IN RESPONSE to the previous post on video games and their effects on the academic performance of boys, a mother reports her own distressing experience with video game addiction. This is a powerful story of one family’s encounter with the compulsion to play.

Ann writes:

As one who has been subjected to witnessing video game obsession since 1987, I wholeheartedly concur that those who play them incessantly become less and less functional in the real world, but may be predisposed to this behavior by other life factors.

When my oldest child was three, my husband brought home a Nintendo game system, something brand new at the time. My husband comes from a home in which the father was an alcoholic, the mother a sweet, religious, but weak woman who enabled her husband’s drinking and otherwise did the best she could. The family was always either playing cards or other games, or watching TV.

Now, as head of our family, my husband (who himself had been a teenage alcoholic), was no longer drinking and was a fine worker in his job, but still given to addictive behavior. ( I believe, for all my mouthing off and persistently trying to come up with alternative activities and ideas while trying to maintain an intact family, I am probably playing his mother’s role to a “T”).

Enter the Nintendo. He brought it in, set it up, and began to play. This went on for hours. The next day the same thing, and on and on, until almost every bit of time off was consumed by this activity. The things he did with the rest of his free time consisted of eating, sleeping, TV watching, and taking care of bodily functions. (more…)

WHILE FEMINISM has been widely attacked for making the lives of mothers more difficult and for destroying perfectly decent marriages, it has generally remained immune from criticism regarding the condition of the unmarried woman without children. It is here that feminists who harbor doubts remain absolutely certain of progress.

The unmarried woman once faced shame and ostracism. If she hadn’t found a man by the time she was 25, she was designated an old maid. She could only teach or work as a nurse or secretary. She didn’t go to bars alone or travel to ashrams in Asia and, most horrific of all, she likely never had a sex life. She didn’t eat, pray and love.

All that has changed.  Today, she is not a spinster but a success. She can be a CEO or lawyer. She lives not with her parents, but in a house of her own, complete with the sort of household niceties married women have, such as full sets of china and antique dining tables. She’s just as likely to read Martha Stewart and host fancy dinner parties. People hardly ever ask her why she never married. They’re more interested in her job, and she is most certainly not a virgin.

But this rosy picture is misleading. Does the unmarried woman have it better today? Yes, she may be richer, but is she happier?

When my maternal grandmother was raising her four daughters, she sternly told them that she was not “running a school for spinsters.” That’s because there was a long and exalted line of spinsters in my grandfather’s family. These women lived well and served as tempting role models. There was one difference between them and their contemporary counterparts. They lived in the bosom of their families and in the heart of vital communities. They knew no more real loneliness than anyone else.

Three of my grandfather’s sisters, Marge, Clare and Agnes, took up residence together as adults. Clare and Agnes worked to put my grandfather and his brother through medical school. Marge kept house. They were later joined by their sister Dot; her husband was a prison warden who was shot by an inmate a year after the wedding.

They lived in a Victorian house on a hill, immaculately tended and amply decorated with cut-glass candy dishes, doilies and lace. They had a poodle who begged for chocolate kisses. To a child, theirs was a world of feminine enchantment, filled with a crystalline delicacy that can only be created by true female celibates.

(more…)

  MANY PEOPLE  argue that video games are harmless. They may even improve coordination and certain types of intelligence. That's one common claim. Video games clearly are not destructive of personal success in many cases. Some people are able to play them in moderation. But there is conclusive evidence that they affect school performance for males. According to Leonard Sax, physician, popular writer on sex differences in childhood and adolescence, and author of Boys Adrift,  published in 2007: A series of studies over the past seven years has demonstrated clearly and unambiguously that the more time your child spends playing video games, the less likely he is to do well in school - whether he is in elementary school, middle school, high school, or college. This negative association between academic performance and playing video games remains strong even when investigators control for all possible confounding variables, such as personality traits. I regard this finding as "clear and unambiguous" because all studies of this question have yielded similar results.  

