The Peculiar Institution
of the Creed of hefnerism

“I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it takes an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation. Yet few slaveholders seem aware of the widespread moral ruin occasioned by this wicked system.”
     Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861

In the winter of 1999 there were no free states offering refuge from the ghoulish spectacle of the embalming of the President of the Frequent Liars Club. It was impossible to avert one's gaze from the juvenilia of the Commander and Creep, clutching his wife in public like a middle-schooler, flinging falsehoods like frisbees. During those dismal days, four small events occurred in my life: on a plane, outside a school, visiting a friend, and taking in a Hollywood entertainment. Each of those ordinary moments impressed upon me the spiritual and socio-structural similarities between the lewdness and rancor of American society in 1999 and the white slaveholding society I was reading about in the slaves narratives. The term for the last half-century of intentional deconstruction of dignity, self control, responsibility and compassion in sexual consciousness is hefnerism.
     The creed of hefnerism is an ethos of non-marital sexual entitlement that holds sexual gratification to be a right and a valid organizing principle of life. On face value, the non-marital entitlement seems reasonable, but in practice it has drastically dehumanized American society, and brought about a cruel new world. Hefnerism promotes a trinity of heartlessness in human connections -- conditionality, externality, and the primacy of sexual gratification -- and has fostered a spiritual bondage, slaveholding ways without slaves, that is blighting mainstream America with the sordid, malevolent atmosphere and chaotic family structures that characterized slaveholding society of the 19th century.
     I was on a Southwest Airlines flight from Albuquerque to Portland, Oregon with my daughter. Three men occupied the row behind us. An elderly gentleman was on the aisle, directly behind me a strongly built man of about thirty, another man with a pony tail also about thirty had the window seat. The two young men were friendly and talked loudly about sports and their jobs in construction and in a store. Their conversation was a lexical sewer flowing with unselfconscious obscenity, vulgarity, and enmity for women. When asked why he was traveling, one replied sourly, "I went to Albuquerque to see my kid. Do you have kids?" "Nah, but I had some close calls. Abortion saved my ass a couple of times." Then he laughed.
     Some days later, I was parked outside of South Eugene High School in Eugene, Oregon, waiting to pick up my son, when a group of boys swarmed around my Mercury Sable. One young man about 16 years old crashed his fist on the hood of my car and snarled, "Suck my ----, bitch." General Motors product loyalty? I don't think so. In America today, such behavior is not extraordinary. "Violent and licentious,' this young man has been indoctrinated his entire life by an entertainment media and a society saturated with disrespect for women. Like the slaveholder's son, he amuses himself by verbally humiliating an older woman in his own community, and as in slaveholding times, he knows he can get away with it. How can such a young man grow up to make a deep personal sacrifice for a just cause or the welfare of a family? In hefnerist America, just as in slaveholding America, he is not expected to.
     A few days later, I brought a new baby gift to Annie, a twenty-two year old mother who I had watched grow up, play soccer, and stay for sleepovers. The baby's father lived in California, and according to Annie, "He has other children and his own life." Annie was reading the thoughts I was trying not to think. "You know I always loved children," she said. "My friends are in bad relationships, they get lied to, ripped off, even worse. I don't want a partner. Marriage is a fantasy, it's just not real."
     Again I was struck by the peculiar institutions of contemporary American society. A vital, refined young woman had made a reasoned conclusion that she will not be loved. Extreme differences in material circumstances obscure spiritual similarities. Annie bred herself to a man she knew cared little about her or his child. This child "follows the condition of the mother': born into a shadow family of unknown brothers and sisters who live far away. Linda Brent, when still a slave, did fall in love, but was not permitted to marry. My young friend does not want to love because she is convinced a loving marriage is unattainable. Hefnerism is the right to sex without marriage, and emphsizes conditionality in relationship. If you meet my needs I will love you, if something better comes along or troubles arise, love will end. Who wants to put their heart on that auction block? Hefnerism has infected today's middle class with the age old vices of the rich and vulnerabilities of the poor.
     During the week I made the baby visit, I saw the movie True Crime, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood and his real family. (This movie can now be found in your local video store in the post-menopausal male Harlequin fantasy most predictable endings section.) In this movie, Eastwood is largely occupied with inflicting pain upon his daughter-aged wife with conspicuous, asinine adultery. He takes a brief respite to pitch his preschool daughter face-first into concrete, drawing blood on her forehead. The great gun-slinging maker of our day finally meets enemies so terrifying he tucks tail and runs: one on the couch reading a magazine, the other down for nap time. When his humiliated and grieving wife has been punished enough, Eastwood begins a dance of courtship and abandonment with his grandchild-aged daughter, the winner of his demonstrably unreliable affections, because he still "loves" her though he does not "love" her mother.
     Unless baby Eastwood escapes from the hefnerist society into which she was born, this may be her life's highpoint of love. When she grows up, she can reasonably expect the kind of love from men that daddy feels for mommy. The Eastwood family, headed by an infantile, compulsively sexual man, an unnaturally thin and miserable wife, and a bewildered, frightened little girl, clearly demonstrates why twelve-year-old girls have a tendency to stop eating altogether. In the final lines, Eastwood charms a retail clerk about forty years his junior by proposing they have sex, then makes one last cynical remark to this stranger about his child's mother. Eastwood is so spiritually deranged he presents this man as a kind of hero, a man doing what he's got to do. This is the wreckage of heroism, incidental child abuse and perfect lousery, "cruel and sensual" like his forefathers the slaveholders.
     The Eastwood movie is particularly significant because Clint Eastwood is a male icon whose career is such he can choose to tell any story he wants. A prominent citizen in a state which has seen numerous shooting sprees by men in schoolyards and day care centers, Eastwood selects a script where he needs to injure a four year old girl. An orthodox hefenerist, Eastwood then says to his child, in effect, "You're cute kid, but getting laid is more important than sticking around to tuck you in each night. We'll leave that to mom's new boyfriend(s) and hope for the best." "Adultery, concubinage, incest are the results of slavery," wrote the fiery "root and branch" abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in his introduction to the narrative of Frederick Douglas.
     Adultery? Concubinage? Those were the good old days. It is obvious that the current epidemic of child sexual abuse is at least in part due to the fact that American children are no longer raised by their natural parents.

