The media, left and right, try so very hard to twist the facts into a story that confirms their views of the world.  Heather MacDonald explains in City Journal how the New York Times is so convinced that gender bias exists in math and science education (against females) that it ignores the salient facts.  One of those facts is that males saturate both ends of the bell curve, not just the high end. 

A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 [Times] article by Tamar Lewin-thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges.

MacDonald reminds us that feminists don’t seem to complain about the “gender bias” that results in males outnumbering females in the lowest score range.  But hey, let’s not let the facts get in the way of an interesting worldview.

I dislike the word feminist.  It’s just so loaded.  But that’s what this article is about, until we come up with a better word.  Sandra Tsing Loh at The Atlantic Monthly says feminists have come to some unusual places in fifty years: getting out of the house, getting college degrees and terrific jobs, and then: wanting to go back to the house.  What gives?  Weren’t women supposed to take over the world? 

[A]ren’t women at home subject to the oppression of their chauvinistic, soul-crushing husbands? As if a mere human could compete with clogged freeways and Sisyphean paper pushing (or its more up-to-date equivalent, paperless pushing) and burnt-coffee-laced afternoons counting the acoustic tiles in stale conference rooms, and the hours spent arguing over the wording of a memo that within minutes after its dissemination will be dragged into the now-two-dimensional circular file […]

Even providing a chilled martini at six o’clock and roast beef at seven to the legendary suburban alpha male of yore allowed most of one’s day to be fairly flexible. As for today’s poorer husbands, many of them are likely too tired from their job’s repetitious, socially invisible physical tasks to continually oppress their wives.

Of course, it’d still be hard for some women to admit this, to admit that they want to be home.  Just like it’s hard for more conservative stay-at-home-moms to admit that they might rather be out somewhere, working.  I still think the issue of working moms is too contentious to receive the more nuanced treatement it needs, at least from the Church.  Most of us Evangelicals are still too quick to condemn moms who work, moms who send their kids to pre-school, moms who do anything but stay at home and teach their children Latin. 

Until the home becomes as viable a workplace as it was a hundred years ago - when so many businesses and farms and means of employ were in the home or nearby - families are going to have to make tough decisions about what to do with the children, and what to do with the parents who tend to them.  It’s not a black and white matter of either A) loving your children or B) loving some selfish career.  Don’t you think?

Brandon O’Brien’s Christianity Today column, “A Jesus for Real Men,” is an unfortunate example of opinion offered from cursory knowledge. A little bit of religious history is a dangerous thing. In fact, the overall consensus of O’Brien’s disserts is that he misses the point and innacurately caricatures and revises John Eldredge, Mark Driscoll, David Murrow.

I completely agree. O’Brien’s named “masculinity movement” has been the subject of much conversation over the past 25 years or so because a dying church in America is witnessing the fruit of radical feminism and the warehousing of generations of passive or abusive men.

Here’s recent data from David Murrow:

The typical U.S. Congregation draws an adult crowd that’s 61% female, 39% male. As many as 90 percent of the boys raised in the church will abandon it by their 20th birthday. On any given Sunday there are 13 million more adult women than men in America’s churches. This Sunday almost 25 percent of married, churchgoing women will worship without their husbands. Midweek activities often draw 70 to 80 percent female participants. The majority of church employees are women (except for ordained clergy, who are overwhelmingly male). [Many only return when their girlfriends or wives bring them back.] More than 90 percent of American men believe in God, and 5 out of 6 call themselves Christians. But only 2 out of 6 attend church on a given Sunday. The average man accepts the reality of Jesus Christ, but fails to see any value in going to church.

We must wrestle with the fact that men have checked out of church-life in America.

Leon Podles provides a historical narrative of the masculinity crisis in The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. Historian Anne Braude’s essay “Women’s History Is Religious History,” in the book Retelling U.S. Religious History readily admits that for quite some time Christianity has been, and continues to be, primarily oriented around meeting the needs of women and their children. Men are not around because American church does not connect.

However, O’Brien, doesn’t get it. The men he critiques are not trying to “re-masculate Jesus,” introduce “greater testosterone” into the church, or use natural instincts to define masculinity. Those are ridiculous assertions. They are addressing the fact that the average man in America simply does not connect with narrow image of Jesus presented in most churches today. The average man doesn’t feel like he fits into the overall ethos of church life since it has been, for far too long, almost exclusively oriented away from bringing men into a broader view of kingdom mission in ways that are unique to callings God has placed on men as they bear the image of God. Moreover, many of the men that do fit into churches organized primarily to meet the needs of women and their children are not the types of men that others look to follow.

O’Brien’s biblical theology is so bad that I’ll have to deal with it elsewhere but his claim that the only time Jesus appears as warrior are his “pre-incarnate” and “post-resurrection” debuts has no biblical warrant and largely misses the reality of spiritual warfare during Jesus life and ministry. Casting out demons is not spiritual warfare? The Kingdom needs warriors who are allied with God to fight against “principalities and powers.” Was Jesus not fighting the devil during his ministry?

Overall, O’Brien wrongly prejudices men against being challenged in good ways because of his own misunderstanding of church history, the reality of the church in America, and a biblical theology that may suffer from a lack of exegetical depth. If O’Brien “got it” a more accurate title to his unuanced opinion would be “The Bible’s Jesus for the Regular Guy.”

If O’Brien knows very little about the writings and teachings of the men he critiques, argues against a straw man, and mishandles biblical theology why should we take him seriously? This would be equivalent an accountant critiquing the Navy’s assessment of what makes a man a good Navy seal.

