SKM, who is a man, writes:

I enjoyed your discussion last year on Paul Elam and his call to exonerate all rapists. It’s encouraging that there are a few websites critical of feminism that aren’t dominated by “MRAs” and “masculinists.” I especially enjoyed the comments of Jesse Powell. It’s also encouraging to know that I’m not the only who both detests, and understands, the “men’s movement.” 

With some exceptions, MRAs are left-liberals, cultural determinists, and sexual egalitarians. These ideologues espouse the same dogmas and myths as orthodox feminism, with one major exception, and support 80-90 percent of the feminist agendum: gender-neutral laws, the ERA, androgynous pedagogy, the feminized military, women in combat and female conscription, and the sexual integration of all jobs and areas of the workforce, including police forces, jails, prisons, coal mines, factories, construction, etc. 

They believe that men and women and boys and girls are exactly the same apart from rudimentary physical differences; that virtually all dispartities in sexual “roles” and behavior are culturally-derived and/or imposed. They’re motivated and defined by a compulsion to perfect interchangeable sexes. They envision a utopian society in which men and women and boys and girls are fully equal in virtually all areas and aspects of life and in which all manifestations of “sexism” and “gender stereotyping” are eliminated.***  Read More »

AMY writes:

I have been enjoying your blog for nearly two years now and have been enjoying a look down “blog memory lane” while perusing your archives. The wisdom contained in your archives is immense and your perspective both refreshing and fascinating. Several afternoons a week I sit at my computer with a cup of tea and a treat to enjoy while soaking in the latest commentary on The Thinking Housewife. Read More »

KATE writes:

I wanted to make a comment that goes along with the caregiver’s comment in the previous entry, and that speaks to the differences between children who are in day “care” and those who are raised early in the home. It is absurd to me that we are still having this debate. I guess we just don’t (or won’t) believe the truth, no matter the evidence that abounds. I have been working in the “early educaton field” for almost 30 years now, and have been in every scenario. I’ve worked in “childcare/preschool;” private sector, Christian/Church, public schools, and now, Head Start. I teach in a classroom where I rarely see any parents. My children are bused (yes, three- and four-year-olds) to and from school every day, with the exception of two or three who are brought to school by a family member. The separation anxiety I now see is children totally disconnecting from the parent image. They are so disregarded at home, they have not bonded truly with anyone, except for maybe an older sibling. Read More »

LOUISE writes:

I just read this morning that Hollywood is planning an adaptation of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Bradley Cooper, the actor slated to play Satan, had this to say:

I’m very excited. I studied that poem at Georgetown, and I fell in love with that character. Satan is very compelling. You understand his argument. Hopefully we’ll be able to maintain the integrity of that.

I’m assuming he means maintaining the integrity of Milton’s poem and not that they’ll be arguing for Satan’s cause. Though with Hollywood, who knows?

A FEMALE READER writes:

I am no early education scholar, and I do not hold an advanced degree in child psychology, but I have taken care of children (my own and those of other people) for twenty years. Somehow, I feel at least moderately qualified to add to your recent posts about maternal employment and its effects on children.  Read More »

ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK was not a man driven by belief, as is everywhere asserted. He was a man driven by fantasy and adolescent rage. M. Mason at VFR writes:

Strip away the quasi-religious cant and this guy is basically a clever variant of an anarcho-terrorist. He tarted himself up with a lot of medieval Catholic symbolism and juiced himself with anabolic steroids to role play the self-appointed secret identity of an avenging, modern-day “Knight Templar,” acting out in real life his own twisted version of a “World of Warcraft” video game.

JUSTIN writes:

Speaking of Breivik’s parents, did you read about his mother, Wenche Behring? Not much in the establishment media about her, that is for sure, perhaps here is why. According to him, she has been debilitated by a sexually-transmitted disease. At the age of 48, she married a man who frequents hookers in Thailand, and she contracted herpes. Read More »

THE INTERVIEWS widely circulated today with Jens Breivik, the father of Anders Behring Breivik, offer a chilling portrait of a selfish, disengaged parent who viewed his son as nothing more than a passing acquaintance. He divorced his son’s mother when the boy was one and had little to do with him afterward, though he did initially attempt to gain custody of the boy. Regardless of how possessive the mother was of Anders, the father was clearly indifferent to his son as he became an adolescent and adult. In interviews, he expressed concern for his own safety and reputation.

Katherine Birbalsingh of The Telegraph makes similar points about the father’s attempt this week to disavow his son. She writes:

What I want to know is why his father isn’t feeling any sense of remorse for having failed his son. Read More »

ALAN writes:

In 1965, American teenagers listened to the “music” of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and other such groups. But grown-ups did not enjoy it and would not have dreamed of playing such “music” in retail stores or supermarkets.

Fifty years later: “Music” that grown-ups in 1965 regarded as raucous or juvenile is now routinely foisted on shoppers in such places. This is just one example of the infantilization of American culture – or, as Diana West describes it ever so accurately, the death of the grown-up. Read More »

Mayor Bloomberg officiates at the "wedding" of two aides on Sunday

HERE are Mayor Bloomberg’s remarks at the “wedding” of two aides on Sunday. Looking at this scene, one wonders how male friendship, let alone real marriage, can flourish in the modern world. How can men fight side by side and love each other on the battlefield of life when there is the possibility that one might stop and ask the other to marry?

