"Moderately Bad Men"

     [This piece first appeared at Eternity Road on August 28, 2008 – FWP]

* * *

     This extraordinary bit of whining by Ellen Tien has been getting a fair amount of play in Blogdom:

     I contemplate divorce every day. It tugs on my sleeve each morning when my husband, Will, greets me in his chipper, smug morning-person voice, because after 16 years of waking up together, he still hasn't quite pieced out that I'm not viable before 10 a.m.

     It puts two hands on my forehead and mercilessly presses when he blurts out the exact wrong thing ("Are you excited for your surprise party next Tuesday?"); when he lies to avoid the fight ("What do you mean I left our apartment door open? I never even knew our apartment had a door!"); when he buttons his shirt and jacket into the wrong buttonholes, collars and seams unaligned like a vertical game of dominoes, with possibly a scrap of shirttail zippered into his fly.

     It flicks me, hard, just under the eye when, during a parent-teacher conference, he raises his arm high in the air, scratches his armpit, and then --then! -- absently smells his fingers.

     It slammed into me like a 4,000-pound Volvo station wagon one spring evening four years ago, although I remember it as if it were last year.

     He had dropped me off in front of a restaurant, prior to finding a parking spot. As I crossed in front of the car, he pulled forward, happily smiling back over his left shoulder at some random fascinating bit (a sign with an interesting font, a new scaffolding, a diner that he may or may not have eaten at the week after he graduated from college), and plowed into me. The impact, while not wondrous enough to break bodies 12 ways, was sufficient to bounce me sidewise onto the hood, legs waving in the air like antennae, skirt flung somewhere up around my ears.

     For one whole second, New York City stood stock-still and looked at my underwear.

     As I pounded the windshield with my fist and shouted -- "Will, Will, stop the car!" -- he finally faced forward, blink, blink, blink, trying, yes, truly trying to take it all in. And I heard him ask with mild astonishment, very faintly because windshield glass is surprisingly thick, "What are you doing here?"

     In retrospect, it was an excellent question, a question that I've asked myself from altar to present, both incessantly and occasionally. What am I doing here?

     Don't misunderstand: I would not, could not disparage my marriage (not on a train, not in the rain, not in a house, not with a mouse). After 192 months, Will and I remain if not happily married, then steadily so. Our marital state is Indiana, say, or Connecticut -- some red areas, more blue. Less than bliss, better than disaster. We are arguably, to my wide-ish range of reference, Everycouple.

     Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is merely a Moderately Bad Man, the kind of man who will leave his longboat-sized shoes directly in the flow of our home's traffic so that one day I'll trip over them, break my neck, and die, after which he'll walk home from the morgue, grief-stricken, take off his shoes with a heavy heart, and leave them in the center of the room until they kill the housekeeper. Everyman.

     Still, beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of our marriage -- Everymarriage --runs the silent chyron of divorce. It's the scarlet concept, the closely held contemplation of nearly every woman I know who has children who have been out of diapers for at least two years and a husband who won't be in them for another 30. It's the secret reverie of a demographic that freely discusses postpartum depression, eating disorders, and Ambien dependence (often all in the same sentence) with the plain candor of golden brown toast. In a let-it-all-hang-out culture, this is the given that stays tucked in.

     There's lots more, but this is about all your Curmudgeon can stand. It's your turn, Gentle Reader:

• Do you think it likely that Miss Tien is a stunningly perfect woman, sterling of character and exquisite of manner, who would never upset her husband Will with a poor choice of words or a poorly timed remark?
• Do you envision Will as a neglectful, abusive cad, who confines her to their home, deprives her of all but the bare necessities of life, and barks menacingly at her slightest hint of displeasure? Would you find plausible the suggestion that Will has even worse character flaws and behaviors than the ones Miss Tien has described here, or do you think it likely that she's "shot her wad?"
• Might it be possible that Will has a few criticisms to make of Ellen, but is too much the gentleman and dutiful husband to voice them in public?
• Were Will the writer of this article, and Ellen its subject, would it be received as readily by the Oprahfied audience to whom it was first presented?
• If Will were to sue Ellen for divorce, presenting her rant as evidence of spousal abuse, do you think the court would free him of all obligations to her, or is it more likely that he'd be tied to her by bonds of alimony for years to come?

     But enough about poor Will. Will, by the Gospel According To Ellen Tien, isn't a Very Bad Man, just a Moderately Bad Man: "like every other male I know." Your Curmudgeon doesn't go in for a lot of self-disclosure, but he will say this: if Will's worst faults are on record in the column above, the C.S.O. would trade your Curmudgeon for Will in a heartbeat. She'd probably throw in some cash, a couple of draft picks, and a player to be named later, at that.

     But enough about that benighted woman. It's her shrieky column that matters -- and not because it's particularly unusual of its kind. It's standard fare in Oprahfied Women's America. That's the truly disturbing thing about it.

     Oprahfied Women have been taught, mostly by innuendo and implication, that men are low creatures by nature, that the very best of them barely deserves a woman's attention, much less her respect, and that anything and everything men do for their women, or for women in general, is either a move in an exploitative game or a stroke in a campaign to "keep them oppressed." A fair percentage of American women have internalized that message. Because the sexes need one another, it puts a lot of men in a quandary about how to deal with the women in their lives, and renders a lot of women so badly conflicted that they cannot be happy no matter what they do.

     Whatever happened to the old motto, "To his virtues, be kind; to his faults, a little blind" -- ? Like most good advice, it doesn't really matter whether the advisee is male or female; the "his" pronouns could as easily be "her." We are none of us perfect, at least not in one another's eyes. No, not even your humble Curmudgeon; he snores, procrastinates about the yard work, and is provoked to profanity by the perversity of inanimate objects. (Customer-assembled furniture, anyone?) No marriage can be tolerable if one spouse insists that the other must conform to his standards at every waking moment.

     Yet American women have been fed large doses of Utopianism about romance and the married state. Many have come to believe that it's possible to find a "perfect" man. More, they believe a "perfect" man is their due...that if they don't get their due, they've been cheated and have a right to redress.

     Now and then, a commenter here or elsewhere will extol the superior femininity and agreeability of Asian women. Your Curmudgeon knows a few, and they do impress him. Given the porous state of the borders, American women had better look to their levees; the "coyotes" could as easily import Asian brides as unskilled Mexican laborers.

What We Walked Away From

     I was going to take today off – I built “customer-assembled furniture” yesterday – but when I encountered the following, I knew I’d have to write about it:

     Imagine how your life as a woman could be without the influence of feminism -
     You grow up with married parents. They stay together through thick and thin and work to keep their marriage harmonious because divorce was never an option.
     You have a big tight-knit family with several brothers and sisters.
     Your mother and grandmother teach you how to be a great homemaker, and you get married in your late teens or early 20s. You never have to waste any time in college or go into debt for a useless degree.
     Your parents and extended family helped you find a great husband who provides for you and your children. Your marriage also lasts a lifetime and divorce is never on the table.
     You're head-over-heels in love with your husband because you never became jaded by going through a string of romances and heartbreaks before you met him. Your parents taught you to date with purpose and find someone who was compatible by asking the right questions before getting emotionally attached, and taught you to save sex for marriage so you never got used by men who didn't want to marry you.
     All the women in your family are also housewives and the older women visit you often and help you with your children and housework, so you're never overwhelmed with motherhood when your children are young.
     All the women in your neighborhood are housewives too, so you're friends with many of the women in your neighborhood and get together with their families often.
     None of the kids in your family ever step foot in a daycare center or public school. You have an unbreakable bond with your parents, grandparents, and children.
     No one in your family ever steps foot in a nursing home because everyone is taken care of by family in their older years.

     Please think about it for a minute or two. Then come back here.

* * *

     The sexual revolution was the only one known to history in which everyone lost.

     Time was, I thought it contained a healthful element: a liberation of sorts. Even today, I’m unable to disavow that idea completely. But it went badly wrong. Our posterity had better study it and learn from it.

