KILROY M. writes:

I thought you might find this amusing cover illustration of Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard of interest. It’s pretty blunt about the ideological tendency of each candidate.

FITZGERALD writes:

I highly recommend this article.  It is harsh, but the points it makes are essentially valid. The Roman Catholic Church has capitulated since Vatican II to the concept of equality in marriage. This represents a surrender to the forces out to destroy the family, a sop to the progressives and their agitators. 

Tradition teaches us that men are appointed the leaders for their families and society. Read More »

THE PREMIER purveyor of propaganda, The New York Times, has these enlightening words on the subject in an article on the Shirley Sherrod affair:

[I]t is an open question whether conservative media outlets risk damage to their credibility when obscure or misleading stories are blown out of proportion and when what amounts to political opposition research is presented as news.

Jane Hall, a communication professor at American University and a former contributor to Fox News, said partisan media outlets “look for something that will get an audience and that will whip up people in some kind of frenzy, warranted or not.”

Ms. Hall said what Ms. Sherrod had endured was “classic propaganda.” 

JOHN writes:

Christian men who are struggling against sexual sin should try real live old-fashioned corporal mortification. Intentionally and prayerfully do something really painful, offer the suffering to Jesus in union with His suffering on the cross and ask Him to use the pain to burn away all the self-inflicted corruption and wash the soul clean. The sin was against one’s own body (1 Cor 6:18), the atonement should be too. Sexual sin throws away self-control for physical pleasure; voluntary, self-inflicted physical pain for the purpose of penance restores self-control, purifies the body and strengthens the mind.

Daniel Mitsui

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JAMES M. writes:

I’m ashamed of my familiarity with this subject [of pornography], and like so many others am living with damage done; I’ve seen things which can not be unseen. I was going to stay out of this but here’s a short poem I wrote about the feeling of self-loathing and hopelessness experienced by a man in thrall to a pornography addiction:

So disgustingly familiar,
I can feel it closing in.
Through open wounds which go undressed,
Here it comes again.

Welling up and seeping, spreading,
Cascading down and through me.
Cutting in, dissolving, shredding,
Fragile wisps of sanctity.

So familiarly disgusting,
In the grip of spectre hands.
Through open open eyes which drift, obsessed,
Here it comes again.

Transfixed now and transformed, dreading,
Search through blowing grains of sand.
Trudging on, my hunger wetting
Thorny gardens of the damned.

And it hasn’t been so long since last time
This wretched spell was cast without the potion.
And I’ve been weak so many times that now
It’s as if I’m simply going through the motions.

YOUNGFOGEY WRITES:

I pointed out in a recent conversation with you that men’s pornography use must be understood in the context of the misandrist culture where it takes place. I now think I can articulate more about why I think this is so important.

If we look at God’s curse on the man at the time of the expulsion from Eden we’ll see that from that point on the world would resist his efforts to draw from it sustenance and beauty. His work would be met by thorns and struggle and pain at every turn. This is really how men experience life. Every day is a battle on multiple fronts. Days are spent battling ourselves, others and the stubborn resistance of the world to bend to our wills. Such struggle is exhausting.

The one place we hope the struggle will not be so hard is at home. We hope that our wives, mothers, daughters and other women in our lives would understand this struggle and instead of being yet more thorns for us to cut ourselves upon, would want to be for us a garden of rest and delight. This is rarely the case, especially in a culture that actively teaches women to despise men, our needs and our natures. After a day of body and soul-breaking labor, most men do not come home to appreciation, respect and submission, but to criticism, manipulation and more unceasing demands. Read More »

DARRELL writes:

One problem with pornography, and the reason it is propagated by elites, is that it tends to destroy the capacity of men for self-government.  And if men can’t govern themselves they certainly cannot govern their families, workplaces and political institutions.

The purpose of pornography is to create moral anarchism and produces men who are either governed by their passions or fundamentally controlled by guilt.  Such men must be governed by an outside entity, typically the state.

Here is relevant quote from R.J. Rushdoony’s book Noble Savages, which was originally published under the title The Politics of Pornography:

Moral anarchism is used to destroy every form of social stability and order in order to pave the way for totalitarian order. Christianity gives to man the faith and character for self-government, and morality is the essence of self-discipline and self-government. Dissolve man’s self-government, and you make a totalitarian authority over him a social necessity. It becomes apparent, therefore, that the link between pornography and revolutionary totalitarianism is a necessary one. The rise of totalitarianism has always been preceded by moral anarchism, and those seeking tyrannical powers over man have always worked to reduce man to a dependent position by undercutting his moral self-government and responsibility. The rise and triumph of pornography is a prelude to totalitarianism. Moral anarchy is the seed-bed of tyranny.

