HERE is a bold, countercultural piece written in 1946 by a leading American psychiatrist.  He contends the push for female equality will be a disaster because women are emotionally stunted and tend to abuse power. “Woman’s nature,” he writes, “in combination with the diverse compulsions and taboos of civilization, gives rise to a strong craving for mistreatment.” His words are prophetic. 

Dr. Ralph S. Banay, a Columbia University professor whose essay appears in The Milwaukee Journal, says “the fair sex is emotionally childish, inclines toward crime, cruelty and deceit, and doesn’t really want equality with men,” but power over them. He writes:

“Woman’s emotional aspect simply has not gone along with the rest of her entity. Woman has become a big and powerful factor in business, the professions, the arts and community life, but emotionally she has hardly moved at all; emotionally she is still back where she was when her stone age counterpart was an object of the chase to be captured and subdued.”  

He advises every woman to place these words in a prominent place: Women are not angelic.

It’s interesting that Banay was a psychiatrist. He would be horrified by psychologists today who push the idea that women are indeed angelic and that masculinity is a disorder.

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JOHN LOCKHARD writes:

The solution to Elise’s problem seems obvious to me. You should add a matchmaking section to your website. I would love to find a woman who likes your website and wants to be a traditional housewife. Heck, Elise herself sounds fantastic, except that I’m eighteen years older than she is. There must be lots of scattered traditionalists who read your blog. Think of it as a way of multiplying your readership! Of course, there would be a certain delay. :-)

Laura writes:

The thought has occurred to me. The problem is, would there be liability issues?

I will say that my recent fundraising campaign is prompted by both need and exhaustion. I’m about ready to sell my female readers to my male readers. : -)

IN RESPONSE to the entry on goddess spirituality, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Under the provocation of Kristor’s insight and yours, I am following out some associations in respect of Gnosticism and our reigning elites. I remarked how the “Goddess writer” rejects scholarly diligence in favor of mystic autoscopy. (“The most important place to look for the Goddess is within yourself.”) Le moi – it’s an even easier reference than Wikipedia!

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JAMES P. writes:

There is a New York Times story today about workplace protection for nannies. You will note, in the article, the assumption that the bill is a good thing because it will extend workplace protection to illegal immigrants. It is pretty much a given that the nanny will be foreign and probably in the country illegally.

This picture says it all — a black nanny with two white children in her care. Whatever happened to white women raising their own children?

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THANK YOU to those who responded to my recent request for donations to this site. If you would like to see this blog remain in existence, and not go the way of so many one-person operations which peter out or suddenly disappear because of the enormous time and energy needed to sustain them, please give.

BRITISH PRIME MINISTER David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg recently delayed cabinet meetings so they could take their children to school. They say they will be doing more of the same in the future. Cameron will be taking paternity leave when his wife gives birth in September and Clegg may have more serious responsibilities as his wife is a top lawyer and reportedly the main breadwinner in the family. According to The Daily Mail, Read More »

IN THIS previous post, Elise, an 18-year-old high school graduate and an intelligent young woman who has thought about the direction of her life, has decided not to go to college. This is a daring thing to do because many of her friends are headed there. But Elise believes that college is unnecessary to achieve her ultimate goal: to be a wife and mother.

The problem is that college is also one of the chief institutions in modern culture for matchmaking. Gone are the traditions that brought young men and women together in other ways. Where is Elise going to even find a man to marry without going to college or, well, going somewhere? Will it take a miracle? Should she hope for a man to fall from the sky? Read More »

Did Pandora release goddess spirituality into the world?

EARLY 21st century culture teems with goddess spirituality. We have shorn the new and reclaimed the old. A matriarchal society must have its she-gods, its polytheistic pantheon of feminine beings who suspiciously have little in common with the modern feminist. It’s interesting how the good goddess, rather than the vindictive or irrational or lustful goddess, dominates contemporary goddess culture.

Here’s a synopsis of goddess theology from one of the many feminine spirituality sites on the Internet:

In the beginning was the Great Mother, worshipped in an era when the ability to bring new life into the world was paramount – hence the elevated position of women in primitive society when the struggle just to survive left little time for anything else. Even when mankind found time to make statues and paint pictures in caves, the focus was still on the necessities of life – motherhood and successful hunting. The religious beliefs, which can be inferred from theses remains, also seem to focus on survival. Read More »

IS THE ANNOUNCED separation of Al and Tipper Gore simply a case of a husband and wife who have drifted apart and have decided mutually and amicably to go their separate ways? This is very unlikely.

At their advanced ages and after forty years of marriage, this picture of a mild and mutual parting does not make sense. More likely, this is a case of deep-seated anger or disappointment. Dissolving a longstanding marriage requires will and determination. The very essence of divorce, its romantic appeal to a generation of radical individualists, is in the will. A whole way of living and network of connections must be reordered. The life story is redefined, which may be especially thrilling on the brink of old age. It requires intense anger, bitter disillusionment, acute meaninglessness or some inner revolt against nature itself to motivate an individual to pursue this course when there is so little to gain and they face the latter stage of life without a spouse. Read More »

IT HAS been one year and four weeks since I started this blog. I was too busy posting to note the anniversary on May 5. There are now 703 entries in the archives, and they include many intelligent, funny, sad, wise and admonishing contributions from readers. It has been a year of curses and compliments.  Read More »

Al and Tipper embrace.

THE ANSWER IS NO. They can reconstruct society from top to bottom, but they cannot tolerate each other. This is why liberalism is ultimately doomed.

