Thanks, Obama! The hilarious reason why a judge just blocked Wyoming’s abortion ban.
Republicans just got a painful reminder that political stunts can backfire.
The article concludes:
For the moment, however, the Obama-era amendments writing anti-Obamacare talking points into two state constitutions have proved to be a thorn in the side of Republicans who hope to ban abortions. Let that be a lesson that a state constitution is a foolish thing to change for the sake of a political stunt.
Vox is more or less correct in its thesis as to how we got here, even if it's absurdly optimistic about anyone "learning a lesson". Where it isn't fully correct is in the assumption it was a stunt. Fired up by conspiracy theories and propaganda, a fair number of those voting for the amendment and the bill that took it to the electorate believed that they were operating against almost certain Obamacare "Death Panels". One Natrona County former legislator has stated:
I’ll be very grieved if they actually use that as an instrument of death, That wasn’t our intent at all.
Of course that wasn't the intent, but did you read the constitutional amendment? There were concerns at the time.
The Equality State Policy Center, for one, was worried about the bill, with its lobbyist, Dan Neal, stating:
I’ll bet that even the original supporters of this amendment can’t tell you exactly what it will do, given the vague language and all the changes made to it during the Legislature’s deliberations in 2011.
Yup.
And as for grieved? Bereaved would be a better term. By yielding to paranoid propaganda, those who sponsored this, and then voted for it, have blood on their hands.
And there's a lesson in there.
In the rules that govern logical thinking, Chesterton's Fence, which should be the first rule of Conservatism, holds:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
A corollary to that might be called Yeoman's Gate, which holds:
Before you go through a gate to get to the other side of a fence, completely figure out. to the extent you can, where the path goes.
If somebody is holding a fence open, urging you to go through, or keeping it close, trying to bar you from doing so, ask what interest he has in either action.
None of these principles were applied. If they had been, it should have been clear that a certain sector of the Obamacare fearmongers were people who were using it for their own political self-interest, not out of any real concern. Those people were among the gatekeepers. "Run through", they yelled, "the big scary blood Marxist bear of Obama is right behind you!. . .And by the way, vote for me next election, here's my flyer full of BS . . ."
And the pathway lead right to here.
A person should likely ask the same questions about the more radical bills that floated in the last legislature, and most particularly about the Crossover Voting bill that just passed.
Why did we allow crossover voting? Nobody really asked, did they?
Where does the path lead, now that we've crossed it?
And why was the gatekeeper so eager to for us to go through?
Bread is the staff of life; in which is contained, inclusive, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding and custard: and to render all complete, there is intermingled a due quantity of water, whose crudities are also corrected by yeast or barm, through which it means it becomes a wholesome fermented liquor, diffused through the mass of bread.
Jonathan Swift, to whom I'd related on my mother's side.
Recently I heard a homily delivered referencing the Lord's Prayer and bread.
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
The Lord's Prayer in contemporary English.
The Priest, an African native, noted that for a time he'd served as a Priest in Rome, and during that time he was thrown into a bit of crisis due to the massive variety of Italian breads (twenty kinds, he related) and that so much of it was thrown away in a location that was just across from him. At home, in Zambia, bread was consumed still just once a month, when his father was paid. How, he wondered, could he relate the scarcity of bread in his native land, with the over abundance of it in his new location, and the scarcity of it referenced in the Lord's Prayer (my summation, not quite the way he put it)? He figured that very few Americans or westerners thought of it in terms of scarcity.
Pater Noster, qui es in caelis:
sanctificétur nomen tuum;
advéniat regnum tuum;
fiat volúntas tua, sicut in caelo, et in terra.
Panem nostrum cotidiánum da nobis hódie;
et dimítte nobis débita nostra,
sicut et nos dimíttimus debitóribus nostris;
et ne nos indúcas in temptatiónem,
sed líbera nos a malo.
The Lord's Prayer in Latin.
Well, it might be just me, or perhaps more the family I come from, but that thought, the scarcity of bread and what it means in the context of the prayer, is something that I have thought of before. Perhaps because I can recall my father mentioning, in reference itself to the prayer, that in the ancient world "bread was truly the staff of life."