The Creed of hefnerism

Imagine the outrage if it were shown that a psychoactive toxin had been entering the water supply of a city over a long period of time. Brief exposure had no measurable effects, but long-term exposure caused malaise and discontent, eventually leading to a decrease of conscience, compassion, self-control, and a capacity to keep commitments to others. From unstable, unhappy families flowed confusion and despair; incivility, acrimony, and even violence became conventional in this city. Class action lawsuits would clog the courts. But it is almost impossible to detect and root out a spiritual toxin because it bonds on a molecular level with economic interests and personal desires.
     The profound shift from marital sexual entitlement to a universal, non-marital entitlement has been catastrophic. The near half-century toxic drip of hefnerism has contorted the connection of men to women away from responsibility toward entitlement, and so disabled a large portion of American society as to either accept a rapist as president, or not want to know if he is one. The counterfeit freedom of hefnerism has not to do with nudity, beauty or "soft" porn. It is an ethically rationalized removal of thoughtfulness and self-control from sexual gratification, independent of marriage, love or commitment. The non-marital sexual entitlements have fostered the widespread reliance on abortion as birth control, more divorce, more children born to unmarried parents, more rape, and more sexual abuse.
     Hefnerism is the intentional practice of externality in human relationships, in which sexuality does not serve nature; rather nature is forced to conform to sexuality. It focuses on the explicitly sexualized appearance of women, promoting disfigurement of the body. The practice of cutting open and installing filler materials into an otherwise natural, healthy breast is the ritual abuse of hefnerism, and will some day come to be viewed with horror and revulsion as the branding of slaves is today.
     Hefnerism distances father from child and undermines natural fathering. Sexual self-control is the foundation of true fathering. The convoluted laws of slaveholding allowed men to have children by their slaves, while protecting them from parental responsibility toward these children. Linda Brent observed, "They regard such children as property, as marketable as pigs on the plantation . . . passing them into the slave-trader's hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of sight." Gone from America are the unspeakable crimes of slavery, but returned to every day life is such unimaginable unnaturalness as a thirty year old man, in the full power of his life and manhood, boasting to strangers on an airplane about terminating the lives of his own offspring.
     Slaveholding and hefnerism call forth continual self-justification. Involuntary bondage focuses the heart on freedom, voluntary self-dehumanization is a snare a thousand times more difficult to escape. It took a war to end slavery, but to end racism and hefnerism, the corrupting states of mind, is far more difficult.
     The apex of political potency of any religion or creed is realized when the creed has the power to impel its adherents to take human life, and no religion has ever guided a powerful nation unless its teachings can justify the taking of human life. Wars had been waged in the name of Christianity for many centuries when Scripture was used to justify slavery, and slaves were forced to spend their few hours resting their broken bodies listening to preachers harangue them about the sin of trying to escape.
     Hefnerism and the later sexual entitlement campaigns are political branches of the non-organized, eclectic spritual movement of auto-deistic humanism. Auto-deistic humanism conveys a sacredness to human experience without reference to a Creator. The dark side of auto-deistic humanism, brilliantly vivified by the current boy-President, is its indiffernce to suffering caused by militarism, injustice, poverty, and environmental degradation when these don't interfere with personal gratification. The conversion from Christianity to humanism as the unofficial state religion in the United States, which paralleled the non-marital sexual entitlements, was completed when the same court that declared slaves to be not individual human persons while somebody owned them, declared human fetuses to be not individual human persons while somebody carried them.
     Hefnerism tends to separate natural fathers from expressing love and shouldering daily parental responsibility for children who do get born. It is once again standard for children to grow up out of sight of their fathers, with only vague and unenforceable claims upon them. Hefnerism teaches that no matter how cruel a man is to his children's mother he can still be a good father. That is nonsense. Hefnerist doctrine has established that Eastwood's character in True Crime and the young man behind me on the plane are commendable for seeing their children at all.
     In recent quainter times, deep thinkers devoted themselves to the task of certifying permissiveness. The Freudo-Victorian drivel that male sexual looseness is an antidote to aggression has less scientific foundation than bloodletting as a cure for bacterial infection. Male sexual entitlement and aggression are inseparable, two sides of the same coin. The current generation of young adults has been influenced by hefnerism all their lives. Millions have heard messages through the public schools that self-control is not to be expected, and sexual assault rates continue to increase even as other types of violent crime decline. Yet the make love not war syndrome lingers. Both the bumper sticker and hefnerism refer not to love but to sex, which, unless controlled by love not only does not cure militarism and aggression, but antithetically turns everyday life into a war zone and family life into a battlefield.
     The greatest direct societal damage of hefnerism has been to undermine the viability of lifespan marriage. If all of one's needs are not met, when troubles come, when a woman's body naturally ages, hefnerism abets abandonment. Marriage is not the only setting for the self-communicative power of love, and there are far worse things than divorce. But the beautiful transformation of self-interest into deep love over many years is the spiritual treasure of marriage. All of the permanent God-based religions provide lifespan marriage as an incomparably valuable solution, not only to the problem of sex, but more importantly, as a vehicle to achieve spiritual freedom. Suckered by the hefnerist con "you can get more and better," millions of people have been robbed of the chance of this incomparably valuable attainment.

