The town where I live is festooned with green ribbons. They are tied to trees in the shopping district, to streetlights, to parking meters and to signs. What does all this festivity signify? Ovarian cancer. The ribbons are part of a campaign to make us more sensitive to this terrible disease. They are the green counterpart to the familiar pink ribbons of breast cancer campaigns.

Cancer is evil. Everyone should contribute to the worthy battle against it. But, if we are going to express our concern for this grave matter with sentimental displays of ribbons, why not ribbons for all cancer?  If we must select one, let it be a childhood cancer.

These ribbons depress me. They depress me not simply because cancer kills. They are a sickly-sweet reminder of the boastful conceit of women. Power makes women selfish.

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A male reader writes:

I would just like to ask you a very simple question, what do you consider the main masculine attributes and the main feminine attributes to be?

Laura writes:

That’s not a simple question! But even complicated questions can have simple answers.

Two years ago, I took a tour of a prestigious liberal arts college and the co-ed leading the tour mentioned that a specific dormitory was assigned to students who declare themselves to be the opposite sex. That’s how plastic masculinity and femininity have become. The truth is a woman can no more become a man than a dog can become a cat, or an apple tree can swim in a pond. Many people today believe that each person is potentially either masculine or feminine, or both, and that ideally a harmonious balance can be achieved, a state of inner androgyny.

Let’s start with the premise that masculinity and femininity are engraved in the structure of the person.  They are both physical and psychic, no more interchangeable than our personalities. We are not androgynous at our core, but are born one or the other according to our anatomy and can never transcend our masculine or feminine natures. We arrive at self-realization not by overcoming our inborn nature, but by honoring and understanding it. There’s always some compelling bit of truth to the view of universal androgyny. Every masculine trait can occur in some degree in a woman, and vice versa.

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In response to the previous post, Karen Wilson from England argues that men are portrayed as effeminate and spineless in Western advertising not only to ingratiate and butter up female consumers. The image is real.

Karen writes:

I think men in ads are often portrayed as weak, partly as deliberate propaganda, but partly because that is in fact what many of them are.  We may wish to deny this because it does not suit our perceptions of our culture and history.  However civilisations are built, maintained and defended by strong men and destroyed by weak men.

The Western male is often a weak species. In short there is no serious and significant group of strong males who challenge the existing status quo. There is no group of strong males who are ready and organised to start a revolution and reclaim their country. It is as though they all assume automatic poodle position.

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Why do men in television commercials so often appear effeminate, incompetent or stupid? This excellent article in The Globe and Mail states the obvious. Advertisers believe portraying men as feckless is an effective strategy. It flatters women consumers who control the purse strings for most domestic purchases. One advertising executive, however, disagrees. The practice is counter-productive and offends women, who prefer to think they have some good judgment and don’t choose the male clods depicted in commercials.

Paul Nathanson, a researcher who studies misandry at McGill University, asks, “Can’t you talk to women without insulting men?”

My hunch is advertisers are not going to start portraying men as strong and admirable any time soon. The traditional family spends less frivolously.  It also probably watches less TV. I never watch television commercials and don’t understand why anyone does.

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In the previous post on electronic games, I wrote:

Electronic entertainment is one of the few realms in which boys can still be boys. I agree with Ron on this point. And, it’s a very important consideration.

But, it shouldn’t be that way. Virtual games, at least the obsessive and exclusive playing of them, are not a good replacement for other types of aggressive play that involve physical movement and real social interaction. The boy who plays games and only plays games is in an artificial world where he is not forced to respond to real people. In sports or idle rough-housing, there is a check on the isolating aspects of male aggression. There are real people interacting with each other and a boy is forced to react to them. That’s not the same as responding to someone in an electronic game.

In truly aggressive play, the boy’s energy is used and satisfied. He is ready to turn to things that involve a different sort of mental effort and patience. A boy can be sated  by aggressive physical play. Games are addictive and a boy never realizes he has had enough until it is too late to play outside or shoot hoops. He gets easily lost in them. That explains the irritability of boys who sit for long hours at the screen and their declining performance in school.

I think games in excess are much more destructive for younger boys than for older ones. They are used by parents as a form of babysitting. Many parents rely on them almost out of necessity because of the destruction of real community in which kids can congregate outside for pick-up games and boys can  engage in mischief.

My husband strongly believes that electronic games do not relieve male agression, but cause it to build. They are no more a complete outlet for healthy masculinity than watching football games on TV. He maintains that the idea that games serve a healthy function is equivalent to saying that pornography is a useful aid to male sexuality. The virtual experience replaces and perverts the thing itself.

