KATHLENE M. writes:

As I read the comments on “Christianity Lite” and “Asher’s Dilemma,” I thought I’d pass on something I stumbled upon at the “Quo Vadis” website called “Nine Days That Changed the World — Come Holy Spirit and Restore America.”  It’s about how when Christians came together in prayer in Poland during Pope John Paul’s visit, their prayers and faith helped usher in an end to Communism.  

HERE is the main part of a letter to the editor of The New York Times this week regarding a piece by Ross Douthat in which he argued that heterosexual marriage is a worthy ideal:

Ideals may be hard to argue with, but they have real-world consequences, and even a beautiful vision of marriage as an abstract ideal becomes ugly when it excludes actual human beings and damages their well-being. Ideas don’t ache, institutions don’t suffer and symbols don’t sob, but real people do.

By Mr. Douthat’s logic, the love, commitment and sacrifice that my partner and I share and practice (13 years so far) count for nothing compared with a particular ideal about what should be true. For that matter, our rights don’t count either. That’s not an ideal that we, or many people in this country, can get behind.

Amanda Udis-Kessler
Denver

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CLARK COLEMAN writes:

I’d like to make a couple of church-centered comments concerning all the discussion of “Asher’s dilemma.” First, I think that James Davison Hunter’s book,  To Change the World, about the failure of the church counterculture gets it backwards. The story is not that 40 percent of the population is conservative evangelical Christians, who outnumber the 10 percent of the population who are the institutional elite, but whose numbers do not equate to influence because the 40 percent  do not occupy the elite positions that the 10 percent do. The story of the failure of the “transform-the-culture” movement is that you cannot transform the other 60 percent if you are not transformed yourself. Read More »

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:

America’s elite class, having nothing to believe in except for the sterile and empty abstractions of freedom and equality, no longer inhabit a coherent, concrete culture, and so were unable to conceive of or or agree upon a sensible project to replace the [World Trade Center]. Read More »

BRANDON writes:

I AM a 22-year-old male college student in Denver who reads your site daily. I have great appreciation for your message. I’m writing for two reasons. First, I have an interesting reflection to share with you and second, I shall make a request for some wisdom if you are willing to offer it. Read More »

ANGELO M. CODEVILLA writes in The American Spectator:

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. Read More »

PLEASE CONSIDER making a donation to this site to ensure its continued existence. Do what you can to protect wholesome values and unsettling truths in a mad and unbelieving world. Thank you to those who have given.

MATAMOROS, known at this site for his comments on sex and the liberated woman, has started his own website, The Jacksonian Club, with the intention of bringing white men together for political activism. Read More »

29 Avenue Rapp

Sebastien writes:

If the ideal of womanhood is to be wife, mother and homemaker, feminism will strip away all these gifts from her and all that will remain is her sexual appeal.  So while feminists claim that women have been sexual objects and need to be free, the truth is that women become sexual objects because of feminist ideology. If they are not going to becomes wives and homemakers, other than sex, there is little else they can do as women. Read More »

                         Charles Eric Maine’s Novel of Lesbian Dystopia

By Thomas F. Bertonneau

[Note: Another article by Bertonneau on World Without Men appeared this week in The Brussels Journal. The essay below was written for readers of The Thinking Housewife.]

BY WAY OF INTRODUCING both my topic and myself I might say that I am a lifelong aficionado of science fiction who is familiar with the genre in depth.  When I teach my course on science fiction at SUNY Oswego, I concentrate of classics texts of high literary merit – those by Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, and Ray Bradbury.  When I pursue my hobby I am less selective.  When I discover an unknown paperback title in a second hand bookshop, I frankly judge the item by its cover and where content is concerned I hope for the best.  Most of the mouldering paperbacks fall short of memorability.  Occasionally, however, I stumble across a jewel among the rubble, a short story or novel more or less forgotten that, for one reason or another, merits contemporary re-visitation.  One such, which I encountered again recently after a lapse of decades, is Charles Eric Maine’s World Without Men (1958)**, a novel about the long-term implications of birth control, abortion, and the so-called sexual revolution that treats these matters in a bold and prescient way.

