CLARK COLEMAN WRITES:

I think the best things that can come out of this whole interesting discussion about a reader who praised his wife in terms that were uncomplimentary to men are:

1) Men can realize that women do need verbal appreciation. Men who are blessed with wives who are traditional mothers should especially express their appreciation, as their wives do not get a lot of that from the surrounding culture.

2) Just as cutting someone else down is not a good way to make yourself feel better (a lesson we try to teach our children at a young age), putting yourself down is not a necessary or desirable component of a compliment paid to another. A man should praise his wife for all that she means to his life, which can be praise that is entirely focused on her attributes and her contribution to their family, without describing himself negatively. I think that almost any woman would say she thrives on the praise and appreciation, not the self-deprecation. Yes, self-deprecation is a valuable aspect of humor, and of humility, but Randy went way over the top in this respect. (more…)

PSYCHOLOGISTS are studying the science of marital commitment, much to humanity’s relief. According to The New York Times:

 “.. it may not be feelings of love or loyalty that keep couples together. [ARE YOU SURPRISED?] Instead, scientists speculate that your level of commitment may depend on how much a partner enhances your life and broadens your horizons — a concept that Arthur Aron, a psychologist and relationship researcher at Stony Brook University, calls “self-expansion.”

There’s more:

“We enter relationships because the other person becomes part of ourselves, and that expands us,” Dr. Aron said. “That’s why people who fall in love stay up all night talking and it feels really exciting. We think couples can get some of that back by doing challenging and exciting things together.”

I suspect Dr. Aron does not include having and raising many children as “doing challenging and exciting things together.”

There’s something disturbing about the word “self-expansion,” leaving aside the obvious societal implications. It conjures images of bellows inserted into an orifice and gas pumped into the body. It makes me think of helium-inflated forms in the Thanksgiving Day parade, of the self, un-tethered and floating away, up, up, up into the atmosphere. Could you imagine being married to that?

(more…)

WHAT an embarrassment it is to so-called women’s advancement when an under-qualified woman is chosen for a powerful position. Such is the case of Elena Kagan, Obama’s Supreme Court nomination. She has no judicial record and a very thin portfolio of legal writings. This is a bright and capable woman, a leftist who views our military with hostility and who has an impressive resumé, but she’s an administrator not a judge.

What’s truly amazing is the hypocrisy of many who advocate for parity on the court. On the one hand, they argue, women are no different from men and thus should be equally represented. On the other hand, they say, women are different from men, that their presence will alter the judicial culture, and therefore they should be equally represented. Sex differences are only relevant to the degree to which they argue in favor of female ascendancy. 

In today’s New York Times, a Georgetown legal expert argues that if there were three women on the court, there might be more inclination by clients to choose women to represent them before the court. In other words, these lawyers might be chosen partly because they are women, something that is considered an absolute no-no when it comes to men. Says Pamela Harris, of the Georgetown Law Center, “If clients are visualizing the court as a predominantly male entity, they are going to want a lawyer who looks like the people on the bench,” she said. “I think this could also be a critical moment in terms of women arguing before the Supreme Court.”

This is one of the silliest reasons I have ever heard for choosing a lawyer to appear before the highest court in the land. Would one chose a lawyer because they had, say, a haircut like Elena Kagan’s? Harris also seems to be suggesting that a women lawyer may come to be considered morally superior to a male lawyer, regardless of her actual qualifications. Certainly, in the eyes of her supporters, Kagan is qualified partly because she is a woman. Feminism merely replaces one form of discrimination for another. No society can avoid discrimination.

(more…)

AT A restaurant last night, where I was celebrating Mother’s Day with my sisters and mother, I couldn’t help but make a few furtive observations of the people in the room. It’s bad to eavesdrop, but it’s also difficult to avert the eyes. The restaurant was filled with families, though I use the word in the postmodern sense. At the next table, there were two mothers, two sons, and no fathers. There were also two of the largest sets of artificial knockers I have ever seen in my life. One women had breast implants so commodious, the waitress could have rested two platters on top, and a wine bottle too. A corsage would have looked ludicrous on this woman, and on most of the women in the restaurant. The freshness and innocence of a single bloom – well, it just wouldn’t do.

I guess there are many parts of the world where the American woman is envied, poor and hardscrabble places where women own only two saris or cover their graying hair in scarves instead of highlights. But I’d rather look like Aunt Bea or a toothless Russian babushka than many an American woman today. Women seem to spend larger and larger sums of money on breast implants, tans, face lifts, hair cuts, hair coloring, hair highlights, make-up and clothes that make them look like street walkers or superannuated dolls.

Where is this money coming from? I thought women were so broke they “had to” work.

