Patience, Leonard Campbell Taylor

HERE is a free rendering of the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale by Chaucer. This is the third of five poems in Keith Jacka’s series “English Girls.” 

THE WIFE OF BATH

The Wife of Bath trod the Marriage Path,
Husbands five took her to wive.

Three dowered her with Gold and Land,
She had them eating out of her hand.

Those three were rich, but also old,
Not long before their blood grew cold.

Said she: “I can’t keep chaste for years,
I only wait till a man appears.

“No sooner a husband’s dead and gone,
Another one shall take me on.

“I tantalise a little bit,
I make them beg; I tell them ‘Sit.’

“What have I got? I’ve got what they need,
They’re all the same from Adam’s seed.

“A shapely breast, a rounded bum,
Will hold men’s eyes till Kingdom Come.

“But husband four put me in my place,
I fell down hard, fell flat on my face.

“He set it all up; me safely wed,
He looked about; who else could he bed?

“He had an eye; he played the field,
No trouble for him to make them yield.

“I seethed inside; I raged with spite,
To see another woman his delight.

“I had my methods to do him down,
No need to shout; no need to frown. Read More »

HERE ARE more interesting comments from readers regarding “Game,” which many readers say is a nihilistic, anti-Christian, hedonistic form of manipulation of women. There is no question that it often is. We are all agreed on that. However, one reader adds another impassioned defense of Game and advocates a Christian interpretation of it that rejects hedonism and recognizes the moral responsibility of both men and women in marriage. 

Mark Richardson writes:

Youngfogey wrote that “the core of Game is manly virtue.” I have to disagree with him on this.

What Game teaches is that women are sexually hypergamous, meaning that they will be attracted to men who demonstrate higher value (DHV). You demonstrate higher value as a man by adopting an attitude of “amused mastery” and by learning how to fend off the “beta tests” sent your way by women. You are supposed to assume that, as the one having higher value, it will be the woman who will want to be with you, rather than you employing romantic supplication to try to win her over.

There are other techniques as well (e.g. “contrast game”) and advice on how to present yourself. That’s the kind of discussion that tends to dominate at Game sites, rather than a focus on manly virtues.

It’s true that Game teaches that men will do better if they show masculine self-confidence, but I haven’t known it to venture much further than this.

Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Respecting “Game,” the very name “Game” suggests insincerity and deceit.  In that way it is an egregiously counter-productive term.  Insofar as those who use the term “Game” actually mean masculinity, decency, chivalry, constancy, moral integrity, and the classical virtues, maybe they should refer to those things explicitly by name.  When I hear the word “game” I think of Las Vegas, the casinos, the public women, the fatuous college boys who are attracted to that scene, and everything else summed up in the vulgar advertisements for Nevada’s heart of darkness. 

I have a measure of respect for a slang-term that some of my male students use: “Man up” (also, “grow a pair”).  If the advocates of “Game” spoke of “manning up” (or of “growing a pair”), then it might be possible to take them more seriously.  Words not only have meanings and consequences; they also have connotations, and the connotations have meanings and consequences. Read More »

YOUNGFOGEY writes:

It seems to me that a portion of your readers have fallen into some common misconceptions about Game.

First, as I wrote, at the core of Game is acting like a man. That means being aggressive, that means having a plan, that means pursuing what you desire, living with honor and, I think (as a reflection of my Christianity), protecting the weak and, if you can find a woman who deserves it, providing for a wife and children. In this way, the core of Game is manly virtue. The thing about virtues is that they are not natural. They must be practiced, put on from the outside in. So, of course there is a tension between authenticity and the practice of any virtue. To say that Game is manipulative simply because it involves the practice of virtues that are immediately present seems more than a little unfair. Read More »

Factory Girls, Frederic Shields

 ANNIE ROSE

Annie Rose Smith of Bethnal Green
Couldn’t care less what Life should mean;

Didn’t use her Mental Powers
Mulling over the passing hours;

Didn’t believe it was her Station
Spending her time in Cogitation.

