Durrr...

New study finds women prefer to be housewives than corporate execs...

The first thing Feminism had to do was convince everyone that there is no such thing as an inherent feminine and masculine nature.

But The Real always wins.



~

Real men, please

Yep.

Don't have to be from the country, or the South, but please, less sissy, OK?

(Hands up, all the girls here, who look first at a man's hands? Yeah? I'm right, aren't I?)

I'm working on a thing today about what feminism has done to men: either angrified or sissified them, neither of which makes anyone happy. It's depressing.



~

A Christian woman combats crypto-feminism in the Church

The Woman and the Dragon.

Quite a lot of sound advice in there about how hidden feminism is destroying relations between men and women. Men, please, please, please, stop apologising for being men.



~

Ooooooo!!!

It's Fringe Night!!

Wheeeee!!!

(Only ten episodes left... boooo!)

This just in from a friend in Vancouver:

8 October
Friend:
Joshua Jackson came into the shop today and I sold him a lot of tea! He was totes dreamy n'stuff and was wearing a lovely sweater.

Me:
Aaauuuuuughhhh!!!!!!

Did you tell him your friend in Italy totally has a crush on him?

10 October
Friend:
no, sadly i just told him about tea.

It's just occurred to me that I like my men at least slightly dangerous.

Dear me! How embarrassingly ordinary! I guess I've still got a few demons left of my own. It's what I have you guys for, I suppose; to keep me from getting too far ahead of myself.

So listen, if any of the rest of you have any batty ideas about going into strictly cloistered convents, just you stop and think for a minute about your responsibilities as O's Picnickers.

Mkay?



~

New 'blogs: the male perspective

Dr. Helen: mostly about how sucky the feminist world is. She's written a book about how the hyper-feminized culture has excluded and systematically discriminated against men, particularly in matters pertaining to marriage, childrearing and divorce. I'd like to review it.

I'm starting a list of blogs by and about men and their view on the world, sexuality and other big issues. Some years ago, I started understanding how much damage feminism has done to men, how it has excluded them from domestic life and from the authority they should have in the home.

Apparently, there are not a few men who have noticed it as well, and the "Manosphere" is the result. There are many manifestations of this, with a wide variety of political opinion, but they seem mainly to be of either conservative or libertarian point of view in the American political sense, and among the latter, that is, libertarian end, to hold not only feminism but women in utter contempt. I think this trend, along with the execrable section of it of "Game" players - men who have dedicated their lives to a materialistic form of hedonism and the luring and using of women for short-term sexual gratification - appears to have been an offshoot of the sexual/feminist revolution in which men have said, "Fine, you want us to throw off our protective role? You've got it, honey."

There is a lot of anger in their writing at the wholesale emasculation of men and the hardening of women, which I can certainly understand, but their hatred of family and marriage seems like a dying patient hating and fearing the cure. A great many of them come across as being as childish and self-centred as the brainwashed women they criticise. Nevertheless, I think their observations about what feminism is doing both to men and to women, and to our societies as a whole, are worth reading. Food for thought, at any rate.

There are a lot of others, like our new friends Joffre the Giant and the Ignorant Redneck, who have taken a less self-harming mode. These more balanced characters seem to have one thing in common that the more angry and embittered men's writers do not; Christianity of a serious, intellectual and strongly devotional stripe.

I am still reading and collecting data about them, but as a whole, the men's bloggers are a very interesting internet phenomenon. They are very much akin, I think, to the early Catholic Traditionalist movement, who found each other and developed a network in cyberspace that helped us understand what was going on in the Church and the world. I should have been reading them for a long time, and don't know how I could have missed them until now. I'll pass on the more interesting bits to you lot and we shall see what we can make of it all.

The Private Man

The Rational Male

Alpha Game

The Spearhead



~

Why do men put up with this crap?

So, you guys know you're bigger and stronger than us, right?

I was just reading this thing on PJ Lifestyle, "5 Things women do that secretly annoy men" but might just as well have been titled, "5 Things men shouldn't let women get away with, but are probably too fed up to bother themselves over". We have a culture (well, the secular world has a culture) that says to men, "Just put up with all this crap, because eventually you'll get sex." Like the little scrap of cheese at the end of a behavioural psychologist's maze.

Every single one of the things that are presented as harmless little quirks of womanhood, are actually examples of why I can't stand women at all, and frankly, don't have much patience for the men who kow-tow to them. Who, in short, fail to correct them. Women, like children in our time, behave badly because no one has the guts to teach them any better, so we all suffer from the apathy of the men in their lives, either their fathers or their husbands/boyfriends.

Maybe most men just want a quiet life and don't want to go to the trouble of correcting their women. I can understand that. Maybe if there is no deeper character there to encourage, the best solution really is to just find someone more honest, more interesting, less whiny, neurotic and childish to hang out with.

But this little article, and the thousands of others like it, are not actually describing women. They are describing the bad habits, the character flaws to which women tend to be prone and which feminism has taught them nurture. Women, quite frankly, have been allowed by the feminist culture to develop their worst character traits, some of which are serious and harmful to herself and others, because men have allowed themselves to be bludgeoned into silence and passivity.

But if you're really with someone you care about and want her to stop, I can't really see how it is helpful to let her get away with it.

Every single one of these things is a trap, a no-win, particularly set for a man as a kind of game to see who gets control of a situation. And here's a tip, if you play along, you lose. If you "win" by following the rules, you lose because you have lost her respect, and honestly, failed to help either her or yourself. Women do these things to test men to see if they are strong enough to stand up to them and stop them from behaving badly.