Padre nostro che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo Nome,
venga il tuo Regno,
sia fatta la tua Volontà
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,
e non ci indurre in tentazione,
ma liberaci dal Male.
The Lord's Prayer in contemporary Italian.
And indeed it was.
Bread was the basic foodstuff that fed great masses of humanity all around the world for centuries. The diet we have today, with lots of variety, didn't exist in many localities, particularly after civilization, i.e., the construction of towns and cities, started in ancient times. Not that any ancient society really had the variety of foods we have today, but hunter gatherer societies can have a more varied one than we suppose, with a fairly balanced diet. In many ancient societies, however, once towns were built and crop agriculture set in, and indeed many societies right up until relatively modern times, bread was one of the basic if not the basic stable food item. A person might have meat often, but they could hope to get by on bread.
Notre Père qui es aux cieux,
que ton Nom soit sanctifié,
que ton règne vienne,
que ta volonté soit faite
sur la terre comme au ciel.
Donne-nous aujourd’hui notre pain de ce jour.
Pardonne-nous nos offenses,
comme nous pardonnons aussi à ceux qui nous ont offensés.
Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation,
mais délivre-nous du mal.
The Lord's Prayer in French.
That's quite a change, indeed, from what we experience now. I suppose there may be exceptions, but by and large I don't know of any society that depends upon bread the same way that all peoples once did.
Πατερ ημων ο εν τοις ουρανοις· Pater hēmon ho en tois uranois; αγιασθητω το ονομα σου· hagiasthēto to onoma su; ελθετω η βασιλεια σου· elteto hē basileia su; γενηθητω το θελημα σου, ως εν ουρανω και επι γης· genēthēto to thelēma su, hos en urano kai epi gēs; τον αρτον ημων τον επιουσιον δος ημιν σημερον· ton arton hēmon to etiusion dos hēmin sēmeron; και αφες ημιν τα οφειληματα ημον, kai aphes hemin ta opheilēmata hēmon, ως και ημεις αφηκαμεν τοις οφειλεταις ημων· hos kai hēmeis aphēkamen tois opheiletais hēmon; και μη εισενεγκης ημας εις πειρασμον, kai mē eisenegkēs hēmas eis peirasmon, αλλα ρυσαι ημας απο του πονηρου. alla rhusai hēmas apo tu ponēru.
The Lord's Prayer in Greek.
Which is, I suppose, why ever culture around the world seems to have its own variety of it, with some societies in the wheat growing regions of the globe having multiple vareities of it. Indeed, Italy and France seem to have a profusion of bread types, and good ones too, which we've only recently caught up with after basically importing their types.
Unser Vater in dem Himmel! Dein Name werde geheiliget. Dein Reich komme. Dein Wille geschehe auf Erden wie im Himmel. Unser täglich Brot gib uns heute. Und vergib uns unsere Schulden, wie wir unsern Schuldigern vergeben. Und führe uns nicht in Versuchung, sondern erlöse uns von dem Übel.
The Lord's Prayer in German.
And thank goodness for that, I'd note. American breads of my youth were lousy, in my opinion. So packed with sugar that they are basically a really bland cake, the left a lot to be desired. Those industrial breads are still around I'd note, but I don't have to buy them and I don't.
Отче наш, Иже еси на небесех!
Да святится имя Твое,
да приидет Царствие Твое,
да будет воля Твоя,
яко на небеси и на земли.
Хлеб наш насущный даждь нам днесь;
и остави нам долги наша,
якоже и мы оставляем должником нашим;
и не введи нас во искушение,
но избави нас от лукаваго.
The Lord's Prayer in Russian.
Ironically, some of the really fancy breads of today started off, oddly enough, as poverty foods. Italian walnut based breads and pastas (basically a species of bread, really) were the food of the really poor, who gleaned walnets. Irish soda bread, which I really like and which I used to make on occasion, is a "short" bread with no or little sugar and no yeast. Easy to make with only flour, just as the Irish poor were likely to not have.
