HOW DOES one leap from the observation that women sometimes use their children as status symbols and indulge grandiose expectations of their own nurturing abilities to the conclusion that mothering is unnecessary? Leave it to a feminist warhorse like Erica Jong  to make this connection, assuring us that communal child-rearing, the sort of thing found in primitive African villages or Stalinist daycare centers, is superior to the atmosphere of the Western nuclear family. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, she says:

The first wave of feminists, in the 19th century, dreamed of communal kitchens and nurseries. A hundred years later, the closest we have come to those amenities are fast-food franchises that make our children obese and impoverished immigrant nannies who help to raise our kids while their own kids are left at home with grandparents. Our foremothers might be appalled by how little we have transformed the world of motherhood.

Dreamed of communal kitchens and nurseries? The number of women who have dreamed of such atrocities is infinitesimally small. No one who experienced a communal kitchen in Soviet Russia would have dared to call it an “amenity” except in contrast to no kichen at all. (more…)

CHRISTIANITY is said to be a great force for social justice. But one of the most important ways in which Christianity has promoted justice is rarely acknowledged. Christianity historically protected men from various forms of exploitation. It is in some senses the ultimate men’s movement.

By this, I do not mean modern-day pseudo-Christianity with its worship of the feminine divine or its aggressive denial of Christian events and revelation. I do not mean those who “honoreth with the lips” while their hearts remain stone-cold. I refer to the Christian creed, scriptures and traditions. The good man, or the man trying to be good, has always been ripe for oppression, even more so than the good woman. It is for him, not the brute or the thug or the despot or the libertine, that Christianity once secured important protections.

This is an important subject and there’s a great deal to say about it.  At the risk of useless simplification, here is a very brief look at the ways in which Christian civilization historically protected men. (more…)

IT MAY BE impossible to fully articulate how the denial of sex differences has altered our world. It is a phenomenon that is sometimes too big for us to see. However, this brilliant excerpt from Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology by the Jungian analyst Irene Claremont de Castillejo gets at the ineffable nature of this sweeping change:

There can be little doubt that with rare exceptions the masculine of woman is inferior in quality to that of a man. It is apt to be less original and less flexible. She tends to be impressed by organisation and theories which she frequently carries to excess because her masculine power to focus runs away with her. She then becomes hidebound by regulations and obsessed by detail. She is much less likely to be willing to make exceptions than a man, as the masculine side which runs away with her is wholly impersonal and disregards the human need of any particular man or woman.

But the same sort of thing applies to the feminine within man. It is less vital and dynamic than that of a woman. The feminine in women is not solely passive and receptive. It is also ruthless in its service of life, or rather those particular lives which personally concern her. (more…)

A BOSTON UNIVERSITY religion scholar finds little sympathy for the feminist theologian and misanthrope Mary Daly among his students. Given that Daly called for the virtual elimination of the male sex, this is not necessarily heartening news. One would hope they would be angry and outraged at the mere mention of her name and that he would be exiled academically for giving her serious consideration. Stephen Prothero says very few of his students are willing to call themselves feminists. That’s not because feminism has died, as he speculates, but because it has won. (more…)

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I thought that your readers might like to see a bit of the beginning of “The Bell” in Hans Christian Andersen’s Danish.  The Scandinavian languages are the Germanic languages closest to English; they are quite easy for English speakers to learn.  I studied Andersen thirty years ago and more in Danish with Niels Ingwersen, an affable Dane, and a translator of Andersen, who spent a year at UCLA as a visiting professor.  In those days, Scandinavian was an independent “section” of the Department of Germanic Languages, but it has since almost disappeared.  This is true throughout American higher education, where, with the exception of Spanish, language studies nowadays recruit too few students to justify their departmental existence.  (more…)

  Matt H. writes: I stumbled across this picture which I felt admirably captured the tragedy of our era: it is a self-loathing man taking directions from a woman doing a man's job. It is from this year's 'Glasgay' festival, which you can learn about here, if you really want to.

  HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN'S story "The Bell," about a town searching for a pealing bell, is a good bedtime story to read aloud to children. In this translation, it opens: IN the narrow streets of a large town, people often heard in the evening, when the sun was setting, and his last rays gave a golden tint to the chimney-pots, a strange noise which resembled the sound of a church bell; it only lasted an instant, for it was lost in the continual roar of traffic and hum of voices which rose from the town. “The evening bell is ringing,” people used to say. “The sun is setting!” Those who walked outside the town, where the houses were less crowded and interspersed by gardens and little fields, saw the evening sky much better, and heard the sound of the bell much more clearly. It seemed as though the sound came from a church, deep in the calm, fragrant wood, and thither people looked with devout feelings.

  AFGHAN WOMEN choose to kill themselves because their lives are so restricted, writes Alyssa Rubin in today's New York Times, examining the case of one mother of six children who attempts suicide after being scolded by a relative. Rubin, who does not compare the female suicide rate in Afghanistan with that in America, writes: It is shameful here to admit to troubles at home, and mental illness often goes undiagnosed or untreated. Ms. Zada, the hospital staff said, probably suffered from depression. The choices for Afghan women are extraordinarily restricted: Their family is their fate. There is little chance for education, little choice about whom a woman marries, no choice at all about her role in her own house. Her primary job is to serve her husband’s family. Outside that world, she is an outcast. Imagine the New York Times giving the same amount of prominent play on the front page to the story of an American woman who has killed herself after having an abortion, a woman for whom "family is her fate" in an entirely different sense, and you may begin to grasp the subtext here. It is interesting how the writer turns what is an act of horrendous violence by women into an act of violence by men: “Violence in the lives of Afghanistan’s women comes from everywhere: from her father or brother, from her husband, from her father-in-law, from her mother-in-law and sister-in-law,” said Dr. Shafiqa Eanin, a plastic surgeon at the burn…

IF YOU are in any doubt, if you think you can raise your children as if you are living in normal times, then read this from today’s New York Times:

The school district in Helena, Mont., revised its new teaching guidelines on sex education and tolerance, after parents criticized them as being too explicit and an endorsement of homosexuality. (more…)

  WHY WOULD the ultra-patriotic, ostensibly conservative Sarah Palin call those who believe women should raise the next generation "Neanderthals?" Where does this withering disdain for Neanderthals come from? Neanderthals, in this context, are all those generations of women who devoted themselves to the care of their husbands and the formation of their children. They refined character and culture. They guarded privacy and sentiment. They kept the home from being crushed by the State. Why despise them? This superiority complex, so common and so rooted in the hearts of feminists, can be traced to the modern cult of the future. As G.K. Chesterton said, it is much easier to project oneself onto the blank pages of the future then fit oneself into the humbling records of the past. We may never live up to its standards. The feminist fears even the homemade cakes and pies of yesterday, which is why she heaps such condescension upon them. "The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes," Chesterton said. "... And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back."

A READER wrote in earlier this week about Sarah Palin’s appearance with Geraldine Ferraro on Fox News. I have just seen the clip. Never has Palin so passionately stated her opposition to the traditional family. The issue of whether mothers work outside the home is “petty little superficial meaningless,” she says with characteristic eloquence. “Neanderthals” consider it important.  Palin says she cheered Ferraro when she ran for vice president, as if every female candidate feels automatic solidarity with any other female candidate. How “great for our nation” it was that Ferraro ran. Golly gee willickers. The supposedly pro-life, small-government Palin applauds the efforts of someone with an entirely different political philosophy simply because she is a woman. (more…)

ALAN WRITES:

Regarding libraries as sanctuaries for the homeless: “The homeless” is code for bums, loafers, panhandlers, parasites, and worse. All of them enjoy the refuge of public libraries. I have seen them sleep at library tables for hours, annoy staff and patrons, misplace books at whim, chat up women, and talk with each other about who’s in and who’s out (of jail). They love to loiter for hours, gaping at beautiful, expensive books on art, architecture, and photography and discretely removing pages they especially like. 

