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"Long live Mars and Venus"

Babe performs the usual Thanksgiving table inspection down Goomp's and pronounces all up to snuff.

"Procreation isn't the only reason for having two sexes, as was demonstrated today," imails our sis, referring to the natural segretation of gals like us in the kitchen and our men in the keeping room this afternoon as we put the final touches on our Thanksgiving groaning-board tour de force while the boys discussed ship-model building and such.

Goomp's boy kitty, Purrky -- Mr. Perkins -- taste tests the turkey prior to the big roast.

"Women 'chat' about recipes, while men 'discuss' tools and model building."

After three hours at 350 degrees, Purrky pronounces the turkey acceptable for feline consumption.

"I can't help it. I love them, and vive le difference."

The table decor and groaning board win hearts and minds all around.

"It was interesting that there was NO FOOTBALL watching! The electronic hearth, and Googling, have raised their level of discussion." Indeed. Football watching -- like anything else -- is just an energizer. When you have ship-model building at hand, who needs football?

"To-day women can be on active service every day in the month"

"To-day women can be on active service every day in the month. They're free of traditional disadvantages," went the cheery Tampax ad copy (left) in those giddy early days of the nation's involvement in World War II. Who knew where this would lead? Slippery slopes always start out level and dry. The way ahead seemed full of hope and promise. As a young woman growing up in the 60's, we welcomed the freedom implied in the 1941 Tampax headline, "What a blessing it is that sanitary protection is now worn internally." Somewhere along the line, things went terribly wrong, as the once provocative if always air-headed Madonna went off the deep end (above, right, top headline now on Drudge: "CHURCH SLAMS MADONNA ON THE CROSS"). Isn't that special? Update: Kiran Chetry of Fox & Friends puts her finger on what's wrong with Madonna's latest effusion: "It's getting old. I mean been there, done that."

"Menstruation Is Fast Becoming 'Optional'" goes the Drudge headline, one among many, all trumped by the one at the top of the left column, "MADONNA TOUR OPENS TO CONTROVERSY." So much for national priorities. We don't wish to embarrass Goomp or Tuck or any of our other esteemed male readers, so we're going to tread lightly on this one, but the issues raised are HUGE:

Most doctors say they don't think suppressing menstruation is riskier than regular long-term birth control use, and one survey found a majority have prescribed contraception to prevent periods. Women have been using the pill for nearly half a century without significant problems, but some doctors want more research on long-term use.

The new methods should be popular. A non-scientific Web survey for the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals found at least two-thirds of respondents are bothered by fatigue, heavy bleeding, "really bad cramps" and even anger. Nearly half said they would like to have no period at all or decide when to have one.

In our salad days we dabbled with "the pill" but finally decided it was too risky -- cancer worries, mainly -- and opted for other means to the same end. Even as we found periods oppressive, they were, at the same time, a sign of physical well being. We were forever wondering how women managed in the old days -- mostly every era until the aftermath of WW II, when Tampax, popularized during the war, caught on amongst the general population of women both here and abroad. Then came the toxic-shock-syndrome hysteria, when lots of women of our generation turned their backs on "No Belts, No Pins, No Pads, No Odor." That is all we will say about these female mysteries to spare our male readers' delicate sensibilities.

Now we're wondering what role this toying with the menstrual cycle may have had in leading to the grim realities of our own and especially Europe's dwindling reproductive rates, even as hate-mongering Muslim immigrants spawn at will. Glenn Reynolds's Tech Central Station article the other day, "The Parent Trap," catches the conscience of the thing:

We've taken a lot of the fun out of parenting. Or to echo Longman, the "social costs" of parenting continue to rise, and, more significantly, perhaps, the "social returns" continue to decline.

Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. But in recent decades, a collection of parenting "experts" and safety-fascist types have extinguished some of the benefits while raising the costs, to the point where what's amazing isn't that people are having fewer kids, but that people are having kids at all.

Our sis has always said how glad she was she had her two Barneys before the pc police stepped in, uninvited, and took all the joy out of it. Is it too late to turn back and take another look at what we've wrought?

In spring a young man's fancy

Up close and personal, our garden's first crocus of spring (x 5) -- with a nod to Georgia O'Keefe -- opens to greet the vernal equinox -- "the point at which the sun appears to cross the celestial equator from south to north" -- which occured in the Northern Hemisphere yesterday at 6:26 p.m. We hadn't realized before googling that "the dates on which day and night are each 12 hours occur a few days before (spring) and after (fall) the equinoxes." Check out the U.S. Naval Observatory's website for details.

