What’s Wrong with the World

I'm unclear about what is more bothersome here...the disproportionate sexism of your written thought, or the assumption that the essence of police work is "violence and coercion." Whatever that actually means.

I can understand not wanting a woman in a combat role. I've known some Marines who served in Iraq, and their dealings with the Army and joint patrols under a female officer did not make for uplifting stories upon their return. Damn funny, but only for someone with as twisted a sense of humor as me. The thing is, the last time I was paying attention, the job description of police chief was more of an administrative job. I don't think that the average head cop is going to be out walking a beat, running down and roughing up bad guys. I think he or she is going to be behind a desk, doing a lot of paperwork. I think - based on the fact that I have worked for male and female administrators in a variety of roles - that it doesn't really make a difference who is issuing the orders and pushing the paperwork in this environment.

Now, if your county is particularly...I don't know, "Wild Westish," then please correct my error. I, however, will be moving on to the other issue.

I think that the essence of police work is actually in deterrence, not in violence/coercion. In the worst case scenario, either of those might be used, sure; but the essential function of the police is to firstly maintain the peace, and only then if that fails to enforce the law.

Does this mean I like cops? No. Do I respect cops? Not to date. Do I tolerate them and acknowledge the necessity of their work? Absolutely. Does this require me to deal with jackassery, Constitutional overreaching, and a near-psychotic fixation with the Taser? Somewhat, until I or some other sane individual can get the fuzz's collective head screwed on straight.

I really have nothing more to say unless you are able to disillusion me as to your meaning in this post. If you're going to spew that sort of...stuff, then you might do yourself the favor of going after one topic at a time. Then, perhaps, you could form a compelling argument. For the moment, though...I'd stay away from multitasking.

"disproportionate sexism"

Now there's a redundancy.

"Does this mean I like cops? No. Do I respect cops? Not to date."

And there's a pathology.

I could be wrong, but I predict you'll get some comments, Jeff.

Btw, whom would you rather have as your police chief - Eric Holder or Lydia McGrew?

I'm completely with Jeff on this one. My daughters always have some sort of wry comment when they see a female policeman around. I have to sort of shush them. I just hope they never get stopped by a woman to be given a ticket some day. Have to teach them what _not_ to say. And then there are the situations where female cops do take down some bad guy (as we thought had happened in the Nidal Hasan case, though it turned out not to be true), and you have to get this balanced conclusion: "Yes, there shouldn't be women in those roles, but she did a good job nonetheless, and we should be glad she did" or something like that.

The story of the inclusion of women in on-the-beat police roles (as opposed to special, narrowly defined roles where females were specifically needed) is one of judicial activism, the enforcement of blatant double standards on matters like height and body strength, and hence, denial of reality. It is told in part in the libertarian book _Feminism and Freedom_ by Michael Levin.

The point about being a paper-pusher made by the commentator above is similar to what we hear about "support roles" in the military. (Though there, many of the so-called "support roles" are themselves now roles that require more strength, etc., than women can well handle.) It completely ignores the desirable fungibility among people in work of that kind. It's absurd to have a police chief who is (let's say) 5' 2" and petite on the grounds that police chiefs don't _usually_ actually have to go out and catch bad guys. A police chief _ought_ to be able to go out and catch bad guys whatever the usual nature of his daily work.

Speaking of fungible manpower, in my town there is some sort of integration between the fire and police departments. I don't know fully how it all works, but there's at least some sense in which when you are hired by the police department, you are also supposed to be able to do fireman's work. Which is, of course, relevant to the role of women in the department.

Sex is not a sufficient criteria for such vocations, but it is an important one alongside others.

DW, I see your "disproportionate sexism" and "disillusion me as to your meaning" and will raise you an "asexual androgyny" and an "illustration me as to your spewing."

Der Wolfanwalt, you wrote:

I don't think that the average head cop is going to be out walking a beat, running down and roughing up bad guys. I think he or she is going to be behind a desk, doing a lot of paperwork ... I think that the essence of police work is actually in deterrence, not in violence/coercion.

A chief of police has to do his time on the beat, "running down and roughing up the bad guys", as a matter of qualifying for the post. So a female chief has already subjected herself to the de-feminization that kind of work requires. And besides, in a small town the chief does go on patrol. Even if there were no requirement for the chief to employ violence, he is still leading men who do and who must. It's certainly preferable to have a chief who is capable of "filling in" when needed.

Your distinction between violence/coercion and deterrence is disingenuous. What is the essence of deterrence? The threat of violence and coercion. You admit as much. Why would you want a police chief who isn't ontologically suited for it?

If you're going to spew that sort of...stuff, then you might do yourself the favor of going after one topic at a time.

OK, I'll work on it.

Then, perhaps, you could form a compelling argument.

My argument in a nutshell: 1) violence/coercion destroys femininity; 2) a female chief is going to be a doctrinaire feminist and will likely impose that ideology on the department; 3) effective police work demands a masculine environment; 4) men respond much better to male authority.

Much more could be said about each of these categories, of course, but that must wait for another day. In any event the argument is for you and your side to make. You are the innovators. Yours is the novelty. You are insisting that sex doesn't matter in opposition to the established norms of Christian civilization. The exponents of androgyny haven't made a coherent argument, but simply imposed their will.

Bill, you asked:

Btw, whom would you rather have as your police chief - Eric Holder or Lydia McGrew?

Eric Holder, hands down. Didn't even have to think twice.

My argument in a nutshell: 1) violence/coercion destroys femininity;

This may be broadly true, but not all women are what I'd call feminine.

Jeff --

How about we let Lydia choose our chief of police?

Eric Holder, hands down. Didn't even have to think twice.

'Specially if we can keep all the school marms from looking over his shoulder.

The point of course is that Mr. Holder is a man, whether he likes it or not, and Lydia McGrew is a lady upon whom I could never wish the destruction of her lady-ness.

As for Lydia choosing our chief of police ... I'm sure she would choose splendidly. In fact she gets my vote for Queen Isabella II. :-)

Nevertheless, that choice properly belonged to the men on the council and the selection committee. They made a bad choice, but the choice was theirs to make. So it's a question of whether I prefer the wrong people to make the right decisions, or the right people to make the wrong decisions? I believe the latter is preferable in most cases, for reasons of order.

My argument in a nutshell: 1) violence/coercion destroys femininity; 2) a female chief is going to be a doctrinaire feminist and will likely impose that ideology on the department; 3) effective police work demands a masculine environment; 4) men respond much better to male authority.

Do these arguments work for Diana Prince (AKA Wonder Woman)? Discuss.

The Chicken

Rats. Forgot to put the Jeff's paragraph in blockquotes, above.

The Chicken

MC--Yes. Especially 4. It was a fun show in a few ways, but it was still kind of weird. Wonder Woman is (mythologically speaking) an Amazon. Amazons are by definition exceptional. The feminist agenda is that Amazons should be the rule rather than the exception.

Btw, consider Hercules wearing a dress and working for the Amazon queen. Degrading? You bet. It wasn't supposed to be one of the brighter moments in his career.

To fall back on my geometry language, let me say that I see a lot of theorems, taken as axioms, and therefore lacking in proofs:

My argument in a nutshell: 1) violence/coercion destroys femininity; 2) a female chief is going to be a doctrinaire feminist and will likely impose that ideology on the department; 3) effective police work demands a masculine environment; 4) men respond much better to male authority.

Let's take these one at a time.

violence/coercion destroys femininity

Really, violence and coercion destroy humanity. They are a perversion of our proper end as created in God's image, and they are compatible with charity only assuming a fallen world in the first place. I've seen men who have been left just as destroyed by violence and coercion as anyone else. Those Marines I know...well, one of them came out okay. The other one is a completely withdrawn misanthrope now. His sense of humor is darker than anyone's I know, mine included.

a female chief is going to be a doctrinaire feminist and will likely impose that ideology on the department

Well, I'm glad you're so certain of that. Until established otherwise, I would like to assume that anyone who enters the police force is motivated by one of two things, independent of sex: 1) a desire to serve the community; or 2) a desire to have power. This seems to sum up the motivational gamut I've seen in males, I see no reason why a female would be different.

Now, I'm open to the possibility of what you're saying, but I would not assume it to be the case without some other evidence. Right now, you're basically saying that any woman who rises in an organization must be a psychotic feminist, and assuming it as given that nobody will disagree. That's not a line of reasoning.

effective police work demands a masculine environment

Why is this the case? I could make assumptions about the underpinnings you are using, but I'd rather not since that leads me back down the "automatically assume you are a sexist" route, which just makes life uninteresting. I choose to believe that you are a more complicated individual, and therefore want to understand why you believe that a "masculine environment" is necessary for police work. Also I'd like to know what exactly you think that a "masculine environment" is.

men respond much better to male authority.

The problem with absolute statements like this is that unless you are sure there is no exception, you're going to get in trouble...and you really should not assume that this statement is absolutely true, because if you do then you are full of a very special type of guano. The very first authority that I responded to in my life was the authority of my mother. I have worked under women at various times of my life; I have studied under female professors.

My empirical experience has led me to believe that men respond to authority, period. They respond much better to authority competently wielded, regardless of the chromosomal affiliation of the wielder. If given the choice between a capable woman and an inept man, I will gladly work under the capable woman first.

In summation, I have an issue in responding to you inasmuch as I cannot pin down all of your assumptions. I can conjure ideas of what you mean by "femininity," and they do not seem to me to be flattering. I am not advocating a radical feminism, here; I'm only advocating an open mind. Not all men are suited toward masculine jobs, and there are, as a matter of everyday fact, women who are more masculine by their nature than many men. I see no reason to force them to suppress these God-given accidental qualities simply because they also have other God-given accidental qualities that we associate by way of generalization with a particular lifestyle.

I look forward to seeing what exactly you'll say to correct me, because I am definitely having difficulties.

I can understand not wanting a woman in a combat role. I've known some Marines who served in Iraq, and their dealings with the Army and joint patrols under a female officer did not make for uplifting stories upon their return. Damn funny, but only for someone with as twisted a sense of humor as me. The thing is, the last time I was paying attention, the job description of police chief was more of an administrative job. I don't think that the average head cop is going to be out walking a beat, running down and roughing up bad guys. I think he or she is going to be behind a desk, doing a lot of paperwork. I think - based on the fact that I have worked for male and female administrators in a variety of roles - that it doesn't really make a difference who is issuing the orders and pushing the paperwork in this environment.

So, can I assume that you would have no objection on principle to female members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? There is certainly an analog between what they do and what a police chief does.

In support of Jeff's statement about the woman being hired as police chief, let's remember that the town council is bringing this person in from outside the community. That seems to me especially significant in a small community like that. It sounds like the town council is trying to make a statement. Even if one were to support a "natural" process whereby a woman is found just as it happens to be "best applicant for the job" (and when it comes to police chief, I'm happy to be a sexist and to favor outright discrimination), this is pretty obviously not the result of such a process. That, in turn, supports the feminist (probably strongly feminist) ideas of the new woman chief. "Come into a back-of-beyond community and show them what a woman can do."

"But it is highly doubtful that a woman who seeks to be the chief of police is anything but a radical feminist."

Or maybe she wants a better paying job. Since your PD only has eight officers, it is likely the chief is also in the field a good part of the time. Since she came from the Shasta County Sheriff's Department and the center of the state only gets more redneck as one goes north (check out Siskiyou and Modoc), it is unlikely that a "radical feminist" would do well. I don't know what Glenn's SD gender mix is but the CHP has had women on patrol and command for a while and I 5 does go through Orland.

One of the advantages (real world as opposed to ideological cant and speculation) of women police officers is that is that they often do better at avoiding confrontations. Even in Charming, violence and coercion doesn't seem work so well. V & C as SOP would be the sign of a thuggish police culture; there are those places in this country but they hardly where one would want to live.

There are consequences to gender sterotypes (see your typical Muslim nation) and the difference between their social conservatism that displayed in Jeff's post is quantitative. Isn't all this most likely a case of elevating personal issues to a macro level?

Al, I don't think the statement that the difference between these and Muslim ideas about gender roles is quantitative is of any value as an argument. In fact, I think it's downright silly. The most mild-mannered version of gender role complementarianism would be said by feminists to be merely "quantitatively different" from Muslim ideas (including, e.g., support of wife beating), but any sensible woman should laugh this to scorn.

Does this mean I like cops? No. Do I respect cops? Not to date. Do I tolerate them and acknowledge the necessity of their work? Absolutely. Does this require me to deal with jackassery, Constitutional overreaching, and a near-psychotic fixation with the Taser? Somewhat, until I or some other sane individual can get the fuzz's collective head screwed on straight.

What's with the dramatics? Near-psychotic fixation with tasers? Seriously? You'd think that tens of thousands of people were being zapped weekly. That officers are making a sport of shooting children. I'm just curious if you actually know any police officers or are your simply venting out against some hypothetical persona you've invented or drawn from tv.

My empirical experience has led me to believe that men respond to authority, period. They respond much better to authority competently wielded, regardless of the chromosomal affiliation of the wielder. If given the choice between a capable woman and an inept man, I will gladly work under the capable woman first.

I will tentatively agree with you on this, to a limited extent. (How is that for a stream of qualifiers?!) Having served in the military, one still takes orders from superiors, men or women. However, based on my 'empirical experience' men and women are not the same, so your choice between a capable woman and an inept man is sort of an apples to elephants contrast. I mean, would you prefer cake or a headache?

Because I would choose the former doesn't really say anything about anything on the table. Are women capable of doing the same kinds of things men are? Of course. What follows?

Lastly, I find the phrase "God-given accidental qualities" quite strange.

Someone who wields waaay much more authority than a police officer is..an orchestra conductor. Notice, that almost all major orchestra conductors (and many minor orchestra conductors) are male, even though, in blind studies, men and women are indistinguishable in musical performance abilities. One might argue historical precedence on this, but I don't see the trend changing in the modern era.

The Chicken

Eric Holder, hands down. Didn't even have to think twice.

You're a hard case. Would you be okay with, oh, a Janet Reno as attorney general, giving orders to the boots on the ground, like the FBI and the ATF - or a Meg Thatcher ordering around the army, navy and air force - without having worn the boots herself?

"Al, I don't think the statement that the difference between these and Muslim ideas about gender roles is quantitative is of any value as an argument. In fact, I think it's downright silly. The most mild-mannered version of gender role complementarianism would be said by feminists to be merely "quantitatively different" from Muslim ideas (including, e.g., support of wife beating), but any sensible woman should laugh this to scorn."

So, please explain to us what exactly the difference is between your belief that women should have no public role and the Muslim belief that women should have no public role?

Who said women should have no public role? Neither Jeff nor I.

Moreover, you just _really_ _really_ don't know much about Muslim views of women, Karen, if you think the issue is one of "having a public role." I mean, how about *going out in public without a male escort*? How about being allowed to say hello to a non-relative male without getting in trouble? (I had a post on here about a Muslim and his wife in an apartment building in Canada where the Muslim is furious that a neighbor in the apartment building says hello politely to the wife in the public hallway.) Did I mention wife beating? Then there's female genital mutilation, honor murders, etc., etc. How about not having to cover your entire face except for eyeslits in public? And then there's the matter of polygamy and the way it is demeaning to women in itself.

I mean, give me a break. A person could go G. K. Chesterton and argue that women shouldn't have the vote, and such a person _still_ wouldn't be anywhere _near_ the Muslim view of women. Chesterton was a chivalrous Christian. He said something to the effect that a man shouldn't mind having to keep himself faithful to one woman, because a man should be grateful for the privilege of having _seen_ one woman.

Can we separate out the "authority" a civil servant administrator holds versus the "authority" a police chief or a Marine captain holds? Please?

I have had male and female administrators above me in the so-called "command" chain in civil life, and some of the women have been marvelous to work for. Part of the reason for that is that some are very successful in finding non-confrontational ways to make the system work, or are well-attuned to nurturing their colleagues, including their colleagues professional capacities. They also deal 99.9 percent of the time with people who are more rational than not, and who are not under the stress of immediate violence.

