Book Giveaway: The Overwrought Urn

 Darwin is traveling to Texas for a few days, so in lieu of a substantive post today, I offer another book giveaway from our inherited library. Up this time: The Overwrought Urn; a Potpourri of Parodies of Critics Who Triumphantly Present the Real Meaning of Authors From Jane Austen to J. D. Salinger, edited by Charles Kaplan.

The black spot in the photos is courtesy of my phone's camera and should be taken as no reflection on the book. 

The Overwrought Urn is a selection of parodies of lit crit, in the style of The Pooh Perplex (in fact, one of the Pooh Perplex essays is included). I would maintain that The Pooh Perplex is generally funnier and more enduring, but some of the essays here are brilliant. Jorge Luis Borges contributes a delightfully pompous analysis of Pierre Menard, a Frenchman whose aim was to immerse himself in the study of the life and times of Cervantes and thus to be able to write for himself, in the exact same words, Don Quixote.

The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is a richness.) It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Menard with that of Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote (Don Quixote, Part One, Chapter Nine): 

...La verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir. 

[...truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future. ]

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "ingenious layman" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes: 

...La verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir. 

[...truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future. ]

History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final clauses -- example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future, are shamelessly pragmatic. 

Equally vivid is the contrast in styles. The archaic style of Menard -- in the last analysis, a foreigner -- suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his precursor, who handles easily the ordinary Spanish of his time.

I was also amused by W.B. Scott's Chicago Letter.

April, 1949
Agony, a sense of plight; a sense of agony, plight -- such, one soon preceives, are the attributes of the Chicago of our time. But I shall have more to say about them later in this letter.
I traveled by the Erie, as one must, I think, do, now and then. The trip is longer, to be sure, on its ancient twisting right-of-way than on other roads. But there one escapes the "lumpenaristokratie" (in Roscoe Chutney's phrase) of the Century or the Broadway, and it is only from the Eire, of course that one my catch those extraordinary night glimpses of Youngstown and Akron.

The longest and silliest essay contains a "new reading" of the old chestnut "Trees".

I think that I shall never see /A poem as lovely as a tree.

Instead, we are given to contemplate the original draft of the poem, written by one Joe E. Skilmer, entitled  "Therese".

I think? That I shall never, see?
Up, owe 'em love. Leah's a tree. 

The resulting analysis of the entire piece makes about as much sense as the version to which we're accustomed.

So. If you like that sort of thing, it's the sort of thing you'll like. A few of the essays fell rather flat, but most of them made me smile at least. And it's free -- you can't say fairer than that!

Leave a comment to get your name in the drawing, and I'll have one of the kids draw names from a hat on Saturday.

Sesame Street Pinball (Eleven Twelve)

Sure, I watched Sesame Street back in the day, and it was plenty psychedelic in the heady days of the early 80s. There must have been a quantity of educational filler, but what's stuck with me for more than twenty-five years is the Pinball segment. This was ostensibly a counting exercise but I think must have been a creative outlet for animators who dropped too much acid before I was even a twinkle in my father's eye.



In case you need to jazz out to the music, here it is performed live by Fighting in the Streets.



And because we're tripping down Memory Lane, here's more Sesame Street for you: the wizard at the bridge. I remember the wizard. I remember the bridge. I just didn't remember what I was supposed to have learned.



Oh yes, of course. Circles.

What Is Faith and Who Has It?

Leah of Unequally Yoked has been hosting some interesting discussion on the topic of faith lately. This started out when she re-posted a challenge from atheist blogger John Loftus of Debunking Christianity. The challenge was as follows:

Christian theists make two claims about faith:

1. That atheists define the concept of faith wrong, and
2. That atheists have faith just like Christian theists do.

So here’s my challenge: Define faith in such a way that it fulfills both requirements!

Leah then critiqued two answer to this. The first which she described as defining faith as "standing on the shoulders of giants" was as follows:

Faith is knowing by testimony rather than by experience. I believe that the Earth orbits the Sun, because the scientists tell me so, and I believe them. I can become an astronomer or an astronaut and find out more concretely, but I can also become a monk and find out the experience of divine revelation more directly.

Leah object to this saying:

I think this is defining ‘faith’ too broadly (and it’s certainly underestimating how much we take on authority). When I was an intern in a genetics lab (one of the more empirically-based things you can do), I transfected cell lines I didn’t create with plasmids I didn’t sequence that were meted out pipets that were calibrated by someone I didn’t know. When it came time to analyze my data, I used a machine that I wouldn’t know how to repair and sent the results to a biostatistician whose methods I wasn’t familiar with.

Long story short, we all do a lot of standing on the shoulders of giants. Our modern lives are complex enough that we have to accept on authority the way most of the physical world around us functions, let along the metaphysical aspects. Using this as the heart of faith makes the definition useless to me, if I want to talk about a way of knowing that differentiates atheists and theists.

This framework might be useful if we think the two groups have different criteria for identifying credible authorities, and I’d be interested in your thoughts on that topic in the comments. My hunch is that, when it comes to metaphysics, it’s not that atheists and theists are turning to different authorities, but that atheists mostly aren’t seeking out explicit authorities on these topics at all. Most atheists don’t cleave to particular philosophers the way Christians might be shaped by a certain theologian. So this doesn’t end up being a fight about how we answer questions, but about what we’re trying to find out.

The second definition she criticized came from Loftus himself and was as follows:

In my opinion faith is what fills in the gaps of the probabilities. If, say there is a 70 % probability something is the case then to conclude more than that 70% probability is faith, and I reject faith based reasoning like that. To reject that kind of faith is to live and operate based on the probabilities. If there is a 70 % chance of something then that’s all I can conclude and that’s all I can use to base my decisions on. And so I could never give my whole life over to a 70% probability. I could only give 70% of my life over to a 70% probability. This is Lessing’s ditch when applied to the past, as you know. Kierkegaard responded by acknowledging Lessing’s point and therefore decided faith must go beyond what the evidence calls for. And that’s what I must reject.

Leah points out this seems to suggest a basic misunderstanding of probability:

Loftus is essentially saying that, when we aren’t certain, we have to hedge our bets, but that can be the wrong way to reason. Let me give an example. I tell you that I have a weighted coin — it is 60% likely to come down heads and 40% likely to come down tails. Plenty of people, given this data, will conclude that they should call out ‘heads!’ 60% of the time and ‘tails!’ 40% of the time. They’ll lose out to the people who call ‘heads!’ every single time you play with enough iterations.
...
What that 70% means is that you need less new evidence to change your mind about this action than you would if you were truly 99% confident. But, absent that new evidence, there’s no reason you shouldn’t stay the course. Instead of half-heartedly committing to the choice you’ve made, you should just stay vigilant that you don’t discount new evidence in either direction, because you’ve started thinking of your current confidence level as an important part of your identity, one that it would hurt you to lose.

Faith is a really, really big topic, but I wanted to suggest a few clarifying thoughts, though not a complete answer to the questions posed.