     It wasn’t just one thing, either. There were a lot of flaws in the ideas of the Sixties and early Seventies. They flowed together and became a huge wave that’s crashed down upon us. What we styled “liberation” became the casting-off of all restraint, including the restraints of humility and good sense. They were slowed by the AIDS panic of the late Seventies and Eighties, but when it became clear that AIDS was pretty much a disease of homosexuals and intravenous drug users, they came roaring back at full speed.

     We ruined ourselves for one another. We became untrustworthy, calculators and sensualists with little regard for what our forebears had learned from theirs. What better things we had within us, we cast out as impediments to the pursuit of pleasure.

     We ruined ourselves. Then we went on to ruin our children.

     I’m glad you can’t see me just now.

* * *

     Strange things have come about because of our heedlessness and crudity. I could go into gruesome details, but I’m not up to that this morning. Consider yourself spared a litany of a sort you’ve seen from me before. (Feel free to thank the customer-assembled furniture I spent yesterday assembling.) But I will mention one thing that’s become unpleasantly obvious, to me at least.

     Very young women on social media are actively pursuing much older men. That includes men in their sixties and seventies. Men who are firmly married. Yes, men like me.

     This was almost unknown two or three decades ago. It’s not completely unprecedented – there have always been fortune hunters among both sexes – but they were both uncommon and disdained. To compound the ironies, these young women seem largely uninterested in money or status. They want old men because… drum roll, please… we’re old!

     No doubt some of my coevals preen themselves over this new phenomenon. Some probably exploit those young women as shamelessly as any young rake. But when the face in the mirror looks like something that sleeps under a bridge and the body beneath it makes the numbers on the bathroom scale spin like the wheels of a slot machine, complete with jackpot bells, you can’t kid yourself.

     So why? What makes us their preferred targets?

* * *

     There’s a known, well understood tendency among older men to idealize “the good old days.” For most of us, what we’re lamenting is our lost youth and what it enabled us to do. But some of today’s laments have another genesis. They’re for times when things were simpler, when we could believe that we had some grasp of “how things work.” And while that, too, might be an idealization, it’s surely something men of all ages would value.

     The typical man of middle to late years can’t fool himself that he knows “how things work.” He’s had all such pretensions beaten out of him. (That process kills some, embitters others, and turns still others into curmudgeons.) In particular, he’s aware that he doesn’t grasp contemporary relations between the sexes. But just four or five decades ago…

     Never mind. I know how tiresome this sort of thing can get. Besides, I have some sprucing-up to do. I have a lunch date! It’s a young woman who just moved to Long Island. She wants to talk to me about what life was like in the Sixties. It’s as good a reason to get out of the house as any, don’t you think?

     Have a nice day.

A Sulvan Future

     The sex doll is now the sex robot:

The end of problems

In a few years, everyone will be single! pic.twitter.com/FaFFmEg415

— Fun Viral Vids 😊 (@Fun_Viral_Vids) November 24, 2025

     ...and Mankind is in grave danger.

---

     My regular Gentle Readers already know about my little quirks, so the following is for the newcomers in the audience: I’m a white Catholic libertarian-conservative with traditional views on such matters as love, marriage, fidelity, and reproduction. Having read that, it’s likely that those newcomers are thinking they know what’s coming. My regular Gentle Readers know better.

     There’s a crisis of sorts in progress. It goes by many names. Its central filament is an unprecedented level of distrust, and no small amount of hostility, between men and women. Distrust and hostility are seldom good things, but these instances threaten human survival.

     Unless you’ve spent the last three decades in a drug-induced coma – if you did, check your savings account before reading onward; priorities, don’t y’know – you’re aware that there’s been a sharp decline in reproduction rates in the U.S. and other industrialized nations. Americans aren’t producing children rapidly enough to sustain our population numbers. Other First World nations are doing even worse that way, but my attention is on the U.S.

     Until recently, there was only one way to produce a human baby: a human spermatozoön had to get cozy with a human ovum and produce a viable human zygote. That procedure required a man to have conventional sexual intercourse with a woman. But today we have sperm and ovum banks, such that sperm and ova can be introduced to one another at “mixers” in test tubes. The resulting zygote can then be implanted into a woman’s womb for further maturation.

     While it hasn’t happened yet, researchers are attempting to clone a human, possibly after some genetic manipulation. That abomination threatens to reduce children to products, something one can order from a “vendor,” perhaps with specifications for the desired “item.” It might serve to keep population numbers up, but it would assuredly destroy the nuclear family, one of the pillars of civilized society.

     But let’s leave those considerations aside. The following passage, which I’ve used more than once before, comes from C. S. Lewis’s masterpiece That Hideous Strength:

“Who is called Sulva? What road does she walk? Why is the womb barren on one side? Where are the cold marriages?”

Ransom replied, “Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is turned toward us and shares our curse. Her other half looks to Deep Heaven; happy would be he who could cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side. On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”

     Did God grant Lewis a glimpse of one possible future – perhaps the one toward which we’re headed?

---

     The video at the start of this piece tells us of a development that seemingly cannot be headed off. The emphasis recent decades have placed on sexual sensation and “satisfaction” has helped to power the production of many pleasure-enhancing devices. Sometimes such devices are mockingly advertised as “marital aids.” What role they have in “aiding” a marriage, I cannot imagine.

     Those “marital aids” are entirely focused on pleasure. They have no relation to marital bonding, unless – I must allow for the possibility – that a really good orgasm can make one fall in love with its “provider.” But how often is a second person involved with the use of such devices? I could be wrong, but I don’t think the answer is “very often” or “most of the time.”

     The sex robot is the “marital aid” completed and matured:

• It can produce the sensations that lead to orgasm;
• It’s housed in an attractive humaniform body;
• It’s equipped with an artificial-intelligence module that mimics the behavior of a willing sex partner.

     I doubt that AI module is equipped with a behavioral pathway that would allow the robot to refuse sex to its owner. Once again, I could be wrong, but if I were, what would the point of the robot be?

     Such robots, regardless of their target market, reduce the probability that their owner will seek a human sex partner. Need I spell out the consequences for reproduction?

     Given the no-man’s-land that dating and mating have become, I predict that once those robots come down a bit in price, they’ll prove very popular. Demand will outstrip supply immediately.

---

     I’m not an idiot. I know that the sex robot is a response to conditions that predated the possibility of such a thing. I also know that the great majority of us don’t decide to have children “for the future of the country.” Finally, I know that exhorting people to have (more) kids for the sake of the future is the worst imaginable way to go about encouraging reproduction. I’m really just shaking my head and wondering if this is a sign that the Last Days are upon us.

     I think I’ll schedule a talk with my pastor. As for you, Gentle Reader: have a nice day.

     And pray.

The Foundation Is Gone

     “Politics is downstream from culture.” – Andrew Breitbart

     A few years ago, I wrote a pair of essays on the deterioration of male-female relations and its most important secondary effect: the declines in marriage and marital stability. Here are the links:

• The Crumbling Cornerstone
• The Crumbling Cornerstone Part 2: Mental Avoidances

     I’ve written other pieces on the subject, of course, but I regard those two as the warning siren that – if I had anything like a wide readership – “should” have alerted Americans to the future they faced. Well, that future has arrived, and its implications for further deterioration are even uglier:

     Fewer U.S. adults now than in past years believe it is "very important" for couples who have children together to be married. Currently, 29% say it is very important that such a couple legally marry, down from 38% who held this view in 2013 and 49% in 2006.

     Another 31% of U.S. adults currently say it is "somewhat important" for couples with children to be married, bringing the total to 60% who consider it important to some degree. Meanwhile, four in 10 say it is not too (18%) or not at all (22%) important.

     In 2006, Americans were more than twice as likely to say it is very important (49%) for couples with children to wed as to say it is not important (23%).

     The latest results are based on Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 1-13. The poll updated several trends on Americans' views about marriage asked previously over the past two decades.

     The above statistics capture a trend away from marriage and family formation that couldn’t be clearer if it were sky-written in blacker-than-black thousand-point type.

     The easiest thing in the world is to predict that a trend in progress will continue. You’ll eventually be wrong, of course (“Trees do not grow to the sky.” – Baron Philippe de Rothschild) but averaged over time, you’ll be right more often than not. Therefore I predict, with fair confidence, that the trend away from marriage and family formation will continue.

