STARTING WITH THIS ENTRY, I will post statements by history’s famous feminists on a regular basis. These false or misleading appraisals of human nature, biological fact, spiritual truths, and common sense take the breath away. Feminism is rife with ridiculous assertions. I call these statements “puerilities” because they are so often child-like.

Here is the psychologically unstable Charlotte Perkins Gilman writing in The Man-Made World: Our Androcentric Culture, published in 1911:

The inextricable confusion of politics and warfare is part of the stumbling block in the minds of men. As they see it, a nation is primarily a fighting organization; and its principle business is offensive and defensive warfare; therefore the ultimatum with which they oppose the demand for political equality – “women cannot fight, therefore they cannot vote.”

Read More »

BJH writes:

Having read your blog, I am going to go out and find the biggest, hairy-leggiest feminazi I can and give her a big old hug. I am then going to fall to my knees and thank the “higher power” that I have grown up during a time when antiquated views like yours are in the minority. Read More »

The aggressively ugly Mary Daly

Where is Mary Daly now? The outrageous feminist “theologian” died earlier this week and one can only breathe a sigh of relief that the world will no longer be perturbed and curdled, at least in person, by the brainless and indigestible wit of this man-hating, child-eating icon, a woman who said things such as:

If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination;

and:

 The fact is that we live in a profoundly anti-female society, a misogynistic “civilization” in which men collectively victimize women, attacking us as personifications of their own paranoid fears, as The Enemy. Within this society it is men who rape, who sap women’s energy, who deny women economic and political power.

Mary Daly was a toxin, a poison, a self-detonating bomb. She helped destroy the gratitude of women. She damaged the greatest and most anti-misogynist culture in the history of the world. If ever there was a case for burning books, this is it. The foolish and hateful works of Mary Daly should be placed in a pyre and consumed until they are ashes to be swept into the trash bin of time.

Read More »

In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her now famous treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she strenuously argued for the education of women. If the minds of women were cultivated, they would be less likely to be “blown about by every momentary gust of feeling.” They would care less about the trivialities of fashion and beauty. This would lead to happier marriages and improved child-rearing.

Though Wollstonecraft is often mistaken for a modern feminist, it is highly unlikely she would have been pleased at the state of education of women today. She did not advocate that woman be taught to venerate masculine achievement and thinking to the point of abandoning her sacred duties as mother and wife.

Presumably Wollstonecraft would have been appalled at the case of Emmie. No education is better than the mis-education of Emmie. Sensibility is better than this kind of sense.

Read More »

A Field Guide to Evil would be handy sometimes, wouldn’t it? It could offer graphics that look like geological cross-sections, with their observable layers of rock. Like the earth, evil is multilayered, extending into the past and composed of radically different materials.

Here is a perfect example of what I mean.

Lisa Belkin of the New York Times in her Adventures in Parenting series (take note of the title; that’s one layer) interviews a woman who has become unexpectedly pregnant at the age of 22. She is unmarried and has just been accepted into a prestigious master’s program. Belkin presents Emmie’s case and solicits comments on what the young woman should do about her predicament. Seven hundred readers write in with their ideas. After publicly considering the possibilities of adoption, raising the child and abortion (marriage does not appear to be an option she considers), Emmy opts for an abortion. She ends her meditations on the subject with this kernel of heartfelt wisdom:

If I get my degree then maybe the path it will take me on will lead me to work on women’s issues. Maybe one day I’ll make a million dollars and start a scholarship program for pregnant graduate students. I can’t believe that nothing good can come of this, I know I’ll do something right one of these days.

Read More »

Fitzgerald writes:

Your broadsides against feminism, in all it’s many forms, have been both gratifying and enlightening. As a white, male professional, I must be careful at all times within professional arenas to mind what I say to avoid the backlash of the feminist apparatchiks that haunt the corridors of companies today, especially in Human Resource departments where they reside like jack-booted secret police always probing and searching for pockets of resistance in the white male population. Should it be discovered or exposed I may harbor any facets of a decidedly un-PC perspective on these topics I could incur immediate and swift censure. The peasants must be quelled.

Read More »

Laurence B. writes:

I’d really like to blow some steam off about the Army. I should first include some context: I am from a military family—my grandfather flew in three wars and my father was in the last class at the Air Force Academy that was all-male.

Read More »

Dear Thinking Housewife,

Men are not taught how to be men nowadays. What can I do about the fact that my husband is such a girl?

Regards,                                                                                  

Anonymous (in an unspecified location)

Dear Anonymous,

I’m sorry, Anonymous, this question makes me mad. Not mad at you, but mad at this. In many ways, the debate over marriage is over, isn’t it? Women are already married to women. And, men are already married to men.

Read More »

There have been heated discussions at this site about race in recent days. Some women find this puzzling. Isn’t this website largely about the defense of home and family? What does race have to do with it? The truth is, the issue of race is related to domestic concerns and these discussions are by no means accidental. They are consistent with the desire to fight feminism and preserve the home front.

