapses, because the sexual freedom of women means that the paternity of a child is no longer a matter of assurance. And the men begin to drift out of the family aspect of society. And the children then are left in the lurch.

[ Scott ] Well, we see this in the... in some of the reactions to divorce, where once divorced the men refuse to support the family any longer. They will not support the women and the children, even though they know that they are their own children. This is not true of all men, of course, but it is true of a considerable percentage, because they have no longer any control over the situation. It is as though they will not pay for it.

Of course, various and sundry methods have been used to crack down on them. But it is one of the consequences of divorce which has not been examined from a psychological viewpoint or even a human viewpoint. It is just taken for granted that since men are still held legally responsible for the support of children and their own children in particular, that they would continue to exercise those responsibilities.

In fact, and in reality, it is running up against a certain factor in human behavior, that a man is not going not pay who doesn’t want to pay when he is no longer in control of his family. And when he has a responsibility, but not the authority, he fails his responsibility.

Now in that and in a number of other respects, it seems to me that we have in recent decades taken men almost for granted as though they were draft animals of some sort that the whole question of what constituets manhood is now a closed book.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] My father used to ... never gave me a lecture on the subject, but he would show me a cue every once in a while and very briefly I remember once that he ... he had a habit of doing something that irritated my mother and I have forgotten now what it was. It was so minor. But she said, “I hope when you grow up that you won’t do things like this.” She said, “Really, I don’t think that he should do that,” whatever it was. And I asked him later when we were alone toghetr. It is good that a good man wouldn’t have done this or that. And he looked at me and said, “Who said that?”

And I said, “Well, mother said that.”

He said, “What does your mother know about being a man?”

And there was a certain... there was quite a bit of truth there. What we are supposed to be like and what we are like are two different things.

[ Rushdoony ] A book was published last year by Bonus Books in Chicago Enemies of Eros by Maggie Gallagher. And it is a woman who ... this Mrs. Gallagher who feels that the whole sexual revolution and Feminism led her into a trap. And this is what she says. She says that women in the last 20 years have suffered more then ever before and I will quote.

“Women are more likely to be abandoned by their husbands, to have to raise their children alone, to slip into poverty and to experience all the consequent degradations. Domestic violence is on the rise, so is sexual abuse of children, while the sexual abuse of women has become the social norm. Women today work longer and harder than their mothers did and under stress are more likely to collapse in nervous breakdowns. Fewer women can find suitable marriage partners and many who do marry will never have the children for which they long,” unquote.

She says one of the great evils of the feminist movement is that it has exalted choice at the expense of wisdom.

[ Scott ] Well, choice is one of those double edged words which doesn’t mean what it used to mean. The pro abortionists call it a woman rights to choose, but they choose abortion and they are not saying so openly. I question whether there is more sexual abuse of women today than before, but it is a subject I am not an expert on. I do notice that a considerable one of the side effects of pushing women into the marketplace as independent workers, women have always been part of the work force, but they have been part of the work force as part of the family partnership. Now they are into the work force as independent workers. And, of course, with independence men have lost a great deal of their leverage over the... over women. They can no longer say, “Well, you go ahead and do what you want to do.”

I recall that Mr. Glazure told me that he gave Mrs. Glazure a million dollars worth of stock for tax reasons and then he said in very shortly after that he said, “I realized that a woman with a million dollars is different than a woman without a million dollars.” And he said, “I adjusted my attitude accordingly.”

Well, the same thing is true about women who are independent in the work force. They... they are in an entirely different position than the traditional. They are no longer dependent upon what my grandmother used to call the bread winner or, no, she had another word for it. I think it was provider. She said provider.

Well, men having lost the business of being a provdier are in a very much weakened condition visa vie women. But women are in a much worse position visa vie men.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now what seems to be going on is that the woman expects the man to continue the traditional role while she has altered hers. And that doesn't work.

[ Rushdoony ] This ... in this book Gallagher says that motherhood has now been devalued by the feminist movement and children have been the victims. And she writes, “Children have been demoted from a public good to a private pleasure. In the process, women’s work has been transformed into a play activity, a hobby like collecting model trains. Kids are supposed to be weird objects of gratification to parents, a modern nuisance to everyone else. You prefer to spend your money on your noisy or smell kids? Me, I prefer a Ferrari,” unquote.