"Science is a particular enemy of manliness. Manliness asserts something you can't scientifically prove, namely the importance of human beings," conservative Harvard gadfly Harvey Mansfield -- promoting his new book "Manliness" -- told Naomi Schaefer Riley in a manfully focussed Opinion Journal interview a couple of weeks back. We disagree re science as the enemy, but here's the professor's argument, which gets it right for the most part:

"Before you're a gentleman, you have to be a man. Gentlemanliness is a refinement. It presupposes that you have a certain superiority over women, but teaches you how to exercise it. It also teaches you that women are superior in their ways." ['Wish he'd chosen another word. "Superior" is so tendentious, guaranteed to get the hackles rising. How about "difference," as in Vive la différence!]

Science is good for confirming what "common sense" already tells us, Mr. Mansfield allows, but beyond that, he has little use for it . . . "Science simply sees people as just another part of the natural world. But what manly men assert, according to Mr. Mansfield, is that "they are important and that their party, their country, their society, their group, whatever it may be, is important."

It depends upon what your definition of "just" is, as in "just another part of the natural world." From our own libertarian Darwinian viewpoint, both women and men harbor evolutionarily-honed imperatives to be noticed by their chosen peers. Science is your friend, professor. The important question is "whom do we select as our peers." He continues:

Manly men defend their turf, just as other male mammals do. The analogy to animals obviously suggests something animalistic about manliness. But manliness is specifically human as well. Manly men defend not just their turf but their country. Manliness is best shown in war, the defense of one’s country at its most difficult and dangerous. In Greek, the word for manliness, andreia, is also the word for courage.

He's obviously never seen Tiny in action. There is no fiercer defender of her turf than she. The interesting thing from our observations is that she will defend tooth and nail her own backyard but becomes submissive when we visit Goomp's. Her brother Baby, on the other hand, is confrontative with Goomp's cats. We think it's a girl-boy thing, supported by a British study we learned of in our Design School days, where it was discovered that male cats have a larger home range than female cats. Mommy vs. Daddy imperatives. Each will defend to the death, but their priorities differ. For both the importance of being noticed is where it's at. 'Sounds scientific and even Mansfieldian. More from the good professor:

For good and for ill, males impelled by their manliness have dominated all politics of which we know. Is there something inevitable about this domination or are we free to depart from it? With more and more countries moving toward democracy and peace, perhaps manliness will become less necessary.

Looking at the geopolitical landscape out there, we'd be inclined to say Professor Mansfield's definition of manliness is expansive enough to include all creatures great and small, female and male, from bower birds and peacocks to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf -- the new President of Liberia who sat proudly with the Leader of the Free World in the Oval Office this afternoon -- to the Muslim woman word warriors like Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali who are just saying no to those who would put them in their place.

Mansfield puts thymos at the center of his argument about what it is to be a man, highlighted in David Brooks's subscription-only op ed in the Sunday Times [via Travis Kavula at Red Ivy]. Answers has a good definition:

Thymos, one element of Plato's tripartite division of the soul -- the other two being reason and desire (eros) -- can be translated as spiritedness. It is the location of such feelings as pride, shame, indignation, and the need for recognition for oneself and for others.

Thymos can overrule both reason and basic animal instincts and propel one into a duel over an insult, or into a burning building to save a child, or into a war for a cause one finds just. According to Hegel, humanity is at its peak when it thymotically risks its life for the sake of a greater good. On the other hand, it is also what drives suicide bombers and other terrorists.

Exactly what we've been saying forever. The importance of shedding shame and capturing honor.

Not to be heard when you know what you know

"Did you know this same discussion was already going on 33 years ago when I first gave birth?" writes our imail correspondent re the episiotomy report blogged here. She refers to those Our Bodies, Ourselves gals who questioned the dictates of the "good doctors":

Women were questioning the need for routine episiotomies, that's all.  Suspicious, as with the performance of C-sections, that the "experts" do these procedures for their own convenience, not for the good of the mother or baby . . . NOT doing an episiotomy requires the doctor to take more care in the delivery . . . to ease the baby out, to prevent tearing.

