Jeffrey Epstein's Cuties 4

So far in this ongoing series, we keep returning to the startling perspective that, looked at through the lens of history, the fact that anyone is opposed to the sexualization of young girls such as depicted in Netflix's movie Cuties and as practiced by Jeffrey Epstein and his colleagues is utterly surprising and and totally outside historical precedent.  We pointed out that people who canceled their Netflix subscriptions in outrage are being criticized by the wokerati for "not appreciating great art."

It seems that the actions of Jeffrey Epstein and his rich and powerful friends are capitalizing on the feminist argument that a woman should be free to choose to do whatever she wants with her body to argue that there is nothing wrong with it.  Liberals seem to be arguing the loudest that there's nothing wrong with sexualizing children.  As American Thinker points out,

If you have any doubts that left-wing adults will project even their weirdest thoughts onto unwilling children, consider the movement to ban "conversion therapy" even for youths who want counseling to avoid homosexuality.  Pro-LGBT fanatics see no problem in deciding what underage people should want or even what kind of sex lives they should desire.

And naturally, the more powerful a person is, the greater the likelihood the person will have the ability to turn his own sick thoughts about children into law, policy, and culture.

Indeed, for most of human history, rape of an unmarried women was pretty much a non-crime and if you're powerful enough, it still is.  A married woman was effectively enslaved by whichever man had taken responsibility for feeding her and however many children she might have.  For most of that time, girls of 12 - the Cuties age, more or less - were perfectly viable wife material, married most commonly to older men, and generally without any particular input on their part.  By the time girls reached an age that would catch Jeffrey Epstein's interest, 15 or so, most would have long since been married with children.

A serious look at the historical record also reveals the reality of near-universal slavery to a life of back-breaking work, in all parts of the world and in all times until the very most recent.  What we view as the slow arrival of freedom for women enjoyed today in Western nations was partly due to conscience on the part of the ruling patriarchy, but even more, due to economic progress making such freedom possible.

The Reality

The New York Times 2016 project claims that slavery was the founding American principle both as a colony and a nation and that the American Revolution was fought to preserve the right to keep slaves.  As we saw in the previous article, this is flatly false on so many levels as to make their entire premise a pack of lies.

To be fair to the Times, just about everyone was essentially a slave in the sense of having very limited ability to make choices.  Muscle-powered farmers work from can't-see to can't-see 6 days per week, just as slaves did.  Most European farmers were tenants on someone else's land.  The landlord limited rent to 10% of the crop because taking more meant that the farmer's family would starve and there'd be no crop next year.

A muscle-powered farmer has very little choice in most activities - if he didn't expend enough physical energy to do all the jobs needed to keep the farm productive every single day, there'd be no harvest.  This was noted long ago: "The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing." Proverbs 20:4.

People forget that no matter how we got here, Americans whom our government defines as "poor" enjoy more TVs, cars, air conditioners, and smart phones than the entire population of Europe.  These material riches make it possible for ordinary people to have much more choice in everyday activities than their ancestors dreamed and attract thousands of people who risk their lives walking across Mexico to reach the United States.

As the Industrial Revolution got underway, steam engines, power looms, and spinning machines were expensive and could be bought only by the moneyed class.  The cost of labor was determined by supply.  As with Asia's modern sweatshops, enough people wanted to get off the farms in favor of factory work that wages tended to be low for unskilled, entry-level jobs because there were so many candidates.

After a few decades of observing the infamous "satanic mills" populated by despairing "wage slaves," Communists forgot how many serfs who had been slaves to muscle-powered farming queued up to work in the mills because sweatshops are a lot more pleasant than stoop labor.  From his loftly elitist perch on Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau famously stated "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" as if swinging a hoe from can't see 'til can't see 6 or 7 days a week had been fulfilling, empowering, and self-actualizing.

Communists believed that the capitalistic classes would keep wages just above starvation forever in order to maximize profits. As modern Marxists put it:

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.

The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.

The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.

Obviously, these beliefs were objectively wrong: ordinary wages in capitalist countries are in fact so very far above starvation that obesity is one of our major health problems.  Wages and purchasing power are so far above subsistence level that we've entirely forgotten what real poverty even is.  The lifestyle of the average ordinary worker in even the most capitalist of countries is far above that of the average Communist worker, not that our modern professoriat seems to have noticed.

Marx and his colleagues did not realize that abolishing private property kills incentives to work hard enough to produce goods people want to buy.  They also forgot that capitalists need to sell manufactured goods to somebody, and that laborers who earned starvation wages would be unable to buy what capitalists wanted to sell.  There is a reason why Toyota is an enormously larger and richer company than Lamborghini - there just aren't that many plutocrats who can afford Lamborghinis, whereas there are hundreds of millions of folks who can buy a Toyota.

Although it took intense struggle by labor unions to get capitalists to start raising pay, it turned out to be in the capitalists' long-term interest not only to lower selling prices as much as possible, but also to pay workers enough that they could buy what was manufactured.

This "invisible hand" of the market still works today: Businesses such as Apple who try to maintain premium prices on their smartphones find themselves undercut by competitors selling for less; Fortune reports that Jio offers the lowest bandwidth charges in the entire world and sells a smartphone for $20.  Rising wages mean that workers are replaced by machines as rapidly as possible, of course, another fact which tends to be overlooked.

Apple guards its costs fiercely, but external estimates are that a thousand-dollar iPhone contains less than $4 worth of human labor because so much of the manufacturing process has been automated.  The more people are paid, the more jobs are replaced by automation, as fast food workers keep finding out - with the result that, per person, there is even more productivity and more stuff to go around.

