An Unexpected Out

In The New York Times, Peggy Orenstein introduces us to an exciting new type of woman known as the "Femivore," who seems to be an urban bourgeois version of a farm wife.

All of these gals — these chicks with chicks — are stay-at-home moms, highly educated women who left the work force to care for kith and kin. I don’t think that’s a coincidence: the omnivore’s dilemma has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a way for women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper.

The "feminist predicament," as far as I can tell, is that feminism somehow overlooked the fact that women are often expected to be Domestic Goddesses whether they have careers or not. Now, once again, the miracle of constrained choice is bringing women's expectations into line with that bedrock reality, to the seemingly inexhaustible surprise of cultural commentators who write for The New York Times.

Once upon a time, Orenstein explains, "middle-class housewives" were "trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping." And then, "a generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment." But "others merely found a new source of alienation," perhaps because relative semi-equality in the workplace did not necessarily translate into equality in the home.

Femivores have apparently managed to resolve these issues by tending chickens, which, as Orenstein portrays it, seems to combine the transgressive thrill of feminism with the rich cultural rewards of doing what's expected.

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy.

As usual, the NYT treats the women in its demographic to an interesting mixture of cheerleading and contempt. There's an implication that educated, middleclass women are the only ones who matter, and that they're trendy and shallow and neurotic, and that any neo-traditionalist drudgery to which they submit, willingly or otherwise, comprises some sort of obscure rebuke to feminism and is therefore novel and newsworthy.

Conventional feminist wisdom held that two incomes were necessary to provide a family’s basic needs — not to mention to guard against job loss, catastrophic illness, divorce or the death of a spouse.

That doesn't sound like "conventional feminist wisdom" so much as realism. More to the point, conventional feminist wisdom also recognizes the reality of patriarchy and misogyny. That's more than you can say for the average NYT article on "the feminist predicament," which tends to take place in a rhetorical world that has been carefully stripped of explicit references to male domination. It's a bit like extracting figures from a film of a storm, and presenting them as mimes who are merely pretending to walk against the wind.

Anyway, feminism said you have to have two incomes to survive, but Femivorism extols the time-honored virtues of home economics.

Femivores suggest that knowing how to feed and clothe yourself regardless of circumstance, to turn paucity into plenty, is an equal — possibly greater — safety net. After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy, the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?

Beats me. I suppose it might depend on who carries more debt.

Even if Femivores are smug, trendy obsessives who seek "instant legitimacy," we still have to give them credit for expanding their consciousness beyond the dreary confines of "conventional feminism."

My femivore friends may never do more than dabble in backyard farming — keeping a couple of chickens, some rabbits, maybe a beehive or two — but they’re still transforming the definition of homemaker to one that’s more about soil than dirt, fresh air than air freshener.

You can transform the definition of "homemaker" all you like, but as long as it's applied primarily to women, it's going to be problematic. As Orenstein actually does acknowledge, sort of, finally:

[I]f a woman is not careful, it seems, chicken wire can coop her up as surely as any gilded cage.

Of course, it's not "chicken wire" cooping women up, in Orenstein's scenario; it's men who refuse to engage in "a genuinely egalitarian relationship," and a culture that still sees this refusal as normal, if not ideal. Looking at it that way, without any coy metaphorical distractions, you can see that there's something a little bit unseemly about advising would-be Femivores to be "careful," lest they create "a dangerous situation."

As if they have no one but themselves to blame if things go wrong. As usual.

A Limited Construct

Carol Iannone notes that Evolutionary Psychology has a tendency to explain the present in terms of a past that it extrapolates from the present:

[N]ot long ago they were claiming that women were naturally monogamous. As female behavior grew wilder, they changed the evolutionary scenario to conjure up the prehistoric woman with serial partners. If contemporary women begin to curb themselves a bit as the culture keeps changing, and they probably will, the evolutionists will no doubt revise the scenario yet again.

This scenario seems just to correspond with what we see of behavior today, and expresses no abiding truth about human nature.

That being the case,"why should we accept this limited construct of human nature and of the potentialities of our lives"? Instead, let's accept an unlimited construct...one that does express an abiding truth about human nature, and will give us a better sense of the potentialities of our lives. Like for instance, the bedrock biological reality of the power that the "male gaze" has over women.

Feminism is largely responsible for the cultivation of “beta males” by making men suppress their natural masculinity. The truth is, even the merest so-called beta has all the masculinity needed to attract women if only he would exercise it. The simplest masculine look or “male gaze” at certain moments can make females melt.

Thus is sociobiology refuted! It's about time we stopped listening to all these just-so stories about masculine power and dominance, and accepted that "beta males" exist mainly because feminists have been emasculating perfectly serviceable men who would otherwise dominate them as Nature intended.

Also: Thanks to this marriage of convenience between EP and feminism, too many men are wearing baggy Hawaiian shirts and backwards baseball caps. Some of them even bake cakes! This behavior drastically reduces their reproductive fitness, because women don't really like men who bake cakes, unless they dress in properly masculine clothes, and maybe not even then. If you doubt this, consider the fact that this man will probably die alone and unloved even though he has a successful TV show. So much for Darwinism!

Our Precious Little Daughters

Rebecca Hagelin doesn't want teens to have sex, which means that she doesn't want them to learn about sex, which means that she doesn't want them to use contraceptives.

It seems stupid, until you understand her rationale. At which point, it seems stupid and vicious.

The basic idea, as always, is that the sexuality of young girls must be strictly controlled for the good of society.

Cynics might claim that this is a way for society to give itself permission to dwell a little more avidly than is necessary on the ins and outs of Teen Sex. But real Americans understand that anything done in a child's name is sincere and blameless by definition, unless it involves pollution control or increasing access to healthcare.

One thing that worries Hagelin is the portrayal of women in the media:

[W]e've created a culture in which our precious little daughters are constantly bombarded by messages that degrade their innate value, reducing them to nothing more than sex objects.

You'd think this would allow her to find some common ground with feminists, who've been making the same point for a pretty long while. Unfortunately, there are some obstacles to a true rapprochement. The first is that Hagelin's idea of "innate value" is skewed rather heavily toward women's utility as breeding stock. The second is that according to this essentially market-based idea of value, women who become sex objects are damaged goods, and will be passed over by male buyers. To feminism, a woman's "innate value" is a bit more durable than that.

Which, I guess, is why Hagelin calls feminism "insidiously evil." You can't blame her, given that feminists are simultaneously complaining about a culture that reduces women to sex objects, and training Our Precious Little Daughters to give blow jobs while they're still in kindergarten. (Please note: While that last statement is not literally true, it does illustrate the severity of the problem.)

Many educators are obsessed with promoting a promiscuous lifestyle. One particularly disturbing tactic is to strip our little girls of their natural inclination toward modesty and replace it with an attitude of sexual dominance. They teach young women that the way to get ahead in the world is not through their grace, or goodness, or intelligence - but through their sexual power.

No citations are necessary, since this is what Hagelin's readers already imagine is happening (especially while they're masturbating). And besides, it's not like someone who really, really, really cares about children would tell a lie. So we may as well face the awful truth: Little girls are indeed being trained for "sexual dominance."

As opposed to what, exactly? Well, let's just call it "modesty." Or better yet, let's say "a natural inclination towards modesty," so that we can pretend something's being stolen from them, rather than imposed on them.

Wouldn't it be nice if women were respected for their intelligence (an important component of which is knowing when to play dumb)? Instead of judging women on their skill at lap dancing, shouldn't we be encouraging them to write essays in defense of female subordination?

