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If Women Ran the World
First Things ^ | May 21, 2013 | Elizabeth Scalia

Posted on 05/22/2013 2:46:23 AM PDT by rhema

Writing for The Atlantic in September of 2012, Hanna Rosin argued that the “hookup culture” so prevalent on college campuses and in the lives of young adults is “an engine of female progress—one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.” She wrote:

To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind.

For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

In other words, women have succeeded in becoming the men they hated.

Earlier this month, during her annual campaign fundraiser called “The Ultimate Women’s Power Lunch,” Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois prefaced her introduction of Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards with the declaration that “humanity is at a crossroads on this small planet and that our survival as a species is dependent on women taking charge, taking the world in our own hands.”

If forensic psychologist and men’s rights activist Helen Smith is correct, Schakowsky and her friends may have their hands full of the world, and sooner than they think. In her upcoming book Men on Strike, Smith offers up statistics and her own research to suggest that men are consciously boycotting marriage, fatherhood, and the “American Dream” because they feel beaten down by politically correct preferences and practices—in school, in the workplace, and in society in general. If the women want the world and all the power, the thinking goes, they can have it; the men will simply retire to whatever man-caves they are permitted.

Smith suggests that after several decades of giving particular attention and encouragement to female students, with good results, it may be time for schools and society to pay attention to the males, and to observe what has happened to those boys less-celebrated, who are now men feeling left behind and lonely. In a recent column for the New York Times, Ross Douthat cited troubling statistics: “The suicide rate for Americans 35 to 54 increased nearly 30 percent between 1999 and 2010; for men in their 50s, it rose nearly 50 percent.”

The sexual revolution promise that women could “have it all” has always been oddly paradoxical: It encouraged women to find their best selves by aping men and conforming to traditionally male valuations of worth and relevance. Mistaking the word “equal” for the word “same,” these “hookup feminists” have become precisely the shallow, insincere, career-fixated, people-users that early feminists decried. From spare button-down shirt in the office, to meaningless sex, Don Draper has not disappeared; he has just changed his name to Donna. Women replace men, but the story—contra Schakowsky—stays the same.

Schakowsky’s hope for a world led by women is also challenged by Mary Eberstadt’s just-released book How the West Really Lost God. Eberstadt challenges the accepted notion that faith supports marriage and the family, asking whether it is not actually the other way around—that the forming of families leads to faith.

Eberstadt makes the case that through committed human love we find God, and that this is particularly true in the transcendent experience of parenthood. The utterly new love that enters the world through childbirth leads us to acknowledge something that is greater than ourselves, and worthy of our gratitude.

Bit by bit we can see in such meditation the beginnings of an intuitively resonant account of how Christianity (and likely other religions too) really waxes and wanes in the world. . . . The Christian story itself is a story told through the prism of the family. Take away the prism and the story makes less sense.

Parents are the most fundamental defenders of life; they will die for their children’s sakes. Disrupt the family and you disrupt life, but not death. Death goes on. Our increasingly secular society sanctions abortion and euthanasia and battles to celebrate sterile unions that cannot naturally populate the world. We are in dissolution, so lonely that we are killing ourselves, so earth-bound in our thinking that we throw people away.

Gender politics have so confused us that the complementarity of the sexes has become a quaint notion, but Jan Schakowsky’s conceit is that we may “save the species” by putting one sex in charge of the whole world.

And people of faith are told they are gullible.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: abortion; catholic; christianity; feminism; homosexualagenda; prolife
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To: MrB; N. Theknow

.. and the way that’s overtly encouraged is nicely delineated in #12 above


21 posted on 05/22/2013 5:29:55 AM PDT by tomkat
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To: rhema

Powerful. So well written.


22 posted on 05/22/2013 5:43:10 AM PDT by Bigg Red (Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved! -Ps80)
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To: rlmorel

This woman agrees on both points.


23 posted on 05/22/2013 5:44:55 AM PDT by Bigg Red (Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved! -Ps80)
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To: driftless2

Hmmm...That is an interesting hypothesis you put forward. It does indeed seem, anecdotally, that it is usually women. Several cases come to mind, right now.


24 posted on 05/22/2013 5:47:48 AM PDT by Bigg Red (Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved! -Ps80)
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To: tomkat

Makes sense to this girl (who does not, BTW, want to rule the world).


25 posted on 05/22/2013 5:49:20 AM PDT by Bigg Red (Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved! -Ps80)
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To: Bigg Red
Then you are obviously a woman of intellectual discernment and overall good sense !

Have my Nomex laid out right over there on the table, and am somewhat surprised to have not needed it so far .. then again, it's early yet     d;^)

26 posted on 05/22/2013 5:55:43 AM PDT by tomkat
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To: MrB

She certainly fits the bill doesn’t she?


27 posted on 05/22/2013 6:04:51 AM PDT by Scotswife
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To: Scotswife

> We have a woman running the most powerful nation on earth - Valerie Jarrett.

Look where that’s gotten us

You beat me to it...: )

Wouldn’t bother me too much if Palin unseated her plus she’s a lot easier on the eyes.


