There was only one time I ever felt like Yale students respected me less because I was a woman.

The Yale Political Union had invited Larry Flynt, the man who brought us Hustler, to speak on the topic of pornography and free speech. I certainly agreed with his position (no restrictions) then, and I would probably agree with it now. But he drew a crowd. That’s why he had been invited. And I was supposed to give a speech about why you should join a right-wing philosophical society, in front of a crowd who’d come to hear Larry Flynt.

There were five speakers before me: a male leftist, a male liberal who played guitar, I don’t remember, something conservative and blond, and then a tiny Anglo-Vietnamese woman who was all but shouted down by the usual white Yale leftist men as she tried to express the ethos of her traditionalist debating group.

And then me. After the first few paragraphs of my speech I think they were scared of me, because I was right-wing enough and weird enough to be scary; but before that, the catcalls and the sexualization were like nothing I’d ever experienced in college.

What I want, in bringing up this story, is to ask about women’s leadership. We have Maggie Thatcher; we have Golda Meir; we have Christina and two Elizabeths and, for Catholics, at least two Catherines. But on a normal day, in front of a crowd of men, how do women lead? Sarah Palin was of course ridiculed for winking, for trading on her sexuality; Hillary Clinton was ridiculed for trying to avoid it.

I think it’s obvious that we can support both gender roles and women’s leadership. We have so many models! But can we give any advice, sustenance, guidance to the women who want to try?

Specifically, for more conservative women, how do we affirm more gendered models of leadership (e.g. the “Yale man”) while still showing women how to lead? Should I have noticed and traded on positive aspects of my gender role as a leader and a woman? How would I have done that?

(title references: Hamlet/Hegel/Lady Thatcher)

There’s been some talk of “then” vs. “now” on Ladyblog lately, and Eva Longoria’s flashback in this picture made me wonder whether “then,” represented by supportive undergarments is better than “now,” which I perceive to be dominated by plastic surgery making such undergarments increasingly unnecessary.

Let’s legislate debate.

Photo: Pacific Coast News

. . . I’m in the latest issue of Doublethink pointing out that lots of women spend many happy years mucking around in the “hook-up culture” without coming out emotionally paralyzed on the other side, an inconvenient fact that undermines feminism’s party line on date rape. Check it out.

How bad is the modern dating scene? Apparently, it’s so bad that young men are going around handing City Journal fellows quotes about how much they hate dating hot women. A world turned upside-down!

I can imagine an anti-feminist response to this startling information that puts full blame on the feminists—Hymowitz tiptoes down that path when she brings up how easy it was when everybody knew the rules of courtship and how hard it is now that everyone hates roles and roleplaying. Fine and fair, Kay, but not enough. Men used to like women who put out early, sat in bars, and had hot bodies, and I can’t imagine anything less than a revolution making them stop. My own explanation: America is no longer producing femme fatales, or, as Florence King calls them, world-class hussies. An old King column lays out her reasoning:

I like to do things well; if I were young again and embarking on the primrose path, I would want to be what Ross Perot would call a world-class hussy, but current standards of dissoluteness have fallen so low that nobody would know the difference.

. . . Today’s pseudo-hussies are nothing more than updated versions of that put-upon figure of Victorian melodrama, the “little shop girl.” There are millions of them in every age and they invariably get caught in sexual tragedies because they lack the personality trait that identifies a bona fide hussy: a bandit streak.

Conservative that I am (not that King wasn’t one), I mourn the demise of the world-class hussy, too. Used to be that, when you went home with such a girl, you were placing yourself in the hands of a professional—I don’t mean that she was a literal whore, but that she approached the task of casual sex with a certain professionalism. Nowadays, the woman you meet at a bar might simply be a frightened amateur. Such a green girl might, in earlier times, have expressed her nerves by jumping nine feet in the air when a man lunged for her at date’s end. Men used to have to talk them down from the tops of bookcases, like skittish cats. It was good practice.