Admittedly, the main attraction of both activities is that a woman has "consented" to degrade herself, by representing herself first and foremost as a means to male ends. But you can't conclude that these career options are two sides of the same coin. At least, not if you're using your goodness, grace, and intelligence to assess the situation properly.

Hagelin worries that all this S-E-X people keep having will "destroy the beautiful and selfless concept of committing one's sexuality and heart to only one person for life." But in fact, that commitment is only as beautiful as the feelings of the people making it. An unsatisfactory marriage is not ennobled by monogamy, and lifelong commitment is not "selfless" when it's imposed as a social duty, under pain of censure or worse.

I'm sure you'll be surprised to learn that although unruly girls can "destroy all notions of fidelity, and commitment for both genders," male promiscuity is more of a design flaw, and doesn't seem to shake the very pillars of Heaven. Boys will be boys!

You can't curse the darkness of radical feminist critique without lighting the candle of traditional female submissiveness, and so Hagelin offers a number of suggestions for protecting our daughters -- by which, of course, I mean our sons -- from the existential threat of equality. One good idea is to help them find strong female mentors, like Phyllis Schlafly, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Duggar. But here's an even better one:

Help your daughter discover the joy and peace of mind that comes with teen years that are free from the threat of sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, and the low self-esteem sexually active girls report having deep in their hearts.

The first two threats can be addressed pretty well by education and condoms. The latter threat may be a bit more intractable, so long as people like Hagelin keep screaming at sexually active girls that they're not just squandering their innate value -- in a buyer's market, no less! -- but also dragging civilization itself into the grave.

Some people might even argue that Hagelin's entire worldview is designed to reduce female self-esteem to the bare minimum, in that it treats personal worth as something you maintain by existing primarily for the benefit of men. It'd probably seem to Hagelin like an intolerable paradox if a teen girl gave in to sexual bullying because of "principles" like the ones espoused in this column. But I'm sure it's happened once or twice.

Which is why, as much as I'd love to share Hagelin's excitement over the decline of traditional values, I remain a pessimist. I'm afraid they're still very much with us, from our hard-right Websites to our high schools to our strip clubs.

(Image via I am the Lizard Queen.)

The Human Community

Those of you who know Michael Gerson primarily as a man who was willing to write outrageous lies about Iraq's nuclear program, in order to make carpet-bombing Baghdad seem like self-defense, may be shocked to learn that he has a softer, more tender side. He worries about children, and puppies, and snowflake babies, and human-animal hybrids, and the emasculation of religion by dime-a-dozen graces like humility and mercy. Which just goes to show that no one is all bad.

In a new column, Gerson worries about stem cell research, which is nothing but a way-station on the road to Auschwitz:

Biotechnicians have been freed from the vulgar moralism of the masses, so they can operate according to the vulgar utilitarianism of their own social clique -- the belief that some human lives can be planted, plucked and processed for the benefit of others.

This is potent stuff. Note the careful distinction between "vulgar moralism" and "vulgar utilitarianism," which may or may not be two different things. And the alliteration, which is always a sign of deep moral seriousness. And the implicit understanding of Lysenko's great truth that "a class enemy is always an enemy, whether he is a scientist or not." Above all, note the portrayal of scientists as the equivalent of the "greys" in UFO lore, who represent a cold, alien, parasitic intelligence with a sinister fixation on genetic engineering and hybridization.

The effect is wasted on me, since I don't care to be lectured on vulgar utilitarianism by the guy who came up with the line "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"; killing foreigners for fun and profit doesn't become moral just because you forged God's signature on your permission slip. But as crackpot scapegoating goes, it strikes me as fairly impressive. It might even inspire some freedom fighter to shoot a bunch of people at his local mall, which seems to be the gold standard for conservative rhetoric these days.

So far, so good. If we get sentimental enough about innocent life — and what life is more innocent than one that exists solely as potential? — then no one can call us a bloodthirsty nation. No one who frets over unborn babies can be brutal or heartless, and anyone who dares to suggest otherwise needs a serious ass-kicking, at the very least.

Now, Katherine Sebelius is Catholic and supports abortion rights, which makes her a hypocrite, obviously. But there's more here than meets the eye, according to Gerson:

It is probably not a coincidence that Obama has chosen a Roman Catholic -- Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius -- to implement many of these policies as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Obama has every right to a pro-choice Cabinet. But this appointment seems designed to provide religious cover. It also smacks of religious humiliation -- like asking a rabbi to serve the pork roast or an atheist to bless the meal.

Right. 'Cause if you want "religious cover," it makes excellent sense to publicly humiliate the person who's supposed to provide it. That's Machiavellianism we can believe in!

We've ascertained that Sebelius disagrees with the Catholic Church, while Gerson disagrees with the Sermon on the Mount. Which means it's now time to x-ray the so-called conscience of the liberal God-hater:

Some say they will not impose their private religious views on others. But moral beliefs about human dignity are not religious dogmas such as transubstantiation or the Trinity. They are assertions about the nature of political justice.

They're not dogmas, see, but assertions based on...on...on transcendental fact. Which means it's A-OK to impose them on other people, by force of law if possible, and by force if not. At the same time, the unwillingness to impose such "assertions" on other people has nothing at all to do with "moral beliefs about human dignity," so there's no reason to defend it as a principled stance, despite its manifest contribution to the development of Teh Greatest Country Ever.

And besides:

Removing the transcendent basis for human rights would also remove the central argument of the Declaration of Independence and the primary motivation for American social reform from abolition to the civil rights movement.

Gerson recognizes slavery and segregation as injustices, to his credit. But the idea that these injustices were justified by "moral beliefs about human dignity," and that this is exactly what made overcoming them such a difficult and gruesome endeavor, doesn't seem to have occurred to him. The average anti-abolitionist had no more regard for the human dignity of slaves than Gerson has for the human dignity of Iraqis, or his correligionists have for the human dignity of gays. Political oppression and murder rarely suffer for lack of a transcendental basis. Honestly, I thought everyone knew that.

Being as you, dear reader, are an ivory tower elitist with a closet full of buttplugs and abortion pills, you might argue that the environment and healthcare are also "pro-life" issues. No way, says Gerson.

It is true that nearly every political issue concerns the preservation of human life. But not every issue concerns the definition of the human community -- who we count as one among us, and who we cast beyond our protection.

Sometimes I wonder if writing columns like this one is some new form of Satanic rite, to replace reading the Lord's Prayer backwards. Of course healthcare and environmental issues have to do with "who we cast beyond our protection," and of course Gerson has no problem booting inconvenient human beings into the outer darkness, for the sake of money or personal righteousness (assuming there's a difference).

If developing life is merely protoplasmic rubbish, it has the legal claims of a cyst or a toenail. But if a politician believes life is sacred, the destruction of more than a million lives a year cannot be merely one issue among many.

If this is the fundamental question, I can address it easily. No American politician believes that all life is sacred. Gerson doesn't believe it. Sebelius doesn't believe it. Obama doesn't believe it. Bush didn't believe it. No one who has ever been president of the United States believed it. You'll see an atheist connoisseur of child pornography elected president — an admitted one, I mean — before you see a believer in the unqualified sanctity of life elected to the city council in the most Christian town in the country. Anyone who truly does believe this, and makes a serious effort to live according to that conviction, will be treated by Gerson and his ilk like a mad dog.

