In 2007, Mia Sardella, then an 18-year-old honor student at Drexel University, secretly gave birth and left the infant to die in the trunk of a car. No one – not even her friends or her divorced parents – knew she was pregnant. Sardella, the granddaughter of a prominent financial executive, may seem an evil woman, but I think she was temporarily insane, a victim of profound cultural dissonance.

Young women today are fed the constant message that sex is natural and simple. They inhabit an intensely erotic world. Despite the widespread availability of contraceptives, adolescents are careless and no matter how enlightened sex education is, this carelessness is quite normal in a young virgin. Some of these deceived girls suddenly face the fact that sex is not so simple; it is all too natural. A small percentage enter a state of such strong denial that they do not tell anyone that they are pregnant and even appear to deny the obvious to themselves. They move through life like automatons. They are the living embodiment of cognitive dissonance on a mass level.

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Unknown to the youthful Emmies of the world, many thousands of women have suffered post-abortion trauma. They have experienced depression, guilt and shame even when they’re lives assumed outward normalcy. One reader writes in with her own experience.

Kathleen writes:

I rarely talk about my past with strangers, but I feel compelled to speak about Emmie, her choice and her parents. If my past helps someone, then it will be worth my time in writing and your time in reading. 

Emmie is me, only it was 1984 and I was about to turn 21 years old. I was attending college and became pregnant.

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Not long ago, I wrote about hiking in the mountains and of coming across lesbian couples who had an air of toughness and lonely vulnerability. In comments regarding the recent entry on modesty and shame, a reader describes an experience that eerily echoes my own.

Charles writes:

Laura wrote: “There is one other important thing to remember. Many people are deeply unhappy. They are begging for normalcy and don’t know where to find it. Loneliness and the absence of piety, reverence and beauty in their lives is killing them from the inside.” 

Well stated. I see this frequently. I observed it several weeks ago while my wife and I were taking a day hike up the side of a mountain in the Appalachians. We encountered numerous groups of people enjoying this sparkling autumn day. However, the group that stood out to us was a group of four young women, probably late 20s to early 30s; all attractive and fit. Although, they were not profane in their choice of words, they were – at one point on the trail – very openly berating and insulting each other in front of everyone else. It was supposed to be all in fun, of course. It was a show and I concluded they must be showing off. I was repulsed by it and I did not want to listen to people tear each other up with their words – even if it was supposedly in jest. 

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A reader reports that he has lost a staggering 75 pounds in eight months on a low-carb diet. His experience confirms comments in the entry Carbs Kill that the real cause of obesity in America is high-carbohydrate diets and the misleading medical advice that focuses on fats instead. Bad science has made America fat.

James H. writes:

I’ve just lost 75 pounds restricting sugars and carbs and feel like I’m in my 30s again. My wife cooks wonderful meals making my weight loss challenge considerably easier. The reason I mention this is because of your posts on obesity. I am absolutely convinced from my own experience that people like Taubes, Eades, Atkins and Kendrick are zeroing in on dietary truths. 

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  In this entry on modesty, shame and the future of resistance, a reader who has experienced the crass power plays of feminists at work wonders whether traditional women aren't insulated from the worst of it. I reply: Every committed housewife in America, unless she is Amish, Mormon, or an Orthodox Jew, lives in the heart of the beast. No one is more despised by our culture than the homemaker who believes in her vocation and does not support either outright careerism or non-committal, do-as-you-like, don't-rock-the-boat feminism. Servant couldn't be more wrong about traditional women being insulated from what he has seen and experienced. The only homemakers who have any kind of status are those who are wealthy, in which case people are generally willing to overlook their betrayal of feminism. Most women in my position experience serious passive aggression by other women and men, a thousand slights and cuts meant to marginalize them. Women who are powerful, who are callous to children and husbands, who neglect their homes, and who glorify their girlfriend gangs are openly celebrated both by popular culture and by family and friends.  You couldn't be more wrong about not understanding what you say. A housewife lives on the frontlines of this culture war. Only the strongest survive.    

The summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire has some of the most extreme weather on the planet. The peak is situated in the path of dramatic clashes of air masses, as if it stood between warring gods hurling ice and blocks of frigid air. At 6,288 feet, Washington is higher than the surrounding mountains, unprotected by the sort of frictional interference that would modify conditions on a smaller peak. The other day the wind chill was – 82 Fahrenheit with winds gusting up to 100 miles per hour.

The observers on the summit, who take continuous readings of wind, temperature, barometric pressure and humidity, are envied by weather junkies everywhere. But their lives include many tedious chores. For one, they have to frequently remove rime ice from the instruments. Earlier this week, there was a seven-inch glaze of ice on the anemometer and wind vane.