Home and family depend not just on women, but on men. Nature has endowed men with the role of protection. That includes protection of family, but also of nation, ethnic group, and race. To say that this form of aggression is natural in men is not to say that it is good. Defense of race, tribe, and nation are only justified when any of these are threatened. Aggression is good only when it protects something vital, something that cannot be maintained through harmony and conciliation.

The belief by women that men – men of all races – can be stripped of these concerns is profoundly disturbing and essentially feminist. This anti-male notion, the fall-out from a wider set of ideas that scorns all natural distinctions and inequalities, is strikingly prevalent among Western women. But nature has apparently endowed all women to some degree with the desire for pacification. The habit of downplaying group connections and differences beyond those of immediate family seems deeply ingrained in women. As noted by two male commenters yesterday, this may extend from ancient survival instincts, an artifact of the days when women had to adjust to raids from enemy invaders by living peacefully with these enemies.

The effort to emasculate men, particularly white men, has been widely successful. Many men now agree with women that anything short of complete submission to or denial of racial hostility is wrong. This feminization of racial attitudes in the West comes at a time of pronounced racial aggression, both subtle and overt. When this aggression is clearly dangerous, when it seeks to destroy what is good, to demoralize and seize scarce resources, the effort by women to stand in the way of men, to chide and belittle them for their racial awareness, is wrong. It is disrespectful, insensitive and just plain foolish. Along with all else that seeks to rob us of domestic tranquility and to overturn the well-being of our children, I passionately condemn it.

Read More »

JOEL writes:

I’m not sure how conservatives, such as yourself, can object to teen pregnancies, such as Bristol Palin’s. While I agree that single-motherhood is horribly destructive to the fabric of society, I cannot see how preaching and pontificating makes any difference in its inexorable march. As the average age of first marriage steadily increases, what you are asking is for individuals to forego having sex until their thirties, given that the average age of first marriage is now that high in some coastal cities. Recently, I was speaking with some older social conservative types, I live in Seattle, and joked that the reason my peers don’t vote Republican is that “Republicans are the people who don’t want anyone to have sex until thirty-five”, and, with the social reality in big cities, that assessment is not far from the truth.

Read More »

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. 

Read More »

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.

Read More »

 

 

Since the 1960s, women have made enormous strides. It’s amazing. They have unhappier marriages, more divorce, about half as many children if they’re college-educated, less free time, fatter children, dumber children, more psychologically disturbed children, lonelier lives, messier homes, and husbands who often earn less money than they do. Is this what Gail Collins means by amazing in her latest encomium to feminist progress, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present?

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.

Read More »

	Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, New York Times

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.

Read More »

Queen Victoria was once the most powerful woman in the world. In all of history, there has been no single woman more powerful than the little queen. Given her position, Victoria must have believed women were capable of ruling. She must have believed they should  be in power.

Then why did the Queen say this in 1870?

“I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings, and would surely perish without male protection.”

It is sometimes said, or implied, that women who are anti-feminist are jealous of the successes of others or are lacking in ambition or are just plain stupid. But, what of the Queen? Here’s what a feminist would probably say. The Queen could not possibly understand the plight of ordinary women because of her extraordinary prerogatives.  There’s no way an anti-feminist can come out ahead. She’s either elitist or a dolt.

Read More »

Over the last 50 years, America has witnessed the cultural devastation of femininity and motherhood. When women fall, an entire way of life and civilization itself are not far behind. In order to reverse this state of affairs, a profound change in attitudes and prevailing mores is necessary. It’s not a question of returning to a former time, such as the 1950’s or the Victorian era, but of returning, as Richard Weaver put it, to the center of things, to the essence of who we are.

Attitudes are not all. We need ultimately to reverse existing laws and practices. First and foremost, we should restore customary economic discrimination in favor of men. America’s businesses and institutions should be free once again to favor men over women in hiring. If they are not, family life will never return to a reasonable state of health; the happiness of women and children will continue to decline; and men will fail to flourish and prosper.

It will take many years to recover the sensibility that sanctions a form of discrimination that was once common. It’s important to begin laying the groundwork. The essential foundation of change is a renewed understanding of ideas and practices that were once so basic and unspoken we did not feel the need to make them explicit or to defend them. Let’s begin this task together by clarifying the issue.

What is customary discrimination?

Customary discrimination, in relation to the sexes, is the voluntary and informal practice of favoring men over women in hiring. It is not encoded in law or enforced by regulation. It exists as a result of a common understanding that men must support families and cannot adequately do so if they compete with large numbers of women, a form of competition that lowers their wages and reduces their marketability. The relative stagnation of men’s wages in the last 50 years proves the point.

Why and when did customary discrimination end?

Customary discrimination came to an official end with the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made discrimination against women in hiring unlawful, and its subsequent enforcement by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. At the time the 1964 legislation was adopted, there was not widespread agitation for a change. The bill was the work of a relatively small minority. However, given the subsequent change in attitudes regarding sex roles, this radical experiment in social change was inevitable. It wasn’t dissatisfaction with home life so much as the novelty of the unknown and the romantic fantasies of the minority of feminists temperamentally unsuited to domesticity that convinced impressionable women to pour into the market for careers.

Businesses have profited from the end of discrimination as it opened up the pool of available labor and provided a check on wages.

