FROM THE SMOKING GUN:

For the second time in recent weeks, a chapter of the Pi Beta Phi sorority is being accused of drunkenly trashing a facility during a formal dance. At a March 6 party sponsored by the group’s Ohio University chapter, attendees engaged in sex acts, used plates as “missiles” during food fights, vomited on carpets, defecated in urinals, and tried to tear off the clothes of a female bartender, according to a letter written by the director of the West Virginia art center where the formal was held. Read More »

JOHN P. WRITES:

I’d like to offer a contrarian view of your post on graduation levels of men and women.

If I understand correctly Jesse Powell’s statistics are aggregate graduation rates for all undergraduate degrees. However, most undergraduate degrees are awarded for liberal arts courses, history, psychology, sociology, English, etc. I don’t have the stats handy but I’m pretty sure that if you look at graduation rates for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields you will find they are preponderantly awarded to men. Read More »

PEOPLE who make bread are the happiest people in the world.

Look at this painting by the Dutch master Jan Steen, The Leiden Baker Arend Oostwaert and His Wife. Notice how glowing Arend is and how sallow his wife. That’s obviously because he is the handler of the dough. Kneading dough is an unparalleled sensual experience and Arend’s countenance speaks of this ancient reality. I mean, it’s almost unparalleled. Anyone who makes bread from scratch at least once a week is guaranteed sanity and a better disposition than if he didn’t make bread once a week. People who never make bread suffer from repression. It doesn’t matter what it tastes like. Making it is good enough.

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Do you remember the glass slipper and the poisoned apple, the damsel with hair dangling from a tower window and the whole castle fast asleep? The Age of the Fairy Tale is past, dear reader. Today, we only have tales of self-fulfillment, of the social atom seeking fusion. Here is a perfect example.  In a new book, three women describe their quest for motherhood. Complete with donated sperm, abortion, miscarriage, and marriage at the last minute, it’s an anti-morality play that ends in motherhood for all. The New York Times writes:

Three would-be mothers, some “lucky” sperm and — voilà! — three happy families, with all of the pregnancies happening the old-fashioned way. Read More »

BRISTOL PALIN entered a new phase of celebrity last week when it was announced that she has signed a contract with a high-end promoter as a public speaker. She will earn as much as $30,000 per engagement to share her insights into single motherhood and sexual abstinence. Only 19, Bristol is almost assured of success in this new endeavor. Even if her speaking ability is modest, she is likely to grow in celebrity and touch a chord in many.  That’s because Bristol represents a new kind of woman who is looking for recognition and reassurance. 

Though the Palins are now wealthy and famous, this new kind of woman is neither. She is likely to have a high school education, perhaps a community college degree, maybe a couple of years of college. An interesting and lucrative career is not in her future. She will work for most of her life in jobs that are just jobs. Her love life, her friends and children are the center of things. She is enough of a traditionalist to reject abortion, but not enough of a traditionalist to reject sex before marriage.  That’s why she finds herself where she is. She is a mother but not a wife.

She is a heroine because she has rejected abortion. She is a loser because she has had premarital sex in a post-marital age. Read More »

SCIENTISTS HAIL the creation of artifical life, drawing attention to intelligence and creativity. This development is missing the spontaneity of Darwinian processes.

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KAREN I. writes:

It is interesting that Siti “kind of assumes you draw your inspiration” from the fifties. I am sure she is not alone in that and you even agreed, saying “the word housewife conjures images of that era, doesn’t it?” As a housewife today, I wonder why the 1950s are so consistently associated with being a housewife. There is a curiosity about housewives of that era that does not exist for any other time, even though some women have always been housewives. Read More »

LAWRENCE AUSTER compares Michelle’s shocking appearance last night at a state dinner to Victor Mature in a gladiator movie. Our First Lady appears to have been slathered with oil, as if she’s about to enter the Coliseum. Auster writes, “Michelle is to female style and attractiveness what her husband’s presidency is to America–a deliberate transgression, aimed at redefining it as something else.”

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 CHRISTOPHER ROACH WRITES HERE:

One interesting phenomenon of our times is that the old-fashioned view that one may act on the basis of sincere belief has been hammered out of existence. We don’t even say, “I think” or “I believe” anymore. It’s “I feel.”

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LISA BELKIN, of The New York Times, is to feminist propaganda what the H. J. Heinz Company is to ketchup. If you look at the enormous smokestacks of a Heinz factory, you get some idea of what goes on in there. Heinz keeps churning it out and people keep lapping it up. It’s the same thing with this one-woman factory of feminist lies and inanities. People apparently love it even though it sticks in the bottle. Now I know you will say that’s unfair. Ketchup is good and Heinz is the best. But it’s literally true and you’ll have to take your ketchup sensitivities elsewhere.

The latest Belkinism comes in the form of this article about the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. Lisa is ever ready to launch into artlessly contorted logic to prove that women are oppressed despite outrageous favoritism and she doesn’t depart from her high standards here. She is skeptical about the correctness of Kagan as a nominee. Kagan is not a mother and thus her nomination gives the untutored masses the impression that a mommy cannot rise to the highest pinnacles of power. This is pernicious discrimination against mommies. (Like all feminists, Belkin can’t imagine that the welfare of children might be anywhere in the picture.) There are hockey moms and soccer moms and PTA moms. Why not Supreme Court moms? It’s true that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, by some fluke of nature, is a mother and so is Sandra Day O’Connor, but Sonia Sotomayor and Kagan are not. That’s unfair. Look at all the daddy judges.