The main reason public figures claim to believe this is because it makes them and their constituents feel better about the mercenary cruelty of the culture and country in which they live, which is why the most highminded "pro-life" rhetoric amounts to little more than grotesque self-flattery (as well as an attempt to define the human community to exclude nonconforming women, and cast them beyond "our" protection). As always, sentimentality and political violence go hand in hand, and a mawkish preoccupation with "innocent life" justifies any crime we wish to commit. Which is why Michael Gerson will probably never have to worry about being out of work.

A Problem On Our Hands

Maggie Gallagher, whose deep and abiding interest in our sex lives is strictly professional, has a new column entitled "The Child Pornographer Next Door."

In one of those surprise twists for which she's famous, it turns out that the child pornographers in question are themselves children, whose activities with sexual partners of their own age is...well, not shocking, exactly. And not titillating, either (that'd be a dead giveaway).

Predictable, maybe?

Six high school students from Greensburg, Pa., were charged with possessing, manufacturing and distributing child pornography this month after nude pictures of several underage girls were confiscated from one of the boys' phones. The three 14- and 15-year-old girls who sent the self-made child porn and the three 16- and 17-year-old boys who received it were arrested.

There are legitimate concerns here. One of them is that these kids — the girls, especially — may be humiliated, victimized or even physically attacked. The problem is, arresting them as "pornographers" accomplishes two of those cruelties right off the bat in the name of protecting them, and may make the third more likely.

The line between protecting children and pathologizing or criminalizing normal sexual behavior is not all that thin, in my opinion, but most people who share Gallagher's outlook couldn't find it if their lives (or, more realistically, the lives of their children) depended on it. As always, the most sensible methods of addressing these problems tend to be opposed tooth and nail by the people who make the biggest issue of them: if a sex-ed class that dealt honestly with the question of self-made porn were so much as proposed, it'd be listed on Rapture Ready before the day was out. (And feminism is responsible for our current bumper crop of girls gone wild, so it's clearly of no use whatsoever.)

Not surprisingly, Gallagher's description of these events is sicker and more disturbing than anything of which the children stand accused. As usual, she treats female desire as tepid and devious, and male desire as uncontrollable. That way, you always know who's to blame when the inevitable happens:

The sexting craze underlines the way the creation of pornography has been equally democratized -- in this case right into the hands of suburban 15-year-old girls pathetically trying to attract or keep the attention of porn-jaded boys.

Why do girls act like this?

Good question! Girls don't want sex per se, you see; they want something else, and they use sex to get it. Which is what makes them contemptible, as opposed to merely bestial.

Oddly enough, whenever Gallagher worries herself over porn or sex, the "shocking" cases she cites tend to be shocking precisely because they portray the stark reality of her own view of male-female relations, minus the pietistic soft focus and the baby fetishism. The consequences for women of the "traditionalism" she promotes in her columns are routinely seen in porn, God knows, and constitute one of its main selling points.

But that's a discussion for another day. Now that we've learned all we need to know about boys and girls and sex, it's time to get serious and make some tough choices:

Right now we have a decision to make: Is underage porn (these aren't really children) a crime or not? If so, how do we treat girls and boys who engage in it "for fun" and not for profit?

I think Gallagher has answered her own question, here and elsewhere: Boys will be boys, and girls who give in to them will be pathetic sluts (unless it was their idea, and they enjoyed it, in which case they'll be dirty sluts). A stern dose of public humiliation would seem to be in order, too...if not for their sake, then for ours.

Here's the punchline; bear in mind that it comes from a firm believer in the transformative power of sexual fearmongering:

If the thought that their fellow students, their teachers, their employers, their college admission officials, the entire football squad, their mothers and the local district attorney may well see these cell phone photos is not enough to discourage teens -- then we really have a problem on our hands.

No kidding. Obviously, we need a lot more funding for abstinence programs!

Some Kind of Link

Since everyone knows that teenagers have no desire for sex unless they've been corrupted by some Pied Piper of sleaze, research into pop-music lyrics is Serious Business.

There's still no firm proof that raunchy music makes kids have sex, but a new study provides another suggestion that there's at least some kind of link between "degrading" songs and teenage sexual activity.

Once you assume that there's some kind of link between hearing about sex and having sex, confirming the theory is relatively light work: Over here, Britney Spears is singing about being a slave 4 U. Over there, a couple of teenagers are having awkward, fumbling sex. Game, set, match!

There are degrading sexual messages in TV shows. And commercials. And magazine ads. And comic books. And those morning radio shows where faux-populist hosts get the workforce's adrenaline flowing by degrading women, laughing at tragedy, and generally acting like a bunch of loudmouthed fucking assholes. For that matter, some children may be exposed to degrading sexual behavior and attitudes in their own homes. But teens' so-called music is obviously much more significant, speaking from a purely objective sociological standpoint. That's just common sense.

Because this is Science, the first thing we need is a clear definition of "degrading."

The researchers...determined how many of the 279 most popular songs in 2005 were "degrading" because they referred to sex that's "based only on physical characteristics" and features a "power differential" instead of being mutually consensual.

First off, sex that's "based only on physical characteristics" is not degrading in and of itself; it's acceptable, in this day and age, for men and women to have recreational sex with people with whom they share no other interests, and have no intention of dating, let alone marrying (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they belong to that lucky group of citizens who are allowed to marry).

This kind of sex is often degrading because we live in a society that sees it as degrading, for reasons having to do with misogyny and homophobia and good old-fashioned ressentiment.

Second, the whole problem with a power differential is that it can create consent (cf. the groupie phenomenon). In some cases, consent can even be seen as an additional degradation (cf. the woman in the clothing ad above).

So right off the bat, the definition of degradation is mired in the same psychosexual fever swamp as the lyrics it's intended to critique. People who have casual sex for no more transcendent reason than ordinary human lust are "degraded" (especially if they're women). But where there's consent, one needn't look too closely for a power differential. (If only our horny teens could get this through their skulls, somehow!)

Those are somewhat arcane objections, though. There are more basic problems here.

"Wait (The Whisper Song)" by the rap group known as Ying Yang Twins was deemed degrading, apparently because it included a reference to rough intercourse.

You can Google the lyrics, if you like, and decide for yourself whether it's the "reference to rough intercourse" that makes the song degrading. I see a larger problem, personally.

By contrast, the lyrics of the rap song "Baby I'm Back" by Baby Bash, including the lines "I wanna be stronger than we've ever been/I'm here to cater to you," was said to be not degrading.

Just for the record, this song is about a two-timin' man who wants to be allowed back into his jilted partner's...er...good graces, and it includes such tender blandishments as "please forgive me for being a rolling stone; please forgive me, let me polish it up like chrome," and "I was gone for a minute; now I'm back, let me hit it."

At this point, I think that we can all agree that this study has a couple of conceptual flaws. On the bright side, these problems are more than made up for by the high quality of the results:

[T]he findings don't prove that the music caused kids to have sex, acknowledged [Dr. Brian A.] Primack, who's an assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

"The opposite could be true -- that people who have more sex then go out and seek music with degrading sexual messages," he said.

Well, at least we know that it's one or the other. It's a start.

And we also know that teenagers shouldn't be having sex, period, responsibly or otherwise. Which means that something must be done!!1

What to do? Laura Lindberg, senior research associate at the Guttmacher Institute in New York City, said that teens need to learn how to interpret and analyze the messages they see in the world around them.

It seems to me that this is what they're doing already, and that adult culture isn't contradicting their interpretation in any serious way. A feminist (or at least anti-misogynist) overhaul of our society could help with that problem; unfortunately, that would require being a certain amount of acceptance of teenagers as autonomous sexual beings, among other concessions to reality that we find emotionally or politically or logically unacceptable. That leaves us with our longstanding two-pronged approach: spouting anti-sex pieties that are totally at odds with adult culture -- and which teenagers can see through like a gang sign thrown by Jay Leno -- and reinforcing the sexual stereotypes and double standards on which those pieties are based.