Their modern equivalents are caught in confusion and anxiety, and can’t think why. After all, they know exactly what they want! World-class hussies could tell them the secret, if they had ears to hear: Romantic success takes knowing what you want and having the “bandit streak” to do what it takes to get it. If it’s obvious that a man wants a one-night stand (a give-away if you met him in a bar), give it to him or don’t; just don’t half-[way] it. If you want to be a mistress—all the gold, none of the commitment!—you can do that, too, but it takes more than physical satisfaction to make a man spend his coin; it takes an aura of feminine mystery. That mystery must be cultivated, and you’ll never pull it off if you act like a seventeen-year-old, if you’re asserting your equality (mystery is about inequality, girls), or if you regard your every emotional swing from wanting a gentleman to wanting a gigolo as Relationship Law.

Feminists thought they knew what they were doing when they eliminated the word “slut” from the lexicon. Now it seems that, by eliminating the word, they’ve killed the concept. If you don’t want women to be crucified for their sex lives, that’s fine, but don’t scrub out the danger, the allure, and the man-eating ambition along with it; they’re crucial ingredients of healthy casual sex (which has always existed, Puritanism notwithstanding).

If you want to be a nice girl, commit to being one. If you are hanging out in a bar, you are a hussy and should commit to that. Hymowitz’s SYM’s think romantic entanglement is a raw deal; no man thought so while the world-class hussy breathed.

UPDATE: How did I neglect to mention Joe Jackson’s “It’s Different for Girls” and Nina Simone’s “The Other Woman?” Go forth and listen. Who said anything about love…

There is a scary alternate universe out there, one 3,000 times more mind-boggling to me than economics or football or the appeal of Sex In The City (three things I notoriously know nothing about): the dating world. Or at least the dating world hoards of both lifestyle and serious sociological-type writers and bloggers oft proclaim to find themselves in.

The more I read accounts of this world, the more I am utterly baffled by how it represents the experiences of absolutely no one I have ever known. This initially made me think people had to be making this stuff up, but their stories are remarkably similar, and since Vast Internet Conspiracy seems unlikely, this leaves me with no choice but to conclude … no, no, it doesn’t. I was just trying to think of what I’ve alternatively concluded, and realized Vast Internet Conspiracy actually sounds ten times more plausible to me than actually believing this world exists.

My latest astonishment arose from this Kay Hymowitz article in City Journal, “Love in the Time of Darwinism” (which Ladybloggers Marianne and Ericka have already commented on here and here).

Hymowitz wrote an article last winter, “Child-Man in the Promised Land,” about why today’s 20- and 30-something men won’t settle down as quickly as their predecessors. I think this is somewhat flawed on premise (because in a lot of places, they do; and because the differences that do exist in marriage-age between the good old days and now can easily be explained by education standards and relaxation of social norms). Apparently, a lot of men thought Hymowitz’s original article was flawed on premise, too, but for very different reasons, which she details in the latest:

Here’s Jeff from Middleburg, Florida: “I am not going to hitch my wagon to a woman . . . who is more into her abs, thighs, triceps, and plastic surgery. A woman who seems to have forgotten that she did graduate high school and that it’s time to act accordingly.” Jeff, meet another of my respondents, Alex: “Maybe we turn to video games not because we are trying to run away from the responsibilities of a ‘grown-up life’ but because they are a better companion than some disease-ridden bar tramp who is only after money and a free ride.” Care for one more? This is from Dean in California: “Men are finally waking up to the ever-present fact that traditional marriage, or a committed relationship, with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery.” You can find the same themes posted throughout websites like AmericanWomenSuck, NoMarriage, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and Eternal Bachelor (“Give modern women the husband they deserve. None”).

The reason, Hymowitz submits, for “all this dating chaos” is that the dissolution of traditional methods of courtship and gender roles have left young men paralyzed by confusion. I submit that the reason for these particular men’s dating chaos is that they are misogynists.