It is safe to say that World Without Men could not be published today.  Editors, evaluating it in manuscript, would deem it absolutely politically incorrect; they would act to prevent Maine from perpetrating the lese majesté inherent in a story that unstintingly defends the idea of a natural order of human existence and which, describing homosexuality without embarrassment as “perversion,” argues that feminism (inherently homosexual in Maine’s view) is a totalitarian ideology.  Better to suppress such a thing.

In World Without Men,Maine tells a story in five quasi-independent but serially related episodes, unfolding a chronology that begins late in his own Twentieth Century and culminates fivethousand years from now in the year 7000 AD.  The first and fifth stories take place in 7000 AD; the setting and a recurrent point-of-view character unify them.  The second, third, and fourth stories fill in the chronological gaps, the second taking place (as one might suppose) before the advent of the Second Millennium, the third taking place fifty or seventy-five years after the second, and the fourth taking place perhaps two millenniabefore the first and the fifth (around 3000 AD).  The five episodes are (1) “The Man,” (2) “The Monkey,” (3) “The Girl,” (4) “The Patriarch,” and (5) “The Child.”  It seems logical to discuss “The Monkey” first, since this story represents the cause in response to which the other stories represent the consequences.  World Without Men is a novel about the liquidation of the male sex.

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I WOULD like to apologize to readers of this site for the unkind things I have said about pizza. I now realize that commercial-grade pizza is, if not the nectar of the gods, a suitable substance for everday consumption. Human beings have an evolutionary drive to eat trash. It is useless to fight this impulse. It’s sort of like asking people to stop itching or mating. I realize that if you are a habitual pizza eater, you cannot help it. Please understand that I understand.

Here is the latest from the Domino’s Pizza Institute about the pizza-eating habits of Americans. This is important scientific news.

Miss Tomlin's School, Washington, D.C., 1926

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JULIAN writes:

I have been catching up on your site and just came across your marvelous short piece of Oct. 22, 2009: “The Unfaithful Wife.” It is the best essay I have seen on the the divorce epidemic. I’m a veteran of a stupid, destructive and monstrously wasteful divorce war, dragged through the courts for three years by a wife of 25 years for no reason other than her simply having become bored with being married. (Ok, being married to me.) That and a very rough menopause, but let’s not go there. 

I emerged from the divorce court sewerpipe relatively unscathed, notwithstanding that the other side used every single dirty trick in the divorce-lawyer playbook. But I’m a big boy and was able to look after myself better than most. I have no complaints for myself because after the initial shock I was not surprised. It’s a mean world. But I was shocked and horrified at what my ex-wife then did to my daughter who was ten years old at the start of it all. I am now a witness to my daughter doing something similarly destructive and cruel, with the active collusion and encouragement of her mother, who still lives alone after 20 years (and one proposal of remarriage, which she made to me, and which I respectfully declined; but that’s another story).  Read More »

AS PART of the ongoing series of entries here on the decline of marriage and fatherlessness, Jesse Powell reports below on the final 2007 figures for out-of-wedlock births. These numbers are stark evidence of the ongoing shift to a matriarchal society. Three years ago, illegitimacy rates were close to 30 percent for whites, 50 percent for Hispanics and 70 percent for blacks. These rates are higher now.

