A COUPLE of readers in the Twilight discussion have expressed the opinion that the male vampire hero in the movies and books is no more harmful or unreal than Mr. Darcy, the famous hero of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Leaving aside the obvious problem with comparing the clunky Twilight to the clever characterizations of Austen, I do not think any similarities with Mr. Darcy justify the romantic excesses of Twilight. That’s because Mr. Darcy is a very problematic hero for women.

Darcy is pure fairy tale and yet he is made to seem real. There are no Mr. Darcys in real life and female fascination with this character is unfortunate if it is not conscious of this fact.

I’m not saying that there are no men as intriguingly aloof and strong and interesting as Mr. Darcy. There are. But I think it is fair to say that there are almost no men who are as fantastically wealthy as Mr. Darcy and who yet combine in perfect proportion his arrogance and sensitivity, his haughtiness and emotional delicacy. Mr. Darcy is sublime, but he is one of the most unreal men ever to grace the pages of a minor literary masterpiece.

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BRENDAN writes:

I have to say that Vanessa’s comment [that Twilight represents a wholesome longing for strong heroes] strikes me as wide of the mark.

Men do not have sexual fantasies about being Spiderman so that they can “get the girl.” It doesn’t register in the sexual attraction and arousal areas of our brains in the least. If anything, it is the appearance and demeanor of the “girl” herself which can be alluring — which is probably why Hollywood is so selective when it comes to the appearance of its star actresses. But there is no “male equivalent” in Spiderman or any other action film, of the kind of hysteria we see among women relating to Twilight. It just doesn’t register with us the same way.

This is why the most appropriate comparison is pornography, because pornography is something that does register in the attraction and arousal areas of the male brain. I’m no advocate of pornography — it’s immoral and also profoundly unhelpful for maintaining a normal sex life. (more…)

    SEE the ongoing discussion about Twilight. Readers disagree with Fitzgerald's claim that the book feeds unwholesome desires in women. Vanessa writes, "Feminists actually really hate those books. It’s such effective emotional porn because it speaks to women’s innate wish to be desired, protected, and dominated by a strong and morally-upright man." She adds: "I think we can all agree that there is pornography, and then there is pornography. I think young women reading Twilight is comparable to young men watching an action film in which "the hero gets the girl," like Spiderman. Those sexual fantasies are a matched pair, aren't they?"

LAST WEEK, a reader wrote in and told a shocking story about a female boss, a woman who actually suggested the reader get an abortion to keep her job in accounting. This was an unflattering story about a woman. I apologize if I gave the impression that every single female boss is mean.

I personally know some women bosses who are understanding and kind, as well as smart and authoritative. I would like to offer a story about one of these heroic women in order to rectify any bias I may have displayed.

There was a man, we’ll call him George, who used to lay out snacks for his fellow workers at 5 p.m. every day on his desk in a large, heartless corporate office. (more…)

HOW IS IT that a confirmation hearing for a female Supreme Court justice becomes an occasion for lamenting how much women are held back? The goofy senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, and Elena Kagan agree that women still have a long way to go. And, so we have the strange spectacle of powerful women telling the nation that women are not powerful.

Although half, and at some schools more than half, of all law school students are women, the dearth of women law partners is a sign that women have it harder than men, the two women stated. “The best thing we could do as a society is to try and enable women … to manage those balances… [and] the desire to have a fulfilling professional life and a wonderful family life,” said Kagan at her Senate confirmation hearing today. Perhaps we could manage for everybody to be rich and have a wonderful love life too.

“Manage those balances” is code for more free child care and less, or “flexible,” work for lawyers who are mothers. “Balance” is feministspeak for handing your children over to the care of others.

Do these women ever talk to other women? If they did, they would know there are not more female law partners because most women do not want to be lawyers who work ten hours a day. They want to marry lawyers who work ten hours a day.

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  REV. JAMES JACKSON writes: Here are two pictures for your amusement. One is a church in Italy and the other a prop from Star Wars. 

  "THE OBJECT of education is to teach us to love Beauty," said Plato. Aristotle claimed it was to make us "feel joy and grief at the right things." John Henry Newman said liberal arts education is the process by which the intellect "is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own object and for its own highest culture." The idea that the well-rounded person requires a period in early adulthood devoted to high culture and works of demanding abstraction runs through the long course of Western civilization. The "philosophical habit of mind," Newman said,  is the highest benefit of higher education. The term liberal arts comes from the artes liberales of classical antiquity, which stood for the artistic and scientific pursuits of free men as opposed to slaves. Freedom required cultivation of the mind in a small minority. The term was used in the Middle Ages to refer to the study of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, and music.   What is liberal arts today? Given the vocational trend and that students at most colleges choose their own courses, it is rare that they receive either education for its own sake or a rigorous immersion in all things that are important. Imagine the wasted dollars. Today the liberal arts stands, as Allan Bloom aptly noted, for the closing of the American mind.

AS REPORTED by the New York Times, the French Parliament has just passed a law that makes “psychological violence” a punishable criminal offense. The law is explictly aimed at meeting the complaints of women against their husbands and male partners. Feminists grow ever more bold and totalitarian in their aims. (more…)

CATHOLIC FEMINISTS may look to the writings of Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI to support their view that careerism and feminist interpretations of history are compatible with their faith. But how do they reconcile this stance with unambiguous statements to the contrary by previous popes? As noted by Allan Carlson, and discussed today at Throne and Altar: (more…)

SEE THIS stunning report at MassResistance about Elena Kagan’s promotion of the homosexualist and transgender political agenda at Harvard. It will blow you away. Among other things, Kagan recruited former ACLU lawyer and homosexual activist William Rubenstein to teach “queer” legal theory. She so approved of the campaign to make homosexual activism an integral part of the curriculum and campus life that she allowed discussions with activists about permitting transsexual men in women’s restrooms. Under her tenure, the Harvard health plan was changed to allow breast treatments for transsexuals.