Whatever her agenda, we have ours. Fascinating that old wives at the frontline decades ago are only now being "vindicated" by modrin statistical studies.  How painful not to be heard when you know what you know. That would be ourselves from day one, even though we've never given birth. We're reminded of the devastating effects of puerperal fever when home births gave way to hospital births (beginning in the 18th century?) and surgeons unwittingly infected untold thousands of healthy new mothers with the deadly germs on their unwashed hands fresh from surgery. Talk about sheeplike obeisance to authority and throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In recent times, midwives have made a comeback.  At the same time, one reads that increasingly Ob/Gyn docs are pulling in their shingle in the face of escalating malpractice lawsuits.  This ain't our field, but it's rich with the wonder and horror of the human condition.

"We have expressed our displeasure to Don"

 

"The female, equipped with a Defense far superior in polymorphous ingenuities to the rather simple Attack of the male, developed, and perfected, the Diversion Subterfuge. The first manifestation of this remarkable phenomenon was fudge-making." (James Thurber: Writings and Drawings)

"Seems to me that MSNBC needs to remove a lot more than "MS" from the network to improve its image," writes Michelle Malkin re the cadaverish Don Imus's latest gratuitous trashing of a woman who doesn't please his eye, in this case MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer:

That skank has to spend three hours with makeup in the morning . . . Who's she kidding? . . . Plus, she's dumber than dirt . . . Oh, my God, what a pig.

Who's a pig?  'Can't help but wonder how Deirdre feels about her husband's venomous misogyny. We used to watch "Imus in the Morning" when the old boy was trashing Bill "it depends upon what your definition of is is" Clinton years ago but haven't been tempted since GW moved into the White House. Presumably, Imus's ratings are still healthy amongst a subset of our fellow Americans (misogyny is universal and can rear its ugly head at any time), since the best the bottom-line guys at MSNBC -- soon to be The NBC News Channel -- can muster in his defense is "We have expressed our displeasure to Don."

Women can be as idiotic as men -- natch -- especially Marxist-lite women (do they realize their entire worldview was invented by a member of the opposite/oppressive sex?)  Check out Ann Althouse's comments re Christina Hoff Summers' National Review piece on ''College Republicans' response to the overpromotion of 'The Vagina Monologues' at Roger Williams University and the predictably repressive/humorless response from the administration."

"The argument can never really be settled"

What, no mention of cats? Babe can't imagine what Howard Kurtz could have been thinking of in listing the "engaging stuff" he has found on women's blogs with no mention of catblogging.

"As for this column, I encourage female bloggers (and others) to drop me an e-mail when they have a posting on media or politics that they'd like to see picked up," wrote Howard Kurtz in his WaPo "Media Notes" column yesterday [via Ann Althouse, who's quoted in the article]:

What's great about this topic is that everyone has an opinion and the argument can never really be settled. So the debate could go on for, say, a century or two.

I've been surfing a number of blogs by women and (attention: this is not a generalization) have found a fair number in diary form that deal with families, literature, cooking and other personal reflections -- engaging stuff, to be sure, but sometimes out of the echo-chamber warfare over media and politics that gets the most attention.

Here's Howie's e-mail address.  What are we waiting for?

What does a white male blogger want?

"I'm not sure, but an argument obviously can be made," writes Roger L. Simon re the recent unpleasantness fomented by aging, botox-muddled Marxist Feminists Susan Estrich, Maureen Dowd and their cohorts to the effect that the powers that be are preventing women from having their voices heard on the op ed pages of the MSM, not to mention the upper reaches of the blogosphere's Ecosystem, blogged here recently.  To put his post in perspective, we present Simon's words with a few editorial amendments (in bold):

This post by PowerLine's Deacon reminded me of that possibility, although I make an effort to link to men and people of pallid skin when I think about it. But unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I don't think about it much.

I'm almost always focused on the interest of the post itself, its subject matter, viewpoint and style. But then when I discover it is by a man or a person of pallid skin, I think good. It's an ex post facto thing, except where foreign blogs are concerned, because I deliberately seek out and link foreign blogs for their unique access to information. Is that affirmative action? I guess, of a sort.

Yah.  Too bad. No blogger worth her salt wants the doubts about excellence that always linger around the edges of affirmative action of any sort.

