IN HIS 2007 book In Praise of Prejudice, Theodore Dalrymple, who formerly worked as a clinical psychiatrist in Britain, offers a compelling theory for an increase in domestic violence. He attributes the rise to two factors: sexual freedom and the cult of non-judgmentalism. The first makes men insecure about the fidelity of their companions: 

How does a man who lives in a sexual free-for-all, in which any casual encounter between a man and a woman may lead to a sexual liaison, bind a woman to him with hoops of steel, to ensure her fidelity?  This is his problem, because he knows that his intrinsic charms, merits, and attractions are minimal, or at any rate, no greater than those of a thousand other men around him. 

In these circumstances, it is best to fill his beloved’s waking hours with thoughts of himself and with nothing but thoughts of himself. 

The second prevents women from judging the obvious and discriminating accordingly:

They have accepted, perhaps without knowing it, the modern prejudice against prejudice, a prejudice that in their case might have preserved them from beatings and sometimes from death itself.  The argument they have accepted goes something like this: the observation that men who dress and present themselves in a certain fashion and tattoo themselves heavily are bad men is at best a rough generalization, which is itself probably the result of class or ethical bias in the observer.

Dalrymple’s insights, based on encounters with “thousands” of men and women, are excellent and plausible. I highly recommend the book. Here are extensive quotes from Chapter 26, The Dire Social Effects of Abandoning Certain Prejudices. (more…)

FRED WRITES:

I really appreciate your work at The Thinking Housewife. It has made a difference in my life. As a life-long liberal I have had the gravest doubts about things, and I find that you have opened new doors of thought for me. It may have been that I was wrong about many things.

Wrong, but I don’t feel guilty and I don’t count it as a sin, to be wrong about things and to make great efforts in service of those wrongs.

(more…)

JOSH F. writes:

I’ve come to reject the “homeschooling” label. When people ask where my kids go to school, I simply tell them that they don’t go to “school.” They are educated, I say in a matter of fact manner, by myself and their mother. The idea behind rejecting this label is self-evident.  First, it’s entirely normal to be miffed by those that believe they are making a great sacrifice by “schooling” their kids with teacher experts. The time/money benefit alone provided by “school” is enough to put the “sacrifice” of “schooling” one’s children into serious perspective. I also have no desire to bring the isolated nature of  “school” into the home nor am I seeking to be part of a collective of  “homeschoolers.” (more…)

THE PIZZA industrial complex is spreading its tentacles day by day. Notice the fine print on this coupon.

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IMAGINE GIVING $100 million to a soulless, ineffective and corrupt bureaucracy to further its soulless, ineffective and corrupt projects. You might as well take tractor trailers full of cash, drive them to a major port, dump the cash in barges, haul the money out to sea and then dump it in a watery grave.

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A HOMESCHOOLING MOTHER writes:

Would that Oprah and Bill Gates would concern themselves with their own families and people in their local neighborhoods. Of course, they are historically common, the plutocrats who seek to incline the hearts and minds of our children toward their universal schemes (which is generally away from the traditions of their parents). 
 
The classicist Thomas Fleming discusses this and how to deal with it in his 2004 book, The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition.  I give but a fragment. (more…)

SCOTT M. writes:

The passing of Jill Johnston has conjured up some bitter memories of my melancholy college years. As an idly curious 19-year-old, I attended one of Johnston’s “lectures” at the student union at the University of Kansas not long after her book, Lesbian Nation, was making a splash in the fetid wading pool of what was known in those days as the “counter-culture.” Her very presence on a university campus was an admission by those in power that the “long march through the institutions” would be allowed to proceed apace, and that gratuitous freakishness could now be marketed as a stimulant. As Lady Gaga and many others have since learned, this is an irresistible enticement to those who are already convinced that they are freaks, and, that there will never be a home for them in the world until the norms are dismantled for everyone.  (more…)

I WAS SITTING in the front row of Sister Frances Michael’s second grade class when I had my first public attack of … internal chaos. It came without forewarning. I didn’t know I had a virus until it was too late. I felt the same uneasiness yesterday when I viewed this clip of Oprah and Bill Gates mulling over the education of millions of children. Whatever Bill and Oprah have in mind you can rest assured it does not involve freedom of choice for the ordinary citizen. We are the playthings of educational masterminds. It is not a question of whether they will control us, but how. They take delight not in the outcome of education, but in the process. The opportunities for managerial adventure are almost limitless. Public education is an extreme sport for the bored and wealthy. It is like Mount Everest: something to be scaled so that one can say one did it, a summit on which to stand and look down upon the rest of the world. (more…)

JOHN E. writes:

