Robinson Crusoe, N.C. Wyeth

“As I imagin’d, so it was, there appear’d before me a little opening of the Land, and I found a strong Current of the Tide set into it, so I guided my Raft as well as I could to keep in the Middle of the Stream: But here I had like to have suffer’d a second Shipwreck, which, if I had, I think verily would have broke my Heart, for knowing nothing of the Coast, my Raft run a-ground at one End of it upon a Shoal, and not being a-ground at the other End, it wanted but a little that all my Cargo had slip’d off towards that End that was a-float, and so fall’n into the Water: Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes:

A survey was conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1938 asking Americans if they supported married women working when their husbands were capable of supporting them. A resounding 78 percent said, “No.”

This shows that even after 50 years of married women increasingly joining the workforce and after heavy industrialization of America, public sentiment was still strongly opposed to married women working if they weren’t forced to by economic necessity. The number one reason respondents gave for their negative answers was: women would take jobs away from men and families would suffer as a result.

An article about the survey appeared in The New York Times on December 25, 1938. Here is an excerpt from the piece: Read More »

THERE IS a lengthy highbrow discussion at the men’s website, The Spearhead, in response to the post here in which I said that a wife can never deprive a man of his honor and character. I have not read the whole Spearhead entry, but I have glanced at it. To give you an idea of the tenor of the discussion, or at least of some of the participants, one reader writes of me:

She is worthless, untouchable filth. She should have been aborted with a chainsaw.

Hawaiian Libertarian, who moderates the discussion and who has not deleted threatening comments such as this, falsely states that I do not accept comments here. I accept the comments of anyone who writes to me, provided they are civil and to the point, as is clearly stated on my home page at the bottom of every entry. He also falsely states that I am a reader of The Spearhead. I am not, though readers do occasionally send me links from there. Read More »

KAREN I. writes:

I am sending a picture of Cassie Herkelman, the girl who won the Iowa state wrestling match by forfeit. From what I read, another girl wrestled a boy in the same tournament and lost the first match after being pinned in 52 seconds. I also read that Joel Northrup, who refused on principle to wrestle a girl, can still participate in other matches in the tournament despite forfeiting the match with Herkelman. 

Northrup can hold his head high, knowing he did the right thing. I wonder if Herkelman is equally proud of her “achievement.”

Read More »

THOUGH HE was required to fill out a lengthy questionnaire about his sexual history, his health, and his personal habits, and to read warnings against donating blood if he was a homosexual or drug user, my husband was asked the following question in an oral interview when he went to give blood to the American Red Cross today:

Are you a biological male? Read More »

HERE IS a news story that will make your day. This really happened in America.

An Iowa high school wrestling champ bowed out of a state competition today because he refused to wrestle with a girl. Joel Northrup, who is homeschooled, forfeited the match with Cassie Herkelman. He stated:

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Cassy and Megan (Black, the tournament’s other female entrant) and their accomplishments. However, wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times. As a matter of conscience and my faith, I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner. It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most of the high school sports in Iowa.

Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes in response to this entry on the future of the bookstore:

Books are not indestructible, but short of tossing them into a furnace or dropping them into an industrial shredder they are difficult to annihilate. Not so the electronic file. A single electromagnetic burst over the North American continent could erase every unprotected electronic file on every personal computer in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It need not be from an enemy attack either – the sun can generate powerful magnetic bursts. A civilization that considers the book obsolete and plans to base its literacy on text-files stored on Kindle-type devices is tempting the nemesis of a blue screen and nothing to read and no possibility of reconstituting the tradition.  Read More »

SEE Lawrence Auster’s commentary on the Lara Logan story. He writes:

[L]iberals want it both ways. They present Logan to the world as superwoman, but when she was assaulted they suddenly treated her as a helpless vulnerable female whose tribulations must be hidden from the world.

HERE is an excellent piece by Albert Mohler reflecting on the future of bookstores. With the news that the Borders chain has filed for bankruptcy, the bookstore appears more threatened than ever as a cultural institution. Mohler explains why the bookstore can never be replaced by online retailers.

He writes:

The general wisdom seems to be that the bookstore will go the way of the record store and the video rental outlet. The bookstore may have been an important cultural asset in years past, many argue, but it has little place in a world of e-readers, online sales, and mega retailers like WalMart that deep-discount bestsellers. Read More »

JOE LONG writes:

A nation with a sense of honor would be raging to avenge Lara Logan. None of the supposed mitigating factors would matter – no, not if she did a striptease for the crowd while chanting “I love Mubarak.” 

In 1898, reports that Spanish authorities subjected women to procedures perhaps comparable to a standard TSA “patdown” today, enraged the American public and contributed considerably to our willingness to go to war with Spain – over someone ELSE’s women, no less. Rumors of the rape of Belgian women during Germany’s WWI attacks on that nation had a similar effect. Logan, on the other hand, was not only assaulted, but assaulted AS a representative of our civilization: the visceral response of a properly socialized man ought to be unbridled wrath. Read More »

PATRICK writes:

Here is a moving testimony at The Spearhead from a man whose wife watched the movie Eat, Pray, Love. She was so affected by it she told him she no longer loved him. Eat, Pray, Love  is a toxic celebration of feelings (only destructive feelings, because non-destructive feelings e.g. gratitude, are boring); a denigration of duty, and therefore a denigration of true love. The comment is a good example of a philosophy (hedonism with a dash of nihilism) applied directly and in an unadulterated form.

