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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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 »

JESSE POWELL WRITES:

The federal government has released the preliminary birth data for 2008. For the first time the out-of-wedlock birth ratio is over 40 percent in the United States, at 40.6. For non-Hispanic whites the ratio is at 28.6 percent; for Hispanics (who may be of any race) it is 52.5 percent. For non-Hispanic blacks it is at 72.3 percent.

Of special note, the black out-of-wedlock birth ratio stayed about the same for 10 whole years, from 1995 until 2005 at about 70 percent (in 1995 it was 69.9 and in 2005 it was 69.3.) One would have hoped that this ratio had hit some kind of natural ceiling and that it couldn’t go any higher. Perhaps that was the end point of family breakdown and human resiliency meant it couldn’t continue to climb. Sadly, that is not the case. The black out-of-wedlock birth ratio has risen steadily and quickly for three years in a row. In 2005, the non-Hispanic black out-of-wedlock birth ratio was 69.9. In 2006, it was 70.7. In 2007, it was 71.6 and in 2008, 72.3 percent.  Read More »

IT IS WRONG to say that all egalitarian marriages are bad, just as it is inaccurate to say that all traditional marriages are good. In fact, there are some very happy ones in the former category. Nevertheless, the significantly higher divorce rate among dual-career couples is no statistical quirk. There is sometimes a level of suspicion and tension in the egalitarian marriage that is utterly contrary to its ideals of equity and the sharing of burdens. There is, among other problems, what Mrs. Pilgrim calls this “fear of being snookered.”

I ran into a friend today who is a typical casualty in many ways of one of these strange and unnatural bonds. 

He was disposing of debris outside his home and I stopped to talk.

Will his wife be moving back in?, I asked. We know each other well enough for me to pry.

No, he said. She will not be moving back in. In fact, pretty soon they will both be gone. They will be selling their house.

Read More »

GUY, the pseudonymous author of What Women Never Hear, the Internet’s best source of love advice for women, regularly opens the car door for his wife. In a recent post, his wife describes the reaction of a man who witnessed this uncommon scene.

Guy remarks, “Until women figure out how to get men to change, men will continue to let their women flop around in an atmosphere of manly inattentiveness.” It’s true. Opening a car door may seem a trivial thing, but it is symbolic of the feminine privileges, including complete dependency on one man, exchanged for the cold and heartless certainties of money and power.

IN THIS PREVIOUS entry, a feminist executive laid out her vision of the egalitarian dual-income marriage, stating that it is more romantic, fairer and less stressful than the traditional model of a working husband and homemaking wife. There is nothing new about what she says. It is now utterly mainstream. Many accept it and many others believe the traditional marriage is no longer economically possible. Of course, believing it is no longer possible, regardless of whether or not that is true, ensures that it is no longer possible.

Here, a reader responds to our feminist commenter’s specific points.

James P. writes:

Maggie Fox writes,

“I stand by my statement that power corrupts. I have personally experienced the temptations of power. How easy it is in a position of power to arrange matters to suit one’s own convenience! How easy it is to become arrogant, or give short shrift to people who need things from you!”

This is the tedious feminist view that everything is a function of power relations. The idea that a man who is a sole provider has – or wants – a slave to exploit is simply weird. A normal man regards the women he loves as a treasure to be cherished, not as a resource to be utilized and arrogantly commanded. This is even more true if she is the mother of his children. And if he does want a female slave, how is it possible to obtain one in a world where no-fault divorce and restraining orders are readily obtainable? Read More »

CHRISTOPHER ROACH WRITES:

I found this story about women protesting different standards regarding male and female nudity quite funny in its earnestness, and the simultaneous demand to (a) show off sexual power while (b) castigating men for being victims of the same.

Read More »

MRS. PILGRIM WRITES:

Your continuing conversation with Ms. Fox has raised some points in my mind.

Ms. Fox is quite, quite adamant that “power corrupts,” and this is why she so vehemently opposes male authority; it might, maybe, could possibly be abused at some point to the detriment of some dumb woman who was fool enough to trust the fellow. This seemed like an interesting line of thought, so I proceeded along with it: Any situation in which one person has another at a disadvantage, requiring that the latter rely on the former for his well-being, must be eliminated in the interests of avoiding abuse of power.

Thus, we must bid farewell to the lawyer, the surgeon, the teacher, the psychiatrist, the architect–anyone who, by virtue of having greater knowledge of a subject than others, might abuse the trust that others would place in him. After all, what if the lawyer sells you out to your opponents in exchange for a healthy bribe? What if the surgeon performs an unnecessary procedure on you? What if the architect designs your house badly? What if, what if, what if? What if we started treating any specialist with the same kind of mistrust as Ms. Fox seems to demonstrate for her own husband (or at least advocates that every woman share)?

I submit that, not only would the economy come to a screeching halt, but our government would utterly dissolve — because, after all, aren’t those “representatives” we elected in a position to abuse the power we just handed them?

Extreme, is it? Ah, but it’s all the same attitude. Where does it stop, this fear of being snookered?

Ms. Fox basically proposes that trust somehow reduces or removes one’s capacity for love, and this proposal should boggle anyone’s mind. What, precisely, does she think “love” is, if relying on someone else to provide something needed can only destroy it? How does she square this “love” with the need to maintain permanent defensive walls against the possibility of being had? She claims that traditional wives “have difficulty relaxing in their own homes as they struggle to care for everyone else,” but how can the egalitarian wife ever relax if she must be on her guard against her own husband?

I think you are certainly correct, Mrs. Wood, to point out that she accuses traditional wives of being mercenary, but the question still remains why she, a very obvious egalitarian feminist, thinks that an emotional response to hormonal fluctuations heightened by temporary infatuation ranks higher in morality or self-interest than a careful consideration of the character of a prospective husband. She is saying, in effect, “Since I have my own paycheck, I can feel free to take up with any jack-leg who makes me giggle when we’re drunk“–and that this is superior! (Also, it raises the question of whether feminism is really about equality, and not about making men into lapdogs and women into wards of the State?)

I submit that, for all her talk, she cannot bring herself to trust Mr. Fox, and rationalizes it as normal and even desirable. I further submit that she undercuts her own feminism by arguing that diversity is not merely unproductive but detrimental to any functional relationship (“We understand each other’s problems at work because we have both had similar experiences”). Read More »