The torch lighting, London, 1948

THE LONDON Olympics of 1948 cost £600,000, the equivalent of $30 million today, and the event turned a small profit. There were no corporate sponsors and the entire bill was paid by amateur athletic associations and ticket sales, in contrast to the debt-ridden 2012 Olympics, which will cost a total of $14.5 billion. Nor was there anything in 1948 like the frenzied, extravagant, disjointed spectacle that was last night’s opening ceremonies, a celebration of Britain’s emergence from the Industrial Revolution into the age of socialist medicine, multiculturalism, and bad music. I cannot imagine what the average Briton who knows his nation is foundering in debt and subsumed by mass immigration thought in his heart of hearts of this show, with its alternately sentimental and sinister imagery, but here is a comment from a reader of The Telegraph:

The world is not in need of knowing how ‘good’ we are at putting on a show, that is obvious. What the world needed to sense was our moral purpose and commitment, this was sadly intensely lacking. Oh yes, this was the UK as perceived by certain media and political elites, all of whom should be shocked now at their lack of political maturity. The Queen symbolically parachuting into the arena a composition of PR folly and stupidity. Read More »

I HAD a fascinating discussion yesterday with a woman who has been in the hair salon business for 40 years. This woman, whom I will call Adriana, knew nothing when we were first talking about this website.

Adriana was very excited because she had just invested in new laser technology for her salon. This technology is something of a miracle because with no apparent side effects other than reddening of the scalp, it can stimulate non-functioning hair follicles to grow hair again. She described in detail how it works and I grilled her with questions because, well, it was just interesting. My first thought was that this represents a revolution for bald men. The treatment is time-consuming and fairly expensive, but a man who is largely bald can achieve a full head of hair again. Read More »

FOUR out of five Time magazine special-issue Olympic covers feature women athletes, including hurdler Lolo Jones, above. Four out of five.  Magazines often emphasize Olympic women gymnasts and ice skaters, but here we see traditionally male domains such as soccer, which has a relatively small following on the women’s side, and javelin, which has an even smaller following. These photos offer the androgynous ideal of hyper-masculine, Spartan warriors.

Photos of male athletes don’t present the same perverse opportunities. Muscular male athletes don’t suggest femininity so they don’t assist the pervasive effort to get everyone, male and female, to undergo a psychological sex change operation.

These photos are a craven appeal not to women who will ever realistically be athletes but to normal women. Be hard-charging. Compete like a man. There is something supremely wasteful and non-commercial about feminine tenderness, which is why popular culture, soaked as it is in materialism, stands so adamantly against it.

A man becomes more masculine by engaging in intensely competitive sports at the highest level. A woman becomes less womanly, except in sports that allow an explicit expression of feminine aesthetics, such as ice skating and gymnastics. That’s a fact of life. It may very well be harmless for a minority of women to make these sacrifices, either temporarily or permanently, but the  glorification of aggression and competitiveness in women that now comes with Olympic sports extends beyond this small minority, and is not harmless.

This 1900 photo of Charlotte Cooper, the first woman champion in the Olympics, suggests that conformity to a masculine ideal is not new to women’s Olympic sports.

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THE blogger Vanishing American addresses the issues I raised in the post on women Olympic athletes. She writes:

One more thing that puzzles me about the adulation directed at the ‘Amazon athletes’: I thought that most right-wing males loathed feminism, and hated the masculinization of women, and their reputed aggressiveness and competitiveness with men. Yet they seem to prefer the well-muscled, androgynous look of some of the women athletes, a look that at one time would have been considered too unfeminine. The old standard of femininity and modesty is all but gone, while the ideal of beauty veers more toward the same muscular and lean standard which epitomizes male attractiveness. Read More »

AT The Orthosphere, Kristor argues that liberalism is a type of mental and spiritual disease. He writes:

Liberalism errs about the order of being, and so disagrees with the world. It’s poor policy to argue with the universe, no? Yet that is just what liberalism does, and not just in the economic realm. Liberalism is at war with life itself, at every level; for it carries its profound philosophical errors into concrete practice. It implements its misprisions. As I have elsewhere said, the liberal is engaged in a death struggle with his own body.

Perhaps the liberal needs something like the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous to wean himself gradually from unreality.

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THE New York Times included this photo today of 10-year-old Kameron Slade making a speech in support of same-sex marriage before the New York City Council. Kameron, who was encouraged to write the speech by his mother, is surrounded by adults (is that the right word?) almost brought to tears by his ideological precocity.

If a child says it, it must be true.

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KAREN I. writes:

The following photo of two American women Olympic soccer players is on the front page of the The Wall Street Journal today. The woman on the right is not in the newspaper photo, but she is in online versions. The two women embracing are Megan Rapinoe (top) and Alex Morgan.

Looking at this, I cannot imagine any normal little girl wanting to grow up to be an Olympic soccer player, can you?