However, the comments from men that follow the post are disturbing.  The appropriate reaction to evil is not to become evil oneself, but to remain moral.  Simply identify and explain the evil – and pursue the good.  To wallow in resentment and bitterness leads nowhere. 

The “anti-marriage” ideology is deeply misguided. Read More »

OUTSIDE, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in two or threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on a platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk; was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.

“Strange,” mused the Director, as he turned away, “Strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games that do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.”

                                               —  Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

THE ENTRY of more women into the military leads to the never-ending project of proving that the military can fairly accomodate women and prevent sexual offenses. A federal lawsuit was filed yesterday by 15 military women and two men charging that the Department of Defense does not do enough to prevent sexual assault by servicemen.

A Pentagon spokesman stated, “That means providing more money, personnel, training and expertise, including reaching out to other large institutions, such as universities, to learn best practices. This is now a command priority, but we clearly still have more work to do in order to ensure all of our service members are safe from abuse.”

The military, which can never ensure all its service members are safe from abuse, will model itself after universities in an effort to try.

Read More »

CAROLINE writes:

I’m sure you’ve heard about the Lara Logan attack and rape in Egypt. Add that to your file of women placing themselves or being placed in fantasy situations: “Gee, here I am a sexy blonde reporter babe covering a bunch of male Muslim protestors in a Muslim country. What could possibly go wrong?” 

Reality must be optional for attractive liberals; after all, we’re all the same, aren’t we? We all want the same things—freedom, as G.W. Bush would have it. And underneath, everyone is really a *good* person, donchaknow? Sharia law, what’s that? According to it, I’m an infidel and inferior . . . but, but, I’m Lara Logan. I’m beautiful and liberated; I mean well, we libs love everybody. Read More »

From "Prison Women"

[NOTE: This post contains sexually explicit material and is not appropriate for children or teenagers.]

JESSE POWELL writes:

The National Geographic Channel recently featured two shows, Prison Women, that examine the subect of female prison guards in male prisons. The settings of the programs, which will be repeated February 23, were the Miami-Dade County Jail in Florida and Dallas County Jail in Texas. 

Women prison guards in male prisons is not a fringe phenomenon. In Miami-Dade County, according to Prison Women, 52 percent of the prison guards were female.  Almost half the guards were female in Dallas County.

Prison culture has been dramatically altered by the presence of women guards, who bring new possibilities for sexual encounters into prison life. Though this was not a point made by the producers of the series, women guards also deprive men who have generally grown up in single mother homes of the male authority figures they need. Read More »

DAVID C. writes:

Are we entering the era in which men will finally begin to stand up for themselves? This is the thought I have after reading a recent article by Anthony Buono, the founder of the Ave Maria online dating website. It is called, “Are Women Unappreciative?” In the piece, Buono writes:

Many women lack the appropriate tools a woman should have to draw out the love and devotion a man is capable of when he is with a woman who treats them right.

I have heard thousands of women complain about men over the years. Many of the things they complain about are legitimate things, but much of it is not. Women have a tendency to exaggerate and over dramatize what is wrong with men. What bothers me is the bitterness and negative attitude that is expressed along with their complaints. Read More »

MY mother used to celebrate Valentine’s Day by making heart-shaped cupcakes of vanilla cake with pink boiled icing. They were beautiful and ethereal, vanilla-scented clouds of sugar, butter, and flour. They were pillows of cake, the sort of thing angels would eat if they had tea parties and buffets.

Fortunately, these extremely evanescent manifestations of my mother’s love were larger than normal cupcakes. This was good because my six siblings and I seemed to suffer from infantile metabolic disorders. Like wolves, we prowled the Siberian steppes of our existence looking for any uneaten remnant of the things we considered edible. Without any tutoring from the others or any sharing of trade secrets, we each perfected the art of removing crumbs from the exterior of a cooling cake without leaving a trace. We employed stealth and cunning in our daily search for adequate nourishment. 

The good thing about cupcakes is that, even though there technically can never be enough of them, they usually do not create questions of fairness. They are all the same size. A single cake cut into pieces, on the other hand, can be outrageously unjust, with some pieces visibly larger and more filling than others. Cupcakes are conducive to world peace. 

From a child’s perspective, fairness is important. To a child, it is sometimes inconceivable that a mother or father can love each of his children the same, that each piece of cake can be equal. A child ponders this puzzle. It is one of the first philosophical issues he wrestles with, wondering how a parent can love him like no other and also love his brother or sister like no other. The child is usually wrong in doubting the capacity of his parents to love all their children equally and exclusively, but he is right in his dawning knowledge of a painful truth. Human love is finite.  Read More »