[ Scott ] Well, the percentages have been distorted by the press. I read recently that the traditional family still exists to 40 percent or so whereas the usual report is that the traditional family has virtually vanished. That is not so.

[ Rushdoony ] No. I have seen figures saying that only seven percent and that is ridiculous.

[ Scott ] It is totally ridiculous. It is over 40 percent of the families still have a traditional relationship. The men still go to work. The women take care of the kids and so forth. And I don’t see any particular difference. I think the press is covering a very thin part of the population and presenting it as the norm. So therefore we are talking about a subject that has been greatly propagandized and distorted. So I think women in the United States today are in a very bad condition, very bad situation, because ether is a virtual war on them. They cannot go out at night alone in most parts of the country. They are not safe. My wife is sending my daughter a mace because she is in Seattle which is a very high crime city and she is living in a mixed neighborhood which is very dangerous and she tells me that every time she gets on a bus black men have things to say. And my wife tells me that that was true in New York 30 years ago and I have yet to see it in print.

We are not in the position anymore telling the truth or hearing the truth about ourselves, the truth about anything that is going on and especially in this highly charged area of sexual relations and male, female relations.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the things that has contributed to the present state is Romanticism, because Romanticism demasculinized society. It turned men into a kind of a middle sex, effeminate generally and with an emphasis also on the homosexual.

Mario Praz in his romantic agony documents that and other things and that is, perhaps, the great classic and has been for 30, 40 years on the romantic movement.

But one of the things that happened with Romanticism is that in the spirit of the arts the artists became an effeminate figure. This started first among poets. And then painters, but musicians and poets were the lead off people. And I the 18th century the poets were rather clearly masculine figures. Then, of course, in the 17th century, as well, whether it was a man like John Donne or Dryden or Alexander Pope, they were masculine men. But then when you enter the romantic sphere you have the deliberately effeminate man, often a man who is given to bizarre sexual practices and the musician who cultivates the long haired and effeminate manner so that Romanticism self consciously and deliberately introduced sexual confusion into the human scene.

[ Scott ] Well, I am really not up on the romantic movement to that extent. I think that the Civil War period, for instance, in the United States masculinity was in no problem in the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] No, but we were not as much influenced by Romanticism.

[ Scott ] That is... that is... that is ... may be one of the reasons. After the war we had a problem because the churches and the intellectuals in general, although they didn’t use the word in those days, had led us into that terrible tragedy and we had then the whole question of immense immigration and some men had to build cities and jobs, factories and so forth and they turned away from literature. They turned away from art. They turned away from culture and more or less turned it over to the women.

To this day there is a lot of that left in the American psyche. This is the only country that I know of where the men have given themselves a lobotomy and where they consider reading and music and poetry and art to be feminine. And I think that we have to go into very careful on this thing, because a nation of slobs is not more masculine.

[ Rushdoony ] No. There is another facet to all of this, not only of Romanticism, but Unitarianism. Some scholars have felt that that has been an important aspect of the demasculinization of western society, and especially of the United States. Dr. Douglas, a woman...

[ Scott ] Yes, I remember. I heard a very goo book.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The Feminization of American Culture.

[ Scott ] ...Of American Culture. But that, you see, what we... what that has led to is to deculturize American men, not to make them more effeminiate, particularly, but just to make them more ignorant.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, she sees a connection, Douglas does, between the decline of Calvinism and the rise of Unitarianism and the feminization of American culture beginning with the clergy.

[ Scott ] Well, there is something to that. These are interlinked phenomena, interlinked trends. To put it on a little more earthly level, the fact I have noticed men in ... in work situations and in business, in corporate life... a man who grows up without a father doesn’t learn the rules.

Now Harold Jeanine did not know the rules. There was nothing effeminate about Harold. He was a... he was a man. And a dominating man and one of his problems, as a manager was that he used to humiliate other men and he couldn’t even figure out other men. He sent them all to a psychological testing group. And they went through psychological tests, because Harold’s father died when he was about 11 or so. I don’t think they were... there were close even before then. And he never did find out how to figure out the other guy, how to size him up, how to handle him, how to treat him. And one of the results was that when Harold was running ITT there was a singing door at the top, because men wouldn’t put up with that and he lost some very good men. And in the end he wound up with a freak show. His successors have had to sell pieces of the company every sense, because it didn’t make any... too much sense. And I have noticed other men who grew up without masculine guidance and who have just never figured out how to get along.

