Posts
In a society that long ago discarded the ideal of premarital chastity, youthful fornication has lost its shock power. If Miss Beech were merely sleeping with a college classmate, her behavior would be no different than that of millions of other young women in 21st-century America, and nowadays only the strictest of religious conservatives would condemn it. None of those passing judgment on her, however, speaks the language of sin. Her stone-throwing Pharisees are strictly secular.That's from a column I wrote for Taki's Magazine. Please read the whole thing.
Much of the opprobrium heaped on Miss Beech took her to task for failing to live up to the careerist ideals of feminism.
UPDATE: David Kirkpatrick shares my suspicion that "Melissa Beech" might be doing chick-lit fiction here.
This is one of the freshest and most important fronts in the gender wars. It's primarily being fought in academia and the pages of feminist publications, but a glance at the distribution of family sizes in coastal and heartland states indicates that there's already a practical component to it, too.
ReplyDeleteOur coastal regions, the bastions of American gender-war feminism, are dominated by small families both of whose adults work outside the home. Many of the women in these families are terribly stressed by the dual obligations of income generation and motherhood. This work-over-children gambit strikes me as a way to assuage their consciences, and to persuade them, if only by implication, that producing further children would be morally wrong, a betrayal of the "sisterhood." The concept isn't innately self-perpetuating, but it has the potential to become a "piety," at least among liberals, that goes without question.
The heartland states feature larger families and fewer women who work for pay. They also display lower divorce rates, lower crime and delinquency rates, and a generally greater degree of social amity and cohesion. The correlation to the degree of acceptance of the theses of gender-war feminism is striking at least.
What are the implications? Apart from the obvious ones, that is.