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Manning: Shane Gillis Was Right on 'SNL,' Talking About Women's Trashy Gym Clothes - and the Truth Goes Much Deeper

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Shane Gillis, the well-known standup comedian, hosted “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend and went viral when, during the opening monologue, he observed a truth we all know but that the left freaks out at when we observe it (and by the way, have you noticed how that’s the left’s only move?).

They hear the truth, then freak out. Well, as Jesus told the Pharisees, you can’t hear the truth because you are of your father the devil – he is a liar and the father of lies. I guess we should make of that whatever we will.

Anyway, Gillis’ forbidden truth was that women at the gym are dressing more and more like, well Gillis used a word that starts with a W and rhymes with “chores.”

The left, the wokesters, and the feminists wroth was terrible, and their retribution swift.

They called Gillis out as a misogynist and demanded apologies simply for observing a truth, though admittedly he did do it in a crude way, but what would we expect of comedians? The left delights in the tired, moldy antics of Amy Schumer, whose entire schtick is crude references to her own body.

Anyway (again), Gillis was honest. Often women wear to the gym what in the past would be considered scant bras. And if they are in shorts, their rear ends are often literally hanging out, showing the crease where the buttocks transition into the thighs. Or if they wear what were once yoga pants, thanks to transitions to thin material and less gusseting (I learned that term just for this article), the outline of their genitals can actually be seen.

Julia Roberts’ prostitute in Pretty Woman, Vivian Ward, would never have dared. And what’s worse, this clothing isn’t limited to the gym.

Should societal standards for women's clothing be more traditional?

Now let’s tie this in to so-called rape culture and maybe even the Cornell 7. We need to be clear at the outset, setting aside the sticky issue of rape fantasy, no woman is “asking for it” when it comes to rape.

Today what some women do, do is conduct themselves in ways that stimulate male sexual interest by wearing increasingly sexualized clothes, as Gillis pointed out. Much of what women wear on nights out now would have gotten them lumped in with prostitutes in the past. What’s routinely worn on the beach by some today would have also gotten them arrested just not that long ago.

Whether they intend it or not, when women present themselves in these ways, men interpret that on a biological level, a level they can’t consciously direct, as potential interest in mating, and that triggers all kinds of physical changes that re-orient the man toward potential mating. (To be extremely clear, men cannot control the biological response, but they 100% can and should control the actions that follow, regardless of the urging of their glands and Ids.)

Since men are small-e evolutionarily geared to push mating and women are small-e evolutionarily geared to be highly selective in mating, we can then end up with a dangerous asymmetry where men think women in booty shorts unlined bras are signaling openness to mating, and women simply like the style or attention but don’t want potentially aggressive advances that can inevitably follow.

Now, that asymmetry is problem enough on its own, but it’s not the end of the world when you’re dealing with mostly decent men — the kind of men we used to produce on a large scale by inculcating Biblical values and the idea of traditional, English gentlemanly behavior.

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But what happens when you’re dealing with another type of men – what we used to call wolves and now some call f-boys (you can fill in the rest of the F), who pursue sex regardless of consequences?

Well, you get endless, aggressive come-ons that women accidentally (or for some, let’s be honest, intentionally) invite.

Even worse, when dealing with the worst type of man a much, much more dangerous situation can present itself. A woman signaling mating interest but with no intention of following through can attract men who are more than willing to transgress not just tradition but the law, in order to satisfy their urges.

This is where some types of rape come in.

Now, to be 100 percent clear, women who are victims of rape do not initiate the crime of rape. But, they can set up situations that make the crime infinitely more likely when they send signals that set off biological and cultural tripwires.

If you bridle at that thought, imagine a person pinning dozens of hundreds dollar bills to his clothing, then walking through the worst neighborhood in town at 2 a.m. Even if he escapes the first night or the second, we know that within a week he’s going to get robbed… at best. Did he commit the crime? Absolutely not. Did he set up the situation that made the crime radically more likely? Absolutely yes.

We should also remember that powerful men throughout history have been willing to trade shocking sums of money to secure women they are interested in. Women are, in some ways, more highly valued than anything else on planet earth and certainly a suit of cold hard cash. So women dressing provocatively don’t set up the inevitable, but they do make a criminal encounter vastly more likely.

