You’ve heard of ADD, ADHD, OCD and the like, and you’ve perhaps seen the children lined up at school infirmaries for their chemical supplements. Now, word is just in from The Onion of a new psycho-neurological condition afflicting the nation’s youth. This should have been discovered ages ago. Millions have gone untreated.
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The band of deciduous forest which extends roughly from the Blue Ridge Mountains to northern Quebec is unusual in the world for its autumnal color. The only other extensive swathe of forest that rivals it stretches across parts of East Asia. Deciduous trees elsewhere do not exhibit the spectacular mixture of reds and yellows. In Europe and midwestern United States, trees typically turn only yellow. The reason for this geographic difference remains a mystery to scientists, though there are intriguing theories. The appearance of yellow leaves is understood. With the diminished light of fall, the green chlorophyll in leaves departs, allowing existing yellow pigment to appear. Red autum leaves are the consequence of a different process. With the drop in chlorophyll, anthocyanin, a red pigment, is produced in the leaf. This is a relatively new discovery and has led to several theories about why trees use energy to create red pigment when they are shedding their leaves. According to an hypothesis published recently in the journal New Phytologist and discussed in this ScienceDaily article, the different climatic conditions during ice ages 35 million years ago are responsible. The bands of forest in North America and Asia developed red pigments to ward off insects that were unable to survive the harsher conditions in Europe and other parts of the world where deciduous trees also evolved. A recent headline in a Vermont newspaper said, They Came, They Peeped, They Left. As the "leaf peepers" who crowd New England's backroads know, these trees are beautiful in panorama. But the greatest effect is from inside,…
Paul Velde writes:
In your piece on men and housework, you remark apropos of another subject altogether, “The average woman wants control over her domestic realm and she doesn’t like the way men… manage the children.” Perhaps the operative word here is “average,” but nonetheless could you find time to expand on this point? In my experience the male-female conflict over children is the cause of much tension in marriages, and, when the results become manifest in terms of spoiled, ill-behaved, ungrateful offspring, profound grief.
Lawrence Auster writes here:
It appears to be the case that if a society gives equal political rights to women, then over time there will inevitably be an expectation of equal political outcomes for women. How is this dynamic to be forestalled? By stating up front, by establishing it as a fundamental principle of the society, that the sexes are different, that women naturally have different social functions from men, and that the exercise of political power, including the franchise, is not for women. Only the stoutest bulwarks against women’s procedural equality can stop the ultimate devolution of society into gender socialism and the spiritual death and loss of freedom it brings. If liberty is limited, then liberty can be maintained.
But if I’m wrong,–if it’s not possible to contain liberty and equality within strict bounds where they do not ultimate turn into socialism–then the American experiment in government is a failure, its principle are void, and we must start over again on an entirely new basis.
I don’t believe that to be true. I devoutly hope that it is not true. But I’m saying that it might be true.
A female reader writes about the previous post The Unfaithful Wife:
That was a thought-provoking article. Maybe I’m taking it the wrong way, but it seems like you’re being much harder on women than men. Men have been having and getting away with having affairs for millenniums. And a lot of women have sucked it up and dealt with it, often for the sake of their children. I’m certainly not condoning affairs or divorce but it’s nothing that men haven’t done. Men have discarded their wives, potential wives and children for decades on the altars of sex and excitement.
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I am running myself ragged, dear reader, trying to keep up with the latest lies in our preeminent newspapers. According to this story in the Wall Street Journal, men will have more sex with their wives if they (the men) do more housework. Is this the ultimate form of feminist blackmail, or what?
Stewardesses are representative of all that was evil in our past. Just look at ’em. Forget the smiles, the waves, the trim beauty. They are desperately unhappy, the aeronautical equivalent of sex slaves.
In her latest encomium to feminism, which was discussed here, Gail Collins singles out stewardesses, and the employment standards of their bosses, for special censure. Before feminist progress, stewardesses had to be pretty, well-groomed, young and unmarried. Now they can be fat, married men, and that’s amazing.
