Monday 13 February 2012

Women Can't Handle Their Drugs

In circulation today is a pointing out that, whereas Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse are dead, the considerably older Ozzie Osbourne and Keith Richards are still alive. The punchline forms the title to this post.

No, nor did I.

Just as women have an emotional strength, a sheer mental toughness, which is rarely or never quite found in men, so the male body is simply more resilient physically and physiologically. That is just the way that life is.

Women have been and remain the overwhelming victims of the Sexual Revolution, and they are now the overwhelming victims of the Chemical Revolution, which in our own case began in earnest with the reclassification of cannabis, the point at which the party of the Fabian and Christian Socialist pioneers finally died.

"What about alcohol?", children are now taught in school to parrot. Quite so. Those boys falling down in the gutter are probably doing themselves long-term harm. Those girls falling down in the gutter are certainly doing themselves long-term harm, and probably opening themselves up to short-term harm as well. It was women who enforced the taboo against female drunkenness, just as it was women who enforced the taboo against female promiscuity. They need to resume doing both, as a matter of the utmost urgency.

Alcohol is too embedded in Western culture to be able to eradicate. Tobacco might well turn out not to be. Anything else definitely is not. But alcohol is. We cannot get rid of it. But we can and must control it. The victims of our failure to do so, like the victims of our failure to enforce the drugs laws, like the victims of our removal of standards of sexual behaviour, and like the victims of our withdrawal of welfare provision and other essential public services, are overwhelmingly women and their children. Whatever happened to feminism?

1 comment:

  1. I came across an article arguing that Whitney Houston's death was a wakeup call in favor of drug legalization. This is usually the same group of people who refuse to believe that marijuana can ever, ever, ever be bad for you in any way. Good grief.

    ReplyDelete