Polite Kid

'Good' is Not a Bad Word
by Chuck Colson - Breakpoint
Eight years ago, a young writer named Wendy Shalit took the culture by storm with a radical book called A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. While many people embraced the idea of a return to modesty�especially the young women whose struggles and aspirations Shalit wrote about�others were appalled. "I knew that my arguments . . . might be challenged," Shalit recalls now, "but nothing prepared me for the tongue-lashings I would receive from my elders. . . . [Feminist writer] Katha Pollitt called me a 'twit.� . . . The Nation solemnly foretold that I would 'certainly be embarrassed� and regret my stance 'in a few years.�"
Well, it�s now been a few years, and Wendy regrets nothing. On the contrary, she has a new book out, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It�s Not Bad to Be Good. As the title proclaims, Shalit is still convinced that true strength and happiness come not from deadening one�s emotions and having sex for fun, but from practicing modesty and self-restraint.
And guess who�s on her side?
As Shalit recounts, "To find out why modesty is more appealing to younger people, [feminist writer Katha] Pollitt might have talked to her own daughter, Sophie, who . . . was disgusted by contemporary sexual norms."
Colson's article then goes on to tell how some feminists' daughters, like the daughter of feminist writer Erica Jong, agree with Miss Shalit's point of view. It's obvious that the feminist ideology has not been a great success in achieving a better society in which women are 'freer' and safer and more 'autonomous', but instead, too often, young women feel more vulnerable and more distressed by the shabby state of male-female relationships, in which heartless, soulless 'hook-ups' often substitute for romance or loving companionship.
Shalit in her original book also made the point, a valid one, that many 'conservatives' who ought to have been on her side tended to dismiss some of her concerns as being feminist 'whining' and complaining. If she said that young women felt vulnerable or treated as objects, this was decried by many 'conservatives' as feminist victim rhetoric.
She said:
First, I want to invite conservatives to take the claims of the feminists seriously. That is, all of their claims, from the date-rape figures to anorexia to the shyness of teenage girls, even the number of women who say they feel 'objectified� by the male gaze. I want them to stop saying that this or that study was flawed; or that young women are exaggerating; or that it has been proven that at this or that university such-and-such a charge was made up. Because ultimately, it seems to me, it doesn�t really matter if one study is flawed or if one charge is false. When it comes down to it, the same vague yet unmistakable problem is still with us."
I think conservatives probably went too far in deriding some of the claims of young women about date-rape, for example, simply as an unthinking knee-jerk reaction against feminism. If feminists claimed that date rape occurred at a certain rate, then the 'conservatives' immediately rejected the claims as feminist propaganda, and tended to deny that rape was as common as feminists said -- just because feminists said it. Surely there is a better and more honest way: examine statistics, and pay attention to real-life anecdotes. We can't rely on anecdotes alone, but when you see patterns, those patterns are telling. I have heard stories from women and girls whose honesty is not in doubt; conservatives have been too quick to downplay and deny that women's rape claims are true.
I agree that false rape claims do happen; I believe that women sometimes do make false claims for vindictive reasons or for other reasons: to escape consequences for some bad judgment on their part, or to get attention and sympathy. But to acknowledge that false rape accusations are made (as with the Duke Lacrosse players) should not mean that we declare all rape claims to be lies or feminist whining.
A while back, when basketball player Kobe Bryant was accused of rape, I was staggered by the number of 'conservatives' who were quick to condemn the accuser as a liar and a 'gold-digger' or attention-seeker. I could not and cannot see how her claims would enrich her or bring her fame; instead, she was exposing herself to being called a liar and worse.
I think in an overreaction to feminist claims about rape, both 'date-rape' and forcible stranger rape, many 'conservatives' have dropped the traditional chivalrous protection of women and have been too quick to disbelieve women who have in fact been victims of rape or other sexual crimes.
Another recent case in which people, both men and women, have been quick to condemn a young woman was the Natalee Holloway case, in which the missing young woman was condemned as a slut, a whore, and worse, for having apparently left a club with a young man she just met. Yes, if that's the way it happened (and we have only the suspects' word for it) she certainly showed poor judgment, but did she deserve rape and/or death as a punishment?
I think conservatives have been too quick to adopt the harsh tone of lesbian libertarian writer Camille Paglia, who tends to blame young women for their poor choices. Paglia somehow has been established as a 'conservative' when she is simply anti-liberal (and often anti-traditional, hence anti-conservative). And she is a feminist, for Pete's sake, yet she has many ardent 'conservative' admirers. Conservatives are all too often easily pleased; anybody who insults liberals is taken to the hearts of these 'conservatives' as being on our side. Paglia is not on the side of traditional values, in any way. In her own words:
I'm someone who is on the record as being pro-pornography--all the way through kiddie porn and snuff films. I'm pro-prostitution--I mean really pro, not just pro-prostitute and against prostitution. I'm pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality, pro-drag queens, pro-legalization of drugs.''
Some 'conservative'. Some advocate of women.
More from the same piece
Like when this huge, nasty expose I wrote for Arion at Boston University came out, and the San Francisco Examiner magazine made it its cover story this summer. They asked me, by the way, "Would you pose as Madonna for our pages?" And I said, "No, but I'll do something just as good." So I posed in a purple miniskirt with a whip and chains in front of a porn store. I thought for San Francisco I should do that--make an extra effort!
So at any rate I got these wonderful moving letters from San Francisco and from the Bay Area--people who said that they were weeping, crying as they read my piece. They said that "for twenty years I've seen our Sixties ideals seem to be betrayed--I felt lost and uncentered--and when I read your piece I remember again the fire that we felt in the Sixties, I remember again what we were working for in the Sixties." Okay, so this is what I'm doing. I'm trying to bring back out of the woodwork all these Sixties people. Come out, come out, wherever you are!''
Paglia occasionally says a true thing, but she is no conservative, and should not be a darling of unthinking conservatives just because she insults their enemies occasionally. I see the same phenomenon with figures like Christopher Hitchins and Andrew Sullivan, neither of them conservative, yet they are still fawned over by conservatives because they aim barbs at favorite targets of many on the right, and they do so with verbal skill or eloquence. Yet they should not be mistaken for conservatives.
So Paglia is right to an extent; she is right that feminism has tended to infantilize women, a point which I have made myself on occasion. We might expect liberal feminists to adopt an infantilized victim image of women, but when conservative women embrace that image of women and defend women who ought not to be defended, on the basis of their helplessness, this is distressing. Women are not helpless and are not exempt from responsibility.
Infantilizing women, and inculcating them with the idea of their helplessness and lack of accountability is not the traditional way; women may have been 'second-class citizens' by our modern liberal standards in the old days, but they were brought up to believe that they were responsible for the choices they made, and they were taught that they had better choose rightly or there would be consequences. Hence young women, in the unenlightened pre-feminist days, were taught that public drunkenness, or even private drunkenness, was a bad and immoral choice, and that it left them very vulnerable to any number of possible fates, none of them good. Rape or worse would be a potential fate of a young woman who got falling-down drunk, or allowed herself to be alone with a strange male. Young women understood that, and behaved accordingly, and those who did not, were at the very least, likely to have their reputation diminished, and to find themselves gossiped about and sometimes shunned. Was this cruel? Maybe; but it brought many a young woman back in line, or deterred her from getting out of line in the first place. Better to be shunned or chastised and to avoid the wrong path than to become a drunk and a promiscuous slattern. And nowadays, drunkenness and sluttish behaviors are the norm for many young women, not the exception.
So was Natalee Holloway to blame, as many conservatives assert, for whatever sad fate overtook her? In some sense, maybe, but does her irresponsibility absolve the guilt of whoever abducted and/or killed her? Hardly.
The young woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape seems to have been less to blame, considering that her job brought her into contact with Bryant, and she may have been alone with him in the context of her job. So was she irresponsible? Most of us can't decide that because we don't know the facts. She may have been star-struck; some young people rashly believe that celebrities are not capable of criminal behavior.
But these young women are all in a sense victims, although I hate to use that odiously overused word, of our current society's libertine norms. In a world in which many young people have a careless and callous attitude towards sex, regarding it as a mere animal act, it's not surprising that 'hook-ups' are the norm and promiscuity no longer scandalous. And in such a degraded atmosphere, there will be more sexual advantage taken: drunk young women are vulnerable. And the dropping of social censure for drunkenness is a contributing factor. It used to be that drunkenness, or alcohol use in general, was considered 'unladylike'. Nice girls did not get drunk. But with the triumph of feminism, with women vying to outdo males in excesses like social drinking and promiscuity, being 'ladylike' was declared to be oppressive for women. It was male chauvinism that invented the image of the 'lady', so the feminists said, so the ladylike ideal must go. The word 'lady' became a fighting word, a grave insult, for feminists. Women must never be called 'girls' or 'gals' or 'chicks', and worst of all was the word 'lady'. because the 'lady' was a prisoner of the patriarchy, with censorious males telling her not to do this and not to do that; her freedom demanded the discarding of all rules of ladylike behavior. Women were thus encouraged to curse and swear like sailors, drink heavily like men, go everywhere unescorted, including into bars (remember ladies could not enter some bars unescorted in the old days). Women suddenly adopted a number of other risky behaviors like hitchhiking alone, often with bad consequences. And the feminists refused to see that their reckless casting off of old taboos and social roles made women immensely more vulnerable to the predators who unquestionably exist out there.
Feminists did women no favors, though they claimed to be 'liberating' women.
But Wendy Shalit is right; conservatives have overreacted against feminists and have thus turned against women in a sense.
Feminists may have exaggerated the victimization of women, and diminished their responsibility for the misfortunes that followed feminist 'liberation', but the fact is, women ARE vulnerable, if only by virtue of the fact that women are not the physical equals of men. And the 'conservative' women who believe the feminist nonsense about women being the equals of men in the military and in police work are as much fools as the liberal feminists on this score. Women, aside from the occasional -type, are simply not a match for men in size and strength. Women and girls are more at risk out there in a world with too many predators and deviants, Paglia and her ilk notwithstanding. Shalit tried to make that point: women are vulnerable, and we have to re-instill in our girls the need for greater vigilance and 'ladylike behavior' so as to minimize the risks. Yes, we can teach our girls to defend themselves as best they can, but to teach them that a few martial arts lessons will make them invulnerable while walking the streets at 2 A.M. is to delude them. And yes they should be taught to use firearms, but we should also teach them that it's still better to live a life which does not expose them to needless risks, and that the old-fashioned ways and norms were much healthier and safer for women than this egalitarian jungle in which foolish and reckless and misguided young women are exposed to dangers their grandmothers would never have imagined.
We do need a return to modesty and to some kind of sanity regarding sexuality and the balance between the sexes. Clearly the 'new' ways pushed on us by the left since the 1960s are not working; they are destroying the very basis of our society.