I would like to add that I blame the over-use of electronic entertainment on women. They use electronic games as an easy form of childcare so they can go off and do their own thing. The departure of women from the home has caused the decline in normal outdoor play.

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Ron Purewal replies to my post, Boys and Electronic Games. Ron makes a number of important points. His most interesting argument is that electronic games represent “one of the few places left in our society where boys can still unabashedly be boys”

Mr. Purewal writes:

In that post, you wrote: “Can the outward passivity that is so characteristic of the addicted gamer ever fulfill female romantic longings? Can the addicted gamer acquire the patience and temperament required by marriage and family without a painful and permanent rejection of his habit?”

There will always be a tradeoff between “the patience and temperament required by marriage and family” and “fulfill[ing] female romantic longings”, because most of the qualities of the former are detrimental to the latter, and certainly vice versa. The former can be summed up, roughly, as “stability”, while the latter can be summed up (again, very roughly) as “excitement and danger”.  although there are a handful of personal qualities that can be positive in both contexts – such as confidence – most “female romantic longings” involve impetuous, risky, aggressive, devil-may-care characters who are ill suited for any sort of stability.

Ironically, men who are easily bored, thrill-seeking, and annoyed by the inefficiencies of social interaction are much, much more likely to pique a woman’s romantic interest.  Much more likely. In short, there’s a reason why romance novels stop at the wedding day.

Second, the problem faced by the addicted gamer in adjusting to marriage is negligible compared to the problem faced by the average American woman, who for her entire life has been coddled and convinced that she can do no wrong and should have no shame, in adjusting to the same situation.  Totally negligible.

Third, under older (and, I might add, more feasible) gender roles, the man wasn’t expected to provide social chitchat and discussion of “gray areas”; he was the man of the house.  if he were the extroverted type, then that was of course a bonus, but a woman had girlfriends for a reason. In other words, the “problems” you’re citing would not even have been problems even a few decades ago, because marriage was not seen as a relationship in which the man is responsible for pushing every single one of a woman’s attention-getting (and -keeping) buttons.

The gamer’s temperament is certainly not unlike that of famous scientists and other innovators that have lived in various eras.  until the last few decades, such men have had no trouble finding and keeping wives, because they weren’t unfortunate enough to live in a culture that tells their wives to walk – and incentivizes them financially to do so – if they feel the slightest bit “unfulfilled” or “bored” in their marriage.

In any case, I see the explosion of “gamers” as a result of the hydraulic pressure of male restlessness and natural male qualities. We live in a culture that has done its best to expunge male-friendly aspects such as competition and horseplay from all parts of childhood.  most kids’ sports are now of the “everyone gets the same size trophy” variety, any sort of natural acting-out is punished out of all proportion, and boys are generally punished whenever they fail to act like good girls (even though they aren’t girls).

Our culture also teaches (upper- and upper-middle-class white and Asian) that it’s not ok to fight, to be aggressive, or, in some cases, even to be confident.  these qualities are hydraulic – if they don’t vent in one place, then they’ll vent somewhere else.  hence, the video-game addiction. Electronic games are one of the few places left in our society where boys can still unabashedly be boys. 

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The fields and gardens, the empty lots and woods, even the highway median strips – all  resound with insect music here at this time of year, as if thousands of soloists, chamber groups, quartets and jazz ensembles were hidden in the bush.  Whatever evolutionary purposes it serves, there is nothing utilitarian about our pleasure in this music. Even you, dear reader, are mortal and this sweet evanescent sound is for you.

The crickets and katydids produce their songs by rubbing their wings together, a method known as “stridulation.” A file on the bottom of one wing is rubbed against a scraper on top of the other wing. Thin membranes on the wings vibrate rapidly to produce the noise we hear. If not for the wings, the sounds would not resonate anymore than the sound of a finger scraped against a comb.

The cicadas have a pair of special sound-producing organs called “tymbals,” located at the base of the abdomen. Here is a wonderful website,  Songs of Insects, that describes the process. “Inside each tymbal are stiff but flexible ribs supporting a stout membrane. Muscles attached to the ribs pull the tymbal inward, causing it to pop. The tymbal pops again when the tension is released. Rapid contractions and relaxations of the tymbal muscles create the loud, buzzing songs of the cicadas, which are amplified further by a hollow area in the abdomen.”

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The institution of marriage is undergoing it’s most profound crisis today. But, it has been subjected to lesser controversies throughout history.

Robert Dale Owen issued the following statement on the occasion of his 1832 wedding to Mary Jane Robinson, to protest the state of law by which women lost property and other legal rights upon marriage.

