AT HER blog Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat reflects on the fashion world’s committment to ugliness and the celebration of the drab and ugly in modern dress. She writes:

 As I ponder more on what I’ve written [on this subject], I think the underlying premise is equality. We are all equal in our intelligence, our talents, our luck, our wealth, our youth (age), and of course our beauty. We are all beautiful. But, in order to make this equality a reality, we have to subscribe to the lowest common denominator. After all, it is much easier to lower the standards of beauty (how low can we get before we call it ugly?) than to reach for the higher echelons of beauty; it is much easier to make our young look old and haggard, to come to our level, since we can never look young and beautiful as only they can. This is the prescription to equality that we have been fed. But we don’t have to accept it.

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  THE singer and songwriter Phoebe Snow, who occupied a musical category of her own and was a big hit in the 70s, died yesterday at the age of 60. According to the New York Times, Snow said her greatest accomplishment in life was caring for her daughter, who was born with severe brain damage and died at the age of 31 in 2007.

IMAGINE an article in a mainstream newspaper celebrating the freedom of heterosexual men to obtain sexual gratification outside normal relations with women. I have never seen a mainstream ad or newspaper piece ooh-ing or aah-ing over male use of prostitutes or pornography. And, yet it is now normal to read about how wonderful sex toys and auto-eroticism are for women. 

This recent piece in The New York Times about the marketing of vibrators in drug stores and online sites is a case in point. This puff piece would have been unthinkable 50 years ago – but that, we are told, is good. There is not a single cautionary word in the entire article. No acknowledgment of the potential for sex addiction in women. The past was one long siege of repression and now women are liberated to achieve sexual ecstasy outside intercourse or even a relationship with a man.

Vibrators come in perfume boxes and can be programmed by an Ipod. Who would ever have thought that giving one to a teenager daughter was anything less than generous? “A woman who has thoroughly explored her own body, both alone and with or without whichever toys she finds interesting, makes for a significantly better lover.” The vibrator is neat, “an ongoing source of fascination,” the road to freedom after millenia of darkness, not a crude device that subverts love and creates hours of easy, impersonal sex that is immoral and undermines appreciation of the real thing.

Women have traded love and early marriage for bedtime with a dime store contraption. (more…)

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY British painter John Atkinson Grimshaw is known for his urban scenes with the moon glowing on dockyards and city streets or the amber glow of shop windows visible in the sooty nightfall. His paintings, 50 of which are now on display in a gallery in London, are unusual in the poetic beauty they ascribe to industrial settings. As Hermes Westbury wrote:

John Atkinson Grimshaw was fascinated by modern industry, frequently painting the commercial centres of Leeds, Liverpool, Glasgow, Scarborough and Hull. He painted at night, using moonlight to transform the sooty reality of the industrial North into an image of romance and mystery: air thick with pollution becomes an atmospheric mist enveloping the dark figures; moonlight reflects off cobbles, glistening with recently fallen rain; long shadows are thrown across the foreground by the golden lights illuminating the shop fronts.

Grimshaw’s works now fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars each. The painter, however, was not rich. His wife gave birth to 16 children, ten of whom died in childhood, and he struggled to support his large family.

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IN A 2007 post at her blog Tea at Trianon, Elena Maria Vidal explored the origin of the phrase “Let them eat cake,” widely attributed to Marie Antoinette with little basis in fact. Vidal wrote:

Marie-Antoinette never said any such thing …. One theory about the origins of the legend of the phrase “Let them eat cake” is that it is the misunderstanding of a passage from the memoirs of the Comte de Provence (Louis XVIII), the brother of Louis XVI. Provence and his wife escaped from Paris to Coblenz by post-chaise in June, 1791. They stopped to eat and had meager provisions. Provence makes the allusion to a remark made by the queen of Louis XIV, Maria Theresa of Spain, in this passage: (more…)

AT the website Minding the Campus, Mary Grabar writes about her experience at a major convention of college-level composition teachers. She reports:

After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly. The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting’s 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against “marginalized” groups and restrict self-expression. (more…)

LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

For 27 years my husband’s father, who was a preacher himself, attended a monthly lunch in a restaurant, where they met with other preachers from several counties nearby. The wives usually came too, and listened to the speaker of the month address issues of concern to church members. After his parents passed away, he and I began attending this meeting, and now, 19 years later, we are seeing alarming changes in the mannerisms of the ministers. 