Jesse Powell writes:

The Final Birth Data for 2007 has just come out, so it’s time for an update on what the out-of-wedlock birth statistics are telling us.  Read More »

HURRICANE BETSY WRITES:

I just had to write to tell you how “deep” that photo you posted the other day is for me!  I wasn’t even born in 1940 – heck, my parents hadn’t even met yet – but  I could have been one of those sleeping children.  The room – poorish looking – the sagging bed. The walls. The bedspread.    But the picture produced a happy mood in me.  Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I have not seen Eat Pray Love and have no plans to see it. (I’m pretty sure I’d rather be water-boarded.) I am simply commenting on the “still” from the movie posted in the recent entry. “Narcissism” is technically the right word for designating the psychological state that generates this image – of how people who think of themselves as “cool,” “sophisticated,” and “deeply spiritual” want to be seen – but by itself it is too clinical to do justice to the jejuneness of the mise-en-scène. Notice how Roberts and her actor-partner Javier Bardem are central to the tableau. The tableau itself is non-Western; it looks vaguely Indian or Ceylonese, but in a thoroughly scrubbed-up way. It is, in other words, nothing but a decorative scrim whose purpose is to set the mutual fixation of the two “stars” in an exotic (really, a faux exotic) context. Now consider the fixation, as such. Neither party is smiling, which one would expect if they were contemplating one another in a pitch of romantic emotion. So what exactly does the mutual absorption signify? I borrow a few ideas from René Girard, the world’s leading theoretician of narcissism, coquetry, self-involvement, and resentment. Roberts is looking at Bardem looking at her, and vice versa. Both are therefore looking at themselves, each using the other as a mirror. (This is the etymological narcissism: Narcissus glimpsed his reflection in a lily-pond and was so entranced by his own good looks that he fell in and drowned.) 

Consider the sartorial characters of the two chief figures, starting with Bardem. He is a frat-boy in a singles bar, dangling his designer-brand three hundred dollar sunglasses in the V of his unbuttoned polo shirt and topping himself off with a hat whose familiarity struck me. It is the type of hat worn by Barack Obama in one of the photographs that has surfaced of his Occidental College days, when he was dedicated to being “cool” in addition to being Marxist. Notice also the glinting gold of an expensive wristwatch on Bardem’s left arm, the one draped over Roberts’ shoulders. As for Roberts, she is trying, I imagine, to look profound and serious, but the ponytail is a college-girl accoutrement, which abolishes the effect. The more or less sari-like dress and the fan are reminiscent of the fashion adopted by women of Theosophical inclination in the 1920s and 30s. As we know, all wisdom comes from the Infinitely Wise East. 

As an account of the general Western attitude towards “the Orient,” the late Eduard Said’s book Orientalism is nasty and without merit. It occurs to me, however, that Said’s charges of fantasizing and condescension apply perfectly to this image – the self-projection of an industry dominated by politically besotted narcissists like Julia Roberts, who, in their spiritual vacuity, have the gall to tell us how to pray and love.

IN A SURVEY of 3,000 employees in Britain, 63 percent of the women and 75 percent of the men agreed that men make the better workplace bosses. Given the climate of liberal indoctrination, and how much women ostensibly have to lose from admitting they prefer male bosses, these numbers are striking. Other surveys have come up with similar results, as is mentioned in Steve Moxon’s book The Woman Racket.

There are good women bosses, of course, but overall women take office politics more personally; they are less straight-forward than men and more emotional. They tend to find decision making and authoritative action stressful, which is why some become raging shrews in positions of command. This is natural. Women are pacifists, not warriors. The interpersonal approach of women generally does not lend itself to leadership. Women are made to nurture, not command.

IN THE DISCUSSIONS this week about a man who said it was difficult to find a woman who didn’t already have a child by another man, I answered that I thought it might be possible for him to find a decent wife who was a single mother. However, in the heat of the conversation I failed to clarify one aspect of my position. I don’t think a woman who has refused to marry the father of her child, as Bristol Palin has done, or who has divorced the father of her child fits into the category of suitable prospects.

In years past, men who did not want to marry the women they impregnated were compelled to, largely by other men. That is no longer the case. Naturally, I don’t view marriage to single mothers as an answer to the cultural dilemma of men. There is no answer to their cultural dilemma that falls short of the restoration of patriarchal values, the return to traditional sex roles, and the end of the sexual revolution. 

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