But here's the kicker: women can't fix these problems by themselves and need your help to stop. They are, likely unconsciously, turning to the men in their lives and using these games to ask for help. It is an irony frequently commented upon that feminism has made women miserable. And here is a perfect illustration of how. And how it can be turned around by a man who is not afraid to be a man and take a leadership role in his relationships. Men who remain silent for the sake of short-term gain have only themselves to thank for ending up either alone, on the serial monogamy hamster-wheel, or married to a shrew. By all means, if those are the things you are after, keep on nodding and agreeing.

And let me tell you, all women try to play these games. Sometimes, if she understands what she's doing, it's harmless, and can be ignored or even briefly indulged (as long as you poke fun at it a bit, which will help her understand that there are limits). But most of the time it can be very damaging because it is has become a habit and a lifestyle and an unconscious method of manipulating the people in her life.

I do it and I've been lucky enough of late to have been surrounded by honest people who expect better. My mother did it and she wasn't and it ruined her, and eventually she lost all sense of moral or emotional honesty.

I will also risk the observation that honest behaviour from women is much more common in the believing, faithful Christian world than it is in the secular realm where emotional manipulation and game playing seems to be the rule of life, even among political conservatives. I suppose this is mostly because of the sex thing. If you watch sitcoms, it's all over. The reward for letting her behave badly is sex, which can be withheld or granted entirely according to her whim.

The question for a man should be, do you actually love her? Because if you're not just using her as a disposable human sex-toy, then you've got a job ahead of you.

Let's look at them one at a time:

1) If you don’t want us to fix it, why did you bring it up?
When men have a problem, we like to figure out how to deal with it so that it frees our thought processes up for debates about who the greatest home run hitter of all time is (Babe Ruth) or whether you’d be more likely to catch a venereal disease from Paris Hilton or Snooki (Snooki). So, if two men are talking and one says to the other, “My boss is being a real jerk. I’ve had a vacation on the schedule for three months, but he’s asking me to work next weekend. It’s not even an important job! Anybody could do it!” he’s hoping to get a solution to his problem.

Is there a way to save his vacation? Should he quit his job? What should he say to his boss?

This is why men tend to be mildly irritated when a woman talks about an issue and just seems to want him to commiserate. “Oh, I can’t BELIEVE she said that to you about your dress! Who does that ratty b*tch think she is?” Doesn’t get anything done. So, we can pretend to sympathize, but we’ll be biting our lip to keep from explaining what to do the whole time.

Well, I'll tell you: this is one of the worst traps. What she's looking for is affirmation that it's OK to keep gossiping and feeling sorry for herself. Very few women look upon problems as anything more than an excuse to gather and nurse their petty resentments.

Don't play along. Don't take the role of "understanding female friend". If you play along, nodding politely and making the kind of noises women are supposedly hoping for, she will never learn to deal with her life in a realistic way. Here's a hint fellows, she doesn't want you to be the woman in her life. If you try to be, she will never stop, she will never learn that moaning and whining, while failing to do anything about her problems, is actually making her feel worse. And it will never improve either her situation or her character. She will never learn the pleasures of honesty, what it feels like to be in charge of her own life and to deal forthrightly with difficulties. If she is in this habit, it means that absolutely no one else in her life has ever called her on this, so it's up to you. Sorry.

If there really is a big, huge problem, and you are both doing whatever can be done to deal with it, then, and only then is it time for emotional sympathy. And I mean only real things. Things that are so scary and awful that the fear, depression, sadness and grief are a huge part of the actual real problem. Cancer. Death of a loved one. Loss of a job.

Or if they are less devastating things that don't actually have any solution, but make you feel legitimately bad anyway. I would certainly expect loads of sympathy when Winnie dies, for example. It's not the end of the world, and there's nothing to be done about it, but it's perfectly OK to be sad or angry about it.

But it's an unfortunate fact that women are prone to being whiny, backstabbing gossips, concerned with meaningless trivia, who love nothing more than to blow this stupid stuff up into a huge deal in order to manipulate a lot of sympathy. Women often don't actually want to resolve their problems or interpersonal difficulties. The culture has endorsed this behaviour and called it "sensitivity" and "nurturing" and told women that it is some kind of virtue. There is a kind of sickening, soul-deadening pleasure in complaining and being "commiserated" with, much like the nauseating thrill of a drug fix. And if you play along, you're only offering her more of the drug, when she's looking for a lot more from you.

The feminized culture has taught her that there is nothing in the world more important than how she feels about a situation, and has emptied her head of anything else; everything in her life revolves around her personal soap opera. She is, in short, addicted to a kind of emotional drug, and she's looking to you for a fix. You are helping neither her nor yourself if you give it to her.

If you were to do something as honest as helping to solve the problem, she would be obliged to do what a man does and solve it, forget about it and get on with her real life. The problem is, that the culture has left her without one, without anything real or substantial to think about. She hasn't got a real life to get back to once the problem is solved. She and the entire feminized culture has made the soap opera into the only life she has.

When you turn around and calmly say to her, "I can either help you solve this problem, and then it will go away and you will feel better, or I can commiserate, but understand that this is your choice, not mine, and I am not going to spend the rest of the evening doing it. My commiseration will not be natural or voluntary, and it will make neither of us feel better," she will be forced to, well, man-up and face the reality of her own behaviour and expectations. She will also, if she is the kind of woman you want to continue to be with, begin to recognise and alter her manipulative behaviour.

She probably needs to be instructed in the kind of game she is playing, how it is hurting her and how it is hurting your relationship with her.

2) Tell us how hard women have it.
Maybe 100 years ago, when they couldn’t vote and were expected to stay in the house away from books lest it throw their underpowered feminine brains into a tizzy, women had it harder than men. However, it’s just not true anymore. There are more women graduating from college than men. A woman can abort a man’s child and he has no legal say in the matter. Men are discriminated against in divorce court. Men can face sexual harassment charges over practically nothing. Our society has become much more feminized. This doesn’t mean men have it so bad that you should feel sorry for us; it just means that men roll their eyes when women talk about how good men have it.

