The small town of Castellammare di Stabia near Naples has imposed fines on women who wear tiny miniskirts, extremely revealing tops and low-slung jeans. The mayor of the town, Luigi Bobbio, said not all miniskirts are affected by the ordinance passed last weekend, “just the really slutty ones.”

According to Blast Magazine, Bobbio said, “the skirt is absolutely allowed and permitted. The regulation, how easily you can guess if you do not fall into the easy manipulation, is not aimed at banning this or that piece of clothing, but to give the city and precise coordinates of the citizens of civilized behavior to respect the freedom of each and therefore the freedom of all. ” His point in this mangled translation appears to be that too much exposed skin undermines a sense of order. (more…)

THE DAILY MAIL examines the trend of British career women converting to Islam. Many of them do so after dating a Muslim man. Some describe their sense of higher purpose after their conversion.  

By the way, Lauren Booth, Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, converted to Islam SIX WEEKS AGO. She experienced a mystical revelation at a shrine in Qom and then six weeks later broadcast her conversion to the entire world.

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THE ENTRY “Do I Believe What I Believe?” is now very long and includes a number of interesting side issues such as whether pronouns used in reference to God should be capitalized. But the main question was:  Do I believe? And the answer is, yes. I believe because it is reasonable to believe.

Here is an apt quote, sent by reader James H., from Hilaire Belloc’s The Great Heresies:

        The last category of fruits by which we may judge the character of the Modern Attack consists in the fruit it bears in the field of the intelligence, what it does to human reason. 

        When the Modern Attack was gathering, a couple of lifetimes ago, while it was still confined to a small number of academic men, the first assault upon reason began. It seemed to make but little progress outside a restricted circle.  The plain man and his common-sense (which are the strongholds of reason) were not affected. Today they are.  (more…)

  THIS ARTICLE about how the new health care law will deny tax breaks for breast pumps is typical of the sort of public controversies that come with nationalized medicine. This mind-numbing distraction and pettiness will become routine. When Obama  ran for election, he spoke about the need for every woman to get free mammograms. Imagine George Washington talking about a medical procedure, particularly a diagnostic medical procedure, as if it were a pressing national concern. Socialism drags down the entire mental life of a nation.

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Everything means something, the Good Lovelies and the Viswijfenkoor not being excepted. For what it’s worth, I concur with Laura that the Good Lovelies put me off; the little-girl, sleepover antics and the false lesbianism are inconsistent with my sense of adult femininity. The Dutch ladies of the Viswijfenkoor play at nothing, make no attempt to doll themselves up, but sing lustily and are unmistakably female. In these traits they strike me as more feminine, actually, than the trio of teasing come-on girls. Laura mentioned the four girls of Kraja, the Swedish folk-group. They are in their late teens and early twenties, but their presentation is not “girlish” in any pejorative sense; they maintain a happy (sometimes a solemn) dignity (depending on the song) that requires no antics. They have enormous natural charm, an essential component of which is an unstudied modesty. I very much liked the Quebe Sisters. Playing the fiddle signifies plenty of discipline over the years, and their choice of repertory is refreshingly non-contemporary. The last fact suggests their healthy independence from “youth culture.” Does anyone remember the Elvis film, Viva Las Fishwives?

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  JOSH F. writes: I believe it to be a dangerous illusion to view Muslim women as  oppressed. After all, good, devout Muslim women are mothers of devout  jihadists. In fact, when one really absorbs the head-to-toe covering  of a devout Muslim woman, it is hard not to see the uniform of a  warrior. The amorphous, ambiguous, unpredictable essence of the  "dress" gives indication of intelligent life, but that's it. I was at  Sea World when I first observed this military garb. It was futuristic and Star Wars-like. The movement underneath seemed gateless, travelled without effort then stood motionless. Repeat. A small perfectly  retangular "slit" for vision and eyes hidden in shade. I didn't see  oppression. I saw assertion.

A READER writes:

I appreciated your brief thoughts in reaction to the United Nations’ report on the global lot of women.  The subject it raises is one that always causes me to wonder just how clearly we in the West see reality when we choose to analyze societies in points East, especially when these analyses delve into relationships between the sexes.  The assertion that seems to always surface is that women are oppressed, and men are their oppressors.  Rather, even more than asserted, it is assumed and taken for granted that this is the defining characteristic of life for a woman who lives in eastern, especially Islamic, societies.  The woman is bound and chained, a prisoner in her own society, and it is unthinkable that she could be happy.  After all, she is not even allowed to drive a car!      (more…)

A WOMAN almost never does something that will bring about social annihilation for herself or her family. Men are more influential in shaping society through idea. Women are more influential in shaping it through form. Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative considers the case of Lauren Booth, the sister-in-law of Tony Blair who recently converted to Islam. My guess is that she sought to embrace God in a socially acceptable form. She might have lost more friends if she had become a pious Christian than a pious Muslim. She did not risk social annihilation, not in the self-annihilating, anti-Christian Europe of today. More Western women will probably follow in her footsteps. (more…)

FRED OWENS writes:

The Good Lovelies are a trio of young women who graduated from my college — St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. It was a wonderful, joyful Catholic community when I attended in the 1960s. And when I see these sweet young women and hear their voices raised in harmony, I remember the good girls I dated back when I was young. (more…)

  THE SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES between male and female voters are apparent in this recent poll of Pennsylvanians.  Pat Toomey, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, leads among male voters by 54 to 40 percent and has a statistically insignificant lead overall. U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, his Democratic opponent, is preferred by 53 to 42 percent of women voters.