I quit going five years ago because I couldn’t stand the show of weakness in the men, but my husband has kept attending and has come home with some interesting reports. We have begun to use the word interesting to keep us out of trouble from the P.C. crowd. (more…)

STEVE KOGAN writes in response to this post about the feminist anthropologist Ellen Lewin:

In the second volume of her journals, Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda Mandelstam writes, “One of the most brilliant men in the history of mankind once said that as soon as thought dries up, it is replaced by words. A word is too easily transformed from a meaningful sign into a mere signal, and a group of words into an empty formula, bereft even of the sense such things have in magic. We begin to exchange set phrases, not noticing that all living meaning has gone from them. (more…)

    DENYS POWLETT JONES writes at the website Catholic Phoenix about the traditional Polish Easter Monday, known as Dyngus Day after a pagan water deity. He writes: For a few centuries, the historical record is silent in matters of Dyngus. Then, in the 15th century, the Easter Monday custom resurfaces in Poland—but now it has turned into a courting ritual, one in which young men seek out the village’s most eligible and desirable girls on Easter Monday in order to dump buckets of water on them and then whip them on the legs with pussy willows. I told you this was no laughing matter. Girls who ended the day bone dry and without any welts on their calves were considered virtually unmarriageable. Sometimes, apparently, the girls fought back against such antics—at one time, an additional custom was to throw pottery at the boys on Easter Tuesday, but in later times the younger generation, who naturally had no respect for the customs of their elders, couldn’t wait and went ahead and chucked crockery at the boys on Dyngus Day itself, sometimes even before the boys had started the conversation with an old-fashioned soaking. (Especially shameless girls turned everything on its head and took to dumping water on BOYS the day after Easter. O tempora, o mores!)  

  DUE TO the Easter holiday, I have not had a chance to post a number of comments that have come in since Saturday. I hope to post them later today. Also, here is an interesting remark from a reader about this post: At our Holy Thursday Mass, all 12 of those having their feet washed were men, generally representing an appropriate cross section of our more senior and more involved parishioners. In contrast, my wife, who is in Denver visiting family, told me that at the Mass at the Denver Cathedral presided over by Archbishop Chaput, about half of those having their feet washed were women. That surprised me, since as you know he is generally perceived to be an orthodox and outspoken bishop.

LAST MONTH in a dialogue about white nationalism, I made this statement:

If it came down to choosing between citizenship in a white ethnostate which identified itself as proudly “Jew-free” in its constitution and a nation that was suicidally multicultural, I would choose the latter.

I strongly stand by this statement and believe it is important for me to draw attention to it. (more…)

   “The death of the God-man is the spring of everlasting life."

THE LAST SUPPER was a feast for men, but no more. The custom on Holy Thursday, also known as Maundy Thursday, is to reenact Christ’s washing of the apostles feet. Most of the “apostles” who had their feet washed at the church I attended last night were women and I’m sure it was the same in the majority of Catholic churches.  So it is in the womanized church of today.

This is no criticism of the many women whose devotion is vital nor is it to excuse men for their absence. But Christ chose men for a reason. We can see today what would have happened if he had not. The faith would have withered a long time ago, drowned in emotion. When worship is feminized, men leave. When it is formed and directed by men, women do not leave. (more…)

  A NEW YORK TIMES writer takes his Passover meal with an oyster, inspiring this excellent discussion at VFR. This sort of irreverence - shellfish is prohibited under Jewish law - is typical. The liberal Jew sees himself as superior to his ancestral faith and scorns it every bit as much as he does Christianity.  As one commenter remarks: These people, be they liberal Jews or liberal Christians, are always liberals first, and their liberalism consciously or unconsciously is used to undermine their religion. Thus all the anti-Semites who think Jews are out to undermine Christianity ought to be sent the NYT article. The liberal Jews undermine and desecrate their own religion in the name of their One True Faith, which is transnational progressivism. Just as liberal Christians are not somehow "duped" by Jews, but undermine their own religion in the name of their One True Faith, which is also transnational progressivism (a.k.a. universalism).

IN THE PREVIOUS entry, a reader wondered at the popularity of the term “beta man.”

Vishal Mehra wrote:

Regarding this alpha-beta thing, we don’t see this usage in any older writers. So either they used different words for this phenomenon or the phenomenon of beta men is itself novel. Or the phenomenon itself is illusory and this classification is wrong and incoherent.

One characteristic of the beta man may help explain why the term has become so common. The beta man is white. No one refers to a non-white as beta. The need for a new name for the spineless white man may have been prompted by racial reality. Never has the white man been so weak. The beta man is not weak vis-a-vis women so much as he is weak vis-a-vis his own ancestry and heritage.  He is the dispossessed, a stranger in his own land, passively assenting to the decay of his civilization. (more…)

AT THE Last Supper, Christ bade a tender farewell to his dearest followers. “He loved them unto the end,” John tells us. His words and actions – the washing of the feet and the offering of his body and blood  – are those of a man who has reserved his greatest expressions of love for the end. Those present hung on his every word.

This was a feast for men. It was no accident that only men were there that night. “I appoint unto you a kingdom,” he tells the gathered disciples. Christ wanted men – and men only – to lead his following when he was gone.

However, the idea that in selecting men over women, Christ was conferring privilege is a gross simplification. It was not privilege first but responsibility he gave them.  At the meal, the apostles question the meaning of authority. As Luke tells us, “there was also strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest.” And Christ explains what authority, or greatness, means. (more…)