AT THE literary journal Praesidium, Peter Singleton analyses photographs of female celebrities over the years, looking for the qualities that make for exceptional beauty. His essay is perceptive and interesting, despite a clumsy opening and some verbosity. The most beautiful faces, he says, are those that suggest moral and spirtual depth. He notices that in recent years prominent foreheads and brows are less common. He writes: (more…)

R., a female reader, writes:

I’m a long-term fan of your website, and visit every day to check for updates. I thought that you, and your readers, would find this interesting:

My younger sister is 17 years old. At her school (a private girl’s school, nonetheless) a mandatory class is ‘Modern Social Issues.’ Every term, students are given a topic which they discuss in full. They form debate teams to discuss the pros and cons of the topic, write essays or poems, research articles, and so on. This past term, the topic was, “Gender Oppression in the Modern Age: Is Feminism Still Viable in Modern Society?” Quite a mouthful, and quite an easy topic for feminist-raised young women to think about.

After extensive research on the subject (said ‘research’ being mostly whining about the poor, poor women), each student was to write an essay discussing in detail the subject, and what it means to her personally. As my sister has had a traditional upbringing (only soured by our mother’s struggle with cancer and inability to homeschool us), hers was by far the most interesting, most honest, and, of course, the lowest marked essay of the class. The teacher went so far to suggest that she have ‘catchup’ classes to better comprehend the topic.

(more…)

  I ACCIDENTALLY MIXED UP comments for the two entries (here and here) related to Hanna Rosin's book. I think I have straightened it all out.

BEN J. writes:

Here’s an article from the Telegraph about a study done in Norway that indicates a significantly higher divorce rate among couples who share housework. You might find it interesting, although you and I wouldn’t need to spend a lot of money doing a study to come to the same conclusion. People are happier in their normal sex roles…who’d thunk it? (more…)

AT Oz Conservative, Mark Richardson writes about the Jill Meagher case:

The news here in Australia has been dominated by a murder and abduction case in inner-city Melbourne. A beautiful woman, Jill Meagher, who migrated from Ireland and who married a local man, had been drinking till the early hours of the morning with work colleagues. When she decided to leave, one of the men offered to walk her home but she declined. Walking home alone she was raped and murdered. The alleged perpetrator was arrested, in part, because of evidence from CCTV cameras.

It’s a desperately sad thing to read about and I couldn’t help but think about the moment she turned down the offer of a male friend to walk her home. (more…)

TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL columnist Margaret Wente repeats approvingly Hanna Rosin’s thesis on “The End of Men,” which is that the reason men are lagging in the modern economy is that women are better at everything and men have become, economically speaking, an evolutionary maladaptation. Men are “cardboard” and women, because of their great adaptability, are “plastic.” She writes: (more…)

IT is rare that I have positive news to relay. Today is an exception. Thanks to the trendy New York City baker Jim Lahey, I have found an outstanding recipe for homemade pizza crust.

This dough is exceptional. Like all low-yeast breads, it tastes more fully of wheat and has the light, bubbly texture that is commonly associated with “artisan” breads. It is very easy to make as it involves no kneading. It does need to rise for 18 hours, however, so you make it the day before.

The recipe is from Lahey’s book, My Pizza, which I borrowed from my local library, and is available at the Bon Appetit website here. Lahey has his own website with a few recipes for the book’s pizza toppings, such as the Boscaiola pie (above), which comes with pork sausage, mushrooms, tomato sauce and red onions. His topping combinations are very good. He has an interesting way of broiling pizzas to give them a charred, wood-fired taste. One can also just cook the pies in a very hot oven.

By the way, Lahey, who started the Sullivan Street Bakery in New York, has observations about the industrialization of pizza that will be familiar to any reader of this site. This is an issue that unites right and left. In the introduction to his pizza book, Lahey writes: (more…)

KATHLENE M. writes:

I’m forwarding this interesting New York Post article by Kyle Smith in case you haven’t seen it.  It’s a biting critique of Hanna Rosin’s book The End of Men and the Rise of Women. The article is titled “Junk Male:  Women don’t need guys anymore — this is progress?” I’m so glad to see that people are starting to question feminism’s nightmare utopia of “freedom” for women.