Now it feels 100 percent fair to say that “men just shouldn’t be like that.” And properly trained, the vast majority are not.

But along with the radical sexualization of women has come the destruction of the moral teaching we used to instill in men, and the societal mores that made wolfish (or f-boy) behavior something that society roundly condemned. But in a society where no one is supposed to judge or be judged, who’s to say what’s wrong and what’s not?

Follow your heart, all the songs say. Do what feels right. Or worse, do what feels good.

The Buchanan Brothers puts lyrics to this idea in 1969, writing

My daddy told me get you all the lovin’ you can –

My daddy before me told me

That his daddy before him told him

Never wait around and never settle down

Cause there are too many women who will hold on tight

To a lovin’ man who will come along and treat them right

But you got to leave with the morning light

Women can say that they don’t like the way men behave, but men by the same token can say they don’t care because the post-modernists taught us there’s only power and its acquisition, and after all… goes the morally bankrupt excuse, “they were asking for it.”

Feminists and anti-Western modernists have taken sledge hammers to the guardrails that the West spent centuries building to protect women from men’s strongest biological impulses. And in less than a century they have obliterated them. After all, as the Cornell 7 accuser wrote after the encounter to one of her accused rapists, “our body, our choice.”

Is it any wonder there’s endless sexual confusion and frustration today?

How do we fix all of this? Well, fathers need to teach their sons that sex comes with a profound responsibility and, frankly, should be reserved for marriage. That it is not just a good time if you can get it. That there’s a sacred honor involved, and a commitment implied.

Mothers need to teach their daughters what dressing like an, err, floozy sets the stage for. And that when one of those lovin’ men comes a knockin’… or textin’… to not be one of those many “women who will hold on tight.”

Additionally, society needs to return to — gasp — traditional values.

It turns out, Donald Kingsbury was right when he wrote “Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.”

The problem of male sexual aggression was solved through Christian values and a code of honor that arose in England. When society blew up the Christian, Western dam we had built, all of the sludge it was holding back came crashing down. And it contained all kinds of charming things — AIDs, drugs, hep C, fatherless children, broken homes, and massive regret to name just a few.

And as we’ve now seen time and again, sometimes that massive regret turns into revisionist history where, as the Cornell 7 accuser texted, “Awe… I really liked being with you,’ to the man she would later accuse of rape.

The good news is that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The entire set of traditions that guarded against all of this are still sitting there, in history books and moral treatises in libraries across the West; and in Bibles in homes across America.

All we have to do is repent of the travesty we’ve made of sex and follow the outline God and our ancestors gave us. But that’s going to take men and women working together to reform society – something the left wants to prevent at all costs, which is why turning us against each other is one of their highest priorities.

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Josh Manning is Editor at Large at The Western Journal. He holds a masters in public policy from Harvard University and has a background in higher education. He recently co-authored Out of the Shadows: My Life Inside the Wild World of Hunter Biden, the tell-all memoir of Lunden Roberts's tumultuous relationship with Hunter Biden and Stolen Valor: The Military Fraud and Government Failures of Tim Walz.
Josh Manning grew up in the South and developed a love of history, politics, and government studies thanks to a life-changing history and civics teacher named Mr. McBride.

He holds an MPP from Harvard University and a BA from Lyon College, a small but distinguished liberal arts college where later in his career he served as an interim vice president.

While in school he did everything possible to confront, discomfit, and drive ivy league liberals to their knees.

After a number of years working in academe, he moved to digital journalism and opinion. Since that point, he has held various leadership positions at The Western Journal.

He's married to a gorgeous blonde who played in the 1998 NCAA women's basketball championship game, and he has two teens who hate doing dishes more than poison. He makes life possible for two boxers -- "Hank" Rearden Manning and "Tucker" Carlson Manning -- and a pitbull named Nikki Haley "Gracie" Manning.

He recently co-authored Out of the Shadows: My Life Inside the Wild World of Hunter Biden, the tell-all memoir of Lunden Roberts's tumultuous relationship with Hunter Biden and Stolen Valor: The Military Fraud and Government Failures of Tim Walz.
Education
MPP from Harvard University, BA from Lyon College
Languages Spoken
English, tiny fragments of college French
Topics of Expertise
Writing, politics, Christianity, social media curation, higher education, firearms




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