First off, it seems to me "faith" itself is a fairly broad term. Christians often talk about the need to "have faith", but in a sense that is a shorthand. Faith in what?
The old Catholic Encyclopedia in its article on faith describes the Old Testament use of the term to be essentially "trustfulness" or "steadfastness":

In the Old Testament, the Hebrew means essentially steadfastness, cf. Exodus 17:12, where it is used to describe the strengthening of Moses' hands; hence it comes to mean faithfulness, whether of God towards man (Deuteronomy 32:4) or of man towards God (Psalm 118:30). As signifying man's attitude towards God it means trustfulness or fiducia. It would, however, be illogical to conclude that the word cannot, and does not, mean belief or faith in the Old Testament for it is clear that we cannot put trust in a person's promises without previously assenting to or believing in that person's claim to such confidence. Hence even if it could be proved that the Hebrew does not in itself contain the notion of belief, it must necessarily presuppose it.

This usage still informs the way that we use the term in reference to interpersonal relationships. I have faith that my wife loves me. She has faith that I am faithful to her. Etc.

Obviously, in this sense one can have faith in any number of things or people, and as it notes, faith in this sense necessarily presupposes belief. I can hardly have faith in my wife's love (as in, trust in its existence and steadfastness) if I don't really believe that I have a wife or don't really believe that she loves me. When Christians talk about "having faith" however, they're pretty specifically talking about "having faith in God" -- that combination of believing in God's existence and of trusting in God to remain steadfast and trustworthy in His love for us.

So one sense in which Christians might say that atheists also "have faith" is that in which atheists perform a similar action (they believe in some thing and that it may be relied upon steadfastly) but in reference to different objects: loved ones, friends, science, progress, etc. Clearly saying one "has faith in" any of these things would carry somewhat different meaning, because these are different kinds of things, but arguably there is some commonality in the type of action which "having faith" in any one of these things might be.

Secondly, I think it's important to be clear on what kind of a thing faith is: faith is an act of the will. St. Thomas Aquinas discusses the issue in typical fashion here in Article 1.

If, on the other hand, "to think" be understood in the second way, then this expresses completely the nature of the act of believing. For among the acts belonging to the intellect, some have a firm assent without any such kind of thinking, as when a man considers the things that he knows by science, or understands, for this consideration is already formed. But some acts of the intellect have unformed thought devoid of a firm assent, whether they incline to neither side, as in one who "doubts"; or incline to one side rather than the other, but on account of some slight motive, as in one who "suspects"; or incline to one side yet with fear of the other, as in one who "opines." But this act "to believe," cleaves firmly to one side, in which respect belief has something in common with science and understanding; yet its knowledge does not attain the perfection of clear sight, wherein it agrees with doubt, suspicion and opinion.

If I'm paraphrasing this right: To have faith, or to believe, is not simply to make an passive assessment as to the probability that something is true, it is to decide to believe something to be the case or not be the case (and one presumes to act accordingly.)

Looking at Loftus and Leah's points about probabilities, I'm having a little trouble grasping how exactly you would act on a 70% probability belief. Leah makes one reasonable assumption. It seems to me that another would be that one would simply lower the stakes. If someone comes up to me and says, "This weighted coin has a 60% chance of coming up heads. How much money would you like to bet that it will come up heads?" I might offer a different size bet than if she had said, "This weighted coin has a 90% chance of coming up heads." But either way, I'm placing a degree of faith in the idea that it will come up heads. In this example, refusing to place any faith in it's coming up heads would mean refusing to bet on the toss at all, or betting on its coming up tails.

But this underscores the argument that "everyone has faith in something", in that, faith being an act, just about everyone ends up acting in some way on a given point in which they must make a decision as to what to believe. In many situations, even refusing to act ends up being some kind of an act. As in, for instance, if I had refused to act in any way as if I believed that my future wife loved me, you can probably bet that she wouldn't have married me. Virtually any act (including refusing to act) that I chose to take would have represented a "bet", either slight or strong, that she either did or did not love me. Refusal to take a position on the question was not really an option.

This emphasis on faith as an act (rather than a piece of knowledge or a feeling) is particularly comforting to me. After all, I can't really say that I know God exists and came to suffer and die for our sins in some absolute, sure sort of knowledge. Nor can I say that I always feel the truth of this. But I most certainly can choose to believe it, and act accordingly.

The Ides of March are come...

In honor of the Ides of March, we watched Julius Caesar from the BBC's Shakespeare's Animated Tales. It has enough plot and action to keep the girls interested, and enough of Shakepeare's language (beautifully spoken) to give them a taste for the originals

Why I never read romance novels

It's the content, stupid.

The Wall Street Journal informs us that books that used to require a brown paper wrapper have assumed a new disguise: e-reading devices. Apparently women are increasingly using their Kindles, Nooks, or iPads to read romance novels in all their increasingly bizarre incarnations:  Amish, historical, pastoral, tragicomical, erotica, and now romantica, in which it seems that couples can have their sex cake and eat their happy ending too. And how convenient is it to have an e-reader so that you can have all 17 volumes of your favorite series without having to display them on a shelf to the scorn of your friends?

The Journal obligingly provides us with a brief excerpt from this literature. I won't give their summary of the plot of this particular book since it doesn't really matter anyway, but get a load of this (yes, it's fairly safe for work):

' "Thank you for spilling wine on my shirt," Elec said, stepping back and unbuttoning his shirt. He yanked it off with little care or concern for the fabric and tossed it on the floor with hard movements. His T-shirt, which also sported a smaller wine stain, was peeled off and sent after the dress shirt.
Tamara almost choked on her drool. Oh. My. God. "My pleasure," she said and gawked mercilessly at his ripped chest and abs.'

Well, I guess if you're churning this stuff out for the consumers, the quality is bound to slip a little.

"He yanked it off with little care or concern." How do you yank off a shirt with care but no concern? With concern but no care?

"And tossed it on the floor with hard movements." Again, how do you "toss" something with "hard movements"? Maybe you can hurl something with hard movements. Maybe you can throw, or possibly fling (though that sounds too airy), or sling or cast it. And with hard movements, no less. Did he karate chop his shirt to the floor? Maybe he did the robot while undressing -- kind of a jerky little dance. I assume his hard movements were meant to be the opposite of sinuous movements, though I bet the author gets that adjective in there somewhere in the book. It's too good not to use.

"His T-shirt, which also sported a smaller wine stain..." Now this is just lazy writing, but I bet we can make it more interesting. How 'bout: "The wine had seeped through his dress shirt and bled onto the chest of his T-shirt"? How 'bout: "He peeled off his ruined T-shirt and thrust it at her. 'Wash it,' he demanded." That's got a little air of realism to it.

"Tamara almost choked on her drool." I actually have seen this sort of thing happen, to infants, and believe you me it is the antithesis of erotic.

"and gawked mercilessly". How does one gawk mercilessly? How does one gawk mercifully, if it comes to that?

I'm reminded of Florence King's observations on pornography from the hilariously unrecommendable When Sisterhood Was In Flower:

About this time, I came across an anti-porn essay by Pamela Hansford-Johnson, who claimed that the literary worthlessness of porn can be proved by transposing its style to a description of the boiling and eating of an egg.
I gave it a try and came up with this: 

I took the glistening, virginally white oval out of the fiercely bubbling cauldron of hot, hot, hot water and cupped my hand around it, feeling its contours with sensations of shimmering delight. I reached for my long, sturdy, battering egg knife and tapped. The shell slipped off and I touched the tender, moist, protein-swollen membranes of the secret softness. The steamy slice of hot, ready, delectable egg burned my fingers but I thrust firmly with my rigid tool and inserted the erect, serrated blade. The lubricious, golden yellow, ambrosial nectar of the pulsating, quickening core gushed out into my egg cup. I centered my mouth over the slickened surface of the gently curving silver spoon and ate, ate, ate. 