In the past fifty years, colleges have gone from being predominantly male to predominantly female. Here are figures from Leonard Sax’s book Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Men:

1949: 70 percent of undergraduate students were male
1959: 64 percent were male
1969: 59 percent were male
1979: 49 percent were male
1989: 46 percent were male
1999: 44 percent were male
2006: 42 percent were male

(more…)

A CHRISTIAN businessman examines the moral, financial, and psychological complications of international adoptions in this thoughtful article. On this issue, he contends, reason “is seen as unspiritual while following the wisps of one’s emotions is seen as very spiritual.”  (more…)

Aservant, a commenter here at the Thinking Housewife, battles it out with knee-jerk misogynists at the Spearhead website in a discussion of  women-only relief lines in Haiti. He offers a  fascinating and pungent reading of Haitian culture. Go to the end of the thread to search for Aservant’s remarks. Here are a few excerpts:

(more…)

A reader sent this riveting photo of Winston Churchill and General Bernard Montgomery reviewing the troops. It seems apropos of recent discussions here of boys and heroes. Look at the faces. Glancing at this, I wondered what Churchill would have thought about the statements made yesterday by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

“I have served with homosexuals since 1968…  putting individuals in a position that every single day they wonder whether today’s going to be the day, and devaluing them in that regard, just is inconsistent with us as an institution.”

I could lend the admiral a few hankies if he needs ’em.

(more…)

From today’s  New York Times:

The nation’s top two defense officials called Tuesday for an end to the 16-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, a major step toward allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the United States military for the first time.

(more…)

 Terry writes-

I realize that I am very late to this thread, but the posts (here and here) on, Mika Brzezinski, the female co-host of Morning Joe and the resulting conversation about whether or not her dress was provocative was very interesting. I didn’t find her dress in the photo you posted all that immodest. In fact, I watch Morning Joe pretty regularly, and I think that Ms. Brzezinski dresses quite modestly as she seems to want to be taken seriously as a journalist, first. She takes her duty to the sisterhood of feminism quite seriously, as her book title implies.  (more…)

Sibella writes:

Just discovered your website through Google Alerts (“female law enforcement” was the key). What a treasure! You’re going on the Favorites right away.

Agree completely with your “I guess being at home is boring if…” statement. Life bloomed when I left the feminist stranglehold of “working mother.” For ten-plus years I worked as a daily newspaper journalist. I’m now a stay-at-home mom and novelist who homeschools two kids. When I left the newsroom, the other reporters were aghast. “What are you doing?!” they asked. “I’m raising the future of America,” I said, “what are you doing?” (more…)

 Eric, a police officer, responds to the previous post about women in police work.

He writes:

I have been a policeman for about 15 years. When I was a young officer, a wise older officer told me that there are three types of female police officers: “nymphos, lesbos, and psychos.” My experiences have (with one exception) demonstrated that he was right. The one exception was a girl who I shared an office with once. Her daddy had been a trooper in West Virginia, and she was just a good old country girl who grew up in law enforcement.

Almost all of the rest of the female officers (even ones I have become friendly with) are there to find girlfriends, boyfriends, or for some reason besides the desire to serve (at least in a law enforcement capacity) their community. (more…)

A male high school senior I know recently visited an elite liberal arts college. The college matched him up with a student who was responsible for showing him around. The school arranged for him to spend the night in the student’s dorm room. The student was a girl.

She made known her intentions during the night. Was this part of the college tour? He declined to sleep with her. They spent the rest of the night talking about her problems with other men.

America’s colleges are in the business of prostituting women in a thousand subtle and overt ways.

(more…)

There’s an interesting post at What’s Wrong with the World on women in positions of command. Jeff Culbreath reflects on the appointment of a female police chief in his hometown in California:

This isn’t just any job: the essence of police work is violence and coercion. The employment of violence and coercion by women – in a way that is habitual or defining for them – turns them into something beastly. A female police chief is uniquely perverse because those whom she will be leading (police officers) and those whom she will be coercing (criminals) are predominantly male. Her position is one of wielding power and authority specifically over men. Tell me, is it healthy for any woman to aspire to this? Does it not indicate some deep spiritual and psychological problems?

(more…)

A reader sent a note asking if I was a Darwinist, perhaps because of a recent piece I wrote on evolutionary psychology. This is a good time to explain where I stand.

To put it in crudely simple terms: No, I do not believe in Darwinism or the theory of evolution, which state that life evolved from matter and that successive life forms were created by random mutations. This theory has not been proved by science.

(more…)

  In the ongoing discussion on idealized feminine beauty, one reader recommends the famous Helga paintings by Andrew Wyeth. Above is his painting Cape Coat. Wyeth said: I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it - the whole story doesn't show.