     If this trend continues much further, it heralds the end of Christian-Enlightenment civilization.

---

“But it's alright, it's alright
For we lived so well so long.
Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on,
I wonder what's gone wrong...
I can't help but wonder what’s gone wrong.”

[Paul Simon]

     The political morass of our era consumes a great deal of popular attention. (Yes, mine too.) It makes me wonder how many people are familiar with the Breitbart quote at the top of the previous segment...and how many of them actually believe it.

     Among the things that most strongly shape our culture is our attitude toward the future. Do we care about the future? How far forward do our cares extend? Why? What predisposes a man to care about the years that will follow his departure from this veil of tears?

     The answers are not hard to find. Our concern for what might follow our deaths arises from those things we hope to survive us:

• Our progeny,
• Our businesses,
• Our reputations.

     Let’s leave businesses and reputations to the side for now. He who has children is most likely to be concerned with the future. (Yes, that assumes that he loves his children.) He who has seen his children become adults and produce children of their own has doubled reasons. But he who has not produced offspring has a nearer horizon for his decision-making. All other things being equal, he will care less about what will follow his death than the man with progeny.

     Marriage has been the traditional method for protecting the well-being of fertile women and the children they have borne. No other method known to Mankind has worked nearly as well at safeguarding those interests. But any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch will be aware that marriages in our time are more fragile, are shorter on average, and tend to produce fewer children than the marriages of previous generations of Americans. Combine those trends with the suspicions and animosities that bedevil relations between the sexes. What does the combination say about our interest in our future?

     Need I say explicitly that a people unconcerned with the future are unlikely to build a stable society, nor to preserve and nurture the social supports bequeathed them by their forebears? Perhaps not, but as is my wont I’ve done so anyway.

     Without a preponderance of stable families that produce and cherish children, Christian-Enlightenment society – especially its highest expression, the United States of America – cannot long endure. It will lack the foundation it needs to sustain it.

---

     “Ve get too soon old und too late schmart.” – Old World maxim

     Rather than flog this beast all the way to the glue factory, I’ll close with an observation from about forty years back. It’s a semi-hopeful observation, which might presage the end of the destructive anti-marital, anti-natal trends. However, it would be foolish to presume that it means anything more than what it’s meant to my Long Island neighborhood: i.e., a reduction in the traffic on Friday and Saturday nights.

     There was a developer who’d received approval for a multi-family compound on a nearby plot of land. He was licking his chops over his prospects, for he had noted the trends toward ever more single people living alone, along with ever smaller families. So he planned for an apartment complex that was heavy with one-bedroom units: the sort of pad that would appeal to bachelors, bachelorettes, and the divorced. After all, if they were “the future” – and given the trends, he had good reason to think so – then marketing to them was the smartest course. At the time Long Island didn’t have much convenient housing for singles, so he’d be tapping an underserved market.

     Sounds like good market analysis, doesn’t it? It certainly did at the time. Working from that vision, the developer produced a 200-apartment complex that was heavily weighted toward small units. It quickly attracted exactly the sort of tenant he sought. It also acquired a moniker: Sin City. (I have no idea whether he was aware of that, nor if he was, whether he cared.)

     That apartment complex is almost empty today. I believe the company that operates it has gone into receivership. I can’t say why of my own knowledge. Certainly such an enterprise is subject to many influences, currents, and vicissitudes. Regardless, the original flood of tenants has left and has not been replaced by tenants like them. Why not?

     Time passes. Things change. People’s desires change. Some regret their earlier ways and strive to change them. Then there’s technology to consider, and its response to the changes in human desires. One advancing technology is making it possible for women to have healthy children safely at a later age than ever before in history...and an increasing number of women are discovering, much to their own surprise and chagrin, that marriage, a stable home, and a husband and children to love are the things they really want and should have pursued from the outset.

     Naturally, the radical feminists eager to keep “the war between the sexes” hot and bloody condemn this development. Could they counteract it and keep the anti-marriage, anti-natal trends “healthy?” It remains to be seen. But at least the evidence is not wholly in their favor.

     That’s it for me for today. Enjoy your Sunday.

A Necessary Condition For An Enduring Romance

     Normally I complete my morning “news sweep” before I light off on an essay for Liberty’s Torch. That sweep covers some fifty-three news and opinion sites. I undertake it twice daily – early morning and late afternoon – as the necessary groundwork for intelligent op-ed writing. But this morning, InstaPundit, a site which sits smack in the middle of my sweep, provides a citation I simply have to blather about:

     Did you hear that at the back, ladies? Laurence Fox – who you perhaps only knew as Billie Piper’s ex-husband because you’ve never seen Lewis (what?) – does not date "woke" women who he believes are being taught that they are "victims", irrespective of whether they are right or not. He thinks that it’s "institutionally racist" to tell the story of the First World War in a racially diverse way, irrespective of the fact that Sikh soldiers absolutely fought for Britain. And he also doesn’t believe in white privilege, irrespective of the fact that he works in a painfully undiverse industry, was privately educated and comes from a wealthy acting family which is nothing short of a dynasty.

     Fox is denying racism and sexism, irrespective of whether or not they exist. It’s nothing short of gaslighting. It’s all very Donald Trump. And as you would expect, the whole debacle has lit a fire under anti-woke poster boy Piers Morgan while gaining Fox thousands of extra Twitter followers.

     I could go over all the things he’s said; I could use data to prove how wrong he is; I could express concern for his mental health (after all, who really enjoys arguing on Twitter?); I could make jokes about his behaviour. But all of that would be to seriously miss the point.

     Got that, Gentle Reader? The writer, “Vicky Spratt,” wants you to know that Laurence Fox is a very minor presence in the acting world, but simultaneously that he comes from “a wealthy acting family.” If op-ed writers were prone to whiplash, “Miss Spratt” would be in a neck brace about now. But that, of course, is merely “pre-defamation,” for Fox’s sin is to disdain the same women as would any sensible man in the Right.

     From the relentless shrieking of her article, “Miss Spratt” is replete with hard-left and gender-war-feminist opinions, which comes as no surprise for “Refinery29.” (It also puts the odds that she’s replete with testosterone and Y chromosomes at six-five and pick ‘em, but that’s a subject to be explored only after a lot of Willamette Valley Vineyards’ “Whole Cluster” Pinot Noir, so it’s too early in the AM for that particular contretemps.) Her entire mission appears to be to condemn Laurence Fox, and any men who see the minefield of contemporary romance by the same light, as reactionary Neanderthals in need of compulsory re-education.

     I haven’t felt such visceral satisfaction over a left-winger’s published tantrum since Jonathan Chait’s famous tirade about how and why he hated George W. Bush.

---

     Allow me to say something that “should” be “obvious” in a large font:

If you and your beloved don’t have the same fundamental values, you’re not going to make it long-term.

     Sometimes that essential commonality isn’t apparent up front. It can take time to determine whether important attitudinal differences stand between two persons drawn toward one another for more superficial reasons. While men tend to be drawn to women’s looks first, he who settles for a pretty face and a shapely body is unlikely to get what he wants...unless, of course, what he wants is just a roll in the hay or a bit of “arm candy.” Similarly, while women are drawn to indicators of status first, she who settles for wealth or prestige is equally unlikely to get what she wants in the long term. (Her case is even worse, as wealth and prestige can be convincingly simulated for an appallingly long time.)

     Let’s take a simple but critical conviction that has sundered many a marriage: children and who shall be responsible for their principal nurturance. Traditionally, marriage has been about the protection of pregnant women and minor children: persons vulnerable to male caprice. (Gentle Readers with an interest in etymology should look up the roots of the word caprice. It’s got nothing to do with Frank Capra.) Indeed, these days a lot of couples eschew marriage because they have no plans to reproduce. However, if he wants kids and believes that she should have the principal responsibility for them – i.e., that his wife shall be a mother and homemaker above all else – he’d better not involve himself with a “liberated” woman indifferent to children who wants a career climbing the corporate pyramid.