Of the unjust rights which in virtue of this ceremony an iniquitous law gives me over the person and property of another, I cannot legally, but I can morally, divest myself. And I hereby distinctly and emphatically declare that I consider myself, and earnestly desire to be considered by others, as utterly divested, now and during the rest of my life, of any such rights, the barbarous relics of a feudal, despotic system.

 

 

Ron writes:

I enjoy your blog, but I’m a bit surprised that comments are disabled. This surprise is multiplied when the post consists of a series of questions, whether rhetorical or not (as does your most recent post concerning gamers). Have you been getting spammed? Any other reason why comments are closed?

Laura writes:

B. is a boy I know who is approaching adulthood. He has spent most of his free time for the past eight years playing electronic games. He is a good person, well-behaved, decent and intelligent. But, he is easily bored. He does not engage in lengthy conversation and seems impatient with the inefficiency of social interaction. He does not like gray areas. Reading bores him and it even makes him angry. He is an addict and wants to get back to his games.

Here is my question: How will he ever find a wife? And, even if he finds a wife, how will he sustain her interest in him? Few girls share his addiction. Electronic games generally bore them to death. Most women like conversation and they like to discuss gray areas. Can the outward passivity that is so characteristic of the addicted gamer ever fulfill female romantic longings? Can the addicted gamer acquire the patience and temperament required by marriage and family without a painful and permanent rejection of his habit?

In a follow-up to my post The Parental Serf, I wrote:

“The enormous sums spent on higher education don’t represent adoration of youth so much as adoration of institutions and a superstitious belief in their magical properties. I don’t mind selling out to the future. I do mind selling out to colleges which offer little of value that cannot be obtained for much less.

James M. writes:

Surely, the “magic spell” can only be sustained within a healthy job market? Recent college graduates know or will come to know what little they received for their parents money, and many are having trouble finding employment. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on each so that they could be taught by unintelligible immigrant TAs while playing in a richly populated hook-up hunting ground. If the economy continues its downward slide, how will a matured reflection upon these memories affect decisions made regarding the schooling of these graduates’ own children?

As a supplement to this issue, we have the mass-dismantling of vocational technology programs in high schools across America. Tradesmen are retiring much faster than they are being replaced. Everyone is getting funneled into college, and the attitude is that kids who don’t go to college are failures; they got “left behind”. Working with your hands is for lower class people who “weren’t suited” for higher education. There are hordes of College Engineering students who can’t actually make anything. White-collar husbands can’t fix a leaky faucet, change their wife’s brake pads, or make a birdhouse.

So, if there is a depression in our future, I hope that positive side-effect will be a disenchantment with unnecessary higher education and a re-invigoration of the trades.

Laura writes:

I also hope for a re-invigoration of genuine learning. I did fairly well in college but I barely learned a thing. Virtually every scrap of higher learning I possess was obtained on my own.

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American journalism moved further along on its own exciting trajectory toward truth and the all-encompassing love of reality today. Oprah, the Queen of Vanity and Fantastic Female Illusions, aired a show on How Other People Live. That’s no big deal. As our Maternal Monarch puts it, we need “to see how we’re all interconnected. ” But, this was no ordinary look into an American home. This time the lead guest was an “independent contractor.”

You know, an independent contractor, just like the guy who fixes your leaky pipes or replaces your roof or does your taxes. Brooke Taylor’s professional base of operations is the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Carson City, Nevada. Brooke, wearing underwear and smiling affably, gave us an extensive tour of the facility on the show. “We’ve all been told that prostitution is wrong,” she said, but that’s because we all have “a lot of misconceptions.” Even her Dad had misconceptions and refused to speak to her for three weeks when he found out she was a working girl.  

“If the customer wants to have a drink at the bar, we’ll stop and I’ll let him get a drink,” she said, standing in the barroom. “Then we come back to my room and we discuss really what they want to do and for how long.” That’s fair. She pulled out a whip and leather straps from the drawer in her night table. “These are the ones where I can tie people up.” The soccer moms in the audience looked on with curiosity.

When Brooke, 24, defended herself to her Dad, she appealed to reason. “Hey,” she told him. “I’m a sexual being and this is what I’m doing with that side.” She’s also an economic being and this is what she is doing with that side. Before she entered this line of work, she was tragically “living from paycheck to paycheck.”

Fortunately, her mother was more enlightened. “She was very supportive right off the bat,” Brooke said. “She took it as an adventure.” And, it is an adventure. There’s even an ATM machine in the bar and a shower room with nozzles on all the walls. Not all of her clients are purely into sex. “Sometimes it’s more about the journey.”