But there is a hell of a difference between saying "we are going to write the regulation INCLUDING that paragraph, because I think it needs to be there and its MY authority to decide", and saying "OK men, we are going in there to take down the kidnapper in order Able, Baker, and Charlie" and not have Able or Charlie get their back up about it. Part of the very notion of command (as distinct from decision making) is that the commander has your confidence that he understands the danger and has made his choice based on that danger without giving it undue weight, having himself dealt with personal danger and coming through it with honor. And part of the "coming through with it with honor" includes steeling himself to harm or kill others when truly necessary, to subject himself to danger as necessary, without freezing up, without going haywire, and without becoming a beast. It is fundamentally impossible to have an ideal commander (as opposed to civilian authority) who has not gone through the lower levels being subject to potential danger etc.

I am with Jeff: we don't want women to INTENTIONALLY be put in a place where they need to learn that behavior as a matter of course. It is not in general a good use of the complementary gender strengths God gave humanity. I suppose that in theory this would not preclude making exceptions for an exceptional woman who HAS proven she can do it without damaging herself and her femininity (whatever that would mean), but in order to even make room for this possibility we have to undermine the right to make distinctions based on the common and usual differences between the sexes. Which damages society. And it would still not alter the fact that men respond better to men in command than to women in command.

Der Wolfanwalt, you wrote:

Really, violence and coercion destroy humanity. They are a perversion of our proper end as created in God's image, and they are compatible with charity only assuming a fallen world in the first place.

Should we not assume a fallen world then? Where are you going with this line of thought?

Until established otherwise, I would like to assume that anyone who enters the police force is motivated by one of two things, independent of sex: 1) a desire to serve the community; or 2) a desire to have power.s to sum up the motivational gamut I've seen in males, I see no reason why a female would be different.

A female might have the same motivations. The difference is that, for her, those over whom she desires power are almost exclusively of the opposite sex - those whom God has created as her head. St. Paul explains:

"But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God ... The man indeed ought not to cover his head, because he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. For the man was not created for the woman, but the woman for the man."

Read 1 Cor 11 for context. The head of the woman is the man. Woman is to man, as man is to Christ. Woman is the glory of man. Woman was created for man. Etc. In the order of creation the desire to exercise power over men is natural for men (even when illicit), but unnatural and a perversion for women. It's a perversion in the same way that sexual desire (even when illicit) is natural between men and women, but unnatural and a perversion between those of the same sex.

So - what we're dealing with here is a woman who has, for whatever reason, embraced an inversion of the created order. Normal women don't go there, even if they might believe such nonsense in their heads, even if they spontaneously behave badly now and then. There is something visceral that stops a normal woman from making this inversion of reality a program for their own lives. That's why I believe any female police chief is almost certainly going to be a doctrinaire feminist, because only doctrinaire feminism provides the ideological framework necessary to perpetuate the lie.

effective police work demands a masculine environment

Why is this the case? I could make assumptions about the underpinnings you are using, but I'd rather not since that leads me back down the "automatically assume you are a sexist" route, which just makes life uninteresting.

You may assume that I am a sexist, at least by the definitions in vogue nowadays. Sorry if that's boring. If it walks like a sexist, talks like a sexist, etc., it is probably a sexist. What I am not is a misogynist.

Why does police work demand a masculine environment? I sense that, with you, I am going to have to back way up. We need to agree on what "police work" is, and on what constitutes a "masculine environment", before getting to the question. And that's more than I have time for. Suffice it to say that most young men today haven't learned civilized masculine behavior themselves. And unless they play some kind of male-only sports or are involved in a street gang, they have no concept of a "masculine environment" and why it can be important. Even that isn't enough as sports and gang-banging are only caricatures.

Properly socialized men can be counted on to respond in certain ways under pressure. There's a unique synergy when men work together that cannot be replicated in mixed settings. Men can talk to each other more frankly - even harshly - without hurting one another's feelings. Men generally try to impress women more than they do each other, and in different ways. Men want women to look up to them, to admire them. In a masculine environment men can do what they need to do without concerning themselves with what the women might be thinking. I recall reading about a study showing that boys were actually more violent and cruel in co-ed environments on account of showing off for the girls. Men also tend to protect each other's dignity and reputation, whereas women tend to ... talk. More. A lot more. When a man messes up on the job in front of a woman, the word is out in a hurry. The prospect of humiliation drives men's behavior in the presence of women and leads to much undesirable beahvior.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet about police work: it's the job of men to keep women and children out of harm's way. The introduction of women to police work destroys the chivalrous instincts that men ought to have for the women in their presence.

men respond much better to male authority.

The problem with absolute statements like this is that unless you are sure there is no exception, you're going to get in trouble...and you really should not assume that this statement is absolutely true, because if you do then you are full of a very special type of guano.

Very few of my statements are meant to be taken as "absolute". There are exceptions to this one, as to the others. Does that help?

I can conjure ideas of what you mean by "femininity," and they do not seem to me to be flattering.

Oh, but they are flattering. My appreciation for femininity is a huge part of the motivation I have in opposing feminism. Unfortunately young men don't experience much femininity nowadays. The girls they know have been modeled and taught masculine behaviors from an early age. If there are no feminine women in your life, I suggest reading "The Privilege of Being a Woman" by Alice von Hildebrand for a primer.

Not all men are suited toward masculine jobs, and there are, as a matter of everyday fact, women who are more masculine by their nature than many men. I see no reason to force them to suppress these God-given accidental qualities simply because they also have other God-given accidental qualities that we associate by way of generalization with a particular lifestyle.

I take this as a serious point. Not all men are equally masculine nor women equally feminine. And that's perfectly fine. But the goal remains a perfect masculinity and femininity, for each person, in accordance with their personalities and gifts. A man working as a clerk in an office, or a scholar at a university, or a checker at a grocery store, doesn't need to prove his masculinity by doing something else "manly". There is a "manly" way of doing exactly what he is doing, especially when working with other men. And that's something that has been lost today. Men are no longer able to look to their work for a sense of masculine identity. As a result, being unable to solve the problem, men increasingly deny that it matters at all.

It probably seems outrageously sexist to you for me to say that women ought to avoid masculine work more than men ought to avoid "feminine" work. There is a sense in which all work is masculine, but some work is not feminine. It's true that a woman may have a special talent for soldiering or police work. Should she be denied the opportunity? In most cases, yes - because it isn't just about her opportunities and her fulfillment and her self-actualization and her empowerment. It's also about the men she will be leading, the men she will be overpowering, and even the women and girls in the community who deserve a more suitable model for their own aspirations and an appropriate sense of "normal".

Al, you wrote:

Or maybe she wants a better paying job.

Possibly, who knows? That doesn't exclude other motivations.

Since your PD only has eight officers, it is likely the chief is also in the field a good part of the time. Since she came from the Shasta County Sheriff's Department and the center of the state only gets more redneck as one goes north (check out Siskiyou and Modoc), it is unlikely that a "radical feminist" would do well.

Quite right about the chief of a small department also working in the field.

You've obviously done some homework but you're still a little mixed up. First, the new chief is from Chico, where she worked for Chico PD and the state university police. Chico is mixed bag politically, but it's a hotbed of feminism and liberal activism due to the university. One of its recent mayors was very openly homosexual. Orland and Chico are worlds apart culturally. Second, Orland's new female officer is from Shasta County. Yes, Shasta is also conservative (or "redneck" if you like) but it still has a 100K+ population center and some big city attitudes.

There are consequences to gender sterotypes (see your typical Muslim nation) and the difference between their social conservatism that displayed in Jeff's post is quantitative.

In your view, then, the traditional Christian and Islamic understandings of the sexes differ not in substance, but only in measure. Is that what you mean to say? Or do you mean that my own views are inconsistent with orthodox Christianity?

By the way, Al - I know some of the men on the council and on the committee. They didn't do this for ideological reasons. So what gives? There were 25 applicants at a time when many departments are downsizing. It's unfathomable that the new chief was literally the "best qualified". No, I believe this is all about the city's shrinking budget and the new female chief's price tag. In other words, this selection was most likely a budget decision.

I haven't been a cop or a soldier, but I have been a guide in the wilderness, leading expeditions as part of a team of guides. What counts above all in such environments is what will happen when things go disastrously wrong. I've been involved in lots of disasters. In such situations, one must rely upon one's comrades to save one's life. I knew my colleagues. They were incredibly, amazingly tough men; competent, cool-headed, and quick. I knew that any one of them could have carried me uphill for 10 miles, if need be. They might have had to stop and puke a couple times in the process, but afterward they would have picked me up and kept going. And I was ready and able to do the same for them. We had to save people's lives with our bodies, and if we had been women those people would have died. There were times I would have died, if the colleague who reached out to rescue me had been a woman.

I don't deny at all that there are strong women. I've known lots of amazingly tough women guides, too. In a really tight situation, I'd rather have them at my side than most of the men I have known in the city. But the male guides left them in the dust. Think of it this way; the female guides were Amazons. The male guides were Spartans.

Interestingly, while those female guides were all quite ardent feminists, and outspoken and aggressive to boot, they every one of them deferred to the male guides. Everyone knew who among us possessed the most power and capacity to cope with a bad situation. They were the leaders, even when a woman was ostensibly the trail boss. The real leaders were always men.

Men who go into bad situations for a living want to know that they are backed up and commanded by men who have done the same, many times, and survived. At such times there is no margin for splitting hairs, no time for due process or considerations of fairness or propriety. It's down to surviving the next 15 minutes. The fresh-faced Lieutenant who has never seen combat knows perfectly well that his battle-hardened sergeant is the real squad leader, and so do all the men. The novice Lieutenant with a shot at success is glad to defer to the judgment of his sergeant. The danger of putting un-blooded back-office guys in command of hazardous field operations - even when they are doing it from behind the desk - is that they have no visceral sense of what field operations are like, and so there is a much higher probability that their commands will be simply inapposite, or stupid. This is why, in the traditional military cultures of the world, combat experience is the sine qua non of professional advancement for the officer.

Many men are not cut out for field operations, for combat. Almost no women are.

Maybe all this is obvious. Indeed I hope it is. But perhaps not; so much of our cultural discourse is carried out among people who have never experienced anything of the kind.

Well said, Kristor. Unfortunately it isn't obvious anymore. Part of the problem is finding the language to explain what every generation before ours simply knew intuitively.

Can we separate out the "authority" a civil servant administrator holds versus the "authority" a police chief or a Marine captain holds? Please?

No, Tony, we can't, except for the Marine captain. (Jeff didn't answer so I guess you were hired to do the work.) Because those civil servants (which is what a police chief is), like Presidents and Secretaries of Defense, send people to die. Sometimes lots of them all at once. I think that's at least as serious as what your average police chief faces each day. So it's okay for a woman to order people to kill and be killed, but not to do any of it herself. If this seems incongruous, then maybe women shouldn't be presidents and secretaries of whatever and attorneys general. If this is what Jeff's really getting at, he ought to just say so. I'm not understanding what immutable principle is at stake such that he wouldn't think twice about sacrificing the moral and physical well-being of his community to hire a PC-enslaved male bureaucrat over a wise conservative woman. It's astounding, really, and he can die on that hill if he wants to, but he's not taking me with him.

I've always hated working for women in various jobs. In my latest novel and Iraqi war vet comments:

A man hates to see a woman in the army or navy who isn’t a nurse or such. When an attractive woman enters a room full of soldiers or officers, it radically chances the atmosphere. Not to mention that women have no business being exposed to combat even as auxiliary units.

I know some women fought in the Revolution and Civil War, there are always a few amazons around, but I still don’t want them in the ranks. We’re supposed to protect and shield women and children from violence. They’re more important. At least, they used to be.

A man doesn’t like to work for a woman. This can’t be helped a lot of times, but in truth, women have no business being in authority over men. It erodes respect for, chivalry towards, and concern about women. They become competitors and no man wants to compete with a woman. There’s no credit or satisfaction in beating a woman, and it’s more humiliating to lose to one, to be ordered about by one, to have to defer to one. Every man feels this, and it’s a gut instinct, but it seems like only a few are willing to acknowledge it these days.

Maybe that’s why I prefer living in the country. Men and women are more natural minded, common sensical, and less perverted. I liked the army, too, for that reason. Men couldn’t be bullied into believing bullshit. Well, maybe the REMFs could. They’d believe, do, and say anything to get promoted.

I think, Bill, that Tony's example was meant largely or wholly to be of non-military administrative (civil servant) jobs where one wasn't sending people out to be killed.

Kristor's comment is the best of all. C.S. Lewis tells funny stories of being set up as a lieutenant in WWI. He had no experience and was really clueless. I've never understood how that British system worked in WWI. It's not like Lewis was an aristocrat, even, or rich. His father was an Irish lawyer. But it was some kind of class thing. The lieutenants were all genteel middle-class and up, mostly inexperienced, and the sergeants spoke with lower-class accents. The old sergeants babied the lieutenants through and kept them and their men alive. And the young guys listened to them, too!

My only very small quibble with anything Jeff has said is the reference to male headship in Scripture w.r.t. men (generally) and women (generally). I tend to think that has to be finessed so that in the most important instance it is the woman's _husband_ or (when she is under his roof) her father who bears that relationship to her, not all men generally. Now, that doesn't mean that I think the headship thing has _nothing_ to say about male-female relations generally. For example, St. Paul says that you shd. find out if someone would make a good pastor by seeing how well he rules his own household! There's one for the egalitarians regarding ordained women. And pastoring isn't even a combat role. (Well, not literally. :-)) So undeniably the reason that male headship in the family was set up is because of a general set of differences between the sexes. But on an individual level, I do not regard every man I meet as in any important sense at all having headship over me.

Lewis, again, is good on this. He was a solid sexist (grin), but in his Preface to Paradise Lost he likens Eve to Shakespeare's Portia. Here I don't think he was being a very good expositor of Milton. Milton's Eve is nothing like Portia at all. But Lewis's point regarding the relations of the sexes is that not _every_ man gets to have authority over _every_ woman, that a woman's husband is in a unique position of authority in relation to her, and that a woman who looks up to her own husband may be perfectly free to, er, look down on men other than her husband. Not that this "looking down on" needs to be a matter of contempt (though unfortunately there are men, as there are women, in the world, who behave in ways worthy of contempt). In Perelandra Lewis does this very well by showing the Green Lady treating Ransom with noblesse oblige.

Jeff, quite right, I was talking about women in civil service administration jobs where life & death never entered into the picture. Mr. Luse, while it is probably the case that the police chief spends 96% of his time on administrative duties that are virtually identical to those of, say, a Dept. of Labor administrator, it is the other 4% in virtue of which he wears a uniform, and in virtue of which "police" is part of his name, and which he may be called at a moments notice to take command of a dangerous situation. These are the money moments. While a policeman is a public servant, he is decidedly NOT a civil servant univocally - the fact that a policeman can order you around, and puts his life on the line daily, makes the classes distinct, and his uniform is an emblem of that distinction. [And it is problematic to suggest that a police chief can certainly be a woman if a Defense Secretary or President can, because it remains a matter in contention that these latter posts really should be in a woman's hands, that there is NO reason to worry at that prospect].

Lydia, absolutely top notch. Women are not inferior to men qualitatively , so it would not follow from Jeff's comments that men generally ought to act as each woman's head generically.

Rather, one man is head of one woman, and in this relationship he is the superior and she the inferior, keeping in mind that the relation is not about WHO IS BETTER but about (a) who makes the final decisions, and (b) who lays down his life - including his personal preferences and whims - for the sake of the other. Any husband who makes the final decisions without paying attention to (b) is thereby abusing his authority, and ultimately denying the very basis for his authority.

But it is ALWAYS the case that the husband is the head of his wife, not just sometimes, or just when they agree to do it that way. And this stems from the inherent nature of the distinct roles of the sexes. We have suffered through at least 70 years of blurring of this distinction, so it is no surprise that the sense of it has been attenuated, but it has not been obliterated. Thank God.

