Marty, your critique of Oprah and Dr. Phil are excellent and astute. What we are seeing today in the year 2002 is alarming. As recently as the 70's or even the 80's it would have been difficult to imagine someone who is called "America's shrink" referring to any human being as "slime" or using the other kinds of contemptuous designations that Dr. Phil (and Dr. Laura and their imitators have now become infamous for and that have earned them such widespread popular respect and praise). And phrases such as "kicking him out on his ass" would have brought professional censure and at least a token apology. Compare the immense popularity of Phil's brand of hate-filled expressions for some kinds of persons with the tremendously compassionate Dr. Rubin, who was America's shrink in the 70's. Rubin's work is still among the best ever in all of mental health. This new version of antisex propagandadists in the 2000's--nay, make that this new version of anti-humanity propagandists, for when one denigrates one category of human beings one denigrates all of humanity--this new breed of media shriking, in the likes of Dr. Phil (and Dr. Laura and sundry local would-be imitators), speaks not just to the grave problem of sexual ingorance and prejudice in general but also to the problem of what kind of benighted and prejudicial public that we now have that gives so much support to such human hostility and why this newly popular support is so much with us just now at this period in our country's history. The constant male bashing that you refer to on these shows clearly tells me that the propaganda that "men are basically bad" is necessary for achieving some sort of national aim. The aim is, in my opinion, to keep men ready to think badly of themselves so they can "redeem" themselves in acts of self-sacrifice. War, that is, is always about killing allegedly bad boys somewhere and about allegedly good boys getting killed in the processs of killing allegedly bad boys. The doctrine that all boys are essentially bad and rude is given more plausibility when people can be made to believe the mythological pseudo-sceintific nonsense that a man's greater levels of testosterone makes him overly sexed and overly aggressive. This is a fundamentally political mythology that serves as a dogma to keep men prepared for being sacrificed to their death and and for sacrificing other men to their death. In this regard, Oprah and Dr. Phil are doing enormous service on hehalf of the nation's current feverish warrior mentality and its requirement that we think of men as the bad-bod-good-boy killers ready and able to kill other more pefectly bad boys anywhere on earth where our war-fevered imaginations can invent them. As to the dogmatic demonization of nonmonogamy, there is not enough time or space here to discuss the many and sundy politically motivated reasons why this sex-bigoted dogma has recently gained so much public support in an era of history that is now so ready to sacrifice its young men in war and the young men as well as women and children elsewhere on earth. Since the time of Musonius Rufus (30-100 C.E.), the notion that sex SHOULD NOT exist for pleasure of any kind has had many adherents. This esentially Rufusian doctine is resurrected in sundry versions again and again in history at the opportune time when many many persons prepare themselves to eagerly advance generally bellicose anti-humanity state of mind that helps bolster a nation's level of hostility toward some human beings somewhere on earth. That is, somewhere somehow somebody is being very bad, and we can reassure oursleves that human badness certainly exists since, justs as Musonius Rufus explained, we see evidence of this badness in the human tendency to want to enjoy sexual pleasures of sundry kinds. So when a people are getting ready to become more and more destructively bellicose toward their fellow human beings, there is a signficant rise in the popularity of antisex crusaders such as the two current crusaders who you have so astutely and perceptively exposed as incompetents in the department of sex expertise. But sex expertise is not what the public care about. What they care about is a rationale and mental prepartions to go on hunts to sacrifice bad people, especially bad males somewhere. In all of human history, there are typically antisex crusades of one sort or another before a nation prepares to go to war or prepares to initate other kinds of human desctruction such as severe but avoidable econcomic hardship on the most vulnerable members of a society. A noticeable increases in the prevalence of antisex propadanda and crusades to cleanse a nation of his bad bad bad people (to kick them out on their ass and to regard them as subhumans---as slime, that is) is, therefore, a fairly accurate foreboding of much more terrible human destructiveness that is being prepared in the not-too-distant future. Where antisex propaganda begins to emerge, there is an anti-human and inhumane sprit that is fomenting and that threatens to intensify its massive psychotic bigotry in the form of some kind of large-scale human sacrifices that may take different forms--war being one of the most typical; but things like witch hunts and imprisonments for victimless "crimes" and severe economic hardships and increases in violent crimes are others. Thank you for you wonderful work in, once again, being a most articulate voice for sexual sanity and for therefore opposing the current huge momentum of public support for increasingly destrucive and bellicose attitudes toward human beings in general. We are in for some very very harsh times ahead!
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