Laura writes:

I think little girls see these images of women who are getting lots of public attention and unconsciously imitate them. By the way, there are more women than men in the Olympics this year, which is to be expected given that virtually every modern regime is pushing women to ape men and devoting unprecedented resources to women’s athletics.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates imagines an egalitarian, communistic world ruled by the select. The key to erasure of the distinctions between the sexes, he says, is to rid women of shame and induce them to practice athletics in nakedness with the men. “And the man who laughs at naked women practicing gymnastics for the sake of the best, ‘plucks from his wisdom an unripe fruit for ridicule’ and doesn’t know — as it seems — at what he laughs or what he does.” (Book V, 457; transl. Allan Bloom)

The world of the macho female athlete is the world of the super state.

Feminine modesty protects privacy and intimacy, everything that is separate from the collective hive. The strongest objection to the near-naked Amazon is not founded in prudishness, but in the desire to prevent a form of human slavery. Most people don’t get that and when you defend female modesty they get caught up in the idea that you don’t want women to have fun.

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AS a commenter points out in the previous entry, an acquaintance of astronaut Sally Ride, writing in The Washington Post, lauds the achievements of Ride and her sister, Karen, a Presbyterian minister who goes by the name of “Bear.” The Ride sisters, he writes, have changed the world. Their parents encouraged them to “study hard, to do their best and be anything they wanted to be.” The groundbreaking Ride sisters both became lesbians. Karen Ride is “married” to another female Presbyterian minister, and Sally, as was revealed by her homosexual activist sister this week, has been in a lesbian relationship for decades.

“The Ride family is an all-American family and at the same time an extraordinary one,” writes Michael Adee. Lesbianism has gone from shameful to a badge of honor.

What went wrong in this “all-American family?” Here’s a clue. The mother Joyce was known for her “groundbreaking Sunday School lessons about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movements to the little children there.” The Ride sisters grew up imbibing the Kool-Aid and their mother filled their glasses to the top.

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HANNA ROSIN, the journalist now widely known for her Atlantic article “The End of Men,” a quasi-manifesto of late-modern feminism, [see the great discussions of it here, here, and here] analyses a paradox of  modern culture that was brought to light in the Aurora shootings. As has been widely pointed out, three of the men in the movie theater that night shielded their girlfriends from danger and were themselves killed. Thus despite all the evidence that we live in a twilight of masculinity, a fact which Rosin considers good and worthy of celebration, masculinity does still exist, Rosin notes, in a primal form. And women still want men to protect them.

Rosin surveys the devastation caused by feminism and the sexual revolution, and finds it “touching” and “poignant” that men remain manly enough to give their lives for others.  Read More »

WHEELER McPHERSON writes:

I enjoyed the post about Capt. Katie Petronio of the Marine Corps. While reading it, I was aware of one pervasive thought: this candid captain has signed her own career death warrant.

The Marine Corps has committed many doctrinal heresies in recent years (the homosexualization of the Corps, the feminization of the Corps, the zero-defect mentality, the “We-must-have-more- minority-officers-no-matter-what-we-have-to-do-to-get-them” mindset, etc.). The one thing the Marine Corps will not tolerate is public dissent from the officer corps. Read More »

IS IT any surprise that Amelia Earhart, the child-woman who was lost at sea, was opposed to fidelity in marriage and refused to take her husband’s name? Wikipedia has an excellent article on Earhart, who was born 115 years ago today. I offer it as one more bit of evidence against the widely-held view that feminism is a product of the 1960s. It includes this:

For a while Earhart was engaged to Samuel Chapman, a chemical engineer from Boston, breaking off her engagement on November 23, 1928.[68] During the same period, Earhart and Putnam had spent a great deal of time together, leading to intimacy. Read More »

AMERICA at last has an articulate and impassioned military woman to speak out against the planned expansion of the role of women in combat. Capt. Katie Petronio, of the Marine Corps, challenges in The Marine Corps Gazette the recently-announced proposal to integrate women into the infantry, arguing that there is no military rationale for a plan that obviously and necessarily entails a lowering of standards. Women, she states, are unequal to the demands of combat.

Petronio was a star athlete who excelled at Marine female fitness tests, but at the end of a seven-month deployment in Iraq, in which she was heavily involved in combat operations, she had lost 17 pounds and had been rendered permanently infertile due to an ovarian disease directly related to the strain. This is bleakly fitting given that the mission to integrate women into combat is effectively a war against procreation. “I am physically not the woman I once was,” she writes.

Petronio goes on: Read More »

WHEN Sally Ride was set to fly on the space shuttle Challenger in 1983 and thus become the first [American] woman in space, Gloria Steinem said, “Millions of little girls are going to sit by their television sets and see they can be astronauts, heroes, explorers and scientists.”

