Khari’s Reviews > The Screwtape Letters > Status Update

"Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's beliefs that they 'own' their bodies"-those vast and perilous states, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another."

"The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in heaven and in hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's beliefs that they 'own' their bodies"-those vast and perilous states, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves ....

"Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of 24 hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which those deductions have been made was...his own personal birthright."

In the age of filters and ai, this is even truer and scarier.

"We are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist-making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible."

"We have engineered a great increase in the...representation of the...nude in art...It is all a fake, of course; the figures in ...are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be...As a result we are directing the desires of men to something which does not exist."

"We now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing to and less able to bear children."

"The business of these great [spirits in the Lowerarchy] is to produce in every age a general misdirection of ... sexual 'taste'. They ...work...through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely."

The point that got me was the idea of we think that any reason for getting married other than 'being in love' is somehow cynical. The idea of sticking together for children is cynical. That looking for an economical, intellectual, and sexual partner is somehow mercenary, instead of just going with the one that you 'love'.

It struck me because it's true. Love marriages are treated as 'better' than arranged ones.

The discussion of marriage and its associated beliefs was rather depressing, we have this view that it was 'different' back then 'easier' or 'more wholesome'.
Nope. They had the same issues we do. This book was written 80 years ago, but it talks about how we can be made to think that 'being in love' is most important, if after 20 years of marriage, we are no longer 'in love' then it must be time to end the marriage.

Well, reading this makes me realize that there really isn't anything new under the sun.

In the prior chapter, Screwtape gave an excellent precis of the idea that all people interact only through competition and through the use of other people in order to gain something for themselves. While he never used the word 'power' it was an excellent summary of Foucault...12 years before he started publishing.