LESBIANS have had special status on the obituary pages of The New York Times for some time now, but today’s front page eulogy for lesbian leftist poet Adrienne Rich is a tour de force of feminist beatification. One would think Joan of Arc had just passed away.

We learn all about Rich’s struggles in an oppressive society. She once knew the “pulverizing onus of traditional married life,” the “strain of domestic duties first hand” and “the soul-numbing dailiness of women’s lives.” Her husband knew the pulverizing onus of married life too. He committed suicide. She mysteriously preferred not to talk about her husband’s death.

Rich’s mother, we are told, forsook her career because she was “cleaving to the social norms of the day.” I guess it hadn’t even occurred to her to become a lesbian poet. Fortunately, Rich was able to escape her own domestic hell and become a leftist working for the “creation of a society without domination” — except of course domination by lesbian leftists and The New York Times. Though she sold almost a million copies of her books, Rich, a graduate of Radcliffe, was “triply marginalized,” as a lesbian, a Jew and …. what was it, oh yeah… a woman. If only she’d been black. Then she would have been quadruply marginalized and might have sold millions. (If only I could be doubly marginalized, I might be rich and oppressed too. Alas, I am just singly marginalized, and not very good at it.)

The obituary is excerpted below. (more…)

JESSE POWELL writes:

It appears very easy to get young men fired up by simply asking the question, regarding young college women who are promiscuous, “What do you guys think about all those sluts?” The women then respond, “Where do you get off calling me a slut!” You know, this is just a thought, but maybe the “Slut Walks” are an effort to diffuse growing condemnation of “sluts” among men. Maybe men are growing in their hostility towards promiscuous women and women are seeking to combat this with “slut pride,” so to speak. Maybe the “Slut Walks” are not a sign of growing cultural liberalism but are instead a reaction against growing cultural conservatism being expressed as hostility from men towards women. (more…)

ANDREW L. writes:

As a recent graduate of an Ivy League college, I find Mary Eberstadt’s recent Wall Street Journal piece about the sexual revolution and its negative effects familiar.  I can attest to a sense of shell-shock as a freshman. My first few weeks were quite an education, as freshman girls, nervous, anxious, and eager to make friends, were exposed for the first time to co-ed living, alcohol, and freedom from parental supervision. (more…)

  The Daily Mail reports that an extensive Canadian study has found that middle class children in day care suffer more developmental delays, aggressive behavior and health problems than those at home. Affluent families are little affected by day care because they don't use it. And children from poor families benefit somewhat. Boys suffer more adverse effects than girls. In addition, parents become gradually more detached from children who have been in day care. For years, feminists insisted that government had a duty to provide families with day care and never expressed the slightest concern for the effects on children. The 10,000 plus children in the study were part of a government sponsored program in Quebec. Will those who long advocated day care now admit in the aftermath of this and other studies that they were wrong and that they failed children? Don't hold your breath.

PAULURAI writes:

I would like to bring to your website’s readers’ attention the feminist indoctrination that is happening currently in India. For example, International Women’s Day has been used as tool over the years to indoctrinate millions of gullible women into socialist and feminist ideology. (more…)

DANIEL S. writes:

Five years ago, Robert Spencer, after reflecting on the demise of the Christian community in Iraq, predicted what awaited the Christians of Syria should regime change come to that Muslim-dominated nation: (more…)

HANNA ROSIN in a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, part of a series on the sexual revolution, continues with her familiar talking point, first popularized in her Atlantic magazine essay, “The End of Men.” According to Rosin, women are more powerful than men today and they should thank the sexual revolution for that.

There’s one problem with Mrs. Rosin’s thesis. Women aren’t all that powerful (in the sense Mrs. Rosin means, which is the power of money and career), and they certainly aren’t more powerful than men.

Take away all the billions of dollars in government support for single mothers, the affirmative action programs, the Equal Employment Opportunity suits, the other civil rights threats backed up by a powerful bureaucratic machine, the prisons for men raised in fatherless homes, the confiscatory family courts, the second income jobs that take opportunities from zero-income homes — take it all away and women are just as dependent as they ever were. Take away the massive investment that women once put into producing the next generation and preparing it for responsibility and hard work — and you have declining prospects, not an era of growth.

And once those subsidies for feminist autonomy disappear – and someday they will, Mrs. Rosin, because the well is running dry — women who trumpet their power over men and talk of free sex as if it is inconsequential for most women will lose all their glamour in the eyes of other women. They will be relics of the Age of Feminist Tyranny, listened to by no one.

By the way, you would think Mrs. Rosin was talking about women acquiring power to do interesting things, not sit in offices all day away from the stream of life.

Here she is on promiscuity: (more…)

  READERS may notice in the comments of some of the posts here, there are sometimes no line breaks between paragraphs. I recently updated my Wordpress platform and this problem has been occurring frequently. Truthfully, it is driving me around the bend. I wanted to let you know I am trying to find a solution.