Ranch cook making what is probably soda, or sheepherder's, bread in a cast iron pan, the way it is made at camps, and the way I even make it
Оч͠е нашь ижє ѥси на н͠бсєхъ . да с͠титьсѧ имѧ
твоѥ да придєть ц͠рствиѥ твоѥ · да бѫдєть воля
твоя · яка на н͠бси и на земли хлѣбъ нашь насѫщьиыи ·
даждь намъ дьньсь · и остави намъ · длъгы
нашѧ · яко и мы оставляємъ длъжникомъ нашимъ
и нє въвєди насъ въ напасть · иъ избави ны отъ
нєприязни
The Lord's Prayer in Old Church Slavonic.
But I can see how many would have never considered this.
أبانا الذي في السّماوات
ليتقدَّسِ اسمُك
ليأتِ ملكوتُك
لتكُنْ مشيئتُكَ
كما في السَّماءِ كذلكَ على الأرض
خبزَنَا الجوهريَّ أعطِنا اليوم
واترُكْ لنا ما علينا
كما نتركُ نحنُ لِمَنْ لنا عليه
ولا تُدخِلْنا في تجربة
لكن نجِّنا مِن الشرير
آمين
The Lord's Prayer in Arabic.
Although I suspect that quite a few still do, even in spite of a modern condition in which foods supplies are so vast in the Western World that bread is sometimes regarded by some as a dietary enemy.
我們在天上的父，
願人都尊祢的名為聖，
願祢的國降臨，
願祢的旨意行在地上，
如同行在天上。
我們日用的飲食，
今日賜給我們，
免我們的債，
如同我們免了人的債，
不叫我們遇見試探，
救我們脫離兇惡，
因為國度、權柄、榮耀，全是祢的，
直到永遠。阿們！
The Lord's Prayer in Chinese.
And, in the context of the Lord's Prayer, if a person does, the deeper meaning of the prayer on that line is quite evident.
E ko mākou Makua i loko o ka lani,
e ho‘āno ‘ia Kou inoa.
E hiki mai Kou aupuni.
E mālama ‘ia Kou makemake ma ka honua nei,
e like me ia i mālama ‘ia ma ka lani lā.
E hā‘awi mai iā mākou i kēia lā i ‘ai na mākou no nēia lā;
a e kala mai ho‘i iā mākou i kā mākou lawehala ‘ana,
me mākou e kala nei i ka po‘e i lawehala i kā mākou;
a mai ho‘oku‘u ‘Oe iā mākou i ka ho‘owalewale ‘ia mai,
akā e ho‘opakele nō na‘e iā mākou i ka ino.
Hawaiian.
Vår Far i himmelen! La navnet ditt helliges. La riket ditt komme. La viljen din skje på jorden slik som i himmelen. Gi oss i dag vårt daglige brød, og tilgi oss vår skyld, slik også vi tilgir våre skyldnere. Og la oss ikke komme i fristelse, men frels oss fra det onde. For riket er ditt, og makten og æren i evighet.
Norwegian
Faþer vár es ert í himenríki, verði nafn þitt hæilagt.
Til kome ríke þitt, værði vili þin
sva a iarðu sem í himnum.
Gef oss í dag brauð vort dagligt,
Ok fyr gefþu oss synþer órar,
sem vér fyr gefom þeim er viþ oss hafa misgert
Leiðd oss eigi í freistni, heldr leys þv oss frá öllu illu.
Old Norse
Faðir vor, þú sem ert á himnum.
Helgist þitt nafn,
til komi þitt ríki,
verði þinn vilji, svo á jörðu sem á himni.
Gef oss í dag vort daglegt brauð.
Fyrirgef oss vorar skuldir,
svo sem vér og fyrirgefum vorum skuldunautum.
Eigi leið þú oss í freistni, heldur frelsa oss frá illu.
[Því að þitt er ríkið, mátturinn og dýrðin að eilífu, amen.]
Joseph Stalin, caught in tape commenting to Molotov.
I don't pay any attention to the Grammy's anymore. I never much did. Anymore, however, nobody pays much attention to them. The same has become true of all the other big awards in entertainment that once meant so much. Now, heavily politicized in a PC fashion, they're really not very interesting and people pretty much ignore them.