LYDIA SHERMAN, at her blog Home Living, says something that is absolutely forbidden in today’s society. She criticizes men who send their wives to work and questions their masculinity. This is a statement that will win her the hatred of both feminists and some in the men’s rights movement. She writes:

Truly masculine men will not ask their wives to go to work. They will try harder to provide for their families, or cut down on expenses so that their wives won’t have to work. Manly men will tell you that when women are not in the workplace, they get their jobs done much better. Women going to work has complicated the way things are done in the workplace, and this has not been good for the men.

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Baltimore oriole, male

THE NORTHERN ORIOLE, also known as the Baltimore Oriole, is an unusual bird, as well as one of rare beauty. The male has distinctive bright orange and black plumage, party attire in a field of grays and browns in the woodlands of the Northeast. Perhaps this festive creature avoids being eaten by hawks by rarely alighting on the ground. It flits in the upper branches and dramatically swoops from one position to another as if on a trapeze. How else to explain the Oriole’s survival given his outrageous outfit? 

The bird’s whistling, flute-like call is also distinctive and unmistakeable. We get very few Northern Orioles, but the ones we do get are easily identifiable from their perches in the woods. The whistle sounds human and they vocalize for many hours during the day.

My teenaged son and I have followed the Oriole’s habits for a few years and our amateur study of the bird is marked by both tragedy and uncommon bird-to-human communication. Read More »

ELISE WRITES:

I’ve been reading your blog for some time now, and I thoroughly appreciate what you write. Your blog posts are always refreshing and challenging. I wanted to ask if you would be willing to consider writing on the topic of the role of daughters within the family unit and of society as a whole. Your posts affirming the work of housewives (as in one of your recent posts) are encouraging – but as an eighteen-year-old homeschooled daughter wondering what the next chapter is in her life, I would be very interested to hear your thoughts about daughters.

I would love to someday marry and be the best wife, mother, and homemaker I can possibly be – but we’re talking about the (irreplaceable) role of the mothers, the wives here – what about daughters living at home? Is it enough to stay simply at home, being a help to mother in areas including housework, homeschooling, cooking, tending a vegetable garden, etc.? Do you think a young woman should get a job, or start a home business, so that she isn’t a “burden” on her parents? Read More »

John Philip Sousa

THERE are many excellent versions on the Internet of “Semper Fidelis,” the United States Marine Corps march written by John Philip Sousa in 1889. Here is a good one and you can hear the Marine Band playing the song in 1909 here.

To our military heroes on Memorial Day, we march for thee.

Sousa and the Marine Corps Band in 1893

THE PICKAXE awakens a lust for power, or at least it does in me. This simple implement, invented by technological minds when levers were still new, inspires visions touched with grandiosity.  The thought of prying glacial boulders from the subterranean depths, of digging deep ditches, or of uprooting the feet of massive trees, all with little effort, springs to mind. The fact that one may never come close to truly spectacular feats doesn’t matter. It is the dream, the enlarged sense of possibility, that counts.

The pickaxe has been idle all winter, propped under the eaves, silent and magnificent, it’s tapered handle suave and elegant against the wall. Even careless neglect, days in damp dirt, never seem to harm its blade, pointed on one end, like a finger, blunt and flat as a spatula on the other, so very much like a hand, but much better. In early spring, the sabbatical ends and by May, I am always vaguely aware of where the pickaxe is. I almost never forget where I have left it a day or two ago. It is like the gun to the hunter, or the net to a fisherman, a material extension of being, an extra limb.

A pickaxe isn’t feminine.  But I don’t care. That assault of the earth, that moment when the flattened blade cuts the surface, as if ripping open an envelope with a long-anticipated letter inside, even when it clangs against a buried rock, is so intoxicating, I wouldn’t give it up to please anyone or to improve my image. I’m anti-feminist, but not anti-work, not anti-pickaxe. No one really likes to dig compacted earth, especially if it’s full of rocks and roots; that’s when you have to pry and pick and paw at the ground, begging for an opening. Men are better at this of course because they’re stronger, but I don’t have a personal chain-gang of diggers and I wouldn’t even want one. Digging is for lovers. Lovers of the ground. Read More »

LYDIA SHERMAN WRITES:

Here is an English translation of “Vackert Väder,” or “Beautiful Weather,” the Swedish hymn which inspired the song by the quartet Kraja:

 In this sweet time of summer
Go out, my soul, and be happy for
The gifts from the great God.
Look, how the earth is decked
Look, how she, for you and me
Is in wonderful bounties. 

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SAGE McLAUGHLIN WRITES:

Eric writes in the entry on feminism and cooking that, “I am noticing a lot of cooking-type reality shows…I wonder how Hollywood turned meal preparation into a gladiatorial competition.” As a fan of cooking shows (though not the “reality” versions in which loud-mouthed, vulgar chefs abusively deride younger, less experienced ones), I used to wonder the same thing. But it’s not so complicated, really. The entertainment industry is now, much as it has always been, in the “dream” business. Selling visions of people’s dreams back to them is what television has been about for quite some time now, and even the element of competition is not so new, with game shows being one of the oldest and most successful kinds of programming. Look around at the prime time competition shows today and what do you see?

You see The Biggest Loser, a show about a competition in which people get to become rich and famous while losing lots of weight. Whoever thought of this wildly popular show—which has now spawned a line of books, food, videos, clothing, etc.—understands America better than most of us would care to admit. Read More »