Here is what I propose. Let all the genetics labs and fertility clinics in the country devote themselves to this just cause. Let’s make Sotomayor and Kagan mommies. Even if we have to resort to cloning, let’s get the job done. It’s only fair.

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SINCE 2000, the male employment rate has dropped by nine percentage points. The female employment rate has declined by less than five points. The difference will almost certainly be less extreme once the recession ends and traditionally male fields such as construction recover. Nevertheless, these differentials have changed radically in the past 60 years. The male employment rate was 57 percentage points higher in 1950, which explains some of what I noted about the fifties here. It is now about 11 points higher than the female employment rate. As of 2007, about 25 percent of women worked part-time while 10.5 percent of men did.

Here is a table illustrating the employment rates for men and women aged 25 to 54. The sources for these numbers can be found here and here. Read More »

Francesco Guardi's Venice Viewed from the Bacino

IN ITS MISSION STATEMENT, the Center for Literate Values, which was recently vandalized by a computer hacker, states:

The literate individual is vanishing. We who teach have seen with our own eyes the decline of analytical finesse and expressiveness in our composition classes over the past two or three decades. We who have children have struggled to keep their moral acumen focused upon the small, persistent inner voice of conscience rather than upon what celebrities are doing or what passes for “cool” on Facebook. All of us have converged upon a basic realization, whether persuaded of it by theory or driven to it by hard experience: i.e., that the West has entered a post-literate stage. Read More »

SITI WRITES:

I’m a student at Dekalb High School, Illinois, and I’m doing a project on women in the fifties for my U.S. History class. I came across The Thinking Housewife, and was wondering what you would have to say about women then — the education of, the roles of, etc. I kind of assume you draw inspiration for your ideas from that time period, and I think your opinions would be relevant. Of course I’ll cite you and your website. Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU WRITES:

Here is a story that points to the arrogance and destructiveness of the American Left. 

More than a decade ago, when I served for a year as executive director of then newly constituted Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, I came into contact with John Harris of Tyler, Texas, who already for some years had been issuing a print journal, called Arcturus, from his small press of that name. John sent me samples of Arcturus and asked whether I might mention it in the ALSC newsletter, which I did. Read More »

LAURA BUSH told Fox News yesterday that she approved of Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Kagan is a woman, and that’s good enough for Mrs. Bush. Imagine a man making this stupendously superficial assessment of a judicial candidate and getting away with it.

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THE PAST 40 years have seen a significant decline in male achievement in America. Men still earn more as a group, but this fact belies the real story. There is a remarkable lag in male success, as reflected in educational attainment, employment rates and wages. Looking at these figures, some of which are assembled in tables below, one is tempted to speak of the progressive economic destruction of manhood.

Larger economic forces, the cultural redefinition of sex roles and the subsequent diminishing of male initiative all appear to play a role. The downward spiral of the American family is not simply a reflection of the sexual revolution, at least not a direct reflection of it. The increase in out-of-wedlock births parallels the drop in male success with lockstep predictability. However, the sexual revolution did remove one major incentive for men to achieve.

The ratio of men graduating from college compared to women has fallen by 50 percent in the last 40 years, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. This figure more than any other speaks of a decline in male initiative. The male employment rate dropped by three percent from 1980 to 2008 while the female rate grew by more than 12 percent. Median wages for men, in the 25 to 54 age group, remained flat from 1973 to 2007 while hourly wages for women increased by 30 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This is a stunning statistic. For 34 years, the middle income man saw no progress, a possibly unprecedented period of stagnation since the advent of modern capitalism. These figures do not include the latest recession, widely reported to have been especially damaging to men.

Below is an interesting chart. It shows Census Bureau figures for college graduation rates of whites (including Hispanics), ages 25-29. A declining male to female ratio first appears in 1975. Read More »

 

Cynthia Davis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MISSOURI is the latest testing ground in the slowly evolving battle against no-fault divorce. A state legislator introduced a bill this winter that would make it significantly more difficult for couples with children to divorce. The bill introduced by Rep. Cynthia Davis requires petitioners for divorce to prove adultery, repeated and substantiated physical abuse, mental incapacity for three years or desertion in cases in which the non-petitioning spouse does not consent to dissolution of the marriage. Standards would be looser for couples without children.

On her website, Davis, who is the mother of seven children, writes:

Under our current laws the innocent spouse can lose their home, finances and custody of their child / children while the guilty frequently get to walk away with a check for the marital equity and very little responsibility for ruining the lives of all the others involved.

June Carbone, law professor at the University of Missouri, is one of the most outspoken critics of the bill. She raises the specter of “battered women” who will be unable to obtain a divorce because the standard for abuse is too high. In this article, in which Carbone attributes provisions to the bill that are not stated in the text, she objects that spouses must prove physical abuse with concrete evidence or testimony from non-family members and that the abuse must occur more than once.

The bill waives the requirement for proven abuse, adultery or desertion in the cases of couples who have been living apart for two years. This seems to be a serious weakness in the measure. It means that a spouse could leave the home and obtain a unilateral divorce by simply waiting.

Not surprisingly, the state’s lawyers have come out against the new bill, partly out of what they claim to be their magnanimous concern for children. Read More »

IF LABORATORY SCIENTISTS succeed in generating life from non-living matter, will they solidify the case for Darwinian evolution? Thomas F. Bertonneau, in a recent article at The American Thinker, explains why scientists will instead buttress the anti-Darwin forces. The logic is so simple that most people probably won’t automatically see it when biochemists someday, with breathless headlines in all the major newspapers and science magazines, proudly proclaim the genesis of life in a test tube.