Therefore, I ignored the flap over Sam Smith's performance when it came out, even though with Douthat commented on it I started to take a little note. But then I noticed something else.
It's no secret that a certain segment of Western, liberal, society is at war with our existential nature, which calls into mind, for a believer, Stalin's quote. And well it should. Communism claimed at first to act in accordance with man's nature, but soon saw it that it couldn't force the nature that it wished for, so it decided to make a new Communist man that was the antithesis to real men in some ways. It failed.
That's what we have going on now.
Sam Smith is a homosexual. While Pope Francis is certainly correct that making homosexuality illegal, as it actually is in much of the world, is wrong, celebrating it is nonsensical. It is a deviation from the genetic norm and highly associated with a variety of physical problems if left free rein. In spite of that, however, and particularly post Obergefel, now a person can hardly even point that out.
And as people who were well attune to development and trends pointed out, the Obergefel decision was going to inevitably lead to a full scale assault on normality and nature itself, which has busted out in the transgenderism craze. Not surprisingly, he collaborates with German songwriter Tim Petras, a man who was chemically and probably surgically mutilated as a very early teen, and who goes by the name of Kim Petras and affects a female appearance.
In Smith's performance, he affected a Satanic visage and gave what can only be called an open embrace of what that entails. Perhaps fully unwitting, Smith has exposed openly what most in his camp have hidden, perhaps for the better.
And by so doing, he joins Stalin in that category. For all his defects, Stalin was a genius and his comment was not only open, I don't believe it to be metaphorical. At least he had the courage to admit what he was up to.
Of course, like all such efforts, it failed.
It's worth noting that this argument still prevails even for those who claim not to believe or doubt. Most of the general fundamentals of Christianity in regard to men, women, and what they do and interact, are not only Christian principles, they're principles of every religion, and exhibited in every natural society. That's why, we'd note, that Communism works no better in North Korea than East Germany. It's contrary to human nature, as is what these performers are exhibiting.
You can be at war with nature, but you won't win.
It's interesting to note. . .
Related to the above, that in the commentary in Playboy documentary that aired one of the models flat out stated that she believed Hugh Hefner to be possessed, and that a girl who was a centerfold or "bunny", I can't recall which painted something essentially stating the same thing prior to her committing suicide.
It was really Kinsey, and his bogus report, that started us down this road, although I've blamed Hugh Hefner, justifiably, a lot.
During World War Two, Alfred Kinsey, with colleagues, was busy studying the sexual habits of perverts who were incarcerated, resulting in a text entitled Sexual Behavior In The Human Male, which would have been better entitled Sexual Habits of Incarcerated Perverts Who Couldn't Be Drafted. It's one of two examples of 1940s "studies" being really results driven. I.e, a report that isn't a study, but a conclusion being justified subsequently by a report, the other being SLAM Marshall's Men Under Fire.
Both texts have done a lot of damage.
Taken objectively, it turns out that really gross perverts act perversely, which didn't stop Kinsey and his associates from actually arranging some acts that should be regarded as solicitation, or prostitution, or just weird. Anyhow, their conclusions were erroneous, as is now well known, but so damaging and influential, they're still regarded as persuasive.
In reality, the overwhelming majority of men and women actually had very limited numbers of, as we like to say now, "partners". Most men and women had no sexual experience at all of the really intimate type until they were married, and it was universally regarded, irrespective of not everyone keeping the standard, that sex outside of marriage was morally wrong.
Entern perversion fan Kinsey and this began to weaken, followed by Hugh Hefner. Not too surprisingly, we are at where we now are.
99 Luftballons
The entire Chinese balloon flap has been very interesting. I'm sure that we're not going to know the truth of it for many years.
What we know is only the basics. The Chinese have been flying spy balloons over the United States, and in this case, although barely noted, over Canada as well. The choice of the two nations together may be simply atmospheric, perhaps that's how you get a balloon over the continental US, or it may be strategic, that flies it over and through NORAD.