The opening paragraph grabbed my attention immediately:

So, women have gained the right to work soul-crushing, corporation-drone, 80-hour weeks, the right to bear and raise children without male interference, the right to live alone until the stress of having a career while retaining most of their family responsibilities gradually squeezes the life out of them.

(more…)

COL. RON CREWS, a retired Army chaplain, writes in the Washington Times about the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

The first anniversary of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Sept. 20, has come and gone. Now, there is mounting evidence that proves our warnings were not idle chatter. The threat to freedom posed by this radical sexual experiment on our military is real: It is grave and it is growing.

Activists inside and outside our government who pushed the repeal have deployed a smoke screen around the fact that once the military was forced to exalt homosexuality in the ranks, the all-too-foreseen consequence reared its ugly head. (more…)

AT The Orthosphere, Kristor has two thoughtful and interesting posts, here and here, on the natural foundations of patriarchy. He argues that all societies are irrevocably patriarchal, including the feminist society:

Feminism is a movement among men, to indulge women with more authority in the determination of public life. Men allowed feminism; they may disallow it whenever they see fit. Who would stop them, other than men? So even feminism is an operation of patriarchy. This alone does not make feminism either wrong or right. It is, rather, a mere fact about the conditions under which alone feminism can exist. You can’t pass a law to make men less powerful in society that will make them actually less powerful than in fact they are, any more than you can make π = 3 by fiat. At most, such legislation can get men to pretend that the confabulations they propose are veridical. (more…)

  THERE HAS been relatively little coverage in the U.S. of the Australian parliament's overwhelming rejection last week of a bill legalizing same-sex unions. The New York Times, as far as I can tell, did not even run the story. The news conflicts with the constantly-touted notion that homosexual "marriage" is inevitable everywhere in the Western world.

A PROPOSED French law that would legalize same-sex “marriage” would also ban the words “mother” and “father” from all government documents, the Telegraph reports. Let’s repeat that. In a major European country, it may soon be illegal to refer to “mother” and “father” in official documents.

The language change is an inevitable move for countries that approve homosexual unions. Same-sex “marriage” and same-sex “parenthood” change the entire conceptual framework of the family. “Mother” and “father” refer to the irrevocable biological origins of every human being and thus exclude homosexuals, just as nature excludes homosexuals from procreation. Once these words are officially banned, they will almost certainly become tainted in everyday usage.

President Francois Hollande has vowed to approve the redefinition of marriage. The law comes before his cabinet on Oct. 31.

(more…)

MARIAN HORVAT has an interesting review at Tradition in Action of The Red Queen, an historical novel by Philippa Gregory about Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of King Henry VII. Ms. Gregory is a feminist revisionist. She “does not like the devout Lady Margaret Beaufort, and so she depicts her as a bitter, scheming and pharisaical woman who pretends to follow the “will of God” – so long as it corresponds to her own.” Gregory accuses Lady Beaufort of the murders of the famous sons of Edward IV, who disappeared while imprisoned in the Tower of London, an accusation which has no historical foundation.

(more…)

IN YET another long comment about, yes, UFOs, Alan provides a link to a thoughtful 1975 essay by the Caltech scientist Bruce Murray. Murray writes:

The existence of UFO’s gets to be a debate of almost theological proportions, involving heresy and faith, and that is not very scientific. The reason is that when one is presented with reports of phenomena that do not make sense, some people cannot stand the uncertainty. It is just like the situation in ordinary social affairs, where there is a tendency to want to have an answer right now, right or wrong, and if the only choices are between, “It’s nothing,” or, “It’s the most bizarre thing in the world,” you choose one of those two answers. Well, the answer really is that you probably do not have the right answer yet, and so you should not make a choice. (more…)