28 posted on 05/22/2013 6:06:38 AM PDT by jsanders2001
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To: rhema

There are two structures of social hierarchy in this world: familes (with the extreme of tribalism) and government. Break down families and you have induced a demand for government.


29 posted on 05/22/2013 6:07:50 AM PDT by Carry_Okie (An economy is not a zero-sum game, but politics usually is.)
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To: rhema

If women ran the world, a major war would occur every 28-30 days.


30 posted on 05/22/2013 6:12:14 AM PDT by Little Ray (How did I end up in this hand-basket, and why is it getting so hot?)
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To: jsanders2001

I don’t care who unseats her just so long as they aren’t commies.

Sick and tired of commies! ugggggh!


31 posted on 05/22/2013 6:12:30 AM PDT by Scotswife
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To: rlmorel
Also true, in my opinion, is that women on their own can be just as venal and corrupt as men.

What women lack in the capacity for the direct physically brutal violence of which men are capable, they make up for with their own capacity for viciousness, backstabbing, and dishonesty. Kipling was wrong; the "female of the species" is not more deadly (as a direct, unconstrained confrontation will show) ... just different. At their worst, men and women alike can be spectacularly ugly. It's called "original sin". Pick up a Bible and read all about it.

Civilisation (IMO) is the result of cooperative action between men and women (individually and in larger groups) trying to minimize the bad and accentuate the good. The so-called "battle of the sexes" is a direct assault on civilisation.

32 posted on 05/22/2013 6:19:12 AM PDT by ArrogantBustard (Western Civilization is Aborting, Buggering, and Contracepting itself out of existence.)
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To: Little Ray
If women ran the world, a major war would occur every 28-30 days.

And all the men would go on a hunting, fishing and camping trip when it did.

Among Plains and Rocky Mountain tribes, this was precisely what happened. If they were lucky, when they got back, the wives would merely have beaten up on each other and nobody was seriously injured or dead.

33 posted on 05/22/2013 6:48:42 AM PDT by Vigilanteman (Obama: Fake black man. Fake Messiah. Fake American. How many fakes can you fit in one Zer0?)
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To: Vigilanteman

I can imagine. In the close confines of a nomad camp, women would “synchronize” pretty quickly. I bet the braves would have kept bug-out bags packed all the time...


34 posted on 05/22/2013 6:52:11 AM PDT by Little Ray (How did I end up in this hand-basket, and why is it getting so hot?)
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To: Vigilanteman

If you read the Bible, Old Testement law had the Women’s tents where they went during that time.

My bride at first thought that was horrible, and then realized it would mean the husbands weren’t around to make them mad.


35 posted on 05/22/2013 7:26:25 AM PDT by redgolum ("God is dead" -- Nietzsche. "Nietzsche is dead" -- God.)
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To: redgolum
There are an uncanny/large amount of similarities between Old Testament tribal practices and Plains/Rocky Mountain tribal practices. We could probably get a 300+ post on that type of thread.

Like the Children of Israel, many of these Tribes were displaced from their homelands and/or escaping slavery.

Just as one example, the Siouxian tribes lived in the Ohio River Valley before moving into the Plains. The Mandan branch pretty much took up farming where they left off because they moved to a remote area of the country (Missouri River Valley of present North Dakota) where they were left alone for the next 3-4 centuries.

The main body of the Sioux, on the other hand, took up the nomadic hunter-gather lifestyle because they took up closer and more desireable lands in modern day Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota where they were constantly being displaced by more aggressive tribes (such as the Chippewa) moving west.

36 posted on 05/22/2013 7:45:33 AM PDT by Vigilanteman (Obama: Fake black man. Fake Messiah. Fake American. How many fakes can you fit in one Zer0?)
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To: rhema
If the women want the world and all the power, the thinking goes, they can have it; the men will simply retire to whatever man-caves they are permitted.

That's a mistake.

Men in power have never ripped women's sex organs out for fun and politics. Women have. Read Robert Graves and some of the other scholars of pre-Indo-European Europe, or "Old Europe". There is a lot of dark stuff locked up in women, and the Communist International wants to use it.

When men have maltreated women (rape, murder) they've tended to die ignominiously. Not so the ancient priestesses who destroyed men on their altars on Midsummer's Night and at the end of the lunar year -- at the close of the ill-omened 13th month.

But don't go by me. Go on, read. It'll make your hair gray .... unless you're a woman with a hidden flavor for sadism, instrumentalism, and cruelty. Read up. Get a load of what The Grrrls have in store for you.

37 posted on 05/22/2013 10:40:33 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: rhema
If Women Ran the World



38 posted on 05/22/2013 11:50:27 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Elsie

Yeah, there’s one significant drawback to that approach. They might reconsider fairly quickly.


39 posted on 05/22/2013 11:51:21 AM PDT by william clark (Ecclesiastes 10:2)
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To: stuartcr

Mother
Theresa?


40 posted on 05/22/2013 11:51:47 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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