It would not appear that the NORAD, American or Canadian response has been stellar. This was apparently, if we're being told the truthy, and we very well might not be, the first time a PRC spy balloon was detected, which if true is a shocking admission of a major NORAD failure. And the entire story of waiting it so long to shoot it down doesn't pass the smell test at all. This thing could have been dropped anywhere from the Aleutians to Wyoming harmlessly, but wasn't. The story about not wanting to damage stuff on the ground simply isn't credible. They were probably more likely to hit a boater where they took it down than they were to hit a human over much of its course.
Which means somebody is probably fibbing.
We now know that U2s accompanied the balloon nearly its entire route over the US. The high altitude spy plane was spying on the balloon, likely picking up anything it emitted, and perhaps messing with its own emissions. That alone may be sufficient justification, justification that can't be admitted, for not dropping it until we did.
Chances are good, I'd note, that U2s are flying near the one now in the Southern Hemisphere.
The big question is why are the Chinese doing this?
Well, one reason is that they got away with it so far, and it did a good job of testing NORAD. We overflew quite a few places with U2s until we simply couldn't, and it was never our intent to test air responses in doing it. We probably also intruded on Soviet waters with submarines for various spying reasons, and the Soviets and Russians probably still do that in some locations.
Nations spy.
But spying in this manner is really interesting.
They may have been able to pick up a lot of electronic data from the ground that a satellite simply couldn't. And, importantly for a nation that is preparing for war with the United States, and it is, testing NORAD made sense.
A new Cold War?
This question came up on all the weekend shows. Are we in a new Cold War. Nobody would say yes.
Well, we obviously are.
One analysis, that the level of trade was too high to support that claim, is nonsense. We didn't have a lot of trade with the Eastern Bloc countries, as they had nothing we really wanted to buy at the time. China has been different, and intentionally so. The real model is the trade level between the Western combatants in World War One, prior to the war. It was enormous, none of which kept the war from happening.
And this war will go hot.
Are the Chinese going to attack Taiwan?
Probably.
Well, rather, they will probably try.
I'd give it about 70% chance of happening by mid-decade. I.e., we're close.
It'll also be an epic fail.
Crossing the Taiwan Strait will prove beyond them, their casualties will be massive, and their government will fall.
Liars.
Fox news crew with the network.
To nobody's really surprise, unless they chose to be completely self-deluded, Fox News personnel privately acknowledged that they knew Trump hadn't won the 2020 election. Indeed, privately, some, notably Tucker Carlson, blasted him.
In spite of this, they just keep on keeping on. If Fox had any honor, all of these people would go, and go right now.
But they won't. And they'll just keep shoving the crap they're shoveling.
Lying about being Jewish
It's interesting that there is now some political cache, apparently, to being Jewish.
We've long had Jewish politicians in the United States, and even before that. Francis Salvador, for example, served in the South Carolina provincial legislature at the time of the Revolution and hew as Jewish. But it can't be doubted, additionally, that being Jewish was once a serious hindrance to obtaining higher office. While Salvador was undoubtedly an exception, by and large successful 19th Century Jewish politicians in the US, and there were some, came from districts where their constituents at least partially had the some background.
Exceptions started in the 19th Century, however. Portland, Oregon had back to back Jewish mayors starting in 1869. Washington Bartlett was the Jewish Governor of California starting in 1887. And so on.
Be that as it may, Jewish Americans being quiet about their religious identity, in some instances, was pretty common well into the 20th Century. Indeed, most Jewish actors in American films changed their names, if they had a name that might identify them as being Jewish.
Now that's changed so much that we apparently have two freshman members of Congress claiming Jewish identify when they have none. George Santos is one, and now Anna Paulina Luna is another. Luna claimed to be raised as a Messianic Jew and that she’s part Ashkenazi Jewish, but has now converted fully to Christianity.
In actuality, she's always been a Christian and one of her grandfathers, a German immigrant, served i the German Army during World War Two.
Marjory Taylor Greene, left, Howler Monkey's right (By Steve from washington, dc, usa - howler monkees doing their thing, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3963947). One of these examples is shameful, and it ain't the one on the right.