I don’t know about the... the clergy. I... I don’t know too many clergymen, but I know a few who struck me as having been raised in some kind of a nunnery or another because they didn’t seem to know a damn thing about talking to other men.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, there was a saying a century and a half ago before the Civil War and after that the three sexes were men, women and Beechers, with reference to Henry Ward Beecher.

[ Scott ] Oh, my.

[ Rushdoony ] And others altered that to say, “Men, women and preachers.” And the source of that was, of course, the Unitarian clergy. And you are familiar with Ralph Waldo Emerson more than most people are.

[ Scott ] Much more than I wanted to be. Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And Emerson was very much a part of that movement, very precious about everything. The culmination of that which influenced a great many people in Britain and Emerson’s European influence could well be the subject of a major book. You have in Oscar Wilde...

[ Scott ] Well, that is going pretty far. I won’t blame Oscar Wilde on Emerson, now... I...

[ Rushdoony ] No, but there is a connection, you see. Emerson did begin the demasculinization of American culture.

[ Scott ] Well, I thought, really, that it was the feminization which allowed these fakes to appear and to masquerade as persons of culture when they were not. It was a terrible mistake in the United States to let the women take over in culture here, because it meant that it became attenuated. It became really formalist. It had no point, no purpose. A nation without a culture is a nation without a mind. And we have paid a very heavy penalty for this. Not having developed any standard of national values. The men... we have... no... not even the self made aristocracy that Jefferson hoped for. I mean, some body said this and it is not original with me that a Texas aristocrt is entirely different than a Boston aristocrat or a California aristocrat. We have no way of even telling the class to which a person belongs unless we know his part of the country and what that context is.

We hear, of course, about people who are very well equipped and we have gone... Clemenceau, I think, was one who said that we went from a position of primitiveness to decadence without an intervening period of civilization. And you cannot be a civilized man if you don’t have any culture. You can only be a brute of some sort. You don’t... you don’t k now where you are, what you are.

A woman... an artist... let’s put it another way. An artist with an education cannot be a good artist. It is not possible. It is not possible to be a good anything without an education and not necessarily schooling...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We went into before. And manhood, it has to have some sort of a definition. There are things which a man cannot allow himself to do, cannot allow somebody else to do to him, cannot allow himself to be. Now we are teaching—and you and I heard this from a teacher, Bob Edwards—they are teaching sex in the third grade and they are having the children draw the positions of various perversions to make sure they understand them, but they are not telling them that these re things which cannot be... should not be done.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So what sort of men and women are we going to have?

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] This is a long way from the romantic movement.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But it is a product of the romantic movement. The romantic movement fostered a false idea of what constituted art and what constituted the intellectual and what constituted spirituality. The dramatic shift in western culture with Romanticism was an important factor in derailing western society.

[ Scott ] Well, I think actually it was simply a part of the loss of faith.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] Of attendant upon both the French Revolutioj and the aftermath. And if there is no God all is permitted and if there is no God, there is no sin. If there is no sin, then what... what holds people together?

There was a sense of honor which lingered on longer. An honorable man did not do this and did not do that. I understand now, though, that younger men have no such concept.

[ Rushdoony ] The very word honor which was so important in our time, is no longer a word that this the same meaning.

[ Scott ] I don’t hear it used.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] I don’t see it in print.

[ Rushdoony ] Except in the court room when you address the judge as your honor which is a misnomer in the case of all too many of them.

[ Scott ] But it is a very important point.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now in Latin... in Latin America in Venezuela, I recall... now we have to go back a number of years, three years or so, visiting my father, introduced me to a man who had killed his brother because he found out that his brother was a pervert. He shot him. And he called the police and the police came and the authorities asked him why he did this terrible thing and he said he had dishonored the family and they released him. There were no charges filed. That was it. Now that is, of course, in credible up here. I remember even younger, even longer than that, {?} a... no, he was a writer. The general in Brazil who stole a man’s wife, a newspaper man’s wife. He ran into the newspaper man in the corridor of a office building and the general immediately pulled out a gun and shot him and he was arrested, of course. His defense was, well, I was with his wife. He knew it. As a man of honor, he said, “I expected him to try to kill me when he saw me and when I saw him I shot in self defense.” They released him. That was that.