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IN THIS entry, Stephen pointed out that pornography hurts a man’s ability to form and sustain relationships with women. Another reader asked for elaboration.  I wrote, 

The more a person habituates himself (or herself) to solo sex or imaginary sex the more he is incapable of dealing with the complexities, unpredictability, disappointments and rewards of reality. 

But here is a far more eloquent response from Stephen, who currently works with sex offenders, many of whom are pornography addicts. He writes:

I should first make clear that I am not an expert, but merely have gained some exposure through my work to an unpleasant aspect of our society, one which needs to be better understood. I should probably also add that the men with whom I deal are extreme examples, and so the harm caused by pornography in their cases are extreme. However, this tendency of pornography to cause harm, I believe, exists in other men; it just would not necessarily result in rape. 

Pornography harms a man’s ability to forge meaningful relationships with women because it replaces the reality of hard work with the easy self-indulgence of fantasy. Any indulgence in a fantasy for an extended period of time will distort the way a man sees reality, and thus how he deals with it. Fantasies about sex, though, are particularly powerful and destructive simply because the sex drive is so powerful and so integral to a man’s personality. (One need not be a Freudian, by the way, to accept this fact.) The reason why sex is so powerful is that sex is a liminal experience, where men (and women) experience transcendence and ecstasy in the original Greek sense of ekstasis, “standing outside oneself.” Indeed, sex, as James Matthew Wilson pointed out a few months ago in a brilliant article at Front Porch Republic, is the last faint glimmer of transcendence, ekstasis, and ultimate meaning for many people today, thus making the allure of pornography all the more powerful. 

Because sex is about transcendence, it is necessarily about openness: to the other person involved, to the potential for a new life, but also to the gift of love that comes from God. And love must be personal and focused on another, or else it is nothing but self-indulgence. Pornography, by separating the pleasure of sex from any relationship with a real person, turns what should be an open act into a self-centered act utterly devoid of openness to transcendence. Pornography perverts what has the potential of being a transcendent experience into a mockery of the divine. Corruptio optimi pessima.

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JAMES P. writes:

Did you see this New York Times article on the “progress” of the sexual revolution in Russia? What amused me was the article’s overall perspective, which is that the sexual revolution indeed represented “progress” – rather than a slide into degeneracy – and that the Russians are to be pitied for their reactionary ignorance:

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THE ILLUSTRATOR Daniel Mitsui has a fascinating piece (see July 14th entry) on recent trends in Legos, the plastic building toys popular among boys. Lego stopped basing its miniature figures on characters and narratives  from medieval history and legend, choosing branded fantasies instead. Mitsui writes:

I began to lose interest in these toys around the time of the first troubling developments. The weird and thankfully short-lived Wolfpack Renegades theme was a harbinger of worse to come; this was the first introduction of characters with no basis in medieval history or literature. Dragon Masters followed, with a wizard named Majisto. Read More »

IN his book on evolutionary psychology and the sexes, Steve Moxon argues that pornography is benign and actually serves a useful social function. He writes in The Woman Racket:

The male desire for a variety of novel sexual partners is insatiable, and for almost all men this cannot be met by actual sex. Masturbation to endlessly varying images of women is the harmless solution (now that we know it doesn’t make us blind). The basic fear about ‘pornography’ is that it ‘depraves and corrupts’ to the point of encouraging sex crime, but in fact it produces the opposite effect. Conversely, dangerous sex criminals are found to have been exposed to little if any erotica, and generally to have had a sheltered existence regarding sex.

Anti-male prejudice, he maintains, underlies many of the laws and social attitudes regarding pornography:

The law against ‘child pornography’ is used against men who have in no way, however indirectly, harmed a child; and this betrays that the law is really about the hatred of male sexuality.

While I agree that anti-male bias is apparent in the feminist critique of pornography, especially in hysterical claims that viewing pornography is tantamount to rape, I disagree with Moxon’s conclusion. Pornography is not harmless even if it doesn’t encourage sexual crime or result in actual adultery or involve any coercion or “objectification” of women who appear in sexual material. Just because a desire is insatiable and natural doesn’t mean it is good. And given that a very small minority of men do prey on children, and even kidnap and kill them, intolerance of sexual interest in children and the trafficking of sexual images of children is healthy and right.

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STUART writes:

Regarding your recent post on feminism and plumbers, I’ve always liked this American promotional poster for plumbers from the 1930s. A bit over the top maybe, but there’s a lot of truth in it. 

My family were farmers but I trained as a plumber as a young man and am still licensed. It took six years to become fully qualified, which included training in gas-fitting, roofing and drainage. I’m 45 now and work as a project manager/estimator for a large Australian based engineering/property maintenance company. 