So women are always inferior to their husbands? Please explain something: how does he get to enforce his authority if she disagrees with him and refuses to follow?

Tony explained the term "inferior." In our society, we're not used to using that term in the sense of a _role_ that he is using it in. We're used to saying, reflexively, "Everyone's equal." But someone has to lead. What "inferior" means in this case is that, properly speaking, the husband is the leader. That's the normal, natural course of events.

Could there be exceptions? Sure. If your husband wants to "lead" your family in black masses, you need to get yourself and your children outta there. In this sinful, fallen world there are many possible legitimate grounds for marital separation. Unfortunately. People are always so creative at thinking of new and horrible things to get involved in.

But this is rather like saying that a soldier should disobey a superior officer if the superior officer gives an immoral order. It's an exception to the normal working of the chain of command, and isn't to be invoked lightly.

Moreover, a wise husband will lead by example, by service, and with love. And as Tony says, a big part of his leadership will be his willingness to lay down his life, to risk himself for his family.

Complementarianism is no excuse for being an abuser or a jerk. I realize this should be obvious, but it's hard for egalitarians to believe it. And every couple will work out the way things work best for them. As Jeff says, a man can do "women's work" without demeaning himself if it's called for. There are going to be times when the baby needs to be changed or even given a bottle, and the mother is sick, tied up doing something else, or exhausted. Sometimes the arrangements of a family that believes in traditional gender roles will end up looking very "modern" in practice, because this is how it happens to work out best for them. If the mom is going to get post-partum depression if she misses too much sleep, Dad may have to do quite a few night-time feedings.

Egalitarians have far too rigid a view of things. If you aren't one of them, you must believe in chaining a woman to the sink in bare feet. In reality, a realization that God has made the sexes different frees people up to stop trying to force the genders to be the same in a marriage, which won't work.

I was talking about women in civil service administration jobs where life & death never entered into the picture.

Why? Jeff's post is premised on his distaste for female police chiefs and the uniquely male culture of certain lines of work.

it is problematic to suggest that a police chief can certainly be a woman if a Defense Secretary or President can

Your use of 'certainly' suggests something I didn't. To repeat: in choosing between a liberal lackey and a conservative woman, he wouldn't even have to think twice. No pause, no hesitation, no chin-scratching. This sounds like the intractability of a dyspeptic crank rather than the exercise of wisdom in defense of an inviolable prinicple. That's because no such principle is at stake. If an exception can be made, and circumstances are sufficiently dire, one ought to consider making it. But it doesn't sound like he would.

We can agree on the wisdom of Lydia's remarks. She's looking better for the post all the time.

Lydia said exactly what I would have, only better.

Please explain something: how does he get to enforce his authority if she disagrees with him and refuses to follow?

Karen, what you have described is the de-facto failure of the marital relationship. Obviously, if the husband gives an order knowing it to be immoral, he violates the basis for his authority, and the wife should disobey him, and if this happens regularly then she needs to be elsewhere, the relationship is broken.

If the husband gives an order that the wife disagrees with not because she thinks it is immoral but because she thinks it is imprudent, or an ineffective way of achieving family goals, then she is obliged to obey him, because that's what the meaning of authority is. If she refuses and this is a regular event, then the marital relationship again is broken.

But if a husband thinks he can "enforce" his authority with violence, he doesn't understand his authority either. If he cannot persuade her that his way is the best way, and he also cannot (through example and self-sacrifice) convince her to follow him out of natural, loving obedience to authority (even when he has not convinced her that he has the best approach), then violence won't achieve obedience except in the most superficial manner. Superficial obedience isn't worth much, and (again) would indicate the relationship is broken.

The short answer to " how does he get to enforce his authority" is through example, love, and self-sacrifice. If these don't do it, he doesn't get obedience.

To repeat: in choosing between a liberal lackey and a conservative woman, he wouldn't even have to think twice. No pause, no hesitation, no chin-scratching.

William, can't we turn that around the other direction, also: if the choice to command is between equally pro-life conservative people, one a man and one a woman, then he wouldn't even have to think twice. No pause, no hesitation, no chin-scratching. Because the obvious choice bears out in practice the reflexive understanding we ought to have of the distinct roles of the sexes.

I do tend to think that hard cases make bad law. So I'm not too worried about dire situations where somehow the only choices for police chief were an ideologue liberal twerp or...me. God forbid. If nominated I will not run, etc., etc. The world is full of men who would make much better police chiefs than I ever could, under any circumstances. Surely some of them live in Orland, right?

To repeat: in choosing between a liberal lackey and a conservative woman, he wouldn't even have to think twice. No pause, no hesitation, no chin-scratching. This sounds like the intractability of a dyspeptic crank rather than the exercise of wisdom in defense of an inviolable prinicple. That's because no such principle is at stake.

There are at least two inviolable principles at stake in the false dilemma you pose:

1. It is the duty of men, insofar as possible, to keep women and children safe from physical harm. Therefore no female policemen, firemen, or chiefs unless there just aren't any capable men around.

2. The work of police chief would harm Lydia McGrew. I like Lydia McGrew, she's a treasure to us and to her family, and it's an inviolable principle that she should not be deliberately done any harm.

Besides, there is no reason why a liberal lackey could not be an adequate police chief. I've worked with many a male liberal lackey, and some of them do their jobs quite well. The cool thing about liberalism is that it is impossible for anyone to live it consistently. We can usually count on liberals to be non-liberal in many facets of their lives.

Surely some of them live in Orland, right?

I would think so, Lydia. It boggles the mind that a department with eight to ten officers couldn't find anyone to recruit from past or present service to this position.

Incidentally, I thought it had to be a budget decision, but maybe I'm wrong about that. I just read where the outgoing chief (who supposedly had nothing to do with the selection process) approvingly told a reporter "the big macho types are not being hired now". In the same article the new chief says, "Now departments look for officers who are compassionate and can build a good rapport with people in the community."

Lydia McGrew:

Egalitarians have far too rigid a view of things ... In reality, a realization that God has made the sexes different frees people up to stop trying to force the genders to be the same in a marriage, which won't work.

Very insightful and worth repeating. Equality is by definition rigid and guaranteed to make everyone miserable.

To Bill re: "inviolable principles":

OK, before you call me on it, I admit that "unless there aren't any capable men around" makes the principle violable. Fair enough. And I have to grant that, from time to time, God sees fit to raise up a St. Joan of Arc (who nevertheless drew no blood with her sword). So if your point is that the principles I have outlined are not absolutely absolute under every imaginable circumstance, you are right. I'm not sure how that detracts from my argument, however.

"Equality is by definition rigid and guaranteed to make everyone miserable."

How does that work? Have any of you ever talked to or read the works of the many women who thought the traditional feminine role was a straitjacket?

Nah, we all live in 2010 and have managed to escape feminist writings...I'm sure a little Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem would cure us of our backward ideas.

Have any of you ever talked to or read the works of the many women who thought the traditional feminine role was a straitjacket?

Karen, Karen - are you kidding? The "traditional feminine role is a straightjacket" line was drilled into my head at school from kindergarten forward. Feminist and feminist-tainted works were required reading in every humanities course I ever took. It permeated the university economics program. The same message now dominates the culture at every level, from television to children's books to the corporate workplace.

Here's how equality makes everyone miserable. Believing in lies always ends badly. Those who believe lies are perpetually frustrated by the truth when it keeps showing up. You believe in equality, but you don't find it anywhere, and that makes you miserable. You try to force it on people, but they don't cooperate, and that makes you miserable. Your husband doesn't do his equal share of housework and child rearing, and that makes you miserable. Other people, whom you consider to be your equals, make more money, or get more breaks, or have more freedom than you do, and that makes you miserable. Still others, whom you also consider to be your equals, seem happy and content with their "straightjackets", and that makes you miserable. You notice that patriarchy, despite the best attempts of feminism to eradicate it, is still found everywhere - in the language, in place names, in old customs that refuse to die, in conversation, in the cultures of immigrants you want to like, in the courtesies of strangers, in a thousand unspoken assumptions - and that makes you miserable.

What is worse is that, the lies of equality being unmasked, there seems to be no alternative system for you. It's egalitarianism or predatory chaos. Going back to anything resembling tradition is simply unthinkable. That's a scary place to be, and that makes you miserable.

It is natural – in both the modern and medieval senses of that word – that leadership should fall to men because when things go to hell in a handbasket, they are the ones who die first. They are the first line of defense for the nomadic band, and by extension for the family. This is why they are endowed with greater physical strength than women, on the one hand, and with the ability to engender thousands of offspring, on the other. The latter capacity makes men fungible, and cheap. Women are expensive – that is to say, they are precious, and to be guarded and protected. It is not the number of men in a population that determines the size of its next generation, but the number of women. Five men and one woman can engender only about 20 young; one man and five women can engender 50 or so. Hence the origin of “king:” “kinning.”

Ceteris paribus, any nomadic band can afford to lose more men than women. Thus if a band faces a grizzly bear, it is only sensible that the men should bear the brunt of the danger – and should be ready to lay down their lives in doing so. Their natural role is to spend their lives in the protection and service of women. So men get to do the fighting, the hunting and exploring, and the dying. Prima facie, it isn’t a particularly attractive job description. Fortunately for men, the order of things has been ordained such that they are naturally inclined to enjoy such activities as hunting, extreme or violent sports, exploration and discovery, strategic and tactical deliberation, competition and struggle, tools, engineering and weapons, explosion, fire and demolition, and – not least – rough-housing, tomfoolery, pranks, hijinks, and pointless feats of derring-do (“Hey, Mom! Dad! Watch this!”). Almost everything that men qua men enjoy derives from the arts and sciences of war. “Man” in the old days meant “Human.” Female men were “weave-men,” whence “woman.” Male men were “weap(on)-men.”

Since in the competition for land and resources that band will most likely prevail that puts its most talented, experienced fighters in charge of its military policy, the natural leadership of men in any social organization is therefore a pretty foregone conclusion, and has been for millions of years. Maggie Thatcher is the exception who proves the rule. Both men and women – but especially the former – are wired to prefer deference to the strategic and tactical direction of men who manifest a good mix of talents in the arts of war, and their derivates. We don’t like to take direction from a dweeby engineer so much as from an engineer who is also an MBA; we prefer a quick and intelligent all-around athlete at quarterback to a stupid behemoth. And women prefer to mate with talented, far-sighted warriors: muscular, athletic, nimble, intelligent, resourceful, thoughtful, skillful, and courageous, that’s the ticket. Odysseus is perhaps the archetypal exemplification of the ideal husband – not the bit about the 20-year absence from home, perhaps, so much as the willingness to be absent for 20 years if that’s what the situation requires of him.

The leadership of the husband in the family then is kingship writ small. Kingship connotes more than paternity. The paterfamilias is called to the family’s offices of Foreign Secretary, Attorney (negotiator and advocate, but also champion), Engineer (husband and farmer), Treasurer (economist and man of business), and chieftain in war. These his outward facing roles are mirrored by his inward facing role of final Judge and Arbiter (“you just wait till your Father gets home!”), and of Lord (the office originally involved seeing to the fair distribution of food). That all these offices devolve most naturally to men is due in the first instance to the fact that all of them are founded at their root on the capacity to wield lethal force, should that become necessary in extremis. And lethality is the peculiar function of men. Since men as men must be the ones who first risk death first for the sake of their families, it is only fitting and sensible that they should take direction of activities that pose the risk of death.

In dire emergencies, families look to the father for direction. I have seen this again and again, as a boy, as an adolescent, and as myself a father. When things are looking really bad, Dad starts barking orders, and while Mom and the kids do indeed (if they have any brains at all) make free with suggestions and intelligence (which if he is anything but a fool he will take into account), still they will scurry to obey him. When the flood came, and the tornado, everyone just knew that my Dad knew better than my Mom about the physics of the situation, and about the lay of the land; he had known about these things without knowing he knew, because he had spent more time than she in playing war, and in building and destroying things. Men deal with the horses, the fire, the truck, the deadly blades, the power tools: they deal with danger, chaos, havoc. The whole point of manhood, in social terms, lies in the willingness and capacity to cope with danger usefully. When a crazy man accosted my family, or a slavering dog, they all shrank back; I leapt forward. It’s automatic.

But of course, without his subjects, a king is just some guy. His kingship then at the most basic level derives from the subjects in their subjection to him. And subjects are not robots; if they were, they would need no kings. True kingship, legitimate kingship, arises from a people’s willing subjection thereto. Anything less is mere tyranny, which is a defect of society, and at its root an act of violence against the nation, rather than in its defense. So a true king loves his people, and attends to them, if he has any sense; for a king who attends only to himself has a fool for a vizier.

None of the foregoing would be relevant, or operant, if we lived in a world where families dwelt in perfect safety. We don’t. But for most Americans, most of the time, we are close. That’s the only way we could have the luxury of experimenting with sex roles. But our bodies and brains are still set up for a dangerous world, with the result that most such experimentation is likely to engender conflicts between our in-built preferences and our practices. E.g., in merely financial terms, and treating the family as a business enterprise like a farm, it shouldn’t matter whether the husband generates more revenue than the wife. But somehow in practice it generally does end up mattering.

Lydia, you wrote:

My only very small quibble with anything Jeff has said is the reference to male headship in Scripture w.r.t. men (generally) and women (generally). I tend to think that has to be finessed so that in the most important instance it is the woman's _husband_ or (when she is under his roof) her father who bears that relationship to her, not all men generally.

Well, yes, it does need finessing and I'm probably not the one to do it. But the scriptural context is obviously not limited to marriage: man (general) is the head of woman (general). This flows from the order of creation. We also have this from St. Paul:

Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over the man: but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed; then Eve. And Adam was not seduced; but the woman being seduced, was in the transgression.

Again, the principle here isn't limited to the context of marriage or to the context of liturgy, as some scholars try to argue. "For Adam was formed first, then Eve." The specific injunction is based upon the fundamental natures of men and women generally. I am quite certain that this is not an absolute prohibition on women teaching or exercising authority over men in every context, but the specific prohibition in this instance is rooted in the general headship of men.

Reading your comment in its entirety, I don't really see a disagreement.

Karen, Karen - are you kidding? The "traditional feminine role is a straightjacket" line was drilled into my head at school from kindergarten forward. Feminist and feminist-tainted works were required reading in every humanities course I ever took. It permeated the university economics program. The same message now dominates the culture at every level, from television to children's books to the corporate workplace.

Or as Uncle Di put it, celebrating the so-called courageous women is like congratulating Godzilla for speaking truth to power.

Jeff,

I haven't read through all the comments yet, but catching your response to Karen just above, I find myself thankful I wasn't drinking a Dr. Pepper at the time of reading . . .

And then I felt a Chesterton quote coming on, but I'll resist until I have time to finish reading through things above.

Kamilla

LOL, great image Kamilla. Dr. Pepper no less.

Jeff, in addition to the sheer physical reasons, which touch on and tend to control (or at least influence) the psychological reasons, there are also the spiritual reasons. Much more could be developed out of the quote you had - Adam was formed first, and Eve out of Adam - indicating the Divine intention of order.

God is wholly ordered, and His creation reflects that. Which means that the order of first causes and secondary causes are set by His will. Since humans, with their reason, naturally are each capable of ordering themselves to their end in some measure (i.e. individually), but not socially, the principle of ordering between them for social purposes is also written in man's nature. The same inborn principle that God emplaced whereby Adam is the head of his family, also leads naturally beyond the family to society. And this extends to the development of spiritual order as well as physical ordering of the family and society: in the ideal at least, the father is the exemplar by which God's goodness and holiness is imaged to his young children, so that they learn loving obedience to God initially through learning loving obedience to their father, who sacrifices himself for them.

Jeff wrote: "Certain kinds of work, too, require male cohesiveness to be effective. This is especially true of physically or mentally intense work in which the stakes are very high. The presence of a woman changes the whole dynamic. The psychological and sexual tensions of a mixed group are entirely counterproductive in such circumstances."

