Few women personify the vanity and emotional instability of liberalism as well as Angelina Jolie, with her multi-ethnic tribe of adopted children and her pathetic efforts to disguise self-display as global enlightenment. Angelina is one of those rare women who make maternal desire predatory. Hold on to your children, mothers of the Third World, when Angelina is in town!

In an article in the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Angelina receives the feminist etablishment’s ultimate endorsement: a glowing article by Naomi Wolf. Strangely, Wolf is the author of the best-selling The Beauty Myth, which repackaged the cliche that feminine beauty is a patriarchal tool. How is it that Wolf warmly approves of Jolie’s visible splendor? Here’s the difference.  Jolie is the object of sexual fanatasies by women, contends Wolf. So there. It’s not just a patriarchal thing.

Wolf adores Jolie for the glamour she has bestowed on single motherhood. This is sort of like adoring Angelo Bruno for the glamour he bestowed on organized crime. Writes Wolf:

Single moms had been cast as society’s pathetic cases, but with more than a quarter of U.S. households with children headed by such moms, this was long overdue for a rebranding. When Maddox appeared — this adorable, brush-cut tyke photographed by Annie Leibovitz in his early romance with his mom — Jolie revealed a new, and fairly radical, vision of single motherhood that made the relationship seem tender, glamorous, and complete, father figure or no father figure in the picture.

Feminists have as much psychological insight into the average child as Fagin, Charles Dickens’ famous con man. Fagin snatched unsuspecting children off the streets of London to turn them into pickpockets. Feminists snatch children from lives of potential normalcy. Do they get a thrill out of this?

It is a widely known fact that children have an affinity for fathers. Life in a household run by a single mother is notoriously unstable. Just check the prisons. I have a hard time attributing Wolf’s ignorance to the blinding effect of ideology. This is brutal callousness. This is a power play by women – not against men, but against children.

How do you celebrate a national holiday for fathers with a guy who shows up a couple of times a week to play video games and sleep with your mother? He’s just a guy. Father’s Day isn’t for guys.

The whole weirdness of fathers is getting weirder. It’s like living in a town where half of the houses are gradually replaced with huts. The people in houses come to be seen as lucky, instead of absolutely normal. “Hey,” say the people in huts, “At least, we don’t live in tents.” “Hey,” say the people in houses. “Huts are adorable!”

In 2007, forty percent of American newborns were born to unmarried mothers. Forty percent. Compare that with 1940, when just under four percent of children were the offspring of unmarried mothers. The numbers reflect the vast wave of Hispanic immigration, but the differences, as everyone knows, are profound across ethnic lines.

The proportion of births among single women in their twenties and thirties has soared. Between 2002 and 2007, the birth rate increased by 13 percent for women aged 20-24 and 34 percent for women aged 30-34, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Roughly one in five births to women in their thirties was to unmarried mothers in 2007.

A father in the house is like a roof over your head. You can survive without it. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t have it. Okay, maybe it’s a luxury to have a roof. But, it’s a luxury that feels necessary.

Mark Richardson, at Oz Conservative, has interesting commentary on a feminist’s reaction to a Roumanian woman who auctioned her virginity on the Internet for $20,000. To a feminist, a woman’s chastity could not conceivably be more significant than a man’s.

The American Philosophical Society, Oxford University Press and Smith College seem far removed from the mass appeal of Cosmopolitan, the trashy women’s magazine that glorifies sex, career and the unremittingly plunging neckline.

But, in a world in which discriminating taste is non-discriminating, whatever is popular must be good. Oxford, you see, is the publisher of Jennifer Scanlon’s recently-released Bad Girls Go Everywhere, the biography of Cosmo’s former editor, the jet-setting Helen Gurley Brown, famous for saying “Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere.” The philosophical society provided research funding to Scanlon, a professor at Bowdoin College. She did her historical digging among the treasured Helen Gurley Brown Papers at Smith. 

These estimable archives must include at least some of Cosmo’s vast stores of semi-pornographic cover photos, as well as precious manuscripts of Sex and the Single Girl, Brown’s best-selling 1962 book that helped single women adjust to a life of promiscuity and raw ambition, paving the way for Carrie Bradshaw. In the book, Brown called the housewife and mother a “parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger … a bum.”
 
Brown grew up poor in Arkansas, a fact which apparently excuses naked ambition and greed. For a time, it seemed the young girl was destined to a life of what Scanlon calls “gender conformity.”  Instead, she discovered the stupendously fulfilling vistas of the workaholic office drudge and passed on her enthusiasm for being single and carefree.

Scanlon includes interesting insights into the period of Brown’s ascendancy, a time when women’s magazines and the mass media generally romanticized and approved of domesticity in women.  In 1956, Life magazine, in a special report on women, warned against careerism.  “The Single Career Woman … may find satisfaction in her job. But the chances are that she will suffer psychological  damage.  Should she marry and reproduce her husband and children will be profoundly unhappy.” A Gallup poll for Ladies Home Journal showed women overwhelmingly endorsed the ideal of withholding sex until marriage.

Brown claimed the single life was superior to married life in many ways. For one, it offered more varied and fulfilling opportunities for sex. There was no reason women shouldn’t indulge in free love, said Brown. She would later add that any society that upheld pre-marital chastity in women could only be “a totalitarian state.”

The single life also provided the sacred satisfaction of career,  “your happy pill, your means of finding out who you are and what you can do, your playpen, your family, your entrée to a good social life, men and money, the most reliable escape from loneliness, and your means of participating.” Millions of women now lead lives of childlessness or single parenthood. How many  have experienced the sexual highs or lucrative salaries Brown promised would be their compensation for domestic loneliness? As the feminist writer Vivien Gornick has lamented:

Who could ever have dreamed there would be so many of us floating around, those of us between thirty-five and fifty-five who live alone. Thirty years of politics in the street opened a door that became a floodgate, and we have poured through in our monumental numbers, in possession of the most educated discontent in history.