They disparage “gold diggers,” and women who expect men to support them once married. Okay, one would think, so these men want strong egalitarian women, women who make their own money, have careers, etc. But then the same men also complain about how “modern women” suck and they just don’t make ‘em like the wives of yore (or like those Russian girls on the Interweb). So which is it?

I don’t begrudge anyone a personal desire to marry and start a family based on “traditional” gender roles. I get a little peeved when they begin suggesting that everyone should do the same, but if a man wants to be the sole breadwinner and find a wife who desires to stay home and cook and clean and take care of the kids—great! Likewise, if a man thinks that is a totally raw deal and would never marry a woman who doesn’t work—great! Or if he wants a bachelor’s life forever—great, too! But listen, dudes in this article: you can’t proclaim you really want a girl, and it’s women’s fault for not living up to the maddeningly-stupid paradigm you’ve dreamed up; that you can’t find a woman who’s sufficiently traditional while still being thoroughly modern. That is not a tenable position, at least not one that anyone other than other MRAs will agree with. There is not something wrong with women as a whole; there is something wrong with you.

But, but … door opening! Read the rest of this entry »

A more somber note from a New York Times article:

The privileged, often therapeutic relationship between hairdressers and clients has long been the subject of magazine articles and movies. A growing movement in New York and across the nation tries to harness that bond to identify and prevent domestic violence, a pervasive problem that victims are often too ashamed to reveal to law enforcement or other public officials.

It’s hard to imagine being a victim of domestic violence, let alone a hairstylist who feels helpless about assisting. The Times cites a DoJ statistic that says in 2006, 600,000 women suffered from domestic violence. It’s safe to say that this number is probably a bit low, considering that these are only the reported cases.

Say what you will about the campy aesthetic of an episode of Cops, there are a few important lessons to be learned, especially when seeing how abused spouses defend their husbands against concerned police officers. You’d like to believe that we’re “past this,” but we’re not. 600,000 women. More than that. Astonishing.

A good friend of mine once fell off the face of the earth — she had moved from an upscale neighborhood in Connecticut to an area much further away from where I was attending college. I called a few times, and emailed to no avail, then figured that life had gotten too busy. A year or two later, she emailed me to tell me she had been in an abusive relationship. The bad kind. Here was a girl perfectly strong in her own regard, and with friends who certainly cared. She finally got away and started a new life, but the scars, both physical and emotional, will remain.

Here’s to hoping that these hairdressers can make a difference.

Rumor has it that President-elect Obama is eyeing Larry Summers as Secretary of the Treasury. Summers was Secretary of the Treasury during President Bill Clinton’s second term but is better known to many for his remarks as president of Harvard University (from 2001 to 2006).

At a 2005 NBER conference at Harvard discussing the percentage of women among tenured professors, Summers questioned whether “intrinsic” physiological factors might account for the relatively low representation of women in academic science and engineering positions.

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I’ll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

The above comments started a heated and international debate and Summers was driven from his presidential post. But I think that everyone may have missed the mark on this — both Summers and his feminist critics. There may be a better explanation the dearth of women in math and science: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.

On this logic, Phillip Greenspun believes that many women are self-selecting out of science in an academic context and into professional careers that make more money. Greenspun explains: “The American academic scientist earns less than an airplane mechanic, has less job security than a drummer in a boy band, and works longer hours than a Bolivian silver miner.”

Greenspun’s dismal view is shared by another famous scientist who said “Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.”

Bonus point to the first person to correctly identify the author of the above quote.

Earlier this week, I asked people to provide definitions of traditional marriage and marriage that could encompass same-sex unions. And there were a variety of responses.

When it came to same-sex marriage, some people spoke about a life time commitment to support and care for each other. Others talked about what wasn’t necessary in the definition — namely procreation or parenting (we’re looking at you, Phoebe!). Others talked about exceptions to the marriage definition articulated by traditionalists (such as that we permit infertile couples marry). One person spoke of a legal relationship between two individuals, carrying benefits and responsibilities. Some proponents, rather than giving a definition, argued that marriage has no essential definition. One said that marriage is about love followed by a collection of rights, such as health benefits. Another said that marriage is a union of equals.

