DESPITE generous state subsidies, including subsidies for dawn-to-dusk schooling that renders motherhood all but insignificant, French women are the victims of a pervasive macho culture that keeps them from rising to the heights of corporate and political leadership, according to this article in The New York Times.

Katrin Bennhold suggests that the average French man is a creature of Napoleonic arrogance who is responsible for the exhaustion of the average French woman, apparently because he does not do enough at home. (Have you ever read a single article in the mainstream press about how exhausting life is for men?) Yet, as Bennhold explains, women want to do household tasks because it is important to their feminine identity. The real oppressor then seems to be the cultural expectation, a holdover of two world wars, that women have children (France’s birth rate, at a mere two children per woman, is higher than the rest of Europe).

But, wait, French women actually seem to want children. So who is the culprit? Something or someone is to blame.

The truth is, French feminists are among the unhappiest women in the world not because they have too little but because they have too much. Feminism is absolutist in its intentions. It will not rest until every woman on earth is perfectly content and has no complaints. Since this is an impossibility, feminism will not rest. It will ceaselessly agitate, searching for sinister designs against women. This non-stop war will not end until feminism’s most basic premises are shown for what they are: lies. (Continued)

Abigail Bringing Gifts to David, Simon de Vos, 1641

THE BIBLICAL heroine Abigail, who brought gifts to David in an effort to appease his anger over her husband’s inhospitable behavior, was a cunning temptress whose bows to the Hebrew warrior were deliberately flirtatious. This, in essence, is the view of the author of this brief profile of Abigail in a 2006 book, Great Women of the Bible in Art and Literature. ”[S]elf-accusation, imploring, humility and empathy, adoration and the prospect of happiness were part of the coded message of a beautiful and clever woman to a hero and future king,” writes Dorothee Soelle. (p. 75) This is obviously a feminist who sees any traditional woman as suspect, but her words remind me of the view one also finds in the men’s rights movement. A woman wants nothing more than to entrap a man and get him to pay her way. She is incapable of having, as the Old Testament story of Abigail suggests, any higher objectives than self-interest or of caring about truth and virtue for their own sake. In this view, if I were to argue that Abigail spoke out of a love of truth, my argument (the words of a housewife) would be part of the ongoing effort to bring about universal female supremacy.

(Continued)

PERHAPS the latest sex scandal at Duke University will inspire the university to expand into a full-fledged academic major its 2007 course “Hook-up Culture at Duke,” which looks at the pressing subject of how “particular bodies gain value in contemporary commodity culture.” Here is the course description from the university’s catalogue: 

Prerequisites 

None, although a previous course in Cultural Anthropology would be helpful.

Synopsis of course content 

What is “hook-up culture”? What does it have to do with power and difference? Is the concept useful for framing gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized experiences at Duke?

This course, designed as a direct result of events last year on campus, will give students a unique opportunity to examine and reflect upon gendered/sexualized life at Duke in relation to contemporary life in the U.S. We will ask: how has the history of university attendance in the US (in terms of race, class, and gender) impacted campus culture? Are new technologies changing intimate or familial relationships between people? (Continued)

This article in The New York Times over the latest sex scandal at Duke University is a good example of how conversation tends to focus on the fly on the wall when there’s an elephant in the room. Apparently, this is not really a sex scandal but a crisis of the Internet Age and its infringements on privacy. There is no elephant, only an itsy-bitsy fly.

For those who are new to the issue, a recent female graduate of Duke wrote a long, witty, obscene “thesis” in PowerPoint format on the men she had slept with during her undergraduate years, appraising their anatomy, rating their performance and detailing the sadomasochistic sext-ing messages they exchanged during the day. I have read the report,which was written for the amusement of friends, and it’s too vulgar to post. The woman, whose parents presumably paid $200,000 for her four-year adventure in collegiate hedonism, combines the sensibility of  a cool, articulate corporate or academic speaker with the bestiality and avarice of a dog in heat. In the initial version of her research report, the names of the men she had slept with were included. It soon spread over the Internet and was posted on various sites. She was also contacted by a major book publisher, an agent and a movie producer. (Continued)

HERE is a brilliant essay,”The Underground Men,” by the artful blogger Cwny at Cambria Will Not Yield. It’s worth quoting in its entirety: 

                                                       The Underground Men

The moststriking aspect of the Western world today is the absence of white Christian males. Where are they? They have gone underground, because Christian masculinity has been proscribed as illegal.

