Daily Archives: July 25, 2022

A visual representation of the souls of my children when they start lecturing me about my failings.

I finally worked up the wherewithal to start looking at my pictures from our trip. Matt had the better idea of posting big chunks of them every Sunday and then going back offline, whereas I thought, foolishly, that I would come home and sort them and then post them systematically. I added Post Pictures to my List Of All The Things I Will Do. I got home and started working down the list. Part of my magical thinking was that if I could just get to the end of my inbox, and do all the other miscellaneous admin (thats what I call it to myself) that always sits there, like the laundry, weighing on my conscience, I would be really happy.

So, I kid you not, I did just that (less the pictures). I coped with my inbox. I went through and paid all kinds of school fees. I found my stamps and mailed my letters. Iseriously, sit down and put down your iced coffeegot to the end of my list. I crossed the last thing off on Monday night and then sat back and waited for the flood of relief and joy that I knew, as certainly as night follows day, would overwhelm me.

But nothing happened. Nothing at all, except that I looked back at my phone and found I had three new tasks magically appear in my email that I didnt even know were going to hit me. And I was just as anxious as ever. And no feelings of happiness or relief whatsoever illuminated my soul. It was a huge and terrible disappointment.

And so, in the spirit of Solomon and all his experiments in temporal joy, let me just warn you off even trying.Do Not Devote Yourself To Admin. Dont. Dont make responding to email your full-time job. Youll do it all and youll still be stressed out. I mean, Im not suggesting you not do it at all, but, as the person who wrote Deep Work said (I think), shove that baby back in the corner. Admin should be confined to a small box, like a yapping angry dog. It shouldnt be let out to wander around and take over everything. Like the laundry, which should live in its own dismal room and be shoved back in whenever it spills out or whenever anything more interesting comes along, email and other sorts of tasks should be forced back into their desolating corner in favor of more satisfying pursuits, like pulling up weeds, arguing with your children about Jordan Peterson, and trying to recreate the Coffee With Milk that you ordered once in Portugal.

Not a very good picture, I admit, but stopping to fix it is really beyond my abilities right now. To put any nice pictures here Im going to have to go back and resize everything and Im not sure how. Hopefully, it isnt as complicated as it looks. Meanwhile, as I said, my children have had a lot of things to say about Jordan Peterson. Apparently, a lot of them watched his short lecture to the church (I havent had a chance to yet) and were both bemused and incensed. For some reason, most of them are big JP fans. The oldest is working her way through his lectures on the Bible and can often be found, headphones plugged in, smiling and shaking her head. They are interesting, but, as she says, he so often misses the point. As to what the church should be doing, my children wanted to give Jordan Peterson some advice. Of course, he is right that young men are being cast off and that the church should particularly invite them in and affirm their biological realities. But (and this is the advice bit) it would be helpful if Professor Peterson would take the trouble to discover what the church is for. And he could do that by reading more Christian writers andthey were quite adamant about thisgiving in and going to church himself. If CS Lewis could submit himself to the mediocrity of the C of E on an ordinary Sunday morning, and Jesus himself could go to the Synagogue for his whole earthly lifeand my goodness, what must it be like to sit there and listen to one dubious and confused biblical exposition after another, oh wait, God does it still! He is there in every worship service in every corner of every country through all timethan even Jordan Peterson can, and should, go. Because it is only by going and submitting ones impressive intellect to the mercies and grace of the ordinary gathering of faithful worshippers that the point of the exercise gradually becomes clear. And that is that Jesus saves us from ourselves and unites us to him. Thats a message that young men need, but also older ones, and women as well.

My children pointed their fingers at me and practically shoutedGo to church, Jordan. The young menand young womenof today who listen to you insist.

And now, if you will excuse me, Im going to go have my morning walk in this hideous thousand-degree weather. And after that, I have no idea. I probably need to go buy a latte since I cant make a good one myself and I cant crop my pictures either. Have a nice day!

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Wisdom of the Ages: Email, Jordan Peterson, and a Latte - Patheos

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With the recent Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade, pro-life and pro-abortion factions have been jockeying to further influence our nations culture. Its hard not to notice the hateful ugliness of a visceral recoil coming from leftist activists. So why exactly does a nations culture matter? Whats at stake? Why does choosing to live a life of virtue, or vice, even matter?

With abortion and many other issues, the world is in a massive state of confusion. Violence is increasing. Order is breaking down. Everyone knows that there is something wrong afoot. Everything that is good these days is under attack. Whats going on, and what can everyday people do about it?

In Against the Grain: Heroic Catholics Through the Centuries I tell the story of 21 saints from 21 centuries focused on 21 virtues and why virtue matters especially for our time. Better understanding individuals who lived as shining examples, as signs of contradiction, who did what was right and not what was necessarily always popular. Against the Grain is a summons to heroic virtue, to sainthood, for all. To be a saint is to change the world one soul at a time.

When the world tilts toward crazy, the desire for the heroic increases. Americans love superheroes. Feel good stories about good defeating evil. Our rational brains inform us that while comic book and movie superheroes arent real, were fascinated by them nonetheless. Why is that? Instinctively we love our military, police, firefighters, medical and everyday heroes. Heroes give us solace, energy, and hope.

MARIO LOPEZ SHARES PHOTOS OF HIS SON'S FIRST COMMUNION

Details of St Savior in Chora church, known as Kariye in Turkish, in Istanbul, Friday, Aug. 21, 2020. Turkey on Friday formally converted former Byzantine church, St Savior in Chora, into a mosque, a month after it similarly turned Istanbul's landmark Hagia Sophia into a Muslim house of prayer, drawing international rebuke.(AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

Catholics know that those who have lived lives of heroic virtue, our Saints, were not fictitious, but real. We look to them to imitate them as they give us true solace, energy and hope. Living lives of heroic virtue is what is required to fix our broken families, nation, and church.

Dr. Jordan Peterson recently asked Church leaders to start asking more of young people. He spoke of "making big demandsbig asksof her members. By so doing they would get a heroic response, heroic involvement, and heroic dedication. Do we prefer short-term safety, affiliation or status over long-term freedom, belonging and heroism?"

Against the Grain, while focusing on heroic saints, is a highly relatable book as it also focuses on struggles and weaknesses. Against the Grain shows the path the saints walked to get to the point of strength. And thats the example that you and I need. Where we too say, "Why not me?"

Against the Grain is a roadmap. It is a message to take action. An action of resistance to the globalists "Great Reset," "Great Transition," and to the anti-Christian elites.

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People Praying in a church

Against the Grain is also a life preserver. More to the point, its an eternal life preserver. When the culture is swamping your boat with garbage and nonsense, living a life of greater virtue, perhaps even heroic virtue, is an eternal life preserver.

We are called to be extraordinary in the ordinary. As the world whips itself into further frenzy, confusion, and madness, the cross is the answer. Saint Bruno, founder of the Carthusians, said in the 11th century, "While the world changes, the cross stands firm." Stand firm with the cross.

