KAREN I. writes:

I thought you might like to know that if their favorite toy of the moment is any indication, American boys have somehow successfully resisted the never-ending attempts to make them more feminine.

The hottest toys for boys this Christmas are Nerf guns. These are not little pistols, but big (sometimes huge), colorful guns that fire multiple soft Nerf bullets. Read More »

JILL F. writes:

I find it interesting that the article by Erica Jong refers to the first “wave” of feminism, as if there were huge crowds of feminists early on. Get real.

The kitchen is an appropriate symbol of motherhood and it stands to reason that those who want to destroy the nurturing woman would attack her hearth. It is from the kitchen that the nourishment of the family flows. Yes, those of us who were raised by working mothers and ate ravioli out of a can often struggle to embrace the necessary mess that being “kitchen centered” entails but a family is really not being nourished unless they spend regular time together, in their home and around their table. Read More »

ELIZABETH WRIGHT, of Issues and Views, writes:

If the Liberty University logo wasn’t everywhere, I would never believe such a thing as this video exists. What is there to say? Popular culture, which is totally reinforced by academia from kindergarten upwards, will inevitably win over young minds. And with no strong adults to fight its assault, the kids don’t stand a chance.

It makes me wonder about the state of Bob Jones University. When Jones gave in to the squealing over the ban on interracial dating, I was aghast that there could be not one, not ONE academic institution to which parents could send their children with the knowledge that miscegenation would not be promoted or given a blessing. I wrote to Jones at the time, identifying myself as a black, encouraging him not to give in. But, of course, the administration did give in.

The poison of PC wins on every score. White adults soon become too afraid even to criticize the low-grade garbage called rap and hip hop, even though there have been movements among blacks themselves to eliminate this detritus. Read More »

THEIR universities heavily-subsidized for many years, British students now consider a cheap degree an entitlement. In London yesterday, 50,000 students rioted over proposals to raise the current cap on tuition of $5,624 (in US dollars) per year to a range of $9,600 to $14,400. Some shattered windows and threw bottles. These photos of the devolving British people are from The Daily Mail.  Read More »

CLARK COLEMAN writes:

Your entry on names struck a nerve. I have been keeping a file of girl names that are not particularly feminine for a few years. When I encounter a new one (sometimes in person, often in local newspaper articles), I add it to the list. Some might doubt that I got the list right, but I am 100 percent certain that these are all girl names I have encountered:

Alex, Ashlan, Ashley, Austin, Biffy, Blair, Coty, Douglas, Hampton, Hayden, Jordan, Kendall, Kevin, Kirby, Kyle, Madison, Marlow, Mickey, River, Rory, Schafer, Spencer, Sutton, Taylor, Turner, Tyler, Whitaker. Read More »

LIBERTY UNIVERSITY is the world’s largest Evangelical Christian university. This shocking promotional video illustrates how white Christians are in the thrall of the worst of crotch-grabbing, anarchic black culture. Check out the anti-mugging at the end of the video, and the white youth uplifted and enlightened by his exposure to a rap hymn.

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JAMES P. writes:

I am fascinated at how many women in this article want to emasculate their sons.

“We liked it that the name carried no image of masculinity” — Gee, why would you want that in a boy?

Levy said, “I wanted to imbue my sons with feminist values” — Why, oh why, do you want to emasculate him??? He’s your son! Don’t you want him to grow up to be a man? 

“Naming your kid Robert after your grandfather who invented the flyswatter and bought the house in Newport is a very different kind of holding onto an outmoded form of masculinity.” — Apparently being a man is outmoded.

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HOW DOES one leap from the observation that women sometimes use their children as status symbols and indulge grandiose expectations of their own nurturing abilities to the conclusion that mothering is unnecessary? Leave it to a feminist warhorse like Erica Jong  to make this connection, assuring us that communal child-rearing, the sort of thing found in primitive African villages or Stalinist daycare centers, is superior to the atmosphere of the Western nuclear family. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, she says:

The first wave of feminists, in the 19th century, dreamed of communal kitchens and nurseries. A hundred years later, the closest we have come to those amenities are fast-food franchises that make our children obese and impoverished immigrant nannies who help to raise our kids while their own kids are left at home with grandparents. Our foremothers might be appalled by how little we have transformed the world of motherhood.