A Tyranny of Sensualism

“ . . but, as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a plaything. The sensualists, indeed, have been the most dangerous of tyrants . . .”
     Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792

The sun has yet to rise on a world where tyrants and sensualists do not hold sway. Tyrants oppress the poor, sensualists flourish in places where most everybody has enough to eat. Both derive their power from appeals to the most base element: fear. Slavery maintained its bitter grip for two hundred years, and racial apartheid was instituted throughout the United States after the Emancipation Proclamation, because of white people's fear of African Americans. hefnerism is essential fear of women, a defeatist assertion that men do not have the compassion needed for a lifespan commitment to an equal partner.
     Owing to our emphasis on individual rights, when Americans take up a so-called right, we tend to hold it more tenaciously than do other democracies. We clung to the right to trade in slaves almost sixty years longer than did Britain. Once a legal right has been established, either by law or social custom, interference with that right creates a sense of grievance and victimization in its possessor, however dehumanizing the right may be in the first place. This sense of grievance on the part of white southern men, most of whom did not own slaves, resulted in the Civil War. The grievances fostered by the mass brainwashing campaigns of "you have a right to what you want" have led to decades of private wars in millions of families, and are now frequently spilling over into public places in ghastly ways (and not just the Bob Dole Viagra commercials).
     There have now been three non-marital sexual entitlement movements, spaced at approximate twenty year intervals. Hefnerism was followed by the female and gay sexual entitlement campaigns -- gynohefnerism and homohefnerism -- in temporal order of the group's status in the social hierarchy. The rites, rituals, and vestments of the three are different but spiritually they are identical. Whether man or a woman, gay or straight, defining your life through sexual gratification is equally incapacitating, like living in a beautiful mansion and being unable to leave the basement.
     Hefnerism has indirectly harmed the human race in three ways: it has undermined privacy, taken the civil rights focus off the poor, and enervated the worldwide middle class from facing the environmental catastrophe that is already underway. The anti-shame movements emphasize public display and approval, and tend to view privacy as unnecessary and secrecy as traitorous. The sexual entitlements have imprisoned American society in a permanent early adolescence of flaunted grossness. Nobody ever died from a lack of pornography. Countless people, mainly poor, have died and been injured from civil rights abuses and environmental damage in towns, in prisons, at the borders. Others have lost civil liberties as victims of crimes of personal entitlement. Many civil libertarians, distracted by the wealth and celebrity of the sexual entitlement movements, are not seeking to remedy these more profound injuries.
     The cults of sensualism and materialism that have so clouded the mind and imprisoned the heart stifle selfless service and are preventing the dissemination of scientific and technological knowledge to solve the real problems of poverty, environmental degradation and the cruelty of war-making. The earth is burning up and the people who could do something about it are busy feting their private parts.
     For hundreds of years the wealthy nations kidnapped Africans into forced labor and wholesale rape. Today the wealthy nations are closing the doors on Africa, abandoning millions of Africans to suffer and die from treatable and even curable diseases, in their poor, poisoned and plundered lands.

Choose Your Master Well

Every life presents opportunities to fight against the corrupting influences of the day. The laws of slavery hardened the heart of the third president, who devoted much of his writing to justifying the continuance of slavery even while acknowledging its monstrousness. The custom of non-marital sexual entitlement has hardened the heart of his namesake, the forty-second president, who abandoned decency, sincerity, and honesty in his maniacal quest for sexual gratification.
     O Brothers of the North! Your freedom lies only in the chance to choose your own Master. Choose well. Do not waste your precious manhood on the games of boys, nor deepen your bondage to the body. Shun that market where human beings are sold. Listen to the voice of the Heart. The heart whispers: freedom is selflessness in action. Fly straight like a swan to this chance to be human, who can tell when it will come again? Or if your legs are strong, lope like a hound with the spit flying. However many times you fall, get up and keep running to that servitude which is mastery of self.