Men and women Archives
April 26, 2007
Esolen on masculinity.
The Catholic news service ZENIT interviewed Professor Anthony Esolen recently on the subject of masculinity and civilization. The result is a tour-de-force of probing intellect and wisdom.
May 8, 2007
No Harm, No Foul
The other night I dropped in on the O'Reilly No-Spin-Zone. He was in the middle of an interview, and the spinner at the plate was ABC's John Stossel, who sometimes makes sense, just as O'Reilly is sometimes Catholic. They were discussing the current case of the D.C. Madam, who, it seems, is threatening to ruin some prominent reputations. She claims not to have been involved in prostitution, but O'Reilly and Stossel took it for granted that that is in fact what she was providing. But, said Stossel, so what? Who was getting hurt? he asked. Why are we trying to put people in jail for this sort of activity? Don't people own their own bodies? He lays his thoughts out at more length here.
May 10, 2007
Feminist Autocracy
I was late yesterday morning. (To where isn't important). I wasn't the only person to arrive late. Some still-unexplained though not uncommon phenomenon had turned a twenty-five minute drive into an hour.
The equanimity of the folks arriving late was uncharacteristic of the modern world: enough so that people started talking about it. A lovely pregnant woman related how two thirty-something self-besuited males (I will not say men, though that is the word she used) shoved roughly past her and an elderly woman in order to get the elevator.
That got me to wondering how much the drive in had helped condition the attitude of the narcissuits.
May 16, 2007
Property and Self-Mutilation
If I own it, I can pierce it. If I own it, I can paint it. It is mine, mine, mine, and I can do what I want with it.
That is the message that the staples-through-the-eyebrows crowd is attempting to convey, about their bodies, with their self-mutilations. Apparently Eve Ensler did not understand that when she said:
I went from Beverly Hills where women were getting vaginal laser rejuvenation surgery--paying four thousand dollars to get their labias trimmed to make them symmetrical because they didn't like the imbalance. And I flew to Kenya where [women were working to stop] the practice of female genital mutilation. And I said to myself, "What is wrong with this picture?"
May 24, 2007
Culbreath on feminism.
Mr. Jeff Culbreath, a friend of many of us here, has a brilliant essay up on why and how to resist feminism. Go read it.
June 17, 2007
Happy Fathers' Day!
A happy Fathers' Day to the dads out there, especially...
--my husband, Tim,
--my dad, Henry W. of Chicago (who won't be able to read this, because he doesn't have a computer, but I had to mention him)
--my fellow bloggers at WWWtW who are dads, and
--Todd, our kind host.
Great fathers are part of what's right with the world. Thanks, guys!
December 7, 2007
For No Particular Reason...
...A Marlene Dietrich quote which I found somewhat intriguing and provocative:
To be completely woman you need a master, and in him a compass for your life. You need a man you can look up to and respect. If you dethrone him it's no wonder that you are discontented, and discontented women are not loved for long.
I'll refrain from comment except to note that this sentiment is much closer to the truth of human nature than anything in feminism. That we've forgotten this, or something similar to it, factors into the increasingly strained, or, where not strained, utterly utilitarian (or is to say the latter merely to say the former more theoretically?), relations between the sexes. Neither men nor women understand who they are supposed to be, by nature.
Update: for those so inclined, here is the Wikipedia entry for Dietrich.
January 7, 2008
Single People and Women Should Receive Less Pay For Equivalent Work
Treating people as things is where most evil starts, and employees are real people not things. As real people employees have human natures, and human nature isn't Kantian universalism or Nietzschean will-to-power or whatever: human nature is social, human beings are raised by mothers and fathers in families, and not everyone is a father at all let alone is everyone equally a father all at the same time. To hire a father is to hire a person who has primary responsibility for materially providing for his family; such a hiring is a different kind of thing from hiring a teenager to mow the lawn or hiring an older mother with an empty nest looking for some extra cash to spend on the grandkids.
Employment as an institution which treats a father of five as a fungible productivity unit equivalent to a bachelor, or a single woman, or even a wife and mother, is a deliberate institutionalization of inhumanity. Deliberate institutionalization of inhumanity is a moral evil, so the institutionalization of equal pay for equal work is immoral.
That doesn't imply that in every case a woman should make less money than a man, or any such risible extrapolation. It doesn't mean that a family-man slacker should draw more pay than a diligent spinster. Human beings being what they are, exceptional circumstances are common and varied, judgement of individual circumstances is always required, and few things are more inhuman than "zero tolerance" categorical rules about the nuts and bolts of everyday life as actually lived.
But as some kind of categorical employment imperative backed by the force of law, the concept of equal pay for equal work is fundamentally inhuman and immoral. There is a basic difference between treating people as human beings with inherent dignity and treating them as interchangeable fungible productivity units, despite how amusing it is to say "fungible productivity unit".
I understand the objections: it is presently illegal to hire and set pay based on marital status and children, it is difficult to get employers to do the right thing, if fathers are morally entitled to greater pay - a living wage - than those who do not have the garnering of a living wage as their natural duty, well, capitalism as presently consitituted is going to lock fathers out of the workplace, fragment jobs into contract work and piecemeal jobs, and hire the cheapest workers. I get all that.
So much the worse for how things are presently constituted.
January 17, 2008
Charity, Particularity, and Justice
One of the interesting dialectical pivot points in recent discussions we've had about employment discrimination is charity. At some point our Christian culture degenerated to the point where "charity" started to mean "acts which are nice to do but always optional". Another thing which seems to have come along for the ride is that charity has become more abstract: the notion seems to be that charity is a marketplace selection of opportunities from which we can arbitrarily choose what we want.
In the discussion on natural obligations employers have toward the men providing for families who work for them, this has manifested in two ways.
The first way has been to treat the contingent obligation an employer has to provide for the basic dignity and needs of employees, and in turn the loyalty and diligence that an employee owes to his employer, as optional: as things not required as a matter of reciprocal justice, but rather as gratuitous and completely optional gifts.
The second way this notion has manifested itself is in the idea that charity (and therefore justice) is fungible: that there is no particular charitable obligation of employer to employee in justice but rather that the employer's obligation is just to some abstract charity-in-general, an obligation (to the extent it is one at all: see the previous point) which can be discharged by giving to one of any number of charitable opportunities in a marketplace of opportunities.
February 16, 2008
Illusive Valentine - a belated Valentine poem to my then-future wife
I wrote this in 1986, two months before I proposed to my wife, Frankie, and 13 months before we were married. I had planned to post this on Valentine's Day, February 14. But, being a preoccupied man, I forgot.
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