So to all those folks who support redefining marriage to include same-sex marriage, I have a few questions.

In light of the “definitions” or qualities of marriage articulated above, do you support or oppose redefining marriage to include polygamy? If not, why not?

Do you support or oppose redefining marriage laws to permit siblings to marry or parents to marry their adult children? If not, why not — particularly in light of the reasons articulated above?

Hahahaha, stupid pirates.  Stealing oil tankers just as the price of oil is plummeting? Your booty is losing its value by the hour!! You guys should look into more traditional booty, like bullion or rum or other various treasures that can hold their value better than oil in these uncertain economic times.

My strategy for dealing with these guys? Let ‘em sail around in their pirated ships for awhile but never let them pull into port.  Problem solved.

No seriously though, obviously we should send in the ninjas. They certainly hate the Pirates of the Caribbean, so I’d imagine that they hate Somali pirates too.

“EHarmony? That’s for people who want to get married and stuff…” said the 30-year-old ex-boyfriend of a friend when they first started dating, after meeting on Yahoo personals. After all, why would a successful, 30-year-old, single male living in Washington, DC want to even THINK about something so dramatic?

And yet, we have Michael Weiss with this: “The question isn’t ‘Why aren’t more men getting married before age 30?’ It’s ‘Why are any?’” He poses the question after quoting divorce statistics. His column is in response to one mentioned yesterday on Ladyblog by Kay Hymowitz, who delves into the “darwinism of dating.” Weiss takes a shot at summing up here:

She says she wants to be treated as an equal, yet she doesn’t want you to earn less than she does. She adores gallantry and chivalry except when it’s seen as misogynist condescension: dare you hold a door open in the wrong setting, and that’s not all you’ll be left holding. She wants sensitivity and good grooming and garrulousness, but too much of that — and she’ll never come right out and say when it’s too much, you’ll only find out during the breakup — and you risk looking emasculated rather than “metrosexual.” When she’s out on the town, is it a one-night stand she’s after or is she aiming to “close a deal”? You’ll never know because as often as you go to bed with a whore and wake up with a virgin, the plot develops the other way about, too.

On the defense for his gender, Weiss seems only to perpetuate exactly what women find so frustrating. The excuses are endless. But Hymowitz is defensive of her gender as well and both writers come off as heart abused, screwed over, or irritated by their own pasts.

However, grains of truth exist within both pieces. As a 27-year-old single, I’m thinking surely, there exist mature, respectful, marriage-minded men, but I don’t know them. I’ve met guys lately who fit exactly the profile Hymowitz discusses. One guy’s life focused almost solely on the Redskins, poker, beer pong and fantasy football. He quotes Anchorman incessantly. Oh yeah, and if bored, he plays “Madden.” Another, who also quoted Anchorman incessantly, claimed he valued his freedom too much to make plans with the girls he was dating on a regular basis. His relationships usually last two months. I’ve met the “still live with my parents” guys and 31-year-olds with well-worn copies of Old School and a kitchen full of beer cans.

Weiss mentions the “growing population that sees lengthier fertility years, and increased rates of infant survival, more men can afford to go matchless longer and rationalize why they’re doing so.” Oh, so that’s what the problem is. Right.

In discussions with friends, I’ve discovered age may be the principle problem. Should 20-something women only date men over the age of 32? Is THAT when maturity and marriage start becoming real to modern men? The truth is that no one (especially singles and divorced people) can write objectively about this subject because almost everyone has gotten burned. Hymowitz and Weiss are properly irritated and in that irritation, propose dramatized — perhaps irrational — theories and answers.

I await the day when the dating game is only something entertaining I was once a part of.

Okay, so I really hate to add to our Palin tag cloud, and I hope that someday it will shrink into obscurity, but to follow up on something ENB mentioned below, I’m kind of jazzed about the Palin short-shorts situation. Why? Because I have the exact same pair of shorts—actually two pairs, one black and one navy.  They’re awesome.  I got them at Target.

