It is often said that while today’s college students lack the reading habits of past generations, they make up for this relative unfamiliarity with the written word with a greater visual and auditory literacy that allows them to navigate the modern world of images and the spoken word.

Thomas F. Bertonneau, a professor of literature and film studies, argues here that this is not so. The less reading a student does, the less likely he is to understand even movies. He writes:

I have taught film and popular-culture courses at the college level in Michigan and New York during a twenty-year period and, during the same period, have taught literature—classics in translation, American literature (nineteenth and twentieth century), poetry, literary theory, genre fiction, and much else. Given that experience, I find no validity in the strained romantic hope that the inadequately lettered and spottily informed student will prove somehow to be cognitively sharp in domains “beyond” the book…

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Leaving aside for the moment any comment on his literary works, I would like to point out one potentially enduring legacy of the writer J.D. Salinger, who died this week. He had the guts to admit that fame is not all it’s cracked up to be.

There is a conspiracy of silence among famous and rich people. They are afraid to say fame and wealth are not all that great. Perhaps they worry that this will reflect poorly on them. After all, why haven’t more famous and rich people spoken up? Maybe there is something wrong with them and so they keep quiet. (more…)

Say it to your friends. Say it to your relatives. Say it to your coworkers. “Jobs for Men First.”  Say it loud and clear.

As Tim Allen quipped, men have two choices: go to work or go to jail. The majority of men are either under the burden of supporting others or should be. Women and children need their success. We flourish when they flourish. We applaud their accomplishments and cherish their victories. Yes, these victories benefit us, but that is not the sole, or even the most important reason, for our applause and our belief in the primacy of male accomplishment in the world. The main reason we cheer them on is this. We love them and wish them well.

That’s right. We love them and wish them well. Is that so hard to understand? Jobs for Men First.

Preserve fatherhood and the future of today’s boys. Jobs for Men First.  Preserve camaraderie and focus in our corporate offices. Jobs for Men First. Preserve masculinity and life-giving femininity. Preserve domestic tranquility and order. Preserve our culture. Jobs for Men First.  Shout it from the mountaintops. Your country and its survival depend on it. Jobs for Men First.

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Imagine a community in America where children live without television and junk food, playing outside in their free time like almost all children once did. In Colorado City, Arizona, many children enjoy this wholesome life. There’s only one hitch: their fathers typically have many wives.

In its latest issue, National Geographic magazine explores the lives of polygamous Mormon fundamentalists, members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of  Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) in Colorado City and Hildale, Utah. It’s a fascinating glimpse into an alternate universe, enviable in some ways, believe it or not, but clearly a world that is structurally unsound. (more…)

Think of it. Women once aspired to look like Lady Agnew. Now they aspire to look something like TV anchorwoman Mika Brzezinski, who appears in the post below. They are both pretty, but there is a world of difference between them. There is no manliness in the woman above; no tenderness in the woman below. Into whose arms would a man or child rush? Feminine beauty will never die, but we seem to have entered its twilight.

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Mika Brzezinski, co-host of the cable show Morning Joe, gave one of the more novel perspectives on contemporary parenting in a recent talk at the Philadelphia Free Library, where she was promoting her paean to female careerism, an autobiography titled All Things at Once.

“My career wouldn’t mean a thing to me if I didn’t have my children to share it with,” she said. It’s true. Children love hearing about office politics and can provide excellent guidance to a tired parent. Families are for sharing.

By the way, according to a recent review in The New York Times, Brzezinski recounts in her book that she was so tired one night from work that she fell down the steps while carrying her newborn baby. All things at once. This brings to mind Richard Weaver’s statement: If you seek the monument to our folly, look about you.

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Marketing can be one of life’s great pleasures. In the simple effort of feeding a family, a woman may accumulate a lifetime of small adventures in the universe of grocers, farmers and food purveyors, ranging from the bored convenience store clerk to the butcher with a bloody apron.  

Unfortunately, the mega market, with its vast aisles of packaged and frozen food simulacra, its canned music and flourescent lights, towers of cereal, pyramids of phony fruit, and gleaming rows of plastic, has an atmosphere that is so removed from the messy and fascinating business of food that one could just as soon be in a place selling office furniture and copy machines. There is an illusion of progress. There is always something very impressive at work here. We are so used to the centralized and the impersonal, to falling into lockstep acceptance of whatever corporate retail offers us, that we barely notice the sterility of it and accept the deadly boredom with hardly a protest. The richest nation on earth and we can’t afford the pleasant, humanizing exchanges between small-time merchant and buyer that the poorest nations have.  (more…)

There is plenty of rampant hatred of women on the Internet. The Spearhead is a new men’s online magazine that has interesting articles lambasting feminism. Sad to say, the editors do not keep their commenters from juvenile posturing and vile insults. Misogyny will not cure feminism. Here are some examples from The Spearhead: (more…)

Again and again we are told the past is over. The modern economy is no longer dependent on traditional sex roles. The influx of women into formerly male jobs is an economic necessity and a sign of progress.

