TWO MOTHERS of young children are running neck-and-neck for Congress in South Dakota. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, the Democratic incumbent who is a Georgetown law school graduate from a politically prominent family, is the mother of a two-year-old on a waiting list for daycare and Kristi Noem, the appealing state legislator who has managed to raise more than any other Republican Congressional challenger in recent months, has two teenagers and a seven-year-old. Both women promote their mommy-ness in their television ads. In this ad for Sandlin, she  is shown giving Zachary a bath. The Noem children appear in several commercials plugging for Mom. In an age of Mama Grizzlies, motherhood gives an air of down-to-earth authenticity to a candidate. The idea that young children might disqualify a woman from office is so passé no one even brings it up. To the contrary, a woman who can do all things is vital, her young children a political asset.

These two women are cut from different molds. Herseth Sandlin (her maiden name is Herseth) is a career politician and a right-leaning Democrat who supports abortion rights. Antipathy to the current Democrats is so strong in South Dakota that Herseth Sandlin is running behind Noem in recent polls. This is so even though Herseth Sandlin voted against Obamacare. Noem is a state legislator who helps run her family’s ranch, never went to college, likes to hunt and has a history of speeding on country roads. She has vowed to vote for repeal of Obamacare. Noem is articulate and extremely pretty. She comes across as genuine and serious, as if she has come to politics out of the call of duty. (more…)

Hurricane Betsy writes, in response to this post on play:

I sent my son to a pre-school (or whatever they call it) many years ago, one day per week, for two years. The Final Event at the year’s end took place at nearby Provincial Park, a beautiful, natural spot. The two daycare workers (older women) in charge set up 10 play stations in a clearing surrounded by old forest. The 50 children were divided into groups of 10 and would line up in front of each of these artificial activity centers, taking their turn at “playing.” One such play center was throwing a ball into a hoop; another was horseshoes; a little slide; and so on. All involved interaction with Fisher Price plastic play things on demand. After each child would dutifully do his play, he’d be ushered on to the next play station, all in proper military rotation. On and on it went, round and round.

Several times, a few children got fed up with this never-ending, on-command, artificial “play” and tried to run away toward the edge of the nearby bush away from the “We are Now Officially Having Fun” area. I saw all this, and I watched, stupefied, as the daycare workers chased after them and ordered them back into their line to continue their “play.”

Today, my heart aches when I recall this travesty.

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KILROY M. writes:

What Ian wrote  regarding Karen Owen’s attention to male anatomy might be the sort of thing often mocked by women as “male inadequacy fears.” I have heard women joke about this on numerous occasions at work, as if it were odd that men, being no less human than women, would indeed feel such anxiety. Meanwhile, these same women see female body images portrayed in the media as a gross crime against female psychological well-being. Of course the media images are unrealistic and cause emotional harm to women, but if what women say about men and their inflated egos is true, then similar objectification is likely to have greater psychological impact on boys. This will undoubtedly affect the future quality of marriage and the happiness of women. But for a woman to see this requires perceiving the bigger picture from a perspective not mired in “grrrl power” narcissism.  (more…)

PLAY is something a child does to fill up time. That’s the common view. A child is not yet an adult. He does not have the attention, dexterity, or focus to start and complete a task, and so he plays instead. It is not so important what he’s doing while he is playing, as long as he is safe, occupied and his time is filled.

Educational play teaches, but even with this kind of play, a child’s identity revolves more around what he is not (an adult) rather than what he is. Adults reorganize their lives to accomodate this incapacity of children. Both adults and children seem to co-exist in this state of waiting until childhood ends.

In truth, a child is more than an adult-in-waiting. Child’s play forms not just the developing person, but the world at large. The child plays because he is seeking to understand and to know. He wants to create something new. When a child plays, he is an actor in the drama of existence. He chooses. He decides. He loves. He thinks. He is free. Child’s play fertilizes all of society. It awakens adults from the slumber of rationality. For children, the spiritual dimension of existence, with both its good and its evil, is always close at hand. Imagination is the apprehension of the unseen. For a child, there is no gulf between the physical and the moral, the visible and the invisible. All reality is one. Things that are just things for us are filled with meaning.