This is an interesting and in my view largely correct, insightful blog entry by Robert Reich:
It also comes, I'd note, on the same day that a Wyoming Republic commentator made what are somewhat similar comments, calling a member of the GOP Central Committee a hypocrite in no uncertain, and indeed highly crude, terms, although if true, they'd be deserving ones.
And hence, I guess, my comment.
While I think that what Reich is complaining about is in fact shameful, which starts with Marjorie Taylor Greene acting like a Howler Monkey during the State of the Union Address, how the crap can anyone on the hardcore political left sincerely make this claim? The hard left in the country has spent the last 50 years totally dismantling any concept of shame in absolutely everything whatsoever.
And that's a lot of the reason why we are exactly where we are.
Do we have no shame?
Of course not. We were told that nothing is shameful.
And indeed, this tracks well into the purpose of this blog, looking at then. . .and now. And, moreover, we often fail to note this trend, i.e., descent, in literature, as we assume that everyone in the past was living in the sewer or wanted to be like us, in the sewer.
That's truly not how it was.
I'll admit that I am torn in how to present this post. When I started drafting it, I found I went into detail on where shame has exited. I hadn't intended in the first place that the thread be a catalog of things formerly shameful, and now no longer shameful. And in looking at it, I don't think that's the correct approach. Maybe I'll expand on individual items later.
But what I will note, is there are a lot of things that were once regarded as highly shameful, in the arena of personal conduct, that no longer are, and in some instances, left-wing social engineers have gone so far as to impose shame on anyone commenting on them, or not engaging in them. Shame hasn't really left in that sense, it's been transferred.
Taking what is a short arch of history, but a long one in terms of individual lives, since World War Two, and really, since the late 1960s, a massive effort has been expended on this by the left. Even as late as the early 1980s, for instance, many things that are now not shameful, were.
Sex outside of marriage, particularly for women (or girls) was shameful.1 Having a baby out of wedlock was shameful.2 Homosexuality was shameful.3 Men dressing in women's clothes or affecting a female appearance was shameful. Prostitution was shameful4 . Avarice was shame, including avarice in these areas.5
Even into the 1970s, being divorced conveyed an element of shame.6 Living with the opposite gender and not being married was shameful.
Well beyond that, having a child and not supporting the child economically, even to the point of your own well-being being impaired, was shameful.
While it was definitely changing during the 60s, putting yourself on display, i.e., being an "exhibitionist" was shameful.
Pornography, even after Playboy, and its consumption, was shameful.
All this started getting ripped down in the late 1940s, it accelerated in the 60s and 70s, and it's gone on to really stretch the balloon in our present age. The results have quite frankly been a disastrous assault on nature.
Now, I don't wish to suggest that every conveyance of shame was warranted or a good thing. There were some really bad results. The high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s were partially due to it being simply too shameful in many people's minds to bear a child out of wedlock, with the shame being imposed both on the young woman, but also on her family. That this has ended is a good thing.
But the Me Generation's deep dive into themselves, and "if it feels good, do it", as the ethos, has been hugely destructive. The KIA, MIA, and WIA of the Sexual Revolution has caused a limping society. The focus on "me" lead to a focus on "mine", destroying community and boosting greed.
And in no small part, it's lead to where we are in things like Reich has complained about, and not just in this post. It's all sort of the same package. If the whole world is about me, me, me, and my needs, needs, needs, I really don't need to care what anyone else thinks or even reality. The difference, therefore, between Marjorie Taylor Greene howling for attention and a transgender advocates demanding that a man be viewed as a woman, as he wants to be, are really thin. Likewise, the difference between a AoC and Elon Mus isn't all that much.
Also, really thin is the difference between individualized self-expression, including pantless individualized self-expression, and Harvey Weinstein pulling the latter off of somebody else. It all just goes together. In a way that they likely couldn't recognize, Hugh Hefner, Harvey Weinstein, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are all fellow travelers on the same destructive cultural bus.
Reich cites to shame being a necessary social engine, and it is. But you can't partially restore shame, really, as it has to be based on a larger something. You can't just say "bad", and it's bad, because it's bad. Bad things are bad, but due to something else making them bad.
