Triangulated between a feminism that preaches perpetual outrage, a porn culture that turns love into a biology lesson (and which has made it into our sit-coms, movies, and music) and a hard conservatism that ignores art, many Western women have lost the capacity to appreciate and create beauty, to wonder and delight, to genuinely love. Bombarded into spiritual catatonia by rage politics, digital devices, easy sex and irony, American women don’t seem to have wisdom, but sarcasm. Instead of joy, they trade in snark. They take flirting to be sexual harassment. Claiming to be “spiritual but not religious,” they are neither.
Compared to white women, women from other parts of the world offer genuine substance. I was lucky enough to date someone from another culture for several years. She was from India, and had in abundance what most women in the West have lost: what the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand called “receptivity to values.” Values, as von Hildebrand saw them, were not just the moral guideposts that people hold to. As author Thomas Howard phrased it, “by value, [von Hildebrand] did not mean the windy generalities invoked by presidents and mayors in Fourth of July speeches but rather (shall we capitalize it?) That Which is excellent in itself and is to be admired (a very weighty word for von Hildebrand). Interestingly enough, the word ‘value’ is so massively basic for him that it is far from easy to tweeze succinct definitions of the word from his work, so to speak.”
Howard then quotes von Hildebrand:
Values are not only like dew falling from heaven, but also like incense rising to God; each value, in itself, addresses to God a specific word of glorification. A being, in praising God, praises Him through its value, through that inner preciousness which marks it as having been drawn out of the indifferent. Nature praises God…This is true of every work of art, every perfect community, every truth, and every moral attitude. Man…must first of all respond adequately to each value as a reflection of God; he must respond with joy, enthusiasm, veneration, love-and lovingly adore God, Who is the fullness of all value.
This is very true. I find American women singularly unattractive and off putting. It’s partly their attitudes (spoiled and selfish and angry to start with), it is partly the wanton way they dress, and it is partly their vulgar speech–it is bad enough to hear obscenities coming out of men with every breath, but I see more and more American women speak the same way. And nothing turns me off more than tattoos–most American women appear to have desecrated their bodies nowadays.
Anyway, it is academic for me, since I’ve been married to a wonderful woman for 30 years (Japanese) who to me is still as attractive as the day we first met. But I feel badly for my two sons, neither of whom have really shown any interest in women, which is kind of shocking until you see what the eligible pool looks like.