Worked in the City with Needle and Thread,
Sewing fine seams for her Daily Bread.

Sewing fine seams for not much pay;
That’s how it was, in her Day.

Stitch for the Rich, make silken dresses;
Saturday Night she’d comb her Tresses,

Put on Glad Rags, Ribbons and all;
She was going to Wilton Hall.

Wilton Hall with Marie Lloyd,
Johnny the Clown, and Murgatroyd.

When an Act was finished, in between
She’d parade with a friend, to see and be seen,

Displaying all her pretty curls
For Right-Looking Boys with eyes for the Girls.

Nineteen Eighteen, World War One,
Soldiers on Leave, out for fun.

An Aussie Boy was he whom Fate
Had singled out to be her Mate.

Read More »

KATHLENE M. writes:

This article explores how kindergarten has become worse in recent years. This excerpt interested me for the reason I explain below:

How and why has kindergarten changed?

In a word: testing.

According to a 2009 report from the Washington, D.C.-based Alliance for Childhood, kindergartners are being taught to comply with state and national standards, which takes away from creative play-time known to be important to early childhood development. Read More »

MARIANNE writes:

Your blog continues to be fascinating and I am a big fan.  

But I’m writing to express a concern, and I hope you will not take it the wrong way, because I truly admire so much of what you have to say. My concern is this: I think it’s a mistake to encourage a man to use “Game” techniques on his wife, even as a last resort, if his wife is treating him with contempt. Read More »

A Young Widow, Edwin Killingworth Johnson

KEITH JACKA  is the author of “English Girls,” a series of five poems. Here is “Arundel,” one of these poems and the first to be published here. The others will appear shortly. Mr. Jacka, who lives in London, is a reader of this site. 

ARUNDEL

Arundel the kindly girl. She knew
How to be both Wife and Mother; true
To her vows. Not one to ruminate and fret,
Or turn aside to nurse some old regret.

Contented with her busy life, minding
All the tasks of Hearth and Home, binding
Up the hurts, wiping away the tears,
And shielding all her brood from nameless fears.

O Arundel, poor Arundel; she’s lost
Her man: John Penruddock, a Royalist,
Caught by Cromwell’s Boys. They took him alive,
Hanged him high in Sixteen Fifty Five.

Poor Arundel the loving Wife. She wrote
A letter to her dear, a final note,
A letter to the one who mattered most,
Against his final fading to a ghost.

A flood of tears assails her sober reason;
But yet she must not yield. It would be treason
To the little ones … must not be left
By Mother, though the Wife is full bereft.

O Arundel, poor Arundel; her man
Is gone; lost and gone forever. He can
No longer reach and hold her in his arms,
Make her smile, safe against all harms.

May the third, eleven o’clock at night;
No act of hers can bring him to her sight.
Next morn he’ll sleep alone in his last cold bed
Never again to be disquieted;
Never again, O never again to be disquieted.

                             — Keith Jacka

  Read More »

YOUNGFOGEY writes:

What struck me most about your reader’s note in this entry was the admission that this guy’s wife holds him in contempt. My guess is that she doesn’t despise him because he wants children and she doesn’t. She probably despises him because he has been neutered by the culture, offers her very little in the way of direction and leadership and refuses to even attempt to get the upper hand in marriage. The wife may treat him with contempt because he is simply too beta. Maybe she doesn’t want to have kids with a guy like that.

I know I am writing about a situation I have no first hand knowledge of, but the situation I have described is so common that it’s not unreasonable to assume this dynamic is at play. The first step for this guy has got to be to step up the alpha, then worry about kids.