But still: since when are running shorts and an oversize t-shirt “sexy,” “slutty,” or “skimpy,” as celebuzz suggests? And since when is such an outfit even vaguely inappropriate for lounging poolside?

If schlubby running shorts from Target and a t-shirt are sexy and slutty, well, apparently I’ve been dressing really sexily and sluttily to sit on the couch with my dogs and watch TV. (What, you thought I wore them to jog or something?  Silly reader, I don’t run unless I’m being chased.)

Interesting note: the page title (which you can see up at the top of your browser) on this particular pic I’ve used (which is from celebuzz.com) is “Palin’s Slutty Shorts.”  The rest of the pics on celebuzz just say “Short-shorts pics.”  Weird.

If you’re on Facebook (or MySpace?), you’ve probably received one of those messages touting a “secret admirer” whose identity you can only suss out by signing up for some Web site or application. The idea that some actual unknown paramour over the age of 15 would be too shy to talk to you in person (or at least, you know, facebook poke you, or whatever it is the kids do these days) but totally comfortable signing up for a Web site that will then reveal his or her identity to you via text message kind of defies logic. Nonetheless, I always kind of assumed it was one of those things along the lines of the “Will you be my zombie jump rope partner ninja pirate bride?” messages that crop up from more annoying online friends—a cutesy meme/gimmick. Turns out it’s more sinister; it’s a hoax! Or at least one such brand of it is:

MyLuvCrush was one of a number of businesses to seek lonely hearts using the increasingly populous online communities. The new generation of Internet services has, some experts say, created new opportunities for fraud and identity crime.

Users of several social networking sites were shown advertisements made to look like incoming messages, said Paula Selis, senior counsel for the state Attorney General’s Office’s high-tech consumer protection unit. Users were told a “crush” in their area was looking for them, then routed through a series of prompts ending with a demand that they sign up for a mobile phone text messaging service to see their nonexistent “crush.”

In Seattle, the state where MyLuvCrush’s parent-company is based, the state has branded this activity deceptive advertising, and ordered MyLuvCrush to stop. Web 2.0: crueler than the Burn Book.

Too busy dreaming about all your secret admirers to read Salon’s 17-billion-part series on the future of conservatism? PunkAssBlog condenses nicely:

Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University: Barack Obama is Ronald Reagan reborn. Also, could we stop obsessing on abortion?

Ross Douthat, author of Grand New Party and a blogger for the Atlantic: No.

Etc. [read the whole thing; if you’re used to traveling in conservative Interweb circles, it’s pretty funny to see an outsider’s take on the whole thing]

Or you could just read Wonkette’s Sara K. Smith on the future of the conservative intelligentsia. The saddest sentence ever written:

NR has now lost Buckley and Frum. The only scribes who remain are K-Lo, Starburst, and their fat Mexican secretary, Jonah Goldberg. Together this threesome will save American conservatism.

Speaking of Wonkette, why is everyone so uproarious about these pictures of Sarah Palin lounging poolside? Dude, the woman just lost the vice presidency; let her guzzle champagne in short shorts all she likes.

And while we’re on the Gawker Media family, Marianne beat me to blogging here about the Kay Hymowitz City Journal article about how it’s hard to be a mysoginist in the dating scene, but if you want more, Jezebel has a good analysis.

Oh, and let’s not get started on the whole bullshit “nice guys don’t get the girl” that all these guys re-hash. Well, yeah, sure, if The Girl is the head cheerleader (and she always is) — but were they ever asking out the girl who was President of Students Against Drunk Driving and the German club (i.e., dorky, awkward me)? Some of them were, sure, but I’ll be damned if most of them aren’t happily married to truly pleasant women who they adore.