Wrong. Stop rolling your eyes, and start helping her understand how harmful her unconscious feminist-trained assumptions are. Yes, just sitting there and taking it, failing to correct her asinine ideas, will probably get you sex in the short term, and if that's all you want, then fine. But if you want to be really in a relationship, you'll have the guts to (ahem) solve this problem. It's one of those delayed gratification things that grown-ups are expected to learn.

And if she starts shrieking feminist slogans at you, then you've learned a valuable lesson about who not to date. If she stares at you open-mouthed because this is the first time she's ever heard anything like this, then you might have a winner on your hands and it's worth trying to educate her.

3) Then there’s the whole toilet seat thing.
The average man could not care less whether the toilet seat is up or down. It means nothing to him and if women simply said, “The toilet seat is down for me all the time and I’m not used to it being up! I would be SOOOOOOO grateful if you left it down when you finished...

Instead, we get, “The toilet seat is always supposed to be down! You left it up! You’re doing it wrong!” Well, no, that’s not “wrong.” There is no arbitrarily correct way to leave the toilet seat and it’s no more trouble for a woman to put it down than it is for a man. If you want the toilet seat down, just ask nicely and then be patient until we can form a habit.

It may sound silly, but apparently this and things like it, are real problems. And I can tell you why: because she's making it one. She is looking for a way to control you with her rage. By facing her down and making the calm suggestion that she help you by reasonable reminders to develop a habit that would be more convenient and pleasant for her, is not going to work if you have established a pattern of passivity. She is going to go in assuming that she has to start shrill and move from there to shrieky if you have allowed her to deal with you this way on other issues. If you start by using the calm and authoritative tone, she will respond in kind. Two mistakes to make are to rise to the shrieking, to lose your cool, to concede the fight to her, to fail to be the one in charge of the situation; or to ignore her and hope it goes away.

4) We’re expected to talk way too much.
There’s this stereotype that says women love to talk and men don’t. There’s probably a little truth to that, but the real problem in that area between men and women tends to come from the topics women want to talk about. As a general rule, most men aren’t very interested in talking about their feelings. Also, the mundane details of their day? Where they went to lunch? Who said what to whom? Not only are men not interested in discussing these things, they’re afraid if they do, it might prompt the woman to spend 15 minutes telling him all the details of her day.

Also, because many women tend to over-analyze, they assign all sorts of deep meaning to trivial gestures and then demand explanations. Sometimes a rose is just a rose and five minutes of silence is just a man thinking about what he has to do at work tomorrow. You want to get a man to talk? It’s not hard. Ask him to explain what’s going on in a UFC fight or what his favorite sexual fantasy is and you’ll have trouble getting him to shut up.

OK, let's break this one up.

1) We have said above that a woman doesn't really want to "talk about her feelings," she wants to enjoy feeling bad and will be annoyed with you for insisting that she stop it. You have a choice before you, either to indulge her, to set limits, or simply change the subject to something that interests you both. I had a boyfriend once who got fed up with me complaining about my job. He finally said, "I think this is just making you more miserable. How about a rule that says you get 15 minutes of sympathetic complaining and then you have to either finds something positive about work to talk about, or we change the subject and talk about movies or something." Because he was honest about it, it worked like a charm, and I realised that he was right. It helped me cheer up at the end of every work day and in the long run discover that I wasn't happy with what I was doing and make a change.

An even longer time ago, I had a close friend who was also sort of feeling around the world and trying to figure out how it worked. He also would worry that long silences were an indication of something bad. Maybe I was mad, or he had said some Wrong Thing. But, being a man, he solved the problem by simply asking, "Is this the kind of silence that means something bad, or is it just because we're hanging out and don't feel the need to fill the space?" And he expected me to answer as forthrightly. Over the years, it got to be one of the most trustworthy friendships I've ever known, because we both knew that if there was a problem, it could simply be addressed by asking. We're still friends today, and it's been ... good grief! it's been 30 years!

2) "The mundane details of the day." Once again, either suck it up or set limits. And you don't have to be blunt. You can be clever and steer the conversation to deeper and more interesting topics. Women tend to focus on trivia, but it's just a tendency, a temptation if you will, and can be defeated through effort and application. Maybe give her ten minutes to run through the whole thing, asking specific questions when it gets too dull. Then take ten minutes to run through yours, and then you can talk about movies. But find a gentle way to remind her that trivia is just that, and isn't very interesting.

3) "Over-analysing". OK, this one may be a genuine indicator of a problem. Women over-analyse the things you do and say when they are insecure and don't believe you are trustworthy. She wants you to talk because she's scared of what you might be thinking and not telling her.

This can be a really big one and very hard to break if she has had a lot of disappointment in life. Sorry, but this one may take a lot of patience. But that does not mean "sympathy" or pattings-on-the-head. You need to do it the Man Way, and tell her, forthrightly, that you do in fact understand her fears, but that she has no actual concrete reason to fear. A big part of this will be to coax her out of herself. With this kind of anxiety, it gets worse and worse the more her universe revolves around it. Fear makes a person selfish and the more you help her to undo the knot of fearsome thoughts, the happier she will be and the more she will be able to focus her attention on you, instead of herself.

Also, women in a certain segment of the culture have been taught to look at everything in (pseudo, pop-)psychoanalytical terms, but not being trained by anything other than Oprahism, don't know how to tell when they are being told the truth. You are going to have to be patient and teach her how to think with her head, and not out of her fears. Fears will tell her things that aren't true, and if you don't learn to counter these lies, she will believe them and not you. (A good resource here would be books about cognitive therapy, which teaches people to undo the knot of lies they have taught themselves to believe, and which are making them miserable.) She will eventually come to trust you, and to prefer living in The Real to living in the awful Fantasy of her anxieties.