(more…)

FEMINISM has battered most of the major Christian denominations during the past 40 years. Here is an apt quote from Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father, most recently published in paperback in 1985. Daly, who died early this year, was a professor of theology at the Jesuit institution, Boston College, for 33 years.

She wrote:

The cosmic covenant means coming into living harmony with the self, the universe and God.

For men of the past – and most are living in the past rather than now – life has meant feeding on the bodies and minds of women, sapping energy at the expense of female deaths. Like Dracula, the he-male has lived on women’s blood. The priests of patriarchy have eaten the body and have drunk the blood of the Sacrificial Victim in their Mass, but they have not wished to know who has really been the Victim whose blood supported this parasitic life. (more…)

MOTHERS NEVER were perfect and quite a few have been rotten. They have always possessed the power to create or destroy, to raise up or to tear down. Mothers never were perfect and yet the institution is without flaw. The ideal is unparalleled. A good mother is one of life’s greatest gifts.

The more degraded motherhood becomes, the more sickly sentimental it is. As the blogger Tiberge writes at her excellent traditionalist site Galliawatch:

Mother’s Day, like Valentine’s Day and Halloween, has ballooned in importance in recent decades, as if to compensate for the loss of love in today’s promiscuous world, the loss of souls in today’s paganized, world, and the loss of traditional motherhood in today’s world of “working moms, single moms, moms on welfare and other newly created icons of the liberated woman. There are even “cougar moms” who, in front of their own daughters, prey on men. These holidays at one time were mostly for the benefit of children who would make Valentine cards at school, dress up on Halloween to knock on doors and ask for candy treats, or buy (or make) a small precious gift for Mother (before she became, by feminist diktat a “mom”).

I know one woman whose mother continually undercut her confidence, complaining bitterly that she was not more successful in her career and that she had married the wrong man. Not surprisingly, this woman never had children of her own. She was rendered un-motherly by her own mother.

And yet miraculously, good mothers abound. In his church bulletin today, the Reverend James Jackson, of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church in Littleton, Colorado, includes a letter to his own mother. He writes:  (more…)

  IN RESPONSE to yesterday's post on noise and music pollution, a reader recommended the 2005 movie Into Great Silence, about the Grand Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. This is one of my favorite movies, one of only two I personally own, given to me as gifts. Josef Pieper said, "Worship is the fountainhead of leisure." The same is true of silence. We revere silence not because we love emptiness. To the contrary. The exact opposite is true. I highly recommend the movie, which is very long and includes little action. You can fall asleep for an hour and wake up and the movie is still there.   

IN A 2002 VFR entry on the relentless noise in public places, Lawrence Auster wrote:

One expression of this breakdown [in the Western idea of form] is the ubiquity in our society of loud unpleasant “music” and other electronic noise and, more significantly, the unthinking acceptance of same. In today’s New York City, for example, you will walk into a retail store or a hair-cutting salon, and not only will there be loud black funk music blasting from speakers in the ceiling from morn till night, with its interminable, melody-less, rhythmless, lyric-less (and identical in every song), “oh ooo ohh, ooh, hoh baby, woohoo, uhh, uhh, Woohoo WoohuahAHahAAA, yeah-huh, baby oh yeah”, but the radio reception is so bad it’s all static. I’m talking about loud static, filling the establishment from powerful speakers. When you ask the employees to adjust the tuning of the radio station or to turn the volume down, they will do so, but there seems to be absolutely no consciousness on their part that there was anything inappropriate about this horrible noise. There is a shocking insensibility in young people today, a complete acceptance of noise and disorder in one’s environment.

It reminds me of India, where villagers love to have all-night festivals with electronic speakers turned up to the max, where people in cities are surrounded by unbelievable, all-encompassing noise and disorder and are not disturbed by it at all. In one sense, this is an impressive quality, expressing the spiritual dimension of the Eastern civilization and the idea of the soul unaffected by matter. (more…)

IN MORE THAN 20 years of marriage, I have made, as mentioned before, many hundreds of gallons of chicken broth. A poultry vendor nearby sells six-pound bags of chicken bones for $2.69. I put the bones in a pot of water, add onions, carrots and bay leaves, and let it sit on the stove for hours, often ignored until late at night when my husband pours it into a container and puts it in the refrigerator. I make soups and sauces with the broth for very little money. If I could summon all the broth I have made, we would be awash in stock. I could sail to France on a broth sea or fill the Grand Canyon with soup. I have made so much of the stuff that my husband has dabbled in broth jokes. Here are a few. (more…)

JIM B. WRITES:

I just wanted to relay a story which made me think of your blog.