All right. That is not the American method. We don’t believe in honor in that European sense.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the ideas that developed with the romantic movement was the belief that men tended to be very mundane, coarse and materialistic, whereas women, it was held, are spiritual and higher beings. As a matter of fact, it was that romantic concept that led to the birth of Feminism. And some of the feminists went so far as to say that God had to be feminine because how else could you have a pure and holy God, a spiritual being. And it led to the development of a number of strange ideas, Transcendentalism carried the implications of its idea to the point where the material world was so down graded that some felt it was not real.

Margaret Fuller, of course, is well known for the fact that she found the fact of being a physical being and living in a material universe very degrading. And after much soul searching and a number of years of inner struggle she finally said, “I accept the universe.”

And Carlysle’s response was, “Ye, gad, she had better.”

But that kind of thinking then climaxed in Marry Baker Eddy, a direct outgrowth of Emerson and the Transcendentalists. She believed, of course, that matter is not real, that spirituality is the only real thing and the universal mind alone prevails and all else is an illusion. As a result, the masculine disposition and temper has been seen in western culture and especially in the United States since then as somehow inferior, as somehow coarse, crude, vulgar, not really fit for the living room unless and then cleans his act up a bit and acts as his wife feels he should act.

And that has been an important strain in western thought.

[ Scott ] Well, it has been a strain. Of course, I don’t know how any sensible person could hold it when you think of the great composers and the great artists, the great poets. And you realize how many of them are men. And, in fact, you look around at the construction of society which was not put together by {?} feather pillows and you are talking about, as you mentioned earlier, the differences between men and women. Women have been cooking, for instance, a long time, but it took men to improve the stove. And if it had been up to the girls I think we would still be in that nice warm cave.

I don’t... I don’t think that there is a high or a low there, but there is a difference in approach. In some respects women are more specific and more earthy than men, because they are more familiar with blood and with the facts of life. They bear children. And they are not—at least in my experience—as ethereal as they are supposed to be. On the other hand, I am very amused by a writer in Punch who said that women have a tendency to live at once... at one removed. He said a great deal of their conversation and their observation is what we are doing.

[ Rushdoony ] I will take exception to your statement that if it depended on women we would still be in the cave. I believe that assuming the mythical idea of a cave man for a moment, one of the first things the woman said after looking around the cave after her marriage was, “This will never do.” You have got to provide better housing than this. So they moved out of the cave in a hurry if they were ever there.

[ Scott ] Well, do you remember Steinbeck’s story about the couple in the middle of the Depression who found a boiler and the were living in the boiler. It was all right. It was a little difficult to get into. You had to get on your hands and knees and there was an elbow that was hard to traverse, but once you got in the boiler, everything was fine. It was snug and dry and so forth. And he... he came home one ... one evening after out trying to do whatever and she was crying. And he said, “What is the matter?” Well, she wanted curtains.

[ Rushdoony ] You are probably familiar with the saying that behind every great man and every successful man is a woman who says, “I haven’t a thing to wear.”

[ Scott ] The way I heard it was there as a ... behind every successful man was an astonished mother-in-law. I was given a book recently. That is not what I meant about conversations between men and women in which they misunderstand one another. But I couldn’t finish the book because it was written by a woman and the male examples are so stupid that I... I threw it away.

[ Rushdoony ] Maybe she had stumbled on something, Otto.

[ Scott ] And I do notice that when women write books in which men are involved, the men are a step below intellectually. But there are exceptions. The Bronte sisters had Heathcliff and, of course, nobody could ever live up to Heathcliff except Lucifer himself. So they go from one extreme to the other. But I do think we have the social scientists of the United States to be serious have in seriously interterfered with the natural cultural developments of this country, even more so than the romantics or the Unitarians. I really believe that our social scientists have decided to redefine human nature in both sexual and beavhioral terms in every sense. And they are trying now to convince the American people about certain things about men and women which are not true. They are trying to teach the children of this country that any form of sexual behavior is normal when it is not, that both sexes are equal in all respects, and they are not. We have now the spectacle of women in the army in the gulf and when they fall into the hands of the Arabs this is going not be ghastly.

