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.

IF YOU have any doubt that modern society is suffering from a profound disintegration in literacy and mental coherence, I invite you to read this excerpt from The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance and Democracy’s Future by the famous Harvard psychologist and madwoman Carol Gilligan and David A. J. Richards. The book was published by Cambridge University Press and was presumably edited. If I weren’t already acquainted with the science and code words of victimology, I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what the authors are saying. The audience for this book has a Pavlovian response to words like “patriarchy”and “women.” All the other words are filler.

Liberalism destroys the mind. It creates fissures in cerebral tissue that widen with time.

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  [T]he best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it.  ... [W]hile the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda.                                 ---   G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

NOTICE THE blasé, non-committal way the Mayo Clinic discusses the link between breast cancer and birth control pills at its website:

The effect of birth control pills on breast cancer risk isn’t quite clear. However, some studies do show a link between pill use and breast cancer. Key factors seem to be how many years you take the pill and how recently you last used the pill. In one study, use of birth control pills led to a higher risk of premenopausal breast cancer in women who took the pill for four or more years before having a baby. Other evidence suggests that 10 or more years after you stop taking the pill, your breast cancer risk returns to the same level as if you had never taken birth control pills. (more…)

ROGER writes:

What a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man.

Just to show that a group of people at a crisis doesn’t always act like a vicious mob, years ago I chanced by a crowd that had just formed where a jumper was spotted up on a building. You read how in these circumstances, everyone is chanting “Jump! Jump!” Well I assure you, we were all hollering at him to stop, reconsider, get back in, etc. One woman was yelling that Jesus loved him (I’m a Jew, but I applaud the sentiment). Particularly impressive was the man near me who (at the top of his voice, so he could only get out a few words at a time) bellowed, “YOU’RE TAKING…A PERMANENT…SOLUTION TO… A TEMPORARY…PROBLEM!!” I looked at him and said, “Damn, you’re good!” He replied, “Throw it all up there and hope something sticks.” After a few minutes the police arrived, and chased us away so the experts could handle things. Eventually the poor fellow was talked down. Anyway, I don’t see how we did any harm. It couldn’t have hurt for him to know that we were rooting for him. (more…)

HOLLY WRITES:

If I may be so bold, I am curious about Christianity with regards to your traditionalist views. Do you espouse Christianity because it is the moral and ethical framework that our culture’s traditions were based on, and because an embracing of it is most likely to bring traditionalism back? Or do you truly believe in the very specific details of the faith — i.e. that Jesus was actually, physically, born of a literal virgin, physically died and was resurrected, etc.?

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  HERE is a heart-warming story about a man who has managed to coax would-be suicides off the sandstone cliffs of Sydney, Australia. If this man had been hired to do what he does, which is simply invite those about to jump into his home for tea, it would never have worked. Charity cannot be legislated.