When I finished this exercise, I stared at my long, yellow, blue-lined Nixonian legal pad in horror.

Wrap that egg in brown paper!

How I Almost Missed Sunday Mass

I was traveling this weekend, and although some people have assured me that there is a dispensation from Sunday obligation for those on the road, somehow I couldn't square it with my conscience to miss Mass because I was out of town at a Catholic conference. A word about the Behold Conference: I enjoyed immensely the chance to get to see many of my favorite women in person, and I took full advantage of the precious opportunity to receive the sacraments and sit in adoration unencumbered by small children. The organizers were attentive, and everything was beautifully planned and executed. The chant choir was exquisite. But as the weekend wore on, I yearned more and more to be home with my family, and particularly with Darwin. It seems I am not a person who likes to travel without her husband. By the time Sunday rolled around, I was in an agony to get home and just be with him.

We were already under travel constraints, since through a minor but honest comedy of errors we had missed the Saturday mass we'd wanted to attend. No matter. We still had all Sunday. But as we drove eastward, missing every Sunday mass from Peoria to Columbus, I grew more and more uneasy. My excellent travel companions Betty Duffy and Sarah Reinhard are women gifted with a fabulous amount of articulate intelligence, and I myself went to college, but though the three of us had reckoned individually with the loss of an hour to Daylights Saving Time and with crossing time zones, we were unaccountably defeated by the unusual combination of the two, which meant that the 1 pm Spanish mass we'd counted on was over by the time we rolled into Betty's town at 2 pm. I knew there was a 6 pm mass at a church along the Columbus beltway, but through a combination of careless navigation errors I couldn't get there in time. But I knew I had one more out -- there was a 7 pm on the campus of Ohio Domincan I could reach just in time.

Trying to use an iPad to navigate while you're driving alone is a dangerous business, as the drivers around me could attest, but I found the quiet campus of Ohio Dominican and hunted the quiet grounds until I found the quiet building with the chapel. It too was quiet, because Ohio Dominican, it seemed, was on spring break. Through the glass doors I could see straight to the silent altar, but the door between me and Jesus was locked.

I had thought, earlier, that the most important thing to me was to get home and be with my husband. I was wrong. Slumped on a bench outside the locked chapel, fighting down rising panic at the possibility of missing mass on Sunday -- a mortal sin, something that could separate me from God forever, and knowing that I could have made better choices during the weekend that would have prevented this situation -- I knew that nothing, nothing, was so important to me as to get to mass that day. Going to mass isn't just an obligation, just as spending time was with my family isn't an obligation. It's an act of love, one I want to perform, and one that by this time I desperately wanted to perform, wanted more than anything else. And here I sat, choking on the very real possibility that I had just blown my chances to do what I had just truly realized I most desired.

There were still five hours left in the day, however, and in a big metropolitan area that turns out to be plenty: the Newman Center at Ohio State University had a 9 pm mass. I passed numerous fast food places, but they had no pull on me -- not because I wasn't hungry, because I was, but because I had no desire to be anywhere but with Jesus. And when I reached OSU with an hour and a half to spare and finally was able to sit in the chapel with the tabernacle, I had to sob a bit for sheer happiness at finally being exactly where I needed to be. All the scripture verses I had ever heard about the beauty of God's house and the deer longing for running streams and one day in your courts came flooding back to me, and they were true. I didn't get home until almost 11 pm, but it didn't matter. I had been to mass on Sunday.

I'll never again make jokes about the "sinner's mass". And now I think I'm going to have to be an OSU fan. Go Buckeyes.

Bring It On

It seems that the threats to "reproductive freedom" have simply become too much for some people to bear. A group calling themselves "Liberal Ladies Who Lunch" have announced the "Access Denied Sex Strike":

In truth, if we lose our hard won rights to medical care, birth control and pregnancy choice, it won’t only affect women. Men will have to go back to the days when they waited for or paid for sex. This issue impacts all of us. This strike is designed to make that point. Ask your man to speak up for your rights, because when we lose our reproductive choices, so do they.

I have to say, these women appear to be on to something. However, I fear they may not have planned on enough time for the effect to really sink in. Eight days might just not give the world enough time to miss their hard work.

My Beef With The Bechtel Test

Kyle had a post up a little while back linking to a video from Feminist Frequency about how the 2011 Oscar contenders measure up on the "Bechdel Test". I forget where I ran into the test before, but I definitely remember it rubbing me the wrong way. As summarized in the video (if, like me, you hate videoblogging, you can read the transcript here):

The Bechdel Test is a very basic gauge to measure women’s relevance to a film’s plot and generally to assess female presence in Hollywood movies. It was popularized by Allison Bechdel in her comic Dykes to Watch Out For back in 1985. In order to pass the test a film just needs to fulfill these three, very simple, criteria: A movie has to have at least two women in it who have names, who talk to each other, about something besides a man. Pretty simple right? I mean this is really the absolute lowest that we could possibly set the bar for women’s meaningful presence in movies.

Now, I gotta say, this just makes me climb the walls. I have a strong dislike for simplistic litmus tests that allegedly determine the quality (or even more generally the qualities) of fiction, and I also dislike "gotcha" tests that are supposed to determine hidden bias. These seems at the confluence of these two, and as a result it takes a certain amount of effort to separate my annoyance from the topic enough to try to come up with some less gut-level reaction to it. Given this aim, I'll start with working through the things I can't accuse the test (in this particular use) of, than then work back to why I have an issue with it as a means of evaluating fiction.

First off, the way that the test is being discussed here is not necessarily that advocated by the comic strip characters who originated it -- where "the rule" was to not watch any movie that didn't fit the criteria. Feminist Frequency (and Kyle) on the other hand, admit that a movie might be quite good while not passing the test. Here's Feminist Frequency again:

Again, to be clear this test does not gauge the quality of a film, it doesn’t determine whether a film is feminist or not, and it doesn’t even determine whether a film is woman centered. Some pretty awful movies including ones that have stereotypical and/or sexist representations of women might pass the test with flying colours. Where really well made films that I would highly recommend might not.

Obviously, there's some level of tension here, because while she insists that some really good and recommendable films might not pass the test, she also seems to see it as a problem when individual films (such as 7 out of 9 Best Picture nominees) do not clearly pass. But still, at least formally the concession is clearly made that passing the test is not necessary to a movie's being good or indeed to having strong and essential female characters.

Also, I feel I should concede that passing the test will correlate fairly decently with films that have more female representation in them. Yes, you can have a woman-centered story with a female main character but structured in such a way that the film doesn't pass, or a story which is evenly balanced between one male and one female character, but in general movies in which a woman or women have a lot of screen time will pass.