Also, also, we have a very frightening culture, and feminism has made things a lot worse by whispering the poison into her ear that men are the enemy and lie and then abandon. Ultimately, she's scared you're going to leave. This fear will be worse and harder to deal with if she was raised by a single mother. She has learned a lot of very bad lessons from her own experience, particularly if she has lived in the general sleeping-around culture. Remember, if she's been with other men and is now with you, it means they've all left and she's really thinking that it's only a matter of time for you.

A big thing you can do to help this is to stop "having sex" with her until you are willing to marry her. I once confronted a friend of mine about this who was complaining about the increasing tension in his "relationship" with a woman whom he lived with but was not married to. Eventually, they "broke up" and she left and never spoke to him again, and he was rather battered by the whole thing.

I told him something he said no one had ever said to him before. "Of course she was angry with you. You were stealing something precious from her. You were pretending to a commitment that you had no intention of living up to in order to get something from her that was not yours to take. You were asking her to play a game, and live a lie, a counterfeit and a sham, of something that is enormously precious." Sex before marriage makes people miserable because it is a kind of theft. And it is theft of something irreplacable. Moreover, you are making her complicit in the destruction of her own happiness.

An even simpler thing to do is, when she asks you (anxiously) during that five minutes of silence, let her into your brain. As I mentioned, she's scared. She doesn't know what you're thinking and I can guarantee that she is sitting there worrying it's something bad, like "I'm so fed up with this, I'm leaving you." And even if she isn't scared, she isn't asking you for no reason. She wants to be included in your inner life. So, don't say, "Nothing." Tell her about your thoughts about your job, even if you think it's too dull. She's really just looking to get let inside your life.

5) Expect us to be mind readers.
Men are not subtle creatures. We tend to be blunt and say what we mean. This is why at some point in his life, every man finds it to be a revelation that women who say they’re “fine” don’t really mean it.

They’re actually upset!

It’s like cracking some ancient code for the first time. This experience tends to be repeated again and again because women are constantly sending out signals that go right past men. When women get indirect, they might as well be talking Chinese mixed with German, “Wang Chung, achtung, Fu-mu hackenderhitzel!” Then it’s, “I’m not telling you what’s wrong! You should already know!”

Then teach her to be blunt and say what she means. You can start by reassuring her that you will be able to take whatever she is thinking about. That you're not made of glass.

All this stuff is about teaching her a better, frankly more masculine, more honest way of communicating. Women do these manipulative things because they think they have to. You will not believe how much happier she will be if you break her of these fear-induced habits and teach her that she is actually free to say, out loud, using words, what she is thinking and worrying about. Her pall of anxiety will lift and you will both be a great deal happier.

Basically, man up and be the leader in the situation. It's really not as hard as you think, and she will love you for it all the more.



~

My new favourite blog

Joffre the Giant on buxom wifely obedience.

Highlights...

Mansome: "Real men don't 'Tweet'" This reminded me powerfully of my stepfather, Graham, who though very troubled in life, was certainly a real man, and being a marine engineer, also smelled of diesel fuel.

It also brings to mind a recent conversation with a male friend about Jane Austen (which he had, of course, read). We were discussing the relative merits of Willoughby and Col. Brandon.

"As a guy, of course, I hated Willoughby instantly."

Good manly instincts there, I think.

~ * ~

Lately I've been getting very annoyed by the response of the churches and prelates to the "gay marriage" thing. They go on and on about how wonderful marriage is and never, ever talk about what needs to be talked about. They're afraid. Not a very manly thing.

"Homosexuality among Christians: not a gift, but a deep wound."


"International Women's Day Meditation: feminism is bad for people"

And I think there's a big something missing in the whole discussion. Women are not going to believe this until men tell them. It's part of our nature. We need to be guided and protected by men, and as long as men don't tell women that feminism is bad, and doing bad things to them, they will keep hurting themselves, and men and children and the whole world with it.

Women are not constitutionally disposed to believe other women. Men need to say it.

Use your authority, given by God, and tell us the truth.



~

If you can get the milk for free...

Pretty much...



~

Be a man!

For God sake! KISS THE GIRL!!!

OK, I've been in bed, sick, since Friday. To keep myself amused while awake, I've been watching back-to-back episodes of Dawson's Creek and thinking about boys.

I know what you're thinking: That show, which was really bad, was mercifully ended several years ago now, so what are you doing? Why aren't you watching something with some moral and intellectual content like Buffy or Star Blazers? And yes, you'd be right, and I'd be embarrassed about it if I hadn't already admitted to you guys that I'd read all the Twilight books.

This show about rich teenagers, played by 20 year-olds, living in dream homes in some little coastal town in somewhere vaguely New Englandy/Martha's Vinyardy, so far, seems entirely to be about which of the two lead males is going to be the first to nail one or both of the two lead females. Glancing at YouTube videos of later seasons, I see that for the most part, this is what it keeps being about.

The writers seemed to think that the most interesting character was it's namesake, Dawson Leery, whom they present as a dreamy-eyed, 15 year-old, nice-guy who pines after girls but doesn't know what to do with the ones he gets, thinks Spielberg is the greatest film maker of all time and who keeps an ET "collectible" stuffed toy beside his bed. His "best friend" is a dewy, leggy, doe-eyed "Joey" who longs for the safe, cuddly, child-man to twig into why she continues, long after she has ceased to care about the art of film making, to come over and watch movies and sleep over in his bed (!!huh?!!) all innocent, like-when-they-were-kids.