Labels: American Culture, Conservatism, Feminism, Societal Decay

There is an interesting post and discussion thread at Chronicles, in which Thomas Fleming discusses how feminism has undermined, to the point of destruction, our most basic social institution, marriage and family.
He notes how there are now few defenders, even among ''conservatives'', of the ''patriarchy'', as feminists have labeled our former traditions.
''The recent decision to deploy women on submarines has been hailed as a victory in the continuing struggle to liberate women from the oppression of the domineering male sex. Conservatives have generally deplored the move, citing the inevitable sexual tensions and lowering of morale that will result from putting young males and females in such close quarters for long periods of time. (And, think of all those poor male homosexuals who find the submarine service so attractive because of the lack of female competition!). Some conservatives even go so far as to declare their opposition to women serving in any military capacity, but they are a species on the endangered list: Even the great nemesis of women in uniform, James Webb, has backed off, proving once again, that no honest man can be a US senator.''
It is a worthwhile piece, and the discussion following is also good. I recommend reading it.
This piece particularly caught my interest, especially the first paragraph, which I have quoted above. In a recent post titled 'A little leaven', I mentioned the degree to which feminism (as well as leftism in all its manifestations) has captured 'conservatives', especially Republicans. Women in the military seems to be one idea which conservatives, despite strong opposition in the early days of feminism's propaganda onslaught, have now embraced.
As I mentioned in that earlier blog entry, those ''conservatives'' who argue for a co-ed military and women in combat, often do so on the basis that there are patriotic women who want to fight for our country, and they should not only be permitted to do so, but applauded and praised for it.
If one counters that women are simply not the equals of men in the realm of physical size, strength, and aggressiveness, the feminist 'conservatives' fall back on the old familiar liberal response: they will cite some exception which supposedly disproves the rule. Example: "I know a young woman who is as fit and strong as most young men, and she can fight alongside any man. Would you forbid her from doing her part to defend her country?"
The fact that women like the one described above are pretty rare does not deter these people from making a broad generalization that women can be the equals of men in battle, just because there are a few isolated examples of strong, brave, tough women.
Never mind, also, the fact that there is more than one way to ''serve one's country'', as in previous World Wars when women had auxiliary groups and occupied support roles, rather than going into combat in co-ed units with the men.
The other large faction of 'conservatives' who argue for women in combat and for a co-ed military is a group that seems to be mostly men, who argue from an egalitarian perspective: ''If women want to be equal, let 'em be 100 percent equal, and pull their own weight. Draft 'em. Make 'em serve. Make 'em fight and die just like the men. It's unfair to send only males out to fight and die for their country.''
I've heard that one more than a few times, and true to form, someone on the Chronicles thread says something similar.
Let's look at that argument. In a way, it's a concession to feminism. It posits that men and women are, or should be, for fairness' sake, equals in all things, and that women can just toughen up and take it like men, never mind that most women would be not fit nor willing to go into combat.
Now, is that the case because women are too cowardly or too lazy or too privileged to want to go to war, or because women are not fitted for such roles?
Should 'conservatives' be arguing from egalitarian principles like 'equality' and 'fairness'? Do those arguing these things actually believe the sexes are equal in ability to fight and in the aggressive traits needed to be an effective warrior? Do they believe that women and men can actually share living quarters, with little privacy or room for modesty, without problematic situations arising?
Do these egalitarians really believe that, or is their profession of belief in equality disingenuous? I think, obviously, that they believe no such thing; their arguments exhibit a desire to punish women, or feminists at least, by forcing them to endure the hardships of combat.
I can concede that the anger towards women is legitimate and justified. Feminism is and has always been a hostile, misandrist movement, which on its part has had punitive instincts toward males. So it is understandable that many men respond in kind.
But to go as far as to argue for women in the military and in combat just out of spite is going a little far. Firstly, does the conservative who makes these arguments believe that the presence of women in military roles in co-ed situations does not have a deleterious effect on male bonding and camaraderie, which is a big part of the effectiveness of the soldier and the military generally?
The presence of women in these situations generates sexual tension, sometimes jealousy and squabbling amongst the men. Men also feel the need to tone down their normal male group behavior because of the presence of females. Women, too, probably develop rivalries and squabbles with other women in the group, who may be romantic/sexual competition for them.
It's an established fact that pregnancies in the co-ed military are a problem, which anybody with common sense could have foreseen.
There is also the possibility during warfare for captured female soldiers to be raped, which possibility most of us who have daughters would take very seriously. But the hard-nosed egalitarian 'conservative' says ''so what? Men get raped too, why are women considered too delicate to risk that? Don't we value our sons just as much as our daughters?"
I tend to doubt that male prisoners are as likely to be raped by captors, although I could be wrong about that.
To return to the question of differences in muscular strength, stamina, and plain old grit, can the average female offer fellow male soldiers the same kind of physical back-up in a combat situation as another male would? To say 'yes' is being unrealistic, I think.
A while back, I mentioned a fire we had here at home, and the fact that one of the firefighters was a young woman who looked to be all of 5'3'' and rather small-framed. There is no way she could perform on the same level as her fellow firefighters who were all young men in their prime, most of them well over 6 feet tall, and solidly built. Sorry, but I want the strong young men here in the case of emergency, and if that hurts the girls' feelings, so be it.
I have heard that the physical requisites for these jobs have been lowered so as to give women a 'fairer' chance to qualify, and that in itself is wrong. It's the same with our military.
Women and men are not equals in all respects, certainly not in strength and size. To even have to say that is ridiculous; it used to be a given, something that even young children could see.
While acknowledging that there are no doubt some women who acquit themselves pretty well in the military, I still believe that these rare exceptions do not disprove the rule.
It does seem as though there is a fairly large group of people on the right who seem to think the idea of female soldiers is perfectly acceptable, whether through cynicism or because they have simply bought the egalitarian, leftist thinking that argues for overturning traditional male-female roles. It's ''progress'', or ''things are just different now; nothing stays the same forever''.
The larger question here, though, is why have so many conservatives bought into the egalitarianism of the left? Just as in the earlier blog entry I wrote, I will say that even some of us stubborn right-wingers have succumbed to the propaganda and to that old devil, peer pressure. These ideas are popular, and nobody wants to be an old fogey or a 'reactionary' or the dread 'sexist.'
That's the real issue that must be dealt with: how do we discourage or avert this insidious leftism, and once having found it, how do we excise it from our midst?

Labels: Conservative Principles, Egalitarianism, Feminism, Misandry, Political Correctness

This post may be of interest mainly to the Christians among my readers; just a heads-up to those of you who are not Christian, although you're welcome to read on if you like.
I've just been reading Joshua Trevino's piece about Sarah Palin at The Brussels Journal, and his high praise of her echoes similar words by so many others who saw or heard her speech.
Now, I know many of my readers are strongly anti-Palin, while some of you like her, and maybe some are indifferent.
And of the anti-Palin group, a certain number are Christians who say they are uncomfortable with women in leadership positions or with women possibly being entrusted with the Presidency. They cite, as support for their views, the Biblical position enjoining women to subordinate themselves to men.
I'm on record here as believing in the complementarity of the sexes, per the Bible, and I've even said I would not object to giving up my own right to vote, because I think female suffrage has led directly to the liberalism and the perverse 'tolerance' that is plaguing the West.
However I don't feel the same strong reaction against Mrs. Palin's candidacy as some do.
Here's something that occurred to me as I was reading Joshua Trevino's article: I thought of the Book of Judges, in which Deborah was raised up to be a judge. I remember that the wonderful Bible teacher J. Vernon McGee said, in discussing that story, that the Lord raised up Deborah because the men had defaulted on their natural leadership position. He noted that in the time of the rule by Judges, it was a time when 'every man did that which was right in his own eyes', in other words, it was a time of decline and lawlessness, which in some ways is like our time.
In Dr. McGee's Notes and Outlines to Judges, he says:
"Because no man was willing to take the lead, Deborah did."
Now, here on this blog we've discussed the leadership drought in our society and the fact that the political choices presented to us have been abysmal, from the incompetent and the inept and the inexperienced to the downright treasonous. For a while it looked as though Tom Tancredo would stand in the gap for us, but he fizzled out early on. Then there was Ron Paul, who seemed to be going from strength to strength, at least in terms of inspiring people, but he too soon faded.There is Chuck Baldwin, who is a good man, and for whom I may well cast my vote. But realistically, on inauguration day, it will likely be one of the two sorry 'major party' candidates standing there being sworn in.
There is no doubt that we have a dearth of good men, men of integrity and courage and strength, to lead us politically. We seem to have few men in public life who are willing to stand up to the forces that are arrayed against us.
So into this vacuum steps Mrs. Palin. It may be that she is not the leader a good man would be, but had there been such a good man, where is he? Somebody has to step up and rally the ordinary Americans, and it seems Mrs. Palin speaks to those people, inspires them, and people are hungry for that kind of inspiration.
She may not be the ideal, but can we not at least see why she is evoking such a powerful response among many leadership-starved middle Americans?
American men will have to step forward and re-claim their leadership roles. It's no good to blame feminism for shearing you of your rightful masculine power, as Samson was shorn by Delilah. Samson let down his guard with Delilah. He fell asleep, and let himself be shorn.
Men, if you don't want to be led by women, become the leaders again. There are many women who want you to assume your rightful role. But in the meantime, until men reassert themselves, there will be more women stepping forward into those empty slots. We can either have the viragos like Hillary or Nancy Pelosi, or we can have the Sarah Palins.
Deborah filled a role in the story of her country, and then when better times came, men stepped forward into leadership again. We can only hope the same will be true for us.