This leads to the beginning of my criticisms, however, because although most stores that have a lot of screen time for women will pass, they will often do so rather incidentally. So, for instance, I'm finishing up reading Jane Eyre -- certainly generally considered a "girl book", and one that has such a strong female main character, who repeatedly stands up against the expectations of a male dominated world, that it is considered by some critics to be an example of proto-feminist fiction. Thinking of the recent movie of Jane Eyre, it does indeed pass, but even so probably 90% of the screen time involves either Jane interacting with men or Jane talking with other women about men. Even with the more spacious book, if you cut it down to only the scenes which involve Jane talking to another woman about something that does not involve any men, you get some fairly pedestrian scenes in which she talks to her female cousins (and listens to them argue), talks to Helen Burns about books and life, talks to her teachers and to the kitchen maid and her aunt's house, and talks to her pupil Adèle. You miss virtually all of what's interesting in the plot: the conflict.

Now, someone will be pointing out to me that the claim isn't that the scenes that meet the Bechtel Test are the most interesting in the story, just that if the story has a substantial part for women that it is likely to pass the test. And I get that. But it frustrates me that someone would try to analyze fiction based on a criteria that is clearly and admittedly incidental to what it is they're trying to measure. Measuring something like the percentage of the time a named woman character is on screen, or the percentage of lines spoken by a woman, would, however, but a lot less fun than the gimmicky three criteria Test. And something like "are female characters realistic and important to the plot" is hard to quantify, and thus wouldn't produce a fun site full of people rating movies according to one's criteria.

Aside from the fact that the Bechtel Test is clearly measuring something incidental to what it's actually looking to find, it seems to me that by design it isn't really set up "to measure women’s relevance to a film’s plot" as to determine the extent to which women are a separate and self sufficient group within the plot. So, for instance, despite it's female protagonist the movie True Grit fails the Bechtel Test as applied by Feminist Frequency:

Interestingly, even though True Grit is a female centered story, following the adventures of Mattie Ross struggling to get by in a man’s world, when we apply the 60 second rule the film doesn’t pass. In fact the only exchange she has with any other woman is with Mrs. Floyd the innkeeper and those incidental interactions total less than a minute. This style of film where the female lead inhabits an almost entirely male world, brings to mind the Smurfette Principle which I’ve discussed in my Tropes vs Women video series.

So clearly, what's being tested for (and what Feminist Frequency desires to see in a movie) is not simply that women in the movie be well rounded character or that they be essential to the plot, but rather that they be in a world which is at least moderately separate from men. This seemed particularly driven home to me by her complaint against a movie I haven't actually seen (and thus can't provide my own evaluation of the characterization) but the analysis itself is telling:

Tree of Life is a more experimental film about a boy and his family. It fails the test because the only brief scene where two women talk, the conversation is about the death of the family’s son. While it’s true there’s very little dialogue in the film as a whole, the father and the son do speak to each other on multiple occasions.

So, a conversation between to women isn't real if it's about how they feel about a male who has died. If it was a woman, that would be fine, since they're talking about the death of a male, it fails. (Heck, if they'd talked about designer shoes instead of about the death of a family member, it would have passed.)

Similarly, any film which is tightly focused on a relationship (between a man and a woman) is going to at least flirt with failing.

Now, given that this test originates on a comic stripe entitled "Dykes to Watch Out For" perhaps that's reasonable enough. But if one's interest really is in characters and stories well told, I don't see why one would allow oneself to get caught up in this particular analysis gimmick. I don't think that woman characters are less real when they talk to men than when they talk to women, or when they talk about male characters than when they talk about female characters. Yes, perhaps that fact that many Hollywood films don't pass it says something about the extent to which women are represented as independent characters in mainstream films, but if so only in a very incidental fashion. And given that the majority of films lack any well rounded characters of either sex, I find this hard to get particularly excited about.

Reading Jane

Though I'm hardly averse to reading "girl books", I had never read Jane Eyre. I think I'd had the idea that the Brontes' oeuvre was yearning hearts and ghosts in lonely manor houses. But MrsDarwin had told me that I should read Jane, and so when I had a spare credit on Audible one month I picked up an unabridged recording, which I've been listening to lately on my commute.

I've been enjoying it far more than I expected, mainly because Jane herself is a far more engaging character than I had anticipated. I tend to loose patience with characters who get lost in their emotions and do obviously stupid things, and for some reason that what I'd expected Jane to be. (Falling in love with a guy who keeps a mad wife in the attic doesn't exactly seem like the wisest thing one can do.) Nor do I have much tolerance for the over-innocent damsel who is buffeted about by an increasingly improbably series of events, which seemed like the other likely explanation for the vague outlines of the plot I was aware of. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised at finding Jane to be a genuinely strong character, despite being (in Bronte's language) "of a passionate character". Despite her "sensibility", Jane is most definitely no Marianne Dashwood. I'd expected to be reading the book as something of an outsider, and Jane is indeed 100% girl, but she's reasonable and rigorously self possessed enough to appeal to my masculine sensibilities, even while seeming genuinely (though appealingly) foreign to them in her emotions.

I've also been struck, given my historical and economic interests, with the portrayal of mid-19th century England you get from Jane's point of view. As a tenuous member of the "respectable" class, Jane is well suited to appreciate the fragility of lower upper middle class existence. When she finds herself in Whitcross, without friends, money or references, she's changed instantly from the educated person Mrs. Fairfax was glad she would have to talk to rather than "the servants" into someone unlucky even among beggars:

Reader, it is not pleasant to dwell on these details. Some say there is enjoyment in looking back to painful experience past; but at this day I can scarcely bear to review the times to which I allude: the moral degradation, blent with the physical suffering, form too distressing a recollection ever to be willingly dwelt on. I blamed none of those who repulsed me. I felt it was what was to be expected, and what could not be helped: an ordinary beggar is frequently an object of suspicion; a well-dressed beggar inevitably so. To be sure, what I begged was employment; but whose business was it to provide me with employment? Not, certainly, that of persons who saw me then for the first time, and who knew nothing about my character. And as to the woman who would not take my handkerchief in exchange for her bread, why, she was right, if the offer appeared to her sinister or the exchange unprofitable. Let me condense now. I am sick of the subject.

This is perhaps the quintessential middle class terror: I am someone, yet one misstep and I could be no one.

But Will it Play in Peoria?

So. Let's blog. We'll start with a generality. Funny thing about the internet: it fosters connections between people who might never have met otherwise, but it's no substitute for the in-person interactions these friends eventually crave. Now let's work in a personal anecdote: Last October, when Darwin and I were riding down to New Orleans with Betty Duffy to hang out at the Walker Percy Symposium with The Korrectiv gang, we had to ride on the spare all the way from Indy to Nashville because we couldn't get anyone out to the Duffy homestead to repair a flat tire (just inspected the day before!) at 5 am. In Nashville we spent a congenial hour with Jordana while Betty's car was attended to. Turns out nothing was actually wrong with the tire, but if it hadn't chosen to act up that morning, we would have missed connecting with an online friend.

Are you tired of the meta-blogging yet? I am, but the mechanics of writing a blog post are on my mind because I'm off this weekend to Peoria, famously middle-American territory, to attend the Behold Conference and to sit in on the Meet the Bloggers session on Friday night. "New Media" is a hot topic these days. Everyone, it seems, wants to write the next big blog, and I am here with my big bad seven years of blogging experience to share the secrets of blogging success (not mine, but someone's) with you.

Write well about interesting things. Often.