Isn’t it cool how we’re each on our own personal journey? The point is what we learn along the way and how we grow closer to each other every moment of the day. We are all interconnected. I am a housewife. Brooke is a whore. Oprah is force of nature. The point is not our minor differences, but our MAJOR SIMILARITIES. We’re human and lovable. No matter where our life’s journeys take us.

On Oprah’s website, which includes a video of Brooke, a commenter defends Oprah’s professional degradation. “Oprah is a journalist. Like any good journalist, she is presenting the issue and all the facts. She simply showed her viewers a very controversial topic and the truth.” Truth is Oprah’s cause and the object of her journey.

                                                                                                  

Is the atmosphere of fear and anxiety that pervades high schools throughout America, fear that without admission to the right college an individual’s life is doomed, one of the most effective crowd control devices ever invented?

Such is the claim of John Taylor Gatto in his new book Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. I entirely agree with him on this point. The belief that learning depends on a college education, and that worldly success depends on it is, a myth. Many jobs today depend on the credentials acquired at colleges and universities, but the learning, especially in an age of advanced commuications, can be acquired for less. Less money, less time, less hassle and less damage to the ability to think.

Gatto was once an award-winning teacher in Manhattan. He now believes schools deliberately inculcate stupidity and passivity. They do bring one good to society: they are a successful jobs program.  He tried to discover the reasons for our profound over-schooling and concluded, “Only a darkness at work, reachable not by common experience but through historical, sociological, psychological, theological, political and philosophical research, could reveal the causes, it seemed to me.”

Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, was the favorite beach town of America’s intellectuals in the 50s ad 60s. Writers, artists, scientists, law professors, historians, psychoanalysts – many of the most prominent names took up residence in summer cottages on the dunes and held their evening cocktail parties overlooking the magnificent Atlantic. Devastating wit and incomparable learning were concentrated in one of the coast’s most pristine settings.

But, the ship of American culture was showing serious cracks. If you looked closely, it was already listing to one side. Alfred Kazin, the New York literary critic, spent his summers in Wellfleet. He wrote a moving essay about both the beauty and decadence of the place. He said of his wife of the time, who was consumed with her work as a novelist and with her love of highbrow parties, “I came to think of R. not as a wife but as a brilliant, wayward daughter, so dogged that I would never be able to help.”

Kazin’s essay “Wellfleet and the Beach of the Intellectuals” is not available online, but here is its melancholy closing:

End of summer. End of a marriage. How strange it was at the “violet” hour of the day, when the light was fading and the couples in odd corners were getting cozier by the minute – how strange it was to look out on the outermost Cape with nothing else in sight but a last fishing vessel. Somewere in that thrilling, frightening emptiness was Portugal, even Galicia in northwest Spain. How strange it was then to think that career can be the greatest passion, capable of destroying a marriage. How little, really, the intellectuals on the beach made of summer. They – all of us – used Wellfleet, that last great wilderness, in a way that cut us off from the primitive, everlasting heart of the world beating in our ears as we gabbed on the beach. 

How sad it must have been to witness the vessel of America’s elite slipping over the horizon.

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In a previous entry, Jeffrey W. laments the end of courtship and describes romance today as a form of “egalitarian play.” In response, I said:

The Victorians created what Linda Lichter called a “religion of love,” with its own sacred practices and totems, down to the ribbon-wrapped bundles of letters from a suitor that a young woman would keep in her drawer. This is not to say they worshipped love, but they knew that it was largely built from human artifice and that without this it was unsatisfying. With all our sexual libertinism, we are far more prudish than the Victorians. They truly knew how to be in love and to woo each other. Their famous “cult of domesticity” was not a cult, it was civilization in its highest form.

Ellie Hunter writes:

I tried to teach my children about this, and my daughter decided she did not want to date. One day a young man came to see my husband about some business and my husband literally snatched him. “You would be a good man for my daughter,” he told him.  The young man thought it was unusual but he was enchanted. He had been in the dating scene and could never figure out what the next step was. Here, in a family courtship, he would be guided to the final results and get where he was going.  We played parlour games, went on outings, trips, and all sorts of activities as we shared the courtship. Mostly, my husband and I did the work and set things up so that they could enjoy time together.
 
Ten years later, our younger son had a bad experience with a girl who acted like she liked him. She was plastered all over him at a Christmas party we had, and needless to say he was happy about it. But, when he proposed, she said she just wanted to be friends.  Later, he went to see her and she gave him the cold shoulder. If  she had known about courtship, and if her parents had been involved, perhaps she would not have played this game.  When people did that, they were “marked” and they learned a lesson.  Today we allow it to go on.  When someone saw my son with this girl they warned me that she was that “type” and that there was no way she was serious about marriage.  At least there are a few people who speak out and who have some sense of propriety in the matter.
 