Against the Grain is a playbook for the good guys to stop playing defense and start playing offense. If you have been conditioned to go with the flow of our immoral culture, this book is not for you. If you live as a sign of contradiction amidst our coarsening culture, and are looking to live a life of greater virtue, perhaps even heroic virtue, be fortified with Against the Grain.

Against the Grain is a book that will change the way you see your faith and your relationship with humanity. Its about an epic struggle and mostly, about our future. As Saint John Vianney said, "The saints did not all begin well; but they all ended well. We have begun badly; let us end well, and we shall go one day and meet them in heaven."

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(Photo by Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images) (2005 Getty Images)

Against the Grain is for culture-warrior, patriotic, serious, faithful Catholics, and people of all faiths interested in the Catholic story. This story isnt just about our forefathers. Its about each persons personal quest to find the courage to be truly faithful in a world where Catholicism is often unwelcome.

Dont wait for Calvary. Instead, move forward with moral confidence. If need be, heroic confidence. Step into the breach. Stand out. Go against the grain.

Saints are heroes. Be one.

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Learn from these heroic saints who lived against the grain - Fox News

On the internet, youll find extreme dieters of all types, and many of them will swear to you that theirs is the only healthy way for a human to eat. At one end of the spectrum, theres Jordan Peterson with his carnivore diet, consisting of nothing but beef, salt and water. At the other, frugivore diets pushed by YouTubers and their ilk are not just vegan and raw but almost entirely made up of fresh fruit. And then, of course, we have the classic and unapologetically restrictive weight loss programs like the cabbage soup diet, the Master Cleanse (aka the lemonade diet), and the currently trendy Mono Diet, where you eat only one food.

Advocates for highly restrictive diets like these tend to massively overemphasize the benefits of their approved food while seriously exaggerating the drawbacks of all other foods. But these are only the most extreme examples of a supposed wellness culture that makes huge generalizations and routinely manipulates or straight-up ignores scientific evidence. Unfortunately, this approach ends up polluting even those conversations that do have some legitimate basisfor instance, veganism.

There are plenty of health benefits to a plant-based diet, and unlike the above examples, its not even necessarily a particularly restrictive dieteven nonvegans and nonvegetarians who eat primarily plant-based can reap the benefits. But the unfortunate truth is that like most things on the internet, a grain of truth gets stretched far beyond the bounds of what science can actually prove.

Its not hard to imagine why some voices for veganism might exaggerate or even fabricate health-related claims. The animal agriculture industry enacts gruesome violence against animals, as well as many of its laborers and, of course, the health of the planet. So if health is what will compel people to change their diets in a way thats beneficial for animals and the environment, its easy to see why some activists and influencers would push nutritional facts as the most effective avenue to help end the industry.

But ultimately, misinformation is only going to harm the movements credibility. Veganism is a more widespread idea in our society now than ever beforewe cant afford to risk causing folks to dismiss the whole thing as bunk. And all of this misinformation, exaggeration, and cherry-picking is a shame, because it obscures the actual strong evidence of the benefits of eating less meat, eggs, or dairy: lower risk of heart disease, stroke, and several types of cancer, to name just a few.

Regrettably, conversations around veganism tend to be rife with pseudoscience. Its not hard to find vegan influencers who spout unproven theories as though they were fact, utilize confusing and misguided logic, or say things that are plainly falselike that a vegan diet can change your eye color. Even actual medical doctors have been known to make dramatic and shaky claims, such as that a single meal high in animal fat can cripple a persons arteries, citing one single, decades-old study that featured just 10 subjects and no control group.

Youll hear people saying that nothing less than a 100% plant-based diet can be considered optimally healthy, when the reality is, we just dont have the data to back that up. Sure, there are plenty of studies that do support the general idea that plant-based eating is healthy in one way or another, and plenty of them are recent and use reliable methodologies. But even good data can be woefully misinterpreted. Correlation often gets mistaken for causation, and its difficultif not impossibleto isolate very specific inputs and outcomes (like, does cheese cause cancer?) because human biology and lifestyles are complicated.

Heres an example: James Beard Award-winning Washington Post columnist Tamar Haspel points to this Bloomberg article, the headline of which boldly claims, One Avocado a Week Cuts Risk of Heart Disease by 20%. Which sounds huge! But a closer look reveals that the study only demonstrates an association between avocados and heart disease, not a causal relationship. Do avocados cut the risk of heart disease, or do people who make overall heart-healthy lifestyle choices just eat a lot of avocados? Based on this study alone, we cant say. Any conclusion is, at best, a loose interpretation of the facts.

And the issues with nutritional science as we know it today go even deeper. For one thing, many of these studies (including the avocado one) rely on self-reported information from study participants. Thats putting a lot of faith in regular people to accurately and honestly measure their own eating habits, which human beings are famously bad at. When the input data is already in question, its hard to trust any conclusions drawn from it.

Even putting that aside, observational studies dont allow scientists to randomize their study subjects. If were just noting what real people are actually doing, we cant separate the elements we want to examinefor instance, meat consumptionfrom other factors like income, education, gender, smoking and drinking behavior, and what else they eat. As a result, the kind of information we get from these studies is imprecise;and unless the results include very dramatic, statistically significant trends, its risky to extrapolate much from them.

But getting the kind of data we could reliably work with is more or less impossible. To truly control a study, researchers would have to literally control everything eaten by hundreds of participants (or more) over a period of years, in order to eliminate all (or even most) potential confounding factors. Real human lives are just too complicated to regiment the way a true lab study requires.

Furthermore, the biological world is just more complicated than wed like to think. Different people have different nutritional needs. For people with certain gastrointestinal conditions, eating fully vegan just isnt feasible. But even barring that, human bodies are unique and one person may not process a particular food in the exact way another person would. With that in mind, one-size-fits-all health advice of any kind should probably be subject to some heavy skepticism. Given all of this, its no wonder that doctors, nutritionists, researchers, and other credentialed expertsnot to mention third party interpreters of research, like journalists and other media figurestend to give diverse, often contradictory advice.

Meanwhile, an alarming portion of the population, and even of the scientific community, are apparently indifferent to nutritional science altogether. Fewer than 20% of medical schools in the U.S. have a single required course on nutrition, and the majority of medical schools teach less than 25 hours of nutrition education in the four years it takes to complete an MD program. All this, despite the fact that diet-related diseasemuch as heart disease and type 2 diabetesare among the leading causes of death in the U.S. today.

Our diet-obsessed culture is constantly searching for a magic bullet to fix all the diet-related problems we face. We try complicated, often punishing, and sometimes even dangerous methods to, ostensibly, get healthy (often a euphemism for lose weight), based on so-called empirical evidence thats shaky at best. The fact is, nutritional science just isnt at a point where we can confidently dole out sweeping directives on how people should eat. Sure, there are some points that the medical community has reached some degree of consensus on: The American Heart Association tells us that eating a lot of meat is not a healthy way to lose weight, especially for folks who have or are at risk for heart disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says to avoid processed food and sugary drinks in order to lower our risk of heart disease and stroke. And the American Cancer Society tells us to eat a variety of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

Eat your veggies and avoid soda are probably not groundbreaking bits of advice for most people, and theyre certainly not going to sell any flashy new diet books. Anyone whos spouting granular advice on exactly what and what not to eat is probably operating more on faith than facts. Perhaps a 100% vegan diet is the healthiest way for humans to eat, after allbut we just dont know for sure. Its past time vegan influencers and activists embrace that scientific reality. The credibility of veganism, and the future of a more sustainable and compassionate world, depend on it.