Dreamed of communal kitchens and nurseries? The number of women who have dreamed of such atrocities is infinitesimally small. No one who experienced a communal kitchen in Soviet Russia would have dared to call it an “amenity” except in contrast to no kichen at all. Read More »

CHRISTIANITY is said to be a great force for social justice. But one of the most important ways in which Christianity has promoted justice is rarely acknowledged. Christianity historically protected men from various forms of exploitation. It is in some senses the ultimate men’s movement.

By this, I do not mean modern-day pseudo-Christianity with its worship of the feminine divine or its aggressive denial of Christian events and revelation. I do not mean those who “honoreth with the lips” while their hearts remain stone-cold. I refer to the Christian creed, scriptures and traditions. The good man, or the man trying to be good, has always been ripe for oppression, even more so than the good woman. It is for him, not the brute or the thug or the despot or the libertine, that Christianity once secured important protections.

This is an important subject and there’s a great deal to say about it.  At the risk of useless simplification, here is a very brief look at the ways in which Christian civilization historically protected men. Read More »

IT MAY BE impossible to fully articulate how the denial of sex differences has altered our world. It is a phenomenon that is sometimes too big for us to see. However, this brilliant excerpt from Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology by the Jungian analyst Irene Claremont de Castillejo gets at the ineffable nature of this sweeping change:

There can be little doubt that with rare exceptions the masculine of woman is inferior in quality to that of a man. It is apt to be less original and less flexible. She tends to be impressed by organisation and theories which she frequently carries to excess because her masculine power to focus runs away with her. She then becomes hidebound by regulations and obsessed by detail. She is much less likely to be willing to make exceptions than a man, as the masculine side which runs away with her is wholly impersonal and disregards the human need of any particular man or woman.

But the same sort of thing applies to the feminine within man. It is less vital and dynamic than that of a woman. The feminine in women is not solely passive and receptive. It is also ruthless in its service of life, or rather those particular lives which personally concern her. Read More »

A BOSTON UNIVERSITY religion scholar finds little sympathy for the feminist theologian and misanthrope Mary Daly among his students. Given that Daly called for the virtual elimination of the male sex, this is not necessarily heartening news. One would hope they would be angry and outraged at the mere mention of her name and that he would be exiled academically for giving her serious consideration. Stephen Prothero says very few of his students are willing to call themselves feminists. That’s not because feminism has died, as he speculates, but because it has won. Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I thought that your readers might like to see a bit of the beginning of “The Bell” in Hans Christian Andersen’s Danish.  The Scandinavian languages are the Germanic languages closest to English; they are quite easy for English speakers to learn.  I studied Andersen thirty years ago and more in Danish with Niels Ingwersen, an affable Dane, and a translator of Andersen, who spent a year at UCLA as a visiting professor.  In those days, Scandinavian was an independent “section” of the Department of Germanic Languages, but it has since almost disappeared.  This is true throughout American higher education, where, with the exception of Spanish, language studies nowadays recruit too few students to justify their departmental existence.  Read More »

Matt H. writes:

I stumbled across this picture which I felt admirably captured the tragedy of our era: it is a self-loathing man taking directions from a woman doing a man’s job. It is from this year’s ‘Glasgay’ festival, which you can learn about here, if you really want to.

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN’S story “The Bell,” about a town searching for a pealing bell, is a good bedtime story to read aloud to children. In this translation, it opens:

IN the narrow streets of a large town, people often heard in the evening, when the sun was setting, and his last rays gave a golden tint to the chimney-pots, a strange noise which resembled the sound of a church bell; it only lasted an instant, for it was lost in the continual roar of traffic and hum of voices which rose from the town. “The evening bell is ringing,” people used to say. “The sun is setting!” Those who walked outside the town, where the houses were less crowded and interspersed by gardens and little fields, saw the evening sky much better, and heard the sound of the bell much more clearly. It seemed as though the sound came from a church, deep in the calm, fragrant wood, and thither people looked with devout feelings.