But even if we can't handle the issue in all its complexity, we can at least avoid oversimplifying it:

"[T]here's no silver bullet," [Lindberg] said. "If you get all teenagers to turn in their iPods, the teen pregnancy rate is not going to automatically decline."

I'm not so sure. If we take all their iPods away, and pregnancy rates drop, what other explanation could there possibly be?

And besides, how can we know until we try? That's the scientific method, after all.

(Illustration: Ad for Mr. Leggs Trousers, 1970. Via Found in Mom's Attic.)

Blessed Benefits

A 1944 pamphlet on propaganda, published by the US Armed Forces Institute, makes a couple of important points:

[I]f propaganda is not in harmony with the individual and his desire, it is likely to be met with cynical skepticism....

In addition...a man's own knowledge and information may cause him to hold to an opinion no matter how heavy the barrage of propaganda attempting to force him to change it.

Movement conservatism has, I submit, sidled away from these bracing truths in recent years, and this has led to a certain...tone-deafness in regard to life as she is lived in the cesspool of iniquity we call America.

As plenty of other bloggers have noted, the Right's current attempt to demonize contraception is roughly on a par with its horrific intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo (a subject on which I had my rather melancholy say here). Which is to say that it's going to cost them more than they'll gain.

If you, as a politician, measure the success of such tactics by the amount of chatter they generate on cable news, it's easy to miss the more crucial point that in the real world, real people are seeing you and yours -- once again -- as a pack of opportunistic busybodies and hypocrites whose commitment to "liberty" is belied by your unseemly appetite for panty-sniffing, your peacock strutting and screeching outside hospices and clinics, and your tireless freelance meddling.

Granted, Americans are seldom happier than when they're fretting over and resenting other people's enjoyment of sex. And yes, very few conservative politicians have gone broke denouncing things of which they're secret devotees; if a conservative politician speaks out against masturbation, you can be pretty confident that his house has a room devoted to it, the contents of which cost more than every healthcare facility in Haiti, and rival an oil refinery in their complexity and danger.

But sneering at contraception -- and, by extension, at the cost of bearing and raising children -- doesn't really come across as a moral stance to most people, I don't think. It's more akin to sneering at people for working at a car wash, or cooking their own food, or not having a chauffeur, or being a woman. There are plenty of stupid stances on which people will give you the benefit of the doubt, or even agree with you: people may be quite willing to believe that climate change is a socialist plot, or that Europe is three years away from sharia. These are subjects about which many Americans know little or nothing, so it's easy and fun to have strong, self-flattering opinions about them.

But when you get into areas where Americans have plenty of their own "knowledge and information," the congressional and media loudmouths who seemed Jeffersonian in regard to foreign affairs begin to look more like a cage full of monkeys who are baring their nasty little teeth and hurling clumps of dung at you.

And that's before you consider the specific economic stresses we're under, thanks to years of the glibertarian economics they championed. I know people who actually want kids, but are holding off because of the economy. I'd assume that there are lots of people like that, in houses great and small across this land, and that they deeply resent the implication that sex is strictly for people who can afford a child. Especially if they understand that our tax dollars pay for contraception for members of Congress, and for their healthcare, and their childcare, and the line of designer fucking machines they've installed in their fur-lined dungeons.

But here's how James Pethokoukis of US News and World Report views the matter:

This is wrong on so many levels, one of which is looking at children born to the "wrong people" as economic burdens rather gifts, the music makers, the dreamers of dreams. She sees them as a cost instead of blessed benefits. Wow.

Wow, indeed. So much for family planning, and the personal responsibility it entails. If it feels good, do it...and the Lord will provide! You can tell the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker that your baby is not a cost but a benefit, and instruct them to forward their bills to The Man Upstairs. And don't worry about what grinding poverty and stress do to your child's physical development or sense of self; as soon as your Blessed Benefit is old enough to understand Atlas Shrugged, he or she will forgive you everything.

There's a more basic fact to consider here, and it has something to do with the mixture of mawkish sentimentality and cold brutality that Pethokoukis has picked up from his political overlords: A lot of people really don't like Republicans, at this point, and many of them will approve of Obama's presidency to the precise extent that he grinds people like John Boehner into the dirt. When you're in this position, attacking programs that are infinitely more popular than you are is probably not a good idea.

So why do they do it? Amanda thinks it's sour grapes. I think it has more to do with a schoolyard conception of sex that most conservatives seem never to have outgrown: it's a snake pit of cooties and faggotry and excretory functions -- simultaneously nauseating and good for a laugh -- which makes it, above all, an excellent stick with which to beat other people over the head. My guess is that given the chance to make fun of Nancy Pelosi for talking about contraception, sober political calculation went out the window: they simply assumed that forming a ring around Pelosi and chanting "Nancy likes condoms!" in singsong would make her a laughingstock, and earn the respect -- or at least the fear -- of the other children.

(Photo from How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, 1890.)

An Unforgivable Choice

Matt Barber, a member in good standing of what Peggy Noonan calls the Conservative Thinkosphere of the Net, has discovered an ugly example of left-wing hypocrisy: Liberals claim to believe in tolerance, but in reality, they're intolerant...of intolerance!

If you don't believe this, try calling publicly for the extermination of homosexuals and see how long it takes for some lefty to get angry at you.

The fact that writers for Town Hall and NewsMax discover this paradox anew every few days shouldn't distract us from Barber's more impressive achievement: He has revealed feminist women once and for all as people who tend to support abortion rights and oppose anti-feminist politicians. The jig is up, ladies, and your disdain for Sarah Palin was what gave you away:

Palin blew it, you see. She made an unforgivable “choice.” She publicly expressed, through both word and selfless deed, that she values all people during every stage of development*, from conception to natural death.

*Offer may not be valid in all states.

In the real world, of course, no one finds Palin's choice unforgivable; many people, including myself, find it admirable. What's unforgivable is the fact that she wants to be applauded for making that choice of her own free will, and for wishing to take free will entirely out of the equation for women who don't have her personal beliefs or her financial resources.

Beyond that, her decision to give birth to and raise her own child doesn't indicate that "she values all people during every stage of development," any more than the prohibition on abortion in Pakistan makes that nation a peaceable kingdom (please note that I'm referring here to violence besides the support of policies that routinely result in women being mutilated or killed).

Barber singles out "abortion-centric feminism" for particular abuse, as though any other kind were possible while the earth is encumbered with panty-sniffing control-addicts like him. He admires Palin because she's "easy on the eyes" — as all godly men must — but also because she "declined to slaughter her own unborn child, Trig, to goddess feminism." And he complains that feminists are claiming en masse that she's "not a real woman," which is a terrible thing to say about any woman unless she's a feminazi or a dyke.

It turns out that feminists object to Palin's choice because they view abortion as an important rite of passage (which is why you never see them calling for sex education, male birth control pills or increased access to contraception). In fact, the credo of these barren, castrating, shrewish, ugly, unnatural, selfish quasi-women is as follows:

“All women are endowed by mother earth with the inalienable right to eat their own young."

Putting aside the issue of Barber's soul-deep loathing for women — which is as hard to miss, and as appetizing, as a foot-high pile of dogshit on your dinner plate — I have to say I'm weary of being lectured on "selfishness" by people whose idea of virtue involves heaping abuse and misery on the poor and the powerless, in the name of a religion whose only truths are emotionally alien and politically inimical to them.