Meet the new media, same as the old media. No matter what pretty templates the aspirational blogger uses or how riddled a page is with bullet points, one will not attract or maintain faithful readership (large or small) without being able to meet these criteria. No amount of highlighting or money quotes in bold font will compensate for poor writing, or a dull topic, or for a posting schedule so sporadic that readers stop tracking after a while (though Google Reader may take care of that, but since I don't use Reader we'll call that point irrelevant to our discussion).

Now Behold is a Catholic women's conference, and my feelings on "lady conferences" have been eloquently summarized by Betty Duffy, but in this case it's Betty I'm going to see.  She and Sarah Reinhard and I are carpooling out to Peoria, where the big draw is not the conference, though I'm sure it's very nice, but the chance to hang out once again with Jennifer Fulwiler and Hallie Lord. Those ladies have come a long way from when the three of us used to visit each other's living rooms in Texas and resolutely ignore the antic screams of our combined children: Hallie has just edited a book called Style, Sex, and Substance: 10 Catholic Women Consider the Things that Really Matter, and Jennifer and Betty are two of those ten women. And the reason I'm making the midwinter trek to Illinois is that people I know but don't get to see often (or people I'm meeting for the first time in person, such as Jamie who invited me to come in the first place) are taking the same journey. The internet giveth friendships and it sustains them long-distance, but nothing beats sneaking out of a talk so that Duffy can take a cigarette break while the girls pass the flask down the line and exchange erudite and profane banter.

That's my blogging cue to embed a YouTube video exemplifying erudite and profane banter:



This did not play in Peoria.

Here's my last blogging tip for the New Media crew: know when to stop writing. When you look at the clock and it's almost 1 am, that's a pretty good sign you ought to pack it in.

UPDATE: Registration for the Behold Conference has been extended to Friday morning, so it's not too late to sign up and attend.

The Accomplishments of Youth

Saturday was parent observation day at eight-year-old Julia's ballet class. I hadn't had the chance to watch her in class since she started at the metropolitan ballet school downtown, though I had certainly noticed that the technique she deploys in the nearly nightly dance performances she puts on the living room had much improved over the last year. Watching her among the 20 or so other students, I could see why. While many of the 7-8 year olds were flopping around in the way that little kids with limited attention spans tend to do, and then having trouble going through the directed exercises, Julia was paying very close attention, and had some of the better technique in the class. The showed all the signs of being a girl who took her dance very seriously.

In some ways, this is a bit of surprise, as getting her out the door to ballet class every Saturday morning is invariably occasion for complaining, foot dragging, and complaints that the classes are boring and she wants to go back to the neighborhood arts center (which I am sure does provide more fun classes, but based on the annual recitals does not turn out a very polished product.) Indeed, that very day the complaining had been such that MrsDarwin and I had privately agreed, "This isn't worth it. If she isn't interested in the better classes, the local ones are cheaper and less disruptive to the schedule."

We have no particular desire to be "dance parents", but MrsDarwin and I do both have a strong tendency towards the, "If you're going to do it, you should do it well," line of thinking. Thus, since Julia has the talent to benefit from higher quality lessons, it seemed like the natural thing to put her in them, and it seems frustrating that she prefers the lower quality class instead.

On some topics, I think it's arguably worth it for parents to cite authority and worldly wisdom and force the issue. Looking back, I kind of kick myself that when I was leaving parochial school at the end of 5th grade and my parents asked, "Do you want us to sign you up for piano lessons through a teacher while you're homeschooling?" I declined because I didn't enjoy practicing, and my parents (taking the line that they weren't going to force a kid to take music lessons when he didn't want to) didn't force the issue. I can still, at the most rudimentary level, puzzle out simpler sheet music on the piano, but despite several attempts to revive and develop the skill through self study, I can't play the piano to any degree. And I wish I could. (MrsDarwin, on the other hand, kept up piano lessons for ten years and plays very well.) One of these days, I'd like to go back and actually take lessons. And, with that in mind, I have a certain hesitance to let the kids off just because they don't like the tedium of good lessons.

On the other hand, while playing the piano is a skill that, once mastered, can be maintained and enjoyed all one's life, it occurs to me that ballet is something that virtually no one does past their teens. I don't necessarily imagine that, talented though she is, Julia is slated for a career in professional ballet. And short of that, most girls put away the shoes by the time they are out of college and never dance ballet again. And if that's the case, and she prefer the local lessons which are more fun and have her local friends in them, then perhaps there's really no reason to force the issue.

After all, no one is making her dance, even if she does know when to come in.

If We Are Given The Time

The weekend's Wall Street Journal has an article on the increasing trend of "gray divorce". The number of divorces overall is falling steadily, but the group among which it has increased significantly is those who are over 50, for whom the divorce rate has doubled in the last 20 years. What can one say? The baby boomers are bad news.

If that last sentence isn't a dead give away, my main reaction to this kind of thing is a kind of sullen resentment, unbecoming though that may be. I recall when my mother used to come back from her quilting group, which was heavily populated with women in their mid sixties who complained about how onerous it was to have their newly retired husbands around the house all the time. "I wish he'd just go find something to do," they'd complain. "I don't want to see him that much."

This recitation would invariably end with my parents' gazes meeting. "I'll enjoy it when you retire," Mom would say. "I couldn't have you around too much."

As it happens, that was not to be. My father's retirement papers finished processing a few days after his death from cancer at the age of 57.

Irrationally, I can't help seeing this as some sort of trade: Have a happy marriage, die early. Have a less happy marriage, retire and complain about spending too much time together.

And thus, since there's nothing I would enjoy more than being home all day with MrsDarwin, it's hard to imagine it will ever come to that.

We just finished updating our life insurance -- something we hadn't looked at in six years, at which time we made a lot less and had only three children. Part of what we took into account at this point is that the level of income that I make at this point is not one it would be easy for MrsDarwin to replace without having the time to go back to school for a professional degree and spend a while working up the ladder, something that is not easy to do as the sole provider for five or more children. So now, if I shuffle off this mortal coil in the next twenty years, the insurance company will provide MrsDarwin with enough money to effectively replace my income throughout that period.

I'll be fifty three in twenty years, which even with my half-Irish cynicism seems just enough to be realistic. And having started on life early, we'll likely have progressed to being grandparents by then (as we'll have daughters aged 29, 28 and 26.) But it would likely take another ten years beyond that (if not far more, given the changing age demographics of the country and the economic outlook) to reach the point when I could credibly retire. And that seems a very long and unlikely way.

Still. I can't think of anything better.

Sleepless Nights

Posting has been light this week. We've been consumed with serious issues here, wrapped day and night in contemplation of life's twists and turns and mysterious coincidences. All day we fret and ponder, wondering what might have been done differently and what will happen next. We've not had a proper night's sleep in almost a week, and we stagger through our days in a haze.

Damn you, Downton Abbey.

The Limits of Pluralism

Kyle would like to give a shout out to secular pluralism, and pluralist secularism:

Pluralism, which entails both a plurality of worldviews and a widespread respect for that plurality, helps keep secular society from becoming an authoritarian instrument of a particular secular worldview. It shies away from forcing people to think and act in a certain moral way. It prefers dialogue and persuasion to command and enforcement. It values hospitality and dissent and disagreement and criticism. It looks suspiciously at all grand narratives and comprehensive doctrines, especially those espoused by people with guns.