In the first episode, Dawson-the-aptly-surnamed falls hard in crush with pouty-lipped ingenue Michelle Williams who has appeared in the tiny outback town to do penance by living with her (narrow-minded bigot Christian...zzzzzz) grandmother, after undergoing some dark and mysterious "bad thing" in the fabled opium dens and slave markets of Marrakech New York City. (I think she dies of cancer in the end because the writers just didn't know what to do with her when Whiney is finished with her and she ceases to be an interesting plot foil for the Perfect Bermuda Love Triangle.)

I hear the show was tremendously popular. And I think I recall hearing it's name bandied about some time in my mid to late thirties.

I've made it through to the end of the first season for one. single. reason: Pacey Witter, budding Real Man and Droopy's other "best friend" who spends all their mutual screen time together telling Blondie to man-up and Kiss. The. Girl! Any girl! just pick one and get going! Or decide not to. But for the love of Mike, fricken be a man about it.


Nice man-purse there dude, bet the chicks really dig it...

Pacey is supposed to be the dumb, smart-alecky "class clown" character who gives comic relief to the endless tedium of the emo teenybopper-talk. But in the 13 episodes I've watched so far, he has been the only character to develop the slightest shred of ... well... character. He's stoic. He keeps his feelings close to the chest. He has a rotten home life but doesn't perpetually moan about it. He knows that keeping up a cheerful demeanour, delivering one-liners, chasing (and catching) girls, punching bad guys and occasionally sticking it to the man, even at the risk of disaster, is more fun than his friend's perpetual hand-wringing and he spends a good deal of effort charitably smacking Blithery up the side of the head to try to jump start the wretched boy's testosterone generator.

Pacey is depicted as a smart-but-under-achieving good guy whose family has rejected him as the "loser" who will never amount to anything. Pacey thinks he is a loser, especially with girls and expects to be the one who stays behind in tiny Capeside pumping gas or tending bar. He's supposed to just be the sidekick.

In fact, Pacey is the one who, in the first ten episodes:
- Initiates an affair with his 36 year-old bombshell English teacher after plausibly falling in love with her
- Then when they're found out, manfully throws himself on the grenade for her, lying to the school board, saying the affair was a rumour he had started to make himself feel cool, destroying his own reputation to save hers;
- Tries to get a distraught Joey to stop drinking at a party after Mooney ditches her;
- Punches a much larger and older student making inappropriate advances on the now-drunk Joey;
- Steals the show with good natured manly charm at the snootily horrible Miss Capeside beauty pageant;
- Drives Joey to the prison in the middle of the night so she can be reconciled to her incarcerated father;
- spends all his remaining efforts boosting Twaddle's ego and pushing him together with Joey because it's what his best friend really wants but is too pathetic to try to get, even though he, Pacey, is now also in love with Joey;
- and finally is, in fact, the first one to actually KISS THE GIRL.

He has passion, charm, strength of character, is able to put his friends' needs before his own and comes through quietly every time someone is in a tight spot. He is, in short, the only interesting thing on the show, the only character so far that I care enough about to want to find out what happens to him, and the one on his way to secure, confident Alpha Maledom.

The thing is, and this is the point of the post, I think Hollywood thinks that he's not. I think the writers think that Drivelly and Joey are what the show is about. I get the feeling that the incredibly tedious, repetitive and irritating "drama" between Leggy, Snivelly and Pouty is supposed to be what the show is primarily about. But so excruciatingly dull has it been that I've just been fast forwarding over their scenes.

I've seen this before. Shows that were supposed to be about the politically correct, in-touch-with-his-feminine-side, safe intellectual, that often had a hulking, manly, doltish but ultimately well-meaning sidekick, nearly always end up being about the sidekick. Does anyone remember Meathead's real name? Can anyone now imagine Luke getting the girl? (Luke was so pathetic they had to make Leia his sister just to stave off the remotest possibility that Han Solo wouldn't get her.)

Did anyone see that British TV miniseries Life on Mars? It started out being about an enlightened, up-to-date, sophisticated modern man going back in time to the brutish streets of 1972 Manchester where he was supposed to show the barbarous thugs of the previous era a thing or two about modern policing, good nutrition, the dangers of sidestream smoke and being sensitive to the emotional needs of women in the workplace. Instead, John Simm got smacked around several times by Philip Glennister, ultimately learning how to drink, beat confessions out of suspects and chase women and bad guys in a '68 Mustang.

"The initial idea was for a humorous ... programme that overtly mocked the styles and attitudes of the 1970s." Then something strange happened. Modern, sophisticated, politically correct, in-touch-with-their-feelings British women fell madly in love with...Glennister, and emphatically not the weedy John Simm, at least until he'd toughened up a bit.

And this was something the BBC Actually. Didn't. Expect.

Unbelievable.

I don't actually remember a great deal of detail about my adolescence. And the bits I remember I wish I didn't. But I do quite distinctly remember the whole boy-girl thing. Having no parents around, I went through quite a lot more of it than perhaps I might have otherwise. It took me a long, long, long time to figure things out. And in the end, one of the big things I got was that I had no time for "modern" men.

Because, and here's the kicker, the Dawson Leerys of the world weren't actually the "nice guys". They were too weak. They had so much angst and enjoyed their angst so much that it made them useless.

So far, Flouncy has done nothing but wring his hands over whether he should or shouldn't "go out" with one, both or either of the two girls. This utter inability to gather up his gonads and act, for better or for worse, has made him useless as a friend to every other character, and has driven The Girl who (thinks she) is in love with him, to become so exasperated she is going to take a scholarship to France. France!

Moreover, after a school year of will-I-won't-I with Limpy alternately pining for her and rejecting her, Pouty's grandfather has a stroke and she has nowhere to turn but...dear heaven! the useless Dawson... who is so wrapped up in his little Hamlet imitation, that he utterly fails to be any use to her in the crisis.

The "nice guy" is such a pathetic dishrag he is incapable of being a good man.



~

Chesterton:

Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.

That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

H/T to Zach.



~

Pick me! Pick me!