I'm also tired of being lectured on morality by people whose basic discomfort with human existence is so profound that only potential life has any chance of meeting their standards for purity. And I'm tired of being lectured on violence by people who are not only comfortable denying human rights to their fellow citizens, and forcing women to bear the children of rapists, but also have no problem blowing up pregnant women in foreign countries and demanding that I wave the flag over whatever's left of their bodies.

One day, I hope to vote in an election that will finally sweep these people from any semblance of power, and to live in a country where their ravings get no more respect than they themselves currently afford to the pleas of the hungry and the homeless and the sick and the abused. For now, I'll gladly settle for flinging Sarah Palin back into the outer darkness where she belongs.

(Photo via Menstrual Poetry.)

A Life of Sex

Anti-abortion activists in Portland, OR have managed to complicate the construction of a new Planned Parenthood facility by pressuring the contractor to drop the project.

[W]hen Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette signed on as the anchor tenant, Walsh said, he called other builders who had dealt with aggressive anti-abortion activists. He was told that protesters had gone as far as staking out contractors’ homes.

“It’s disruptive and very threatening,” he told The Oregonian. “I just didn’t want to put my family through that.”

One of the protest organizers is a man named Bill Diss, who has some interesting theories about human sexuality:

He called Planned Parenthood a “killing center” that targets young girls, teaching them about sex and masturbation, which he called “the gateway drug to lust.”

Young girls, mind you. Not children, and not teens. Girls.

“They’re up in North Portland targeting young black girls to get them into a life of sex,” said Diss, who is a science teacher at Portland’s Benson High.

I wasn't aware that lust required a "gateway," nor did I know that it would simply wither away in the absence of targeted vocational training. Consider the experiences of Saint Jerome in the Syrian desert:

There was I, who from fear of hell had condemned myself to such a prison, with only scorpions and wild beasts as companions. Yet I was often surrounded by dancing girls. My face was pale from fasting, and my mind was hot with desire in a body cold as ice.

Some might suggest that the intensity of these daydreams intensified Jerome's desire to control women's sex lives. Some might even claim that he lashed out at real women for the behavior of the imaginary dancing girls who disturbed his desert peace, and in doing so found a way to dwell persistently on female sexuality without having to feel guilty about it.

As for me, I've always seen adult obsessions with the sex lives of children and teens as...well, let's just say "problematic." Mr. Diss has the right to protest this clinic if he likes, of course. But if I had a kid in his class, I'd be very tempted to switch schools (and not just because I don't think a science teacher should be quite so horrified by the idea of "a life of sex").

(Illustration: "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" by Felicien Rops, 1878.)

Highly Intelligent Wolves

John Hawkins huffs, and he puffs, and he blows down the straw house of the metrosexual male:

[A] real man should be able to shoot a gun, catch a fish, hunt, take and throw a punch, know what to do if a tornado or hurricane hits, cook a steak, jump-start a car, change a tire, drive a stick shift, give a firm handshake, read a map, handle a budget, swim, tie a tie, give a 5 minute speech, comfort someone who has just had a loved one die, negotiate a raise or a price on something he's going to buy, and tell a pushy salesman "no."

Damn straight. Just yesterday, I shinnied up a tree over Squaw Tit Lake, and shot a 9-pound carp with my trusty Luger P08. I dove in and got it, and while swimming to shore I saw this guy standing there waiting for me. No sooner do I give him a firm handshake than he says I'm trespassing and poaching. Well, I started to tell him a few things about individual rights and wise use. About five minutes in, he socked me on the jaw pretty hard. But I came back with a right hook and laid him out flat.

After jumpstarting the car by coasting downhill and popping the clutch, I saw a funnel cloud coming my way. But I took a quick look at the map, and figured out how to get around it OK. I got home in time to cook up a steak, put on my tie, and balance my checkbook before heading out to buy a new riding mower. I figured I deserved a reward for wringing a raise out of my boss.

I'd jewed the salesman down by $500, and was aiming to get the price even lower, when he starts whining about how times are tough since his son died, boo hoo hoo.

"Natural law makes no false judgments," I told him. "Its decisions are true and just, even when dreadful." He sighed, and seemed to shrink inside. "I can let you have it for five percent over cost," he said, finally. "Congratulations," I said, "you just talked yourself out of a sale."

I took little pleasure in all this, though, probably because feminism has robbed me of the simpering female audience my efforts deserved, and left me playing to an empty hall. If I'd been prancing around in pink Capezios, singing "The Nightmare Song" from Iolanthe, you know the bitches would've come running.

That said, there's more to being a Real Man than giving firm handshakes, scaling fish, and overawing Wal-Mart greeters. Here's Hawkins again:

Not everybody has the same religious beliefs or version of patriotism, but men should understand that standing up for God, country, and what's right is important because it sets a much needed example for others to follow.

I seem to detect an ambiguity here, if not an aporia...particularly when we problematize the historical givenness of the distinction between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum....

[slaps self back and forth across face, takes a shot of bourbon, pretends to have something in eye]

What I mean to say is, dang, that Hawkins fella tells it like it is, sure as shittin'. I always say you can believe whatever the hell you want, long as you set a good example by believing the right things. 'Cause if you don't, you ain't worth a bucket of warm spit, haw haw.

We human beings are born savages, not much different than highly intelligent wolves. It's only because we have been socialized, civilized, taught better, and bathed in the grace of God that we have the wherewithal to live together respectfully in a civilized society.

When you see a Real Man like Hawkins come out and speak the truth like this, in front of God and everybody, you can't help wondering why the Feminazis and the Atheists and the Commies and the Fags and the Dykes and the Hippies and the Muslims and the UCC and the Academics and the Gangbangers and the Blame-America-Firsters and the Liberation Theologists and the Eco-Freaks and the Postmodernists and the Liberals and the Welfare Queens and the Peaceniks and the Socialists and the Climate Cultists and the Latte Sippers and the Vegetarians and the ACLU and the EPA and the UN and the Surrender Monkeys and the Evolutionists and the One-Worlders and the Quakers and the Babykillers and the Democrat Party can't just shut up for once and listen to reason.

I swear, it's almost like there's something wrong with them.

Hail The New Puritan!

If you want a vision of the future, imagine hemp lingerie irritating your crotch -- forever.

Melanie Reid explains:

[I]f society proceeds down the true path of eco-purity, we may well save the planet; but will simultaneously discover that life is too dull to be worth living on it any more. Women in particular, I fear, will find themselves returned to the Dark Ages.

How can it be otherwise? No skiing, no cars, no travel, no exotic foods, no extravagance, no Hollywood, no wasteful labour-saving devices, no clothes made of anything but recycled plastics and hemp. No more Luxx magazine filled with beautifully engineered, sleek, accessory porn.

There's the summum bonum for you in a nutshell: consumption, and plenty of it. Love, parenthood, friendship, knowledge, the comforts and terrors of art and religion and nature...none of it means anything at all, unless your mailbox is filled to bursting with catalogues advertising high-end lingerie, heated towel racks and electric nose-hair trimmers. Here we have endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, none of which could ever grow stale or flat.

And what does "eco-purity" offer in return for the loss of this bounty? Chafed labia and cheap grace!

What is becoming so fascinating about the new puritanism is not just that we are all being brainwashed to accept the inevitability of hair shirts, but also their unquestioned moral worth. That somehow or other, this life of sackcloth and bicycles is going to benefit our souls and make us all better people.