Staff meteorologist Mike Carmon wrote in the daily journal on December 28:

Temperatures rose through the 20s throughout Saturday night and the wee hours of Sunday, and a southeast flow fed plentiful moisture into the region. As a result, glaze ice began to form around 10 p.m. At first, the accumulation was nothing out of the ordinary-about 1-2″ per hour. Then, when I went to the tower for the midnight observation, I could not believe my eyes! There was nearly 7″ of glaze ice coating the posts that I had de-iced approximately one hour before! It was by far the fastest accrual of glaze ice I had seen in my lifetime. The pitot-static anemometer and wind vane were encased in this thick coating. It took many, many whacks of the crowbar to get rid of all of this ice.

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In the previous entry on the low-cut, low-rise, low class clothes of modern women, clothes that leave a man feeling insulted or in a constant state of  distraction or alienated from his normal male responses, Clark Coleman argued that men should shame women for their appearance. I said I thought it was unlikely that they would.

Perhaps I was too pessimistic. Maybe it could happen. Certainly it would be a great development.

But would men have the courage to criticize women who are powerful and attractive or even those who are their friendly co-workers? Can they afford to criticize women who are powerful and attractive?  There are effective ways to go about it. No woman likes to be called a slut. It’s a word that retains its power, unplugging the secret, stoppered spring of modesty and shame in even the most uninhibited and sexually practiced of women. Men have used this word often in reference to women with little social status, those who are not beautiful and who are sexually loose. They risk nothing in doing this. Could they use it against someone successful, in a position of influence, surrounded by admirers and yet dressed in lingerie at work?

As another reader comments below, the situation is serious for men. They sometimes risk financial and social ruin in criticizing women.

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In 1898, Elizabth Bisland wrote a brilliant essay on the advance of what is now known as feminism. Woman is not by nature egalitarian, she argued. At heart, she is an aristocrat, prone to selfless loyalty to the hero who fires her romantic yearnings. Men were forcing egalitarianism on women. With the advance of radical democracy, they suddenly refused to play the role women’s loyalty demanded of them.

“He is relentlessly forcing a democracy of sex upon woman; industrially, mentally and sentimentally,” Bisland wrote. “He refuses to gratify her imagination; he insists upon her development of that logical selfishness which underlies all democracy, and which is foreign to her nature.”

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  The discussion on female immodesty continues here.

In a brief discussion about my post Fatherhood and Democracy, a commenter at Dennis Mangan's blog makes an apt observation: A bad king or a bad dictator can be deposed. But how can you depose a bad people?    

Was feminism the inevitable outcome of racial and cultural defeat? There is good reason to believe it was.

Feminism is the invention of Western white women. Their discontent, which emerged so forcefully in the 1960s, was arguably a reaction to the emasculation of men. Men were different first. They shed the trappings of male authority. They embraced feminine pacifism and revolted against all forms of paternal authority. 

This emasculation was a white phenomenon too. The white race had run afoul of history. It lost all pride and the will to survive. Why replicate itself? Fatherhood became aimless and decadent. Men stopped being chiefs and lords, kings and bosses. They became just guys. Guys do not rule anything.

A woman can never become a chief or a lord. But she can become a guy.

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Intellectual women have been openly antagonistic toward traditional women in the main organs of the press for more than 50 years. And when they are not openly so, they are often subtly and cleverly so. Thus the notion that women are not intelligent unless they are paid professionals remains alive and well.

This attitude is especially disturbing when expressed by supposedly conservative women. A good example is this recent article by Kay Hymowitz in City Journal. 

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  Lisa Miller, a former lesbian who has been ordered to turn over her daughter this Friday to her previous lesbian partner, has apparently fled and gone into hiding. The woman who has been awarded primary custody of the girl by courts in Virginia and Vermont has no biological tie to the child.  For all the mistakes of her past, Lisa Miller is a heroine. The case demonstrates why a federal constitutional marriage amendment is the only way to protect traditional marriage and children.  Custody disputes such as this are likely to become common, with parents fleeing to sympathetic states like fugitive slaves. If I were Lisa Miller, I would risk everything, even prison, for my daughter.

  In the previous entry, Karen I. describes an amazing incident in which her nine-year-old son was held down by pre-teen girls while one was forced to kiss him. His arm was injured. The story is typical of the aggressive sexual behavior popular culture encourages in young girls.

Like most women, I cherish the company of other women and welcome the opportunity to bask in female affection or talk about mutual interests. But I have turned down invitations to be part of any women’s book club. A disturbing cultural phenomenon has swept the nation. On the face of it, it seems a sign of progress, an awakening of  intellectual enlightenment and refinement. Women gather in living rooms to sip wine and discuss literature. What could be unhealthy or backward about that?

The truth is the women’s book club has too often become a self-justification society, a bastion of thought-control. Within the intimate enclosure of these gatherings, female supremacy is sometimes stroked and preened, like a spoiled Persian cat sitting on the lap of a spinster.

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  The Mystical Nativity, Botticelli   Heav'ns youngest teemed Star, Hath fixt her polisht Car,    Her sleeping Lord with Handmaid Lamp attending: And all about the Courtly Stable, Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable.             - from "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," John Milton

The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green:
The trees of nature fruitless be
Compared with Christ the apple tree.

His beauty doth all things excel:
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
The glory which I now can see
In Jesus Christ the apple tree.

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