Read more:

Vegans need to stop exaggerating the health benefits of a plant-based diet - Fast Company

I

My preference for female artistes (outside groups) has two sides in a balance. On one side there is Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Carole King, and Joni Mitchell. On the other, there's Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone.

There are others like Olivia Newton John, Mary Hopkin, and Sarah Vaughan, but I listen to the above seven more.

Baez, Joplin, King, and Mitchell pushed the boundaries of songwriting for women. They were storytellers telling their own stories, and stories of their time.

Fitzgerald, Holiday, and Simone were singers who gave life to the great American songbooks and composer-songwriters of their time. However, Fitzgerald had her fair contribution to songwriting. Holiday also wrote a few songs.

When I reached the end of my formative years, these seven female voices became my lighthouse.

II

Aman Bhai, a friend who happens to be a child psychiatrist once told me, if you treat a child as an adult, they'll respond back as an adult. I remembered this. When I became a father, I would encourage serious and open discussions with my daughter, Annapurna. Whether because of this or not, Annapurna has shared things with me ever since she and I can remember. This gave both of us a portal to transcend a generation divide.

A couple years ago, I asked Annapurna to give me a list of some albums I could present her in vinyl (LP). A few days later she gave me her list. The second serial was circled. It was Amy Winehouse's Back to Black.

Annapurna told me, "Listen to this album. You'll like Amy."

I had no idea who Amy Winehouse was. The only guess I could make was from her surname. It was evident she was Jewish and white. I now had to listen to the "Back to Black" single.

The 10-second intro sent shivers down my spine. The moment Amy started to sing, I was blown away. Had I listened blindfold, I'd have thought I was listening to a black voice. When she spoke, I was even more surprised. She had a British accent. London Cockney to be precise.

The seven female voices that tuned my ears are all from the USA, with Joni from Canada. I never came across one British female voice worthy to be inducted into my personal "hall of fame". And here I was listening to such a voice that was full of power and majesty.

My curiosity didn't end here. Amy's voice was tearing emotions out with honesty. The lyrics were unexpectedly explicit, but honest. The voice was raw, natural, and full of melancholy. In the melancholy there was an emptiness.

I never heard a female voice with this emptiness. I had to find out more.

III

Back to Black has eleven songs. Each song is different, but they all string into a common thread. Like Joni Mitchell's Blue (1971), Back to Black is an autobiography of a young girl trying to understand relationships. Like Carole King's Tapestry (1971), the album navigates through different experiences of a young girl.

Back to Black songs are songs of love and betrayal. They're not sugary. If love can kiss, it can also bleed. This is the freshness and honesty I never found in depth in the song writing of Baez, Joplin, King, and Mitchell.

There was still something different with Amy. In her voice, you can feel blues, gospel, and jazz oozing. However, it wasn't polished. It was raw. Only Billie Holiday, in the seven female voices that were my lighthouse, had that raw voice.

Once you hear a voice like that, you know there's a story behind all this.

IV

The more I explored Amy through her studio albums and live performances, the more it became evident, that she wasn't listening to sugary pop while growing up. Coming from a musical family, and her paternal grandma Cynthia knowing the jazz musician Ronnie Scott, intimately told you what type of songs her young ears were subject to.

Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me to The Moon" was one of the first songs Amy listened, at the age of two. She would sing the song to cheer her up.

While growing up, she listened to Motown girl groups. She listened to gospel voices in Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin. She listened to the jazz of Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Thelonius Monk. Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday also trained her ears. Carole King, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Alanis Morissette, and others were also with her in her formative years.

Amy only wanted to be a jazz singer. When she applied to the Sylvia Young Theatre, she wrote in her essay, she wanted people to hear her voice and forget their troubles. Many certainly did. She also wrote songs to forget her troubles. Sadly, she failed to make ends meet.

Growing up near and later settling in Camden in London exposed Amy to the bright and dark sides of popular culture. Camden is a place that makes dreams. And dreams can go either way. They can be fairy tales or can end up in nightmares. When you live between the two in a place like Camden, you need to be managed well. Sadly, that wasn't the case with Amy, before or after her fame. Her death was just the end, but her troubles started well before that fateful day, July 23, 2011, when she never woke up.

V

Amy Winehouse was the missing link in my balance of seven female voices. The balance needed a voice that would resemble both its sides. Amy was that voice. Through Amy I explored Adele, Fiona Apple, Billie Eilish and some others. Somehow, they lack that raw, honest, and sincere emotion in their voice, and the lyrics came so naturally with Amy.

Although Amy is no longer with us, "I'm not ashamed even if the guilt kills me" to say that she was a breath of fresh air while she sang, and fresher now as we look back with a smile on our faces on an artiste who was honest and natural.

Asrar Chowdhury is a Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University. He is the author of Echoes in SHOUT of the Daily Star. Email: asrarul@gmail.com; asrarul@juniv.edu

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Remembering the honest and natural voice of Amy Winehouse - The Daily Star

Last summer, I wrote about how Portnoys particular brand of transgressive boorishness served as an inspiration to Republican politicians eager to capitalize on the backlash to newly established progressive social norms around things like gender pronoun usage and diversity, equity and inclusion practices. But that alliance was never ideological it was aesthetic. To a certain kind of secular, mostly apolitical Barstool bro, the party of evangelical pro-lifers might not have been an ideal fit, but it was certainly more appealing than the party of woke scolds and stuffy bosses across the aisle.

Now that the Supreme Court has handed social conservatives their most significant ideological victory of the modern political era, those voters will have to choose: Is it worth giving sanction to an overtly religious, mostly unpopular political project simply to own the libs? Portnoy himself explicitly says no. But cultural backlash is as unpredictable as it is powerful, and its place at the heart of the modern GOP means that how a particular type of independent, attitudinally conservative voter responds could shape America for years to come.

To look at the empirical evidence in so much as it exists around opinion on abortion rights, one might think that Republicans victory over Roe is somewhat Pyrrhic. The most recent data from the Pew Research Center, collected at the beginning of July after the Dobbs decision, shows that 57 percent of the population disagrees with the decision itself (including a not-insignificant 29 percent of Republicans); the only group expressing overwhelmingly strong approval is white evangelicals. Sixty-two percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in most or all cases.

But dig deeper into the data and youll find that support for abortion varies considerably based on the duration of pregnancy, especially taking into account voters geographic distribution. There are also, of course, the inherent limitations of public opinion polling, as well as the relative rarity of single-issue voters (among whom anti-abortion voters outnumber their counterparts). Its not quite accurate to say the GOP has summarily alienated an electorate that otherwise seemed prime to embrace it in this falls midterms.