Labels: Bible, Feminism, Politics, Women In Leadership

Here is an interesting view of men and male-female relationships as seen by actress Carole Lombard, in 1933.
It's quite a contrast to today's belief system according to the 21st century feminists, as cited in my recent post. But here's what Miss Lombard had to say:
"I like superior men," Carole Lombard says
By Carole Lombard
I could never admire a man unless he were superior to me in most ways, rather domineering in manner, and a much better player than worker.
To women who make their way in the world, directly competing with the homo sapiens, this may smack of lese majeste. So an explanation should be forthcoming.
In the process of evolution, affected by the sociologic scheme of things, man has had the advantage of development -- physically and mentally. This situation may be reversed a thousand years from now. But at present, with woman's emancipation a recent event, man is considered the superior animal....
Read the rest of the short piece at the link.
For those who are not classic movie fans as I am, and who thus don't know about Carole Lombard, you can read something of her here. She was one of the more fascinating actresses in a time when there were many memorable actresses (and actors) in Hollywood. She was a great beauty in her time, and she died a tragic death in a plane crash, leaving behind her grieving husband, Clark Gable.
She was known as something of a free spirit, very individualistic, and I suppose in today's world she might be classified as a feminist:
Carole was born Jane Alice Peters, 1908, the daughter of Frederic Peters and Elizabeth Knight. Jane Alice was a bold, little tomboy. The tag-a-long little sister of her two older brothers, Stuart (1905-1956) and Frederic (1902-1979), demanded to be included in all neighborhood baseball and football games... to be thought of as an equal.But as you can see, believing in "equality" did not mean that she thought as feminists of today think.
It just illustrates how attitudes have changed since Lombard's time.
Many women of today look down on the women of her era as being downtrodden or unenlightened; I think the women of that era might beg to differ -- as do I.

Labels: American Culture, Classic Movies, Feminism

Over at Intergalactic Source of Truth, the Colonel linked to this piece from One Cosmos, entitled 'The Pathetic Last Children of Nietzsche's Pitiable Last Men.' Blogger Gagdad Bob writes a very cogent analysis tying together the present degenerated state of party politics in America and the breakdown of the family and male/female polarities. Some of you may have read this post when it first appeared way back in January 2006, but I missed it, and it's a great read, touching on some themes that I have dealt with here at times.
In this piece, Bob also mentions an article entitled Wimps and Barbarians, by Terrence O. Moore, which you may read in its entirety here. Moore's article discusses the lack in our modern society of manly virtues such as what the Greeks called Thumos, which is
...the part of the soul that contains the assertive passions: pugnacity, enterprise, ambition, anger. Thumos compels a man to defend proximate goods: himself, his honor, his lady, his country; as well as universal goods: truth, beauty, goodness, justice. Without thumotic men to combat the cruel, the malevolent, and the unjust, goodness and honor hardly have a chance in our precarious world. But two conditions must be present for thumos to fulfill its mission. First, the soul must be properly ordered. Besides thumos, symbolized by the chest, the soul is composed of reason and appetites, symbolized by the head on the one hand and the stomach and loins on the other. Reason has the capacity to discern right from wrong, but it lacks the strength to act. Appetites, while necessary to keep the body healthy, pull the individual toward pleasures of a lower order. In the well-ordered soul, as C.S. Lewis put it, "the head rules the belly through the chest." In the souls of today's barbarians, clearly thumos has allied itself with the unbridled appetites, and reason has been thrown out the window.
The second condition that must be present is a sufficient level of thumos to enable the man to rise to the defense of honor or goodness when required. Modern education and culture, however, have conspired to turn modern males into what C. S. Lewis called "men without chests," that is, wimps. The chest of the wimp has atrophied from want of early training. The wimp is therefore unable to live up to his duties as a man:
'We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.''
Please read the discussion thread following Bob's essay on One Cosmos. The discussion covers, among other things, the role of anger in our society, and the tendency of some religious traditions to censure anger, notably Christianity (or some interpretations of it) and Buddhism.
Bob says
To the extent that a tradition tries to eliminate anger, it is a false or partial teaching. Righteous anger is needed, but only in service of what is good or moral. Again, these traditions apparently noticed that anger was a problem in human affairs, and thought that they should just jettison the whole thing instead of doing the much harder work of diferentiating between healthy and pathological anger or moral and immoral violence.
[...]We know so much more today about psychology than they did then, about the roots of pathological anger in childhood trauma. The key is not to split off or repress anger, but to integrate it harmoniously within the psyche.
With regard to Christ's teaching, if in saying that we should always be passive in the face of violence, he wouldn't be a very wise man, would he? He certainly wouldn't be worthy of worship. After all, if I am more moral than the God I worship, what kind of God is that?''
Evidently Bob is not a Christian, although unfortunately there are many nominal Christians who interpret Jesus' words in the same negative way. I would judge the dominance of psychology and the therapeutic culture, which Bob seems to be very conversant with, to be a huge part of the breakdown of our society and to be a contributing factor to the number of 'men without chests.' All the navel-gazing that is at the heart of modern man's self-focus, all the hand-wringing and ambivalence, and all the psychobabble about not being 'negative' or not 'judging' others, contributes to the loss of the manly qualities. Think of neurotic urban postmodern culture, embodied in Woody Allen movies and Dr. Phil, and secular liberal culture in which the least manly 'men' reside, the men who think hunting is barbaric, firearms are for redneck crazies, and war and self-defense are regressive ideas.
These people do not get their lack of manliness from Christianity and traditional Western culture.
A commenter, Kelly, on the discussion thread, makes some insightful comments about women and the loss of the male virtues; she says that women, too, suffer from the lack of courage and commitment. This seems true; the attitudes of many of today's ultraliberal women would not have been of much use on the frontier or back in the early days of the colonies. Women, too, are affected by the breakdown of our culture's values.
Moore's article says, in describing our culture's emasculating effects:
A close look at the culture in which boys are raised reveals not only that they are no longer encouraged to become vigorous and responsible men, but also that practically every factor affecting their development is profoundly hostile to the ideals and practices of traditional manhood and the painstaking steps necessary to attain it. The demanding regime of physical and moral instruction that used to turn boys into men and the larger cultural forces that supported that instruction have been systematically dismantled by a culture that ostensibly enables all individuals but in reality disables men. "It's too easy!" complained John the Savage of the overly efficient, overly sexual, overly youthful, overly fun Brave New World. That dehumanizing tyranny of pleasure, described by Aldous Huxley, resembles the world of easy effort and easy virtue that entices adolescent males today to indulge in their appetites at the expense of their nobler longings and passions.''
Moore also describes the debilitating effects of fatherless families, deficient discipline in schools, and the lack of male rites of passage in guiding boys to healthy manhood.
The essay and the blog discussion are stimulating reading.
I think the discussion of the role of anger, specifically, is one of the more important ones for us today, given that our society is under threat by some formidable forces -- demographic assault, and an invasion marked by sporadic violence, to which we seem unable or unwilling to offer the necessary resistance. Are we ourselves lacking in the courage and conviction, or is it only our rulers? Or do we get the government we deserve, as Joseph de Maistre said, and as I have quoted him? Why do we seem to choose the 'wimps' as rulers? Is this all we have to work with these days? Are there no 'men with chests' to lead? This also ties in with our discussion of the lack of leaders in our time.
And what's the solution? In our political scene, we seem to be locked into this struggle between the 'mommy party' Democrats, and the 'daddy party' Republicans. Or are the Republicans becoming another mommy party, with their 'compassionate conservatism', their political correctness, and the 'welcoming nation' policies? Do we need a real 'daddy party' to represent the masculine virtues which are so essential? Maybe this is part of the reason why a new party, a real conservative party is needed; the male virtues are not really represented in the two-party system we now have.
Personally I think we desperately need the male virtues in this day and age; the female approach, accommodation and peacemaking, are useless against merciless and aggressive enemies and rivals.

Labels: American Society, Feminism, Political Parties, Societal Decay, Therapeutic Society