Thus, as women were initially given property rights in order for wealthy families to be able to keep money away from their daughters' husbands, capitalists lowered prices and increased wages to make themselves wealthier while creating more and more economic value with fewer and fewer workers.

Our earlier Cuties article pointed out that in 1968, the Phillip Morris Company targeted the Virginia Slims cigarette brand at women who controlled enough money to be a worthwhile market.  This was the culmination of a bit over 100 years of economic progress for women.

The earliest time we know of that a non-wealthy women could exist separately from men was when the Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, NH started hiring women to operate spinning machines around 1850.  The mill hired women because their fingers were nimbler and their eye-hand coordination was better.  Sexism in favor of women and against men arrived with the very first industrial jobs in America.

The women stayed in company dormitories, earned a bit more than enough to pay for their food, and were not dependent on a personal relationship with an individual man in any way whatsoever - though their bosses, and of course all company executives, were almost exclusively male. They didn't earn enough to pay for child care.  If a woman gave birth, she'd have to give up the child or find some other means of support.  To this day, it is gravely difficult for a single working-class woman to earn enough to raise a child or children without help of either the welfare system or a husband.

Over time, wages increased as productivity increased, to the point that women could earn not only enough money for food, but could also afford luxuries like cigarettes, as Phillip Morris realized and took advantage of.  Women working in factories while men were off fighting WW I and WW II contributed to women's expectations of being able to take jobs and to make independent decisions.

So What Happened?

Whatever degree of freedom modern women have was given them through a combination of economic progress and conscience.  Chattel slavery has been practiced since the dawn of time because without other sources of power, compelling another person to work through threat of extreme ill-treatment was one of very few ways to get menial tasks done.  Slavery was profitable so long as the cost of feeding the slave was less than the value of whatever work was done.

Slavery works only for low-skill tasks because it's difficult to ensure that high-skill tasks are performed properly by unwilling workers.  Even then, the profits aren't what you might expect if you have even the most minimal sort of conscience - George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both complained about the costs of taking care of slaves after they became too old for useful work.  Worked-out animals have always customarily been "put down" or eaten, but even people who thought nothing of owning slaves weren't prepared to go that far.

The first patent for a machine that used steam power to pump water out of mines was issued in 1606, and Thomas Savery patented the first practical steam pump in 1698.  By the time the first anti-slave petition passed the British Parliament in 1792, the early Industrial Revolution had progressed far enough in the previous centuries that other sources of motive power were making slavery less and less economic. By the 1800s, steam engines were powering mills, factories, breweries and a host of other manufacturing operations.

Over a similar period of time, the invention of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other household appliances made women's traditional housework less essential, so there was less need for legal mechanisms to compel it.  For these reasons, many historians assert that the American Civil War was not really needed: emancipation would have arrived as soon as slavery became unprofitable, which wouldn't have taken long as machines became better able to do unskilled plantation work.  Modern agricultural equipment harvests cotton faster, better, more cheaply, and infinitely more morally than any number of slaves, just as your Maytag does for laundry.

We can see this by the contrast between the mechanized modern Western world, and those parts of the planet where modern technology has yet to penetrate.  Slavery, both legal and in-effect, persists in less developed parts of the world where machine power is less available, and sure enough, the economic effects of the Chinese coronavirus has retarded the emancipation of women in many of those same places.

Thus, measures to eliminate slavery in general and to free women in particular were undertaken voluntarily by men, partly out of conscience, and partly because slavery was less necessary from an economic point of view.

Put another way: regardless of whether men might have felt moral qualms about having dominion over women or slaves, throughout most of history slavery was often the only way for an individual to rise above the poverty level of bare subsistence by forcing other people to do his work for him.  Occasionally you'll find someone willing to sacrifice their personal power and fortune for their moral beliefs; we call such people "saints," and honor them because they're so rare.

Once modern technology provided a way for wealth-creating work to be done without requiring the oppression of other human beings, the voices of conscience became louder and more compelling.  But we can't help but observe the deliciously fundamental irony that just about all the miracles of modern technology were brought to us by those same Dead White Men that, we are told, are the source of all oppression in the world.

Nothing could be further from the truth - it was precisely because of the scientific and technological developments coming from Western Europe and its cultural descendants, that freedom for others became possible without everyone starving to death.

In other words, the jaw-droppingly politically-incorrect truth is this: it is entirely and completely due to the efforts, over many centuries, of Europeans - mostly Christian, nearly all white, and almost exclusively men - that technology was developed to the point where women's rights was even a possibility.

Without the industrial, mechanical, electrical, and electronic revolutions, women would still be tied to the washbasin and the stove.  Why women?  Because somebody has to cook and clean, women can, and they can't do the backbreaking manual farm labor that is required to operate a pretechnological subsistence-level farm.

Then, once societal wealth had grown so vast that women's rights was an economic possibility, again, it was exclusively due to the moral sense of the men of the Western world - again, mostly Christian, nearly all white, and this time exclusively men because only men were allowed to vote - who in fact did vote to allow women to vote.  And the rest is history.

Having been liberated by voluntary decisions of the patriarchy, you'd think that the two sexes could have cooperated to make a better world, as the early suffragettes preached.  The theory was that "nurturing" women would make for a better, less violent, and more caring government.

Instead, we have seen far vaster and more brutal "woke" tyrannies after the liberation of women than were ever seen before.  In democracies, women seem to have gone to war with men, instead of just trying to reform men and learning to work more effectively with them.

As with any war, this has created immense changes in the attitudes of both men and women which are having profound long-term effects on societies all over the world.  In the next article in this series, we'll take a look at where this social wrong turn has led us.