So one might look to another indicator, albeit one lacking the veneer of empiricism that polling maintains: The opinions of thinkers and leaders in the conservative movement. What actual politicians say is unreliable, as beholden as they are to pesky primary voters and wealthy, ideological donors. What about those responsible for curating the vibes of the modern conservative movement?

At the beginning of June, the National Review fellow and social-conservative wunderkind Nate Hochman wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled What Comes After the Religious Right? In it, he expanded on the somewhat declinist view of the conservative Catholic writer Matthew Walther, who coined the term Barstool conservative in a 2021 op-ed for The Week writing that, While the old religious right will see much to like in the new cultural conservatism, they are partners, rather than leaders, in the coalition. Hochman argues that although a figure as non-pious as Trump (who could plausibly claim the mantle of the Barstool president) might have empowered social conservatives, theyre too much of an electoral minority to succeed without their comparatively libertine coalitional partners.

Hochmans insight invites a similar reflection from the other side of the aisle. Once upon a time, as the writer Matt Yglesias recently pointed out in response to Portnoys pro-Roe stance, chauvinistic bros were reliable Democratic voters, who made common cause with realpolitik-ing feminists willing to overlook the Clinton-era partys affective cultural conservatism in exchange for political wins. Both were opposed to the Moral Majority-era sanctimony of the Reagan-Bush GOP, the ethos of the alliance perhaps best summed up by a notorious quote regarding Clinton from the former Time White House reporter Nina Burleigh: Id be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.

For various reasons beyond the scope of this essay, the salience of cultural politics has increased in American life to an extent that makes that alliance impossible. Conservative thought leaders now find themselves at the same crossroads liberals once did: What price are they willing to pay what are they willing to sacrifice, or excuse to keep such fickle, secular, Portnoy-like independent voters in the fold?

What are conservative thought leaders willing to sacrifice, or excuse to keep such fickle, secular, Dave Portnoy-like independent voters in the fold?|Michael Reaves/Getty Images

As the GOPs most reliable and motivated voting bloc, the anti-abortion movement is clearly not going anywhere. To the chagrin and fear of liberals, and the hope of the would-be New Right, theres some evidence that they might not have to. Looking at the replies to Portnoys initial post-Roe tweet, alongside the criticism from hard-right figures like Dan Bongino (as well as Hochman himself), one can see a slew of comments from average, non-blue-check-sporting Barstool fans, protesting that all the Supreme Court did was let it be a state issue, or that he should simply stick to sports.

This is where Barstool per se ceases to be a useful framework through which to understand the shifts occurring in American politics today. (As with any brand with as massive a reach as Portnoys, its fans are more ideologically diverse than a liberals snap judgment would assume.) The angst inspired by Portnoys pro-abortion rights turn reflects a much broader phenomenon: Just as secular and religious GOP voters are split, theres an even narrower division among those who are simply alienated by the modern left and those who are outright anti-feminists, especially among young voters.

The anti-feminism of todays young conservatives takes a few different forms. There is, of course, the outright hate spread on forums like 4chan and by trolls like Nick Fuentes; the casual, fratty misogyny of more mainstream figures like Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler, who in a live streamed rant after his Jan. 6 committee testimony called his female former coworkers thots and hoes; and the faux-erudition of New Right leaders like Sen. Josh Hawley, who in a keynote address to the National Conservatism Conference decried the lefts attack on men in America. (Its not just America, either: In South Korea, youth anti-feminism helped propel a conservative president to the Blue House.) Young anti-feminists see a world where women are at least notionally more empowered than ever, yet no one seems to be happy about it. They look to the past for solutions in lieu of inventing new ones for the moment.

And there are plenty of historical examples, both religious and secular, to draw from. In her 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, the feminist writer Susan Faludi described a taxonomy of anti-feminist reaction to the advances of the Equal Rights Amendment era, from Christian leaders like Paul Weyrich who promised to overturn the present power structure of the country to the quasi-paganism of the poet Robert Bly, who encouraged real men to reclaim their cultural birthright by psychologically isolating themselves from women. Faludi sums up their shared philosophy as the belief that the very steps that have elevated womens position have actually led to their downfall.

One might wonder what Faludi, in an era where Weyrich and Bly have inspired successors in figures like the (now-disgraced) megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll and the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, would have to say about the backlash to womens more recent advances. To borrow a rhetorical move from Woody Allen, whom Bly especially hated, we dont have to wonder; I happen to have Ms. Faludi right here: Writing in the New York Times in response to Roes overturning, she argues that feminisms growing entwinement with celebrity culture is a primary culprit in making it more vulnerable than ever to a more pernicious backlash, one that has never relented, one that has brought us the calamity of the Alito draft opinion.

This is why social conservatives find themselves at a moment of not just dog-that-caught-the-car peril, but potential promise. The Courts ruling was only made possible by the combined forces of secular conservatism, via Trumps mass heterodox appeal, and the decades of concentrated effort by a minority of religious activists. Like with Weyrich and Bly, or Driscoll and Peterson, anti-feminism can take many forms and have many motivations, but the basic ressentiment it taps into transcends religion, class or partisanship, and is stubbornly persistent. By subsuming life-or-death social issues under the auspices of Lean In moments and social media slap downs over whether Taylor Swift is or isnt a feminist, as Faludi wrote, liberals and feminists have risked erasing the distinction in the publics mind between serious material outcomes and such symbological slap-fights.

That possibility conjures a world where arguments about womens health outcomes, or whether theres a feminist case against abortion, or over pro-family Republican economic policies might become immaterial as abortion becomes an entirely different, more recognizably modern kind of culture-war issue. We simply dont know yet whether the Barstool cohort of the modern GOP will look around at a post-Roe world and decide their party has gone too far. But if they dont, and Trumps coalition holds, it will be the most powerful symbol yet of Americas transition to a symbolic mass politics of cultural grievance.

Those politics still can have very real policy consequences, as millions of women in red states are now discovering. Improbable as it might seem, whether or not said consequences endure or even spread might depend on what occurs in the hearts and minds, and on the ballots, of men like Dave Portnoy.

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The Barstool Bros' Split Over Abortion Could Determine the Future of the GOP - POLITICO

Believe me, I hear you loud and clear about the awful new comments policy, which has pretty much shut down this blog's comments. I believe the Mothership is working in some way to fix this. In the meantime, if you have something substantive you would like to say, email me at rod -- at -- amconmag -- dot -- com, and I'll consider posting your words. I won't use your name unless you explicitly ask me to. Be sure to leave clear instructions if you want me to edit out anything.

A reader writes:

Just back from a week at summer camp as an adult leader for my son's scout troop. My kids live in sort of a conservative catholic cocoon, we do a few things "beyond the pale" (in the sense of the old border with Scotland). For many years scouts has been like baseball: kept safe more by inertia than by anything else.

Now that "scouts BSA" (formerly the Boy Scouts) also has girls, cross-dressing can actually be harder to see at first glance. Someone walks past, girl or boy? Maybe it's a good thing there are girls, my son is often oblivious to these things.

