VICTORIA WELLMAN at the Daily Mail writes:

Cheerleaders, with their micro-minis, tight mid-riff baring sweaters and iconic pom-poms, have been impressing male fans and rousing excitement among eager sports spectators in America for decades.

But the half time show of a professional football game that these days centres around a group of scantily clad women writhing and waving their toned arm in the air to the beats of the latest number one hit, was once a strictly male-only arena.

In fact in the late Thirties, the job was deemed too ‘masculine’ for women whose appropriation of slang and loud shouting was seen as unfeminine.

The Mail’s photo of the 1924 cheerleading squad for Columbia University appears above.

The art of cheerleading has most certainly declined. When I was a football cheerleader (photo below), I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing risky athletic stunts. That much enthusiasm for football would have been unthinkable to me. Nor would I have sought the position if it involved quasi-nakedness or clothes purchased from a porn shop.

Mostly, being a cheerleader was a massive civic commitment. It wasn’t just the team that depended on you. An entire municipality might draw sustenance from your selfless support for a game you hadn’t the least bit of interest in.

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A March Calf

Right from the start he is dressed in his best – his blacks and his whites
Little Fauntleroy – quiffed and glossy,
A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,
Standing in dunged straw

Under cobwebby beams, near the mud wall,
Half of him legs,
Shining-eyed, requiring nothing more
But that mother’s milk come back often.

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HENRY E. McCULLOCH writes:

The Catholic World Report offers a pre-trip report on Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Mexico. Pope Benedict is en-route as I write, and should land in the State of Guanajuato this afternoon. He will spend the whole of his brief visit in that state – at Guanajuato, the capital, and the industrial city of Leon – before heading home via Cuba. (more…)

DANIEL S. writes:

The has-been pop singer Madonna has promised to “speak up” up for the homosexual movement in Russia during in upcoming performance in that country. The Russians have threatened to fine her for her possible homosexual advocacy. What I want to know is what business is it of Madonna’s to go into another country and tell the people of that country how to order their society? My advice to the Russians would be to ban the arrogant pop singer and the rest of the glitter imperialists from coming entirely.

In a similar vein, I must confess my sympathy for the Mohammedan cleric in Indonesia who encouraged his countrymen to return their tickets for a Lady Gaga concert and boycott the event altogether, rightly noting that the malevolent Lady Gaga promotes immorality.

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  A NOTE to readers of Lawrence Auster's View from the Right: VFR is currently offline because of a problem at the hosting service. Mr. Auster is moving to another hosting service. The site should be online again by tomorrow, perhaps even sometime tonight. [UPDATE: The site is now up and running.]

    GUIDO RENI'S Saint Joseph with the Infant Jesus (1635)

N.W. writes:

I thought you’d appreciate this story my mother told me. A woman asked her 11-year-old son if he knew why the priest wore rose colored vestments at Mass last Sunday morning. After a moment’s thoughtful pause, the boy replied “I don’t know for sure but I think it has something to do with breast cancer awareness, right?” (more…)

  PAINTED in 1474, Antonello Da Messina's Portrait of a Man is striking for its naturalness and luminous quality. The face is of an unknown man in a setting with a plain black background, no landscape or vista behind him. "The sitter's gaze meets our own, establishing a suggestive dialogue," says the Galleria Borghese's catalogue of its finest masterpieces. Da Messina's portrait is far more beautiful where it hangs in the famous Roman gallery than it appears here and yet the pleasure of establishing a dialogue with this interesting, subtle face remains. You can also see a better version of it here at Art Renewal.

WRITING at The Orthosphere, Kristor examines a rhetorical weapon highly effective against modern liberalism. He writes:

Utopians are almost always intoxicated by some grand, glorious and beautiful vision, so that they tend to make sweeping statements of perfect generality. This tendency makes them, and their ideas and proposals, quite vulnerable to a rhetorical technique known as retortion. Retortion applies a doctrine to itself, to see whether it survives the treatment. If it does, the doctrine is more likely sound. If not – well, then it is dead. A doctrine that does not survive retortion is autophagic: self-devouring. (more…)

IN A recent article at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, Thomas F. Bertonneau considers the relevance of the parable of Plato’s cave to higher education today. He writes:

The Parable of the Cave presents some truths that the contemporary academy, steeped in egalitarian ideas and committed to blandness and relativism in everything, mainly avoids facing. (more…)

  THANK  YOU to those who have contributed so far to my latest fundraising drive. I greatly appreciate your generosity. For those who would still like to contribute, they can make a donation to help keep this website in existence here.

LAST MONTH, we discussed the publication of two disturbing articles by British female academics. The ethicist Francesca Minerva argued in an academic journal that it is not immoral for parents to put to death newborns with cognitive problems. And, another ethicist, Anna Smajdor, wrote in a prestigious journal that because pregnancy is unfair to women and prevents them from attaining equality with men, the development of artificial wombs is necessary and good.

Now, as if all this wasn’t enough to prove the bankruptcy of British intellectual life, another shallow, unprincipled, and hopelessly juvenile feminist professor makes her mark.

Susannah Cornwall, a theology professor at Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute, argues in a lengthy paper for the Centre for Religion and Political Culture that there is no proof  that Jesus was a man. He may have been an “intersex” person, neither fully male nor female.

Cornwall, (I know she looks like a waitress at the local sports bar, but she is a certified theologian), writes:

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JONAS HIMMELSTRAND, a well-known Swedish family activist, has left his native country to escape heavy fines for homeschooling his two children, according to Caroline Moynihan of MercatorNet.com. Homeschooling is illegal in Sweden.

Himmelstrand is the founder of Mireja, a pro-family organization critical of Swedish family policies, which offer generous parental leaves for parents of babies and heavily subsidized day care. As discussed in this previous post, Himmelstrand contends socialized child care has caused an increase in  childhood psychological problems and an inability by Swedish parents to discipline their children. He has spoken widely in Europe and North America. At Mireja, Himmelstrand writes: (more…)

  SEE my comments on the Violence Against Women Act at U.S. News and World Report.  Readers are able to register their agreement or disagreement with me by clicking one of the boxes to the left of my entry.