That is why elaborate toys are a mistake for children. Elaborate toys, especially mechanical toys, deaden the imagination. The world as it is elicits a response from a child. He needs the time and freedom to act upon his inner life. Boredom is a natural and necessary part of play, a phase of exhaustion, rest and preparation. Contrived play suppresses a child’s awareness and stupefies him.

Play is not play when it is regimented, when it is enacted in large groups or impersonal settings. In an institutional setting, the playing child is like a seedling in a drumming downpour. His tender shoots are battered. He is over-stimulated, too busy and distracted to hear the barely audible voices of inspiration within. He may age, but he does not grow. He is prepared for lifelong stupefication.

For a child to play well, he must be loved. There is no play without love. To enable play is an exalted task, an awesome responsibility. The adult who supervises and nurtures the playing child, disciplining and loving him, is far more powerful than the world will ever admit. With balls and dolls, blocks and swords, civilization is forged.

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THIS EXCERPT from Leon Kass’ article The End of Courtship is a partial response to the question, asked in a recent post, of why promiscuity damages happiness:

The supreme virtue of the virtuous woman was modesty, a form of sexual self-control, manifested not only in chastity but in decorous dress and manner, speech and deed, and in reticence in the display of her well-banked affections. A virtue, as it were, made for courtship, it served simultaneously as a source of attraction and a spur to manly ardor, a guard against a woman’s own desires, as well as a defense against unworthy suitors. A fine woman understood that giving her body (in earlier times, even her kiss) meant giving her heart, which was too precious to be bestowed on anyone who would not prove himself worthy, at the very least by pledging himself in marriage to be her defender and lover forever. (more…)

DESPITE generous state subsidies, including subsidies for dawn-to-dusk schooling that renders motherhood all but insignificant, French women are the victims of a pervasive macho culture that keeps them from rising to the heights of corporate and political leadership, according to this article in The New York Times.

Katrin Bennhold suggests that the average French man is a creature of Napoleonic arrogance who is responsible for the exhaustion of the average French woman, apparently because he does not do enough at home. (Have you ever read a single article in the mainstream press about how exhausting life is for men?) Yet, as Bennhold explains, women want to do household tasks because it is important to their feminine identity. The real oppressor then seems to be the cultural expectation, a holdover of two world wars, that women have children (France’s birth rate, at a mere two children per woman, is higher than the rest of Europe).

But, wait, French women actually seem to want children. So who is the culprit? Something or someone is to blame.

The truth is, French feminists are among the unhappiest women in the world not because they have too little but because they have too much. Feminism is absolutist in its intentions. It will not rest until every woman on earth is perfectly content and has no complaints. Since this is an impossibility, feminism will not rest. It will ceaselessly agitate, searching for sinister designs against women. This non-stop war will not end until feminism’s most basic premises are shown for what they are: lies. (more…)

TOO BAD Karen Owen was not a reader of the website What Women Never Hear while she was a student at Duke. She might then have recognized some of the age-old differences between men and women, differences that are no longer preached in home and culture. A. Guy Maligned, the tireless author of WWNH, is adamant that women withold before marriage to ensure their own happiness later on. In this post, he writes:

Freely offered and unobligated sex turns females from ‘durables’ into ‘consumables.’ They attract men, but only those of low quality stick around. Other men use them and discard them back into the recycling pool.