So, I know I'm not reporting anything crazy, nor unexpected. Of course, now that American youth are on a trans / genderbender kick, of course that streak will infect the scouts. How could it not? Years ago,scouts BSA was officially unwelcoming to LGBT scouts and leaders, so there were some constraints - that's all to the wayside now. Now the only thing holding it back is who runs scouting... moms and dads mostly. But you know how that is. If there's no express counter-cultural rule, you know which way this goes.

So among the camp counselors this year, there were a good 2-4 who didn't, shall we say, dress according to their biology.

What do you do as a parent? Do you say something on the survey? As if that would accomplish anything (other than labeling you as a hater).Do you seek after authority, to try to rein this in? But could you do it, even if you tried?

Do you encourage your son to be a counselor when he gets older? Would you send your kid off to room with folks like that for a couple months? Sacrifice your son on that alter-altar? A really good boy from our troop is there this summer as a counselor... I will pray for him.

So another institution is taken over, kids lose one more place where they can be a kid, and you have (sadly) one more example of why we need a Benedict Option.

Here's a letter from a Reformed pastor:

I read your blog today about the feminization of Christianity and the need to man up.Thought provoking for sure.Then I read your Substack about the Reformed Church in the Netherlands and I was surprised to see that my thoughts were somewhat tracking yoursHere are some observations in no particular order.1. Hyper masculine church leadership often results in catastrophic disasters. Men who cant control their sex drives, (Ravi long list here Canadas Bruxy Cavey is the most recent addition to this hall of shame) or their need for power (James MacDonald) or their competitive spirit (Driscoll) destroy what they build in the most fantastic ways. Jesus is aware of this as he commands the path of cross bearing, suffering and models rhetorical poise in the face of intense attack. Be ready to die for God, for truth, and for your neighbour. But first, you die to yourself. 1.5 Hyper masculine Christianity is Islam. Rules, oppression of women, violence, strict discipline, little to no grace. Hyper masculine Islam is ever waiting in the wings and is actively recruiting. They will tell a man to fight and shed the blood of the enemy. The Christian idea that the fight is against powers and principalities and ultimately against the evil within is in competition with those eager to find warriors to battle external foes who can only kill the body. 2. When I grew up all the men went to Mass on Saturday nights. We were Protestant and my dad would often note that the Catholics had the most men in church. Why? Maybe it was the ritual. Maybe it was the fact that the church with its huge bloody Christ painted on the wall, the focal point for all to see, created the sense of death, and with it the sense of adventure the spurs a man to be the best. Or maybe thats just me, from a strict Calvinist iconoclastic upbringing being shocked by such an image. I can still see that Christ arms out stretched with a grey bearded God the father above him holding up his arms with his and a dove above them both. Blood and water being collected from his side into a communion chalice. No mystery here when it came to theology. Blood, death, God, Christ. A church that still could pack the place at 11:30pm on Christmas Eve. When we Protestants lost the visual arts, we started to lose everyone.3. Bible study with a group of young men the other night. Our discussion of the Virgin Birth devolved into a discussion about the mysterious birth of Anakin Skywalker. They knew more about George Lucas and his parody of the virgin birth than the story in Matt 2 and its theological implications. You are right on about Myth, men crave myth, and when they cant find it at church they will settle for light sabres in a universe far far away. 4. Protestants kept the Bible though. A Protestant understands what is going on. The Orthodox have the liturgy, the Catholics the dogma, the Protestants insist on the Bible to keep the others honest. :). But we are losing the Bible now. My denominational seminary continues to weaken its Greek and Hebrew requirements. Apparently you dont have to sweat and struggle through difficult course work to be a pastor anymore. Men looking for a challenge need not apply. Makes me mad. I chose Calvin Seminary because an old professor of Old Testament looked at me over his glasses and said Seminary is school and it is difficult. As it should be, my 25 year old self thought. I wish I could say that my seminary education was almost as rigorous as an MD, should be more rigorous. The doctor can only kill the body, a bad pastor wrecks a lot of souls. My seminary also actively recruits women, an odd thing since our 30 some years of women in office has yet to yield much more than 10% of pulpits as actually being available to women. The congregations, not a bishop, choose and they tend to be conservative. 5. That said, do I want to fight the trans issue? In some ways we are like King Theodon when Gandalf says War is upon you. There isnt a choice anymore. Ive got public school teachers telling me they have to lie to parents to hide a kids trans identity. Ive got members who work for large organizations that have to promote the June agenda, as part of their jobs. I meet with them, we talk about it. Is this fighting? I am not sure. People dont come to church to hear what is blasted at them 24 hours a day everywhere else. I hate having the culture dictate what I have to talk about. But, the war is upon me and an enemy gets a vote. It is foolish to ignore an enemy. What does fighting look like? -I have a Bible study for broken drug addicted young men.-our church keeps men at the upper levels of leadership, even though not all agree with this.-we have an explosion of little children and growing young families. Where will we be in five years? StrategyI am not sure how to fight.6. Many people dont get it. Things that are obvious to me are not obvious. We are masters at adapting to bad circumstances, and often blind to how bad those circumstances really are. Iniquity is probably the right word, avon in Hebrew, crooked path, lost way, falling in the pit one dug, exchanging truth for lies and losing all sense of truth its the same problem.7. Why did Jordan Peterson succeed? I wish I knew.

Another reader writing about men in the church:

This is in regard to your second "men in the church" post.That article you wrote about Anna, the young Catholic woman who had been struggling to find a husband, has stuck with me since you published it in 2019. I am an evangelical man living in a "seminary town" who attended the seminary off and on over the past eight years, finally graduating last year. The seminary environment had a similar gender imbalance to what Anna speaks of in her complaint, but reversed -- there were far more men than women at the seminary. This was to be expected, it being the flagship seminary of a theologically conservative evangelical denomination who believes only men should be ordained as pastors. But I found it to be the worst possible environment to try to date in. The deck was stacked against me. I was "competing" against hundreds of men far more godly (and handsome, charming, intelligent, etc.) than myself, and the attractive single women at the seminary had their pick of the litter.The churches, on the other hand, were a bit different. As with most evangelical churches, the ones I attended did have more single women than single men. However, I now, like the reader you quote at the beginning of this post, attend an ACNA church. What drew me to the Anglican tradition is what draws most young men to more liturgical traditions -- the beauty and seriousness of the liturgy and the gift of an actualpath to walkin terms of spiritual discipline. Unfortunately (but also fortunately, because I love my church!), I now attend a church where there are currently preciselyzerosingle women in attendance, apart from one or two who appear to be straight out of high school, which is a bit too young for this 32-year-old.I actually asked my pastor about this when I first met with him after beginning to attend the ACNA church. I noted semi-jokingly that I was concerned about never finding a wife if I stopped attending a baptistic evangelical church, since most of the single Christian women in town were of that ilk. He assured me there were plenty of Anglican women, and even joked that maybe I could get a Catholic girl to make the jump to Anglicanism! Well, these Anglican women must be in other congregations in other cities, because after six months of attending, I haven't seen any at my church. I say this not out of bitterness or discontent. I am merely noting a curious fact.(There is a saving grace for me, though, because I work at a fairly large classical Christian school, which sees an influx of young, single female teachers each year. There's the awkwardness of navigating workplace romance, but at least there are options. I tried the online dating thing and found it to be largely a waste of time, and the platforms designed to be addictive. I can't see myself ever doing online dating again, though I know it works well for some people.)