Certain painful acts of renunciation deserve our respect, like saving oneself for marriage, or going without healthcare, or spending Sunday mornings at church instead of a truck-stop glory hole. But saving energy is just so...so...tawdry. And meanspirited, too; it's like saying we don't deserve endless growth and boundless consumption. Where's the pleasure in that?

Now, I happen to think that the "green design revolution" is occasionally too optimistic, or at least too wedded to the basic assumptions of hyperconsumerist chatterboxes like Melanie Reid. The last thing we need is a "green" version of this culture, with 100% recycled junk mail, and 100% sustainable sprawl, and solar nose-hair trimmers made by the tens of thousands in the Marianas. Design is responsibility, or it is nothing at all.

But the debate ultimately hinges on whether climate change is as serious as most scientists say. If it is, then with all due respect to Ms. Reid, the comfort of her nethers would be feather-light on the scale of things.

Which is probably why she dives immediately into denialism, via praise for David Bellamy, who has bravely challenged the prevailing orthodoxy by pointing out that it snowed a lot this winter.

David Bellamy...declared recently that the extended spring ski season in Scotland - deep, extensive snow cover, the best in a decade - could be proof that global warming does not exist quite as painted. He pointed out that the global high-temperature record has not been broken for a decade, and temperatures are now flat or falling.

Indeed, the impartial observer might see the harder weather - together with the recent bitterly cold winter in China and the Arctic - as a joyful thing: a sign that maybe things aren't that bad after all.

But oh no. This kind of heresy must be crushed.

I'll say. For helpful hints on crushing this kind of heresy, we could do worse than consult the burlap-clad neopuritan worrywarts at the The World Meteorological Congress:

The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century.

The current La Niña event, characterized by a cooling of the sea surface in the central and eastern Equatorial Pacific, is a “climate anomaly” part of natural climate variability.

The opinion of the WMO probably means little to Reid, who objects to being lectured on climatology by "climate-change academics," particularly when "they announce, in as menacing a tone as Abu Izzadeen, that we ignore what is happening 'at our peril.'"

You can see her point. Who wants to be dragged down by all this talk of "peril," when there's vitally important shopping to be done, and the cool caress of silken underthings to enjoy? Besides, climatologists only say these things because it pays their bills, just as aspirin manufacturers only make aspirin because people get headaches. It's all so obvious when you think about it.

It's not the lies that bother Reid, though. It's not even the absurdity of trying to meaure the "hypothetical waste" emitted by cars ("how is it possible?" she asks, her eyes wide as saucers). It's that goddamn hemp lingerie:

My real problem with the eco-alarmists is the pleasure they take in austerity; their evident desire to strip away pleasure....They dislike colour, excess and fun. They really do want to see us imprisoned in a narrow, grey, scratchy world of recycled car tyres and hemp lingerie (and no, I didn't make that up).

At last we've reached the center of this labyrinth. Climate denialism is a feminist issue, and here's why:

Who will be the victims of the eco-smug; of this pious gospel of make-do-and-mend? Why, women - who will have to forgo their washing machines and their dish washers, carry supermarket shopping on the bus, and return to the horror of reuseable nappies.

In other words, women will suffer because they'll have to continue doing "women's work," which apparently becomes unjust and onerous only when it involves reuseable diapers. You can't get much more radical than that, even if thy name be Dworkin.

I suppose you could argue that men ought to be helping out with these chores, where applicable, whether we're headed for a grey eco-socialist dystopia or not. But I suspect that'd only provide further evidence that the "climate hoax" is part of a massive social-engineering experiment that'll simultaneously force women back into traditional roles (that they haven't actually left), and emasculate men by forcing them to change diapers instead of working in steel mills and fighting the Hun.

I'd love to discuss this at greater length, but right now I have to put on my hemp underwear and lick the dishes clean.

The Divorce Industrial Complex

Having spent the past few weeks insisting that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's paranoid style has absolutely no place in American politics, Townhall's columnists can now return to more pressing concerns, like the War on Fatherhood.

Albert Mohler interviews Stephen Baskerville, who has written a book about this problem. You can tell that it's very serious, because it has a military metaphor right in the title, and deals with the victimization of men.

The root of this crisis is no-fault divorce, an invention of the "Divorce Industrial Complex" which allows one partner to get a divorce even when the other partner doesn't want one:

It really is unilateral divorce — involuntary divorce. It allows one spouse to force divorce on the other without the involuntary spouse having done anything wrong. In other words, your spouse can divorce you without you having done anything legally wrong or agreeing to the divorce.

Lest you think this complaint is directed at the very concept of female autonomy, rest assured that although "the overwhelming victims of this are fathers...it happens to mothers as well." In order to save this minority of wives from the shame of being cast aside like a cigarette butt, it's right and natural that we should imprison the rest of them in miserable or even dangerous marriages until their husbands grow tired of the arrangement.

Legally speaking, Baskerville's claim is that marriage is a contract, and should accordingly remain in effect unless its terms are broken by one or both parties. You'd think that not loving someone anymore would easily qualify as nonperformance. But Baskerville, who's on the faculty at Patrick Henry College, and is therefore competent to "shape our culture with timeless biblical values," answers to a higher authority and expects women to do the same.

Arguing that women must stay married until their husbands say otherwise isn't very popular, so Baskerville switches gears and asks us to think of the precious little moppets who are growing up without the benefit of having their parents trapped in a loveless sham of a marriage.

[T]he father’s contact with the children when it is not authorized by the government becomes a crime. He can be arrested for trying to see his own children without having done anything legally wrong.

Again taking this argument at face value, if marriage is a legally binding contract, then it's a matter for the courts by definition. And one thing the courts are going to decide is who gets custody of any children, and under what terms. Baskerville knows his audience well, which is why he uses the terrifying phrase "authorized by the government." But to the extent that this is accurate, it was at least as accurate back in those dear dead days before no-fault divorce came along, as the laziest perusal of 1950s melodrama will demonstrate.

Still, libertarianism is all the rage, so the problem has to be presented as one of government tyranny:

[W]hat’s most important about it is this huge machine is government based. It’s not just private entrepreneurs in this case, it is government officials. It's lawyers, it's judges and it’s the huge social services bureaucracies … it’s a huge entourage that is not only profiting from divorce, but increasing government power over private lives in very dangerous ways.

One old-school option, as we know, was for the government to force you to stay married to a person you can't stand. That's not good enough for Baskerville, though, who says that "simply repealing 'no fault divorce' and reinstating fault in divorce would not solve the problem."

He doesn't specify what would solve the problem, but it's not too hard to guess. Given that his first aim is to stoke male rage and self-pity, you can bet that his second is to preach of the coming kingdom in which legal rights and men's rights will be synonymous. Like the rest of his crowd, he believes that once he's stirred up enough hatred of government and hatred of women, and extorted enough faith in God The Father, generations of long-suffering men will rise up and force our nation's self-centered bitches back into line. At which point, "the government" can get back to its proper business of rubberstamping the natural order.

Even without reading between the lines, Baskerville's rhetoric is as offensive as it is dangerous. But it'll never seem as outrageous as Rev. Wright's remarks. Invoking conspiracies and nursing grievances always seems worse, somehow, when minorities do it...perhaps because it's so obvious that they're mere puppets of the international neo-Marxist conspiracy, which would like nothing better than to see White America laid low.

A Lack of Judgment

In one of those sweeping gestures for which he's justly famous, William Saletan has formally approved the proposition that "the ideal amount of teen sex is zero."

We're still waiting to learn how much and what kind of teen masturbation is ideal, if any. Perhaps Saletan can prepare some diagrams for us with his free hand.