Females desire a boyfriend so desperately they provide unobligated sex that switches off or limits a man’s respect. This turns her into his ex, and puts her in the business of looking for another man—that is, self-recycling. (more…)

THE BIBLICAL heroine Abigail, who brought gifts to David in an effort to appease his anger over her husband’s inhospitable behavior, was a cunning temptress whose bows to the Hebrew warrior were deliberately flirtatious. This, in essence, is the view of the author of this brief profile of Abigail in a 2006 book, Great Women of the Bible in Art and Literature. “[S]elf-accusation, imploring, humility and empathy, adoration and the prospect of happiness were part of the coded message of a beautiful and clever woman to a hero and future king,” writes Dorothee Soelle. (p. 75) This is obviously a feminist who sees any traditional woman as suspect, but her words remind me of the view one also finds in the men’s rights movement. A woman wants nothing more than to entrap a man and get him to pay her way. She is incapable of having, as the Old Testament story of Abigail suggests, any higher objectives than self-interest or of caring about truth and virtue for their own sake. In this view, if I were to argue that Abigail spoke out of a love of truth, my argument (the words of a housewife) would be part of the ongoing effort to bring about universal female supremacy.

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BRUCE CHARLTON writes here:

This essay by Robert Graves had a big influence on me from when I first read it more than 35 years ago, in a copy borrowed from Bristol Central Library. As usual with Robert Graves, the essay is compounded of brilliant insights, crazy notions, and rampant egotism – expressed with total conviction.

‘Genius,’ in either its modern or Roman conceptualization, is a pagan value and a part of that noble pagan world with its ‘warrior code’ values of honour, integrity, duty. In its Roman conception, genius would ideally be an attribute of all respect-worthy men; but while necessary, genius is not sufficient, and is not one of the highest ‘goods.’ In particular, a man of genius may also (nonetheless) be consumed with pride and devoted to power. (more…)

PERHAPS the latest sex scandal at Duke University will inspire the university to expand into a full-fledged academic major its 2007 course “Hook-up Culture at Duke,” which looks at the pressing subject of how “particular bodies gain value in contemporary commodity culture.” Here is the course description from the university’s catalogue: 

Prerequisites 

None, although a previous course in Cultural Anthropology would be helpful.

Synopsis of course content 

What is “hook-up culture”? What does it have to do with power and difference? Is the concept useful for framing gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized experiences at Duke?

This course, designed as a direct result of events last year on campus, will give students a unique opportunity to examine and reflect upon gendered/sexualized life at Duke in relation to contemporary life in the U.S. We will ask: how has the history of university attendance in the US (in terms of race, class, and gender) impacted campus culture? Are new technologies changing intimate or familial relationships between people? (more…)

JEFF W. writes:

I have been thinking quite a bit about Karen Owen of Duke University lately, after reading her thesis. I thought that perhaps you could answer some questions that have been on my mind.

Do you think that she is a coldly uncaring about the young men in her thesis as she seems? Is it possible for a woman to be that cold? After luring all these men into having sex with her, does she view them all just as objects? Or is that the pose she puts on in her thesis?

Also what is to become of Karen Owen? Can a woman like this ever be a wife and mother? The thought has entered my mind that it is a good thing that she will probably not reproduce. (more…)

This article in The New York Times over the latest sex scandal at Duke University is a good example of how conversation tends to focus on the fly on the wall when there’s an elephant in the room. Apparently, this is not really a sex scandal but a crisis of the Internet Age and its infringements on privacy. There is no elephant, only an itsy-bitsy fly.

For those who are new to the issue, a recent female graduate of Duke wrote a long, witty, obscene “thesis” in PowerPoint format on the men she had slept with during her undergraduate years, appraising their anatomy, rating their performance and detailing the sadomasochistic sext-ing messages they exchanged during the day. I have read the report,which was written for the amusement of friends, and it’s too vulgar to post. The woman, whose parents presumably paid $200,000 for her four-year adventure in collegiate hedonism, combines the sensibility of  a cool, articulate corporate or academic speaker with the bestiality and avarice of a dog in heat. In the initial version of her research report, the names of the men she had slept with were included. It soon spread over the Internet and was posted on various sites. She was also contacted by a major book publisher, an agent and a movie producer. (more…)

HERE is a brilliant essay,”The Underground Men,” by the artful blogger Cwny at Cambria Will Not Yield. It’s worth quoting in its entirety: 

                                                       The Underground Men

The most striking aspect of the Western world today is the absence of white Christian males. Where are they? They have gone underground, because Christian masculinity has been proscribed as illegal.

