Thursday, October 07, 2004

Bad faith

Pop singer Christina Aguilera has toned down her image recently, but still defends her former hypersexual behaviour as follows:

I wasn't a 'bad' girl, but it was the persona of a strong and aggressive female ... It's all in how you see it. And I had to go against the the many opinions of people who didn't see it that way.

But that has been taught to us from the beginning of time, with men trying to gain power by suppressing the woman and making her feel wrong about her sexuality. (Herald Sun 7/10/04)


Note how thoroughly Christina has absorbed the ideas of left-liberalism. For her, social dynamics are to be explained in terms of a will to power of one group in society over another. Sexual modesty, in this view, can only be seen in terms of a power struggle between men and women.

There are two striking consequences of this outlook. First, as mentioned above, sexual modesty can't be taken seriously on its own terms: it can only be interpreted as an illegitimate power play. And second, men and women are radically set apart in their social relationships: from the very beginning of time, thinks Aguilera, men have acted to suppress women.

This is a bad faith view of the relations between men and women, which encourages a very unnatural division between the sexes.

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