     The “woke” female of today is almost always exactly that sort of “liberated” woman. Moreover, she tends to see relations with the stronger sex as problematic at best, a contest for dominance between the sexes in which she is determined to be the victor. (She might phrase it differently – e.g., “I’m unwilling to be submissive” – but this is usually an evasion.) What man of traditional values would want to partner with such a woman? And if an enduring partnership with one such is off the table, what would be the point of dating one?

     Laurence Fox’s values are his own. (As one’s values are personal, discussions of whether such values are in some way offensive, or dismissive of “female strengths,” are inherently fatuous.) If “Miss Spratt” dislikes them, she’s free to spout her own, as she has done. But she’s not going to invalidate Fox’s convictions; indeed, she might have given him a “leg up” in the mating dance with her diatribe.

---

     As “woke” women have become ever shriller and more combative, men have become ever more tentative in their dealings with women generally. Combine this with the legal hazards that attend contemporary marriage and childbearing, and it becomes inarguable that contemporary feminism, in concert with contemporary left-wing political machinations, are the greatest enemies to romance that young men have ever faced. Even if she seems normal and sane at the outset, you cannot know beforehand whether she’ll someday flip her wig. Much will depend upon the company she keeps, and of course upon whether she was sincere in her original profession of values and priorities.

     Don’t kid yourself, gentlemen: over the years you’re together, she could change in critical ways, not just in her appearance. (If you’ve bound yourself to her entirely for her looks, you’re a benighted fool who deserves what he will surely get.) It’s vital that she be sufficiently stable not to disavow her values over time...and influences that can induce such disavowals are everywhere today. Moreover, as she changes, you must continue to love her in the active sense. You must provide for her and protect her, as is your genetically ingrained responsibility, but you must also do what you can to support her in the trials the passage of time will inflict upon her, which are more severe than those it inflicts upon men.

     What’s that you say? Where are my prescriptions for romantically inclined women? Sorry, I don’t do the distaff side. Perhaps one of my Esteemed Co-Conspirators will ring in with it later today. (Hint, hint, Linda!)

What Men Need To Be

     There are subjects about which I shouldn’t write. Not because I have nothing to say about them, mind you, but because even thinking about them raises my blood pressure close to the catastrophic failure level. Worse, those subjects have been multiplying at an alarming rate. It suggests that fairly soon I’ll be reduced to doing my frothing at the mouth in total silence.

     Whether for good or for ill, my Gentle Readers send me links to all manner of articles, including articles on subjects of the variety mentioned above. (No, I’m not about to ask them to stop.) So regardless of my cardiologist’s recommendations, I daily confront examples of irrationality and viciousness that light my boilers and get steam pouring out of my ears. And before you ask: Yes, I have one before me this morning:

     Women are challenging incumbents up and down the ballot, banding together to demand action on gun violence, going undercover to fight misinformation online, pushing for consequences for perpetrators of sexual assault, organizing against laws restricting access to reproductive care.

     And every so often, we stop to look for the men in the room. We scroll through our Twitter feeds, our group text threads, our email chains. We look for the ones who chimed in, took a stand, organized their workplaces or their communities.

     Too often, we’re left craning our necks. We have male allies in Congress and in our workplaces and at home who’ve made important contributions to the fight for gender equity, to be sure. But we have many, many more men on the sidelines.

     If you’re a conservative – of either sex – the above ought to incense you. At the very least it should have you repressing some very naughty language. As Dad was a Navy man, I assure you that I’d be right there alongside you.

     “Action on gun violence.” Excuse me? Don’t we already have laws against assault with a deadly weapon? Or do you have it in mind to take our guns from us?

     “Perpetrators of sexual assault.” Got anyone in mind? Bill Clinton, perhaps? Maybe Joseph Biden? Or is this an attempt to refuel the “#MeToo” wagon that’s making men shy away from women in more and more venues?

     “Misinformation online.” From what sources? The New York Times’s recent attempts to persuade us that the duly elected President of these United States is actually a Russian agent? Or its more recent initiative to persuade us that America’s founding principle has always been slavery? Or are we talking about “progressives’” drive to censor Americans who disagree with them?

     And what’s this about “restricting access to reproductive care” – ? Is your concern about the expense of in vitro fertilization services? Do you have even one example of a pregnant woman being denied gynecological or obstetrical services? Or is this another veiled attempt to conflate “reproductive care” with abortion?

     If the authoress of the article is hoping for male allies for those “causes,” I wouldn’t advise her to hold her breath while she waits.

---

     It’s been said that we all get more conservative as we get older. That pattern isn’t without exceptions. I’ve known a couple of people who got more left-inclined over time. I haven’t seen one of them in some years, but I’m still in touch with the other, so the “aging makes you grow more conservative” rule does have exceptions.

     What aging does seem to do to each of us, quite reliably, is to reduce our tolerance for bullshit. Life’s too short always to be mucking out one’s mental stable. That includes feminist bullshit. I’ve certainly had enough of it, and I know I’m not alone in that regard.

     This Reshma Saujani appears not to be in touch with the trends: specifically, what she and her feminist allies have done to drive American men away from women. For that is the direction in which American men have been moving for nearly twenty years. Let’s list some of the causative influences:

• Employment law’s preferential treatment for women;
• The “guilty until proven innocent” standard on women’s allegations of male sexual misconduct;
• The destabilization of marriage through “no-fault” divorces;
• The destruction of fathers’ rights under modern family law;
• The pauperization of divorced men through specious “child support” provisions;
• Women’s increasing disdain for families and children, including their own;
• The feminization of education, from grade school through university education.

     Those are just the ones that come to mind at this early hour. There are others.

     While all that’s been going on, with the entirely understandable consequence that American men are retreating from engagement with women, women have come to exhibit many of the maladies that were once regarded as “men’s problems:”

• Drinking to excess;
• Shortness of temper;
• Constant fatigue and mental lapses;
• Slovenliness, vulgarity and foul speech;
• A tendency to lash out at family members;
• And of course, constant complaints about being unappreciated.

     Could there be any better evidence that the supposed gains women have made since the advent of post-war feminism have actually been losses – for all of us?

     Yet women are still demanding more privileges – free birth control, free abortions, special workplace accommodations, seat quotas in corporate management, et cetera – and whining about not having any “male allies.”

     If Miss Saujani expects men with any significant amount of self-respect to sign onto that, she’s seriously deluded. Yet her article appears in Fortune, a place I’d not have expected to see such nonsense. Nor is it her first publication there.

     Better do your ally-prospecting among the soyboys and beta cucks, Reshma baby; you won’t get much action from genuine men.

---

     As I’m feeling even more exercised at the moment than I was when I first set my fingers to the keys, allow me a brief personal statement.

     As the song goes, there’ve been some women in my life. You could say I’ve known my share. Most of them have been decent sorts, even those who parted company with me on unfriendly terms. But the emergence of aggressively demanding, “entitled” women, including a growing number who openly proclaim men to be “the enemy,” has made it harder for me to trust any woman. They don’t show the telltales quickly enough for me to award the classical “benefit of the doubt.” So I tend to avoid them in just about all venues and all circumstances: socially, occupationally, at my parish, and in my neighborhood.

     My attitude is hardly unique. I’ve known just as many men as women. Ever more of them are taking a noli me tangere attitude toward the “fairer sex.” It’s safer that way, even if can make one’s nights a bit lonely.

     When I met the woman who is now my wife, I was on the verge of vowing to stay away from women for good. And there have been moments since then when I’ve wondered if it might have been the best course even so.

     To any American women who have suffered through this diatribe: It’s time to choose. You can be an “entitled” harridan enlisted in the war on men, or you can be a decent person who takes us as we are and asks nothing more. Men are not going to award their love, their respect, or their fellowship to the former sort of female, no matter how good she looks in a bikini. We’re certainly not going to ally ourselves with your anti-male “causes.”

     Consider yourselves warned.

Quickies: Sexbots, Again

     Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to developments in robotics and artificial intelligence. Maybe there’s more going on there than I’m aware. But I doubt that whatever it is, it’s sufficient to justify a tirade of these dimensions:

     Porn and sex have always driven technological development....The development of sexbots’ capability and quantity has leapt forward in the last five years, and is expected to grow exponentially in the next five.