We all know the term ''fight or flight" in its usual sense, and in the sense in which we've discussed our predicament on this blog.
But how many are familiar with the phrase ''tend and befriend"?
That's a label applied to the supposed feminine strategy for dealing with a threat.
The model, called "tend-and-befriend" by its developers, won't replace fight-or-flight. Rather, it adds another dimension to the stress-response arsenal, says University of California, Los Angeles, psychologist Shelley Taylor, PhD, who, along with five colleagues, developed the model.
In particular, they propose that females respond to stressful situations by protecting themselves and their young through nurturing behaviors--the "tend" part of the model--and forming alliances with a larger social group, particularly among women--the "befriend" part of the model.
Males, in contrast, show less of a tendency toward tending and befriending, sticking more to the fight-or-flight response, they suggest.''
Here is an interesting analysis of that idea, in light of liberal and conservative politics:
Fight, Flight...or Tend and Befriend?
'When I was a psychology professor in the 1990s, it was commonly accepted that there were two ways that people coped with fear: fight or flight. The scientific understanding at that time was that when we sense a threat, our body shoots noradrenalin in our blood stream, causing our heart to pound faster, and our muscles to fill with increased blood. This biological response readied us to sustain increased physical activity, whether to fight or run away. The fight or flight theory lent credence to the liberal's contention that the conservative response to wage war in Iran was a response to fear-- to fight.
But a more recent theory supports the conservative contention. When Shelley Taylor at UCLA looked at the research on fight or flight, she found that it was primarily based on studying men. In her studies of women, she found a very different response to fear, which she termed "tend and befriend." It also had biological underpinnings. When women sensed a threat, they emitted oxytocin, sometimes called the bonding hormone. Rather than fight or flee, they would talk, soothe, and try to connect. I saw a similar response to fear when I worked with women rape victims. Many reported that rather than fight off their assailant or try to flee, they were kind to the rapist in hopes that he would change his mind.
Both ends of the political spectrum lob accusations at their opponents for feeling fear, as if it is a shameful feeling-- the adult version of the "You're a baby" attack. But I contend that it is more admirable to feel fear than to block or minimize it.''
In this real-life example of a female victim 'befriending' her attacker and captor, it appeared that the effort was a success and the woman's 'heroism' was hailed by the liberal media. It seemed that the 'tend and befriend' strategy was the answer. But did it work ultimately?
From Wikipedia, more information on the perpetrator and his trial:
The defense called psychiatrist Mark Cunningham to the stand to testify about Nichols mental condition. Cunningham said Nichols had an emotionally distant relationship with his parents because when he was a child they worked long hours and were seldom home. His father routinely drank alcohol and also smoked marijuana which led Nichols to begin abusing the same substances as a child.
Cunningham said Nichols was sexually abused by a cousin and his older brother and that he was bullied as a child. "The stresses of his childhood is what carries forward into adulthood," Cunningham said.
He said Nichols began to show extreme beliefs in college and he presented a college essays that Nichols wrote in 1992. In them, Nichols lays out his belief that there is an organized and deliberate attempt by whites to eradicate the black race, by imprisoning black men, and keeping them from having children. One of Nichols essay read "If violence can be a righteous tool for the white man, then surely it can be used as a righteous tool for the black man. If violence can be used to murder defenseless women and children in South Africa and Vietnam, then surely it can be used to defend the human rights of dark-skinned people all over the world." Nichols wrote he believes blacks should use violence to rebel arguing that if violence is right in Vietnam and the Middle East "surely it can be used in South Central Los Angeles."
Cunningham said those beliefs "are the seeds of what later grew into a delusional disorder" as he was confined in the Fulton County jail. Nichols said the conditions paralleled slavery: labor without pay, poor sanitation, chains; and he compared his white judge, Rowland Barnes, to a slavemaster. He said Nichols eventually became so delusional he thought he was at war with the government and that he did not know right from wrong even as he pulled the trigger. Cunningham also read an excerpt from Nichols confession: "I felt as though I was a slave rebelling. I was a slave rebelling against the government of the United States. And as a soldier, I don't feel as though I committed any war crimes.... Slaves have a tendency to rebel. And as a result, I felt as though it was my right as a human being, basically, to rebel as a slave. And I felt that it was my right to declare war on the United States government."
Prosecution: Nichols will always be dangerous
...Lead prosecutor Kellie Hill said jurors only have to read Nichols� own words in letters to fellow plotters to realize that the risk of escape is real. Nichols� last known plot was at the beginning of jury selection for this trial, when paperclips fashioned as handcuff keys were found in his cell at the DeKalb County jail, where he was housed after his escape plots were uncovered at the Fulton County jail, Hill said.
Also found in the cell were sharp pieces of broken tile that could be used as a weapon, Hill said. "His plots to escape are not fantasy � he is able to manipulate people inside and outside the jail," Hill said. "He is still planning. He is still dangerous� He is someone who must be sentenced to death for the safety of our society."
Hill read from one of Nichols� letters to a Fulton County jail inmate where he talked about how he had bribed a guard and gave advice on how to overpower guards for their escape. The guard in question was later fired. "What better way to get a glimpse in to a mind of a cold-blooded killer than to look at his own words", Hill said.
[...] Nichols, 36, had been a successful, middle-class, church-going man, earning $80,000 a year as an UNIX system administrator for UPS. His life began to fall apart when Nichols impregnated another woman, causing his girlfriend of seven years to end their relationship.''
There are a number of obvious lessons in the story of Nichols. He should have been a black ''success story" of the kind that Republicans like to cite as proof of the idea that blacks just need to acculturate and follow the rules. He did not come from a poor or 'disadvantaged' background. His parents were professionals. He himself got a good education and was making a good living, as mentioned above. So what went wrong? That's a question for another blog entry.
The issue here is the way in which the interaction between Nichols and his White female captive, his ''Angel," reflects our society's current approach to dealing with threats.
We are a feminized society, and when it comes to dealing with evil, we are losing because in liberal fashion, we try to 'block or minimize' fear, and to appease evil by 'tending and befriending', hoping that we can reform and redeem those who are out to harm us.
The White female hostage encouraged her captor, who had just been on a killing rampage, to read not the Bible, but Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Life. If that isn't a commentary on the state of our watered-down 'Christianity' I don't know what is. And when this bit of proselytizing seemed to work, momentarily at least, this was hailed as a triumph for 'purpose-driven'-ism.
The accounts of Nichols' later comportment and behavior show that there was no 'conversion' or repentance, at least none of a lasting nature. The fact that anybody was naive enough to think that a little Oprahfied pop psychology and a dose of pop-Christianity could change this man in the twinkling of an eye should be cause for embarrassment. But it isn't, apparently.
We as a society are pursuing the same strategy with regard to all the threats which face us. We first try to 'block or minimize'' the fear we refuse to recognize, and we try to 'tend and befriend' all those who breathe out threats against us. If only we appease everybody, use all the politically correct, deferential language, and behave in a generally 'nice' fashion, we imagine we can win over our enemies, change them, save their souls, render them harmless.
The altruism about which I blogged yesterday is another manifestation of this 'tend and befriend' feminized response. And it seems that even those self-deluded liberals and leftists recognize on some level that threats do exist; everyone is not our friend. Not everyone means well. Danger is real. But the choice to block and minimize the threats and to deny the fear, and the choice to try to feed the crocodile in hopes of being eaten last, is the wrong choice. It's far better to acknowledge the reality of the threat and act accordingly so as to ensure survival.
Maybe Nichols' captive rolled the dice and won that particular time. Maybe she herself succeeded in escaping with her life. But it could well have turned out tragically for her. Appeasement of evil is always a huge gamble, and the odds are not in our favor if we rely on this tactic.
Now is not the time to 'tend and befriend'; it's been tried and found wanting. Let the more primal response serve its intended purpose.

Labels: Appeasement, Feminism, Liberalism, Political Correctness, Pop Psychology

It's interesting that this story has emerged now; it's been known for a while that these things happen.
I posted about such incidents a couple of years ago, but I think the fact that the issue is getting coverage in the mainstream media is something new.
No, not in war, but in the Peace Corps. An investigation by ABC's 20/20 claims that "More than 1,000 young American women have been raped or sexually assaulted in the last decade while serving as Peace Corps volunteers in foreign countries," and that some of the victims say "the Peace Corps has ignored safety concerns and later tried to blame the women who were raped for bringing on the attacks... Jess Smochek, 29, of Pennsylvania was gang raped in Bangladesh in 2004 by a group of young men after she says Peace Corps officials in the country ignored her pleas to re-locate her." These attacks have happened in Benin, Bangladesh, Haiti, South Africa, Georgia, and many other places. When I blogged about the subject a while back, I got one very nasty, bullying-style comment from someone who found my blog piece objectionable, and hateful towards Third Worlders, according to him. Interestingly, the comment was posted from a government facility. The tone of it was rather creepy. But that's the nature of lefties; they become nasty and hateful while deploring other people's ''hate". And when your ''hate'' is nothing but facts, backed up by links -- well, that does not stop the left from attacking.
This piece from Alternative Right is about women in the armed forces, specifically the decision to put women into combat units. I think that one point made in the article, the fact that all our institutions have been infiltrated and co-opted, is a very valid one. Most of us on the right have thought, traditionally, that the military was a last bastion of the 'old America' but we see that this is not the case, and has not been for some time.
This story from the UK has been much discussed lately, though, like the Peace Corps story, it has been known for some time, but ignored by the controlled media.
What is the common thread here? Of course leftism and political correctness drive much of the hypocrisy on these issues. But a very important part of these problems is feminism, which of course is part of the leftist subversion of Western society.
The insidious thing about feminism is that it has pervaded all segments of society; even ''conservative'' or right-wing women -- and men, often -- support feminism, and even more, without realizing it, implicitly endorse feminism and egalitarianism in all its forms. Many uninformed people on the right think it is somehow part of the 'American way' to erase all differences between people, whether racial or gender or any other innate difference.
In discussing the shooting death of a female police officer, the FReepers are divided over whether women should be in such roles, though at least one good comment is offered.
To: AbolishCSEU You are right. Even conservatives have bought into the feminist outrage at the very idea of there being any limits at all on a woman doing exactly what suits her fancy. PC has hit us all hard. - Women ARE built different than men, they don�t have the upper body strength to do certain jobs. A former military officer told me that he had women under his command and that when his company got the order to "bug out", the women couldn�t do the heavy lifting to accomplish a bug out. They�d just ignore the order to do so, and call it done. In combat, sadly, calling it done isn�t getting it done. It�s foolish and costs lives.
26 posted on Sunday, January 02, 2011 5:31:40 PM by Twinkie
I don't know who Twinkie is but she (I am assuming it is a she) makes good sense, unlike some others on that thread who spout the egalitarian party line with the best of them.
Women are different than men, and as 'Twinkie' implies, there should, accordingly, be limits on what they do, and where they go. Is this unfair? It's simple common sense.
The girls who traipse off to the Third World in some do-gooder cause, and who thus come to harm, as well as the young rape victims in the UK, and the women in the military -- all have been taught the feminist dogma that women can do anything a man can do, except beget children. ''I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman!"
Obviously women are not invincible, and women who knowingly enter into dangerous situations based on naivete and ''colorblindness'' may come to harm by having been taught that they are 'strong women' who can handle anything. And besides, everybody is the same under the skin, right?
Feminism taught that girls as young as 12 or 13 were entitled to be called ''women'' and entitled to make their own sexual choices . Young girls like those in the UK incidents likely come from 'broken homes' or homes with an absent father. Their mothers, in turn, are probably self-centered feminists who are out pursuing their own ''choices'' while their daughters go unsupervised and unguided, easy prey for the predators. Girls who are living a loose lifestyle (to use an archaic term) are vulnerable to many dangers. Girls who are out meeting grown men, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, will end up compromised at some point, bereft of inhibitions while intoxicated to insensibility, a sure recipe for disaster.
Yet women continue to insist that women should have a ''right'' to do these things: to impair themselves with drugs or alcohol, to consort with people who are a danger, to wander the streets alone (or with other females) at all hours, in bad areas -- all in the name of 'equality' and 'freedom.'
The same attitude leads young women to go into countries which are known to be dangerous, and to put themselves in risky situations -- to show that they 'trust' people, and to show their 'tolerance' -- but they too seem to think, like Helen Reddy, that they are ''invincible''.
Feminism, more than many other aspects of liberalism, has really dug in deeply into our society. It will be hard to challenge that, but it's something that has to be done.