Ever since former Harvard president Larry Summers tried to explain why more men than women were scientists, the media has been talking about this disparity and what to do about it.  It’s the gospel of fundamentalist egalitarianism, taken to the extreme.  That doctrine states that if men and women don’t participate in an activity in numbers proportional to their general demographic, there must be bias at play.  If more men are in the sciences than are women, then clearly, someone is discriminating.  In this article at The American, Christina Hoff Sommers talks about how the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences is attempting to remedy the discrepancy by recruiting more women into the empirical endeavors.  But they are biting a bad, bad apple.

Few academic scientists know anything about the equity crusade. Most have no idea of its power, its scope, and the threats that they may soon be facing. The business commu­nity and citizens at large are completely in the dark. This is a quiet revolution. Its weapons are government reports that are rarely seen; amendments to federal bills that almost no one reads; small, unnoticed, but dramatically con­sequential changes in the regulations regarding government grants; and congressional hearings attended mostly by true believers.

American scientific excellence is a precious national resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation’s health and safety. Norman Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, and Burton Richter, Nobel laureate in physics, once pointed out that MIT alone - its faculty, alumni, and staff-started more than 5,000 companies in the past 50 years. Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results?

If we really want to get technical, more women than men are earning humanities PhDs.  Should we start some kind of program to recruit more men into English departments?  Should we be figuring out ways to attract more Republicans into performance studies deparments?

Heather MacDonald writes in City Journal about rape on college campuses.  Apparently, it’s an epidemic that’s been going on for twenty years, when a study suggested that one in four college women would be raped or assaulted while in college.  What MacDonald found when researching, though, is that college administrators don’t do the one thing they should be doing.  They don’t ask female students to modify their behavior.  She says that most…

…alleged rapes could be avoided if the girls took certain steps: don’t get into bed with a guy when you are very drunk, don’t take off your clothes, don’t get involved in oral sex, and so on. Such advice is fully consistent with female empowerment. It recognizes that girls have the power to stop “campus rape.” It treats them as moral agents able to control their fates.

But when I suggest to campus sexual assault administrators that they could stop what Koss calls the “rape pandemic” overnight if they persuaded girls to exercise more prudence, I inevitably receive responses like the following (these are my interlocutors’ actual words): “I am uncomfortable with the idea of ‘recommending that female students exercise more modesty and restraint’ - this indicates that if they are raped it could be their fault - it is never their fault.”

MacDonald suggests that administrators answer this way because “these self-professed women’s advocates really do believe that a drunken hookup is rape, and yet are withholding from women the simplest, surest way to prevent being raped, simply in order to preserve the principle of male fault. If the latter situation actually prevails, I conclude that the campus rape movement is purely political, interested solely in casting men as the evil perpetrators of the patriarchy rather than in most effectively protecting potential victims of a traumatic crime.”

Is she right?

Robin Morgan has been one voice of American feminism for a long, long time.  In her famous essay “Goodbye To All That” (1970), she was really angry.  In her newest essay, “Goodbye To All That (Part II)” - published just last week - Ms. Morgan is still really angry.  Here are some gems of this ranting endorsement of Hillary Clinton: 

• No matter how many ways a woman breaks free from other discriminations, she remains a female human being in a world still so patriarchal that it’s the “norm.”
• So goodbye to conversations about this nation’s deepest scar-slavery-which fail to acknowledge that labor- and sexual-slavery exist today in the U.S. and elsewhere on this planet […]
• [G]oodbye to some feminists so famished for a female president they were even willing to abandon women’s rights in backing Elizabeth Dole.
• How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to [support Obama and] turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign?
• Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman-but because I am.

In case you’ve been out of college for a while and have forgotten what a myopic, angry feminist rants sounds like, read on.

Writing in WORLD this week, John Piper pulls no punches:

If I were the last man on the planet to think so, I would want the honor of saying that no woman should go before me into combat to defend my country. A man who endorses women in combat is not pro-woman; he’s a wimp.

 Gee, John, why don’t you tell us what you really think.

In “The Feminine Critique,” Lisa Belkin writes about the paradox of contemporary femininity:

Don’t get angry. But do take charge. Be nice. But not too nice. Speak up. But don’t seem like you talk too much. Never, ever dress sexy. Make sure to inspire your colleagues - unless you work in Norway, in which case, focus on delegating instead […] How are we supposed to be assertive, but not, at the same time?

The article asks the question, “[W]hy, 30 years after women entered the work force in large numbers, the default mental image of a leader is still male.”  Hmm. 

…is the title of an LA Times column about the new book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America by Susan Faludi, who seems to think the answer is yes.  The book argues that 9/11 led to a return to “traditional values and gender roles” (what the word traditional means, I’m not sure).

(more…)

Okay, so people are saying a lot of Republican women are going to vote for Hillary Clinton next year.  This is scandalous, which is why it’s such a good story for the Clinton campaign to tell: it suggests rifts in the Republican party, it plays to conservative women who’ve ever felt a little slighted by their conservative male colleagues, it plays like the tempting of a woman to leave her husband and go man-bashing on a girl’s night out with mint-chocolate martinis and uncomfortable shoes.  And now, it even sounds like Peggy Noonan wants to have a girl’s night out with Hillary.  The long and short is, the presidency is about ideology and ideas, not about Girl Power.  If Republican women don’t know why they’re conservative and why Hillary is not that, then please, let them out themselves by voting her in.  At least we’ll know who they are.