I believe in gender stereotypes!

The titanic arrogance and impenetrable wall of assumptions behind this headline simply boggle the mind.

Gender stereotypes persist among young Canadians

[Plan Canada surveyed] 1,000 Canadian youth between the ages of 12 and 17.

They found that while 91 per cent felt that equality between men and women in Canada is good for both boys and girls, some youth still subscribed to gender stereotypes. For example:

* 48 per cent of the youth thought men should be responsible for earning income and providing for the family
* 31 per cent of the boys felt that a woman's most important role is to take care of her home and cook for the family.

I wonder if they took the trouble to define any terms.

I don't doubt that the survey simply asked, "Do you think that equality between men and women is good for both boys and girls". In my experience, surveys of this kind are no more sophisticated than online newspaper polls. So I don't doubt that there was no attempt to define "equality".

But the concept "equality," like it's in-bred idiot cousin "human rights," can mean a lot of different things, and since it has become the primary operating concept in Canadian government, it might be helpful for someone to actually define it.

Because it is not defined, "equality" has become not a concept in political philosophy or economic theory, but an essentially meaningless noise, one of those words that Chairman Mao described as a "little stick of dynamite you plant in people's minds". Effectively, it has become a kind of battering ram to knock in the doors of many moral social bastions. No one wants to be thought to be against "equality," so whenever some feminist (or increasingly often, homosexualist,) government bureaucrat in Canada, Britain, the UN or the EU starts slinging it, everyone ducks and covers.

But let's ask a few concrete questions. What does "equality between men and women" mean, exactly? Does it mean that a woman's testimony in court is held to be as reliable as a man's? Does it mean that in criminal cases, the same rules of evidence apply to men as to women? Does it mean that a woman doing a job, say a Toronto bus driver, receives the same pay and is taxed at the same basic rate as a man doing the same job?

Few people realise that most of these kinds of things were already covered in British Common Law long before the Great Emancipation.

But now, "equality" as the holy grail of all government policies, is wielded like a blunt instrument, mostly to make the lives of small businessmen miserable.

Here's an example.

In the Canadian bureaucracy, at all levels, it has been held to equate with the fictitious concept, "equal pay for equal work". The slogan that feminists used in the Canadian government is actually more accurately given as "equal pay for work of equal value". A lot of people assume that this means "the same pay for the same work," as in, you pay a female bus driver the same as a male bus driver if she does the same job and works the same hours.

But in fact, the slogan, which has become the government's operating policy, is a byzantine labyrinth of Official Feminist socialist doublethink that attempts to weigh the value of work done and arbitrarily assigns a job a dollar number that must be met by employers.

This little bit of socialist interference in business has been enshrined in Canadian law at several levels, such as the Ontario Employment Standards Act and there are real consequences for employers failing to govern themselves according to it.

As Real Women of Canada puts it: The "equal pay for work of equal value" slogan/policy

would include the problem of evaluating different jobs having very different factors, such as job risks, uncertain tenure, working conditions, training, etc. There is no objective way to measure the value of a job apart from the price it commands on the market. Once market wages are abandoned as a guide, the system, unfortunately, becomes a subjective assignment of points based on the bias of the evaluator about the relative value of working conditions, job skills, education, training and responsibility.

Of course, most Canadians, including doubtless the boys and girls surveyed by Plan Canada, know nothing about this. Being fair-minded people in general, the first assumption is probably the one everyone makes, that "equality" is a good thing and the idea of defining it has never crossed any of their minds.

But the survey above is an interesting indicator. On the vague, undefined notion of "equality between men and women," everyone surveyed (remembering that these are just kids) snapped to attention and saluted, like the good little Canuckistanis they have been brainwashed to be. But when the survey asked some questions about something real, like whether a woman should go out to work or look after things on the home front, they were able to break their coding and nearly half of them answered honestly.

It gives one a ray of hope, don't you think?



~

Such duty as the subject owes the prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.

Someone said it!

In British politics no less!

Feminists are obnoxious bigots and men are getting a raw deal

Yay! there's still a man in the UK with a pair.

(Turns out he's already married though...dang)



~

Good news for us lonely, frumpy single Trads...

Religious girls in long skirts luckier in love?

That's what Pravda says.

Religious women in strict clothes would be laughed at and used as a subject for countless jokes during the beginning of the 1990s. Their secular friends and colleagues did not even want to believe that young women wearing long skirts and handkerchiefs could arrange their private lives successfully. However, as experience shows, girls in handkerchiefs enjoy special demand.

The TV series and two motion pictures Sex and the City has earned global popularity for one simple reason. The lives of its main characters are very similar to the fates of millions of lonely woman all over the world. They are successful, attractive and stylish, but single. How can one explain the paradox?

It seems that those women, who do not use cosmetics, wear plain clothes, cover their heads with kerchiefs and follow religious rules, are no competition to fashionable and liberated women when it comes to love affairs. Real life proves the opposite, though. Religious women get married one after another and celebrate the joy of motherhood. The prototypes of Sex and the City women keep meeting each other in restaurants and cafes to sip cocktails and complain to each other of their failures in relationships with men.

I think there's another aspect to this that people might miss. Religious people are usually connected to a large community of other religious people, a church or other religious group, sometimes an entire subculture. This makes a person much more accountable for his actions in life. The secular world has no internal social order. In the religious subcultures, there is a social order which puts checks on behaviour, but also supports people and keeps them connected to other people.

For people just living their secular lives, one of the biggest characteristics is isolation. Seculars are by nature atomised. They are not accountable to a group, their lives are lived, especially if they are not married, entirely according to their own personal whims and ideas, and in most cases, they live far away either physically or socially from their families of origin.