The odd thing is, I don't think the same thing goes for the distaff example. If that's true, it would be yet another illustration or our differences.

and to Karen - yoo hoo, I'm here. Do you really think *I* haven't read those works? Funnily enough, most of those women were privileged middle-class suburban housewives who *did* have the opportunity to bust (sorry) out of their straightjackets. Care to give a guess what Betty Friedan's life work really was? It sure as shootin' wasn't cooking up hamburger casserole for Carl. Or any of a dozen other feminist whiner/writers I could name. Shall we really get serious about Egalitarian straightjackets, Karen? Do you know what happens to an Egal who begins to ask hard questions?

Mr. Luse, you rhetort would have a bit more punch if you got her name right - it's Maggie Thatcher, not "Meg". Or Baronness to you. You can earn extra-credit points, though, if you can tell me the origin of her nickname, "Daggers".

Kristor, your example of wilderness guiding was brilliant - it's not how someone leads when things are going well -- the measure of a man (or woman) is taken when things are going disatrously.

Lydia, I liked your quibble with Jeff (I think I saw that he said his argument does need refining). But you also said something which realy caught my eye - that the pastoral role isn't "literally" combat. Our battle is not against flesh and blood and all that, right? It reminds me of the Luther quote about where the battle rages and the proof of the soldier being if he stands steady in the breach. I believe that even though the pastor isn't the commander of a physical battle -- he *is* a commander, lieutenant, etc in a very real sense. It is the business of men to lay down their lives for women and children -- whether it is a physical battle or a spiritual one.

Funny you should mention CSL's sexism as well. A friend just sent me his editorial copy of "A Sword between the sexes" by Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen in which she attempts to do to Lewis what she and her sisters at CBE have already tried to do to St. Paul. Apparently, he wasn't interested in reading it.

Kamilla

"Certain kinds of work, too, require male cohesiveness to be effective. This is especially true of physically or mentally intense work in which the stakes are very high."

Thank you. I don't care who's offended. If I were in a dangerous situation involving one or more hefty thugs and a policewomen appeared--sorry--no matter how enormous her gun or her attitude, my fear would barely wane one iota.

No, that's not 'sexist,' that's sensible.

Tony, you wrote:

Jeff, in addition to the sheer physical reasons, which touch on and tend to control (or at least influence) the psychological reasons, there are also the spiritual reasons. Much more could be developed out of the quote you had - Adam was formed first, and Eve out of Adam - indicating the Divine intention of order.

Quite true, and thanks for stating it. An over-reliance on physical reasons for male headship is obviously a mistake. The ontological fact of headship exists no matter the age, disability, incapacitation, effeminacy, or even the absence of the male.

Men are men and women are women. I treat every woman as a lady, even the feminists, even the obviously masculinized women. At least at first. Tonight a woman complained to me that my handshake was not firm enough, so upon her departure I gave her a good manly Orland handshake and asked her if she liked that better. She said I was a quick study. :-/

[I trust my colleagues will not object to my deleting AngryLemming's vulgar and obscenity-ridden comment in its entirety. - Jeff Culbreath]

I think that the appropriate response to "vulgarity" and "obscenity" is to redact it, unless there is some fear that exchange of ideas might undermine some sort of petty hegemony, Jeff.

Come to my house, and I'll deal with your thoughts and arguments head on. Of course, based on your conduct in this thread, I don't think I have a lot to fear on that front.

No not at all. I tend to be blunt and write as I speak, which can be vulgar, though I'll check what I said and try to be less pointed. I'll try editing, so you can more readily engage it as it was intended: a counter point and perspective as strongly felt as yours. Although, in my defense to others, there wasn't any profanity/obscenity and I'd appreciate a retraction of that point, but as I said vulgarity may have been present, so I'll try again to engage what you've argued.
Where I work requires lifting up to 70lbs in quick repetition for 10-12 hour shifts.
On the dayshift the "good 'lo boys" have rule of the roost and males make up the vast majority of the actual laborers. Most of them grew up together and have played in sports teams together and go to bars and watch football together. Their man-hour efficiency (which I would hate to assume you also don't understand) averages at 80% annually.
The nightshift is mixed, both in respect of gender and culturally. Most of the laborers are female and of Asian decent. The supervisor is a weak-willed (relatively) but earnest man with 25 years experience working for this company. The lead is a cranky Sicilian decedent and Catholic adherent, with four or five life-times worth of experience in a wide range of positions and companies. The assistants to these men are: 1 a Kurdish immigrant (former refugee), and 2 a 5'1" 90lbs American woman. As far as authority is concerned, all four have rule of the nightshift roost, but the assistants are most directly involved. I should point out that the nightshift does not socialize much with each other outside of work, with the exception of Laos New Year when we get plastered together. The jokes are dirty and would border on the likes of those 4chan would find funny. In fact, the men are comprised of bikers, academics, and veterans, which lends an even saltier and masculine flavor to the environment. The women are mostly Asian, as I mentioned, and are slight-of-build to look at, but they can more than hold their own. This shift's man-hour efficiency averages at 160% annually, because of the unique synergy that exists when men and women work together as equals.
But, people [who don't engage women as equals] don't last long. After a week or two of pontificating about how the women are de-femininizing themselves, or are essentially feminists (a common reaction to strong women who have self-confidence, when the person ejaculating such nonsense is a weak excuse of a person hiding their insecurities behind a veil of prejudice and aggrandized precepts of "masculine" versus "feminine") [their] inability to keep up eventually leads to [them] running away from a steady paycheck. This is why we mock [those who adhere to a sexual caste system]: while [they] can fool [themselves] into believing the fault is with women who can do the job better than [them], we can see how pathetic [their] shriveled self-worth really is and how it connects to [their] emasculated performance.
What [one] reads into things tells more about [them] than [they] think. To those of us who embrace others as people, rather than trying to make them fit into our neatly prepackaged ideas of what and who they should be, [those people's] fears and concerns are so much cake and headaches. Really, [those people need to] grow up. [They should] [t]ry judging people on their actions and words, instead of on the basis of these vague conceptualizations and abstracts which are meant only to describe aspects of human existence. [They need to] [g]row up or "an hero", we're tired of carrying [their intellectually] dead weight around. Next [they'll] try to convince us that Intelligent Design and Evolution are radically opposed and create a pointlessly polarized debate of zealotry and fail.
Is there tension of a sexual nature? Oh, yeah, sure. But, that's where the jokes come in: if [one is] mature enough to realize that ...

[content redacted - Jeff Culbreath]

Nightshift is crass, blunt, and has numerous running jokes about gender roles, sex, race, language, religion, and homosexuality - and I remind you, it is mostly female and it is far more efficient and productive than [their] good ol' boy craptastic dayshift.

Hrm, no obscenities were harmed in this edit. Vulgarity is lacking too. Blunt, to be certain, but I think you just didn't like to have the numbers pointed out between two very different classes, which defy your argument/statement. I would appreciate it if you would debate or reply, instead of just trying to silence my reply.

Also, Jeff, to address snippets in this thread since my last comment:

- I see little different essentially between the "stock" Muslim approach to women and yours except in intensity. Also, I believe that you are utterly - to put it mildly - incompatible with orthodox Christianity.

- You continuously refer to the feminism of this new police chief. I have yet to see a concrete example; only circumstantial, subjective observations about her coming from a "hotbed of feminism."

- Based upon your comments thus far, I am sorely tempted to speculate that the definition of feminism begins, for you, with the inclination of a woman to wear pants.

- In the largely home-schooling, traditionalist social milieu of my youth, the only men I have ever encountered who espoused views similar to your own were misogynist psychotics who were sad little kings of sad little hills. Very uninteresting people compared to the other families, though I fear you might find them to be ragingly feminist. Which when I sit down and type it makes me want to laugh very hard.

Well, from the reposting by AngryLemming, I would certainly go out on a limb and say that there's nothing overly vulgar in there. Unless the labeling of anatomical parts for illustrative purposes is too delicate for Jeff's sensibilities.

Maybe I shouldn't invite you to my house after all. :)

AngryLemming, thanks for the edit, though it still needed work. I may respond later ... or not. Good night.

AngryLemming, thanks for the edit, though it still needed work. I may respond later ... or not. Good night.

How's this?

[No can do, AngryLemming. Please use your imagination and find some other way to make your point. - Jeff Culbreath]

the only men I have ever encountered who espoused views similar to your own were misogynist psychotics who were sad little kings of sad little hills.

Wouldn't bother me at all if you deleted that guy's comments too.

I appreciate the sentiment, Bill. Unlike AngryLemming, Der Wolfanwalt is flat out of arguments. He'll go away soon enough.

Wouldn't bother me at all if you deleted that guy's comments too.

Posted by William Luse | January 31, 2010 4:51 AM

...Wow. I'm just trying to get anything approaching a cogent argument out of this crowd. Still waiting, but if you would rather see me not here, then maybe I should scale back my expectations.

I appreciate the sentiment, Bill. Unlike AngryLemming, Der Wolfanwalt is flat out of arguments. He'll go away soon enough.

Posted by Jeff Culbreath | January 31, 2010 4:58 AM

Unlikely, Jeff. Go ahead and delete if you want to take the easy way out. I don't know what school of dialogue you're informed by, but in my estimation the delete key, applied to an interlocutor's argument, is not the tool of a brave writer secure in the strength of his arguments.

To date, in this thread, I have yet to see from you anything other than logic devoid of reason. You have made statements based on assumptions that you have not bothered to prove; and further you have refused to make the effort to do so when challenged. The former I can write off as laziness. The latter implies, at least to this interlocutor, that he is talking to empty space. Very chatty empty space, but empty nevertheless.

I await eagerly to find myself wrong.

Der Wolfanwalt seems to have the better point about this site and it's authors/adherents. Too afraid that someone might have a different perspective that could shatter their fragile hold on reality. Okay, if you'll keep deleting my posts, in spite of any real reason, than you cannot argue against my position, I'll say this one last thing:
Welcome to the internet.
Welcome to a global (aka universal, aka catholic) sphere of human communication. We may not always agree but, at least we are civil enough not to try to censor each other's experiences and the ideas and understanding which result from those social/ political/ and fundamentally human lives. If you didn't want to engage other people, one must wonder why you contacted us, the radical tacheon particles of the interwebs, and laid out your beliefs and position upon our doorstep. If you wanted to be an insecure voice among like-minded peoples, do that, without trying to sound or present your prejudices as anything more than the tripe we see when CP gets defended. Just because you have a right to an opinion doesn't mean your opinion is automatically right - it means you have the right to submit it to scrutiny. Scrutiny, obviously, being the last thing an ideologue wants, you retreat from an earnest engagement over and over and over. You even refer to your beliefs (all of you) as an ideology. Idiotes means "personal" or "closed" logy, being "language" or "world"; thus ideology means (and check your Heidegger and Vogelin) a closed personal world, as opposed to the real world. Where does it end?
Do I have to sound off to the same beat you pump to, or should I offer a pale unthoughtful counter-argument you can easily fabricate and dissuade? Are you that afraid of a real conversation? If so, get off my internet!
We assemble for an honest engagement. I thought you desired the same, but you have proven to me that you just want to indulge in a masturbatory session of like-minded people, without having to actually think or argue your position with others. I wonder if you have really reflected on how limited you have forced your view of people and the world to be because of this essential weakness, this phobia, of "otherness". Maybe you will one day, when you've had sufficient experience and gained an understanding of what it means to be Catholic and catholic, of what it is to be a human being. But, for now I'll let you teenagers play with yourselves. Lest I become truly peeved and bring you to anon's attention.
But, i digress, I aim to offer you a peaceful conclusion to our lack (due to your editing) of conversation. Your "butt-hurt" about women authorities has nothing to do with the women involved and everything to do with you. If you can't handle women as authorities, maybe you need to move to Laos or the Arab Emirates, where we view men and women as equals we have seen the double of efficiency and the nullification of the gender politics you hold dear (by way of your mind-set). We out-perform by 2-to-1. What possible reason can you give to reverse this unity of people? What reason can you give to posit that people should be categorized first, then engaged as human beings?
I know you'll probably delete this too, but at least I've tried to make a Catholic out of you. I tried to make you listen to reason. I've tried to talk with you, while you insist on talking at me.
You can only look yourself in the mirror as long as no one defies your position, you are weak. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, "Jeff"

the only men I have ever encountered who espoused views similar to your own were misogynist psychotics who were sad little kings of sad little hills.

Wouldn't bother me at all if you deleted that guy's comments too.

And I quote. Is this really the caliber of thinking this site seeks? Are you all happy to circle-jerk yourselves while the rest of us move on?
If they don't agree with us, delete it. Great! Aquinas was a rebel and didn't agree with the consensus of his time, so we can delete his posts as well, right? Augustine was controversial, he opened doors to Greek thought in Christianity, he interpreted Catholic as catholic, that makes him your enemy too right? We have nothing to fear but our objectors... that's the pint of your posting rules isn't it?
Come on, you don't want to hear from anyone other than yourselves? Are you still talking about the "greatest play ever" from highschool? Are you so lacking in adult interaction?
Prove me wrong, go aead, it's your editorial on life... you can make it whatever you are willing to accept...

Some curious points here.

"On the dayshift the "good 'lo boys" have rule of the roost and males make up the vast majority of the actual laborers. Most of them grew up together and have played in sports teams together and go to bars and watch football together. Their man-hour efficiency (which I would hate to assume you also don't understand) averages at 80% annually."

Hmmm...considering your description of the group, I wouldn't be too surprised. "Good old boys" tend to be resting on their laurels, and if their peers have been longtime friends, they've mastered the art of covering each other's asses.

Your nightshift group on the other hand, seems more diverse, and as such, has a greater motivation for efficiency since y'all are not "good old boys" and have far less room to slack off. That, and making up for the daytime shift's inefficiency, would naturally jack up your own. It's kinda like how, in basketball, rebounders have inflated rebounding numbers when scorers are having off nights.

In this case, you are comparing a hard-working mixed group to an inept male group, which is like comparing apples and elephants. Ceteris paribus, I'll bet that the group with more males will more than surpass the evenly mixed group in efficiency.

Nice try, but the example doesn't fly.

As for the other egalitarian:

"I see little different essentially between the "stock" Muslim approach to women and yours except in intensity. Also, I believe that you are utterly - to put it mildly - incompatible with orthodox Christianity."

"In the largely home-schooling, traditionalist social milieu of my youth, the only men I have ever encountered who espoused views similar to your own were misogynist psychotics who were sad little kings of sad little hills. Very uninteresting people compared to the other families, though I fear you might find them to be ragingly feminist. Which when I sit down and type it makes me want to laugh very hard."

These aren;t really arguments. As such, the claim that this guy has nothing left is valid. Personally, if the first comment is the starting point of your axioms, I don;t see why anybody ought to bother arguing with you. No better than those little kings of their little hills, really. The only difference is that civilizations are built upon the shoulders of little kings in their little hills, while civilizations are often undone by those who say that the little kings don't matter.

Furthermore, the second comment is about as plausible an argument as the "I never knew anybody who voted for Nixon" argument.

At least the real crusades engaged their opponents outright, this "10th crusade" is made of fail and weakness of mind, so far as they have shown. I will not edit myself, to satisfy your requirements for engagement. You have made no such equilateral move to actually engage my argument. Your pitiful attempt and your readers' pitiful attempt to close off your bubble of ideology from scrutiny negates the very "crusade" you claim to be undertaking. You want a crusade? Face me. Or don't you have the "balls" to do so? My argument from more matured understandings of theology than the centuries old and outdated Thomist approach has been slighted in order to uphold said ideology.
But, professing yourselves as ideologues does not absolve the fact that you are in our domain, you are on the internet. Anon does not forgive, anon does not forget. Words which even I must take with a grain of salt and some apprehension. Because anon is the name of the legion of people you are trying to argue with. I am but a peak of an iceberg, you are but a flake of snow. Your server is anon's playground, remember it well. There is no need of your censoring and fear - engage others as human beings, capable of rational discussion, and you will bare the profit of their trials. Denying us a voice is akin to Ek denying a voice to Luther, who was at heart a devout Catholic monk. But Ek's satanic actions led to a schism which lasts until this day, by way of exploitation of Luther's position. Silence gives consent, but it also breeds contempt.

