Basic HTML Version
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER 10, 1982
PAGE 9
3. Sex. No change has been so rapid, so great, and so surprising
as the change in the last twenty years concerning sex and the
relations between the sexes••.•
The great change in sexual behavior has taken place in two
stages. The first is what was called the sexual revolution.
This meant simply that pre- and extra-marital sex became much
more common, and the various penalties for promiscuity were
either much reduced or disappeared....But even� powerful than
� of the above changes� the effects of feminism, which is
still early.!.!! its career of reform and is the second stage of the
great change of which I am speaking.••.
There is an almost universal agreement, among those who count for
university students, that feminism is simply justified as is....
[Elitism--which would include racism and sexism, the author
states elsewhere, are the "paramount sins of the day."]
Women
today have, to use our new talk, an agenda. Also, it is their
movement, so they are involved and excited, have much to talk
about. The men, on the other hand, are waiting to be told what is
on the agenda and ready to conform to its demands. There is
little inclination to resist.
All the principles have been accepted; it only remains to see how
to live by them. Women are to have careers just as do men and, if
there is to be marriage, the wife's career is not to be sacri
ficed to the man's; home and children are a shared responsibil
ity; when and if there are to be children is up to the woman, and
the decision to terminate or complete a pregnancy is a woman's
right. Above all, women are not to have a "role" imposed on them.
They have a right of self-definition. The women were the victims
and must be the leaders in their recovery from victimization.
The men, as they themselves see it, have to be understanding and
flexible....
The result is a desexualization of life, all the while that a lot
of sexual activity !,! going £!!,and
_!
reduction of the differ'=
ences between the sexes••••Sex is all right, but it creates a
problem••..Dating is almost a thing of the past••••Above all: no
courtship £r courtliness. Now there is friendship, mutual re
spect, communication; realism without foolish fabulation or
hopes.
Author Bloom then concludes by projecting the disastrous impact that femi
nism, fostered in the universities, has upon the entire educational proc
ess:
This conviction has as its first consequence that all old books
are no longer relevant, because their authors weresei'Ists (if
they'tiappened to be women, they were maimed by living in sexist
society) ••••And ln the absence (temporary, of course) of a liter
ature produced by feminism to rival the literature of Sophocles,
Shakespeare, Racine, and Stendhal, students are without literary
inspiration••..These are the tenets of the egalitarian creed, and
today its primary tenet is that the past was sexist.