     Manufacturers are talking with oil companies, as a boatload of sexbots can relieve the stress of workers isolated on all-male oil-rigs for months at a time. Manufacturers would also like to see sexbots in prisons, to reduce rapes and tension between inmates. The most popular market for the Samantha bot is truck drivers. Apparently, they enjoy her conversation on those long, lonely drives as much as they appreciate her availability on those equally long and lonely nights.

     Even with the rather crude models that are available today, there is a market for sexbots. There are already all-robot brothels in Italy, France, Japan, Britain and other countries. One academic study predicts that by 2050, Amsterdam’s infamous Red Light District will be staffed entirely by sexbots free of infectious diseases, and not by sex slaves smuggled in from Eastern Europe and Asia. Experts say these specialized robots will start to appear in ordinary homes in the next decade, as lonely humans look for love.

     There are underlying trends of greater importance than the rise of the sexbot, because they power the accelerating popularity of the sexbot:

• The increasing hostility and distrust between the sexes;
• The burgeoning obsession with “youth;”
• The legal and social assaults on marriage;
• The ever increasing cost of childbearing and child-rearing;
• The political and social intrusions into the family;

     …among others. He who fears that the sexbot will damn and doom our species would do better to direct his efforts against those things. Men – I speak with authority here – want actual, loving, supportive women, not sexbots. (We also want companionship, children, and communities.) We only recur to artificial substitutes when the real thing is unavailable, unreliable, or untrustworthy.

     I could be wrong; it happens now and then. But I can’t see us arriving at a Cherry 2000 future unless we allow the diseases of our present to go unaddressed long enough to become incurable.

The Deadliest Poison, 2018 Edition

     “A lie will go halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.” – Originator unknown.

     “Faster than a nasty rumor” – one of my favorite comparisons.

     It was only a few days ago that I wrote this:

     I got a particularly vicious laugh out of this piece. After haranguing us for decades that men are predators, that women don’t make false accusations about sexual assault, that even sex consented to at the time is rape if she regrets it afterward, et cetera ad nauseam infinitam, women are discovering the secondary consequences: that men no longer trust them. Quite a lot of men have institutionalized that distrust. Wall Street executives, sensing the rich possibilities for false claims against them, have adopted a “never be alone with an unchaperoned woman” attitude. No one is laughing at Mike Pence now.

     But it was obvious from the start that that would follow! What man in his right mind would leave himself open to attack by the less ethical and more vicious female sex? And of course, the more he has to lose, the more likely it is that he’ll understand the importance of taking precautions, so America’s “top catches” are insisting upon indisputable pre-recorded consent.

     A decade or two ago, men determined not to be mulcted for babies not of their seed started requesting certificates attesting to having been vasectomized. Anyone with three functioning brain cells should have expected further deteriorations in the degree of trust between the sexes. And here they are.

     That piece concisely expresses my attitude toward those who deplore the trend it describes as somehow “men’s fault.” An old supervisor from my salaried days predicted it in all its details. He sketched out the double-bind in which “always believe the woman” pseudo-jurisprudence would leave men: vulnerable to charges of harassment and assault if we interact with women; vulnerable to charges of discrimination and exclusion if we don’t. The latter course is the one most men in white-collar situations deem the less hazardous. As it happens, a few people still need to be laughed at:

     I read in Bloomberg News the latest in what is now a series of articles detailing all of the absurd strategies men are using, ostensibly to protect themselves from accusations of harassment or assault in the #MeToo era.

     Some steps seem calculated to protect from false accusations, such as “the man in infrastructure investing [who] said he won’t meet with female employees in rooms without windows anymore.” Other steps, such as “no business dinner with a woman 35 or younger,” seem to reflect men’s distrust of their own ability to do something pretty simple: share a meal with a young woman without harassing her. In all cases, these self-instituted rules are deeply gendered, suggesting that the men suspect women are likely to fabricate harassment or assault allegations, and implying that the men do trust themselves not to sexually harass other men. Neither reflects well on them.

     It is maddening to watch adult men respond to revelations of endemic sexual harassment in the workplace by instituting a series of ludicrous personal codes, rather than by learning the relatively straightforward lesson on offer: Don’t sexually assault or harass anyone.

     To my great surprise, the author of that article, Tahir Duckett, is a young black man. Well, he’s allowed to take what chances he likes with his own career and reputation, but in the virulent “#MeToo” era, to call other men who might have more to lose “childish” and “cowardly” strikes me as supremely arrogant. Though I must admit, there are other possible explanations:

• He’s a homosexual and senses no risk to himself;
• He’s trying to impress the women around him;
• He’s simply stupid.

     Arrogant; homosexual; on the make; stupid: take your pick. Any of those four explanations will suffice to encompass Duckett’s inability to grasp the real threat the “#MeToo” era poses to men: the power of the lie when granted the presumption of validity.

---

     There’s a war on. Indeed, there’s more than one. The one of interest to me today is the war feminists and their allies are waging against men.

     Men, in the feminist theology of today, are inherently the enemies of women. The feminist does not desire that women see men as individuals, for that would blunt their chief thrust. No, men as a class must be regarded as predatory and exploitative. A man with the opportunity to commit sexual assault should be regarded as one who would do so if he thought he would get away with it. In the men-as-enemies view, that is sufficient justification for an accusation of sexual assault even if nothing of the sort has occurred.

     Wait, what? How can that be a justification for a false accusation? Quite simply: There’s a war on. Men are the enemy and always have been. Even a man who has committed no offense is part of the oppressive “patriarchy” that stands in the way of women getting what they’re due. Therefore any blow struck against a man is a blow in the war, and is justified by the exigencies of war. As we mathematical types like to say, quod erat demonstrandum.

     A cultural presumption that when a woman lodges an accusation against the man, the man is therefore guilty, is an unstoppable superweapon in women’s hands. Men are defenseless against it. Indeed, even impossibility is no defense, unless he has video-recorded every instant of his life. Consider the slander by which Christine Blasey Ford attempted to torpedo the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. Consider that even though she could produce absolutely no evidence that he had ever so much as touched her, and had no corroborating witnesses willing to confirm her accusation or supply the circumstantial details she claimed to lack, millions claimed (and still claim) to believe her.

     Christine Blasey Ford is either deluded or lying. She appears competent enough to support herself and to cross the country unaccompanied for her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, so the presumption must be that she’s lying...yet millions claim to believe her.

     Tahir Duckett should shove that up his ass and sit on it awhile.

---

     Nothing is more deadly, whether to individuals or to a society, than a lie accepted without question. Lies have always been the favorite weapons of evil men – and so much more so with evil women. There’s certainly enough fiction on the subject. Start with To Kill A Mockingbird. Or if you prefer real life incidents, consider the case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men who narrowly escaped execution for a gang rape they didn’t commit, and go on from there to the more recent case of Tawana Brawley.

     There’s an important quote from a historical figure most American youths never encounter, no matter how extensive their educations:

     “Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.” – Martin Latsis, deputy chief of the Ukrainian Tcheka during the primacy of V. I. Lenin over the U.S.S.R.

     Evidence was unimportant to Martin Latsis. What concerned him was class: whether the accused was part of a demographic or an occupation believed to be “counter-revolutionary.” Such persons were guilty simply because they existed. Any accusation, however farfetched, would suffice to condemn them. Latsis would approve their execution without a qualm. Compare this orientation to the “Always Believe The Woman” attitude of feminists in the “#MeToo” era.

     There’s no need to beat this any further. Either you get it, hate it, and will oppose it with all your powers regardless of the possible consequences, or you’re a misandrist feminist (or one of their political allies) and had better keep your hands where I can see them.

On Making The Best Of Things...Including Yourself

     [It’s become clear that creating an insuperable condition of distrust and hostility between the sexes is a principal objective of gender-war feminism. At one time I thought the disease had reached its peak and would thereafter recede. Given recent events, I am no longer of that opinion. The following piece first appeared at Liberty’s Torch on September 22, 2013. -- FWP]

---

     I'm as anti-authoritarian about relations between the sexes, and the positions of the sexes in society, as I am about everything else. I accept no "thou shalts" or "thou shalt nots" from any authority but God. I insist on reasoning everything out -- but with a caveat: Practical Reason, as C. S. Lewis put it, must begin with the laws of Nature and make proper use of the available evidence. More, its conclusions must be put to the test and survive their practical applications.