All of this is to say that more and more young men are going to realize, when they jump ship to more liturgical churches, that their pool of potential mates rapidly shrinks. (Although perhaps this is not true for Catholic churches, if Anna's Australian experience is anything to go by.) If they are coming out of evangelical circles, they might be able to find a woman willing to make the jump with them (especially if, like my ACNA church, their church allows them to be a member and still hold to believer's baptism). But they need to prepare for that reality. I think, too, that pastors and other leaders in these liturgical churches need to be prepared to play matchmaker across their networks to find these eager young men wives who are similarly committed to liturgical Christian living and serious discipleship. It's an old-school approach, but what other option is there, especially for men unlike myself who don't also work in a Christian environment?

Reader Joan in Mass. writes:

for the first "Where Are The Men?" postFor all the digging Podles does into the beginning of the feminization of Western Christian congregations in the High Middle Ages, I'm surprised that he didn't mention the most famous change from that time, the one still being debated: mandatory priestly celibacy. It altered the appeal of the priesthood, ensuring that a very different sort of individual would choose that path. I don't know much about organizational dynamics, but I do know one thing from my years as an employee: the personality of the individual in charge sets the tone, both the CEO for the organization as a whole and the first-level supervisor for the team or sub-unit. At the top of the church, elite families still placed their younger sons in positions of power, tolerating mistresses and secret families, but at the parish level, the priest was more and more likely to be the sort who had never fit in with his male peers and who still couldn't relate to them. Thus, without changing anything else, the church became less welcoming to normal men, simply because the guy in charge was not one of them. And then the divide was baked into the culture and endured even after Protestants restored marriage for the clergy.

In response to your correspondent in the ACNA, I have heard before that religious groups oriented around addiction recovery tend to be overwhelmingly male because addiction is an overwhelmingly male problem. Unfortunately, a history of addiction, especially addiction to something illegal, is a huge red flag for large numbers of women, especially women who have never struggled with addiction themselves. A guy has to get a long, long way from a past like that before law-abiding women will start to trust him.

Here is a letter Harvard's diversocrats sent to faculty and staff:

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"Additional demographic categories"! Well, never let it be said that these people working these bullshit jobs are just laying around.

Originally posted here:

From The Mailbag - The American Conservative

In response to the stifling atmosphere of many American universities, a group of academics, journalists, artists, philanthropists, and public intellectuals recently united to found a new institution: The University of Austin. This experiment in higher education is intended to foster an environment of open debate and the fearless pursuit of truth.

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In June, UATX offered its inaugural Forbidden Courses, a noncredit summer program intended to cultivate spirited discussion about provocative questions. It featured instructors and workshop leaders including author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, historian Niall Ferguson, economist Deirdre McCloskey, playwright and filmmaker David Mamet, as well as others who object to the increasingly censorious culture in higher education.

I was selected to be an instructor for this program, because of my own unusual background and experience in higher education.

I was born into poverty and grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and all around California. At 17, I fled, enlisting in the military right after high school. In 2015, I entered Yale on the GI Bill, and discovered that college was much different than what Id anticipated. Hundreds of campus demonstrators demanded that two professors, Erika and Nicholas Christakis, be fired for defending freedom of expression. Maybe, I thought, that was just a one-off incident. But then I arrived at Cambridge University as a PhD student, and, in 2019, observed as protesters succeeded in disinviting Jordan Peterson as a visiting fellow from the university.

I described these experiences to my class at UATX, and several students slowly nodded their heads in recognition of the prevailing campus culture. I then asked the 10 students: How many of you have withheld a social or political opinion at your campus for fear of ostracism or retribution? Nine raised their hands.

It was apparent that, like me, these young students desired an academic environment that prioritizes freedom of expression and open inquiry. The course I taught centered on social class and the role of money, education, and culture in Americas status system. I tried to foster the kind of environment I wished Id had as an undergraduate.

During a discussion about social class, I posed a simple question to my students that I would never have uttered at Yale or Cambridge: Do some poor people deserve to be poor? This sparked immediate pushback from students, who replied that nobody deserves deprivation.

I then rephrased by asking, Are some people more responsible for their own economic misfortunes than others? Even this I would not ask students during a seminar in an elite college.

I asked this question about responsibility to my students whose home institutions included Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Columbia, among others to help them understand their role as future leaders. Research indicates that graduates of such colleges are the most responsible for shaping politics and culture and customs. As Pano Kanelos, the president of UATX, has written, Universities are places where society does its thinking, where the habits and mores of our citizens are shaped.

I explained to my class that if those who sit at or near the apex of society ignore the importance of individual agency, then this undercuts the dignity of people in deprived and dysfunctional environments who are trying to improve their lives.

One student responded, What about people who try to desperately improve their lives but are arrested for it, like drug dealers?

An excellent question. I explained that the majority of poor people do not commit crimes and are never arrested. I was disheartened to see that the students were surprised by this fact. The students and I spoke about how the people who influence culture and shape policies oftentimes come from elite educational backgrounds and seldom have contact with people who dont attend selective colleges like themselves.

We discussed how, oftentimes, the only impoverished individuals who educated people are exposed to are those who break the law, whether in the media or in pop culture. TV shows often expose affluent viewers to low-income people who turn to crime, because that makes for a more interesting story than characters who work steady jobs to take care of their loved ones, which is how most poor and working class people live. One student observed that those who write and portray lawbreaking characters tend to come from relatively affluent backgrounds.

My goal in asking this provocative question wasnt to pressure students to agree with me. It was to get them thinking critically about a point of view they might not ordinarily encounter. In the end, they might come to a different conclusion than I have and that would be perfectly fine.

Id never seen a class so intellectually engaged in a conversation before. At the end of the program, one student stated, Our discussions didnt get heated, in the emotional sense. They were very critical, in the best possible way. We were genuinely engaging with each others ideas even while disagreeing.

For a fledgling university, testimonials dont get much better than that. Eager to obtain intellectual nourishment, those involved in UATX most notably its students have already begun to cultivate the atmosphere of truth-seeking that older institutions promised. After years of self-censoring at Yale and Cambridge, I have renewed hope for the future of higher education.

Rob Henderson is a founding faculty fellow at the University of Austin and a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Follow him on Twitter @robkhenderson.

More here:

A welcome alternative to the lack of academic freedom on college campuses - The Boston Globe

Heres my prediction. The Tories will lose the next election. There will be an almighty battle for the soul of the Conservative party. Kemi Badenoch will win. Hows that for an opening paragraph?

To take a few steps back, this leadership campaign is a dud. The broadcast media calls it bitter and personal, but its neither: its polite, its dull, it features two competent administrators who disagree over one, albeit profound, point about taxes. Rishi would balance the books, then cut taxes; Liz would cut them now, unleashing growth that balances the books down the road. Im with her, but its hardly Hillary v Trump, is it?