Why would American businesses and government ever voluntarily return to a state of affairs that is not in their interest?

Though businesses profit from a larger labor pool, they also suffer costs due to more women working. Women, over the course of their careers, have higher absentee rates; are more easily distracted because of family duties and greater sociability; require expensive services such as day care; and file costly discrimination and harassment suits. Men are naturally more suited to competitive work and a collegial atmosphere. In many fields, the working environment would be more collaborative, focused, and placid due to smaller numbers of women, especially women who are unstable or unhappy due to the conflict between work and home.

Obviously, women would still be present in some numbers in all fields, especially at lower levels. With the removal of anti-discrimination laws and a renewed sensitivity toward the obligation of businesses to reinforce family life –similar to the awareness they now hold regarding the natural environment – the  economy would gradually arrive at a smaller and reasonable number of women in the workforce.

Does a return to customary discrimination mean women never hold jobs?

No. Women even remain a majority in certain fields, such as education, low-level office work, psychology and nursing. These fields are suited to the interruptions of family life, to the years before marriage, and to the natural skills of women. Business and institutions would be as free to favor women as they were before, but would violate an unwritten code if they favored anything but exceptional women in lucrative fields.

Especially gifted and ambitious women, generally those who will not have families, will still be exceptions in all fields, as they were before the feminist era. There will still be women doctors, lawyers and professors, just far fewer of them. Ambitious women will not find it as easy to make their way as they do today.

America needs the labor of women. We cannot afford to go back in a global economy.

Competition in the world economy is not the first and most vital task of the American market. Given its size, the American economy has vast potential for serving itself and Americans alone. In any event, our economy requires a healthy, moral and educated workforce. It also requires a large number of consumers within its own borders. Consumers are born, and raised, not manufactured.

America cannot have this adequate workforce without healthy families. The dramatic increase in divorce, the decline in the health and literacy of children, the increase in unethical business practices are all directly related to the departure of women from their main function in the home. The dramatic drop in fertility is a result of this loss of function. Fewer children mean fewer consumers. We face economic crisis because of an end to customary discrimination, not the other way around.

Doesn’t this mean poverty among women will increase as those who are divorced or single won’t be able to support themselves or their families?

Divorced women would still receive the support of their husbands. However, parallel changes in divorce law are necessary to make for less incentive for women to divorce. Women should generally face the loss of child custody and a serious decline in income if they initiate divorce, except in the event of proven malfeasance on the part of the husband. Single women will still be able to find jobs and receive help from fathers and extended family. Most of them will not be rich.

Why would women ever accept a return to discrimination?

The end of customary discrimination was never in the interests of women. It has forced the majority to help support their families while raising their children and managing a home. The experiment was tried. The apple was eaten. Women now see that careers come with personal costs and that many jobs are not as thrilling as feminists claim. They are ready to embrace discrimination again.

Won’t there be fierce competition among women for high-earning men? And, won’t women become obsessed with men’s careers?

There is competition for high-earning men now.  They have always been desirable mates for some, not all, women. Most women will be able to find what they cannot find now: a man who can support them and their children in reasonable comfort for many years.

It’s true that when women are not focused on career, they focus more on the careers of their mates and prospective mates. In some, this focus becomes excessive and neurotic. Such is the price to pay for a return to sanity for many. Though they won’t be caught up in building their own careers, women will find much that is satisfying to absorb their minds and express their varied interests. The rewards of larger families, domestic crafts, volunteer work, artistic pursuits and vigilance toward the elderly will be rediscovered. Instead of being openly disparaged by our opinion-shaping institutions, these will be embraced and publicly celebrated.

Won’t American families always be tempted to increase their incomes, and thus their buying power, by sending wives out to work?

With a greater awareness that the short-term luxuries purchased with a second income come with long-term costs, this practice would decline. Also, prices would eventually return to a one-income standard. To arrive at this event, there would be an inevitable period of sacrifice, perhaps a lengthy one. Would men and women accept this burden? Americans have accepted and endorsed many changes in recent years to protect the natural environment, having realized the consequences of not protecting it would be catastrophic. The same change in awareness could occur regarding family life and the culture at large. People could come to admit what they already know: that a country and an entire culture are quickly decaying. If we continue as we are, it’s not a question of if but of when we will not possess the luxury of turning back.

Read More »

In light of the renewed discussion of Sarah Palin, I offer a short, politically incorrect list of the reasons why women should not hold the reins of power, even at levels less significant than the presidency: 

Women, even highly intelligent women, are more emotional than men. 

Women govern with ideas of nurturing. Society functions on notions of duty and discipline. 

Women have too much to do in the private realm. 

The future depends on the child-rearing of today. 

Birth rates sharply fall under egalitarian leadership. 

Men lose interest in fields dominated by women. The more women govern, the less men seek to govern. 

Female public figures are judged more than men on their physical appearance. 

Women who hold power tend to disparage the powerlessness of most women, making it difficult for women in general to forsake ambition for greater goods.

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

I read the intriguing interaction you had with Rose, the conservative lesbian. I guess my view is that Muslims will be Muslims, and lesbians will be lesbians, however intelligently and insightfully they (lesbians) present their unconventional life style.

Read More »