But what really irks is not the discriminatory rules that insisted they be young and beautiful. Stewardesses were often unambitious women looking for husbands and travel before they settled down to marriage and family. They didn’t want to be president of the airline or even a lowly director of marketing. They wanted to pass the time well before real adulthood began. Feminists despise the lowly stewardess. She lacked ambition. She smiled too much. She could have gotten high marks at any charm school. Husbands and babies adore smiles. And that’s just the problem. Down with stewardesses forever! They are a relic of human happiness, a reminder of lost joy.
If any good has come from feminism it is a dawning appreciation of female sexual desire and its potential to destroy. The monogamous instincts of women have been vastly exaggerated in the popular imagination, even by Darwinian realists who pride themselves on their clear-eyed appraisals of human nature. Sexual liberation has revealed the full extent of feminine waywardness and disloyalty.
At least two-thirds of divorces in this country are initiated by women. Women are more eager than men to get married; once married they are more eager to get out of marriage. In many of these divorces, women act as if their husbands have disappointed or offended them when the truth is these women desire another man or the possibility of new romance. Economic power for women and divorce laws that guarantee maternal custody or joint custody have unmasked the truth about female sex drives: Women are not innately faithful nor do all women naturally put the interests of their children above their own. They express their sexual restlessness in entirely different ways than men and in often confusing forms.
For centuries, women have consoled themselves when their husbands were unfaithful with the thought that men are naturally promiscuous. This commonly reinforced idea has allowed a woman to feel that a husband’s adulteries are not necessarily a reflection upon her. The same is not true with feminine betrayal. Women are viewed as naturally monogamous and so their infidelities cause more despair and may lead women themselves to give more weight to passing infatuations.
When I was 14 years old, my family lived across the street from a handsome couple and their five children. I used to babysit for them, sitting up late at night in their living room listening to the clock tick. I remember seeing Mr. Minder one spring night mowing his lawn. I was struck by something strange in his expression. It was one of complete detachment, as if the mower was pulling him on a leash.
Two days later, my father woke me early in the morning. “Get up, get up,” he said. “Something terrible has happened.” Mr. Minder was dead. He had gone the night before into his garage, sealed the doors and turned on the car. It was a devastating event. He was a kind and gentle man. I cannot help but think that he was a victim of his own innocence. For when he learned that his wife was having an affair with a neighbor, he was overcome by hopelessness. He was entirely unprepared for such a thing.
Born in 1971, I was a member of one of the first generations of children whose mothers routinely left their children to outside care so they could go to work full time. My father had a good, not great, job but one a family could live on and my mother chose to work so they could have more material possessions. When I was small, I used to forget where I was supposed to go after school because caregivers included my grandparents, my mother sometimes, a neighbor, my mother’s workplace (where I would sit quietly for two hours and wait for her to take us home), or an after-school program. My mother sometimes used all these options in one school week, so there was no consistency. Every caregiver, including my mother and grandmother, acted like we were a burden and I remember my poor grandmother lying down in the middle of the day, exhausted from long days of caring (for no pay at all) for the small children of her three successful working daughters’ children.
I don’t know anyone clinically sane who thinks life in America is actually better today, when nearly one fourth of college-educated women don’t have children at all, than it was in the 1960s. By every gauge of social welfare, things are dramatically worse. The percentage of babies born to unwed mothers has increased sevenfold. The proportion of children living in single-parent households has tripled. The divorce rate has doubled. More than a million new children every year are affected by parental divorce. The number of children who live apart from the biological fathers has doubled, increasing fom 17 percent to 34 percent.
Children who grow up in single-parent households or with divorced parents have significantly worse outcomes in life in every area. In fact, they have negative outcomes at two to three times the rate of children from two-parent married households. But, even though at least half of these children are females, Collins actually thinks things have gotten better. According to this reviewer, things were “positively medieval” for women back in the 1960s. So medieval that women were barred from jury duty in some states so they could see to their domestic duties. Oh happy, happy day!