Scanlon credits Brown’s later book Sex and the Office with bringing about “more honest and open discussion of female sexuality.” The book advises working women on, among other things, how to accept offers from married men and initially included scenes of office rape and lesbian sex. The West German goverment sued Cosmo for publishing excerpts, calling them “youth-endangering literature.” Brown is similar to many feminist ideologues in her belief that female sexuality was first discovered in the 1960’s. For thousands of years, women had lived in a state of tragic ignorance that belies the biological results.

Scanlon describes Brown as a “second-wave feminist,” distinguishing her from the first- and third-wave varieties.  She does not mention that the nineteenth century’s so-called first-wave feminists wanted to protect women and children from the predations of the commercial world and would have been appalled by today’s glorification of female independence. They believed the commercializing of home would lead to neglect of children and a precipitous decline in domestic harmony. They were right. In maritime terminology, feminism since the 1960’s has been more tsunami than ordinary wave.

Brown at least recognized femininity as distinct from masculinity, as anyone who has marveled over the navels of the women on Cosmo’s covers well knows. In this, and in her wholesome insistence that women not feel sorry for themselves, she was opposed to mainstream feminists, who despised the normal feminine preoccupation with looks and loved a pity party. But, Brown, an ardent champion of abortion, comes off well only in contrast.

The Cosmo world lives on. If you despair for tomorrow, rest assured  doctoral candidates will be trolling through the Helen Gurley Brown Papers for years to come and perhaps vying for the Helen Gurley Brown Research Professorship at Northwestern University. The Cosmo look is also destined for a long self life. Just walk into any third-grade classroom and you will find Girlie Brown knock-offs dressed like miniature hookers.

For occasional moments of sexual splendiferous-ness and the tedium of lifelong ambition, women have traded the good life, not just for themselves, but for those they might love. Brown and many others have profited handsomely from their choice.

On my recent ballot for Common Pleas Court judges in Pennsylvania, eight out of the fourteen candidates were women. If the trend in law education continues, women could be a majority of lawyers in the coming years. About 47 percent of law school students are currently female, but women have been gaining steadily in undergraduate enrollment and graduation over men.

Of course, overall women lawyers do not accrue the same power and success as men. That’s for a funny reason. They just happen to be women, not neutered automatons. They just happen to bear and raise children and to enjoy caring for their husbands.

Still, feminist legal organizations remain at a fever pitch about the under-achievement of women lawyers. At an “unprecedented and historic summit” earlier this month in Texas, 150 top women legal leaders adopted the “Austin Manifesto,” calling for the elimination of “the barriers that have thwarted the advancement of women in the legal profession for the past several decades.”
 
They are demanding that 30 percent of equity law partners, tenured law professors and general counsel be women by 2015 and 10 percent of equity partners be minority women by 2020. They also intend to strong-arm the profession to “restructure the compensations systems to reward the full range of contributions by attorneys.” That’s code for over-compensating those who work less.

With more women in top positions, we are sure to get more of the sort of legal crusading typified by Sonia Sotomayor. Women like to bring the crusading spirit to almost everything they do. It’s downright scary in a judge.

Feminism is not a “women’s movement.” Women have been its most outspoken and visible proponents, but men have enthusiastically embraced its central ideas and worked to fulfill them.

Men may even be the greater feminists today. Feminism has meant a loss of status, of political power and of earning potential for men, but these are things they have willingly conceded for other benefits. Women have succeeded in ways they never could have imagined in convincing men that the central project of a woman’s life is easy and relatively unimportant.  One of the principle ideas of the feminist interpretation of history is that men are innately threatened by women in positions of power.  Recent history shows this is not true.

Many men complain about the arrogance and machismo of powerful women, or the stupidity of affirmative action, while at the same time accepting and furthering the culture of feminism. Some do so out of respect for women, or what they consider to be respect, and a desire to atone for the sins of their fathers. The past is entirely disgraceful, and the life of the traditional woman a veritable hell. The thousands of years in which women devoted themselves to home, children and community were one long period of barbarity.

Ready sex without marriage is hard to turn down. Obviously, many men approve of the sexual freedom feminism has granted. The ancient dream of a chaste bride lives on, but is now rarely fulfilled.  It’s still a private dream, but there is no widespread, publicly-expressed regret.  There is no visible worry or hand-wringing that working wives have many more opportunities for intimacy with men than traditional women at home.

Men today want their wives to earn money and studies show they often choose wives based on their earning power.  Internet discussions are filled with the testimonials of women whose husbands will not agree to their staying home and caring for their children full-time.

Many of these husbands act out of sincere concern for their families. They sometimes do face near-poverty without an extra income. In many cases, they face not poverty, but a simpler life. It has become difficult for many women to persuade men that their presence at home is worth even considerable loss of material comfort. This is the great immeasurable, the fact that cannot be easily quantified when surrounded by healthy and functioning children from homes run by working women.  Men do not possess the same maternal intuitions, making them all too often the more enthusiastic feminists today.

The candidacy of Sarah Palin showed the extent to which men embrace the idea that a woman’s work at home is a beautiful hobby and nothing more.  Many men, as well as women, consider the life of a woman at home too boring and stultifying for an educated woman. The repetitive, but economically remunerative chores of being a tax attorney or a marketing executive or even a vice president are rarely mentioned. Men need to be more honest about the nature of their support for feminism.  Are they truly concerned about the welfare of women when they trumpet equality?