This was of course a ridiculous statement. How many little girls had ever wanted to be astronauts? About as many who longed to be soldiers or fighter pilots. In other words, very few. Steinem’s real point, in keeping with her intense dislike of women, was that women should want to be astronauts and there was something wrong with them if they didn’t.

Ride, who had a warm, radiant smile and is said to have served ably in her two missions in space, died Monday at the age of 61. For all the fanfare that once surrounded it, Ride’s story will likely fade into history and her life ultimately inspire very few girls. This will be so not only because women do not excel at space science or the physical demands of space travel as men do but also because, as Ride’s obituary proved, she did not lead a full life. Ride was in a lesbian relationship with a childhood friend for 27 years.

To her credit, Ride did not make her lesbianism public and was private about her personal life in general. Her sister and the woman with whom she had a relationship, Tam O’Shaughnessy, have released the information to the world and now Ride has the double distinction of being both the first woman and the first lesbian in space. O’Shaughnessy was Ride’s friend since the age of 12. Ride was briefly married to another astronaut, but they were divorced. So while Ride accomplished much in her career, thanks in part to the spirit of affirmative action, she seems to have never fully emerged from childhood.

The only good reason for a normal woman to go through the grueling rigors of becoming an astronaut is that NASA is a great place to meet men.  Ride’s life, however, does not even offer that slim hope to little girls, that wonderful compensation for dreary days in a control cabin. Ride flew into space but never experienced other thrills that are as great or far greater. She never gave a man such necessary and life-sustaining love that he was able to do great things, such as fly into space. She never looked up at the stars with her own children and encouraged their wonder. She did not pass on her love of space to a son or daughter or grandchild.

Though she performed capably in her public position as a Role Model of the Century, Sally Ride’s example will likely be the exact opposite of what NASA and Gloria Steinem predicted. She will serve as a reminder of at least some of the very good reasons why women don’t want to be astronauts. The vast majority of women would sooner love an astronaut than be one. And given that most men are destined to perform inglorious jobs for most of their lives, women will come to see that the dream of conquering space rightly belongs to men.

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ACCORDING to The Bellarmine Report, the value of J.C. Penney’s stock has dropped by more than 50 percent since the chain announced its support of homosexual marriage in February when it hired the lesbian Ellen DeGeneres as its spokeswoman. So if you were a J.C. Penney’s shopper, continue to boycott its stores.

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

In Friday’s New York Times are three letters responding to the NYT’s article “Boy Scouts to Continue Excluding Gay People” of July 18, 2012.

The first two are liberal moanings about how horrible that is and how BSA “represents the worst in human values.” After these predictable screeds, however, comes an unlooked-for ray of light. Amazingly, the Times gives the last word to Kathy Heggemeier of Portsmouth, Virginia, whose mordant comment is a bitter-sweet observation on the twisted state of America today. Read More »

PAUL writes:

Here is a video of a great 60’s song You Were on My Mind. This was not a little kid’s song that one might see on the Disney Channel today, although I was only around 12 and still adored it. This was directed towards teens and adults. It is a blend of rock and folk rhythms. And the dancing was vibrant but not crude or grandiose. It was uplifting and carried no counterculture message. You had to feel like dancing. Read More »

ALAN writes:

Your dissection of the New York Times editorial on the Boy Scouts was excellent. “Retrograde” is, of course, a term of derision favored by Modernists because it suggests that they are superior to those who have gone before them. It is typical Modernist arrogance. The truth is that Americans in years past were wiser, more competent, and better able by far to identify and resist evil than Modernists.

The Boy Scouts annoy Modernists because they insist on keeping distinctions, in this case the distinctions between good and evil and between private and public. To obliterate the public/private distinction is the reason for the endless propaganda we see and hear about “openness” and “erasing borders” and “breaking boundaries.” The goal is to weaken the very idea of private property – one of the principal goals of the Communist Manifesto being to outlaw private property. This is why the children’s department in any modern library includes books like Against Borders. The goal is to get them and brainwash them when they’re young.

Mr. Romney, however, is no disappointment to me because I never expected anything from him. Sorry to sound cynical, but I believe all potential presidential candidates are bought and paid for. Traditionalists ought not to expect any substantive changes on a national scale. They should concentrate on local issues and keep as much local power as they can. Governor George Wallace had it right when he said many years ago that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two major political parties.

We live in a profoundly evil age. But the first tactic of resistance is to recognize and oppose that evil, and this The Thinking Housewife continues to do most admirably.

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SJF writes:

I’m sorry to say that I did not remember that today was the anniversary of the moon landing until I saw a news item about it. When I showed it to a friend, he responded, only partly in jest, “Big deal. Some old white dude. Besides, the message he left is sexist.” I then outed myself, and said, “I’m proud he’s white, and I’m proud he’s an American.” Since I sometimes buy this guy beers after work, he just rolled his eyes and walked away. But seriously, who as an American could not be proud? The fact that we do not celebrate this day as a nation is wrong. Read More »