Collins must narrow her gaze on the few seize-the-day female careerists in her midst, women who are perfectly happy to not see or raise their children, if they indeed have any, and to divorce their husbands. She basks in ludicrous examples of female oppression. Reviewer Francine Prose states:
The early pages of Ms. Collins’s book are peppered with accounts of incidents so outrageous they almost seem like jokes. A draft of a Congressional bill to insure equal pay for women was discovered to have been filed “under B — for ‘broads.’ ” At a pregraduation party at Barnard, one woman remembers, students who were engaged to be married were handed corsages, while their classmates without engagement rings were presented with lemons.
Imagine that. Corsages for women. If that’s medieval, this must be the Stone Age.
Rose responds to the post How to Disown Your Parents, in which I stated, “If desire cannot be trained or modified [in homosexuals], the same is true for heterosexuals and for pedophiles:”
Friedman does not appreciate the traditional corollaries that accompany his biological determinism. Certainly if men can be born with inherently feminine natures and women with inherently masculine ones, it must follow that women can have inherently feminine natures and men inherently masculine ones. But that would be sexist. This is rather like the leftist contradiction that a male transsexual’s desire to wear a frilly dress and ribbons is congenital and instinctive and to be tolerated (or celebrated) for that reason but a woman’s desire to do the same is merely an arbitrary social construction. Friedman’s essentialism stands in stark contrast to the Foucauldian theories recently condemned at View from the Right. Gay activists and sympathizers tend to bounce back and forth between the two positions depending on which is useful to them at the moment.
Laura’s point about pedophilia is a good one and it is for this reason actually that I think conservatives should on principle refuse to argue about whether homosexuality is genetic. Successfully reformed pedophiles are rare but whether a desire is inborn or not has nothing to do with the moral status of its expression.
Keith Bardwell, the Louisiana justice of the peace who made national news for refusing to marry an interracial couple, continues to be disarmingly honest in his statements about the incident. His candor and lack of racial animosity have probably made a few people think twice and the story has briefly reopened an ancient theme that is now rarely discussed in public. "It's kind of hard to apologize for something that you really and truly feel down in your heart you haven't done wrong," Bardwell told a radio reporter over the weekend. He refused to officiate at a ceremony involving a black man and a white woman. He said he does not approve of interracial marriage because of its effect on children. "I've had countless numbers of people that was born in that situation, and that they claim that the blacks or the whites didn't accept the children," Bardwell told CBS. "And I didn't want to put the children in that position." .
If parents reject an adult child for embracing homosexuality, they are guilty of scientific ignorance and should be disowned for their hostility to truth, according to Dr. Richard Friedman, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. In a column about "toxic" parents in yesterday's New York Times, Friedman described a patient who was harshly criticized by his family for his homosexuality. Friedman met with the man and his parents to bring about a reconciliation. He wrote: The session did not go well. The parents insisted that his “lifestyle” was a grave sin, incompatible with their deeply held religious beliefs. When I tried to explain that the scientific consensus was that he had no more choice about his sexual orientation than the color of his eyes, they were unmoved. They simply could not accept him as he was. I was stunned by their implacable hostility and convinced that they were a psychological menace to my patient. As such, I had to do something I have never contemplated before in treatment. At the next session I suggested that for his psychological well-being he might consider, at least for now, forgoing a relationship with his parents. Friedman is one of a vast army of psychology professionals who spout this pseudo-scientific bigotry. The major professional organizations, such as the American Psychological Association, virtually command orthodoxy on the subject, untroubled by the fact that homosexuals were capable of essentially changing the color of their eyes in less tolerant times. If a person has no…
God is in all of nature. Paradise is eternal springs, blooming roses and an unending harvest of apples. Such were the convictions of Saint Dorothy, believed to be the subject of this exquisite painting by the Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo. I like to think of Dorothy as protectress of gardeners, especially as they lay down their spades and pitchforks for winter. Dorothy lived in the Roman province of Cappodocia, now in Turkey, during the reign of Diocletian. Her story is filled with poetical beauty. According to legend, she was condemned to die after refusing to marry or to renounce her faith. She was said to have declared: "I serve the Son of God, Christ, mine espoused! His dwelling is Paradise; by His side are joys eternal; and in His garden grow celestial fruits and roses that never fade!" It was winter and, en route to her execution, she was approached by a cynical young lawyer, Theophilus, who derisively asked her to send him some of the roses she had spoken of on joining her bridegroom. To which, she answered, "Thy request, O Theophilus, is granted!" The young woman was beheaded and, immediately after, an angel appeared to him with a basket of celestial fruit and flowers, saying, "Dorothy sends thee these!" Gerard Manley Hopkins imagined Theophilus' response in his poem, St. Dorothea: You waned into the world of light, Yet made your market here as well: My eyes hold yet the rinds and bright Remainder of a miracle. O this is bringing! Tears may swarm While such a wonder's wet and warm! Legend has it that…
In the following exchange, a reader challenges my comments about Sarah Palin. I present what I believe to be the traditionalist woman’s case against Palin for president.
