MORE INTERESTING COMMENTS have been added to recent posts on the franchise, the soaring illegitimacy rate, the faux manliness of Hillary Clinton and fatally distracted parents. Comments have also been added to “The Purloined Lunch,” which offers reflections by readers on the meaning of serving a spouse.

That discussion reminded me of another lunch story.

A woman I know was divorced and rasing her nine-year-old daughter alone. The daughter was protective of her mother and every morning would make her a bag lunch before she went to work as a professional in a corporate office.

One day the mother forgot her lunch. The daughter was distraught.

She did something that perhaps would only occur to a child. She called the radio station her mother listened to on her commute to work and told the staff what had happened. They then announced on air, “Mrs. N, go home. You forgot your lunch!”

ROBERT RECTOR has a good article at National Review on the statistics discussed here last week showing  an illegitimacy rate of more than 40 percent for the first time in U.S. history. He writes:

The steady growth of childbearing by single women and the general collapse of marriage, especially among the poor, lie at the heart of the mushrooming welfare state. This year, taxpayers will spend over $300 billion providing means-tested welfare aid to single parents. The average single mother receives nearly three dollars in government benefits for each dollar she pays in taxes.

… If poor single mothers were married to the fathers of their children, two-thirds of them would not be poor.

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DAVID BROOKS’ recent words are strangely inspiring. If you recall, Brooks said the quintessential American product is something “coated in moral and psychological meaning.” Our famous conservative columnist believes America will enrich itself, and the rest of the world as well, with these special manufactures.

When you get right down to it, many things could be coated in moral and psychological meaning, don’t you agree? As Brooks said, affluent consumers “crave ” the stuff, and non-affluent consumers probably do too. Well, this got me craving for some myself. Here, inspired by Mr. Brooks, is my own personal culinary variation on his important and timely theme: Read More »

DIANE WRITES:

One of the big shortcomings I’ve found in the conservative strategy is that we lose sight of the fact that everyone sees through their own filter. If we want to reach liberals and leftists with truth, we have to tell them in a language they understand. Somehow, we keep trying to tell them in the way that WE understand, but they don’t have the kind of sensors that can hear the message in that language.  Read More »

Karen I. writes:

The article about children left in cars turned my stomach. Imagine the torment of the poor forgotten children. Children are being sacrificed for money, plain and simple. 

We have one vehicle, which is one of the many “sacrifices” I make to be home with my children. Even though it is a fairly new car in excellent condition, that I can take for the day whenever I want, people tell me they cannot imagine being a one-car family and they act as though I should be working so I can have a car of my own. As I drove my husband to work today, I passed at least six daycare centers on the busy street. They are all on the way to a major city where many professionals work. Countless mothers who need their own cars, fancy homes and designer clothes pull into the parking lot of those centers daily, drop their kids off without a backwards glance and speed off to important jobs. They truly believe they have no choice because how else can they pay for all those things they need? Sadly, I can see where a parent with this mindset would “forget” the child because the child is not seen as a person, but as a chore in the busy morning routine. Drop off the dry cleaning, drop off the child…it’s all the same, right? Until a tragedy reminds us otherwise. Read More »

THIS ARTICLE is almost too upsetting to read. The Washington Post examines the relatively rare, but increasingly common, incidence of children who die when they are left unattended in the back seats of cars during warm weather. It’s horrific. One child reportedly pulled out all her hair before succumbing. Some of the parents have faced criminal charges.

All of the cases appear to involve parents or relatives shuttling children to day care or babysitters. An investigator blames poor cognitive processing:

Some people think, ‘Okay, I can see forgetting a child for two minutes, but not eight hours.’ What they don’t understand is that the parent in his or her mind has dropped off the baby at day care and thinks the baby is happy and well taken care of. Once that’s in your brain, there is no reason to worry or check on the baby for the rest of the day.

That’s right. Drop off and forget. This whole way of life is criminal. Our entire culture, not the parents themselves, should be indicted for child neglect. If parents can’t remember when their babies are in the back seat of the car, how can they care for them day after day? For every baby neglected this way, there are thousands who are neglected in smaller, less noticeable ways, leading chaotic lives, shunted around like packages and suitcases. This is a wrong way to live and anyone living this life must sense it. But again, these parents have suffered and I don’t think it’s fair to charge them with murder. The deaths of these children should weigh heavy, like millstones, on all those who trumpet women’s liberation and the casual destruction of home.

Notice the mention in the story of a mother who is an Army veteran. Her frenetically over-scheduled life, with children conceived through artificial insemination while her husband is in Iraq, is desolating. It’s a chilling story. Our culture may shower children with material things, spoiling them with spurts of focused attention, but it remains profoundly hostile to the young.

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Twenty years ago, I began making my husband lunch every day, a bag lunch though I rarely packaged it in the traditional brown bag.