The broadcasters talk about blue on blue warfare because it gets ratings, but also because they dont understand Tories, who they assume are Neanderthals. The phrase, its up to the Conservative Party to decide, is delivered in a tone that suggests our next PM will be chosen by a grand council of the Ku Klux Klan.

Meanwhile, much of Westminster is apathetic. Some MPs suspect Boris will be missed; others are furious at the treatment of Penny Mordaunt, the only candidate whose character was truly assassinated. Government has largely stopped functioning: Putin could ring ahead to say hes about to invade and hed get an answer phone.

Tories are asking themselves what theyve actually achieved in office (inflation, welfare and immigration are out of control) and theres a widespread expectation that theyre going to lose to Labour - hence intelligences greater than our own are already trying to figure out who will make the biggest splash in opposition. Theres probably greater interest in the men and women who *lost* the leadership election than for the brave kids who made the final round. Weve our eye on one in particular.

The names Badenoch, Kemi Badenoch. Thats Bay-denock, by the way, not Bad-ee-nock as I keep hearing on TV (Barack and Kamala had to be pronounced correctly, but no one bothers when the subject is a Tory).

Look, if Special K goes all the way to leader of the Tories, itll be because of her ideas and her talent for putting them across. But she is a black woman and, of course, there are going to be a billion think pieces written about it. All Ill say for now is what she has said: she is proudly Nigerian; growing up in an unstable country for 16 years can make you appreciate what weve built in Britain; and Nigerians tend to be, contrary to what the Left presumes, quite right-wing.

Millennial conservatives are comfortably globalised; they are also into truth-telling. Badenochs voice rings with the impatience of a cohort that has fallen so far behind that it doesnt have time to waste on lying, so expect the Tory Party of the future to say that you cant spend what you dont earn, that the Lefts obsession with race is divisive and that a trans-woman is not a woman.

Moreover, the coming conservatism will be aggressively civilisational. Rishi and Liz are the last gasp of Thatcher; the goal of their politics is to help people make more money, to live independently.

The new conservatives dislike taxes, too, but they sense that the Right has been wrong to shy away from cultural issues on the false assumption that they are a fringe debate. In reality, if youre not fighting the culture war, youre losing it, and you cant have a good economy if your society is decadent. The way that lockdown has transformed popular attitudes towards work risks becoming a case in point.

If you dont make a compelling case for markets, family, church or nation, support for all these will die and the West will weaken - while other systems, Russian or Chinese, dominate the globe.

Kemi Badenoch speaks for conservatives who think Britain is in serious danger of cracking up. They read Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson; they watch Thomas Sowell on YouTube. I like to bench-press to Malcolm Muggeridge, which is the most right-wing thing youll read all day.

The belief that the culture war is not incidental but central is going to be resisted by party elites, which is why I imagine the battle for opposition leader will be far more interesting than this contest, for there will be those who will argue that a confrontational style of conservatism isnt conservative at all. Is it not the Tory mission to build consensus? they will ask. And a lot of MPs simply wont like being told they are wrong.

Last week, Michael Gove, explaining his support for Badenoch, said that working with her: I had the experience that I must imagine that cabinet ministers had in the early 1980s, in finding that some of the verities that they had held dear were being taken apart brick by brick by a young woman who was easily their intellectual superior.

Thats quite an endorsement. Its also a warning. Just as the wets had to give way to Thatcherism, anyone who wants to be on the Badenoch bus, or compete with her, has to embrace a more muscular politics.

For myself, I rather enjoyed Boriss style of government, lazy and arch, the Roger Moore-era of Toryism. But the Kemites would have us put down our Martinis and cigars, saying that if we want to keep em, well have to fight for them; lose some weight, punch below the belt. Its all about to go a bit Daniel Craig in the world of conservatism.

Originally posted here:

Kemi Badenoch is the future of conservatism - The Telegraph

I was lined up in a mall outside a jungle gym, braving the closed-circuit plumes of COVID to tire out my kids on a glorified cat scratch tower, when I heard the child behind us ask, Daddy, why do those kids have masks? Do I need one?

The child was talking about my kids.

Oh, no sweetie, the father said, masks dont do anything, some people just wear them to feel good about themselves.

He pointed the dickish remark at my back, at my tatty leggings, my halo of unfoiled roots, but also at my children, running in circles, the only victims of the Liberal Mask Agenda in the whole place.

Adrienne Rich, among others, impelled me to turn around. The man wore his toddler about his shoulders like a pelt, the spoils of war. Also cargo shorts.

Whats your problem with masks, man? I asked as calmly as I could in my mask.

I dont have a problem, youre the ones making it a thing, he replied.

You brought it up, buddy. Im just standing in line for a jungle gym.

Here, the mass paused, gripping the shins of the child on his shoulders, then shouted, You dont have permission to talk to me! He turned toward his wife, who was holding the shopping bags, and fixed his gaze over her head, waiting for me to turn back around.

As I fumed and prepared to drop $50 on entry and specialized socks, I listened to him jostling his son behind me. I can do what I want with you, youre mine, he said in a kind of joking tone, certain once again that he was king of the place at the mall with the giant bumblebee mascot.

So often in literature, parenthood appears on the male as a kind of pelt thrown over like a prize. Something has been given to the fathersome knowledge or form of powerbut he has trouble decoding it, except maybe as an author.

Paul, the divorced intellectual Park Slope dad at the center of Teddy Waynes The Great Man Theory, has long wanted to teach his daughter something. When Mabel was small, he read to her: Often she fell asleep as he read, and the moment she succumbed, curled up on him like a shrimp, had always made him feel most like a parent. She has clearly come into her own, but he continues to see her as an extension of his own ego: Mabel is his little baby girl whose vulnerability had given him a sense of mission beyond himself.

Paul is an academic, if one demoted from staff to adjunct in the opening pages of the novel, and his daughter, now a tween, has begun to distance herself from her clueless dad who is soon living with his own mother in the Bronx. Paul tries to muscle through the disconnect with his powers of analysis, casting back to her birth: When Mabel was delivered and thrust into his unpracticed arms, he supposed he felt something, thought it was more an acknowledgement of the moments historical import rather than overwhelming love for this wizened homunculus of a stranger who was about to upend his heretofore streamlined life. You can see how great Paul might have been to have around in the difficult early days of parenting.

Ten years later, his ex-wife Jane has a new partner (she has also betrayed their values by getting Botox), and his daughter spends weekends with Paul, for whom the raw magic of her existence hadnt faded. Parenthood had opened up his frigid soul, creating a Mabel-sized space in his heart, an unexpected warm spot in an ice-cold lake. And she continued to give him a reason, in his newly destitute adjunct state, to make something of himself, so he redoubles his efforts on his book, The Luddite Manifesto; something that will disrupt the status quo in ailing Americait will rail against anti-intellectual cable pap, against Trump, and against the dumbing down of children by social mediaand something, like 99 percent of manifestos, that no one wants to read. It will be published by a university press.

Wayne specializes in this kind of alienated, troubling man. In Loner, his unreliable narrator, a smart, awkward Harvard undergraduate, took just a few chapters to go from social miscues to incel predation (Loner came out the year before Cat Person). The Love Song of Johnny Valentine followed an over-managed Bieberesque child star doomed by his industry and was published the year before Biebers entitlement culminated in his being hoisted up the Great Wall of China on his bodygurds shoulders.