It was the people with guns who might espouse grand narratives and comprehensive doctrines that got me. I had to respond.

Men with guns aside, there's an extent to which I perhaps agree with Kyle. If by secularism, one simply means not having the state enforce the practice of religion, then I of course support it. And if my pluralism one means keeping the power of the state modest enough (in certain dimensions at any rate) to allow as many different sorts of people to practice their beliefs, rather than imposing a uniformity of life and practice on all of them, then again I am for it.

The problem seems to be that when "pluralism" is actually stated as a goal, people seem to develop a sort of gardener's eye about the whole thing. Those protecting pluralism start to look for all the way in which those with one set of beliefs might be stepping upon those with another set. Not "imposing beliefs on others" becomes and end unto itself, and since most beliefs actually do have implications that would touch on others, soon the gardener is uprooting one thing and then another, sorting and separating and trying to impose and orderly "pluralism" on the whole. Just as the parent who tries to stop all fights and unfairnesses among a large gathering of children tends to make them either bitter or bored (or occasionally both) if we set the goal of rigorously enforcing pluralism, we soon find ourselves wiping out nearly all beliefs other than the admiration of pluralism itself.

It seems to me that what is more likely to achieve real pluralism if one does "impose" certain shared values or beliefs, while leaving a fairly wide range for people to do as they will in other areas. Ironically, given my jumping off point, imperial might ("men with guns") has, in some cases, been one of the less problematic shared values to tie a highly pluralistic empire together. Thus, for instance, the British empire was, in a sense, able to maintain a more pluralistic society than its successor states of India and Pakistan, because it was clearly being run for the benefit of the British empire. Once that layer of force and order was accepted, pluralism was possible because it was not necessary to define what it was to be Indian other than "the British rule it". Independence brought the necessity of definition, and with national definition, such high levels of pluralism were no longer tolerable.

Brandon on the State of Liberal Education

Speaking of college, Brandon has an outstanding post over at Siris entitled "The Unservile Arts":

An interesting article by Andrew Delbanco on the endangerment of liberal arts in the college context. It really does seem that liberal arts at the college level is in very bad straits. In any case, just some random thoughts on the subject:

(1) College is an extraordinarily inefficient way to teach workers what they need in order to work. The best way to teach workers what they need to do is to give them on-the-job training, or to make use of a workshop-and-licensing system. Sending someone to college so that they will be a more productive filer of papers is truly absurd; and right now the only thing that a college degree really signals to most businesses is that you can stick with something for a few years.

Likewise, you don't get a competitive and productive workforce by sending them to school; you get a competitive and productive workforce by making it worth the time and effort it takes to work competitively and productively, and by giving them the resources required to do so. We do, in fact, do this, in part by putting an immense amount of pressure on people to get things that most people can only get by being good workers; and school does, in fact, contribute directly to this by teaching people to sit at desks and do work, and the like, but this direct contribution is minor. Education mostly contributes indirectly, by turning out people who can do things and make things that make other people more competitive and productive.

Everyone should remember the Gilbert & Sullivan song about the modern major-general, which was making precisely this point.

(2) Our current system of higher education has all the features typically associated with an educational system on the verge of breakdown....[Continue Reading]

No, really, go read it. This is one of those posts where quoting the entire thing is nearly irresistible.

What a College Education Gets You

While I very much see the primary purpose of going to college as intellectual rather than practical (perhaps majoring in Classics is a dead give-away in this regard), for a lot of people one of the primary motivations for going to college is to improve their earning potential and employment prospects. This isn't crazy. In 2010, the median income for men with a bachelor's degree of higher was $61,388 a bit more than twice the median income of $30,232 of men with only a high school diploma. For women, the difference is even more stark: $41,132 for women with a bachelor's degree or higher vs. $17,830 for women with only a high school diploma. [source]

There's an interesting report out from the Social Science Research Council entitled Documenting Uncertain Times: Post-graduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort which sheds some interesting light on how a college education affects the employment prospects of people just out of college, and specifically, how their major and their academic performance their income, employment, debt, etc. The study is a followup to a book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses which used academic assessment tests to track how much students appeared to be actually learning while in college -- and found the results more modest than might have been hoped. This followup study is based on a detailed survey of roughly 1000 students, most of whom graduated in 2009 and the rest of whom graduated in 2010 or 2011.

Some of the things I found particularly interesting included:

65% of them reported having student loans, with the average student debt for those with debt being $27,200. 15% owed more than $50,000. (This is a lot, but given the stories one reads along the lines of "I owe $100k in student loans and can't get a job!" it's actually better than I expected.)

8% are married
9% are cohabiting
24% have moved back in with parents.

Their average income (for those working full time) is just under $35,000/yr. That average income is pretty much exactly the same if you look a the top 20% academically or the bottom 20% academically, but top 20% are only 3% unemployed while the bottom 20% are 9.6% unemployed.

Social Science/Humanities majors had an average income slightly higher than Science/Math majors ($32,200 vs. $31,721) but they were significantly more likely to be unemployed (6.9% vs. 4.8%)

Engineering/Computer Science majors had the highest average income ($50,625) while Education/Social Work majors had the lowest income ($28,500) and the highest unemployment (13%).

Those with the bottom 20% of the academic assessment scores were just as likely as those in the top 20% to have gone on to full time graduate school (31% vs. 30%). Students who had majored in science or math fields were the most likely to be in grad school (49%), humanities majors were about average (32%) and business and education majors were the least likely (16% and 17% respectively.)

And when it comes to the love life, those with health related majors were the most likely to be married or cohabiting (35%) while those who'd majored in engineering or computer science were the least likely to be so (13%).

With Defense Like This, Who Needs Prosecutors

French economist and politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn can't seem to stay out of the news -- or a few other things -- according to the latest reports. When he was arrested in New York on accusations of raping a hotel maid (Strauss-Kahn claimed that he had had a "moral failing" with the maid, but insisted he had not forced her) many in Europe worried that American prudery had caused a rush to judgement. Now French police have brought Strauss-Kahn in for questioning on charges of being involved with an international prostitution ring.

According to French news reports, Mr. Strauss-Kahn allegedly was invited to parties by the prostitution ring that took place in Paris as well as in Washington—with the last one taking place in the U.S. capital just days before Mr. Strauss-Kahn's ill-fated trip to New York. The reports allege the expenses were covered by the prostitution ring.

A person familiar with the matter confirmed that "prostitutes were brought from France for these parties," saying there were at least "three trips to the U.S. which were for orgies." The person said the "last trip was just before the Sofitel case."

Paying prostitutes isn't illegal in France, but encouraging prostitution by offering them to others and using corporate funds to pay for them is.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn's lawyers have stated repeatedly their client wished to be heard by Lille prosecutors "as quickly as possible," saying they wanted to put an end to a "press lynching." His lawyers weren't available to comment Tuesday.

In a colorful exchange in a recent radio interview, one of Mr. Strauss-Kahn's lawyers, Henri Leclerc, said the former IMF chief wasn't aware that the women at these parties were prostitutes. "He could well have not realized it, because you see, in these parties, one is not necessarily clothed and I challenge you to tell a naked prostitute from a naked worldly woman," Mr. Leclerc told Europe 1 radio.