Your nightshift group on the other hand, seems more diverse, and as such, has a greater motivation for efficiency since y'all are not "good old boys" and have far less room to slack off. That, and making up for the daytime shift's inefficiency, would naturally jack up your own. It's kinda like how, in basketball, rebounders have inflated rebounding numbers when scorers are having off nights.

Thank God someone wants to put forth an argument, rather than delete opposition!

Granted, but we tried that. Five years ago, the same leadership was executed in a group of males, spanning between the mid-20's to the mid-50's the result was 100% efficiency. Much better than dayshift, but nothing compared to the more mixed group. On record, nobdy compares as a processor to Vatsana, she is 4'10" 85lbs, soaking wet. But, she fills every order at no less than 99.9905% accuracy and 310% productivity. But, while she is an outlier, she is also close to the norm on nightshift. I used to expect the same results as you posit, but my experience has forced me to change that position and opinion.
In the end, if I had to rely on someone else to do something, whether to save my life or fulfill a job, Vatsana would be the first name I call for (before even Marleenken) simply because there is absolutely no ego involved. She wouldn't even participate in this discussion because there is "too much drama" and not enough "measure" (action/proof, if you'll forgive her ESL, which to be technical is actually English as a fifth language-EFL).
Though I humbly submit to any difference of experience you might submit to the dialogue, Johnathan. Certainly, we seek to enrich and expand our understanding beyond our limited scope, yes? I do, which is why I find myself Catholic, after all these years of turmoil and debate. At least we can engage each other honestly and forth-rightly in some cases... whic draws into frame the author of the original article and his refusal of opposing or differing positions. Hegemony created many ills, I hope it doesn't also cause a vacuum in this blog's meager following...

To be more "tl;dr" sensitive, Johnathan, the good ol' boys were given the same leadership and stil failed to make 100% consistently. This is not a game, but rather a livelihood to our shift's people. That is a major difference. I would argue that your perspective is too prevalent among our counter-parts on dayshift, and thus they have become inept. But, the multi-national I work for still acknowledges them as "world-class". 80% is 30% better than our multi-national partners in China, the EU, and in Germany (specifically). A few years ago I would have said the same, but years of data have shown otherwise: the mixed group is simply better, by a factor of .8, both in production and (more importantly) in quality (which is closer to a 2.1). This is not apples-to-elephants, as you presume, but a statistic based on many years of examples and experience. To date their are four outliers which defy the average (which you may find both interesting and frustrating): Evan (American, male 230lbs) Lewis (Italian-American 250lbs), Vatsana (Laos, 80lbs), and Marleenken (American, 85lbs) are the most valuable and distinguished of people in their department. Both Vatsana and Marleenken can and do lift 70lbs (over 80% of their body-weight) repetitively through the night. They are some of the most trusted and authoritative of processors, often giving orders to others (Vatsana unofficially being an assistant). So, what would you say, given that more expanded explanation and justification?

While I'm at it, and mods are apparently asleep, you might be interested to note, that I even reached your corner of the blogsphere. As things stand, my presence will afford you a crowd of readership you have yet to conceive. This is not a matter of pride, but a word of caution, anon follows in my wake, and I do not know why (yet). [Jeff should not have to monitor his thread night and day for foul language. Cut it out, A.L.--Language edited by LM]
Even the FBI have given anon sway and power. I suggest you do the same...

Lemming,
What asylum did you escape from? I'm not being a jerk, I sincerely want to know.

Step2,

It's not an insane asylum, it's the "Progressives School for Argument". I can tell because A.L. has used the stock response they all use when get tired of having to play by someone else's rules. They always, always, always ascribe fear to their opponents:

"Are you that afraid of a real conversation? If so, get off my internet!"

Although this particular graduate seems to have minored in Algorisms as well.

Kamilla

My argument from more matured understandings of theology than the centuries old and outdated Thomist approach has been slighted in order to uphold said ideology.

This quote may be of interest to Dr. Feser.

But, professing yourselves as ideologues does not absolve the fact that you are in our domain, you are on the internet. Anon does not forgive, anon does not forget. Words which even I must take with a grain of salt and some apprehension. Because anon is the name of the legion of people you are trying to argue with. I am but a peak of an iceberg, you are but a flake of snow. Your server is anon's playground, remember it well. There is no need of your censoring and fear - engage others as human beings, capable of rational discussion, and you will bare the profit of their trials.

This may be the single most ludicrous paragraph to ever appear on W4. This is not 4chan AngryLemming, and your references to it and its pathetic culture largely fall on deaf ears. Just drop your silly anon speech and leave; with each post it becomes increasingly apparent that you have little of value to contribute to the discussion.

You have made no such equilateral move to actually engage my argument.

While I usually am willing to take an intellectual opponent at face value and try to respond to them seriously, I am having a little trouble here. Angry Lemming, in particular, posted a long and very detailed account of the workplace and its proficiency for 2 different groups. The net detail is that proficiency is much higher in the mixed group than in the all male group.

And....?

Yes, you conclude...? What, precisely do you conclude from this? You didn't actually state the specific conclusion, before wandering into abusive references to this website and its posters.

OK, I am not totally blind, I can see the direction of your argument, even
though you don't actually make the argument. You might have concluded one of (or both of) the following: (1) a bunch of males with all their brawn couldn't produce nearly as much work as a bunch with diminutive females, so brawn is over-rated, and Jeff's argument falls to the ground. (2) The night shift, with its diverse make-up and mixed overseers is actually responding BETTER than the males in the day shift respond to their male managers.

If you had actually stated the conclusions, of course, the problems with those conclusions would come popping out. In number 1, nothing Jeff (and Kristor, and Lydia) have said precludes the possibility that females, or a group that is mixed, cannot work productively and effectively. Nor that females cannot move moderately heavy loads all day. But that's not what the post of police chief is about: moving 75lb loads is not command, and it does not involve regular life-threatening danger. The response of Jeff's, that your comparing your work to that of police chief is an apples to elephants comparison, is still valid. But let's ask an opposing question: what if the Asian women were called to lift a 250 Lb. load and carry it 100 yards once in a while, while being in someone's gunsights - how well would they "produce" in that situation?

The second optional conclusion is not quite as far off the track, but still fails. The managers of the day and night shifts are still not people in command of those responsible for risking their lives to protect civilians and overcome danger threatened. The 2 teams' responses to their managers are not battle-responses. So you are still comparing apples to elephants.

Der Wolfanwalt, I was unable to actually locate an argument in your comments, just a string of commentary on how stupid and self-righteous the rest of us are, along with a simple flat contradiction or two.

I am generally happy to engage people who want to present arguments (in reality, my friends generally roll their eyes at my foolish willingness to engage arguments that seem to have even a smidgeon of reasonableness to them). But what I have seen so far is belittling language without the arguments to make such belittlement marginally acceptable even as a rhetorical tool.

I failed to see any actual discussion when I happened upon this blog. It consists primarily of people sitting around agreeing with each other in broad principles, picking over details, and calling themselves crusaders. Okay, crusaders, show your mettle and squash the little gadflies who have come to bother you, because that is what we are; and if you can't actually manage that, then your potency to act must match your minds in smallness.

Again: all I have been hoping for is actual explication and arguments. All I have gotten is "Oh, he's out of arguments." Not satisfying. I do get some enjoyment out of the self-righteous flailing and the moronic chauvinism, but that's candy, and I want meat.

So, if you insist on me taking the first real step in this dance, then here you go:

Certain kinds of work, too, require male cohesiveness to be effective. This is especially true of physically or mentally intense work in which the stakes are very high. The presence of a woman changes the whole dynamic. The psychological and sexual tensions of a mixed group are entirely counterproductive in such circumstances.

Men also respond much, much better to male authority. As do women, for that matter. Even those who give lip service to feminism bristle under female authority when it is actually exercised. And because it is so unnatural, women in authority often feel like they have something to prove, thus distorting their judgments. A chief of police needs the respect of his officers and the men of the community. A female chief - despite the “gender neutral” attitudes most men will express when asked – just isn’t going to get it.

Consider the case of Jean D'Arc. She was a woman. She was chosen by God to break out of her womanly role and take on a manly role. By your logic, this was a bad decision on the part of God. He would have been better off raising up a boy for this work. It would have been much better to male cohesiveness, the avoidance of sexual tension, and men's natural predeliction for male authority. Silly God, choosing a woman to do a man's work.

Of course, God is all-wise and all-knowing. He chose Jean D'Arc for His own inscrutable reasons, but one thing that seemed to bother Him little was her gender. What is more, the villains of this story were the ecclesiastics and nobles who scoffed at her for precisely the same poor reasons as you advanced against your female police chief.

Now, you will probably point out that the holy Saint was called explicitly by God, and that the police chief was not. Well and good, but not the point. Vocation is a calling by definition, even if it is not as exciting as being spoken to by saints or by God Himself. The vocation of a priest is every bit as valid as the Maid of Orleans' vocation as a soldier. So long as the calling is toward the Good, and the person pursuing the vocation can actually fulfill the vocation's requirements, then I fail to see any issue. Certainly the preservation of some general delineation of masculine and feminine roles is both uninteresting and uncompelling, without some other element to reinforce it. If this whole role integrity argument is to be the sum and summit of your word on the matter, then my propositions to you are two: 1) You cannot hold that St. Jean D'Arc was approved by God to lead men in battle; and 2) your understanding of the sexes and the relationship between them is not grounded in any reality more meaningful or concrete than that of genitalia, and you have made assumptions on that ground that you are not entitled to make.

For the record, I don't hold to AngryLemming's "welcome to the internet" basis for holding you in contempt, because I don't need to. If you want to give the lie to your claims of manhood by not meeting your opponent head on and in the open, then you can use whatever excuse soothes your sensibilities. That is really your affair. However, I will say that redacting comments - or deleting them outright - has never stood in my mind as characterized by anything if it was not characterized in part by intellectual cowardice. The fact that you would rather expend effort politely calling me an ass than by showing me to be wrong to my face merely re-emphasizes that judgment.

Well, you've got something to chew on, now. I would be very interested to see what comes next.

Does this satisfy your requirements, Tony?

your understanding of the sexes and the relationship between them is not grounded in any reality more meaningful or concrete than that of genitalia,

Oh, come, D.W. How about upper body mass and strength, testosterone producing heavier bone mass, the ability to conceive? What does it say about us that we have all these pregnant "sailors" in the Navy? What does it mean about even sheerly practical things like attrition, loss of investment in training, etc.? Brian Mitchell is very good on this in _Women in the Military: Flirting With Disaster_.

There are tons of purely empirical reasons for eschewing the feminist model of society.

I would note here that since feminism has taken over our laws, an employer isn't even permitted to "discriminate" on the grounds of pregnancy. So wonderful. Orland could end up with a pregnant police chief or on-the-beat cop and couldn't ask her to step down for that reason. And if she goes into fighting bad guys and gets the baby killed, I guess that's just the breaks, huh? An unborn child _was_ killed in the Nidal Hasan murders at Ft. Hood recently. Nobody was even supposed to say, "What the dickens was a pregnant woman doing being a soldier?" The notion of a _warrior_ has been completely lost. This does not bode well for the protection of our society, including our women and children.

These are obvious empirical points that should be the sheerest common sense. Feminism is a war on common sense.

Feminists are also great exponents of the "hard cases" or "special cases" argument. Hence, as in your comment, Joan of Arc is suddenly an argument for feminism in society generally, and that in defiance not only of common sense but (if you're going to bring God into the matter, which--for the record--_you_ are doing) plenty of New Testament Scripture delineating a very strongly sexist view.

P.S. We do redact for language and explicit sexual talk, D.W. The idea that it is "cowardice" to do so is ridiculous. We also ban trolls, which you don't appear to be, yet. And, yes, we reserve the right to decide who is a troll. We actually have many liberal commentators who state and argue their views quite forthrightly and have banned scarcely anyone in the entire history of the blog, so by no means do we suppress debate and disagreement per se by the use of deletion, editing, or banning.

Sorry I couldn't tell from the context, Lydia, but are you essentially explaining Joan by the logic that it was a special circumstance? That sort of fluff might fly around here normally, but I'm afraid it doesn't really work as an argument. Why should God make a special case out of her? He is rational - supremely so - so this should not be hard to reconcile with the theory of gender roles advocated herein.

Also, I agree that the New Testament contains language that has a strong sexist view. The Old Testament advocates genocide. I don't think that either are moral imperatives, in spite of them being explicated in Scripture. I also don't see quite how that fits into the whole argument, but being that the statement was contained in a structure that was emphatically not a sentence, I'm having some trouble processing it.

Maybe it's because I feel like normal definitions don't apply in here, but I have yet to see a "liberal" commenter. Of course, in the regular world I'm also not a feminist or a progressive. As to your integrity in redaction and banning, I'll just have to take your word for it, since you've denied me the ability to actually see and judge for myself.

Gosh, you obviously didn't read the APA thread. Or many other threads. In fact, you appear to be rather new around here.

Yes, I'm saying that Joan of Arc was a special case, if indeed she was called by God. (I'm a Protestant, unlike Jeff, so I at least hold open the possibility that she was mistaken.) But think of it this way: If I have lots of reason to believe that God does not believe in the overthrow of traditional gender roles but rather that he created them, and if a woman shows up whom I have lots of reason to believe was sent by God and who leads armies (though Jeff points out that she didn't actually kill anybody), the apparent conflict can be resolved by concluding that God approves in general of traditional gender roles but does not consider exceptions to destroy such roles. As actually, they don't. Any parent knows that exceptions to rules don't necessarily destroy the rules and don't create the kinds of problems that you were trying to avoid by making the rules.

Moreover, I would point out that Joan of Arc was a _maid_ (ahem) and that there was no question of her being a career woman in any modern sense nor of her demanding that she not be discriminated against in being allowed to go out and lead the army if she got married and got pregnant. The comparison to a contemporary police chief making a life's work of it is...kind of childish.

Nor, again, is it necessary to bring in God's will or the Bible to see that something like traditional gender roles are sensible and that demanding that women be allowed to do all or most of the things that men do is insane. I think Jeff's point about male dynamics in high-stress, dangerous situations (backed up by Kristor and by lots of other human experience) is an extremely legitimate, empirical point, and is particularly relevant to a woman police chief or officer.

I think God created gender, and that there are consequences gender brings to the party. Motherhood, for example. Does that create some hierarchy of roles that overrides the talents and qualities - also given by God - that a particular woman might possess? No. Why? Because the God Who revealed Himself to man is not a sodding idiot.

I might point out that "maid" in this context is synonymous with "virgin," so all that is being pointed out here is that she was very young - not having been given in marriage - and morally upright.

Also, if we're going to take away the claim that gender roles are ordained by God - which claim, brace yourself, I would categorically disagree with - then you actually have no leg to stand on, because there is no reason why roles cannot adapt and change over time. "Because they can't," seems to be the main thrust of the argument here, which is less of a manly stand on principle and more of an intellectual collapse.

Although that has been somewhat par for the course in this thread.

Lydia, remind me why you're blogging? You are willing to take advantage of the work of feminists in obtaining the opportunities for you to get an education and have a public role yet you return the favor by telling all the rest of us shut up and go back to the kitchen. Please, either change your mind about what women can do or take your own advice and allow the men to do all the talking.

Ah, Karen, I heard a wonderful answer to that very question when it was posed to one of my heroes, Phyllis Schlafly, a few years back when she was in town. She said that she credits her ability to do all the things she has done not to feminism but to the free market, which has eased women's work so much and given women so much more time.