We've been seeing a lot of this recently, interestingly, and some of that's a good sign. The Me Too movement is an effort to restore shame where it had once been. At least up into the 50s, if not beyond, men who expected women to put out were called "wolves", and to be tagged that was shameful. While the name was no longer around by the late 70s, early 80s, the same conduct was still not admired at that time, but Hefner and company were ripping it down, and in deed, raping it down, basically. Hollywood, where actress self prostitution was pretty common all along, was interestingly the first to really say "enough", on an individual level, and try to reverse it.
But you really have to restore the metaphysical basis for why that's wrong, to really get anywhere.
Young people, left without the guide rails of the culture that was torn down, have partially restored it as well, although groping for a basis for it remains. And in some odd ways, as we recently addressed, even the transgender movement, deep down, is an effort to reach out to get back to a less material, less perverted, time.
So here we now are. Having become comfortable with a Quasi Judaical Dictatorship that's suddenly betrayed autocracy and restored democracy, the left finds itself now championing what it had become comfortable omitting, and here at last, its rediscovered, shame.
So is this a "everything was better in the past" post? No it isn't.
But shame exist for a reason, and excising it wholly was a mistake.
Footnotes.
1. People will instantly claim that there was a double standard, and to some degree that was true, but not to the degree that people commonly imagine. It is true that it's becoming public knowledge that a girl had sex outside of marriage would tarnish, and often severely, her reputation, and if it was a case of multiple men, it would put her in a category that would be difficult to ever get out of, but men who were multiple standard violators likewise got tagged with a permanent, indeed lifelong, reputation they couldn't get out of either. They had greater leeway than women, but not absolute leeway.
2. As noted in later in the thread, this probably partially lead to the high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s. It also, however, lead to a lot of children being given up for adoption in a process in which the pregnant girl often absented herself, or her family absented her, for a period of time so that the pregnancy would not be discovered. I know at least one person who experienced, this, later going on to a very respected adult life and the pregnancy not being discovered until after she had died. As there was a high demand for healthy infants to adopt, and frankly white healthy infants (and there still is), this often worked out well for the adopted as well. Again, I personally know one such person whose mother was a college student when she became pregnant and the father never knew.
Indeed, that latter item is surprisingly common. You'd think the distressed young woman would have always told the father, but often, they didn't. This is because they didn't want, quite often, to be faced with the choice of marrying the individual, which also often occurred. Such marriages usually happened quickly before the woman "showed". In cases in which the women were in their 20s, they often just didn't want to be married to the man in the end, and for teens, their families didn't want to put them in that spot, quite often. And of course, date rape wasn't really a concept at the time, and therefore in cases in which that resulted in pregnancy, not wanting to marry the man made sense.
3. This tended to have an arresting influence on open displays of homosexuality, and it also led to quite a few homosexuals simply suppressing it individually, or even refusing to acknowledge it in any sense.
4. It still mostly is, of course, but there are ongoing efforts to break this down.
The degree to which prostitution is shameful, although not really being a prostitute, tends to change by era. In rough and ready frontier areas, the institution tends to exist pretty openly, and it also tended to very much be associated with certain armies, sometimes by compulsion. That doesn't necessarily mean that the individual shame associated with it evaporates, but rather the tolerance of it is pretty open. In other eras, there's very low tolerance for it.
There tends to be a myth that prostitutes were the founding women in a lot of regions of the frontier, which is just flatly false. I've heard this myth associated with one local, now long deceased, historian, but as I've never read his work, and for acquired bias reasons I'm unlikely to, I don't know if that's really true. Be that as it may, the most typical fate for prostitutes was early death, due to the lack of protection from disease.
5. But not just in these areas. Being "greedy" has been something that's always been around, but which wasn't tolerated in the way it now is until after the Reagan Administration came in.
Americans have always had a very high tolerance for the accumulation of wealth, but not to the present level. Simply being wealthy is not a sign of avarice, but having wealth was at one time very much associated with a social expectation of charity. Quite a few wealthy people still exhibit that trait today.