And while we’re on girlie sites, Slate has announced the editors for its soon-to-be-launched women’s mag, Double X, which include the lady Chloe Sevigny played in Shattered Glass (Hanna Rosin) and the intimidatingly impressive Megan O’Rourke, who edits the poetry section of The Paris Review (which, in a fit of something, inspired me to decide I don’t read enough literary journals and subscribe to The Paris Review this morning, because I need more things piling up on my coffee table…).

But the pub I can have pile up on my coffee table no longer? Playgirl. After 35 years, the mag will lavish us with handle-bar mustaches and ample chest hair no longer. (Oh, okay, I’ve never even seen a copy of Playgirl, I just needed another bad segue).

Evening, folks.

Screenshot from today’s mag:

I gotta go with the original. Fey is cute, but she’s a Palin imitator — on screen, and in a beauty contest.

Stumbled upon this via Alarming News.

In the seemingly eternal struggle over who has it worse in the modern dating world, Kay Hymowitz weighs in on why some men are feeling so aggrieved. And I do mean aggrieved. Here’s what the fellows have to say:

Here’s Jeff from Middleburg, Florida: “I am not going to hitch my wagon to a woman . . . who is more into her abs, thighs, triceps, and plastic surgery. A woman who seems to have forgotten that she did graduate high school and that it’s time to act accordingly.” Jeff, meet another of my respondents, Alex: “Maybe we turn to video games not because we are trying to run away from the responsibilities of a ‘grown-up life’ but because they are a better companion than some disease-ridden bar tramp who is only after money and a free ride.” Care for one more? This is from Dean in California: “Men are finally waking up to the ever-present fact that traditional marriage, or a committed relationship, with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery.”

Here’s what I have to say: If you date only very fit, gorgeous women, you up your chances that she’ll be obsessed with her looks. If you hang out in bars trying to pick up women, you may run across some women who’ve been picked up before and have the STDs to prove it. And let’s not forget that for most of human history, women have gotten the short end of the marriage stick: no rights of our own, financial insecurity and, to quote Scarlett O’Hara, a passel of brats.

I have to admit, I’m a little tired of all the belly-aching from men about how it’s so hard to find women who aren’t disease-ridden or gold diggers, and how it’s so hard to date because the rules are different for every woman. Because here’s the thing: We girls are having a hard time figuring out the rules as well. We have to figure out which guys are interested in a relationship and which guys are just trying to get laid. We have to worry that if we do the independent thing and ask a guy out, that guy will think we’re desperate.

I know that it’s easy to get cynical about dating, because it feels like so much is on the line. But can we please try to remember that men and women are not monolithic groups? You’ll have a much easier time if you go into dating with the expectation that women all have different preferences and thoughts about traditional roles. And if you aren’t sure whether she likes having the door opened for her, or expects a man to be a bread-winner, those would be some good conversation topics on the first date, don’t you think?

From Amy Watson at Inkwell:

Last week, I posted a disturbing video of a public school teacher in North Carolina berating an elementary school child for indicating that she would vote for Senator McCain were she old enough to vote. While that was an example of blatant political indoctrination, there are many examples of subtle indoctrination that children experience everyday in the classroom. A few states away, a brave child in Oak Park, Illinois decided she would perform a clever little experiment on her teachers and fellow students and wear a “McCain Girl” t-shirt one day and record reactions to it and then an “Obama Girl” t-shirt the next and record the reactions from the same group of people. Click here to read about her not-so-surprising results.

There are things not everyone notices. If in movie after movie I see no black characters, I tend not to think about it; if I were black, I would. Similarly, if I were Christian (or of that background) and Sundays-off were instated, as Peter Lawler suggests, I’d probably say, ‘great, a day off!’ and think no more of it.