[ Rushdoony ] Just to go back to my statement about the Unitarians. I don’t think we have studied the situation enough to appreciate the extent to which Unitarianism has influenced western civilization. A Canadian scholar writing on Darwin, the title In the Minds of Men has called attention to the fact that contrary to the myth that Darwin was a simple Bible believing person until he took the voyage on the Beagle, he came from a Unitarian family, a strong Unitarian background. And he represented in his thinking a Unitarian impulse to overthrow the credibility of the Bible.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. He was not a Christian at any time.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] No. No. There is no question that the Unitarians led the way to where we are. But we are now in the hands, much worse.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Than their predecessors. We are up against amoral people who call themselves scientists who have decided that human beings must behave in a way they have never behaved in the history of humanity.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And this has opened the gates to monsters.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, one of the things we tend to forget, too, is that the biblical pattern is the God given one and it will reassert itself.

[ Scott ] That I agree.

[ Rushdoony ] The 31st chapter of Proverbs gives us a picture of a virtuous woman and the word virtuous is used in the sense of strong, morally strong and in every way strong. And the virtuous woman is presented as one who manages an estate, branches, farms, business, the varied enterprises and handles a substantial household, buying and selling and so on while her husband sits in the gates, that is he has a governing place in society. To sit in the gates meant to be a town ruler or a ruler in the state. And the chapter too often is taken as an indication just of what the women was. But it is also by indirection a state to what the man was.

Patriarchy meant that men were leaders in society, but a wife.... the wife of a patriarch as comparable to a prime minister. She had greater powers than women have ever had in any other society. So the place of women in patriarchy has never been studied properly. It has been subject only to abuse by feminists who don’t know anything about partiarchy.

[ Scott ] Well, not only don’t know anything about patriarchy, but have abandoned the full idea of looking at other cultures. This country has turned into a very parochial country. It used to, when I was a boy, look around the world for examples and for knowledge. People used to go overseas in order to learn things. It was taken for granted that all the wisdom of the world didn’t repose within the boundaries of the United States. And a person who didn’t know anything about any other culture was considered pretty narrow.

Now we have women, of course, are important. They are partners and every marriage is a partnership. I have seen some marvelous businesses that were, in effect, partnerships. It generally takes the best effort of two people, a man and a woman to make one good career, because a career has to be concentrated in a certain area and the individual who is doing the concentrating has to be supported in all kinds of peripheral ways in order to enable that concentration to take place. You see it today in certain stage families, in certain entertainment people where the man is a business manager and the woman is the actress or the singer or whatever. And it is not a matter then of sex, but of ability and talent and which one is the best to put forward, which one is the best to support.

The part that bothers me is the loss of courtesy on the part of women toward men and vice versa. I have had women speak to me in recent years in tones that really amaze me. I mean, you know, I have... in my eighth decade it still startles me to have some young girl start calling me by my first name. There is no respect for age. There is no respect for sex. And this goes both ways.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The men don’t respect women today. Women today are not protected in the United States by the men. Do you realize every day you pick up the newspaper there is a mutilated body of a woman somewhere thrown out for the dogs to eat and the men sit and watch television on football. I mean, this is the final stage of a sick society.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, to go into the counter trends, to list just two of them, first of all, I think what the very interesting aspects of our life today which a lot of people find most irritating is the popularity of the western. The western portrays men as men. Now it may be an unrealistic picture and very often it is. It maybe radical distortion of our history. But the enduring appeal of the western is that good and evil are sharply drawn. Men are men and women are women.

So this tells us that people still respond to that standard.

[ Scott ] The ideal persists among the people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But the elite is doing its best to destroy it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And to rule it out of existence. And this ... in that lies, I believe, the crux of the problem. It isn’t that people are different, that men are different and women are different than they have ever been before. That this not the case. But the cultural pattern that is being enclosed is anti natural. I mean for us to be told, for instance, that we must respect somebody like Barney Frank is an insult to every sense you have. And yet that is the condition of our society.

Now obviously we are talking about just a few instances here and it is very treacherous to take an instance and turn it into a generality. The majority... I think the majority of men and women in the United States are fundamentally the same as they have ever been.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in think a second very hopeful sign is the Christian school movement and the home school movement, because in these context, there is a stress on a respect for elders and for the opposite sex. And the children who go to such schools are taught to respect their parents and to respect their sister or their brother.