Labels: Biased Media, Egalitarianism, Feminism

I did not follow the Casey Anthony story closely, though I was aware of the basic storyline, but I was shocked when the verdict was announced, like many people.
This is the classic tabloid fodder story, and I am mentioning it simply because it sums up so many bad trends in our society. It is symptomatic of a great many things, some of which are topics I blog about.
First, Casey Anthony is a beneficiary of the bias in our legal system in favor of women. In cases involving murder, it seems women are less likely to be convicted, and less likely to receive the death penalty if they are convicted. I've remarked on this before. Andrea Yates is an example, and Susan Smith got a much lighter punishment for killing her two sons than a father would likely get for the same crime.
''Infanticide in the industrialized nations is as common or more common as the killings of adults, and the vast majority of these infants are killed by their mothers, according to the World Health Organization.
A custodial mother is five times more likely to murder her own children as a custodial father, adjusting for the greater number of single mothers, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.
And women are getting away with it. Among women convicted of killing their infants, two-thirds avoid prison completely and the rest serve an average of only seven years. The average prison sentence for females in the U.S. is only about 70% that of males for most violent crimes. A man convicted of murder is 20 times more likely to receive the death penalty than a woman.
How do women get away with it? For one, their victims tend to be the helpless, or semi-helpless, such as children, the elderly, and infants. Thus there's less struggle in their crimes, and less evidence left behind. Also, they tend to use "hands off" methods such as smothering and poisoning, which are less traceable. Female murderers tend to be older than male murderers, and thus are looked upon with more trust and less suspicion. When killing husbands or other adults, women often hire others to do the killing.''
And of course, being young and relatively attractive is not a detriment. People tend to sympathize with a young woman, especially as defense attorneys have a practice of making said young women look demure, sweet, harmless and wholesome in court.
To be fair, it's true they do something similar with male defendants, dressing them up to look respectable and clean-cut, even if they are known thugs. But women benefit more from the makeovers. Female jurors tend to be more easily swayed by this kind of manipulation, and men find young damsels in distress sympathetic sometimes too, as apparently this alternate juror did.
In my personal opinion, defense attorneys are among the most amoral and unprincipled people in our society; it is all about winning the case and adding a notch to the belt, and/or 'sticking it to the system.' Many defense attorneys (and I have known some) are hard-core leftists who think the system should be brought down, period. I do realize that our legal system requires that every defendant be defended, but many defense lawyers go above and beyond, and in some cases have crossed the line into the unethical if not illegal.
When I first heard the verdict, I immediately thought that the jury was probably disproportionately female, and it looks like seven out of twelve were women.
Several blacks were on the jury, and the men selected seemed in a few cases to be not exactly conventional White males. Juries are selected carefully; these things are no accident.
But when you read the Daily Mail article you get a sense that the whole tone of the jury was set by the women:
'We were crying and not just the women. It was emotional and we weren't ready. We wanted to do it with integrity and not contribute to the sensationalism of the trial.'
The juror, who is single and has no children, added: 'They picked a great bunch of people, such high integrity. And there was high morale," she said. "We all joked. We are like a big group of cousins.'
Imagine such a case back in the era when only men could serve on juries; would the jury behave this way?
To me, this case illustrates so many things: feminization of society, the influence of the 'therapeutic culture' with its emphasis on emotion and subjectivity, and then there are factors like the perpetual adolescence of many Americans. This young defendant in saner times would have been considered as a mature woman at 25, not as a 'kid' as her behavior implied. Then there's the fact that she had a child without a father in the picture, much less marriage. Then, the 'wiggerized' way of life, for lack of a better term, that is so widespread among the under-30 set. Then we have the tabloid media culture, where stories like this one are so exploited and hyped.
The fact is this woman will likely profit by her actions; she will be interviewed by daytime TV and tabloid papers, and worst, she will probably go on to have other children.
The dumbing-down of our society is a part of this story, and I refer to the moral dumbing-down that has taken place, not merely the disastrous educational system. Many people don't seem to care about the innocent victims (such as Caylee Anthony) and somehow identify with the Casey Anthonys of the world. That is troubling.

Labels: Biased Media, Criminal Justice System, Feminism, Feminization Of Society, Therapeutic Culture

At the blog The West's Darkest Hour, blogger Chechar weighs in on the ongoing discussion of women in ethnonationalism. It's a very interesting read.
He quotes from the discussion at the Counter-Currents blog on the subject of women, and he quotes mostly from a commenter named Karsten, who makes very good points, which I generally agree heartily with. This part in particular:
''Focussing on attracting women (or any minority) is the standard recipe for how a movement kills itself. It�s how traditional conservatism was distorted into the abomination known as "neoconservatism." First, it too asked, "Where are the women?" and became pro-feminist. Then "Where are the Jews?" and became philosemitic. Then "Where are the blacks?" and became "anti-racist," and so forth, until this more "inclusive" conservatism hadnothing conservative about it, and was just another kind of leftism.
It was the Janelle Antases and their equivalents among Jews, blacks, and other minority groups that destroyed the Old Right, because they whined and whined and wanted the Right to change to suit them, and sure enough, it did, until all of its principles were gone.''
This is such an important point. It's what is weakening, and threatening to destroy, any kind of dissident group in our society, from even the mildest dissenters like the Tea Partiers (with their 'diversity' mania, and their fear of being 'racist), to the nationalist political parties in Europe. And now even the harder-core right is succumbing to this desire to 'expand the base' or bring in more warm bodies, or whatever. In the effort to become all things to all people and thus attract more support, and with it more respectability if not power, the ethnonationalist right risks becoming an empty shell.
And the very fact of needing and craving the support of minorities (or indifferent women) is in itself a symptom, a sad indication of how lacking in confidence most Whites are these days. The apparent need for validation by having minorities on board with us, or even speaking for us, is sad and disheartening.
However, the situation between men and women is a different case.
The difference between the male-female divide and those between races and ethnicities is that to state the obvious, men and women need each other. We can have, and did have, our own societies divided along racial/national lines. But men and women cannot form separate societies and survive, although some fanatical feminists believed that total separation of the sexes was the ideal. But that is not a natural or healthy situation.
My only problem with Chechar's post was nothing to do with the ideas he expressed; it was simply that at times, as I read it, I was confused as to where Chechar's comments stopped and the quotes from Counter-Currents began or ended. Otherwise it is a very thought-provoking post, and you may want to follow the link to the discussion from which the quotes come at Counter-Currents.
I do think it's crucial that people on our side accept that we will likely never be a majority; to attract real mass support would necessarily require a loss of our very identity and an assimilation to the prevailing corrupted society around us.
Pandering or accommodating to women (or minorities) is a losing proposition, in the starkest terms.
And I do have to agree with many of those who say that it should, it must, be men who constitute any kind of ethnonationalist movement. Women can act in supporting parts but 'putting a feminine face' on it would compromise it and render it useless.