This is a myth. The exact opposite is true. Sexual egalitarianism is hurting us economically. See this article at The Spearhead, which argues that corporations grow less healthy the more women take over management: (more…)

Notice how this article on women who earn more than their husbands is dripping with contempt for homemakers, portrayed in so many words as petty, materialistic, idle and obsequious. The writer, Sandra Tsing Loh, is the woman who announced her decision to leave her husband and the father of her two children for another man in Atlantic magazine last year. The upshot of this confusing essay seems to be that everyone, both man and woman, wants a wife, but a devoted wife is too much of an absurd and sick fantasy to exist in real life. (more…)

In the ultimate denial of last week’s victory for Scott Brown in Massachusetts, some liberals are attributing the outcome to bias against women.

The state has already had a female governor (briefly), female lieutenant governors, and four women in the House of Representatives. A woman is currently president of the state senate. But Massachusetts lingers in the dark ages, longstanding prejudice holding women politicians such as Martha Coakley back, according to this story in today’s New York Times. Katie Zezima writes: 

“Welcome to liberal Massachusetts — we’re not,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic political consultant. “And if you didn’t believe it before, anyone who thinks that Massachusetts is liberal in light of Tuesday’s results need only look at the record and lack of success women have had in Massachusetts politics. That should just put it away for good.”

Brown ran a “macho, testosterone campaign.” Hormones determined the election results.

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Why are many middle-aged women today lonely, unhappy and childless? Because when they were young they were told they could have it all. Female fertility peaks in a woman’s twenties and her attractiveness to men does too, but they weren’t informed of these basic facts of nature.

Feminists continue to feed young women the myth that they can get married and have children whenever they want. Look at Sarah Palin’s words to her daughter Bristol on Oprah last week:

“I’m telling her, don’t think she has to find a man and marry young. The world is her oyster and she’s going to be able to pursue an education and career and avocation opportunities without a man.”

Some people have said that Mrs. Palin had her own children young because she saw through feminism and believed a woman’s commitment is to her family first. But this obviously is not the case. Here she is advising a daughter who already has a child to not form a family of her own right away or feel any need to get married young. When even supposed conservatives are stating these falsehoods, it is likely that the loneliness and unhappiness of the modern woman will continue to be nourished for many years to come.

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One of the great conceits of feminists is that they introduced female sexual pleasure to the world. Before the sex experts of the 1970s, human beings were entirely in the dark about female anatomy and the nature of womanly pleasure.

Feminists must maintain their claim over this discovery. It’s a subtle form of blackmail. Women are told they cannot possibly enjoy sex unless traditional sex roles are overturned. (more…)

  Do modern women seem to you either desperately unhappy or manically triumphant? Do they seem to be hopeless or filled with the most unreal of hopes? Perhaps we need look no further for light on these strange contradictions than Dr. Laura Berman, the famous expert on female sexual health. Dr. Berman, who proves that wearing a white lab coat gives almost any statement an air of authority, openly advises women to have sex. She advises them to have sex with themselves: Exploring your body alone allows you to discover new sensations and retrains your mind to focus on pleasure rather than self-conscious or self-defeating thoughts. Masturbation is the best way to reach orgasm for a lot of women, not just those who struggle with orgasm ability. This may also be something to discuss with a therapist, if you’re not comfortable going through it on your own. If you are, check out Betty Dodson’s book on the subject, Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving. Though it may take some work, the odds are that you’re capable of having the orgasms you want. Some people sincerely believe the sexual revolution has led to more pleasure overall for women. I disagree. A woman living in the lonely chamber of  "self-pleasuring" is not enacting her deepest dreams. It used to be promiscuity was sinful in a woman. Now sexual reticence is.

Hannon writes in the entry on women and romance:

I would be genuinely shocked if there are many women out there who could feign disinterest on being given these tender attentions. This can be tested in the platonic world also. Try giving a simple flower (not a bouquet) to a woman at work and experience her reaction. The absence of such civilized and kindly gestures– from fear of harassment charges or simply the effects of post-modern autonomy– strips life down to a level that is abnormally disconnected. (more…)

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

Have you heard about this horrible incident on Oprah yesterday, where Sarah Palin and Oprah discredit Bristol’s brave attempt to reconstruct her life by advocating and practicing abstinence?

It was a terrible moment in modern feminist history.

A young girl tries to go back to traditional (even religious, which I think is Bristol’s confident basis for her choice) principles, and two modern “career” women, one her own mother, shoot her down.

Bristol was brave, uncompromising, and silently suffering.

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Here’s an amazing fact. It is illegal in Quebec for a woman to officially adopt her husband’s last name. The Canadian province is so far advanced toward a socialist definition of family it’s surprising children aren’t taken from their parents at birth.

Jean Paul writes:

Reading about the current American struggles against the Marxist-feminist agenda, may I submit some amusing tidbits from Quebec, the most socialist part of a socialist country? Your readers may find them of interest and they might be the future news for the U.S. (more…)

Alex A. writes:

I remember reading in your blog once or twice that women, in contrast to men, crave romance. I have some questions I’d like to ask about what women mean by “romance” because, like many other men, I just don’t get it.

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