I know you may be loathe to recommend it but this might be a guy who could benefit from reading some Roissy or Athol Kay. Read More »

A READER writes:

Dear Professor Wood, 

Thank you for your teaching. Your site shows the young generation of women and men, my nieces and nephews and the children of my friends, a path which they see rarely on campus or on the job. One young man whom you influenced was recently baptized (Eastern Orthodox) at age thirty. 

You have written much about divorce, especially when children are involved, but I have not seen the following situation addressed. What is a man to do who was married while young to a woman who became increasingly feminist and refused to give him children for years, and continues to refuse to do so? What should we, his friends and relatives, encourage him to do (having already encouraged her to change her heart)? I might add that she is angry, bitter, spiteful and treats him with contempt. At this point, he still wants to have children, but no longer trusts her as a wife or mother. 

Were they Catholic, an annulment might have been in order (or would it not?), but they are not.

 Sincerely Yours,

A grateful reader

Read More »

AMR writes:

I was looking through the headlines tonight and saw on MSN a video advertised as “You want to marry this kid when she grows up? Your heart might be broken until she gets one thing first.” I thought it was going to be a video on some goofy thing that a kid said, but after reading your site for awhile, I found it disturbing. Now five-year-old girls don’t care about men and want “a job.” It’s as though jobs are the be-all and end-all for women, not a man who might want to commit his life to her or a family or God. So sad. I’d bet she lives in a single-mother household.

After reading a book called Dressing with Dignity by Colleen Hammond in high school, I didn’t really like feminism. Your site helps put into words and expand on the idea that feminism hurts. Thank you for your eye-opening site. It is too bad it’s not mainstream. Read More »

TODAY’S journalists are so quick to provide every mind-numbingly boring detail about their chaotic personal lives and so upfront about how indifferent they are to their children. This writer, in his description of his recent “courtship” in The New York Times, talks about his two children from two different women as if they are luggage stowed in the backseat, which presumably is what they are. He focuses instead on the extremely banal details of  divorce and remarriage. He writes:

We took an apartment together as our relationship deepened. She grew close to my boy, became pregnant with our child, and we considered our options for the future. Discussions regarding marriage occurred, predicated, of course, on the completion of my divorce. (It was a source of much joking at Harper’s — another thing I’ll truly miss — that my second child came before my first divorce.) But neither of us wanted to rush things. It felt unseemly to dive immediately into a new marriage so soon after the formal dissolution of an earlier one. We’d make our wedding when we wanted, we agreed, not merely when permitted by the state or demanded by a sense of social propriety.

Read More »

NEW YORK Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is divorced, has been living with his girlfriend, the Food Network celebrity Sandra Lee. Under Catholic canon law, that makes him guilty of “public concubinage” and he is not entitled to take communion. While many thousands of Catholics appear to be unaware of canon law, Cuomo cannot plead ignorance. As reported in The New York Times, Edward N. Peters, a consultant to Vatican court, has publicly criticized the governor for continuing to receive communion and has called for denying him communion. This is a positive development.

By the way, Cuomo took his young daughters to the gay pride parade in Manhattan last fall. He is an exemplary Catholic all around. Read More »

I’VE OFTEN wondered why more people who have divorced their decent spouses don’t later publicly regret their selfishness and tell the whole world just how stupid and thoughtless they were. Probably because repentance hurts or because many people who initiate divorce are too far gone for self-reflection. Here, however, is just that: a woman who has devoted a blog to describing her divorce and its effects. She confirms my point. Divorce is spiritually destructive to those who initiate it. She writes:   

If you have forced a frivolous divorce on your spouse and children, you will never be able to shake off the stench of your selfish act. You will have to explain it to people you date and to their families and to their children and to the people your children marry and to your grandchildren when they start to ask questions about your life. Probably you will be ashamed to tell them the naked truth because it will reveal your selfish, frivolous character and there is nothing you can say to sugarcoat this huge personal defect without resorting to half truths. They won’t say anything to your face, but they will discuss it when you leave the room and they will question your suitability as a potential family member…as well they should.