This is an example of two ways of doing things. One is through the parents, which is mocked and ridiculed today, but it is lasting and happy. You know, the moderns spread the lie that parents and family were oppressive and that girls needed their freedom to choose. But in a courtship, a parent is more likely to get an end result. In dating, the choices are just so confusing and it rarely ends in marriage.

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Jeffrey W. writes:

I couldn’t help but react with some bemusement (and perplexity) to the response from the single-man in his mid-twenties you received to your letter. I am the same age as your correspondent and my experience searching for a spouse has been made difficult by the fact that very few of my peers seem to be interested in seriously pairing off at all and my efforts to get to know women with the sought after purpose of marriage is frequently met with derision (I am frequently told not to desire a wife so much). From my perspective courtship and flirtation are not so much hurried as non-existent. Egalitarian play is the essence that composes most social interactions among young adults with the result of there being a marked lack of wooing and encouragement to seek out marriage. Those among my peerage who are married usually describe themselves as having stumbled into it by accident or were overtaken by it like an impersonal force of nature.

Laura writes:

The amount of group activity that takes place among single people in their twenties amazes me. “Egalitarian play” is a great term for it. Conversation is the greatest of aphrodisiacs. It seems hard to engage in this art at its highest when one is always traveling in a herd.

This is the ultimate triumph of the Marxist project: the destruction of the foundations of love.  When people feel awkward and constantly uncertain in the civilized pursuit of romance and attachment, family – and all that is naturally anti-statist – are cut off in their delicate, embryonic state.

I’m sorry if this sounds heavy. After all, we are talking about something very commonplace: the nearly universal desire for a mate. But, I cannot help but see the demise of courtship as an event of great consequence and as a threat to our way of life. It has been destroyed by ideas. Make no mistake about that. One of those ideas is that ‘mating’ happens naturally. We are liitle different from gorillas in the bush.

A good illustration of just how far we have come is the courtship, which I wrote about here, between Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine. It is hard to imagine these two people having existed as a couple outside the form and structure of Victorian love, which was very ritualized and in its own way highly sexual. The Victorians created what Linda Lichter has called a “religion of love,” with its own sacred practices and totems, down to the ribbon-wrapped bundles of letters from a suitor that a young woman would keep in her drawer. This is not to say they worshipped love, but they knew that it was largely built from human artifice and that without this it was unsatisfying. With all our sexual libertinism, we are far more prudish than the Victorians. They truly knew how to be in love and to woo each other. Their famous “cult of domesticity” was not a cult, it was civilization in its highest form. While the Victorians were “prudish” about sex, we are prudish about masculinity and femininity themselves. We are spiritual prudes, embarrassed by the loftier possibilities of love and by the need for others.

This leaves us with the question of what does a healthy, normal young person do about this?  He holds onto his ideals and never departs from them. There are others searching for him. Ideas have consequences. To see things as they are and as they should be is not a passive thing. It influences the world and changes your life.

I should also add that there is only one word that can accurately describe the women Jeffrey meets who are indifferent to marriage even though they are in their mid-twenties: Stupid. Most of them are no doubt good girls by today’s standards. They have been convinced marriage is beneath them until they have impressed the world with their accomplishments and are making good money. What fools. Their femininity has been all but surgically removed.

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Alexander writes:

This week, you’ve featured a letter from a women in her mid-twenties struggling to find a husband. It is also interesting to read from the perspective of a single man in his mid-twenties. I find it’s very difficult to know what a girl is really interested in, and whether she is interesting to me. I fear that given the standards of the society we’re in, those of us who are interested in more than the normal contemporary relationship come off to most people as not interested in a relationship at all.

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 Kidist Paulos Asrat has interesting observations at her blog Camera Lucida on the latest cover of O Magazine, the scripture of all things Oprah. Could Oprah be depressed? Miss Asrat says Oprah looks “insecure, hesitant and certainly non-powerful” in this photo. So ubiquitous is Oprah’s face, I do not possess the ability to sharply discern one image from another. She seems uniformly plastic in all. Oprah’s handlers like to present her as both fragile and fantastically more attractive than she is, the better to draw the weak to her throne. The hair on her shoulder seems to represent the conceit of a woman who is far too old for this sort of “come hither” gesture. Increasingly, Oprah is a sop to the middle-aged and their search for perennial youth.

I wonder if Oprah has ever gazed into the mirror and said to herself, “I could be wrong. I could be hopelessly and irretrievably wrong.”

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