  DID YOU ever in your wildest dreams imagine the day when the foremost international organization was monitoring housework around the world? That day has arrived. The United Nations considers your laundry its business. It must make sure men are doing enough. The United Nations is the world's most powerful and highly-funded promoter of animosity and division between the sexes, stoking this ill-feeling with an unending profusion of reports and a blizzard of misleading statistics. Every sign of difference in any culture around the world is a sign of the active campaign by men against women. The global lot of women is dire. But it is not life itself that makes things hard, it is men: men who rape and kill and keep women from going to school, men who refuse to let women have their own businesses and men who do not provide women with enough counseling. The United Nations are united against men.

IT’S SEVERAL weeks old, but this New York Times interview with Gloria Feldt, former head of Planned Parenthood, is worth reading for its insights into the feminist mind, particularly for its stunning admission that feminists consider housewives to be traitors. Simone de Beauvoir claimed it was wrong to be a housewife. Feldt agrees. She says this of unemployed women:

They make it harder for the rest of us to remedy the inequities that remain. We have to make young women aware of how their choices affect other women. It should be acceptable criticism to point out that, although everyone has the right to make their own life decisions, choosing to “opt out” reinforces stereotypes about women’s priorities that we’ve been working for decades to shatter, so just cut it out. And, the “individual choice” women have to become stay-at-home moms becomes precarious when they try to return to the workplace and find their earning power and options reduced. If we could see child-rearing as a necessary task and not an identity, and if we could collectively recognize that facilitating it benefits us all, we would go much further in guaranteeing women’s choices than we do when we are expected to uncritically celebrate every individual’s decisions[emphasis mine]

When feminists say that they only want freedom of choice for women, they are either lying or inadvertently stating a falsehood. The society that does not explicitly support and celebrate the unpaid mother and wife is waging a battle against her.

Feldt also candidly admits that feminism is a war against men. She says, “It’s partly about overcoming social norms that overemphasize niceness, deference and attractiveness to the opposite sex.” She says women create “barriers’ for other women by being polite toward men in business meetings or agreeing to take on the lion’s share of household duties.

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  LYDIA SHERMAN reflects on a visit by a friend from South Africa who is amazed by the honesty and trust common in this country. In some areas, people leave their doors unlocked. Porch furniture is never stolen. Farmers leave cans of money by tables of produce and trust that buyers will leave what they owe.

IF YOU are stubbornly bourgeois, you may enjoy the links to recordings of some of the most sumptuously melodic classical compositions of mid-nineteenth century Europe in this entry. If you take the time to listen to these recordings, I guarantee you will not be disappointed. Thomas F. Bertonneau has added some great examples to the list.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

Bruch’s D-Minor Violin Concerto, his Scottish Fantasy, Raff’s C-Minor Piano Concerto, and Lalo’s Norwegian Fantasyhave in common, with each other and with much of mid-nineteenth century “classical” composition, a basis in folk music.  Bruch, Raff, and Lalo, representatively for Romantic composers, strove to write singable melody; they often did this by mining the treasury of actual folksong, in a way that is obvious in Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and Lalo’s Norwegian Fantasy,but rather less obvious (but no less the case) in the purely abstract scores.  The snobbism of twentieth century academicism declared peremptorily that such immediate appeal to ordinary and recognizable emotion was “inauthentic.”  (See Theodore W. Adorno.) (more…)

  VIEW the very funny David Zucker video spoofing Sen. Barbara Boxer at RightChange.com  here.

MAX BRUCH, the mid-nineteenth century German composer and pianist, completed the first draft of his Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor Op. 26 in 1866. The violinist Joseph Joachim made suggestions for revisions and premiered the piece in Bremen in 1868. It was an instant success, eventually eclipsing all of Bruch’s other compositions. Violins seemed to “play the piece by themselves,” said the somewhat irritated composer.

They still do. This is one of the most beautiful pieces ever written for the instrument. It will never die.

Sadly, Bruch took a one-time payment. If he had agreed to royalties, his estate would have received payments for the concerto until 1990, according to his biographer. Instead, his daughter Margarethe, who passionately promoted her father’s work after his death, died in poverty.

If you have never heard this sublime work for violin, I highy recommend the 1962 recording by Jascha Heifetz and the New Symphony Orchestra of London. The first movement, which my older son played to a standing ovation at his school three years ago and which I had the pleasure of hearing him practice for many hours, is breathtaking. You can hear the second movement here and the dramatic finale here.

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  THE NORTHEASTERN hardwood forests of America are spectacular always, but never more than at this time of year. When the trees reach their autumnal climax, the forest is in flame. Embers of leaf burn at our feet. We live inside a massive hearth, torched by tree. The deciduous tree speaks of illuminated manuscript and gilded hallways, of morning and mourning. The tree smolders for two weeks before it is fully extinguished. The whole speaks to us, as Robert Frost said, "as if it were leaf to leaf." A poet of New England is a poet of leaves. He said there is no reason we have to go because they have to go.