Mr. Jeff Culbreath, a staunch traditionalist, does not weldome my comments on his thread because of feminism. He does so because he and I respect and value each other. Neither of us owes that to feminism, and I do not owe the great relationship I have with my male colleagues here at W4 to feminism in any way, shape, or form. I am not "taking advantage to the work of feminists" in blogging here.

D.W., I think that it is possible to discover something about what is natural for human beings without explicit reference to God's having made it natural. I suppose if one denies teleology _altogether_, then one is going to have to go with the amorphous notion that gender "changes over time," though frankly, I think one would still have to be a fool or an ideologue to think that men and women _have_ changed right now in such ways and to such an extent that a woman police chief is perfectly fine. There are reasons from observation to believe that maintaining a male-bonded atmosphere in police work and keeping out of it those who are the bearers of life is a good idea.

But I see no reason for one's having to be an explicit theist to have some idea of what is natural. And believe it or not, human nature _doesn't_ change all that much, not at root. That, too, is a matter of observation.

You keep alluding to observations and reasons, but I don't actually see any. You say that somehow Joan was an exception to an otherwise inviolable rule, without really showing how that is necessarily so. All we are expected to do here is feed at the trough of your δοξα (doxa)? Forgive me if I find that lacking in compulsion.

Incidentally, nobody has yet offered me a reason why it was okay, in your estimation, for Joan to exercise authority over men, and to order them to their deaths. I'm looking mainly to Jeff as the Catholic in the house.

As for you, Lydia, I was going to say that you would have to be a fool or an ideologue to think that the nature of men and women hasn't changed over time. I personally find Karen's reasoning to be far more compelling. But, then again, she's actually offering reasoning here.

"However, I will say that redacting comments - or deleting them outright - has never stood in my mind as characterized by anything if it was not characterized in part by intellectual cowardice."

You know, there really should be something of the equavalent of Godwin's law for these cases where liberal/progressive types invoke fear/cowardice as their opponent's motive when the real problem is their own inability to conduct a discussion within the given paramaters. The internet may be a big, wide world, but this little corner is the province of Paul, Jeff, Lydia, et al, and if they ask you to take your shoes off at the door, you do so. Why? Because this is their place and we are their guests.

If you can't play by their rules, well, there is a whole 'nuther world out there.

Now, when we're talking about proper spheres of influence and why, beyond simple body parts, men are made to be warriors and women made to be nurturers - consider the relative expense to societal survival of sending men to war or sending women. A purely evolutionary argument with no reference to creators and their silly, restricting rules. Men are cheap, women are expensive. A society can rebuild itself much more quickly with one man and five women than it can if the ratio is flipped. God doesn't give us these "rules" because he's a cosmic killjoy. He gives us these rules because that's the way things work.

There is a paradox to be found in the freedom we have when playing within the rules God sets for us. My own experience bears this out. I've never seen on the faces of others and felt myself so much joy as I have among those who live out this, "understanding of the sexes and the relationship between them [that] is not grounded in any reality more meaningful or concrete than that of genitalia." You see, what we know that we know that we know is: This is the glory for which we were created.

Kamilla

To quote Ronald Reagan, "There you go again."

Karen, this feminist penchant for re-writing history is really quite tiresome. Us wimminfolk has bin gettin' eddicated for years and years and years - try reading a little of St. Paul, or that awful papist Thomas More and what he thought of his daughters' education, ever heard of Hildegard von Bingen? Shall I go on?

Lydia, I love Phyllis Schlafly - perhaps we should also remind Karen what Mrs. Schlafly did before she became so famous. To her response, I would add one thing - the printing press. Education became more available to *everyone* with the advent of that nifty little gadget.

Kamilla

No matter how rarely they may be encountered in actual experience, the extremes of circumstances drive the design parameters for any system. A system that is designed to cope with extreme conditions may actually operate somewhat less efficiently under normal conditions than its less robust, battle-adapted alternative (as Angry Lemming’s day shift underproduced its diverse competitor). But a system that is not designed to cope with extreme conditions will be destroyed when they eventually arrive. In a dire emergency, my money would be on the good old boys who are “adept at covering each other’s rear ends.” Those are just the kind of guys I want on my team when it hits the fan; we will communicate with each other wordlessly, save and cover each other without having to think about it. Don’t tell me it doesn’t work this way; the only reason I’m here to write this is that it does. The female guides always griped that we men didn’t do our share of the scutwork around camp, and I’m sure they were correct. We spent a lot of time in camp on push-up contests and making stupid jokes. How the scutwork all got done when women formed no part of the crew, I have no idea.

Another way of saying the same thing: it isn’t the normal environmental conditions that impose severe selection pressure on populations, but the abnormal. When a band of pacific matriarchal agriculturalists is left to its own devices in clement weather, it out-breeds nomadic patriarchal raiders from the snowy steppes. But when the two meet, or the weather takes a turn for the worse, well, I hardly need to finish the thought, do I?

The human societies that still exist on earth have been informed by extremes; ditto for our bodies. It is the extremes of experience that set our nature. In an emergency, the women quite properly shrink back, and the men quite properly step forward. The whole species is set up to cope with emergencies.

Flexibility is of course also advantageous. If all the men but one have been killed in combat, it is time to move the last man to the rear and let the women take the brunt of the fight. This is why Viking and Samurai women were expected to be able to wield a sword, even though they were never placed in the front lines. And there are always variations from rules, such as Jeanne d’Arc and Maggie Thatcher. But variations from rules are one of the ways we distinguish rules, and vice versa; so that, no rules, no variations, but rather only chaos.

Finally, also, in normal circumstances, when selection pressure has eased off, system design parameters can afford to have a lot of play, so that social experimentation can proceed. And such experimentation may well from time to time discover novel solutions to the basic design problems faced by the system designer that work better than the solutions that have traditionally been used. But most innovation is lethal, and much of the innovation that isn’t lethal isn’t particularly good. Most innovation is stupid. That’s why Edison said success is 98% perspiration; the perspiration is generated by all the work involved in shooting down stupid new ideas. Such as the work now being undertaken on this thread.

"opportunities for you to get an education and have a public role yet you return the favor by telling all the rest of us shut up and go back to the kitchen."

Educated minds produce more than a series of cliches. Please stop bashing the kitchen. Cooking is perhaps the greatest art of the ordinary. Anti-kitchen feminism has impoverished our cuisine and our family table traditions. It is an adjunct of fast food colonialism, to borrow academic phraseology.

As for the original subject, one major benefit to limiting the police leadership to men is that men know other men's physical talents and emotional limits from the "inside." The sexes will always be a bit mysterious to each other.

How much has television distorted our view of policing? The stereotypical criminals are reversed on television: the tatooed thug is innocently accused, the mild-mannered bureaucrat wimp is the sex criminal, etc.

And every time a criminal or co-worker challenges the woman cop, she gets a Girl Power moment and never a smackdown. Unreality reigns.

"Cooking is perhaps the greatest art of the ordinary."

Kevin Jones, my hero!

I got a Cuisinart for Christmas this year. It's one of my favorite Christmas presents, ever.

But bread? When my mother brought a bread machine home, I almost threw her out on the street. That infernal machine is now well-hidden and my bread is kneeded by hand.

Besides being art of the ordinary, cooking is great therapy. Perhaps that's why so many feminists seem angry and frustrated?

Kamilla

P.S. I apologize for the interlude - perhaps it will help if I offer the explanation that cooking has become one of my great joys since I threw off the chains of religious feminism and embraced something much better.

I personally find Karen's reasoning to be far more compelling.

That's a rolling-around-laughing moment, D.W. Okay, I hereby hold myself excused from arguing with you anymore. You think a series of incredibly silly feminist cliches ("You should stop blogging because you're a woman and all the opportunities you enjoy you owe to feminism," "Have you read any feminist authors," etc., etc.) are *compelling reasoning*???

That's pretty hilarious.

But when the two meet, or the weather takes a turn for the worse, well, I hardly need to finish the thought, do I?

Kristor has a particularly good point in today's world, when the feminist West is in fact coming under competition from a group of something like snowy raiders from the steppes. Our feminized leaders' leadership in these circumstances has, shall we say, not been inspiring.

It seems to me that the loss of Christian masculine chivalry has been an _enormous_ loss for the West. Our boys are being raised to be sex-obsessed barbarians and our girls to be prostitutes. (Literally: I read recently that casual prostitution is becoming a new "thing" among ordinary high school girls.) The only alternative that liberals can think of to everybody's-the-same feminism is Islam--and they aren't doing a very good job at responding to Islam, either.

The chivalry of the Christian West was a unique thing. I'm not even romanticizing the 12th century. Not by a long, long shot. I like computers, and I'm probably less enamored of parent-arranged and very young marriages than many of my fellow conservatives. But I remember chivalry even from my own childhood, even from less than forty years ago. Men could make gentle jokes about "the ladies" without getting slapped down. Female cops were very rare. The expanded role of women in the military was just getting going under Jimmy Carter. The feminists hadn't had a chance to make much headway yet. Was it idyllic? No, I'm not saying it was. Only some men opened doors for ladies at that time, and the idea of rising when a lady entered the room was pretty much already passe. But we could still remember what it was like, what that unique _flavor_ was of Christian gentlemanliness--Christian even among men who were not Christians. Now, it has passed from memory, and whole generations have risen up who have no idea what I'm talking about.

Both women and men have suffered, and so has basic safety in our country. This is a sad, sad thing.

… the loss of Christian masculine chivalry has been an _enormous_ loss for the West. Both women and men have suffered, and so has basic safety in our country. This is a sad, sad thing.

And how. My 23 year old daughter lives in Chicago, 2,000 miles away from my protective guard. It bugs the crap out of me, night and day. I can’t rely in the slightest degree upon the supposition that she is in her upper-middle-class neighbourhood full of athletic twenty-something men surrounded by chivalrous gentlemen, upon whom I may implicitly depend to spring eagerly to her aid and comfort, or to her defense, should that become necessary, simply on account of the fact that her womanhood makes it their duty so to do. No. I must instead understand that she is _alone_.

When I was about ten to fifteen years old, I traveled all over Chicago on buses--little white girl, all alone. When I wanted a book that they had in a different branch of the Chicago Public Library, I would phone the CTA and find out how to get there on buses and elevated trains, and then go by myself to get the book. Mind you, it probably wasn't safe, even then. But I would guess it is far worse now.

Lydia, I don't know why exactly it is that you blog. If all you want to do is hear the sound of your own voice and those who agree with you, then feel yourself absolved from paying attention to me. The fact of the matter is that calling me a feminist only emphasizes the insular absurdity of your ideology. I have spent far more of my life being called a male chauvinist by people far more intellectually stimulating than you. I like Karen because she can make a pithy observation - which I have no skill at - and you can't respond but by "laughing."

Kamilla...maybe you misunderstand how this sort of thing works. You write a blog, and you have commenting enabled, then you deal with the consequences. Presumably, opening the floor means that you want dialogue. To which point, one of two things can happen: you can either use commenters to hone your own argument, increase your own understanding, and possibly change your mind; or you can use them as an aid to some sort of intellectual she-boppery. I'm pretty clear on what's going on here.

Doesn't mean I'll stop reading - as I've been doing for a while - and where I deem appropriate, call out the absurdities that I expect to encounter. If I happen to encounter an actual conversation, then I will dance a jig. If not, then I'll keep plugging away. Either way, I'm here to stay, although for the present I've seen the dead horse at issue here beaten and violated sufficiently to satisfy myself.

I'll be back for more frolicking later.

Oh, don't worry, DW, I've been around long enough to know how this all works. When I am in Ukraine, I take my shoes off at the door to someone's house, because that is the custom there. When I am at my aunt's house the shoes are off as well, but there I can put my stockinged feet up on the furniture. When I am a guest, here, of Jeff's, Paul's and Lydia's, I try to play by their rules.

That's how it works. Everyone has rules and a polite guest doesn't bang around, rooting through cupboards and spitting 'baccy on the light taupe carpeting.

Kamilla

"To be more "tl;dr" sensitive, Johnathan, the good ol' boys were given the same leadership and stil failed to make 100% consistently. This is not a game, but rather a livelihood to our shift's people. That is a major difference. I would argue that your perspective is too prevalent among our counter-parts on dayshift, and thus they have become inept."

The leadership is not the point. It's the culture. If they're still the "good old boys" who grew up together, it doesn't matter who leads them if their approach to the work is the same.

"Both Vatsana and Marleenken can and do lift 70lbs (over 80% of their body-weight) repetitively through the night. They are some of the most trusted and authoritative of processors, often giving orders to others (Vatsana unofficially being an assistant). So, what would you say, given that more expanded explanation and justification?"

I would say that these women sound like immigrants. And as such, immigrants often have a higher motivation to work harder and increase efficiency. (Plus, third world women tend to do a lot of heavy labor, even at home. Although, third world men can more than match them. I once saw a scrawny male child porter who could not have been more than 60 lbs lift his own weight in sacks.) Tell me, how many of the men in the earlier groups have guaranteed pension and/or job security? As such, job security here does not necessarily mean a system of policies that make getting fired much harder the more senior you are. It could be as simple as being a good friend of the boss.

So, you have an immigrant-dominated mixed workforce (immigrants work much harder than they would in their old countries, which will account for the diparity with their home countries) which is highly motivated to keep working versus a bunch of guys who will take their work for granted still. Heck, I'm sure they can achieve a 160% efficiency rating. They just don't bother to. You are still comparing apples and elephants. As such, the conclusion drawn from the comparison is invalid.

Oh, and before I forget, somebody brought up Joan of Arc.

Some people seem to think that she was some kind of world-beating Amazon. They forget that her main role in the victory of Orleans was to serve as a religious inspiration to the (surprise!) men to whom it would fall to actually take Orleans.

The woman could barely swing a sword. She was called by God to rally a people whose faith was flagging and an army whose confidence was in ruins. She was not called to fight herself. Her own personal forays into battle have been rather disastrous.

A woman inspiring an army is not so uncommon. Heck, a woman being inspiring so often stems from her own femininity, and as such does not make it so out of place in history.

Lydia, remind me why you're blogging? You are willing to take advantage of the work of feminists in obtaining the opportunities for you to get an education and have a public role yet you return the favor by telling all the rest of us shut up and go back to the kitchen. Please, either change your mind about what women can do or take your own advice and allow the men to do all the talking.

Karen, your gross misrepresentation of Lydia's views is not appreciated. I'm sorry that you seem unable to imagine any possibilities between Feminism and the Taliban. But the fact is that intelligent, articulate and "public" women have always had a place in Christendom and didn't need the help of feminism to get there. Three women who predate modern feminism by centuries have been named Doctors of the Church. Etc. The contributors and commenters here are not cartoons invented by your Women's Studies professor, nor are they stuck in some 1950s time warp (as delightful as that prospect might sound). Maybe consider engaging their ideas rather than throwing old slogans around?

Presumably, opening the floor means that you want dialogue.

Then how about giving us some dialogue, DW? At present your contribution here amounts to nothing more than "nyet! nyet! nyet!". You've been treated well here. You've also ignored every argument and wasted your undoubtedly valuable time hurling thinly-veiled insults. I'm glad Lydia has put you and your whining on ignore. I'm long overdue for doing the same.

Jeff,

First of all, let me welcome you to W4 -- I'm a regular reader and commenter and I think your first post is a worthy contribution to the already high standards your colleagues have set for you. As for the substance of the debate between you, D.W. (I like using his initials because they remind me of Arthur's kid sister, Arthur the aardvard from the children books), and even Bill Luse, I would summarize the core clash of ideas as follows:

1) the traditionalist position on gender roles suggests that reason and observation (not to mention the Bible) tells us the sexes are designed for different roles in society and therefore society (and the individuals, since we are ultimately social creatures) will function better if we play those roles;

2) the liberal position on gender roles either suggests that the sexes are not designed for any special roles -- society imposes roles on the sexes (or rather men impose roles on women) -- or the more nuanced position of both D.W. and Bill Luse is to suggest that yes, there are general differences between men and women but because there will always be specific individual cases of strong women and weak men, and therefore we should design social institutions to be flexible to accomodate those individual cases.