They are also entirely on their own in the project of finding a mate, and secular people often have great difficulty defining their values and personal wishes because of this lack of a cultural context. In a religious group, the value system is well defined (even if not always appreciated in every instance) and generally accepted. There's a "norm" for behaviour and values that is shared with a stable group of other people.
This creates a pool of potential mates that makes marriage a lot easier to find and to maintain.

Religious people have networks, even if they don't have families of their own to help, that can make finding a mate much easier and much more safe. Where secular people are reduced to the bar scene (or whatever it is they do) meeting strangers and taking huge chances. A religious person meets a potential mate at the parish after-Mass tea and snacks and in five minutes knows exactly what he's about, who his friends and family are, probably where he went to school and what he does for a living.

Religion, in short, creates social cohesion in the midst of a secular environment that is a wasteland of moral confusion, social isolation and risky encounters.


This bit was pretty good too:

Men become attracted to religious women because they create personality cult in their families. An emancipated woman perceives her husband just as a partner, whom she can compete with. A religious woman sees her husband as the head of her family. A man is a ruler in traditional families.

"She serves him dinner and she bows to him, she is completely crazy"...

...says the emancipated modern woman...


Oh, and...

Pravda! Who knew those guys were still around?!



~

Sounds good to me

Where do I get one?



~

Men, dress like a grown up

Put this on

And shave every day. Make sure your hair and fingernails are short and clean all the time.

Don't go getting all Italian on us, mind you. There's nothing more revolting and effeminate in a man than physical vanity. A man who cannot pass a mirror or plate glass window without glancing into it, is no man. But do make the effort to be neat, clean and properly dressed. The right sort of woman will notice. Trust me.

Also, I recently had occasion to compliment a young man of my acquaintance on his corduroy trousers.

I didn't realise that there is such a corduroy following out there...

An Address to the Corduroy Appreciation Club

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak to the fifth annual Grand Meeting of the Corduroy Appreciation Club on November 11th, the date which most resembles corduroy. Below is the text of my address. Hail the wale...

I came to this beautiful hall in a soiled subway car, but I might as well have travelled in a grand carriage. As I walked down the street I drew sidelong glances. “Who is this man,” they seemed to say. “A man at home where-ever he travels. A man of refinement. A man of elegance. A man of corduroy.”

...

This is not some fabric reserved for oily diplomats, or gentrymen of questionable morality. Corduroy is not weak! It is not effete or innefectual or elitist. Corduroy is a fabric built to take on the world. Tuck your corduroy trousers into your boots and feed the pigs. Roll up your corduroy sleeves and bring in the harvest. Put on a corduroy field jacket and go outside to build something.

...

We join together because there is one danger so clear, so present that without the efforts of those tonight assembled we might be subsumed by evil. Consumed by that inky darkness.

While I am hesitant to even speak this evil’s name, I must, and I will.

Tonight, friends, we join together to battle velvet.

Velvet is the fabric of evil.

Confidence men and crooked bankers join together nightly in velvet-fueled bacchanalias, laughing at their latest swindles. Sickly courtesans don velvet codpieces and drink champagne toasts to their dominance of the common man. Third-world dictators rub themselves with velvet swatches while firing squads execute dissident leaders.

Louche, lude, lascivious velvet is our enemy, and there is no one to fight against it but us.

~

What do we think of this?

Here's something interesting. Not quite sure what I make of it.

Welcome to Taken In Hand, a website about wholehearted sexually exclusive marriages in which, to the delight of both spouses, the man actively controls the woman. The degree of control and the way the husband retains control vary from Taken In Hand couple to Taken In Hand couple, but in all cases both husband and wife actively want the husband to have the upper hand. No matter how strong, tough and forceful a Taken In Hand wife may be, and no matter how hard she might try to take control in their marriage, she would be aghast if her husband were to let her get the upper hand. Likewise, no matter how loving, kind and considerate the husband may be, he prefers to keep his wife firmly in hand.

Pretty counter-cultural, I'd say.

It seems to almost entirely consist of contributions from readers, not sociologists or headshrinkers or accredited "experts", but regular people who relate their own experiences.

It appears to be mostly an English/UK thing, but looks a lot like those websites from the US made by evangelical Prods where they talk quite freely about "male-led" relationships and marriage.

It's pretty freewheeling, especially in the comments, and some of it can get pretty racy, but I see that there are rules against vulgarity or explicit descriptions.

I wanted my site to be one in which private information (such as intimate details about what posters do in the bedroom, or wherever) would remain private rather than appearing on the site. I wanted my site to appeal as much to Orthodox rabbis, conservative Christians and readers' parents or grandparents, as to individuals who might also read obviously racy, graphic sites.

A lot of it is about err... "domestic discipline," which I know a lot of conservative Prods approve of, though I have no idea how the Catholic Trads would feel.

One thing I like about it right off the bat is that it will obviously make the feminists' heads come right the heck off and explode.

EHKS-SPLODE!

The first three headlines on the front page are:

"She needs me to be firmly in charge"...

"How to get into the right mindset for taking control of her?"

"How can a laidback man get into the right mindset to take control?"

I have to say, just sitting here fantasizing about the screeching and howling is doing me a world of good...

That faint popping sound you hear...

I am getting the feeling that there are a lot more women writing in to sites like Taken in Hand, and others like the American Protestant male-led relationship sites, but fewer men. I was wondering if this is because more women are coming to resent the limitations that our feminism-dominated western society has placed on them. I think that there is a strong undercurrent in society against marriage that hardly ever gets talked about. But women have always and will always want to get married, and at least nowadays, men seem to have pretty strong resistance to that.

I think more women are finally seeing that they have been sold a bill of goods, that feminism has done nothing but ruin the marriage market. It has turned women into harridans no decent man in his right mind would want to marry, and has turned men into perpetual teenagers who seek nothing in life more than the next quick, meaningless liaison.