Really, Monsieur should fire his legal counsel if they are going to suggest that he is so unworldy as not to be aware of these fine distinctions. What will they suggest next, that he can't tell good wine from bad when it's not in the bottle?

Income Inequality: 1945 Edition

I guess it's a sign that I'm a hopeless econ wonk that one of the things that I came away thinking about after watching The Best Years of Our Lives with MrsDarwin the other night (a good movie, which I'd strongly recommend) was how the income situations of the major characters would translate into modern terms.

Released in 1946, when it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, The Best Years of Our Lives follows the return to civilian life of three service men who all came from Boon City (a fictional Midwestern city) but didn't meet each other until they were hitching a ride on a B-17 back to their home town after the war.

Sailor Homer Parrish went straight into the Navy from high school, in which he had been an athlete, but he lost both his hands in a fire when his aircraft carrier was hit, and he now has a set of hooked metal prosthetics instead of hands and forearms. Before leaving he got engaged to his high school sweetheart, but he doesn't know how she'll react to his disability.

Capt. Fred Derry is slightly older. He comes from a fairly poor family and worked as a soda jerk before the war, but during the war he was the bombardier on a B-17. During training, he got married, but he and his wife had only a month together before he shipped out and he hasn't seen her since.

Sgt. Al Stephenson is in his 40s. Before the war he was a loan officer at a bank in town, and during the war he served as an infantry platoon sergeant in the Pacific. He's been married 20 years and has two children: a son just finishing high school and a daughter who graduated and has been working in a hospital for the last two years.

Much of the drama stems from the efforts of these three characters to integrate back into normal, civilian lives. However, a good portion of this conflict also relates to jobs and what place these characters will take in the post war economy.

Al comes back to a promotion: his bank puts him in charge of the small loan department, tasked with dealing with GI loans. He's given a salary of $12,000/yr. I wanted to get a feel for how large an income that was. Running it through a basic inflation calculator, 12,000 in 1945 translates to $143,792 in 2010 dollars. That's very good money now. Compared to how most people were doing, it was even better money then. I discovered that although many of the more detailed historical income tables on the Census.gov website only go back to 1967 (or in some cases even just 1991) it's possible to access scanned copies of the original Current Population Surveys dealing with income back to 1946. According to the 1946 report, the median income for a man engaged in full time civilian work in 1946 was $2600, which translates to $28,714 in 2010. By comparison, the median income for a full time, year round male worker in 2010 was $50,063. According to that 1946 report (page 15) only 2% of city-dwelling families in 1946 had incomes over $10,000 ($110,440 in 2010 dollars) putting Al very close to being in "the 1%" despite working for a very small bank by modern standards. Clearly, material want is not going to be among Al's problems. The conflict he deals with centers around the different experiences he's had over the last three years compared to the other managers at the bank -- and the personal difficulties of integrating back into family life.

If Al comes back to a cushy job, job woes are very much center stage for Fred. During the war, Fred was making $400/mo as a Air Corps bombardier. That's $57,517 in 2010 dollars. It also would have put him in the top 20% of incomes according to the 1946 income distribution tables. (By comparison, the threshold for the top 20% of incomes now is right around $100k.) Returning to civilian life, Fred is determined to find a good job, but in the post-war labor glut he finds that his status and pay from the Air Corps don't translate to many advantages in civilian life. At one point we see him in a job interview:

Manager: Did you do any work with supply or logistics in the Air Corps?
Fred: No.
Manager: Did you do any staff work? Did you lead men?
Fred: No.
Manager: Just what did you do, Captain?
Fred: My job was to sit behind the Norton Bomb Sight and get the bombs onto the target every time no matter what happened.
Manager: Well, we don't have much call for that here.

In the end, Fred finds himself back at the store where he had been a soda jerk, now working as an "assistant floor manager", a position more galling because the floor manager he is assistant to used to be his assistant at the soda fountain. This job pays $32/wk, which in turn works out to $1,664/yr. Run that through the inflation calculator and Fred is now making $19,939 in 2010 dollars. This now puts him in the bottom 33% of incomes in 1946. If we assume that the $32/wk rate is for the equivalent of 40 hours, Fred is making an hourly rate of $0.80, which makes an inflation adjusted $9.59/hr. I'm struck by the inflation adjusted hourly rate for Fred, since it's probably moderately close to what you'd make in retail now, though with his "assistant floor manager" title, perhaps he'd make closer to $12-$13/hr now (as compared to the $8-$9 which is common for basic retail). I was curious how other major expenses compared then to now. Table 7 of the 1946 census report shows median rents paid by income. For families making $1,500 to $1,999 per year, the median monthly rent was $25. That works out to $299/mo, a good deal less than you'd be able to find even a very cheap apartment for in most Midwestern cities now. Fred is making a little bit below the median for a man in Retail Trade, according to Table 17 of the 1946 census report, which gives the distribution of income by employment sector and lists the median income in retail at $1,927. I think it's probably arguable, at least from those few facts, that living on a retail job was significantly more possible then than now.

Homer, meanwhile, is trying to adjust to ordinary civilian life with his prosthetic hands (the actor playing Homer was a real veteran who had lost both hands in an explosives accident, he was one of only two non-professional actors ever to win an Oscar.) Income is not an immediate issue for him as he receives a disability payment from the government for his war injuries: $200/mo (which translates to $28,758/yr in 2010 dollars.) This actually puts Homer pretty much right at the median income for full time civilian workers. Given the sacrifices he'd made for his country, it's good to see that set of worries being taken care of.

The Unmanly Bitterness of the Manosphere

Sin has the tendency to inspire sin. The abused becomes the abuser, the person who believes himself oppressed begins to take on all the least likeable characteristics of his oppressor.

This has always been struck me with particular force when I've stumbled across the writings of the "manosphere", a region of the internets in which men wail about how in the post-feminist age women are all money hungry cheaters with inflated senses of entitlement.  The solution to this is, allegedly, to use to the rules of "game" to dominate women by proving the practitioners to be "alpha males". A highly technical process with all rigor of a pseudoscience behind it (perhaps some enterprising gamester can introduce the taking women's head measurements into the process) practitioners council each other on how to deliver "negs" (negative compliments) which will cut women down to size by informing them of their SMV (sexual market value).  Then once the women feels like she needs to pursue since she isn't being pursued, she melts when given "kino escalation" (he touches her).

You get the idea. I always get the sense of a couple rather mangy looking lions hanging around outside the pride talking about how they're really more alpha than the lion who actually has all the mates and cubs. For all the acronyms and specialized terminology, you can tell that these boys' manes are more than half weave.

As with most wrongheaded worldviews, there are some insights buried in there. The Sex-in-the-City feminist manifesto "from now on, we're going to have sex like men" (which in feminist speak apparently means without thought or commitment) is most certainly something which has managed to make a lot of women (and men) unhappy -- potentially for life. Once having correctly diagnosed this as seriously messed up, however, the manosphere solution appears to be that men should retaliate by turning into a bunch of whiny Carrie Bradshaws themselves. A group of guys supposedly outraged by the fact that many modern women demand special treatment and aren't interested in marriage spend their time whining about how mean girls are and generally advocating an approach to dealing with women that seems guaranteed to make them singularly unattractive marriage material.