Librarians must suffer their presence because those who run libraries (not necessarily librarians) will do nothing to kick them out or keep them out. Indeed, librarians and other staff are expected to defer to their plight with sympathy and helpful advice on how to improve their situation. (more…)

DEREK TURNER, writing in Taki’s Magazine, examines the much-publicized conversion of Lauren Booth, Tony Blair’s sister-in-law who proclaimed herself a Muslim six weeks after having a mystical experience in a mosque. He writes:

Lauren’s conversion has been greeted with hilarity. Her father scoffed: “I mean, come on, the girl doesn’t have a spiritual bone in her body.” (more…)

MARKUS writes:

I don’t have a TV, but as of last year I started watching the odd hockey game over the Internet, which provides live feeds through Canada’s government-sponsored network, the CBC. Throughout the Stanley Cup playoffs, and continuing into this season, viewers have been treated frequently to this bit of propaganda (see link to commercial): 

The ad is by Plan International, an organization that used to be kown as Foster Parents Plan International. Seems their name has gotten shorter even as their, uh, mission is expanding. (more…)

A NEW REPORT on the disastrous state of the American family was issued recently by Princeton University and the Brookings Institute. “The Future of Children” contains all the bad news you already know, such as the nearly 40 percent illegitimacy rate and the harmful effects of single motherhood on children, and some news you may not know, such as that most unwed parents are actively involved with each other upon the birth of their child but break up within a few years.

Equally distressing are the recommendations and prescriptions offered by the report’s authors who suggest more programs and services, more marriage education classes, more daycare, more useless nagging of the poor and uneducated. They seem determined to disregard the obvious: that we are quickly becoming a matriarchal society from the bottom up, and why this is so. Radical sexual and economic freedom for women and the decline of masculinity, with government subsidies of single mothers aiding that decline,  have been a disaster. No government program will undo this reversal of roles. The authors seem to fully support the egalitarian society and its attendant assault on the traditional family. 

Here are their recommendations: (more…)

DAWN EDEN writes about the works of J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, in The Weekly Standard:

Throughout his career, his men remain boys. They may be boys who have charm, or pride, or courage, or brains, or (like the title character of The Admirable Crichton) all of the above. In his final play, the biblical drama The Boy David, he turned the young king of Israel into a proto-Peter Pan—even to the point of, as with Peter Pan, writing the role for a female actress. Not only are his men boys; his women are boys and, like David, are destined to rule, but minus the divine call to parenthood. Theirs is the independence of pure isolation from responsibility, the kind that the 19th-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton championed: an impregnable “solitude of self.”

(more…)

LAST MONTH, a judicial board in Britain asked judges to treat women defendants with greater lenience. The notion of special standards for women is also gaining ground here. Los Angeles County Court has seen a steep increase in female criminals in recent years, as have many jurisdictions. It now boasts of a special program especially for women.

Women convicts do face difficult circumstances, particularly as mothers. However, as the blogger Simple Justice notes, these circumstances should be viewed individually, not on the basis of sex. He writes:

When there’s a special court for women, it by definition precludes men. Some women deserve a break, having been manipulated and pressured into committing crimes, or having done so to feed their children. So do some men. But there’s no court for that.

What this perversely reflects is the inability of the criminal justice system to lose the rhetoric of blame and give every case the degree of individualized thought it deserves. There’s no reason why a woman before a criminal court shouldn’t be given the depth of scrutiny necessary to determine whether she’s an evil, malevolent person, but rather a victim of circumstance who is undeserving the typical harshness our system metes out. There’s no reason every person who comes before a court shouldn’t receive that. (more…)

SPANISH newborns automatically receive the last name of their fathers (with the mother’s surname coming first) unless the parents choose to have the two names reversed. Under a proposed law, in cases of non-agreement or uncertainty, a baby would receive the parents’ names in alphabetical order. The idea is to remove any trace of patriarchal favoritism.

This is a country, by the way, that has one of the lowest birth rates in the developed world.          (more…)