Relatives and friends who witness divorce and say nothing, imposing no shame on the one who initiates divorce and pointing no fingers, are selfish too. It is not kind to withhold judgment.

Read More »

A Shepherd Resting in a Wooded Landscape, Sidney Richard Percy 1870

SEE more Victorian and Edwardian British paintings here.

IN 1893, on her death bed, Elizabeth Mardewel, an education reformer who was pioneer of the kindergarten in California, uttered these words: “I believe in the power of the kindergarten to reform the world.”

As recounted in Rousas John Rushdoony’s The Messianic Character of American Education, Mardewel also said, kindergarten would “regenerate the human race.”

In truth, the history of early childhood education in America is the history of waning maternal attachment and the declining family. Kindergarten did reform the human race. But not for the better.

BRUCE writes:

It suddenly dawned on me this morning that with the ongoing feminization of the police and military, a watershed has been crossed, a step that demonstrates the profound unreality of modern life. 

How could women ever have gotten themselves to the point where the idea of having large numbers of women working as police and soldiers and sailors and pilots (i.e. the ‘need’ for enhanced career opportunities for women) would take precedence over their own safety and the safety of their children? That is a really remarkable level of unreality – and one which I fear will elicit a terrible price if or when equal opportunity, mixed-sex police forces and combat units (with female/feminized commanders) come up against all-male gangs and armies. Read More »

THE BLOGGER Dennis Mangan joins the ranks of small-minded men’s rights ideologues attempting to burn me at the stake. Mangan writes about my comment that men have nothing to fear in marriage other than the loss of their honor. He comes to the conclusion that conservative women cannot possibly empathize with the plight of men.

Mr. Mangan conveniently ignores the fact that this particular statement by me occurred in the context of a discussion about comments at another website from men who said no women can be trusted and that “99 percent” of women are nothing more than materialistic whores when it comes to marriage.

In addition to failing to mention that participants in the particular discussion in question called women many nasty, unprintable names and celebrated soulless sexual conquest, Mr. Mangan also forgets to take note of the many, many things I have written against female-initiated divorce. If I am not mistaken, I have written more prolifically on the subject than Mr. Mangan. His omission of this small detail suggests some deeper motivation for wishing to excommunicate me from the ranks of anti-feminists. Could it have anything to do with my being a woman? Could it have anything to do with my frequent writings on the devastating loss of the male provider or my refusal to say that the divorce rate justifies anti-marriage campaigns by men or obliviousness and indifference to the soaring rate of illegitimacy?

The lists of my posts on the scourge of unilateral divorce by women is very long. Some (not all) can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Men’s rights ideologues like Mr. Mangan gleefully search for heretics and smack their lips when they think they have discovered that a conservative woman who denounces women for divorce and yet who also points to the responsibilities of men in marriage and society is really an impostor and secretly out to subjugate men. Why do men’s rights advocates so fervently wish to prove that no woman can be trusted? Why must they burn me on their pile of pathetic rhetorical twigs? So they can bask in their One True Faith and not contemplate the complexities. So they can indulge a sense of victimization and self-love.

I repeat. I have written about female-initiated divorce at least as forcefully as Mr. Mangan has. Not only have I written about it, but I have gone so far as to call for a return to presumptive paternal custody. I agree with Whiskey, the blogger quoted by Mr. Mangan, that women must criticize other women for damaging the lives of decent men. I have made this point many times. For all I know, Mr. Whiskey got this point from me. No one has more adamantly insisted on it than I have. Oh! But all that was just an act. I am really a feminist in disguise! Burn me at the stake! I don’t deserve to speak and stand up for marriage! You’re good to go, men.

Arguing with a men’s rights fanatic is like being interrogated by the KGB. The very hairs on your head may be used as evidence against you. At any moment you might be proven an imperialist dog. Even if you have lived the life of hard-working peasant, you can still be an enemy of the people.

                        Read More »