Women have made lunches for their husbands for eons, long before there were factories or corporate campuses or high-rise office buildings. Farm wives heaped the table at noontime. Men in India carried their tiffin in metal holders to keep it warm, a practice which has possibly declined due to the large-scale departure of Indian women for the office themselves. Making lunch for a working man is as old as time. It seems a mundane and perfectly ordinary thing to do.

But, it isn’t a mundane and ordinary thing to do anymore. It seems beset with political overtones. I knew that making lunch for my husband everyday would not win me the esteem of others. Read More »

A SPRING day makes an old tree look young.

The ancient oak, its roots upturning the cracked plates of a misplaced sidewalk, corrugated bark frayed and acne-ridden, haggard limbs immodestly outstretched, wears a youthful fringe. High above the street, ignored by the preoccupied in occupied cars, seed and leaf unfurl. In festive alliance, wisdom and inexperience commingle against the moody spring sky.

Who wins? The green frills are there. They dangle and swing. They drop with the slightest stress to the sidewalk below.  A few may land.  None will grow, but those that briefly decorate the majesty and acceptance, the piety and determination the mature leaves obscure.

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SEE Rick Darby’s skewering of New York Times columnist David Brooks, who forecasts a bright future with Americans providing “emotional experiences” to the rest of the world.

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WHEN women become leaders of society, entering previously male domains of authority in significant numbers, they feminize leadership. To feminize something is by definition to make it less stern, less weighty, less serious and less plain. This is not the case with every female leader. Margaret Thatcher did not feminize the British government. Janet Reno did not make the position of attorney general a girly thing. When individual women are manly and accept masculine standards, they do not change the nature of the job.

But with the entry of many women into leadership positions, the inevitable Oprah-ization and feminine embellishment occurs. After all, women can’t stop being women. They can’t become manly any more than a cat can become a bicycle, and who would want them to? A perfect example of this phenomenon is the creation by one woman of a single-issue Barbie doll with the high church outfit of an Episcopalian priest. Barbie adorns the office of the Rev. Dena Cleaver-Bartholomew, rector of Christ (Episcopal) Church, in Manlius, N.Y.

Whether this Barbie poses serious marketing opportunities, I cannot say. But as a woman who once avidly played with dolls, I can say that this outfit suggests tantalizing possibilities. It possesses the right amount of drama and interest. I can imagine taking on and off the tiny hat and having Barbie sweep into an imaginary room with her majestic cape. Cleaver-Bartholomew says Barbie could be used for evangelization, providing evidence that Christians “have a sense of humor, we can be fun.” Precisely. The woman priest removes the stern face and the furrowed brow from Christianity. She makes God an easygoing guy or even an appealing blonde.

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HERE’S from a hilarious piece in The Onion that shows “sexism is rampant in nature”: Read More »

JOHN WRITES:

Thank you for your wonderful website. Usually I agree with mostly everything you write, but I have to take exception to this statement: 

“It is wrong to say that all egalitarian marriages are bad, just as it is inaccurate to say that all traditional marriages are good.” Read More »

MARKYMARK WRITES:

I clicked on your link to the Politico piece on Michele Bachmann & Sarah Palin. If not for the conservative terminology, I’d have thought I was listening to a couple of feminists! What’s sad is that the big, conservative commentators (Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, et al) lionize Bachmann & Palin; why, they’re The Second Coming! When Palin made her crack about having a woman do something you want done, I could see no difference between her or any of the NOW Gang. If this is what conservatism has morphed into, we’re done; as a people, a culture, and a nation, we’re done. Read More »

In 1790, the average white woman in America gave birth to eight children. The white population doubled every twenty-two years. Today, according to the latest birth statistics, the average white woman gives birth to 1.84 children, not enough to replace the current white population and not enough to sustain economic growth in the long run, as economist John Mueller points out here.

This decline in our culture, this slow enervation of our people, has been worth it. The average woman no longer faces the indignities of a life centered on her domestic empire, with dozens of grandchildren to accompany her through old age. She is a free agent or, despite the wealth and comforts of the modern age, she is too poor to afford children. Fortunately, she is not anywhere near as stupid and unhappy as this woman, a typical domestic dingbat, painted in 1783 by Charles Wilson Peale.

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WHEN A WOMAN obtains a position of power, whether it be president of a university or bishop of a church, the fact that she is a woman must be celebrated and analysed. If she is a CEO, we must hear how she became what she is and what it is like to be in her shoes. If she is a congresswoman, she must speak about seamlessly melding the private and public, how it really isn’t that difficult to do everything at once. If she is a judge, we must get her deepest thoughts on all those years in which women were not judges.

Not only do these reflections on the miracle of a woman’s ascension become distracting to the business at hand and mind-numbingly boring, they subtly transform the public perception of what power is. The idea that power entails self-erasure and an awareness of responsibilities becomes secondary to  power as self-fulfillment. The same script is played again and again. Unless a woman is unusually manly and eschews all this attention, the occasion of her job becomes an occasion to celebrate self. Once many women pass into power, the public realm is transformed. It is less a drama of ideas and competing objectives and more the arena of striving personalities battling the odds.