     Much of the strife and malaise that afflicts American society derives from the willful dismissal of those provisos by feminist activists who want to resculpt relations between the sexes according to a wholly artificial vision that conflicts sharply and irremediably with metaphysical reality -- that is, with what Nature has given us.

     Those activists have put incredible effort into persuading Americans in particular:

• That traditional family structures somehow oppress women;
• That men who subscribe to those structures are authoritarian brutes;
• That women can take up men's traditional roles to their advantage;
• That men can and should be compelled to subordinate themselves to women's preferences;
• That a woman who prefers a traditional marriage and marital role is a "gender traitor."

     If you're unacquainted with that system of thought, and have never been subjected to a haranguing from that perspective, welcome to our planet! We hope for friendly and peaceful relations with your planet, too. But I digress. The nadir of this lunacy was provided by Simone de Beauvoir:

     "No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." -- Interview with Simone de Beauvoir, "Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma," Saturday Review, June 14, 1975, p.18

     Hm. So "oppressed women" are not to choose freely what life path to adopt, because too many would choose the "wrong one?" That doesn't sound like liberation to me; it sounds like a change of oppressors -- and not from a harsh master to a gentle one.

---

     De Beauvoir is not alone in her inanities. There are contemporary feminists who tout the same line of nonsense. Hearken to feminist evangelist Linda Hirshman:

     Half the wealthiest, most-privileged, best-educated females in the country stay home with their babies rather than work in the market economy. When in September The New York Times featured an article exploring a piece of this story, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” the blogosphere went ballistic, countering with anecdotes and sarcasm. Slate’s Jack Shafer accused the Times of “weasel-words” and of publishing the same story -- essentially, “The Opt-Out Revolution” -- every few years, and, recently, every few weeks. (A month after the flap, the Times’ only female columnist, Maureen Dowd, invoked the elite-college article in her contribution to the Times’ running soap, “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?” about how women must forgo feminism even to get laid.) The colleges article provoked such fury that the Times had to post an explanation of the then–student journalist’s methodology on its Web site.

     There’s only one problem: There is important truth in the dropout story. Even though it appeared in The New York Times. ...

     The census numbers for all working mothers leveled off around 1990 and have fallen modestly since 1998. In interviews, women with enough money to quit work say they are “choosing” to opt out. Their words conceal a crucial reality: the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace feminism. Add to this the good evidence that the upper-class workplace has become more demanding and then mix in the successful conservative cultural campaign to reinforce traditional gender roles and you’ve got a perfect recipe for feminism’s stall....

     What better sample, I thought, than the brilliantly educated and accomplished brides of the “Sunday Styles,” circa 1996? At marriage, they included a vice president of client communication, a gastroenterologist, a lawyer, an editor, and a marketing executive. In 2003 and 2004, I tracked them down and called them. I interviewed about 80 percent of the 41 women who announced their weddings over three Sundays in 1996. Around 40 years old, college graduates with careers: Who was more likely than they to be reaping feminism’s promise of opportunity? Imagine my shock when I found almost all the brides from the first Sunday at home with their children. Statistical anomaly? Nope. Same result for the next Sunday. And the one after that.

     Ninety percent of the brides I found had had babies. Of the 30 with babies, five were still working full time. Twenty-five, or 85 percent, were not working full time. Of those not working full time, 10 were working part time but often a long way from their prior career paths. And half the married women with children were not working at all.

     And there is more. In 2000, Harvard Business School professor Myra Hart surveyed the women of the classes of 1981, 1986, and 1991 and found that only 38 percent of female Harvard MBAs were working full time. A 2004 survey by the Center for Work-Life Policy of 2,443 women with a graduate degree or very prestigious bachelor’s degree revealed that 43 percent of those women with children had taken a time out, primarily for family reasons. Richard Posner, federal appeals-court judge and occasional University of Chicago adjunct professor, reports that “the [Times] article confirms -- what everyone associated with such institutions [elite law schools] has long known: that a vastly higher percentage of female than of male students will drop out of the workforce to take care of their children.”

     How many anecdotes to become data? The 2000 census showed a decline in the percentage of mothers of infants working full time, part time, or seeking employment. Starting at 31 percent in 1976, the percentage had gone up almost every year to 1992, hit a high of 58.7 percent in 1998, and then began to drop -- to 55.2 percent in 2000, to 54.6 percent in 2002, to 53.7 percent in 2003. Statistics just released showed further decline to 52.9 percent in 2004. Even the percentage of working mothers with children who were not infants declined between 2000 and 2003, from 62.8 percent to 59.8 percent.

     No, you're not imagining the tone of disapproval in the above. Miss Hirshman definitely takes the Simone de Beauvoir attitude toward free choice: women who choose to be homemakers and mothers are choosing wrongly. By their free choices -- by opting for traditional women's roles rather than some alternative in the market economy -- they're helping to derail feminism. And the advance of feminism, we must remember, is what really counts, not the happiness of women or the well-being of their children.

     Hirshman considers McElroy / Sommers feminism -- choice feminism -- to be a wrong turning:

     Conservatives contend that the dropouts prove that feminism “failed” because it was too radical, because women didn’t want what feminism had to offer. In fact, if half or more of feminism’s heirs (85 percent of the women in my Times sample), are not working seriously, it’s because feminism wasn’t radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn’t change men, and, more importantly, it didn’t fundamentally change how women related to men.

     This is without foundation, but let's proceed to Hirshman's prescription for curing this terrible malady of women opting for homemaker-motherhood over careerism:

     Women who want to have sex and children with men as well as good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power need guidance, and they need it early. Step one is simply to begin talking about flourishing. In so doing, feminism will be returning to its early, judgmental roots. This may anger some, but it should sound the alarm before the next generation winds up in the same situation. Next, feminists will have to start offering young women not choices and not utopian dreams but solutions they can enact on their own. Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy. It will require rules -- rules like those in the widely derided book The Rules, which was never about dating but about behavior modification.

     There are three rules: Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.

     Clearly, Hirshman doesn't think homemaking and motherhood qualify as "good work" that deserves to be taken seriously. By "unequal resources" she must mean unequal earning power, since young marrieds almost always go to the altar with equal resources-in-hand: approximately $0.00.

     Most of the remainder of Hirshman's article is vapid and predictable, but her conclusion re-emphasizes her priorities:

     The privileged brides of the Times -- and their husbands -- seem happy. Why do we care what they do? After all, most people aren’t rich and white and heterosexual, and they couldn’t quit working if they wanted to.

     We care because what they do is bad for them, is certainly bad for society, and is widely imitated, even by people who never get their weddings in the Times. This last is called the “regime effect,” and it means that even if women don’t quit their jobs for their families, they think they should and feel guilty about not doing it. That regime effect created the mystique around The Feminine Mystique, too.

     As for society, elites supply the labor for the decision-making classes -- the senators, the newspaper editors, the research scientists, the entrepreneurs, the policy-makers, and the policy wonks. If the ruling class is overwhelmingly male, the rulers will make mistakes that benefit males, whether from ignorance or from indifference. Media surveys reveal that if only one member of a television show’s creative staff is female, the percentage of women on-screen goes up from 36 percent to 42 percent. A world of 84-percent male lawyers and 84-percent female assistants is a different place than one with women in positions of social authority. Think of a big American city with an 86-percent white police force. If role models don’t matter, why care about Sandra Day O’Connor? Even if the falloff from peak numbers is small, the leveling off of women in power is a loss of hope for more change. Will there never again be more than one woman on the Supreme Court?

     Worse, the behavior tarnishes every female with the knowledge that she is almost never going to be a ruler. Princeton President Shirley Tilghman described the elite colleges’ self-image perfectly when she told her freshmen last year that they would be the nation’s leaders, and she clearly did not have trophy wives in mind. Why should society spend resources educating women with only a 50-percent return rate on their stated goals? The American Conservative Union carried a column in 2004 recommending that employers stay away from such women or risk going out of business. Good psychological data show that the more women are treated with respect, the more ambition they have. And vice versa. The opt-out revolution is really a downward spiral.