I am blogger, hear me roar

"I know that a lot of women feel that men are clamoring to get ahead of them," ventures the ever gallant Glenn Reynolds, stepping into the hornet's nest of angry women of the left as exemplified most recently by Susan Estrich's shrill attacks on Michael Kinsley over the fact that there are more men's voices than women's on the nation's top op ed pages:

But on the other hand, I know that a lot of men are afraid that women will pile all over them -- and play the double-standard "you're hitting a girl" gender card -- if they say the wrong thing. (And there's evidence for this -- ask Larry Summers.) That's gender dynamics.

Cringe.  That's not gender dynamics, dear professor.  That's Marxist Feminist dynamics, and those old gals don't speak for us nor a lot of women across this land or this blogosphere, no way.  Christine Hurt of Conglomerate, whom you link, gives reason to hope this too shall pass:

I have noticed that although there are few female law professor blawgs, there are plenty of female law student blawgs. I think the tide is turning.

As a youngster in the fifties, we were outraged at the double standard -- our brother/playmate was only a year older yet was allowed to do things we weren't "because you're a girl."  Then came the portrayal of women as weakminded also-rans in the classical literature schoolchildren were reading in those days.  We tended to "identify" with the heroes, whether female or male. When some man back then thought to compliment us by saying "You think like a man," we were fighting mad.  We're a girl, and we think like ourselves. But then sometime in the sixties, when we were launching our own career as an independent-thinking woman, the women of the left co-opted feminism and spoiled it for the rest of us. As with all fundamentalists, you either agreed with the party line, or you didn't count.  We were a voice in the wilderness forever until the blogosphere gave us a soap box from which we could make our voice heard over the din of the MSM Susan Estriches of this world.

When people like top lefty blogger -- and former catblogger -- Kevin Drum say "men are more comfortable [than women] with the food-fight nature of opinion," we breathe deeply and repeat "Margaret Thatcher, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Condi Rice."  As we said in a recent post:

Maybe we're in a Pauline Kael bubble of our own, but most of the women we know -- fellow bloggers, readers, friends and relatives -- adore fiery political discourse and keep coming back for more.

What does a woman want?  Like a man, it depends upon the individual. With a nod to Helen Reddy, I am blogger, hear me roar In numbers too big to ignore.

Update:  A place at the table with the big guy.

A quick fix

"You're right that I missed Michele, though.  I'll fix it," writes Kevin Drum in the comments section of our post about the "woman problem" in the blogosphere, with reference to his mistaken citation of "exactly two" female bloggers in the Ecosystem's top 30.  Thank you, sir.  You are a gentleman. That's one of the big things we bloggers lay claim to, of course, correcting the record amongst ourselves. [Know what, though? He fixed it but never gave us any credit for calling it to his attention.  Hmmmm.]  Drum adds, in response to our food-fighting post:

As for why I wrote about this, that's obvious, isn't it?  It was because of the recent Kinsley/Estrich dustup.  Since the blogosphere doesn't have the same traditional barriers to entry of the op-ed page, it makes an interesting comparison.

Point well taken. Our main argument, though, would be that Marxoid feminists like Estrich & Company don't speak for a lot of us gals out here who favor self-reliance and rugged individualism over victimology and government handouts. Even as Susan whines and complains, we are out here blogging our hearts out. Please stop by again and check out our "Look to the animals" posts.

A woman blogger's work is never done

'What is the point of rehashing the same subject every six months or so when it never EVER changes? ' writes the Divine Miss M of A Small Victory in our comments to the previous post on the alleged lack of good blogger babes out here in the sphere:

Is it something in their biological clock that says "oh, six months are up. Let's write again about how there are no good women bloggers, even though there ARE and I'm just too lazy/stupid/ignorant/sexist to find them or I just don't think they are worth my time because they have a vagina!

As we warned our imail correspondent, Michele's "a spicy gal. No-prisoners type." We mentioned she has blogged about her panic disorder:

She:  That much anger is very dangerous.

We: I suspect that blogging helps . . . She has a HUGE following.

She: Obviously, she's found her niche: Angry, explosive, panic-ridden citizens with vaginas.

If the thong fits? But back to the topic, Teresa of Technicalities gets down to the gist in our comments section:

Heaven forbid they [libs and their MSM allies] actually go looking around to see what is really going on! (that would be like . . . work).

Those who do not work are doomed to be worked over?