The Great Man Theory leaps ahead of the parenting discourse, lets call it, to ask what dads are bringing to the table, and to explore the undercurrent of panic about the End of Men. Paul is smart enough to know men are a problem, and sensate enough to get a whiff of toxic masculinity, but convinced that he, center of the universe, is the only person who can fix it: He is a man writing to ward off global and personal crises; he needed to prove to his family that he had the stability and gravity of a sun.

The psychology professor Jordan Shapiro observed in his book Father Figure: How To Be A Feminist Dad that men are brought up to see themselves as the dominant narrative in a household; protagonists on a heros journey, as in popular man-texts like Robert Blys Iron John: A Book About Men and the work of Jordan Peterson.

As parables attempting to explain our existence go, Iron John is cuckoo bananas. The base story (Im paraphrasing) is that all men have in them a child who must steal a golden key from under his mothers pillow, unlock a cage containing a wild, hairy man to retrieve a golden ball, then journey out into the jungle where he can become a warrior and awaken his inner Wild Manthe missing piece of himself that will trigger healing from the absent father and give him Zeus energy. Think men howling around campfires in the mid-90s.

Bly, part of the mythopoetic movementthe New Age but just for menbelieved that separation from the mother is a key rite of passage for boys, though something moms get in the way of under our current societal structure: A clean break from the mother is crucial, but its simply not happening. Bly warns of female tripod rage and of the she-wolves a boy may encounter in the woods, and takes some strange turns in issuing warnings about the mother-child relationship:

A mans moustache may stand for his pubic hair. A friend once grew a moustache when he was around thirty. The next time he visited his mother, she looked into the corners of the room as she talked to him, and would not look at his face, no matter what they talked about. Hair, then, can represent sexual energy.

Still, Blys ideas were a stepping stone from the patriarchal alpha prototype to something better, and a response to Feminism; he believed that men had female and male energy inside of them, and made a case for the expressive mens movement. Had Paul been a Park Slope dad in the 90s, you could see Iron John appealing to his intellectual sensibilities.

From the distance of an additional quarter century, though, a new kind of fragility runs through manhood: a fear of cancel culture, to extinguish the men who mess things up. And Paul is quite far from unleashing his Wild Manhis 80-something mother is having more sex than he, and Paul finds himself mopping someone elses semen out of the backseat of her car that he uses for his work as a rideshare driver. The key is back under the mothers pillow.

Paul is painted as an Encino Man dug up from an earlier age when mens ideas were deemed important and their place in society unshakeable. You do feel a bit bad for him, just barely grasping the most rudimentary shapes of a typical parents existential awakening: His baby. Strange that after thirty-five years of independent selfhood, with relatives reaching backward in fixed history, he was now permanently linked with a human hurtling toward an undefined future.

Needless to say, mothers are light years ahead in charting this territory. I have created a death, chimes Samantha Hunt, whose ghost story and journey through the woods Mr. Splitfoot is profoundly successful where Iron John is mostly confusing. How can I become a god? the hero of Rachel Yoders Nightbitch asks, skipping to the heart of the matter. For Nightbitch, birth and motherhood bring a terrifying and complicated shift in power: She had that freedom when she gave birth, had screamed and shat and sworn and would have killed had she needed to.

How can men compete with that?

Just before The Great Man Theory came Raising Raffi, Keith Gessens memoir of early parenthood. There were quite a few moments that leapt out at me, including this recollection of his wifes (the writer Emily Gould) home birth: At one point, when Emily was on the bed, just before the babys head started coming out, a geyser of blood shot out from her vagina.

In this, I do indeed see a case for men as witnesses to birth, with access to an angle women cant see, unless, I regret, with a hand mirror. Gessen has written an examination of the fatherhood condition, plumbing his own aggression and impotence, revising coarser Jungian ideas about the father-child situation as he goes:

Raffi did not want to kill me and marry Emily. It was more complicated and difficult than that. What he wanted was all her attention even as he also wanted to be his own person. He wanted to re-create the relationship theyd once had, when he was smaller, but in a way that it could no longer be re-created.

It is a proper reckoning. Understanding that the breastfeeding dyad can be hard for a dad to crack, he works to occupy a larger and more positive role as Raffi reaches toddlerdom, and grapples with his own eventual uselessness: I think now that there is no tragedy like the tragedy of parenthood, writes Gessen. There is no other thing you do in life only so that the person you do it for can leave you. Here, he hits on what I understand as key themes of writing about motherhood: the figurative death that takes place, the invisible work of care, the confrontation with your own shadow in your childs personality, the knowledge that you arent writing the story in the end. Gessen is welcome at my witchy mom bonfire anytime.

When I otherwise think of the literature of good fathers, it often concerns surrogate fathers (Goodnight Mr. Tom, Heidi, The Box Car Children), or grief for a lost father (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the wonderful H Is For Hawk). All of Shakespeares dads are terrible, likewise those of Steinbeck and Woolf. I guess we have Doctor Manette and Atticus Finch, proto-Brooklyn dad (whose outsized presence covered for the absence of Harper Lees abusive mother), Jaysons Greenes Once More We Saw Stars, and the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard and for good and wrenching and complicated dad thoughts. There are also a slew of dad manifestosBetween The World and Me, Dreams From My Fatherwhich nevertheless get us back to dad as author.

If Paul doesnt, in fact, have anything particularly worthwhile to say as an academic, or as a dad granted a cosmic glimpse of himself as a speck in the wider universe of humanity, you have to ask yourself what the point of him is. How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didnt know what to do with theirs? asked Rachel Yoder. How easyhow wrong but easy nonethelessit would be to walk away from it all, thinks the hero of Lydia Kieslings Golden State, who is trying to help her Turkish partner gain access to the U.S., but otherwise spends the novel with their child Honey, traversing the state of motherhood:

a warren of beautiful rooms, something like Topkap, something like the Alhambra on a winter morning, some well-trod but magnificent place youre allowed to sit in for a minute and snap a photo before you are ushered out and youll never remember every individual jewel of a room but if youre lucky you go through another and another and another and another until they turn out the lights.

The sadness of Pauls irrelevance comes late in the book when he, touchingly, delivers the terrarium he has built and tended with Mabel to Mabels stepdad Steve, a seemingly great dad, the kind you or I might know:

Contained in his arms was the small world theyd created over the years: new bugs, new worms, new soil, but the same pebbles that theyd first collected together in the park when Mabel was a little girl.

Its better off with you, he told Steve, and handed over the tank.

Lauren, the cable news producer he is seeing, informs him that she will be having a child by donor, but is happy to date in the meantime. By this point he has been fully cut loose from the university, after a female student reported him for being a creep.

After he carries out his last bad idea, his ex-wife and daughter will find it quite easyif wrongto walk away from him, and thats the real tragedy, one he might not even understand.

Link:

A Great Man Is Hard to Find: On the Literature of Contemporary Fatherhood - Literary Hub