In an indirect way, Proposition 8 reminded me that, if we voted on it, we’d be a Christian country. This could explain why I, neither gay nor Californian, found it so unsettling. But what’s great about America is that we don’t get to vote on a state religion. If all Americans but one were Christian, we would still not be a Christian country. But what those who’d like to see America as Christian as possible can do is pass measures, whenever possible, that are merely the benign wishes of the majority, the majority being Christian. Opponents to such measures can then be painted as oversensitive, convinced of impending theocracy. Since I already responded to this, here goes:

The very real problem with Sunday as an “unofficial sabbatical” is that it puts social and financial pressure on all to observe the Christian sabbath. It screws over those who’d prefer (or whose religion mandates) a different day off. If no one’s at the mall because nearly everything’s closed, non-Christians’ shops do poorly, and eventually there’s pressure. Now, if spontaneously shop-owners mostly close on Sundays, nothing can be done about it. But do actively advocate them doing so is to advocate making America an officially Christian country.

In an officially religious state, or one that was one for centuries, one does not need to practice a religion to continue its traditions. I’ve met Israelis who become practicing Jews while in the US, but say they’re completely secular while in Israel because there, it’s just a given that one is Jewish. Something like that is true in Western Europe–there may be less fervent Christianity there than in the US, but that’s because when the national monuments are cathedrals, when the national holidays are your faith’s, you do not fear losing your heritage if you missed church the last few months. This sounds lovely until you consider the case of religious minorities, who end up feeling less their nationality because the culture, so infused with religion, can never truly be theirs.

The blog war between Kerry Howley and Will Wilkinson on one side and Todd Seavey on the other has attracted the attention of other bloggers, including our own Elizabeth Nolan Brown, and it’s such an interesting controversy that I can’t help weighing in (thereby perfecting the symmetry described here). The basic dilemma is easy to explain: Everybody agrees that women are treated differently than men in ways that sometimes make their lives difficult and constrain their choices; everybody also agrees that most of this discrimination stops short of a gun to the head; Kerry thinks that social pressure is a kind of coercion that libertarians should care about; Todd thinks social pressure is, at most, coercion-lite, and therefore not something that libertarians have to oppose. (Some libertarians might, but, Hell, some libertarians hate asparagus and we don’t make a plank out of that, even if the asparagus-haters are objectively correct.)

Confronted with the obvious point that social pressure limits liberty—something everyone is willing to grant, I think—I can think of four possible responses:

1. Social pressure limits liberty and should therefore be eliminated. Nobody can tell me what to do, not even with their eyes.

2. Social pressure limits liberty and should therefore be made voluntary and contractual. I am only subject to the rules of communities I have agreed to join. You’re welcome to vacuum floors in pearls and a sun dress if that’s what you really want, and I’m free to wear jeans, go to graduate school, and make my husband do the vacuuming.

3. Social pressure limits liberty, but I kinda like involuntary communities. However, I think that discrimination on the basis of gender is illegitimate, so we should eliminate all social norms having to do with gender discrimination, just as we try to eliminate racist social norms because racism is illegitimate. Everything else can stay, even if it’s mildly coercive. (Who wants to get rid of family, nation, and every form of ethnic and cultural inheritance, and why do they hate the Good?)

4. Social pressure limits liberty. However. I notice that my libertarian paradise can only sustain itself in a world with stable communities and self-governing individuals, and the only thing capable of producing either is tradition. If I want to live among mature individuals capable of citizenship in a libertarian state, I’d better defend the social norms that make it possible to bring up those people. If I think that organic communities obviate the need for government intervention, then I’d better preserve those communities, even if they engage in soft coercion. If some of their norms treat women differently or even disadvantageously, that might be good or bad but, in any event, is a matter for that community to decide for itself.

Number 4 is the most interesting one here, because it suggests that feminism and libertarianism (or at least certain brands of it) might be at odds.

I don’t want to define feminism too narrowly, but it seems necessarily to involve gunning for the patriarchy, making feminism hostile to the institutions that right libertarians want to conserve. In other words: If you oppose government interference because you think it artificially disrupts traditional institutions, then you’ll also oppose feminists when they want to do the same thing, which is often. (Judging from this diavlog, Howley’s feminism wants to disrupt the traditional family a lot.) Number 3 is one way out of this that enables a girl to be both a right libertarian and a feminist, and if anyone wanted to explore that exception in another post I’d read it. That being said, number 4 is the kind of libertarian I am, which is why I don’t usually call myself a feminist. (That, and, as a postmodern femme, I’m way into gender roles.)