Labels: Ethnonationalism, Ethnopatriotism, Feminism, Inclusiveness, Wn

The spirits of your fathers
Shall start from every wave�
For the deck it was their field of fame,
And Ocean was their grave:
Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell
Your manly hearts shall glow,
As ye sweep through the deep,
While the stormy winds do blow!
While the battle rages loud and long
And the stormy winds do blow.
-Ye Mariners of England - Thomas Campbell
I have been reading a lot of commentary on the British Navy hostages, and as always I am as much interested in the strange responses among many 'conservatives', on the web forums and blogs, as in the event itself.
A lot of questions occur to me in connection with the whole incident: were the British in Iranian waters, as their captors claim, or in Iraqi waters? Was this a 'provocation' meant to escalate the situation between Iran and the Coalition, as some are claiming?
I always start from the premise that whatever our Moslem foes have to say is false or deceptive; that cynical assessment is based on reality. Given that the Moslem ideology/religion encourages lying to the Infidel, how are we to accept at face value anything they say, especially when it is in their interests to lie?
And why were the British so ill-prepared for this encounter with the Iranians? Was this not a contingency that was considered? Apparently their rules of engagement did not allow for them to resist in any way, but it is also true that they were outnumbered and outgunned, apparently.
Still, given the leftist, appeasing tendencies of the Blair government (and no, my friends, he is not the modern Churchill; he is a leftist and a dedicated multiculturalist globalist) it is not surprising that the rules of engagement would not allow the British to fight back. Now, I have heard a lot of sneering comments from the usual neocon hawks about what 'wusses' the British are, since they did not resist capture, but let's think back to a few months ago when our National Guardsmen at the border retreated from armed drug smugglers and paramilitary thugs. Not to condemn our National Guard here; it seems their rules of engagement did not allow for self-defense, so we are really not in a position to jeer at the British here; we are the proverbial dwellers in a glass house. And remember, our country is being invaded by thousands of unknown people, many of them dangerous and armed, every day. We are not exactly Fortress America. So this wussiness is not something that afflicts only our British cousins. Again, though, I blame the elites, not the troops; they merely follow orders. All of us in the West are afflicted with appeasing, weakling leaders, who are more concerned with not giving offense than in protecting the citizenry.
The other controversial aspect of the story is the presence of the female 'seaman', and her being paraded before the cameras wearing a headscarf (I believe it is called a 'hijab' but I don't know all the terminology of the Moslem customs, nor do I want to know. None of us should have to know a hijab from jilbab from a niqab.)
I found the whole headcovering fetish to be insulting; why is it that whenever they capture a Western woman, they have to shroud her in their barbaric headcoverings? Surely that is an indignity, subjecting them to the benighted, backward customs of their stunted culture. And what if we removed the headcoverings from their women here in the West? They would consider it an outrage, and an infringement on their 'freedoms', while they can impose their medieval ways on our people, unchallenged.
And here comes the next aspect of the story: the presence of this woman in a combat situation. I am still amazed by the ferocity with which many 'conservatives' defend the presence of women in combat. Conservatives these days are amazingly quick to seize on recent liberal innovations and to defend them. Conservatives are getting very good at conserving liberalism these days. So if you criticize the presence of women in these situations, you will get savaged by people who claim you are sexist, or you are diminishing the bravery of the women who volunteer for military service. I don't deny that women are capable of bravery and strength; there are plenty of stories, true ones at that, of brave women in the colonial and pioneer days in our country, women who defended their homes and families when it was necessary to do so. But that is different from women being sent to the front lines, into harm's way, knowing that they may be subject to capture, and to rape and torture. And many are like this British 'seaman', a mother of a young child. In some instances, married couples with children both go to war, and the children are farmed out to relatives for the duration. I don't see how a real conservative can favor that arrangement. It goes against long-established standards of Western history. Even some of the more warlike peoples in Western history did not send women into combat, notwithstanding those apocryphal or semi-apocryphal stories of 'Amazon women' who lived in separatist female societies and outfought men. This is all a feminist fairy tale. I think those stories are in the same realm with those Chinese martial arts movies featuring female martial arts masters who could whup all the men. Maybe such women existed somewhere, but in all my study of Asian history I never came across any accounts of such female warriors.
I have heard people say that it's 'sexist' to imply that going to war should be an exclusively male pursuit. How dare we value boys less than girls by decreeing that they have to fight for their country, while females are coddled and excused? Sexism!
How do you argue against such twisted reasoning? It shouldn't even be necessary to explain why war has traditionally been a male pursuit, and women have tended to the home and hearth. While allowing for the rare exceptions of women who are exemplary soldiers (remember those stories of women during the Civil War who dressed as men and fought alongside the men, unbeknownst to everybody? Or the women who cut their hair and went to sea, and became pirates?) These oddities are supposedly meant to prove that women are just as tough as men, just as warlike, and just as brave. Oddly, however, the feminists always point out that women are far less violent than men, more pacific, and less likely to be territorial. Still, in the next breath, they will say that women are the equals of men, and only 'societal conditioning' and sex-role expectations make women weaker than men. So now we have the ridiculous situation of female police officers who are not big and strong enough for the job guarding large male prisoners and arrestees. (In the case of Brian Nichols, a fifty-something grandma was hardly able to hamper his escape and his subsequent murder of a couple of people.) And we have female schoolbus drivers unable to control rowdy, violent students who are in their charge, and innocent children are hurt as a result. Women are just not the equals of men in situations requiring force, physical size and strength and aggressiveness.
And unfortunately most of the women who have been captured by the Moslem enemy have been sexually abused; in the first Gulf War, the first female pilot to be captured apparently was, but this was hushed up at the time. Apparently, Jessica Lynch, the much-lauded soldier who was held in captivity while injured was also abused in this fashion. But the defenders of women in combat will say that men can be raped or abused also, and why should we protect women more? Don't we care about our sons in combat? Let's not coddle women and put only the men at risk.
Again, this is just liberal talk; no matter which way you twist and turn, you can't deny history; women have traditionally not been warriors. Women are not as fitted emotionally or physically for warfare, and there is no denying that women are vulnerable in ways that men might be less so. The presence of women tends also to weaken male bonding and trust, with sexual rivalries and jealousies playing out, and there are other complicating factors: sexual tensions, sexual harassment, pregnancies. All of this distracts from the mission. The sexual aspect should not be introduced into an already highly-charged setting. And we have all heard how the standards in the military have been PC-ized and dumbed down so as to compensate for and to downplay the obvious disparities between men and women. This harms us overall.
From a cultural perspective, do we really believe that putting women in combat situations against the Moslems in particular is a good thing? The Mohammedans surely respect us less for sending our women up against them. Yet, perversely, lots of conservatives are in favor of it for exactly that reason: if it angers or insults the Mohammedans to have females fighting them, then good; let's keep on doing it. That seems like an especially weak reason for putting women in combat. Do we use them just to tick off the Moslems? How childish.
Another twisted bit of reasoning by these 'conservatives' is that if we remove women from combat, we are just as bad as the Moslems, because they keep their women at home and in a subordinate position. So, we have to flaunt our female soldiers just to prove how much more enlightened we are than they are. Well, yes, we are more advanced than they are; I'll say it. But if we are, it's not because of idiotic leftist egalitarianism like putting women and girls in combat.
I sincerely hope these hostages are released quickly, and that they come to no harm, especially the woman. Now is that sexist to say so? I hope that the UK government takes any steps necessary to ensure that their people come home safely, but at the same time, the British should maintain their tradition of strength and honor, and not allow themselves to be humiliated and degraded by the Iranians or anyone else. The Moslems are testing us repeatedly, and with each capitulation and accommodation, their contempt for us increases. Only standing up to them will stop their depredations; appeasement just emboldens them.

Labels: Feminism, Iran, Moslems, Political Correctness, Western Culture

As if to illustrate what I was blogging about yesterday, from the Anglo-Saxon forum, a thread requesting ''More English ladies comments, please" -- from a forum participant who thinks too few women post on the nationalist forum.
And as if to confirm the idea that many women ''don't get it", see this response from a female commenter:
Okay, I'm English and female but having had an albeit brief look around the site my feelings are that there seems to be a lot of anger/agression around (although as I said I've only had a brief gander). I'd also like to add that there seem to be some friendly folk on here too though.
I realise this in an 'ethnic English site' (maybe it's me who is in the wrong place? ) and I'm interested in all things English...but I'm also interested in other places and people too and hope I'm tolerant of others. Maybe it's a male thing or maybe I just need to look around here more but could it be that first impressions could be a bit off putting?
I'm not planning to form an opinion that quickly but just thought I'd give you feedback on my first impressions...and seeing as you seem interested in possible reasons more females don't post.''
I know this is not ladylike of me, but it's lucky I cannot reach through the computer screen to this woman.
I would certainly love to have a talk with her, shall I say. Does she not see any reason to be angry? Does she live in some part of the UK which has been blissfully free from the ''enrichment'' that has been visited in other less fortunate areas? Or is she just one of those pathologically ''nice'' ladies who thinks we can all just get along if we try hard enough, and avoid playing rough?
The men who respond to her post, sadly, also show that they haven't eradicated political correctness from their minds, and feel compelled to half-apologize for their feelings of anger, and assure the lady with the delicate sensibilities that they really aren't bigoted:
You have to realise where the anger is aimed. Its not at all foreigners. Its at ALL those who would erase or undermine our identity and culture for the supposed reason of tolerance.
ALL nations have tolerant people so tolerance is no indication of identity national or ethnical.
I have several black and masses of Asian friends. All my asian friends talk English around me they dress in English clothing they appreciate that there is an ethnic English who have claim to be the indiginous folc of England.
Just as I accept their Pakistani or Bangladeshi ethnicity.''
This makes me sad. Please, stop protesting that you have nonwhite friends; nobody on the other side is the least bit impressed. Boast that you have friends from your own folk; that shows integrity, and takes more courage these days.
This man gives a good, honest response, not grammatically or orthographically correct, but most importantly, not politically correct, so I give him high marks:
We have been accused of being white sumpremists, nazi, ignorant, everything you can think. Well we come out fighting when this happens , ans we beive that patriotic ethnci englsin peopl should no longer havetput up with ths. Or idenity is being squeesed to death by multicult rubbish and pc liberal appeasemnt.
Its so not matter of being tolerant, we have been that for to long hence our current dire straights and troubles. I love thework reinactors and living hisrory doe, they do a huge amont to keep our culture al heritahe and ideniity going. BUT i do not want to see our idenity tobe eventually only be found in those places. All of England is my home. I taked pride in putting my ethnic englsh idenity, people and counrty first. This right not wrong. This is England so our people our culture and our idenity must be dominate and come first. (as other countries culureis and idenity should do in their own lands)
No one are fefending ethnnic english interests and our country so t is up for us to do this. We may at times coem across a angry and at time we are, but we have aims and one is not to roll over.''
Meanwhile, things are hotting up in Luton, Bedfordshire. The BBC offers the usual biased, servile, politically correct version of a protest march in Luton, in response to a recent clash when Islamic hecklers disrupted an event welcoming British troops home.
Here is blogger Lionheart's report of things, complete with video coverage.
From what I could see, the young English men protesting were mostly restrained, if a bit rough around the edges.
The police, however, seemed more ready to intimidate and confront these young men than they were in recent videos I saw, where they retreated from hostile Pakistanis running through the streets. What a disgraceful police force; politically correct to the core. Brave when confronting their own, but servile when facing Islamics. What a disgrace.
The discussion on Lionheart's blog is interesting; the first comment is critical of Lionheart and the protesters, but he answers quite adequately.
Meanwhile the BNP website apparently suffered a DOS attack over the weekend, the 'Largest Cyber-Attack in History'
The Green Arrow quotes Nick Griffin:
The size of the renewed assault is unparalleled and there is no doubt that whoever has organised this has had to pay out a serious amount of money to the criminal underworld.
On Friday the servers of Clear Channel, part of a huge conglomerate that provides billboard advertising to the BNP, suffered a similar attack. Their IT professionals tracked the criminal activity back to a notorious "anti-fascist" organisation openly aligned to the Labour Party and supported by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. This organisation was protesting at the decision by Clear Channel to allow the BNP to display advertising in support of our European Election Campaign.
[...]
The attack on the BNP website is an indication of the increasing desperation of our opponents, who, unable to defeat us in democratic debate, would rather just have us closed down. BUT THEY WILL NEVER WEAKEN OUR RESOLVE TO WIN BACK OUR COUNTRY!''
I hope he is correct, and I know that in the UK as in all of the West, the women will have to get on board and support the effort, or at least stop holding the men back with all that prissy, self-righteous niceness. Women of past generations knew that sometimes niceness and palaver is not enough; sometimes it's necessary to defend yourself, your people, and your way of life.
It appears as though things may come to the boil sooner in the UK than here in our country, and the way things play out there may influence events here; the converse will be true if things heat up here first. We can only guess and speculate, however; the situation is unpredictable. But I certainly wish our British and English cousins well.