This will never change. No matter how many women become judges and presidents, this will be part of the nature of women in public life. As Lawrence Auster stated in the previous entry, men do not publicly marvel over their accomplishments in the same way. Women always will because of their inborn preoccupation with the personal and because public power is not their native element.

Men in power also do not analyse the male “stereotypes” reinforced by their example. That’s the other inevitable feminist preoccupation. We must delve into the stereotypes a prominent woman reinforces. In what way does she confirm that women are still oppressed despite their power? Here is a perfect example of this thinking. New York Magazine reflects on the different stereotypes that Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin represent. Yes, these women are the most powerful women in the world, but in what way do they only confirm that women are still being held down? Amanda Fortini concludes that Clinton is the classic “bitch” and Palin the “ditz.” She writes: “The vice-grip of female stereotypes remains suffocatingly tight.”

And, indeed it does. That’s because women will always be women.

No matter how many women have attained power, the Year of the Woman will never end. It will be the perpetual Year of the Woman, the Month of the Woman, the Day of the Woman, and the Hour of the Woman.  We will never be able to put down our pom poms and simply do the job.

IN THIS RECENT ENTRY, a reader named Jesse provided fascinating information on fertility statistics, past and present. He has a remarkable command of the numbers. I was curious to know why he had researched all this and devoted so much of his time to data on unwed motherhood and falling birth rates.

In response, Jesse sent this brief essay.

    “Why I Turned against Feminism”

I first turned against feminism when I was 24 years old, in 1995. I was influenced back then by a cultural conservative revival. I first heard of “out-of-wedlock births” as a problem in 1994 or maybe 1993. I sort of had an inkling I was against feminism for about six months before. But from childhood to age 23, I was a feminist just like everybody else. Indeed, there didn’t seem to be any other choice. Feminism was like a state of being, merely the way of the world, the way things were. Feminism was simply an expression of common sense and common courtesy. The idea that feminism was an “ideology” that people may or may not agree with never really occured to me. 

Anyway, what changed things for me is this. I was trying to figure out how to get a girlfriend and what I could do to be of value to a woman. My number one priority emotionally was how to make myself attractive to a woman. Well, daydreaming and fantasizing about what the ideal family life would be like I developed the fantasy of me taking care of the woman while she raised my children. I had the idea of making money, of being a big strong man and of her being happy as I provided her with a safe, secure and comfortable home where she could dedicate herself to the raising of our children.

The amazing thing is, this fantasy just kind of welled up inside of me. It was like it was instinctual or something. The fantasy felt so wonderful and happy. I thought to myself, “Eureka! This is how I can have value to women. I can be a breadwinner and a provider!” It was a great victory. Finally I had a rational way of developing myself in a direction that would appeal to a woman. 

Then, darker thoughts came to me. I thought, feminists wouldn’t want me to be that kind of man; that feminists were opposed to me fulfilling this happy fantasy that I had developed. This filled me with rage. How dare they try to sabotage my life. It was as if feminists wanted to destroy any opportunity I had for a woman to love me, that feminists wanted me to live a desolate life without meaning and that no woman would ever love me if I went along with who feminists wanted me to be as a man. 

So, after realizing that feminists were opposed to my dream of becoming a provider and protector of women that is when I absolutely turned against feminism and decided that I was going to become the man I wanted to become and that I thought I should become whether they liked it or not. Soon afterwards I started to see feminism as not only my enemy but as an enemy of society in general. I saw that the problems that I suffered other people were suffering too, and that indeed many of the problems of society had their root in the harmful effects of feminism on human relationships.

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THE NEWS that the illegitimacy rate among American blacks is now over 72 percent, and has climbed significantly in the past three years, is more depressing confirmation that one major portion of the American population lives in a post-family world, a place of everyday chaos and callousness. 

Even taking into account the significant innate differences between blacks and whites, differences which make traditional family formation less likely for blacks, these statistics carry important lessons for both blacks and whites, who now have an almost 30 percent illegitimacy rate.  The collapse of the black family reflects a collapse in masculinity. It is the inevitable outcome of the loss of the male provider and of state-supported economic independence for black women.

Elizabeth Wright, conservative black author and blogger at Issues and Views, writes in an essay on black men:

Those black men of that earlier period of our history, who took the lead in entrepreneurial activities, were looked upon as the natural authority figures in their communities, held in regard by their peers and respected by the young. They were driven by the same natural urges so well described in George Gilder’s book, Men and Marriage—an innate understanding of their, dare we say it?, masculine responsibility. Read More »

J. writes:

I found this Facebook post so depressing and sad. In fact most young women say just what she has posted. These days it takes a rebel to declare she wants a home, a husband, and children. This woman is getting a lot of “atta girl” comments. I’m a simple woman so I haven’t said much, but I forsee a stressed unhappy woman in the future with no inner peace. Read More »