Have I done a fair job of summary?

I heavily favor Jeff's position, which I've come around to recently, only because I believe now that social cohesion and social institutions are much more fragile than I once thought and as they become infected with liberal ideas (e.g. let's treat these women over here just like they were men) cohesion starts to break down and the institutions don't work as well. Is it any wonder that we found massive breakdowns of order at Abu Grahib when the place was commanded by a woman and run by mixed units of men and women? Yes, men can screw up plenty (and have screwed up plenty historically), but when you throw women into the mix it is much, much harder to achieve any kind of serious success in developing civilization (which is Kristor's point as well -- I like his systems metaphors).

I would add, too, that when the idea that policy should take large account of exceptional women comes to mean that _anything_ should be open to women because they might be exceptional, then we have to deal with the fact that ideology tends to warp people's ideas of who is really exceptional. As I said above, I really, really doubt that, even granting the legitimacy of "gender-blind" tests for suitability for police chief, the candidate selected has just by chance turned out to be clearly the best for the job.

The appeal to unusual or exceptional cases has turned out in American society to be a bait and switch. We were told that women had to be allowed in principle to be hired as cops, because there might be exceptional women whose lives would be blighted if they couldn't exercise their overwhelming vocation to be cops, we were asked rhetorically, "What if a woman could do it just as well as a man?" and so forth. And what happened? The height, weight, body strength, etc., standards were all _lowered_ to accommodate the women. It happened almost instantaneously. So much for "just a few exceptional women."

Now, I think it's kind of interesting that D.W. started out by saying that he understands not wanting women in a combat role, but he remains very annoyed with those of us who don't think a woman should be a police chief. Yet it's been explained I think quite rightly that a police chief should _have been_ on the beat--which means, ready to take on something like a "combat role" at a moment's notice--and should _be able to_ do on-the-beat work even now. This seems to me quite convincing. It's a bad idea to find jobs that de facto involve a lot of paperwork but for which previously you also had to be able to do men's work and then just to say, "Well, since these are mostly not physical, not combative, etc., we'll just _define_ the job that way and ditch the fungibility." Bad idea. And obviously an idea driven by a desire to let a woman take on the job. If that isn't a priority in itself--and I see no reason why it should be--then neither a woman nor a short little man should be hired. A police chief should be a policeman--hence, a strong, tough guy able to do the full range of ordinary police work. Something similar has happened with the attempt to cordon off things women can do in the military. Flexibility and fungibility have been lost.

Oh, so certain genders are better at certain jobs? Oh totally: My wife could tell you that. She's a doctor of polymer physics and she'll totally tell you why men should not be physical scientists.

It's simple: When you work in a lab full of LITERALLY million-dollar instruments, men are a friggin' liability. They don't listen to instructions. They don't read the manual. They assume that if the million-plus-dollar digital metal vaporizer doesn't do what they want, then surely the right application of muscle and persistence will force it to. Just push the buttons HARDER and MORE FREQUENTLY. 'Cause nevermind that there's a 40-gram charge of GOLD (yes, gold) in the reaction chamber: the virtues of PATIENCE, CAUTION, and LISTENING TO INSTRUCTIONS surely are for sissies and women. A Real Man just forges ahead and if he cracks the chamber and gold-sublimate accretes to every metal surface in the system, well that's just a sign that men aren't really cut out for the whole "physical science" thing.

So yeah: Let's keep the genders where they belong. Men should still to soldiering and manual labor. My wife and her girlfriends should meanwhile be the only ones in the labs and clean rooms.

*When I was about ten to fifteen years old, I traveled all over Chicago on buses--little white girl, all alone....Mind you, it probably wasn't safe, even then. But I would guess it is far worse now.*

Actually, Chicago is an extremely safe city, moreso now than at any time in the past 40 years or so. Chicago had 970 murders in 1974; in 2008 it had 510. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago (and hey, lookie there: a picture of a female CPD officer! I dunno guys: She looks pretty damn capable. I wouldn't want to cross her.)

And having white skin in Chicago makes you MORE safe, rather than less. You'd better believe that a violent criminal in, say, Garfield or the Near North, knows that attacking a white woman will result in a world [language edited LM] descending on him. (That whole "violence and coercion" thing, y'know?).

But I'm not done yet: I actually come from a family of cops. NYPD cops, I might add. And yeah, my uncles and grandfather were a bunch of gruff, tough guys. One of them was even a K9 officer (dog handler, although the dogs they use are significantly tougher and bigger than most small bears).

They all started as patrolmen and ended as sergeants or captains. I remember several framed medals of distinguished service. One of my uncles has even got 2 bullet fragments inside him.

They were also, like me, skinny as beanpoles--maybe 145 pounds, sopping wet, with their boots and guns on.

As a little kid, I'd always ask them, "Did you ever shoot anyone Uncle Tom/Dick/Harry?" to which the answer ALL of them gave me was, "No; I've never pulled my gun and I hope never to have to." Moreover, they gave the impression that only MORONS had to ever pull a gun. Or wrestled a perp to the ground. Or done any of the super-macho, rough, tough stuff that everyone seems to assume is the daily meat and drink of cop-work.

J,

While it is true murders are down in comparison with 40 years ago, we did just have a spike in murders between '07 and '08 along with a couple of other types of what are known in the trade as "index crimes" (e.g. robbery and burglary). As for white skin, years ago when I did some volunteer work in the projects, I was told the same think about my white skin being helpful to my safety BUT that was in the context of gangs wanting to protect their drug trade. A sexual predator would not weigh such considerations when thinking about his rape victim -- why would he care about the consequences of attacking a white woman -- he just wants to gets his sick and twisted thrills. My advice to any single white woman is stay away from black neighborhoods at night, have male escorts in any neighborhood at night, and just don't stay out too late unless you are part of a relatively large group.

Lydia,

Great follow-up comments and they reinforce for me the idea that liberal ideas really are a destructive virus that work in insidious ways to destroy good social institutions.

Why would black neighborhoods be less safe than white ones for "white women" at night?

J, are you white? If you are, do the police officers in your family think it's ok for your family members to walk alone in black neighborhoods?

I should specify--your female family members.

J,

It sounds to me like your Uncles and Grandfather were just lucky and/or lied to you to protect you from the harsher realities of life (I suspect the later). I also think you still don't understand how the physical reality of being a man is different from being a woman -- a 145 lb. man will still have more muscle mass and potential for lethal force than a 145 lbs. woman.

As for why black neighborhoods are less safe than white ones, I could offer all sorts of reasons, but since that would take us far afield, let me simply state that it is an empirical reality that black neighborhoods here in Chicago (and probably in 99.9% of all major cities) are less safe than white ones. As for your scare quote around white women, I'm confused. I was talking about Kristor's daughter, who I assumed was white, but of course I could just as easily ammend my statement to "less safe for women, black or white, at night." Most violence in black neighborhoods is black on black anyway, although there is more black on white violence than the opposite in our society, but again, this subject is off topic.

I apologize for introducing the race issue by a single word. My only point is that I was, rather surprisingly, safe doing what was probably a foolish thing even some thirty years ago. I believe that in general our society is less safe now than it was then (and I'm not claiming that it was very safe then), and I think this is related to changes in concepts of masculinity and the loss of a particular notion of a strong male who is not therefore a nasty barbarian but who protects women and the vulnerable. Perhaps a better type of example here would come from the horrifying recent cases where people have been beaten up or worse while bystanders do nothing. Some of these come from England and Europe as well as America. In England and Europe notions of legitimate self-defense are even more eroded than they are in the U.S. And these notions are closely related to concepts of masculinity, though I do advocate women's being capable of self-defense as well to the extent that they are able for emergencies.

"As a little kid, I'd always ask them, "Did you ever shoot anyone Uncle Tom/Dick/Harry?" to which the answer ALL of them gave me was, "No; I've never pulled my gun and I hope never to have to."

That has been my experience too. Viewing police work as "combat" is dated and counterproductive. Jeff, too many city councils have had to write too many checks with too many zeros because of macho, moron cops who exceeded their authority. That is likely why they are looking for someone who can be effective and responsible (Btw, I read too fast - seems like your force now has two female officers).

"In your view, then, the traditional Christian and Islamic understandings of the sexes differ not in substance, but only in measure. Is that what you mean to say? Or do you mean that my own views are inconsistent with orthodox Christianity?"

Nothing personal or silly here. The various religions are mere superstucture. The likelihood that a given person is going to hold strongly to traditional views is a wiring issue and a person so wired is going to cleave to the traditions they have available.

Christianity in the West benefitted from the liberalizing influences of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Even then coverture and other indignities were the rule until recently.
In the West, not even the most reactionary Christianist would introduce legislation to execute gay folk. Not so with Christians in Uganda. Social conservatism is the problem, not this or that religion.

We have women on police forces because they have worked out. Views on the roles of women are irrelevant. If it works, the traditional views must be wrong, adjustments should be made and we move on. If one prefers personal relationships to be a certain way, well, there is a lot of flexibility in a nation of 300 million.

"God is wholly ordered, and His creation reflects that. Which means that the order of first causes and secondary causes are set by His will. Since humans, with their reason, naturally are each capable of ordering themselves to their end in some measure (i.e. individually), but not socially, the principle of ordering between them for social purposes is also written in man's nature."

Just-so stories should be a source of personal comfort not rationalizations for limiting the goals and aspirations of strangers.

Man in his God-given role of protector? Not so much, if one reflects on it. The whole grizzley bear thing is a red herring. The largest threat to women are other men whose women are in turn threatened by men who protect their women. Dimorphism is the problem not the solution, here.

BTW, in hunting and gathering societies, women and children are usually far more productive then adult men in providing regular sources of food.

The lead is a cranky Sicilian decedent

Well that explains the difference in productivity, the lead is dead.

a 145 lb. man will still have more muscle mass and potential for lethal force than a 145 lbs. woman.

Maybe, maybe not, but likely true on average. Also very likey the muscle mass would be distributed differently.

We have women on police forces because they have worked out.

Al, I think your history is a little over-simplified here. Are you unaware of the litigation that opened police forces to women and required that requirements for height (for example) be modified to bring women in? Are you unaware of the deliberate, top-down attempts to stamp out "discrimination" against women in all jobs? I suggest, again, sections on this topic in Levin's book _Feminism and Freedom_.

Real world reality check:

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/arpaio_tactics_causing_fear_and_loathing_in_marico.php?ref=fpa

*We don’t like to take direction from a dweeby engineer so much as from an engineer who is also an MBA...*

Yeah, that was the management theory at NASA for a while: Ignore the poindexters with the pocket protectors, pay attention to the guys in sharp suits instead. The results were disappointing.

*It sounds to me like your Uncles and Grandfather were just lucky and/or lied to you to protect you from the harsher realities of life*

Actually, I bet they didn't.

*I believe that in general our society is less safe now than it was then...*

Whereas I believe human life is neither more nor less precarious now than it's ever been.

*. . . Perhaps a better type of example here would come from the horrifying recent cases where people have been beaten up or worse while bystanders do nothing.*

Yeah. 'Cause that never used to happen.

We have women on police forces because they have worked out.

They have worked out because aside from the other issues that have been raised, (1) men pick up the slack in responding to dangerous situations and (2) women have not really been tested. Moreover, one could say that because of the relative peace in most communities police departments should be downsized or eliminated completely. But what sort of officer does one need if an incident involving armed criminals arises?

If it works, the traditional views must be wrong, adjustments should be made and we move on.

Just because a system is perpetuated does not mean one can assume that it "works."

As if the Arpaio article is at all relevant.

*Are you unaware of the litigation that opened police forces to women and required that requirements for height (for example) be modified to bring women in? Are you unaware of the deliberate, top-down attempts to stamp out "discrimination" against women in all jobs?*

I'm sure you think you're making some kind of good point here, but I have no idea what it is.

*But what sort of officer does one need if an incident involving armed criminals arises?*

Um, an armed one?

*But what sort of officer does one need if an incident involving armed criminals arises?*

A cool-headed one?

*But what sort of officer does one need if an incident involving armed criminals arises?*

Robocop?

shut up and go back to the kitchen

This is rather ironic/hilarious - watching Chopped the other night, the hosts were remarking that it was the first time they had two female chefs as the finalists, and they were crowing about what an advancement this was for wymen. So they are let out of the kitchen and then they complain that they are left out of the kitchen?!?!

By the way, cooking shows and FN in general has some of our favorite programming for what passes for the sad level of entertainment on TeeVee these days.

*Just because a system is perpetuated does not mean one can assume that it "works."*

Fine, sharp guy: What does define a "working" system? 'Cause really if something perpetuates but that isn't a goodenuf criterion for it being called "working", then a heckload of stuff in our world needs reevaluating.

Meantime, I'm pretty sure if my car runs then I can assume that the engine "works".

*(1) men pick up the slack in responding to dangerous situations*

Actually I bet they don't.

*...and (2) women have not really been tested.*

Actually I bet they have.

And what about the positive counter-argument: Taken as an obvious given that law enforcement does NOT primarily consist of bustin' heads but rather of building community trust and keeping "eyes on the street" to prevent crimes from even happening in the first place (a la the "Broken Windows" theory), maybe women make BETTER police officers since people are more inclined to trust them, confide in them, report small but crucial pieces of information to them, etc.

*But what sort of officer does one need if an incident involving armed criminals arises?*

Who ya gonna call?
GHOSTBUSTERS!

*(1) men pick up the slack in responding to dangerous situations*
Actually I bet they don't.
*...and (2) women have not really been tested.*
Actually I bet they have.

JC: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
MP: Yes, but that's not just saying, "No it isn't."
JC: Yes it is!

J,

We had the following exchange:

*I believe that in general our society is less safe now than it was then...*

Whereas I believe human life is neither more nor less precarious now than it's ever been.

While crime figures for the U.S. have gotten somewhat better over the past 20 years, one of my favorite bloggers known as Mencius Moldbug (you should check him out, although be warned, he may blow your mind away) loves to link to this report from the U.K. to show how well modernity has responded to crime:

http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf

Check out page 15 for the money graph. It is hard to argue with such an arresting (forgive the pun) figure. The British, at least, used to know how to police their streets better.

Fair criticism, gary.

Then again, we've had significant numbers of lady cops for, what, 30-40 years now? The idea that every Woman Jane of them is just coasting on a mix of political correctness and her put-upon male colleagues seems . . . improbable.

*While crime figures for the U.S. have gotten somewhat better over the past 20 years, one of my favorite bloggers known as Mencius Moldbug (you should check him out, although be warned, he may blow your mind away)*

My mind remains firmly in place. So, according to that graph, absolute incidence of crime went up about 90% over a century in Britain. Okay, but the British population rose 105% during that time period.

'Cause really if something perpetuates but that isn't a goodenuf criterion for it being called "working",

Um, what do you think would happen vis a vis the EEOC and state civil rights boards if various police departments started saying that they didn't think the lady cop thing was working out too well, or not in most cases, or anything even remotely along those lines, and started firing quite a few women? Hmm?

It's not exactly like we're living in a world in which reality and whether it "works" or not are the only constraints on whether a practice continues. Far, far, far from it.

I'm always interested when something comes up involving a woman police officer that no one can openly discuss the gender issue. There was a case a few years ago where a woman pulled someone over, he jumped out and jumped her and left her wounded by the side of the road. She was hailed as a hero. No one wanted to say, "You know, she wasn't really successful." There was no consideration even of the possibility that she was more likely to be jumped because she was female and the guy thought he could get away with it. I sympathize with police who get wounded in the line of duty, but _just_ getting wounded in the line of duty doesn't _automatically_ mean you're a good cop or a hero.

"*I believe that in general our society is less safe now than it was then...*"

Agreed. But that has next to nothing to do with women working in police work. I would say that the world over violent men are becoming more openly daring. Even more women are becoming more willing to express their anger.