I’m looking forward to showing my daughter The Princess and the Pea as you have shown here. My wife or I at one time conveyed to our two-year-old daughter that there is such a story called The Princess and the Pea. A few months ago she wanted to hear this story every night before going to bed. Since I didn’t have the story available in print, I tried to indulge her by telling it from memory. I am a terrible story-teller, but apparently I got the basic idea across. A couple of nights ago, after I bid her hop into her bed for the night, she grabbed a baseball lying on the floor, lifted her little toddler mattress, and stuffed the ball underneath, exclaiming “It’s a pea!” Considering the relative size of the baseball, and the thickness of her single mattress, I guess she was leaving no room for doubt as to her princess-ly sensitivies!

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   THE WEBSITE Art Passions is a trove of works by some of the best 19th and 20th century illustrators of fairy tales and myths. You may have noticed the images I occasionally post from there. The site is the work of an anonymous woman artist devoted to these old story books. The artists featured include N.C. Wyeth, Gustav Doré, Adrienne Segur, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen and others. If you read fairy tales and myths to your children, I highly recommend this site, which is a labor of love. It is strange and wonderful that this form of technology can convey the pleasures of these antique illustrations. See Doré's dark and foreboding illustrations of Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy and Wyeth's images of the immortal Crusoe. Thank you, Art Passions!  

ROBIN writes:

Laura wrote: 

The egalitarian life the writers envision is a marriage breaker. It leads to continual domestic strife or domination of the man by the woman. 

This brings to mind a tragic story of marital dissolution in our dear friend, a man who wanted family, but sits alone today in a rented apartment in the ashes of feminist indoctrination.  (more…)

Reader N. writes:

It is good and wise of you to both call attention to the latest feminist tirade in Newsweek and to point out how the idea is wrong. Many women do not bother to criticize openly such ideas, and that is a grave error.

Why? Because while silence is not assent, it is not necessarily dissent, either. Men who see such articles even glancingly on the newsstand, and who hear no dissent or disagreement from women in their lives, are going to naturally assume that said women agree with it. And given that, more than a few will decide that “If that’s what women think of me, then I don’t need to be around them.” (more…)

IN ITS latest issue, Newsweek, as if in a burst of originality, calls on American men to buck up and be more like girls: more housework, more nurturing, and more of the jobs traditional associated with women. Now, it’s one thing to say that men must do feminine work out of dire necessity, but it’s quite another to say this represents something good, as Newsweek does.

The egalitarian life the writers envision is a marriage breaker. It leads to continual domestic strife or domination of the man by the woman. Women are inherently better at childcare and household management, and so the typical man will remain forever under a wife’s tutelage in these areas. Therefore, when men do these things at home, it is often as if he is doing them for the woman. In short, the idea of equality is a myth. (more…)

  THE LATEST development in the ongoing campaign to present Woman as victim is a digital clock in Times Square ticking off the deaths of women by childbirth (roughly 1,000 women a day worldwide.) The implication of the clock is that these maternal deaths are preventable. Risk-free childbirth is apparently a realistic goal. According to the Times, obesity is involved in half of the very small number of maternal deaths in New York City. You can safely bet there will never be a clock in Times Square counting the lives of children lost from abortion or inadequate care.

THE AUSTRALIAN intellectual magazine Quadrant features a two-part piece this month by Edwin Dyga on the political significance of the conservative blogosphere. It can be read online here and here. The Thinking Housewife, which saw its 1,000-post mark yesterday, is mentioned in the footnotes. Mr. Dyga says today’s conservative blogs may be tomorrow’s mainstream media:  

“With the right commitment and experience, today’s dissenters on the right could become part of tomorrow’s establishment; this can only have a positive influence on the next generation of journalists and politicians. Those who value popular democracy and free political expression have nothing to fear.” (more…)

AS I SAID earlier, it doesn’t matter whether same-sex marriage is approved by legislatures or courts, it is already gaining de facto recognition. Obituaries in The New York Times now refer to the “spouses” of same sex couples. Here’s today’s admiring obituary of Jill Johnston, author of Lesbian Nation, a book which touted female separatism in the 1970s.

Johnston, who died Saturday at the age of 81, was candid about the motives of feminism in an interview with The Gay and Lesbian Review four years ago:

“Once I understood the feminist doctrines, a lesbian separatist position seemed the commonsensical position, especially since, conveniently, I was an L-person… Women wanted to remove their support from men, the ‘enemy’ in a movement for reform, power and self-determination.” 

Now turn these words around and imagine The New York Times quoting a man who said he was part of a movement that viewed women as the “enemy” and sought power on behalf of men. (more…)