     So Hirshman demands that the top spot in every woman's decision-making process should go to whether or not her choices will position her to become a "ruler" -- i.e., one who wields authority over others. Her own happiness should stand no better than second in the lists; after all, the future of feminism is at stake!

     Finally, these choices are bad for women individually. A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world. Measured against these time-tested standards, the expensively educated upper-class moms will be leading lesser lives.

     Authoritarianism in the raw: "You have a duty to hew to this standard as I've expressed it, girlie, so no backtalk! Get out there and do your best to become a ruler!"

     I don't need to tell you how I feel about such blather, do I, Gentle Reader?

---

     One of the classical false dichotomies is the choice restricted to two contrasting authorities and their dictates. He who only gets to choose between masters remains a slave. No virtue inheres in submission to anyone's authority...unless the choice of going one's own way is open as well.

     Over the years I've observed the human carnival, I've noticed all the following:

• The overwhelming preponderance of happy American women are married and have adopted a traditional wife / mother / homemaker style of life.
• The strongest and least stressed marriages are those in which "traditional" male and female roles obtain.
• The unhappiest women are found among the careerists who have completely renounced marriage and motherhood in favor of work for wages.
• Many unhappily married women, though perhaps not a majority thereof, are unhappy specifically about having to work for wages.
• Far too many men of a "conservative" bent take the above prescriptively: that is, as a command that the only proper place for a woman is in a traditional married woman's role.

     It doesn't matter that the path to happiness for most women seems to be that of marriage and traditional wifely and motherly pursuits. Indeed, it wouldn't matter if one could "prove" that that's the only path to female happiness. No good can come from either the de Beauvoirean / Hirshmanesque command to women to "get out there and prepare to become a ruler" or the authoritarian-paternalistic command to "stick to your home, your kids, and your kitchen." There must be free choice.

     Some women would best relate to life, men, and society by adopting a traditional "wifestyle;" others, upon whom God has bestowed other gifts and insights, would do best to follow another path. If our experiences since the inception of the "Women's Lib" movement are at all indicative, there are more women of the first sort than of the second, perhaps far more. That doesn't confer authority over such decisions upon anyone.

     If freedom means anything, it means the right to pursue happiness according to your own notions and priorities, whether you have two X chromosomes or only one.

     Some women will choose "rightly" for themselves, and will become enduringly happy.
     Some women will choose "wrongly" for themselves, and will become enduringly unhappy.
     Neither group acquires the authority to dictate to other women, nor to their daughters or nieces.
     Neither does any man.
     All anyone can do for others is to provide an example -- hopefully, a good example of a life well lived.

     All else is folly.

---

     There's only one more point to make: about bargains and the promises they imply.

     One cannot rightfully be saddled with a responsibility against one's will. That's especially true as it pertains to practical matters within a marriage. However, a responsibility once accepted cannot rightfully be abrogated without making provisions for its acceptance by others -- willing others. He who accepts the role of family provider is, in the usual case, stuck with it; he cannot lay it down with a clean conscience. Similarly, she who accepts the responsibilities of homemaker and mother cannot morally walk away from them without first seeing to it that someone else willingly picks them up. This is especially significant when the subject is the care and nurturance of minor children.

     These things must be agreed to before responsibilities of either sort are accepted. Some decisions, such as the decision to produce children, are irreversible.

     It's best for a man and a woman contemplating marriage to hash all of this out beforehand. What standard of living are the spouses-to-be anticipating? Do they expect the same one, or markedly different ones? In what sort of environment will they live? Who wants children? Who's willing to accept the responsibility for their care and upbringing? Who's willing to settle for an apartment? Whose heart is set upon a detached house with all the responsibilities that implies? Those are the biggest topics that, if not settled willingly and amicably before marriage, can become life-destroying bones of contention afterward.

     There's no escape from life's major decisions. No one can make them for anyone else...nor can anyone "delegate" them to some reliable authority in full confidence of the results.

---

     The title of this tirade -- "On Making The Best Of Things...Including Yourself" -- might be a little too subtle for some readers. There are two "parts" to the "thing" that is you:

• What you are -- i.e., your nature as a human being of one or the other sex;
• Who you are -- i.e., the individuality you've acquired from your path through life.

     Each of these provides opportunities and constraints. Neither is absolutely binding; neither can be utterly dismissed. Along all the paths one might take through life, the quintessential asset is accurate self-knowledge, of both your "what" and your "who." Happiness is all but impossible to obtain without it.

     To young Miss Smith, who's pondering what course to take: the "traditional" roles of wife, mother and homemaker, or the "modern" approach of careerism and ascent through the business world. Do you know yourself? Well enough to make promises to others and be confident that you'll keep them?

     If not, you'd better get started on it PDQ. Life is short.

Quickies: Figuring On The Downside

     I have the great good fortune to be old, married, and content with my lot. Moreover, I grew up before contemporary, “gender-war” feminism had gotten off the ground. So my memories of my years dating and mating are generally unthreatening ones. But today’s young men are in a quite different environment, sexually, culturally, and legally.

     Many young women have absorbed the notion that “he’s an oppressor,” and therefore deserves whatever she (or any other woman) might do to him. Many others have decided that the only reason to have anything to do with a man is to pump him for what she can get out of him. Still others, having married and decided that they “made a mistake,” see nothing wrong with punishing their husbands, or ex-husbands, for their own errors. Some even derive pleasure from it.

     What percentage of single women fall into those categories?

     An old parable, often used to argue against admitting Muslims to these United States, runs thus: There’s a bowl of M&Ms^® before you. You like M&Ms^® and are minded to enjoy a few...but someone whose word is good has told you that in that bowl of hundreds of M&Ms^® there are ten that have been laced with cyanide, any one of which would suffice to kill you. Do you eat from the bowl, or do you pass on by?

     I think most of us would pass on by, no matter how much we might love M&Ms. The downside is simply too great to risk.

     Now, where you see M&Ms^® in the above, substitute single young women. There are probably hundreds in the neighborhood of any given single young man. How great does the percentage of self-absorbed, evil minded women – women psychologically ready, willing, and able to make a man’s life a living hell – need to be to persuade a single young man to abstain from romantic explorations and “go his own way?”

     Do prevailing cultural currents or the state of “family law” have any bearing on such a decision? What about demographic factors, religion, education, and so forth?

     Discuss!

The Y-Chromosome Stigmata, Continued

     I’ve already received a raft of inquiries about yesterday’s piece on this subject. The majority of them ask the same question: Why? More specifically, why did I write it?

     I’ll tell you why, but I’ll tell you up front: You aren’t going to like it.

---

     Certain characteristics of my books routinely draw disproportionate attention. The one that was on my mind yesterday arises from the immense popularity of my most popular protagonist with women. Hundreds of female readers have written to plead / implore / demand that I write more about that character. Here’s the best illustration why:

     "How old would you say I am, Louis?"
     He grimaced. "When we met, I'd have taken you for my age, or a few years more. But that can't be. You're many times as old as the oldest man I know. Possibly as old as recorded history."
     He was wrong. I'm much older than that. But for all his penetration, I didn't expect him to have seen so deeply into me. I'd grown too used to being inscrutable.
     "On what do you base this...estimate?"
     He smiled and tilted his chair back.
     "Would you say I have a specialty, Malcolm?"
     I thought about it.
     "If by a specialty you mean something you do appreciably better than anything else you do, then the answer is no, because you do everything well. If you mean something you do appreciably better than anyone else around you, then the answer is still no, because you do everything better than anyone I've ever known."

     [From Chosen One.]

     I invented a character of enormous physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual power: a supergenius who could best any athlete on Earth at anything, who possessed a deep and abiding Catholic faith and an unbreakable resolve never to put his own desires above another person’s needs or rights. Louis Redmond, quite frankly, is impossibly good. I had to make him short, ordinary-looking, and prone to outbursts of temper to avoid the Mary-Sue trap. The most extravagantly described male character in any “sweet savage” romance falls far short of him.

     In reality, there are no such men. That’s why my female readers all adore him. Among my male readers, the tendency is to resent him.