AFGHAN WOMEN choose to kill themselves because their lives are so restricted, writes Alyssa Rubin in today’s New York Times, examining the case of one mother of six children who attempts suicide after being scolded by a relative. Rubin, who does not compare the female suicide rate in Afghanistan with that in America, writes:

It is shameful here to admit to troubles at home, and mental illness often goes undiagnosed or untreated. Ms. Zada, the hospital staff said, probably suffered from depression. The choices for Afghan women are extraordinarily restricted: Their family is their fate. There is little chance for education, little choice about whom a woman marries, no choice at all about her role in her own house. Her primary job is to serve her husband’s family. Outside that world, she is an outcast.

Imagine the New York Times giving the same amount of prominent play on the front page to the story of an American woman who has killed herself after having an abortion, a woman for whom “family is her fate” in an entirely different sense, and you may begin to grasp the subtext here. It is interesting how the writer turns what is an act of horrendous violence by women into an act of violence by men:

“Violence in the lives of Afghanistan’s women comes from everywhere: from her father or brother, from her husband, from her father-in-law, from her mother-in-law and sister-in-law,” said Dr. Shafiqa Eanin, a plastic surgeon at the burn hospital, which usually has at least 10 female self-immolation cases at any one time.”

Women in Afghanistan, it seems, have no part in their own happiness, are not themselves capable of cruelty of any kind and live under the regime of men who bear them open contempt. Life is no doubt hard for many women in Afghanistan. There are extreme difficulties involved with adolescent marriage, with the Muslim worldview and life in extended families, and it is always sad when someone chooses to end her life. But it is worth comparing this appraisal of the powerlessness of Afghan women with James Kalb’s recent description of life in rural Afghanistan.

Like so much of feminist propaganda, this article is based on the assumption that women who do not make money are too stupid to affect any of the conditions in their world. Sometimes I think feminists live in a big plastic bubble that hangs above the earth. How else to explain their blithering ignorance about the mass of real women except that they only see them from some artifically-imposed distance?

IF YOU are in any doubt, if you think you can raise your children as if you are living in normal times, then read this from today’s New York Times:

The school district in Helena, Mont., revised its new teaching guidelines on sex education and tolerance, after parents criticized them as being too explicit and an endorsement of homosexuality. Read More »

WHY WOULD the ultra-patriotic, ostensibly conservative Sarah Palin call those who believe women should raise the next generation “Neanderthals?” Where does this withering disdain for Neanderthals come from? Neanderthals, in this context, are all those generations of women who devoted themselves to the care of their husbands and the formation of their children. They refined character and culture. They guarded privacy and sentiment. They kept the home from being crushed by the State. Why despise them?

This superiority complex, so common and so rooted in the hearts of feminists, can be traced to the modern cult of the future. As G.K. Chesterton said, it is much easier to project oneself onto the blank pages of the future then fit oneself into the humbling records of the past. We may never live up to its standards. The feminist fears even the homemade cakes and pies of yesterday, which is why she heaps such condescension upon them. “The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes,” Chesterton said. “… And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”

A READER wrote in earlier this week about Sarah Palin’s appearance with Geraldine Ferraro on Fox News. I have just seen the clip. Never has Palin so passionately stated her opposition to the traditional family. The issue of whether mothers work outside the home is “petty little superficial meaningless,” she says with characteristic eloquence. “Neanderthals” consider it important.  Palin says she cheered Ferraro when she ran for vice president, as if every female candidate feels automatic solidarity with any other female candidate. How “great for our nation” it was that Ferraro ran. Golly gee willickers. The supposedly pro-life, small-government Palin applauds the efforts of someone with an entirely different political philosophy simply because she is a woman. Read More »