Howley says that the affinity between feminism and libertarianism has been masked by “various historical contingencies—the particularly puritanical brand of feminism popular three decades back, the ill-fated conservative/libertarian alliance forged in response to the cold war.” However, if there are legitimate, non-historical reasons why libertarianism might be friendly to or even depend on traditionalism (i.e. if fusionism is a philosophy and not just a coalition), then there are entire schools of libertarianism that have good reason to be hostile to feminism and its strained, artificial disruptions of traditional institutions. If your right libertarianism doesn’t sound like #4, or if your feminism is weirdly Burkean, then, of course, you’re fine, but I’d be curious to hear guesses as to how many right libertarians and feminists fall into those loopholes.

Last note: Todd can get away with saying that libertarianism and feminism don’t contradict because he considers libertarianism to be strictly political; lower taxes and property rights are good for goose and gander. I can’t get away with such a conciliatory position because, like Will Wilkinson, I think that everyone who wants small government wants small government for a reason, usually a philosophical one—you like individual freedom, you like non-state institutions like church and family, or whatever. If your reason for liking small government is simply that you’ve done the math and decided that markets are more efficient, then your libertarianism falls outside the scope of this post. However, most libertarians are people and therefore possessed of philosophical commitments, and I’d guess that most libertarians’ philosophical commitments have some connection to their political ones. (This would be a good time to mention that, in my judgment, a simple objection to gunpoint coercion is fine but doesn’t get you all the way to a theory of government. Given real-world political ambiguities—What about non-gunpoint-y “nudges?” What about systematic discrimination that is effectively as limiting as gunpoint coercion? What about the political reality that a dogmatically libertarian state just ain’t in the cards?—you need a little more.)

As it turns out, even really famous people read emails (or have interns read emails) from the likes of you and me. Last week, Matthew Berry of ESPN quoted one of my emails to him about his Love/Hate column for Week 10. This is as close to sports commentary stardom as I will ever get. Ever.

So to celebrate, I wanted to take this opportunity to continue writing letters, as it appears they get read.

Dear Andy Reid,
So I was just wondering…what’s your threshold for deciding to, well, stop using the passing game and start using Westbrook? I mean honestly here, my boy Brian got 14 carries in 5 quarters of football. Meanwhile, Donovan Mc-”The Other Team NABBed The Ball” decided to spend most of the game giving the ball to the kids whose uniforms look like traffic cones. Fifty eight pass attempts! Goody gumdrops. Congratulations, you tied the Bengals and also managed to bring my team to the brink of a loss this week. You, sir, are on my bad list.
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I can’t believe it even has to be questioned.

Hands up anyone who thinks this is ok:

Girls as young as 13 will be urged to have contraceptive jabs as part of Government plans to curb teenage pregnancy rates.

What have we done to our daughters if they are getting pregnant at 13, and behaving like trollops at even younger ages?

This is not progress, people. This is not what the feminists fought for. This is not “liberal” or “progressive” by any stretch of the imagination. This is chaos and destruction writ large on our children.

For anyone who needed proof that society is busted (you know, because you’ve been under a rock since birth), there’s your proof.

Doesn’t it tarnish your feminist credentials a little bit when you use up an entire column writing about Michelle Obama’s poor choice of Election Night attire?

I mean, I enjoy a little sartorial criticism as much as the next girl, but isn’t this just a wee bit over-the-top? Especially coming from someone who has spent her entire career criticizing the patriarchy?

In other Michelle-Obama-as-fashion-icon news, I’m actually getting pretty sick of hearing about what a fashion icon Michelle Obama is. Yes, she dresses well. But nothing she wears is that different from what successful career women all over the country wear. Or am I completely missing something here?