     The greatest embarrassments of my years as a fiction writer have been the times when I’ve been required by honesty and Christian humility to reply to a female correspondent that “No, I’m not writing about myself.”

     There are no Louis Redmonds. There are no Armand Morelons. There are no Todd Iversons or Stephen Graham Sumners ...damn it all. All we have are frail, fallible, all-too-human men, many of us weary unto death from straining to meet irrational, impossible expectations – both our own, and those of others.

---

     There’s an old bit of office humor that’s much to the point:

We, the Willing,
Led by the Unknowing,
Are doing the Impossible for the Ungrateful.
We have done so much,
For so long,
With so little,
We are now Qualified,
To do Anything,
With Nothing.

     That, in a nutshell, is the state of the American man in this Twenty-First Century since the birth of Our Lord. Though we labor largely in service to our wives and children – even today, with so many of us having surrendered to the gimme-itis virus, that remains the case – the female half of our nation has been granted a license to treat us like shit. Few women decline the privilege. Worse yet, they have a substantial number of enablers – “white knights” – from among our number.

     Typically, a man will bind himself to a woman who appears ready, willing, and able to:

• Appreciate his strengths and virtues,
• Show tolerance toward his weaknesses and vices,
• And provide him what he needs from a wife and helpmeet.

     In recent years, ever more women have chosen to simulate those attitudes and readinesses, rather than actually embody them. The chaos in our divorce courts and the wreckage they’ve produced testify eloquently to that trend. But let a “men’s rights” group gain some visibility, and what happens next? Denunciation and attempts to shout us down from the feminist mouthpieces, especially the ones who exhort their “sisters” to embrace...lesbianism!

     Those “angry ugly girls,” barely one in a hundred of whom could even change a tire, get a respectful hearing nearly every time.

     Is it really so surprising that we’re getting sick of it? Is it really so surprising that American men are less willing to marry than ever before in history? Is it really so surprising that we're ready to rebel – to “go our own way?”

     Be aware, Gentle Reader: It’s a (generally) happily mated man who’s writing this.

---

     Things are difficult throughout American society. The reason is seldom discussed: Whether rightly or wrongly, many persons feel they haven’t gotten what they deserve. Frustration often makes the frustrated one angry – openly, vocally angry. When he gets angry enough, he starts to “act out.”

     Quoth Suzanne Venker:

     At the end of the day, most men just want a woman who’s nice. “Nice,” to a man, means being soft, gentle and kind. It means asking your husband how his day was and really listening. It means doing something nice for him with no expectation of getting something in return—you know, the way you did when you were dating.

     Indeed. We don’t want the ersatz version of “nice” that dissipates once the ring is on her finger. We want women who embody the feminine virtues as our grandparents’ generation – men and women both – knew and appreciated them. But they’re getting to be in very short supply, displaced by an attitude of female superiority that simultaneously maintains that women are men’s equals in every regard – which they’re not – and that women are in such danger from men and masculinity that they must have special privileges, written into law and custom, to protect them from us.

     That, Gentle Reader, will not end well. The article I cited yesterday is only the tip of the iceberg. Look beneath the waterline if you dare.

The Y-Chromosome Stigmata

     I no longer remember how I found this article:

     It Sucks To Be A Man: 66 Guys Explain Why

     ...but reading the comments the “66 guys” submitted often had me at the verge of tears. They struck such a chord with me that I found myself wishing I could contact the contributors and, as a gesture from a fellow sufferer, buy each of them his drink of choice.

     But I can’t. So I’m writing about the experience instead.

---

     The first thought I had upon delving into these plaints was that very few men are willing to express such sentiments to anyone other than the closest of their male friends. We certainly can’t say anything like:

     “The world does not care about men the same way it cares about women.” (“sud0code”)

     Or:

     “You have to cry in secret.” (“Cryoptic2”)

     ...where women or unknown men might hear us. The storm of reflexive denunciation would register on seismographs around he world.

     We’re supposed to be tough, you see. We’re expected to “suck it up,” to “soldier on” and keep going. Cui bono? Answer that one for yourself.

     Maybe it simply must be that way. Maybe the race would die out if the non-childbearing sex didn’t automatically shoulder the hardships, the physical exertion, the weariness and the wounds. That doesn’t mean we don’t hurt or get weary.

     There’s a limit to what a man can endure. Appreciation helps to extend that limit. The complaints, contempt, and denigration we get from the entitled, pampered, protected sex – you know who I have in mind, don’t you, ladies? – tempts us to shrug, drop our burdens, and walk away. But those of us who do shrug, etc., come in for even more odium...some of which is redistributed onto other men who are still gamely trying to meet the expectations of their parents, their spouses, their children, their communities, and society in general.

---

     Every man has not just limits but limitations: a sphere within which he’s competent, and outside which he isn’t. Heinlein’s fatuous pronouncement aside – and remember, Gentle Reader: I admire Heinlein – it’s not possible for any man to become competent at more than a tiny fraction of the extraordinary volume of accumulated human knowledge and technique. Some of us can “fake it” somewhat outside our genuine competences. Beyond that, we must hire others who know how to do what we don’t. Specialization is mandatory for the man who seeks to become valued and well compensated for some skill – whatever it may be.

     So we tend to put off dealing with problems we know ourselves incompetent to fix. If the services of a specialist would be costly, we tend to put that off, too. Rather than acknowledge our honesty in admitting to our limitations – Clint Eastwood, where are you when we need you? — we tend to get razzed, whether gently or cruelly, by the Other Half.

     “You can’t have problems. It’s a weakness…and if you are weak, you are good as dead. You are only allowed to have solutions. If you ask for help, you’re a ‘pussy.’”

---

     Men are isolated by a number of mechanisms, expectations, and myths:

     “As a high school student, the worst part of being a man is the treatment of male students. I once had an old female teacher that spread each boy apart, but let all the girls sit together wherever they wanted.” (“smartypants-mcgoo”)

     “Men don’t get touched. Platonic physical intimacy is important and men generally don’t get it from others. We’re taught not to from a young age because it’s socially inappropriate.” (Gnarwaughl)

     “Men aren’t ‘allowed’ to share their feelings and consequently have a much higher suicide rate.” (“HitchikersPie”)

     This condition of atomization means that we have little or no support system to call on when trouble comes along. Combined with the prevailing assumption that in any conflict with a woman, he’s wrong and probably deserves punishment:

     “If there’s a ‘he said, she said’ situation, people will generally assume we’re guilty, even if it makes no sense.”

     “If I don’t agree with [a woman], I am called either sexist or racist. If I try to argue that I am not, that makes me more guilty.”

     “Not being allowed to fight back if a woman hits you. Also, if she hit you, you probably deserved it.” (Kaalcite)

     ...and the pressure to isolate oneself, simply for safety’s sake, becomes difficult to resist. In this we see a great part of the reason for the “men going their own way” phenomenon that’s recently become visible. Ironically, communities of such men are forming, and finding that many of the problems they experienced in “normal” society are completely absent.

---

     “How it is okay, even fashionable, to mock or trivialize men as being untrustworthy or evil.” (vzen)

     Men – not “humans” of both sexes, but men — built this entire civilization. We shed quite a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to do so. Our principal motivation was to provide a safe, clean, comfortable life to our women and children. Yet we’re always the “oppressors,” the “bad guys.” We’re vilified for our “patriarchalism,” when without that patriarchal authority and the matching responsibility, women would be cowering in caves.

     One of the things that makes me resent contemporary trends in speculative fiction is the insistence by the barons of the publishing industry that the heroine be female and the villain be male. Yet real-life female heroines are close to unknown. The individual willing to put his wealth, health, or life on the line for others is nearly always male. You wouldn’t know it from the ravings of the militant feminists.

     And of course, in any difference of opinion with a woman, regardless of the subject or the context, we’re always “wrong.”

     See The Red Pill. Especially if you lack that precious, terribly battered Y-chromosome and have wondered at the wounds accumulating on those who carry it. Then think about the transgender phenomenon, especially this aspect thereof: more than 90% of transgenders are biological men who want to live and be treated as women.

     Please.