Labels: Activists, England, Ethnonationalism, Feminism, Jihad, Nationalism, United Kingdom

Men have always tried to isolate women, to keep them as creatures apart. Men have always put women in houses, shut them away behind walls, kept them for themselves, detained them apart from the community. Men used to put women in a harem; now they put them in a house. But the home, like the harem, has considered its own interests rather than the interests of the community, and in so doing it has jeopardized its well-being rather than fostering it. The home, like the individual, is insufficient when it stands alone.
If a man commits an indiscretion all other men protect him. If a woman is at fault, other women, instead of protecting her, are often the first to condemn.
Women in the past have been afraid to lose the respect or the admiration or the love of men by opposing their wishes. In the last few years the suffragists have demonstrated that women do not lose the admiration of the worthwhile men by expressing their own individualities. On the contrary, it has been my experience that the modern man finds the intelligent, socially conscious, individualistic woman a more companionable person than her frightened sister who fears to speak or move lest she offend him.
Women gain far more than they lose by an attitude of independence.''
The above is from a magazine article from 1922, called Women as Dictators, written by a Mrs. Oliver H.P. Belmont, president of the National Women's Party.
Notice how the writer asserts that men, all men, men in general, have 'shut women away behind walls' or 'in a harem.' She does not specify which men, where, but indicts all men as guilty of doing these things.
The earlier waves of feminists were little different than the later, post-1960s feminists in this respect. They refused to differentiate between men in the Western countries, the men who were their own forebears, and men in the Islamic world or the Eastern world where purdah was often practiced, and women were truly secluded and treated as children or worse. No; they convicted all men of doing these things, without exception. And in this respect they were also following the pattern of today's liberals and leftists, the first rule being 'never give your own people any credit for their good points, and never fail to criticize and condemn every imperfection of your own people.'
It's ironic that in the part of the world where women have traditionally enjoyed the highest status and the greatest degree of personal freedom, feminism of the most militant type arose.
The very women who already had the most privilege were the ones who complained the loudest about oppression and 'discrimination.'
Maybe this is not so ironic after all; it does follow a pattern. One of my black political science teachers in college said that the 'oppressed' groups only organize to demand their 'rights' when the Oppressor (guess who that would be?) takes his foot off the neck of the 'oppressed', thus giving them room to stand up for themselves. So the 'victim' groups who are organizing to make demands and to push back against their perceived oppressor are already in an improved position, or they would not have the chance to rebel or 'resist'. Organized 'activist' groups are by definition in a position to push 'back'. Were they truly denied any power or any 'rights', their protests and complaints would either be ignored or silenced. Their complaints and grievances would not even be heard, and in fact, they would be too harried or distracted to organize on their own behalf, if they were truly oppressed or persecuted.
And there seems to be a truth here. All the aggrieved 'victim' groups have the freedom to organize and accuse and complain and even to engage in open defiance of their supposed victimizers. This in itself discredits, to some extent, their claims to being helpless victims.
Most of the perpetually aggrieved minority groups already have considerable privilege and status. Few are really 'oppressed' or persecuted or even discriminated against. Why are the 'oppressors' so willing to put up with the constant accusations and demands? This is not what we would expect from a ruthless oppressor class of people.
If we look back in history, we can see that even in supposedly 'backward' ages in the Western world, women enjoyed much better treatment than their counterparts in the East, particularly in the Islamic world. The Western tradition of chivalry, which I've written about here in the past, was part and parcel of the Christian culture of Europe, although it can be argued that the Northern and Western European cultures, even before Christianity, were inclined to monogamy and an elevated status of their womenfolk.
Christianity, as often happens, is and has been blamed for 'holding women back' or 'keeping them subservient', with the blame being laid mostly on the apostle Paul and his politically incorrect remarks about women obeying and submitting to their husbands. But the rest of the quotes in question involved Paul's instructions to men to love their wives. It was not a one-way street; the Bible implies that men and women both have rights and both have duties in marriage and in the world in general.
The militant Mrs. Belmont quoted above rails against Christian male dominance:
The church has been very, very hard on women. It has done its best to keep us in subjection and to restrict us mentally. Women are beginning to feel very bitter toward the church or the men who control it. They haven't driven us away from the Christian religion. They can't do that. But by their dictatorial discrimination they are driving us out of the churches as they are organized -- out of the edifices.
Women have given their time, their energy and their money to support the church. We are allowed to sit in the pews, but not to stand in the pulpit. The men of the church accept our support, but are not willing to share their exalted position with us. We are required to acknowledge man as our spiritual superior. We do not acknowlege him as such, and we know that Christ did not so acknowledge him.
If man wants to make a little god of himself he will have to do it by himself and for himself. He may stand in the pulpit and sit in the pew, but we must also stand as well as sit.''
Mrs. Belmont may not have anticipated that her feminist successors would, a few decades later, be talking about women being 'goddesses', and even introducing goddess worship into 'Christian' churches.
I wonder, though, if Mrs. Belmont would even be troubled by that; I suspect she would find it reasonable, and in that light, she and other feminists would be doing what they accuse men of doing: making 'little gods' (or goddesses) of themselves. And that is a picture of our age: the 'self' is the true god of much of the world.
On another front, Christianity is now being blamed for the perverted altruism and pathological refusal to discriminate that is killing the West. But again, Christianity is not to blame, but a corruption thereof.
Chivalry arose as part of the Christian culture of Europe but the original pre-Christian cultures of Europe contained the seeds of chivalry in the great degree of equality between the sexes. The sexes were not considered the same, as among today's deluded feminists and egalitarians, but different and complementary. There can be a kind of parity without pretending that the sexes are 'equal' or 'the same.'
There's a very good piece here about chivalry and feminism. The writer quotes Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts on the subject of chivalry:
A man without chivalry is no man.''
I've heard some men curse chivalry as being another damaging practice from the past, like Christianity, and men are often understandably embittered by the excesses of feminism and leftism/liberalism generally. But it seems to me that chivalry, and the Christianity of which it was a development, actually strengthened men, and of course, society at large. It may seem paradoxical, but it certainly appears that the West was far stronger in the days in which we were Christendom, and in the days in which women and men had their separate spheres.
If we look to find the causes for the rise of feminism and of the left in general, I think it's easy to overlook the decline of Christianity and the loss of faith of much of the Western world. Into the vacuum steps the counterfeit Christianity which is the gospel of humanism and egalitarianism, with its bogus heaven-on-earth notions of a socialist multicultural utopia.
Instead of the 'easy yoke' of Christianity we now have the heavy hand of totalitarian political correctness, which has more 'thou shalt nots' than the Bible has, and which is enforced with a harshness that the strictest Christian sects cannot compare with.
I have no magic prescription of how to find our way out of the maze, except to say that I think men will have to assert their rightful leadership positions and simply stop bowing down to feminism and all the works and pomps of liberalism and leftism, which is after all the ideology of a coalition of the failed, frustrated and envious of the world: weak men and militant women.

Labels: Chivalry, Christendom, Egalitarianism, Feminism, Western Civilization, Western Decline