Maybe I’m influenced by my background, but I’ve always felt plumbers (and many other trades) are undervalued for the work they do. So much of this dirty, difficult and at times dangerous work goes unnoticed by many. And of course our cities and towns would soon fail without the essential maintenance of infrastructure, utilities and services of all kinds.  Read More »

JOHN LOCKHARD writes:

My thanks to you and Thomas Bertonneau for introducing me to Françoise Hardy.

There’s a detail which I found very beautiful. French is more flexible with articles and possessive pronouns than English. In the first two verses, she sings “et les yeux dans les yeux, et la main dans la main.” Literally translated, “and the eyes in the eyes, and the hand in the hand,” or, in more natural English, “eyes locked, hand in hand.” French uses definite articles where English doesn’t. Read More »

'BORING' IS EXCITING: Sandhogs celebrate their dramatic breakthrough on the No. 7 train tunnel yesterday.

LAST MONTH, in an interview with the ever-incisive Katie Couric, Gloria Steinem noted, while offering a philosophical overview of contemporary society and world history, that there are relatively few women plumbers. This insight struck me like a lightening bolt. It showed that Ms. Steinem continues to be a penetrating thinker. Now, I have never met a single woman who wanted to become a plumber, let alone a woman who wanted to become a plumber but was prevented from fulfilling her dreams, but Ms. Steinem is probably very plugged in to the feminine plumbing subculture. Almost everything that is humanly possible exists in this world and I don’t doubt there are one or two frustrated women who have unclogged drains since early childhood and have longed, to no avail, to commit themselves to the lonely, back-breaking labor of the plumber’s life.

I am here to tell you that it is not just plumbing that remains a closed field to women.

Look at this New York Post photo of the crew that just completed a new subway tunnel in New York City. Does something seem amiss? You are right. There are no women in this picture. Where was Ms. Steinem when this photo was taken? Her presence was needed. Ladies, oppression is real. It is real and ongoing. From the bowels of the earth, men are ruling the world.

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THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU, who teaches literature at SUNY Oswego in New York state, has sent the syllabus to his Western Heritage course in response to recent discussion here about college literary studies. The syllabus includes compelling remarks on the moral dimension of literary studies:

The study of literature is the single most important and life-changing element in an undergraduate’s four years of matriculation towards his or her baccalaureate.  The study of literature is not only a discipline; it is the discipline.  Understanding difficult, extended texts requires patience and perseverance, a putting aside of distractions, and a determination to suspend all hasty or childish judgments.  Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish writer of the Nineteenth Century, once said of life that while one perforce lives it forwards, one only ever understands it backwards.  So it is with studies, most especially with literary studies: we perforce read forwards, but only ever understand once we have finished reading, “backwards,” as it were.  Moral commitment remains indispensable to the endeavor …

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THE PLACES I most liked to play as a little girl were scenes of enclosure and domestic adventurism: the playroom furnished with dolls and a tiny mock kitchen, the living room where my friend and I staged balls, the pavements where we played skip-rope and hopscotch, the shaded streets where we rode our bikes.

Here at Tradition in Action is a fascinating piece on modernist playground equipment and its hostility to girlish play. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira writes:

The feminine soul is a fountainhead of grace, delicacy and sensibility, which enriches the moral and social life of humanity with spiritual values that man does not give it. The equilibrium of the mankind demands women with a rich mental structure displaying all the gifts proper to their sex, just as it demands men with profoundly virile souls. It would be absurd to educate a generation of boys in the most effeminate way possible. No less absurd would it be to educate a generation of girls with the intention of making them as masculine as possible. 

Kristyna Koci, chief negotiator for the Czech Public Affairs Party

THE PRESENCE of large numbers of women in governing positions degrades politics, not because women are incapable or stupid but because women are womanly. Here is a perfect example. Czech female parliamentarians have posed for a racy calendar. The purpose of the calendar is to create a refreshing, anti-authoritarian image. Wouldn’t you rather have your life controlled by beautiful women, than men in suits? The Telegraph reports:

“We want to draw attention to the fact that we have women in politics,” said MP Lenka Andrysova, who appears in one shot in a thigh-high dress kneeling on a shelf.

They want to draw attention to more than that. John of Powerline reacts with flippant indifference: “Czechs seem to be having a little more fun in their political lives than we are.” Paul disagrees:

My conclusion is that this calendar confirms the decline of Western Civilization, assuming the Czech Republic is part of that Civilization.

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IT’S RARE to come across good news in the gossip press, unless you find items about two beautiful narcissists getting married uplifting. But the news that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are engaged is an exception. Here’s a man and woman who were settled into a lifetime of public animosity. Instead they have chosen to be parents for their child.

America doesn’t need to hear Bristol’s lectures on the joys of single motherhood. It does need to see young people in their early twenties embrace marriage and parenthood.