The two little girls in their party dresses are a necessary addition to the scene. Without them, with just three men in suits standing at a podium, one would see even more clearly how absurd and unappealing, how dryly procedural, a wedding without a woman is. Read More »

A. WRITES:

I wish I had taken a picture the other day of a crow sitting on a stop sign in my rural neighborhood with something really huge in its mouth. Yup. Pizza, from the neighborhood pizza parlor. 

I promise a picture if I see it again.

A British study reportedly showing that babies and young children under five are better off psychologically if their mothers are employed received widespread attention last week in the British press. Meanwhile an American report reviewing 30 years of research on the effects of day care came up with very different conclusions and was virtually ignored when it was released by the Heritage Foundation last month.

In her report, “The Effects of Day Care on the Social-Emotional Development of Children,” Jenet Jacob Erickson focused on the findings of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Study of Early Child Care Research Network from the early 1990s. This study of more than 1,300 children from 10 American communities evaluated both the home and child-care contexts from infancy through age 15 years and included videotaped interactions between children and mothers, as well as interviews with mothers, teachers and adolescents. Children were also observed in child-care settings.

Here are the key findings of Erikson’s review of the National Institute study and other research conducted during the past 30 years:

•Children who spend more hours per week in non-maternal child care are more likely to exhibit problematic social–behavioral adjustment, including less social competence and cooperation and more problem behaviors, negative moods, aggression, and conflict. In teachers’ reports of kindergartners’ social adjustment, the effect of hours spent in non-maternal care prior to kindergarten is comparable to the effect of poverty in predicting behavioral problems. Read More »

NO ONE who committs mass murder of innocents could reasonably be called a Christian. Yet the press has widely reported that Anders Breivik is Christian or a Christian “fundamentalist.”

Breivik himself denied it in his manifesto. Lawrence Auster writes, “Breivik makes it clear that he is what is known as a ‘cultural Christian.’ This is a very common stance today among conservative-leaning Europeans. Cultural Christians value and want to preserve certain aspects of Europe’s historic Christian culture, even as they plainly admit that that they are NOT believers in God, NOT believers in Christ, and NOT Christians. Which means that it is a gargantuan lie for the media to describe Breivik as a Christian, let alone as a fundamentalist Christian.”

Read More »

A NEW STUDY by British social researchers contends maternal employment in early childhood is psychologically beneficial for children. The study, which received prominent attention in the British press last week, is a dream come true for the liberal press and policy analysts, supposedly disproving the common sense belief – a belief held for all of human history – that maternal care of very young children is primary and important. The head researcher said children of mothers who do not work were more likely to suffer from social problems and “depression.”

According to The Guardian,

Katherine Rake, chief executive of the Family and Parenting Institute charity, welcomed the research paper. “This study shows what mothers know intuitively. If you are able to get the balance right, your child and your career can both flourish.”

But this is not what mothers know intuitively. They know they cannot be in two places at the same time. As for those not able “to get the balance right?” Those who place toddlers and infants of necessity in the care of poorly-paid daycare workers? Tough luck. 

The fanfare surrounding the study was noticeably absent of critical thought. In truth, this new study cannot be taken seriously and may actually demonstrate the opposite of what it is believed to prove.

Researchers at University College London, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, tracked 19,000 white children born in 2000 and 2001 who were being followed as part of a larger study. The team looked at the children up until age five, making their sweeping claims even though psychologists and other observers of the human condition widely believe that the psychological effects of early childhood care do not always manifest themselves right away. Read More »

A READER writes:

I’m surprised that you have not commented on the July 14th airing of the show The Talk. The show features an all female panel, like The View, and after discussing the story of the Catherine Kieu, the woman who sexually mutilated her husband, they sit around and joke about it and say how fabulous and hysterical it is. Read More »

THE PHOTOGRAPHS now in wide circulation of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik show a man of immense grandiosity. Posing in uniforms or with weapons, looking straight at the camera and smiling with self-satisfaction, Breivik displays heroic pretensions that are in stark contrast to his actual life. According to this profile, Breivik spent much of his time playing video games, a world of risk-free, contained aggression. He does not appear to have done anything more heroic on the political scene than commenting at blogs. He did not run for office or even set up his own website. His crimes were against the defenseless: unarmed young people in bathing suits and office workers sitting at their desks.

Assuming he did act alone, here was a man with an overblown fantasy life revolving around the virtual world of video games and Internet websites. He now has the renown that matches the glorious self-image he cultivated there. That is one of the most disturbing aspects of his horrific crimes. He wanted to be famous and he is. Read More »

THE FATHER of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behrig Breivik divorced the mother of Breivik when the boy was one and has been estranged from him for 16 years. Breivik’s crimes, while extraordinary in every way, show the rage characteristic of a significant minority of men raised without fathers.  Anders, who was the center of a custody battle between his parents, became a discipline problem in his teen years.

According to The Telegraph, the father, Jens Breivik, is a retired Norwegian diplomat and has been married three times. Anders Breivik’s mother was his second wife. Presumably Jens Breivik did not try to intervene in his problem son’s life after he was 16 years old.