In olden times, the white Christian male was seen as an essential part of the social structure. He was the spiritual head of his family, loving his wife as Christ loved His church, and the guiding light of his young children. Certainly it is easy to go back through history and find many examples of the failure of the Christian patriarchal system, but you have to be a modern, satanic Christian not to concede that if Christianity is to be taken seriously then the patriarchal family is the main unit of society. But of course Christianity is not the faith of modern man, so the Christian patriarchal system has been jettisoned. What has taken its place?

The technocratic white man currently rules the Western world. But his is a curious rule; he rules a kingdom of unruly barbarians and Amazon warriors by making sacrificial offerings to the barbarians and strategic appeasements to the Amazons. He would rather deal with those two legions of Satan than face Christian men, because his reign of technology and money is directly opposed to Christ’s reign of charity. If that reign of charity were to be reinstated, the technocrats’ reign would end. And it is the Christian male who traditionally has sallied forth to defend and build His reign of charity. (Continued)

IN THIS World War II recruiting poster for the U.S. Marines, the soldier is unmistakably a woman. She is manly, with her tie and clipboard; she appears to be play-acting, dressed in a male costume, but there is a softness to her face and her hair is loose. Her mission is purely administrative and the dreamy look in her eyes suggests love for a Marine, not for war. Compare that to the recent recruiting poster below it. There the woman bears no trace of femininity; one cannot imagine her ever falling in love. She stands above men, in command, a ferocious female fighting machine. She is taut and angry, a human embodiment of artillery. Her outstretched arm resembles a gun and her mouth seems to spew invisible smoke.  The men look up to her in adoration.

(Continued)

IN 1979, James Webb, the future Secretary of the Navy and U.S. Senator, wrote in Washingtonian Magazine:

There is a place for women in our military, but not in combat. And their presence at institutions dedicated to the preparation of men for combat command is poisoning that preparation. By attempting to sexually sterilize the Naval Academy environment in the name of equality, this country has sterilized the whole process of combat leadership training, and our military forces are doomed to suffer the consequences. (Continued)

Journey into the Whirlwind
Within the Whirlwind
By Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg

The Thinking Housewife Book Club

Years ago, I picked up the books of Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg and was so astonished by the clarity of her memories and by both the Stoicism and feeling with which she described unimaginable suffering, cruelty and bureaucratic absurdity, that I vowed to actively remember her forever, as if she was a relative or a good friend lost in a plane crash.  That’s why I return, and I imagine others return, to these books every so often and remember her remembering, vicariously reliving that time when Ginzburg was in solitary confinement in the Yaroslavl prison, the days when she traveled the Sea of Okhotsk in the stench-filled hold of a slave ship and that moment when she encountered berries in the snow while felling trees in the subarctic Siberian taiga:

It was already May when, as I was crouching close to the ground in order to cut the branches off a felled larch tree, I noticed in the thawed patch near the stump that miracle of nature – a sprig with five or six berries on it, of a red so deep that they looked almost black, and so tender that it broke one’s heart to look at them. As with all over-ripe beauties, they could be destroyed by the slightest touch, however careful. If you tried to pick them., they burst in your fingers; but you could lie on the ground and suck them off the branch with your dried, chapped lips, crushing each ojne separately against your palate and savoring its flavor. The taste was indescribable, like that of an old wine – and not to be compared with ordinary cranberries: its sweetness and heady flavor were those of victory over suffering and winter. (Journey into the Whirlwind,  Transl. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward)

Soviet Communism lies in the dustbin of history, but for all that has been said and written,  its full reality has not permeated the consciousness of many Westerners. The extremity of their suffering calls us to know at least some of the victims of Soviet Communism up close. Yet the inhabitants of the dark underworld of Soviet concentration camps, the zeks and deportees, the exiles and prisoners, still have not gained the attention they are due. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is world famous, but other accomplished memoirists have never achieved the ranks of Anne Frank, Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel. The warmth once extended to Stalin and, to Communism in general, perhaps lives on in the muted horror over their legacy. Lingering bad conscience, the close affinity of Communist ideals of equality and social justice to the objectives of modern liberalism, must explain why someone like Ginzburg is rarely read in American high schools or universities.  Here is an author meant for the student pondering the lessons of the twentieth century. And, regardless of its lessons, here is a story as gripping as the best works of the imagination.   (Continued)