Accordng to Amy Contrada, Brian Camenker and Peter LaBarbera,

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is committed to the radical campaign pushing acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism as “civil rights.” Her unprecedented activism supporting that view as Dean of Harvard Law School (2003-2009) calls into question her ability to judge fairly and impartially on same-sex “marriage” and other homosexuality- or transgender-related issues that may come before the nation’s highest court. (more…)

FITZGERALD writes:

The Twilight series is nothing more than female emotional pornography. It’s an intoxicating formula for today’s girls from 10-40 and yet it has none of the social stigma attached to traditional pornography. Here’s a particularly interesting article at Whiskey’s Place. The author understands that men retreat from fields that women enter. Women have now entered the fantasy world and are crowding men out with the complicit actions of the growing estrogen mafia in most every business. Even more prescient is the author’s assertion that this will destroy normal income streams from steady male customers to the vagaries of emotionally-driven fads in popular culture. Sadly, the most important aspect of the article is as follows: 

“The result will be even more young girls with rather skewed and unhealthy ideas about men, male behavior, and greater contempt for “beta males” who don’t measure up to the standards of fantasy. Many but not all the type that would not generate much male attention on their own (clearly some attractive girls like the stories) … (more…)

  TIME reports in its "Wellness" section, which is devoted to "a healthy balance of the mind, body and spirit:" New research from Belgium and the U.K. suggests that women may increasingly be considering freezing their eggs as a way to prolong fertility as they pursue a career — or find the right romantic partner. A survey of nearly 200 female students found that half of those pursuing degrees in sports or education would consider freezing their eggs to give them the option to delay starting a family, while more than 8 out of 10 women pursuing a medical degree said that they would do so. Meanwhile, a tiny study in Belgium (which included only 15 women in their late 30s) found that half of those interviewed said they'd consider freezing their eggs to take the pressure off the hunt to find the right partner.

MARTIANUS CAPELLA writes:

And eternal be their memory–the liberal arts colleges died long ago. Within most of those colleges which dub themselves “liberal arts colleges,” not a single administrator or professor knows what the liberal arts are nor why they ever were. The liberal arts curriculum was designed by theologians of the Middle Ages to train the “free” (liberal) man in the pursuit of knowledge in grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. When I attended a “small, prestigious liberal arts college” at the start of the 1980’s, none of my classmates received a liberal arts education, rather, each learned a trade–in fact, each received an illiberal arts education, one pursued for economic purposes. I, too, learned a trade: physics. I studied no history except The History of Science.  (more…)

  KEVIN FRY, of Scenic America, laments the eye-blistering ugliness of America in this video, which is three years old but as fresh as when it was first made: "There's not a single chance to interact with another human being when coming to this environment," he says, referring to a large box store. "There's a difference ... between building a place for cars and a place for people." But perhaps H.L. Mencken was right when he said Americans have a lust for ugliness. Maybe they actually like it. I only know that being a housewife in America means consigning oneself to retail purgatory, to hours in sterile and soulless aisles and parking lots that are as charmless as the surface of the moon. My favorite line of Fry's is: "There's no serendipity anymore."    

  THE AUTHOR of Throne and Altar writes in response to recent posts here about Catholicism and feminism: [T]he true Catholic social doctrine, as expressed clearly from Pope Leo XIII to Pope Piux XII, has exactly one principle, and it is simple and clear. That principle is patriarchy. More precisely, the guiding principle of Catholic social thought is this, that a man should be the sole provider for his family. In a follow-up post, he considers cases in which he believes this ideal does not apply: extreme economic necessity, families that run farms and joint businesses, and women who have a unique calling.

  CAMILLE PAGLIA writes that middle class values are killing eroticism and romance. Writing in The New York Times, Paglia says middle class propriety is behind the stifling regime of postmodern androgyny. Although she makes some excellent points, I don't agree with her thesis. It's true that androgyny is a natural sex suppressant, in the same way cages suppress desire in animals, but it's not middle class values that have encouraged confusion in sex roles unless one considers "middle class values" to be inherently immoral and materialistic. To the contrary, middle class women have followed the lead of their higher ranking counterparts, the Gloria Steinems and Katie Courics of the world, into a life that makes them masters of their men and asexual careerists. It's not middle class values that are the problem but the intoxicating drug of ideology. To Paglia, it's "Down with the bourgeoisie! They never knew how to enjoy sex anyway."

AT HIS site, Gary North offers an intriguing thesis for why American neighborhoods are less close-knit than they once were. He writes:

 What ever happened to the social phenomenon known as “neighbor”? It moved out of the neighborhood sometime around 1960.

If I were to blame a single factor, it would be government-subsidized mortgages. When the Federal government created insurance for depositors in savings & loans, it subsidized the destruction of community. When people could afford to move up, for 20% down, they did. They moved out in order to move up.

The ultimate carry trade — borrowed short and lent long — has undermined modern society. The subprime mortgage crisis is the latest installment of the housing market’s carry trade. The undermining of community is still going on.

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