I would suggest that it is a good idea for all youth including women, be trained in self defense. Unfortunately, if more women are able to defend themselves then those men who would normally prey on defenseless women will have to practice their violence on more men and maybe youth.

"Um, what do you think would happen..."

We would likely abandon the project. What you have done here is to construct a neat little box in which you never have to question your "first principles". If we persist in hiring women for jobs that those principles deem unworkable then it must be political correctness run amok. After all, those principles (or your interpretation of them) could never be wrong.

pb, I referenced Arpaio because he has been the very model of good law enforcement for many on the right.

Lydia, you are conflating two very different things - the tendency we have to misuse the term "hero" and the specific situation which happened to involve a woman officer. Plenty of male officers are successfully assaulted during stops, because all officers are extremely vulnerable at stops, especially if they are alone. A number of years ago two El Segundo officers were killed during a stop. They were males - stops are dangerous.

Arpaiao is a model of law enforcement on the right? With respect to illegal immigration. Perhaps also with respect to state sovereignty. A sheriff is usually also a politician since it is an elected position, and Arpaiao may be in trouble for acting like one.

TL,

You said, "Agreed. But that has next to nothing to do with women working in police work. I would say that the world over violent men are becoming more openly daring. Even more women are becoming more willing to express their anger."

You continue to provide me with amusement, my old friend. Why in the world do you think violent men are becoming more openly daring? Do you believe Brian Nichols would have been half as daring if the Sheriff guarding him had ben a man his match in size rather than a woman about half his size? And do you think that, just maybe, women are becoming more willing to express their anger because they are assisted in doing so by the vision of lady cops walking the beat and soldierettes guarding prisoners at Abu Graib?

You're the poster girl for the old Chesterton quote, "Men can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough."

By the way, though I know our feminist friends will not appreciate my bringing this back up, I think Jeff made a good point originally and in several comments since: the de-feminization of women in making them tough for work such as police work. I myself don't think (and I expect Jeff doesn't think either) that this is successful enough for the sake of the work itself. But to the extent that it is, it's a shame for the women whose femininity has been sacrificed. I had a friend some years ago who refused to admit that the widespread use of women in the military had been bad for the military. (He taught an academic subject at West Point at the time.) But he was pretty outspoken about how it had been bad for the women. It kind of surprised me that that was where it hit him.

All,

J. says the following in response to my link:

My mind remains firmly in place. So, according to that graph, absolute incidence of crime went up about 90% over a century in Britain. Okay, but the British population rose 105% during that time period.

Apparently J. can read statistical data as well as he can reason. The report clearly shows a graph with data that dramatically depicts the rise in "indictable offences per thousand population" -- so the report controls for population increases! And from 1900 to 1997 the number goes from 2.4 to 89.1, which is not even close to 90%, but for those of us who can do basic math is actually over a 3,600% increase in crime. But J's mind remains firmly in place!

We would likely abandon the project.

Come on, you can't be this unreflective. Accusations of 'bigot' and 'sexist' would fly like fireworks on the fourth of july if a police chief said something like women officers don't work. And if they started letting women go--just women--yeah, I'm sure liberals of the country would consider the matter settled and "abandon the project".

None of this means a thing as to whether women are actually fit for police work, of course. Let's not be completely absurd, though.

"Her position is one of wielding power and authority specifically over men. Tell me, is it healthy for any woman to aspire to this? Does it not indicate some deep spiritual and psychological problems? "

Sometimes I really wonder whether the posts on here are intended as satire.

Come on, you can't be this unreflective. Accusations of 'bigot' and 'sexist' would fly like fireworks on the fourth of july if a police chief said something like women officers don't work. And if they started letting women go--just women--yeah, I'm sure liberals of the country would consider the matter settled and "abandon the project".

None of this means a thing as to whether women are actually fit for police work, of course. Let's not be completely absurd, though.

Matt Weber, I found it hard to believe that he meant that the project of having women cops would be abandoned, but you seem to interpret it the same way.

It has to do with whether women are fit for police work just in the sense that they _cannot_ make the argument that they are on the police forces "because it works." Since we know that they would be kept on *even if it didn't work*, that's a poor argument.

And part of my point is that it doubtless would be regarded (in court, too, to the tune of compensation and required reinstatements) _illegal_ for police departments to start firing their women officers after drawing the conclusion that "this isn't working out." Women were originally forced on to police departments by legal requirements, by litigation, and the role of potential litigation hasn't just disappeared as by an invisible hand.

There hasn't been some sort of natural period of experimentation where it just _happened_ to be discovered in the laboratory of life that this works just great. Therefore the advocates of women in police work shouldn't talk as if we are all so naive that we are going to accept that this is continuing "because it works." If you know anything about civil rights laws, you know this just isn't true.

Something similar is well-known in terms of women's role in the military. It isn't the case that it's just turned out that it works great. Rather, dissent is suppressed on this subject. There is no doubt that no man could openly advocate the position in Brian Mitchell's book while at the same time advancing right now in his military career.

What amazes me is that liberals deliberately put in place these sorts of forced requirements--"You _will_ have women in these positions, and you _will_ get in trouble if you refuse or if you say this isn't working"--and then simultaneously they want to draw the triumphalist conclusion that, hey, look, it's working just fine or it wouldn't be continued. Just how stupid do they think we are?

>>The employment of violence and coercion by women - in a way that is habitual or defining for them - turns them into something beastly.

The employment of violence and coercion by ANYONE turns them into something beastly. Congratulations to this woman for breaking through as the first woman police chief in the area. I hope she is able to display grace and courage in overcoming the bigotry she will undoubtedly experience from the terminally insecure.

Ugh, importing a chief from outside the area is just about assured to be a bad idea; if they avoided that, and promoted only on ability, nothing wrong with a lady Chief-- you'd know that she didn't have an ax to grind on her own guys.

Reading a few comments-- Lydia, feel free to quote ME, as a former second class petty officer in a technical field, as saying that I've got doubts about females in the military. There's nothing inherently WRONG with it, just needs to be watched so the loads of BS I saw doesn't get through. No different in kind than making sure that folks' buddies don't get an unfair advantage, it just happens to be to a greater degree.

Matt:

The employment of violence and coercion by ANYONE turns them into something beastly.

So by definition being a policeman or a soldier makes you beastly. Perhaps we should have a special "retirement" program for them after 10 years or so of beastifying: Ah, sorry, you've hit 10 years, report to the meat factory for processing, you beast. Thank you for your service, sorry it turned you into a beast. I hope we enjoy the sausage.

Just out of curiosity, isn't it possible to wield violence and coercion in the name of the common good, and be noble doing it?

The swearing-in story, with photo:

http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_14315792

Ah. She's got experience writing grants. She enjoys working on budgets and on program development. And she's going to build relationships with other departments. In other words, she's a seasoned back office weenie.

I'm sure she's a very nice person and a solid professional. But she sounds like she's getting ready to be a museum curator or something. Just what we need against the orcs.

Jeff Singer,
Mencius is another one of those who escaped, but he is at least a good storyteller. From the report you linked to it could also be reasonably concluded that the laws have changed in 97 years, since the prison population and homicide rates have risen only a fraction of the amount of "indictable offenses".

So I guess we're all supposed to be OK with this?

Slain New Orleans Officer Eight Weeks Pregnant
http://www.officer.com/web/online/Officer-Down-News/Boyfriend-Says-Slain-New-Orleans-Officer-Was-Pregnant/2$40017

Which part, Jeff? The boyfriend (and presumably father of her child) bit? Or that fact that a slain officer was a woman (and a pregnant one at that)?

You know, I stopped watching "Extreme Makeover - Home Edition" some time back. The episode that did me in was a home re-building for a couple with small children and, if I recall correctly, they were both police officers. She had been shot while on duty, nearly bled to death at the scene, and ended up in a wheel chair.

Before I managed to turn it off, I believe I started screaming at the idiot box, something about how nice it was that other people were paying for their foolishness.

In what world is it good and right to put women, particularly mothers of small children, in the line of fire?!

Kamilla

Wow, I brought up that very possibility upthread. And it's real. Of course, it would be discrimination for them to take her off the line of fire when she became pregnant, right?

But let's not forget, as one of our commentators above told us: The comparison of police work to combat is _outdated_.

"Before I managed to turn it off, I believe I started screaming at the idiot box, something about how nice it was that other people were paying for their foolishness."

Would your reaction be the same if it was the husband in the wheelchair? Other people would still be paying.

Had she been injured as the result of a traffic injury would that mean women shouldn't drive?

"But let's not forget, as one of our commentators above told us: The comparison of police work to combat is _outdated_."

The police are not the military and vice versa (posse comitas and all that). The nature of all occupations (including home makers) is that some injuries will occur. Police work is not all that dangerous in terms of actual injuries compared to many occupations and factor tranportation injuries out and it is less so.

You want problems on the job? Put a woman in charge and see how long it takes. Women come into the position with ideas of proving they are qualified. Thus, they sooner or later, start trying to prove it. Not by doing a good job but, by trying to flex their new "power" over the men they are trying to control. They have come into the working world with the inborn ideas that they are NOT qualified for these jobs and positions and therein lies the problem. But, instead of acting like responsible adults about it, they tend to instead, act like a brats! I have been on several of these jobs and time and again I have left those jobs. As a matter of fact I am looking again at this moment because of women who are indeed running my place of employment into the ground. Ran by the mother and two daughters. They took over the business when the father passed away and the business has become a bigger mess by the month. They have stripped away everyones vacations and ALL OTHER BENIFITS yet, they continue to go on two week vacations three times a year and flaunt their latest purchases! All the while expecting us, the employees, to literally "Call-in" EVERYDAY to see if anything is going on. In other words....hang on their string! I am not the only one looking to leave. Several others are as well. Do I think women belong in charge? HELL NO!

Ti:2:4: That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children,
Ti:2:5: To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.

If women went home and took care of their own children, husbands, parents and homes ... how many of our problems would disappear nearly over night?

Debra

Interesting. Our new Chiefette lists only four pages of interest on her Facebook page. One of these is an ABC television comedy called "Modern Family" ( http://abc.go.com/shows/modern-family/about-the-show ). Unsurprisingly, the show features a male homosexual "couple" which adopts a girl from Vietnam.

"If women went home and took care of their own children, husbands, parents and homes ... how many of our problems would disappear nearly over night?"

That's easy - none.

Such a interesting idea. I intend to return to this site again soon.

Jeff, in case you haven't heard of this story already: Santa Cruz Inmate Escapee Terrorized Pre-School Class. The female deputy was only 5'3". Everyone's ignoring her sex, height, and weight were probably factors contributing to his successful escape.

Hre's the url for the article (http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2010/11/30/santa-cruz-inmate-escapee-terrorized-pre-school-class/)

She's been placed on leave: http://www.chicoer.com/breakingnews/ci_18161116

Huh. No idea why?

Not really, just hunches not worth mentioning.

So, apparently our chiefette is suspected of using funds from the department's K-9 Unit to purchase .... an animal for her own self:

http://www.orland-press-register.com/news/chief-7382-police-orland.html

Under condition of anonymity, three independent sources confirmed that Carr faces a possible criminal investigation regarding whether she misappropriated more than $1,000 from the K-9 Unit fundraising efforts during the recent Glenn County Fair.

Those sources indicated she used the funds to purchase some type of animal for personal use.

What can be learned from this? Embezzlement is one of the most common crimes committed by females, but they don't have a corner on it by any means. Women without men do seem to have an unusually strong interest in pets, but there's nothing especially sinister in that.

No - it appears that the city fathers, in their rush to appoint the first female police chief, simply failed to grasp that any woman disordered enough to want this kind of job is predisposed to have other serious moral disorders in her life.

Watch, it'll turn out she was purchasing a snake. Joke. (I actually did once meet a woman who had a boa constrictor for a pet, though...)

Please, let it not be a snake! The jokes would never end around here.

I have to say, the city worked extremely fast on this one. The K-9 Unit fundraising at the fair happened only a week ago.

I thought the joke would be that she got a car. (Though I know nothing about her marital status.)

*cat

The Chiefette apologizes (it was a horse):

http://www.orland-press-register.com/news/regrets-7391-saying-actions.html

"The Orland Police K-9 Booth was important place to be in order to promote the program that we wanted to bring to the community and raise funds to support the program and get it up and running. No one else was available to be in the booth on Saturday and I had a friend go to a horse auction for me to bid on a horse. My bid was accepted and I needed to give the money for the horse to my friend to repay her. On Sunday, I was unable to get the cash needed from my account. I used $1,300 of the K-9 money to pay for the horse knowing that it would be replaced on Monday when I could get to my bank. On Monday I went to my bank, withdrew the monies to replenish the fund. The total amount was deposited into the Orland Police Department K-9 account."

"No - it appears that the city fathers, in their rush to appoint the first female police chief, simply failed to grasp that any woman disordered enough to want this kind of job is predisposed to have other serious moral disorders in her life."

What moral disorder? All I see is a 24 hour bridge loan which is a judgment issue. Of course, no male executive has ever done anything like this (misuse of client funds is a major cause of State Bar disciplinary actions).

A number of questions do arise:

1. One normally goes to an auction with a cashiers check(s) and/or a roll of benjies. Why didn't she go to the bank on Friday?

2. Her friend couldn't carry her another 24 hours?

3. The police chief didn't know someone she could ask for a 24 hour loan?

4. Why didn't she call the city mamager and ask if there was a problem with her writing the fund a check (I assume the funds were in her account)?

This sort of thing tends to happen in small communities where things can get sloppy. Of course the "barefoot and pregnant-keep the wimmin folk in their place" contingent revels in this sort of thing.

2. Her friend couldn't carry her another 24 hours?

Good catch. It doesn't add up.

What moral disorder? All I see is a 24 hour bridge loan which is a judgment issue.

It's a judgment issue in a business, maybe, where you have some kind of understanding with the boss. But a police department? I mean, this woman has spent years working in government offices. She knows the rules.

Anyway - you're right that the story being told here doesn't rise to level of moral disorder that I had in mind. Still, greater disorders should be expected under the circumstances, for reasons hashed out thoroughly in this thread.

The lady chief resigned today, just a few days after being re-instated: http://www.orland-press-register.com/news/chief-7857-police-ending.html

This paragraph rates a "hmmm" from me, considering that "anti-bullying" has had, shall we say, political ramifications somewhat different from its obvious meaning:

Poczobut also released a brief statement in which he thanked Carr for her service and said she “will long be remembered for the anti-bullying awareness as she worked with the school system on this issue.

Ah, same here, Lydia. I'm against bullying - saw far too much of it in school myself, and that's one big reason we homeschool - but today it seems to be "gateway cause" leading to the promotion of other kinds of mischief.

"Equality is by definition rigid and guaranteed to make everyone miserable."

I've seen too many counter-examples of that to buy into this statement. My husband and I have a very equal relationship -- and yet (shock, horror!) we are blissfully happy. We have a wonderful marriage. The same is true of most of our friends. I could not be happy in an unequal marriage. I find dominance of any sort unhealthy. My husband would not want a submissive wife. He's a very secure and confident guy, and I think it would make him uncomfortable to have someone deferring to him. Self-respect is important to him. I enjoy what could be called "feminine pursuits" -- being with my children, teaching them, reading to them, decorating the home, cooking, etc., while my dh has a high-powered, high-earning job. I used to have a very good job and actually earned more than he does, but I don't mind being the one to stay home with the kiddoes. I still do a little work on the side, which helps pay for luxuries and holidays and keeps my hand in so I can go back to work when we have a bunch of kids in college. This role, while "traditionally feminine", was not foisted on me. I accepted it by choice. My dh would have been happy to stay home with the children if I had wanted to continue working. We work things out -- on an equal basis. We're both prepared to give up things we want, and we can always figure out between us what would be best for one another and for the kids. Personally, I think inequality is "rigid and guaranteed to make everyone miserable."