A few days ago, after I had been at work a few hours, my wife called me up, annoyed. It seems that the door to the baby’s room had swung shut. The breeze coming in the windows newly opened to the warm spring air had done the deed. Unfortunately, the outer doorknob was broken, and it couldn’t be opened. This was something that was on my list to fix before the baby came three months ago, but you know how it is (we never shut the door, and many other things had to be done, etc.etc.) (more…)

  Speaking of Oz Conservative, I highly recommend Mark Richardson's 2008 entry on the David Blankenhorn book, Fatherless America. Richardson writes: There is now an assumption that "parenting" is what women have traditionally done - the hands on care and nurture of children - and that a good father is therefore a man who shares or takes over this mothering role. This is an excellent insight into parenting today.

MARK RICHARDSON, of the outstanding website Oz Conservative, also takes issue with the words of a reader here who wrote a thank you letter to traditional women.

Mark writes:

When men do self-deprecate, when we do defer, it is a sign that the culture of relationships has become unbalanced, that the romantic instincts are not balanced by an awareness of what is required from men to maintain a successful system of marriage and family life.

While I agree that an over-emphasis on romance can destroy traditional morality and that masculine objectivity is the cement of family stability, I disagree that the words of this reader in this particular context represent male submission. After all, they were expressed at a website advocating feminine deference to men in all realms of life, a site which has never seriously put forth the idea that women do more of the essential work of life. In fact, the opposite has been strenuously argued and the reader who expressed this gratitude has written at length here on the destructive consequences of the women’s vote. If such words are objectionable here, if they are a sinful submission to women, they cannot be spoken anywhere. Certainly they should not be spoken often anywhere nor should they be mistaken for fact. But it seems the reaction to these words portends a further drying-up of social courtesies and of male expressions of affection. I realize many men say to this: Tough luck. Every woman must now hang on the gallows of feminism, even one who has devoted her life to husband and family. (more…)

WHEN ASKED if he was bothered by a booing crowd during a game, Bill Russell, the Celtics basketball legend, said, “I never heard the boos because I never heard the cheers.” It’s a mistake to live for compliments. It may mean you live too much for the opinion of others. One should possess conviction of what is right and wrong, of what one wants to achieve, and live by it.

But no one can entirely live that way except maybe the greatest saints. Life without compliments is like life without some essential vitamin. One can survive, but not live well.

We live in a narcissistic culture and some people are stuffed with praise – the praise of their parents or teachers or themselves. A narcissist wears a particular bland and unvarying glow. He doesn’t hear or see others; he emanates light.

But even in this climate, many individuals are malnourished, or only given a sugary version of approval.

A compliment can be a disarming experience, particularly if you have lived a relatively cold existence. A person who is not used to compliments may actually be suspicious when one is given. He searches for ulterior motives because the experience is new. If the compliment concerns something trivial, like an article of clothing, it may simply provide a moment of pleasure or, for some of us, a moment of confusion. Sometimes the praise can be trivial and yet said with so much warmth it carries greater meaning.

The rarest and most valuable compliments are those in which a person has seen into another and found something real that others cannot see or do not value. This sort of compliment can be redefining or redeeming. One or two in an entire lifetime is enough. They are never forgotten, held in the inner chambers, like an heirloom ring in a box. (more…)

    KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT, reviewing the new Kitty Kelley book on Oprah, peers into the emptiness behind the legend. She writes: This is a woman who thinks (and who everyone thinks) wields more power than she does. In fact, when her show did influence the election of G.W. Bush, it was the adroit Bush who got the better of her and sent a positive message to her audience. The forces do not revolve around Oprah. Oprah leaves her daytime show for her new network the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN – Oprah is always ready to focus on her "girl power") next year. I think she’ll simply be relegated to a respected, but somewhat obscure, chapter of American cultural history. I honestly don’t think people will remember her into the next century (or generation) other than the apparent sensation she caused: "What did she do?" people will ask. Well, she hosted a paradoxically big but inconsequential "first black woman's" talk show.

LYDIA SHERMAN WRITES:

I think women should not expect compliments from men and if they happened to get any, should consider it an enormous privilege. Although I never get compliments from young men, every so often an elderly man will say, “Nice dress” or “Like your hair.” That does not bother me. I know what they are saying deep down: “I wish we had something nice to look at in this old world.” It used to be heart-lifting to see a woman in a pretty dress with an innocent smile. Today women are either drab or trying to show their wares. When we do see something pretty, our compliments are taken as harassment. I say it’s time to go on a compliment strike. Just give out compliments to those who really deserve it. We should be more reserved in our compliments, our smiles. “A few smiles, a few compliments of the navy,” said Jane Austen in Persuasion, and (Captain Wentworth) he’s a lost man! These things were always preludes to something serious. They were also measuring sticks or grades that told people how well they were doing. If women are not doing well, I don’t think they should be complimented. The Proverbs 31 writer said, “her husband praises her in the gates.” These were well-earned praises after a long list of character qualities and accomplishments brought on by those higher qualities of diligence and faithfulness to the home.

(more…)