The feminist movement has given men the freedom not to marry and made it easier for them to get what they want (sex) without having to “pay” for it with marriage. Feminism has done women this terrible disservice in telling them they can sleep around just like men, and have careers and be “successful”. This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that women really don't want that. Or are starting to realise that it's not what it was cracked up to be.

I read once that a big reason that Blue Whales are now so rare, is that even after the whaling moratoriums were in place, there were so few of them left that they could not find each other in the sea to reproduce. I get the feeling that some of us old fashioned, traditional sort of people are like blue whales and finding each other in the vast and hostile oceans of the world, (a world, moreover, in which we are now in the position of having to remain strictly closeted) has become very difficult.

Let’s hear it for the internet then!



~

How to get married

I've recently come to the conclusion (ok, it wasn't recently, but I've recently had it hammered into my skull like the tent peg that went into the head of that guy in the Bible) that "dating" is stupid.

It's stupid and destructive. It damages kids, teenagers (I could cite the stats, but we all know, don't we...we remember), it damages people who would just plain like to get married and stop all this idiot messing about. It damages people who fail in the 'dating game'.

In fact, the term 'dating game' is pretty appropriate. It's playing games with your heart and with your future.

And it's vulgar. Quite frankly, it's undignified and should be rejected on those grounds alone.

So where does that leave those of us who would like to be married but find the 'dating game' repellant? I think we are in a pickle. The old rules, and the structures are pretty much eradicated. It used to involve families, and other interested parties. But we don't have those anymore. In fact, the tidal wave of divorce, that hit the West Coast just about at the time my mother was getting into her encounter group lifestyle in the early 70s, has made it extremely difficult for people even to believe that getting married, let alone staying that way, is even possible.

When I was going into grade five, I had come out of a hippie 'free school' ("Sundance"... I kid you not) and my mother noticed that I didn't know anything. The hippies were so busy encouraging us to express ourselves that they forgot to teach me the times tables. (Thank God I already knew how to read, and lose myself in a book). When she panicked and realised I needed to be sent to a real school, I asked to go to a Catholic school. It was rather a new environment, I'll tell you. I went from a place where nearly all the kids came from single-parent "families" to one where nearly all the kids came from normal homes, two parents and one house in which they had lived all their lives. (I didn't exactly fit in...)

I think that was about 1975.

By the time I left St. Pat's and went into junior high, three years later, nearly all the kids' parents were divorced.

It happened that fast.

Is it any wonder most of the people I knew, out there in the secular world, before I managed to climb out of the mire, regarded marriage as some kind of sick joke? The idea that people get married and stay married, that they take it seriously like in the Olden Days, would make most of my old acquaintances laugh. No one even knows how to do it these days. I mean, apart from the whole "getting together" and "having a relationship" stuff, what else is there to do?

The Jews have an idea. I have one Jewish friend: Rabbi Yehuda Levin. He lives in New York and has nine kids. He's a pretty young guy, by modern standards, to have kids who are old enough to get married, but the last time he was in Rome, he told me he had to get back to New York to arrange his son's wedding. He asked me, as he has done every time we've met since the first time nearly ten years ago, when I was getting married. It's a big thing for Jews, I guess, and they still know how to do it, because their social system hasn't been blasted to smithereens by the Asteroid.

And they also think "dating" is stupid. Spiritually and morally dangerous.

Traditional Jews lead a modest social life. Teenagers don't date or go to parties, and boys and girls don't spend time with each other socially. While we're growing up, we don't get into emotional entanglements worrying about how popular we are, or who is more popular, or who we're going to go out with.

None of that happens at all in our community because we think it's unfair. It's not nice, and it doesn't do any good. The result is that when we're ready to get married, we're not playing any games. It's not a popularity contest and we're not trying to impress anyone.

When we're ready to get married, we go about it honestly and sincerely. We don't marry the wrong person because we might have been trying to impress somebody or compete with someone. All that is eliminated. We find somebody to marry, we get married, and the marriages last. Divorces happen, but rarely.

We start to date when we're old enough and serious enough to think about being married. When we do go out, it's with someone who has the same values we do. Usually, we come from families who know each other, or we have a mutual friend who thinks we're compatible and introduces us.

...

After we are introduced, we spend time together, and we consider marriage. We want to get to know what's on the other person's mind, what kind of life they want to live, what kind of life they have lived, things that have to do with being married. We wouldn't go to a movie because we want to get to know each other, not a movie. We don't want to waste time doing a lot of activities; we prefer to spend the time talking. We're not looking for a thrill; we're looking to get married.

It's a good system, and a considerate system. It takes into account that people have feelings.

For example, in our tradition, while a man and woman are dating and thinking about marriage, the dating is kept completely secret. They don't talk about it and they don't go where people are going to see them. If it doesn't work out, nobody knows. [And there are no breaks in the social sphere everyone has to continue living in...good idea.]

If it were public, people would wonder, "Why didn't you marry him? Is something wrong with him?" Or, "How come he didn't marry you? Is something wrong with you?" This way is more discreet.

If it works out, everyone is thrilled. If it doesn't work out, no one knows and no one gets hurt.

This seems like a pretty sensible system. It assumes that everyone has the same goal and works in a compassionate way to helping people attain the goal.

So, where's ours? What are we doing about this as Catholics? As "Trads"?

I had thought that in the Trad community there was more or less consensus on the "dating is for marriage" thing. I had assumed that the people who called themselves Trad Catholics had, more or less, the goal of living like normal, sane, grown-up people. That they rejected, along with the idiocies of NewChurch, the parallel rubbish in the secular world of "dating" and courtship.

Nope. Turns out not.



~

Boys and Girls

There is nothing, nothing at all, good about the sexual revolution.

We've done nothing but hurt ourselves with this.

Some people it has outright destroyed.



~