MARK L. writes:

Coming soon, to a neighborhood near moi — legalized brothels!

I only recently found out that prostitution is considered legal according to Canada’s constitution. However, the practice was somewhat curtailed by laws making it illegal to solicit for sexual services for money and to operate brothels. This was all contradictory, and of course these practices went on, but the message was (at least somewhat) clear: “While we as a society do not want to swell our jails with prostitutes, we do not condone prostitution as an activity.”

(more…)

THE CASE of John Sanderson, a student at Mississippi State University who was shot to death in his dorm room last week, has not inspired national outrage. Sanderson is white and only one of the three black men suspected in his murder has been arrested so far. The Mississippi Commissioner of Higher Education called the murder “a senseless tragedy.”

Is it racist to use stronger words? Walter E. Williams, in reference  to Trayvon Martin,  asks whether it is racist to state the obvious about black criminality: (more…)

HAVING apparently learned nothing from the divorce revolution in the West, India is preparing to dramatically alter its divorce laws to eliminate lengthy waiting times, to make incompatibility an acceptable ground for divorce and to make it especially easy for women, who currently have no right to property acquired by their husbands during marriage, to sue for divorce.  The Times of India reports about proposed amendments to the Marriage Act: (more…)

DIANA writes:

I saw the blockbuster du jour, Hunger Games, on the second day of its release. Suffice it to say, I thought it was drivel, with awful production values and shopworn ideas. What most interests me here is not the movie itself but two reviews of it in conservative publications.  I respectfully disagree with the approval that The Hunger Games has been accorded in two conservative outlets, which I generally admire. (more…)

AT LEWROCKWELL.COM, Heather Carson writes against the “Cry it Out” method of baby care. It’s far better to respond generously to an infant’s demands, she argues, than to let him regularly cry himself to sleep, as the Cry it Out method recommends. I agree, with the caveat that minor, unmet crying is necessary and inevitable. Her argument that persistent neglect of a crying infant causes psychological harm is persuasive.

(more…)

  A READER at VFR explains why Obama's comment about Trayvon Martin, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," was politically astute and why it would not be acceptable for a white politician to make a similar statement.

RICK SANTORUM is picking up strong levels of support from women voters, particularly in the South, The New York Times reports. If, as Democrats contend, conservatives are waging a war on women, that war is largely being fought by women. From the Times’s piece: (more…)

DANIEL S. writes:

Recently the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, the ranking Muslim scholar in that country, announced that churches in the Arabian Peninsula should be destroyed, basing his words on a statement attributed to Mohammed, the founder of Islam. (more…)

Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They all want to control women. They want to control how we dress. They want to control how we act. They even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and our own bodies. Yes, it is hard to believe but even here at home we have to stand up for women’s rights and we have to reject efforts to marginalize any one of us, because America has to set an example for the entire world.

         — Hillary Clinton, at the recent Women in the World Summit in New York

THE recorded happenings of the recent Women in the World Summit in New York, which was part consciousness-raising session and part Global Girls Night Out, are a cornucopia of feminist sloganeering and power-mongering. The arrogance, saccharine self-pity and unabashed lies of the assembled female eunuchs, some of the most influential women in the world, are breathtaking to behold. The immortal crow, Gloria Steinem, was there, cawing about reproductive freedom. For Steinem, women will not have reproductive freedom until they stop reproducing altogether. Mass sterilization might make the Queen of Cold Hearts, who presumably never met a child she approved of, rest at last.

You can read more about the “summit” here if you have the stomach for it. Coca Cola, Hewlett Packard, Liberty Mutual – these are some of the noble, paternalistic corporations that sponsored this orgy of self-love.

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VICTORIA WELLMAN at the Daily Mail writes:

Cheerleaders, with their micro-minis, tight mid-riff baring sweaters and iconic pom-poms, have been impressing male fans and rousing excitement among eager sports spectators in America for decades.

But the half time show of a professional football game that these days centres around a group of scantily clad women writhing and waving their toned arm in the air to the beats of the latest number one hit, was once a strictly male-only arena.

In fact in the late Thirties, the job was deemed too ‘masculine’ for women whose appropriation of slang and loud shouting was seen as unfeminine.

The Mail’s photo of the 1924 cheerleading squad for Columbia University appears above.

The art of cheerleading has most certainly declined. When I was a football cheerleader (photo below), I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing risky athletic stunts. That much enthusiasm for football would have been unthinkable to me. Nor would I have sought the position if it involved quasi-nakedness or clothes purchased from a porn shop.

Mostly, being a cheerleader was a massive civic commitment. It wasn’t just the team that depended on you. An entire municipality might draw sustenance from your selfless support for a game you hadn’t the least bit of interest in.

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