In olden times, the white Christian male was seen as an essential part of the social structure. He was the spiritual head of his family, loving his wife as Christ loved His church, and the guiding light of his young children. Certainly it is easy to go back through history and find many examples of the failure of the Christian patriarchal system, but you have to be a modern, satanic Christian not to concede that if Christianity is to be taken seriously then the patriarchal family is the main unit of society. But of course Christianity is not the faith of modern man, so the Christian patriarchal system has been jettisoned. What has taken its place?

The technocratic white man currently rules the Western world. But his is a curious rule; he rules a kingdom of unruly barbarians and Amazon warriors by making sacrificial offerings to the barbarians and strategic appeasements to the Amazons. He would rather deal with those two legions of Satan than face Christian men, because his reign of technology and money is directly opposed to Christ’s reign of charity. If that reign of charity were to be reinstated, the technocrats’ reign would end. And it is the Christian male who traditionally has sallied forth to defend and build His reign of charity. (more…)

MABEL LE BEAU writes:

Personal stories from descendants of Gulag survivors are indeed poignant. They are the stories of every survivor, anyone managing to persist in their choice to live no matter the dire conditions, the indomitable will to not allow anyone or any circumstance to get the better of them. To keep going, one foot after the other, step by step by step, ever-foward based on a self-confident sense that a Way will be found to traverse through all peril. (more…)

IN THIS World War II recruiting poster for the U.S. Marines, the soldier is unmistakably a woman. She is manly, with her tie and clipboard; she appears to be play-acting, dressed in a male costume, but there is a softness to her face and her hair is loose. Her mission is purely administrative and the dreamy look in her eyes suggests love for a Marine, not for war. Compare that to the recent recruiting poster below it. There the woman bears no trace of femininity; one cannot imagine her ever falling in love. She stands above men, in command, a ferocious female fighting machine. She is taut and angry, a human embodiment of artillery. Her outstretched arm resembles a gun and her mouth seems to spew invisible smoke.  The men look up to her in adoration.

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STEVE KOGAN writes: 

There are times when a political hit job in the news can consume me to distraction. Either I find a way to work it out of my system or live with it until it disappears, although some never truly go away. I know an academically accomplished woman whose insults and smears are so barbed that people who were on the receiving end years ago can still feel the sting when they think of her. 

 The other day I experienced a reawakening of two such smears that have stuck in my craw for the longest time, the first being Dick Durbin’s remark on the Senate floor on June 14, 2005, in which he likened “what Americans had done” at Guantanamo to totalitarian regimes. His reference to Nazis was bad enough, but “Soviets in their Gulags” hit me hard. 

The second sliming was Tina Fey’s ridicule of Sarah Palin on NBC’s Saturday Night Live (“I can see Russia from my house”), which was peddled by the left with such avidity that it not only became an emblem of Palin’s supposedly diminished mental faculties but also made people believe that the words were actually hers. In effect, Tina Fey became Sarah Palin, while Dick Durbin was allowed to remain himself after he performed an exercise in damage control that sounded like remorse but was nothing of the kind (“I am sorry if anything I said,” and a “heartfelt apology” to those who “may believe that my remarks crossed the line”).  (more…)

IN 1979, James Webb, the future Secretary of the Navy and U.S. Senator, wrote in Washingtonian Magazine:

There is a place for women in our military, but not in combat. And their presence at institutions dedicated to the preparation of men for combat command is poisoning that preparation. By attempting to sexually sterilize the Naval Academy environment in the name of equality, this country has sterilized the whole process of combat leadership training, and our military forces are doomed to suffer the consequences. (more…)