Now this is a... a very important factor and there are people across country who are not Christians who are sending their children to a Christian school because they like the standards that their children are picking up with reference to them, the parents and with reference one to another.

[ Scott ] Well, I... I think that is true. And I ... my personal experience has been that certainly on the senior level your manhood is tested. You must tell the truth. And you must be courteous and you must pay some attention to the other man. If you violate any of those precepts you will not very long remain in the counsels on the top.

The fundamental facts of life cannot be altered no matter how many wizards we have in the social sciences or how far adrift the press may go. Eventually, I think, we are developing here an official elite while the Christian movement is developing a real elite and the one will replace theo there.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I think another very hopeful sign is what has happened to Playboy. From the end of the 50s to the beginning of the 80s Playboy to a great extent had a powerful influence on our culture. But what has happened in the 80s, the latter 80s is that its circulation has dropped about 50 percent. It no longer has the general influence it once did. And Heffner, from representing a kind of an ideal to young men, began to look more and more foolish. So that in itself is indicated a healthy direction.

Television and the fimls have tried to perpetuate that ideal, but they are losing an audience as a result.

[ Scott ] They are getting more deperate all the time.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I expect that they will reach explicit sex on the networks within the foreseeable future, or at least they will try to. And it... it reminds me of a situation I encountered once in New York on Madison Avenue and the subject came up. A fellow said to me he was going to bring call girls in to the situation to get a client. And then he looked at me and said, “You don’t approve.”

I said, “No, I don’t.”

He said, “For what reason?”

I said, “Well, among other thing, I wonder what you are going to do for an encore.”

And that is where Playboy reached.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] What do they do for an encore? Any subject can become a bore. These types are the only ones I have ever heard of who have been able to turn sex into a boring subject. And what they are doing to the children, of course, is to take the romance out of relationships. And there is the part of the romantic movement you didn’t mention, but it is a very important part. The idealization of love we have to have. And we have, last year, 1.3 million abortions in this country. At no other time in history do I know of have the women of any nation been taught in times of peace into destroying their own progeny.

So we are up against some very large, difficult situations.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Very clearly. But even as these things are happening at the top, on a grass roots level there is a steady growth in the other direction. And there is return to the older standards and to a biblical faith. I ... I think the very fact that there is a such a militant hostility is evidence of the fact that of the revival.

[ Scott ] Well, there is a revival going on and I don’t know ... I don’t think it is possible for any of us to discover the extent in terms of numbers. Numbers are not really the most important thing anyway. If you energize a significant percentage of the population that changes the country. But we do have, I think, the equivalent of not simply the {?} this is not a regime that has helped to the tradition of the past. We have a regime that is trying to take us into a very unsavory future and the... in large measure the revival you mentioned and the home schooling and so forth, the ... the congregations leaving the main line churches and going into smaller and more austere groups is a reaction against what is being imposed. Really, in spiritual terms it is a spiritual revolution.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, that is what we need. And I think the direction of the future is one we can take heart in.

I think the present looks very grim, Otto.

[ Scott ] Well, there is no question about it.

[ Rushdoony ] But I don’t think that the future is going to be what these people think it is going to be.

[ Scott ] I don't think they are going to be putting out these lessons forever. I don’t think they are going to be debasing three year olds... third grade children forever. I think that the United States is composed of many more healthy people than that. I do think that the consequent discovery is going to be difficult.

On the other hand, I think something is going to have to energize the men of the United States, because the feminist movement would never have gotten as far as it did if the men hadn't surrendered.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The men surrendered and they very often provided the ideology for the feminists.

[ Scott ] That is right. They have encouraged it. Women have lost a great deal when they are knocked off the pedestal.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They have lost safety. They have lost protection. They lost two husbands. They lost children. They are now reaching the age where I am beginning to read complaints about the fact that the biological clock has run out and they are suddenly discovered that they are alone. They didn’t fulfill themselves.

And this operates on the other side. 1.3 million abortions means 1.3 million fathers. And one of the weirdest things that is going on is the assumption that men are no better than bulls.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And that they didn’t want children or that they are not important to children. So we will see, I think, some remarkable shifts and changes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, our time is about up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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