Betty Duffy wrote a moderately good piece on this whole mess over at Patheos, cutting through all this sex war silliness with the eminently Christian point that the sexes are created to be complimentary, not in competition. The answer to the war between the sexes proposed by secular feminism is not, "No, we will dominate you," but rather Christ's description of marriage which looks all the way back to the Genesis account of the creation of man:

“Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”

They said to him, “Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss [her]?”

He said to them, “Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery.” (Matthew 19: 4-9)

Interestingly, this got quite a backlash even in highly traditional 1st century Israel:

[His] disciples said to him, “If that is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

He answered, “Not all can accept [this] word, but only those to whom that is granted. Some are incapable of marriage because they were born so; some, because they were made so by others; some, because they have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Whoever can accept this ought to accept it.” (Matthew 19: 10-12)

The internet being what it is, Betty's post soon attracted the ire of manosphere inhabitants, including one "Dalrock", who wrote an airily dismissive counterblast:

New commenter thule222 shared a link the other day to a blog post on the “balanced”* “religion and spirituality” site Patheos by Elizabeth Duffy titled Complementarity, Not Competition. I’m alarmed at the emotionalism of Ms. Duffy’s post along with the lack of intellectual rigor it displays. It contains a number of vague statements, a quote from the Pope about how some men are bad and others are good, and a picture of a man who appears to be taking the risk of launching a new business venture. After reading the post several times, my best take on what she is trying to get across is Shame on you if you read (or write) blogs in the manosphere. She could of course have had another point in mind entirely. Instead of my take on her blog post, she may have actually meant I like pizza. Her lack of specific assertions backed up by facts and logical argument makes this impossible to know. This is tricky business, and I’ve learned recently that you can’t take a woman’s own written claims as indicating her own opinion. It could even be the case that I need to tell her what she meant before she can decide if she will or will not back up her own assertions.

Now, with an opening like that, you might think that you're going to get a thorough evisceration of Betty's post. You might think that you'll see clearly reasoned arguments, citations of evidence, etc. After the huffing and puffing, however, the post turns out to be a rather glancing blow. Mostly, the post wanders off into Dalrock's musings about how he thinks women are not capable of behaving like adults (adult men, one presumes) but want to be taken seriously anyway.

Aside from being about a general sense of unhappiness, feminism at its core is a rejection of the patriarchal view that women at times behave like children, and a deep desire of women to be taken seriously. With this in mind, I can only assume that Ms. Duffy very much wants us to take her seriously when she tells men not to take women too seriously.

Women have demanded and been granted the right to have their finger on the nuclear button and the unchecked power to destroy the nuclear family. How can we not be alarmed at the thought that they might not have the capacity to keep their emotions in check?

I don't know if it's his emotions that are out of check or merely his prose writing ability, but Dalrock never seems to be able to come around to any kind of a point, though he has a lot to say. Much of it, curiously, seems to have virtually nothing to do with Betty's post:

The first feminists felt (and many women still do feel) that they needed to keep their emotions in check and perform up to high male standards in order to blaze the trail for other women. However, they either never figured out how to transfer this ethos to the larger population of women or never really intended to deliver on this promise. What has made this much worse is newer generations of feminists don’t consider themselves feminists, they consider themselves traditional conservatives. This gives us women who have post grad degrees in women’s studies who also expect men to at times afford adult women the understanding and protection granted to an eight year old.

From this, we can learn that Dalrock thinks feminists are devilishly clever, and that he really likes to link to his own posts, but what objection he has to Betty's description of how relations between men and women (and marriage in particular) should be complementary rather than competitive is unclear. We get a rant about how feminists have ruined everything, but the connection of those paragraphs to his (never clearly stated) objection to Betty's post is tenuous at best. Near the end, he tries to tie it all together:

For her part Ms. Duffy appears to absolve herself of any responsibility for the great harms of feminism while both defending it and enjoying the benefits of it. At one point she uses standard feminist language to shame men who raise concerns about it (emphasis mine):

There is a corner of the internet known as the “manosphere.” In a backlash to perceived cultural bias against men due to the mainstreaming of feminist principles, some men, feeling oppressed and trampled into submission by strong women…

Elsewhere in the post she writes:

The married portion of the manosphere has gained traction among some Christian and Catholic men, who—perhaps raised in broken homes—are looking for male role models as they strive to build a marriage and a family that will last.

Not only does she ridicule and belittle those who voice concerns with the immense damage caused by feminism without seriously addressing the actual issues, in the subtitle of her post she washes her hands of any responsibility for the harms of feminism. In truly childish form, if there are any negative outcomes to the changes women have demanded she decides that it must be men who are to blame:

For feminism to have gained a foothold, men had to collude with it, and it has been in their interest to do so; this leaves the message of the manosphere ringing hollow.

Yes, that's the end of the post (except for a footnote). It goes out with more a whimper than a bang, and one never really is clear what the author's substantive critique of Betty's post is. Perhaps the key issue here is that Dalrock is so busy defending the honor of the manosphere and describing the evils of feminism that he doesn't really seem to ever grasp what Betty is saying with the quote that he chooses to end his response with. She is not saying, as he claims she is, that "if there are any negative outcomes to the changes women have demanded she decides that it must be men who are to blame". Far from it. Rather, Betty points out that the blame for the moral and societal breakdown is shared. Feminist thinkers latched onto divorce, sex outside of marriage, abortion and contraception as means to allow women to enjoy "equality" with men in society and the workplace, and to free themselves from "oppressive" moral and social structures. Sex takes two, however, and it clearly was not the case that men were all saying, "Whoa there! Let's not break up this great social order we've got. If you sleep around for fifteen years before you feel like getting married, things aren't going to work out so well!" (And, come to that, the idea that marriage was oppressive and people should all go try the Sex In The City life arguably wouldn't have been so salable if a certain portion of men and women hadn't labored to make their marriages convincingly oppressive.) Our society got messed up (in the particular way our society is -- in a fallen world all societies are messed up in one way or another) through the sins of both men and women, and it's certainly not going to get healed if all the members of one sex sit around saying, "No, you shape up first!"

If there's a dark amusement in all this, it's that there's a symmetry between the feminist and "manosphere" views of the world: In the first, men are at fault for everything and they need to be cut down to size and tamed so that women can lead full and fulfilling lives. In the latter, feminists are at fault for everything, and they need to be similarly tamed so that men can be happier. In both views, dominance is the necessary prerequisite for happiness and fulfillment.

In point of fact, gender struggle is no more likely to lead to a happy society (or a happy marriage) than is class struggle to lead to a happy society. Even if the "manosphere" has been right in identifying a few of society's problems, its one-sided solutions and antagonistic attitude provides no solutions.

[Administrative Note: Having seen how the comments at Patheos went downhill fast, let me assure anyone wanting to vent that I intend to maintain standards in my comboxes. Think before you post, and understand that the man of the house has no hesitations here about showing people the door to maintain order. And put the coffee down. Coffee is for closers only. (full David Mamet strength language warning on that link)]

WTFuhrer?

Moon Nazis, my friends!




Holy UFOs, this is either going to be a fabulous cult classic or the worst movie ever made -- not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive.