After Weinstein, what?
by Michael Cook, MercatorNet:
One path leads to bigger rulebooks. The other leads to a revival of chastity.
The lugubrious profile of Henry Lawson, with his gigantic handlebar moustache, graced Australian $10 notes for decades. Lawson was a 19th Century writer who wrote about “the bush”, the rough life of the farming and mining settlements of early Australia. He’s not known much abroad, but a handful of his short stories are truly world class. He’s a kind of Down Under version of Mark Twain.
Alas, his romantic relationships foundered and after flaring into fame, his candle guttered into alcoholism, debt, homelessness and mental illness. Whatever his faults, he was a deeply humane writer with a great respect for marriage. In one of his stories, “Joe Wilson’s Courtship”, he writes with surprising insight about (close your eyes and take a deep breath) chastity.
But I think that the happiest time in a man’s life is when he’s courting a girl and finds out for sure that she loves him and hasn’t a thought for any one else. Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, and keep them clean, for they’re about the only days when there’s a chance of poetry and beauty coming into this life. Make the best of them and you’ll never regret it the longest day you live. They’re the days that the wife will look back to, anyway, in the brightest of times as well as in the blackest, and there shouldn’t be anything in those days that might hurt her when she looks back. Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, for they will never come again…
Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, for they’ve got a lot of influence on your married life afterwards—a lot more than you’d think. Make the best of them, for they’ll never come any more, unless we do our courting over again in another world. If we do, I’ll make the most of mine.
What’s your reaction to that? Cloying sentimentality? Victorian moralism? Christian claptrap?
Wherever we stand, we’ll have to admit that Joe Wilson’s sentiments are almost incomprehensible today. In fact, a number of words about relationships have almost vanished from our lexicon in the last 50 years. When was the last time you heard words like modesty, continence, purity, courtship, shame, temptations, passion, or fidelity in the context of what we blandly catalogue as “relationships” – let alone his exhortation to “keep them clean”?
More than a moral vocabulary, we’ve lost a precious possibility for channelling our sexuality. And it seems no more possible to recover it than it is to raise the Titanic. We can only gaze at the fragments of forgotten splendour scattered over the ocean floor.
But maybe not. Maybe there’s someone who can raise the Titanic. Maybe his name is Harvey Weinstein.
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