There is an interesting discussion at What's Wrong With the World of the Palin issue, centering on the question of unmarried pregnancy. The participants in the discussion talk about whether there should be a stigma on unmarried pregnancy and illegitimacy and to the credit of some, particularly Lydia, there is mention of the double standards which have traditionally been applied in situations like that of Bristol Palin.
Here is one area in which the traditional ways were not the optimum: the disproportionate stigmatizing of the mother in such a pregnancy, while in many cases allowing the father to go scot-free, no condemnation, no requirement of support for the child, no nothing. As much as I say I believe in the old ways for the most part, the old ways were much harder on women in these situations.
Zippy, in referring to the scathing criticisms and condemnation of Sarah Palin and her daughter from certain quarters on the right, asks, as I have been wondering myself:
Where is the chivalry? Where is the class? Attacking her in that manner seems self-defeating. One can make the substantive points - as you in fact have - without acting a boor in one's treatment of a lady. Traditional men treat women differently from men.''
[emphasis mine]
Yes!
I think too many men have been wounded or angered by feminists and feminism and are now taking out their bitterness on women in general. This would be less objectionable if the same men did not claim to be traditional or conservative in outlook. Now, if we really want to return to the old ways between men and women, then chivalry is a part of that package. One can't disclaim belief in the equality of the sexes and yet expect to have free rein to attack women in the same way as men. In the old days, no man with any self-respect would pick a fight with a woman or challenge her to a duel, or take a swing at her, inviting her to 'fight like a man." But this is what many anti-feminist men on the right have been doing, and are doing in this Palin thing; they are saying women should be able to 'take it' like men -- as if they are in fact equal.
And do conservatives, really, after all, believe that men and women ARE equal and the same, and that thus men can take off the gloves and treat women the same as men? It sure looks that way from here.
And yes, I know exactly what some will respond: they will say 'the feminazis claim they are equal, so let them take it like men, if that's what they want.'' Sorry, no, it can't be had both ways. If a man attacks a woman as if she were a man, he is the one displaying a belief in women's equality; he is behaving as if she CAN take it like a man, and that he fully expects her to be able to duke it out on male terms, by male rules. Or does he fully know she can't, and is he thus looking to take on a weaker opponent, which is rather unchivalrous?
Chivalry was not a matter just of outward niceties, like the old story of Sir Walter Raleigh throwing his cloak down into a puddle so that a passing lady would not muddy herself. It isn't just about opening doors or pulling out a chair for a lady. It's the recognition that men and women are different and that because of the relative weakness of women, they are not to be treated as men.
Again, I hear somebody say 'well they want to be treated just like men.' And? People in Hades want ice water, too. Some women want to be treated just like men, but men insist on treating ALL women that way, with the excuse that 'the feminazis want it that way." Well, those feminazis (to use Limbaugh's rather tiresome term) don't speak for me or for a lot of women, and they weren't given power to dictate to us all. Why do men seem to capitulate easily to what 'the feminazis want'?
Some won't like my answer, but here it is: I think they want the same things as 'feminazis' want, in many cases, though for different reasons.
I think men withdrew all the little niceties because they were nursing a longtime resentment of 'having' to observe the chivalrous gestures. Men felt put-upon about opening doors or doffing their hats to ladies. That was obvious by how quickly they dropped the gestures. The phrase 'women's lib'' was barely coined before men started going on strike against chivalry. I remember way back in 1969 or so, when the "bra-burners" had just made the news (actually the bra-burnings were an urban myth, but that's another story). I was on a public bus in a big city, during rush hour, when some female workers boarded. There were many seated men, and not a few weeks before, these men would have vacated their seats for the women. This time, one man said, in a surly fashion: ''they want to be equal? Let 'em stand up!"
At that time, the prevalent belief among most men was that women had it easy, and didn't work hard as men did. Well, true enough, men did physically harder and more dangerous work then. But many of these women were not in white-collar or 'pink-collar' jobs; they were worn-looking women who worked in suitcase factories at grueling jobs, or who waited tables on their feet all day and had varicose veins. They were women who worked as seamstresses in sweatshops. These were not pampered, spoiled women. And I suspect that many of them had kids at home, and would have to cook a meal or do laundry when they got home.
But the rest of the men on the bus simply kept their seats and let the women stand the whole way home. Thus it was ever after that. The women didn't complain and no man broke ranks and gave a woman a seat.
At the time, I didn't think much of it, because I was a young liberal, and I thought, fair enough. Women ARE equal. We should stand up, same as the men.
However, I questioned this a short while later, when the strike by men extended to refusing to yield seats to elderly women or women in late stages of pregnancy or women with babies or toddlers in their arms. That, I thought, was thoughtless, to let those women stand as a way of punishing the 'bra-burners.'
In those days, I would get up and give the old women or the pregnant a seat, if need be. But the men seemed to feel no shame about not doing so.
Some of you might say, 'why should they feel shame'? Because as regards old folks, male or female, we should defer to them, and pregnant women, though not infirm by definition, still have a hard time keeping their balance on a moving bus or train. A pregnant woman's center of gravity shifts, and she has a hard time staying on her feet.
I think women's lib provided an excuse for men to drop all chivalrous gestures, which it seems many found onerous or unfair.
Men were glad to be shut of chivalry and its demands, and to cite 'women's libbers' as they were then called, as their justification for doing so. And they could feel quite self-righteous about it.
So it is now; men do not want the old system of chivalry, because they no longer believe in its tenets, in the idea that a real gentleman defers to ladies, regardless of whether he deems them worthy of those considerations. The idea behind it was that of noblesse oblige, not a sense of compulsion. If you believe that women are the frailer sex, or that they should be treated with gallantry, then you don't resent giving them small considerations and gestures. It showed nobility of character. It's easy to show consideration to those whom you consider to be your lessers in some way; it was in no way a concession to 'feminazis' but it was a magnanimous thing, an 'I can afford it'' thing.
At some point, men no longer believed in those things, so the small courtesies began to be treated as impositions, and when the first pretext presented itself, the courtesies were dropped like a hot potato.
I think few would disagree with me when I say that there is little courtesy in general in our society; we all feel equally entitled and nobody wants to yield to anybody else. Few people show special courtesy to the elderly now; this is also part of the anti-chivalry fallout. Elders are 'the weak' whom knights of old were sworn to defend and protect. How many people see old folks that way now? Most, including many conservatives, see old folks as a burden and an unsightly nuisance. Conservatism, for some, is a pretext for a selfish, mean approach to life. This is what kept me from identifying with conservatism for a long time, because I saw this 'rugged individualist' every-man-is-an-island meanness. Now, I can see that much of it is part of the classic libertarian mindset, which celebrates selfishness. But that mindset has prevailed among many 'conservatives' these days.
In general, even conservatives today behave in reality like rank egalitarians/individualists, with a 'devil take the hindmost', 'look out for number one' attitude.
And this de facto egalitarian treatment of women is in effect an affirmation of feminist principles. By "conservatives."
Another point in which many men agree with 'feminazis' is on questions of sexual morality and abortion. It's facile to blame all that on feminists, when people like Hugh Hefner and other men were on board with it. Why wouldn't they be? It made for more sexual license, with women persuaded that 'liberation' meant freedom to practice casual, commitment-free sex. Abortion meant that men would have fewer 'mistakes' that they would have to pay child support for. And women's pursuit of careers in place of marriage meant that many men, who were/are marriage-averse, would be able to preserve their vaunted 'bachelor lifestyle' much longer, with women who would be sexually available with no strings attached.
So, men's interests coincided with those of feminists, in many cases. And they didn't have to be burdened with chivalry anymore. No more opening doors -- ''because the women hate it." No more expectations of commitment before sex.
I don't believe that men in general, including 'conservatives', would welcome a return to the status quo ante. Not at all.
Too much of what I see today on the right is little more than knee-jerk anti-liberalism. The leftists and liberals believe in women in high office, so let's denounce women in high office. The liberals believe in working mothers, so let's condemn working mothers across the board. The liberals promote premarital sex so let's condemn it harshly and bring back the scarlet letter. Why stop there? Bring back the stocks and the pillory.
But only for women, of course. Apparently, women get pregnant by parthenogenesis, without a male playing a part in it, these days.
This latter-day anti-feminism would have us be more traditionalist than tradition itself. There has been a long tradition of women taking an active role in this society, long, long, before 'feminazis' came along, and long before the abominated 1960s. If you want to go way back, Tacitus, the Roman historian, described the high status of women among the Germanic tribes. Women were in prominent positions in Celtic societies in ancient times.
More recently, Alexis de Tocqueville described the high status of women in America. It is not a product of Rush Limbaugh's 'feminazis' or of 'hippies' or of Hillary Clinton. It's a longstanding feature of our Western civilization, like it or not.
So what 'tradition' are we harking back to in trying to put women back into their 'proper' roles? Cite me chapter and verse. What tradition? Where? When? Or are some conservatives confusing Moslem tradition with Christian tradition?
Generally I believe that mothers should stay at home and care for their young children. When the children are of school age, however, I don't see why a woman cannot or should not work, as long as her mothering duties are not neglected and her children not shortchanged, and as long as her husband does not object.
Full disclosure: I have been both a working mother and a stay-at-home. Given my preference, I would have stayed at home permanently. But we don't always get what we want in life. Conservative or no, we cannot always control our life's circumstances. It is an ideal but it is not always reality.
Conservatives, above all, should be the ones who can differentiate between an ideal, to which it is good to aspire, and the realizable, which is often what we can realistically manage in an imperfect world.
It grieved me to leave and go to work every day; I can honestly say I shed tears over it. But one does what is necessary sometimes.
Many working mothers feel bad enough about leaving their children without being castigated and called bad mothers or bad Christians for it.
By the way: those of you who object to working mothers will, I am sure, support some kind of welfare payments for widowed or divorced women who would otherwise have to leave their children to go to work.
What's that you say? No? Then I see a contradiction here. Is staying at home only reserved for some?
Not everybody has family they can rely on for childcare, remember, in this day and age of mobility and family disintegration. And curiously, many 'conservative' men are opposed, somehow, to paying child support or alimony, so leave their ex-wives to support or partially support the child(ren). I could cite many instances of this.
One more thing: 'conservatives' have often very vocal in demanding that many divorced or widowed women on assistance get up off their lazy behinds and go to work, placing their kids in daycare. Is this not inconsistent with the idea that all children deserve to have their mothers at home? Or are only wealthy women allowed to raise their own children? It seems to me that conservatives who believe in full-time mothering have not thought this question through.
I remember Newt Gingrich's proposal to bring back orphanages as an alternative to welfare.
So where were Gingrich's family values there, if all children need their mothers?
I am not calling for taxpayers to support all women who want to stay at home with their kids, but maybe if we can afford trillions for war in Iraq, we could afford to subsidize stay-at-home moms --- IF we truly believe it is a must for mothers to be at home. But actually I am not convinced that we really believe this. I think the attacks on working mothers have ulterior motives; it isn't about keeping moms at home at all, but about making political points, or it's a feeble kind of striking back at the faceless 'feminazis.'
But either we believe in the ideal of women caring for their own children, or we don't. There should be no double standards, one for women in intact marriages or women with plenty of money, and a second for women who are alone due to divorce or death, or women whose husbands earn too little to support the family. Maybe there is some truth to the liberal stereotype that conservatives are out-of-touch people who are wealthy and insulated from reality.
Believe it or not, I am about as traditional as you get on these things. But I see no reason to try to establish some kind of pre-'feminazi' Golden Age which never was, and punish all the women who don't conform to the ideal. That is not what tradition means. Tradition means
1 a: an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom) b: a belief or story or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable 2: the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction 3: cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions''
It does not mean some mythical ideal which never existed in reality.
Cultural continuity means that we are bound to what actually existed, not what we wish had existed, and not what ideally would exist in some perfect world.
I think conservatives need to seriously re-examine where they stand, because they are all over the map on these things.

Labels: Egalitarianism, Feminism, Social Conservatism, Traditional Morality