Elizabeth P. writes:
Many of your comments I find great rapport with, until I read the one concerning Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and their husbands [see preceding entry].
It is perhaps stretching it a bit to say that Sarah Palin is a dedicated mother in the light of the unhappy events surrounding her daughter. But there have sadly been many families who have had a daughter go astray in the area of morality, and hopefully everyone is sadder yet wiser and forgiven as well. So to out-and-out say that she is not a dedicated mother is, I believe, a bit uncharitable.
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Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, of Minnesota, was the subject of a profile yesterday in the New York Times. She is an up-and-coming Republican star. In her recent statements on health care reform, she has questioned the Constitutional authority for a federal mandate on health insurance. Bachmann, who is pretty and a frequent guest on cable news shows, has been accused of spreading “reckless lies” by Democrats. This speaks well to her honesty and principles.
I like many of the public statements Bachmann has made, except for this:
“Sarah Palin is a dedicated mother, committed public servant and strong political figure who has fought hard to protect life, the family budget, and freedom.”
Palin is not a dedicated mother and has done nothing to support the family budget, which has been decimated by the sort of feminism Palin exemplifies. Bachmann, by the way, has five children. Her husband, in a nice reversal of roles, is a clinical therapist, and they have reportedly taken in some 23 foster children. This is the conservative feminist ideal: hyper-domesticity and hyper-careerism at the same time. Plus a man who holds the purse.
A female reader writes:
I really enjoy your blog and I have read it since its inception.
I was wondering if you could find it in your heart to give me some advice, as an older wife to a younger one who is isolated from normal wives.
What is a traditional wife to do when she is sick, especially if the illness is long-term and may never resolve itself? I feel like such a failure. I can’t cook for my family or clean my own house. I can barely care for my children adequately.
I feel like there must be some kind of women’s wisdom as to what I am supposed to be doing in this situation, that I just never got, like I never got anything else I needed to know about how to run a household.
The ideal voter or political representative in any high-functioning democracy is the father. He is more important politically than the mother; more important than the young man without children or the single woman; more important as a type than even the property owner. Wise democracy would limit the franchise to fathers. There may be great statesmen or thinkers who have no children, men such as Alexis de Tocqueville who possess vision and insight. But, the ordinary father is more crucial to civilization; without him, it cannot prosper over the long term. In the father, the impersonal and personal, the abstract and concrete, the public and private are more likely to exist in the sort of harmony that makes for good political judgment. By father, I don't mean any man who has biologically reproduced, but the man who is married and takes part in rearing his children and has an active bond with them, whether they are young or adults. For a woman, the world is personal and her influence is pervasive whether she has the vote or not. For the man without children, the future is not as alive; even property or personal wealth may not make him care for those who will live many decades from now. The father is more apt to possess both public-spiritedness and loyalty, dispassion and compassion. Patriarchy is often misunderstood. Too often it conjures images of despotic chiefs or overlords. A democratic patriarchy is…