Putting aside the question of whether it's seemly for a grown man to spend so much time fretting officiously over the sex lives of other people's children, I think the belief that teenagers are "good" to the extent that they're nonsexual says a lot more about us than it does about who they are, or should be. The modern concept of childhood exists more for the benefit of adults than children; innocence is the shadow cast on them by our own guilt.

In too many American families, adolescence recapitulates Eve's temptation by the Serpent: will these little angels remain pure, or will they corrupt themselves by learning things they shouldn't know and thus, in a certain uncomfortable sense, becoming our equals? (Girls, of course, can also be accused of failing to manage a valuable resource properly...by preferring use value to exchange value, as it were.)

It's no wonder that as unease about sex increases, the ultimate symbol of "childhood innocence" becomes the fetus, or even the stem cell. According to this school of thought, children shouldn't be seen or heard; they should be imagined.

Real children, meanwhile, get punished for turning out to be human after all...despite all our good-natured attempts to treat their sexuality as something that can vaccinated against like measles, or cured like strep throat. They suffer when they try to live up to our fantasies, and they suffer when they fall short of them.

That's OK, though, because the underlying fear is not so much that children will suffer excessively because of sex, but that they won't (which, among other problematic things, would prove the Knights of Purity wrong on a fairly fundamental point).

Like the people who piously invoke the ideal of "colorblindness" in order to ignore everyday proof of racial inequality, Saletan hopes to lead us to Heaven by settling down comfortably in Hell:

It's absurd to have to say this, but judgment isn't a bad word. You can moralize without losing your soul.

It hadn't occurred to me that judgment is what's been missing from the national discussion about teen sex, but Saletan surely wouldn't say it if it weren't true. Evidently, things will change for the better only if we don't.

The Power of Men's Tears

The LA Times alerts us to the plight of "post-abortive men," who are suffering unjustly and intolerably from their lack of control over other people's bodies:

Jason Baier talks often to the little boy he calls Jamie. He imagines this boy -- his son -- with blond hair and green eyes, chubby cheeks, a sweet smile.

But he'll never know for sure....Baier, 36, still longs for the child who might have been, with an intensity that bewilders him.

As well it might. You don't have to be a psychologist to suspect that Baier's fixation is indicative of larger problems, and that they existed long before he reveled in the ejaculation that got his fiancee pregnant.

But in a world where misogyny is routinely confused with morality, pathology can easily pass for principle:

These days, he channels the grief into activism in a burgeoning movement of "post-abortive men." Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman's issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement -- both political and deeply personal in nature -- contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

"We had abortions," said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. "I've had abortions."

Who on earth cares if this madness is "deeply personal"? Like the maudlin description of Baier's "child who might have been" (behold childhood innocence at its most beatific!), this language comes perilously close to glorifying, or at least mainstreaming, a reaction that's basically pathological. Sane people don't "talk often" with aborted children, any more than they celebrate Hitler's birthday or wash their hands twenty times per hour.

I'm actually in favor of support groups for "post-abortive men," so long as they aim to assuage inappropriate grief and rage and textbook Freudian melancholy, instead of intensifying and exploiting them. You'll never guess which approach Morrow favors:

The activists leading the men's movement make clear they're not relying on statistics to make their case. They're counting on the power of men's tears.

And God knows these men have plenty to cry about:

Morrow, the counselor, described his regret as sneaking up on him in midlife -- more than a decade after he impregnated three girlfriends (one of them twice) in quick succession in the late 1980s.

Alright, then. Two decades after this fellow saw fit to behave like some jizz-spraying version of Johnny Appleseed, he wants society to acknowledge and honor his pain...not because he made a mess of three women's lives, mind you, but because he woke up one day wishing he'd forced them to bear and raise his children. First he wanted sex, and now he wants sanctity; either way, no sacrifice is too great for Modern Womanhood to make.

Here's another cute anecdote:

Chris Aubert, a Houston lawyer, felt only indifference in 1985 when a girlfriend told him she was pregnant and planned on an abortion. When she asked if he wanted to come to the clinic, he said he couldn't; he played softball on Saturdays. He stuck a check for $200 in her door and never talked to her again.

Aubert, 50, was equally untroubled when another girlfriend had an abortion in 1991. "It was a complete irrelevancy," he said. But years later, Aubert felt a rising sense of unease.

It's sad that so many people would see this as evidence of moral progress, or at least a change of heart. It isn't. Aubert's "unease" is even more pathological than his indifference; it's progress only in the medical sense, like the progress from primary to tertiary syphilis. His post-abortive regret - which seems to be based on the crude assumption that he had some all-compelling power he failed to exercise - demonstrates perfectly why abortion must remain legal, and why men should never be given a formal right to decide whether a woman can have one.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, guys. I'm suffering from PMS right now, and my bitch of a wife won't bring me a Midol.

(Illustration: "Crying Man" by Kauzya Akimoto.)

A Malicious Ideology

A word to the wise from Phyllis Schlafly: Them radical feminist dames is crooked as a barrel of snakes:

Radical feminists have devised a scheme to cash in on the flow of taxpayer money in a big way. Their good buddy, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., has just introduced Senate Bill 2279, called the International Violence Against Women Act.

Some of this money will go to "a certain type of women's organizations" (e.g., the Family Violence Prevention Fund). This exemplifies the shamefully narrow focus of the International Violence Against Women Act, which targets violence against women rather than fetuses or men or conservative Supreme Court nominees or Lasiorhinus krefftii, the Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat.

Radical feminists who would be the recipients of the act's awesome bureaucratic and money power are very selective about the kinds of violence they will target in 10 to 20 foreign countries. They have no interest in speaking up for the hundreds of thousands of unborn girls in China and India who are victims of sex-selection abortions.

Schlafly probably hasn't read the UNFPA's statement on gender-based violence, which specifically identifies prenatal sex selection as a form of "gender violence." Feministing recently had some not entirely complimentary things to say about the practice, too. The disagreement, of course, is over methodology. Schlafly wants to solve this problem, and most others, by banning all abortions now and forever. Most "radical feminists" would probably prefer to address the causes of prenatal sex selection, such as social structures that perpetuate the idea that women are inherently less valuable than men.

So far, we've learned that a bill intended to prevent violence against women will try to prevent violence against women by giving money to groups that try to prevent violence against women. And that feminists who support abortion rights aren't calling for a worldwide ban on abortion. We can be forgiven, I think, for feeling that Schlafly's hunt for logical inconsistencies has been a bit of a bust.

She's nothing if not persistent, though:

Feminist ideology about the goal of gender-neutrality and the absence of innate differences between males and females goes out the window when it comes to the subject of domestic violence. Feminist dogma is that the law should assume men are batterers and women are victims.

Just in case you doubt this, here's an example of gender neutrality going out the window, thanks to the "malicious ideology" of feminism:

Political correctness requires that the Illinois Bar Journal use gender-neutral words, but anyone familiar with this subject knows that "petitioner" overwhelmingly means wife and "respondent" means husband.

Yes, we do know that, don't we? (And isn't it odd how the people who dispute this fact tend to be perfectly comfortable with racial profiling?)

Having demonstrated that political correctness is the handperson of feminist ideology, because it demands the gender neutrality that feminist ideology rejects except when it doesn't, Schlafly points out that accusations of domestic violence can give one party - and it's usually going to be a woman, since the little minxes are clever enough to know that they're statistically more likely to suffer abuse - an "unfair advantage in divorce and child custody."

The possibility of this grave injustice - which is far more dangerous, you'll agree, than legally codifying the presumption that women are lying bitches who probably deserved whatever they got - is apparently what justifies Schlafly's headline: Feminists Abuse Domestic Violence Laws.

My brain hurts.

(Illustration via What Were They Thinking?)

Recording Angels

This afternoon, after taking a good stiff dose of tenocyclidine and striking my forehead robotically with a ballpeen hammer for the better part of an hour, I read an article by Gail Russell Chaddock and became convinced that Mike Huckabee is the ideal person to lead our troubled nation:

Huckabee is shaping his come-from-behind campaign on the same principle that grew the Church at Rock Creek from a few dozen people in 1996 to more than 5,000 today: Every life has value – and don't count anyone out.

This, Ms. Chaddock points out, is a message that can't help but resonate with "values voters" (an eccentric but politically significant subculture whose vote - unlike yours or mine - is strongly influenced by things they believe about stuff).

There's a lot more to Huckabee than that, though. He's guided by moral absolutes, and he's a "conciliator" with "a great sense of humor." He grew up poor, and "set up a 24-hour broadcast ministry." He understands the problems average people face, and strives to criminalize abortion.

Better yet, in an age when American presidents are all too willing to let their resolve be shaken by empirical evidence of their own failings, we can count on Huckabee to measure his accomplishments against nothing but his own sense of self-satisfaction:

"He felt that God wanted him to run for the Senate. I, too, felt that that was what he was supposed to do," says his wife, Janet, in an interview. "We didn't have a Plan B" when he lost, she adds. "But you can't second guess something when you think you've done the right thing. You have to make the decision and have peace about it. That's where your faith comes in."

Faith is also the basis of Huckabee's preternatural empathy with the downtrodden:

Put in the terms of his faith: It's the Golden Rule in action.

This is what allows Huckabee to feel the sinner's soul-deep craving for punishment as if it were his own, and to fulfill it:

Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas today refused to authorize a Medicaid payment for an abortion for a 15-year-old girl whose stepfather has been charged with incest, despite a Federal judge's order that such payments were required by Federal law.

It's a little odd that Ms. Chaddock chose not to mention this episode in the course of her otherwise uncompromising profile. Then again, maybe it's not really relevant. After all, we have it on excellent authority that Huckabee's a "conciliator."

Meanwhile, Governor Matt Blunt of Missouri is conducting an unbiased scientific probe into the insupportable horrors of the Abortion Holocaust:

The task force was conceived by John McCastle, president of Alliance for Life-Missouri, who recruited many of the group’s members. Among the questions McCastle poses: Does abortion lead to crime?

McCastle draws that question from unspecified studies, which he says suggest an overwhelming majority of women prisoners have had abortions.

But people in prison typically have numerous problems. Determining whether abortion is a cause, rather than an effect, could be challenging.

After Ms. Chaddock's rather one-sided profile of Huckabee, you can't help but be impressed by AP's presentation of both sides of the argument: Did these women have abortions because they had problems, or do they have problems because they had abortions? Teach the controversy!

In other news, only 37 percent of Fox News viewers describe themselves as pro-life.

(Illustration: "The Recording Angel" by Elihu Vedder, 1883.)

Humorless Fanatics

America's kulturkampfers are normally a tough-minded, unemotional bunch. But remind them about the Christlike sufferings of Larry Summers - or, if you're in a hurry, wait for them to remind themselves - and they'll weep like a captured squonk.

For instance, the irrepressible George Leef is heartstricken that unlike Larry Summers, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was given the opportunity to say stupid things on an American college campus:

The New Republic points out the idiocy of embracing freedom of speech for a murderous dictator, but refusing to listen to a respected scholar.

It's probably my superficial, postmodern intoxication with the play of difference that causes me to believe there's a distinction to be made between "embracing freedom of speech" and "refusing to listen" to someone who's exercising it.

And between "refusing to listen" to a respected scholar, and disagreeing with what he says.

And between disagreeing with him, and providing compelling evidence that his "academic speculation" amounts to little more than bad-faith bullshit.

And between visiting a college in one's capacity as a foreign leader, and running it in one's capacity as its president.

Leef seems to understand that he's sunk himself in a dangerous rhetorical swamp, and accordingly attempts to pull himself out by his own hair, like Baron Munchausen:

Why are so many American professors humorless fanatics who think that everything they do has to revolve around pushing their political vision?

Beats me. As I understand it, Summers is a hero to conservatives for arguing, despite a lack of relevant expertise and evidence, that women are underrepresented in the sciences because they lack certain "intrinsic aptitudes." If that doesn't qualify as "pushing a political vision," it's hard to imagine what would. Even granting the conservatarian tendency to see informed disagreement with male-supremacist pseudoscience as neo-Lysenkoism, it's hard to see how Leef can claim with a straight face that people "refused to listen" to Summers.

Between that, and the fact that he feels personally affronted by the mere existence of Latina/o Studies, I'm thinking Leef may want to direct his search for humorless fanatics to the nearest mirror.

(Illustration via Oldtasty.)

An Attraction to Legacy

An article in The Boston Globe describes the changes that are supposedly afoot in the life sciences:

For half a century, the core concept in biology has been that every cell carries within its nucleus a full set of DNA, including genes. Each gene, in turn, holds coded instructions for assembling a particular protein, the stuff that keeps organisms chugging along.

As a result, genes were assigned an almost divine role in biological "dogma," thought to govern not only such physical characteristics as eye color or hair texture, but even much more complicated characteristics, such as behavior or psychology. Genes were assigned blame for illness. Genes were credited for robust health. Genes were said to be the source of the mutations that underlay evolution.

But the picture now emerging is more complicated, one in which illness, health, and evolutionary change appear to be the work of almost fantastical coordination between genes and swaths of DNA previously written off as junk.

With this in mind, let's peek in on Dr. Lonnie Aarssen, as he searches assiduously for the "Mommy gene":

“Only in recent times have women acquired significant control over their own fertility, and many are preferring not to be saddled with the burden of raising children," says Lonnie Aarssen, a Biology professor who specializes in reproductive ecology. "The question is whether this is just a result of economic factors and socio-cultural conditioning, as most analysts claim, or whether the choices that women are making about parenthood are influenced by genetic inheritance from maternal ancestors that were dominated by paternal ancestors.”

These women "prefer" not to be "saddled" with a "burden"...what else could this be but a clue to the rigors of daily life in the Pleistocene?

Dr. Aarssen suggests that because of inherited inclinations, many women when empowered by financial independence are driven to pursue leisure and other personal goals that distract from parenthood.

“The drive to leave a legacy through offspring can be side-tracked by an attraction to legacy through other things like career, fame, and fortune – distractions that, until recently, were only widely available to men”.

Enjoy it while it lasts, bitches, 'cause the times they are a-changin' back:

The women who leave the most descendants will be those with an intrinsic drive for motherhood. The ones who would rather forego parenthood in order to have a career, lavish vacations and leisurely lifestyles will of course leave no descendants at all. Over time those genetic traits that influence women away from motherhood will necessarily be ‘bred out.’

I suppose we could fret over the loaded language here (e.g., an "intrinsic drive" that some women would "rather forego"), but it'd be irresponsible given the gravity of the threat we face. If feminism is to survive, its adherents must learn to ignore "personal goals that distract from parenthood," as well as the "economic factors" that seem (to the untrained observer) to offer an alibi for childlessness.

Can these barren quasi-women learn to embrace the "genetic predisposition for mating and having children"? Or will they continue to heed their "genetic inheritance from maternal ancestors that were dominated by paternal ancestors," and consign themselves to the evolutionary ash-heap?

Only time will tell.

(Illustration by W.K. Haselden, 1906.)