"I pay my taxes", while something nobody likes doing, was actually something the very wealthy used in their self-defense at one time, as the upper tax rate was extremely high.
6. Fault, of course, had to be demonstrated for divorce up until nearly everyplace, or maybe everyplace, adopted "no-fault divorce".
Divorce is really regarded as being routine today, but even into the 1970s it was a mark against a person.
Basically- Save the tomboys, let little boys paint their nails, don’t be a jerk to your kid because there are bad people/groomers in the world- protect your child and teach them they’re great the way they are and doing those things doesn’t mean they’re a different gender
In that, I also noticed the operation of synchronicity. And here I find it at work again.
Among the various bills pending in front of the state's legislature are two regarding the horrific abuse of minors in the name of "gender affirming care". Chemical and surgical attacks on gender and surgery to "reassign", or at least partially remove, a person's gender characteristics is "care" in the same way that the Holocaust was a "solution". It isn't, it demonstrates extreme moral depravity, and it's an absolutely insane rejection of nature.
Some of this topic, and that one, started off with various items I'd read or heard, which was then followed, by what I just noted here:
Well, I was in the bookstore for three days running, but that's another story.
And just before the trip to the bookstore, I became aware that somebody who I've known their entire life now identifies as transgendered, but there's something else, I suspect, going on there that I'll not deal with here.
I noted in that I'd post another one on this particular topic.
And then the very brave Luka "Bunny" Hein testified in front of the legislature, saying a lot of this stuff more bravely than I could have.
I so thoroughly killed off my younger self to become what I was, what I am, that I truly feel as though trying to find any part of her left in me would just feel like resurrecting someone else’s corpse
I suppose that metaphor is appropriate with how Frankenstein-like I feel now
Luka Hein.
Hein isn't alone. She's joined by Chloe Cole, whose name has been given to one of the proposed statutes, "Chloe's Law". Cole, like Hein, is an activist against this horror, but she's gone further and is crusading generally against what we might call the perversion of youth. If you want to know why there's so much furor over a certain book that keeps getting mentioned in regard to school libraries, look at her Twitter feed. She put the pages of the book up, complete with the male on male dick sucking images, which are the reason people are complaining about the book.1
I've known little boys who played with dolls who grew up to be men's men, and I've known plenty of girls who took up what had been formerly regarded as very male activities, or male habits. Indeed, ironically in our day and age, younger women who have retained highly traditional ideas, or perhaps I should say highly feminine behavior, have been ridiculed and belittled, while women as a whole have been pushed into entire roles that are not only traditionally male, but in some (limited) instances, such as combat soldiers are likely genetically so. Up until just recently, however, it wasn't the case that the conclusion was made on some societal level that this must mean those boys want to be girls, or those girls want to be boys.
Now that's being shoved down upon them.2
What's really going on here?
We discussed some of that just the other day, but there are a number of things going on, the first of which is the complete rejection by the WASP class of the concept of nature and standards, which we touched on in our earlier essay. That's left them a ship adrift, and subject to the winds of forces which very much have an agenda.
As we've already gone into it in some depth, we won't here. But basically to sum it up, up until after the Second World War the dominant American culture, the WASP culture, was rooted in a Protestant sense of Christianity, which means that it was rooted in a Christian world view. Even people who were not Protestant Christians picked up large portions of this world view, given us the oddity of Protestantized Catholics and Protestantized Jew, as well as Protestantized Agnostics and even Protestantized Atheists. Humorist Garrison Keiller has a joke in one of his monologues about claimed non believing bachelor farmers going to Lutheran Easter services and noting that "it was a Lutheran God they didn't believe in", but there's something to that.
As part of that, or related to it, American society, and European society wasn't all that far removed from nature in a way up into the early 1960s. You certainly can find examples of people who lived an urban life for generations by the 60s, but more often than not you'd tend to find some recent rural connection. People's parents, or grandparents, had been farmers quite often. And certainly in North America, as Gene Shepherd noted in one of his essays, even urban people retained outdoor activities to some degree if they had no farm connection.3
Why does this matter? Well, for a couple of reasons. Starting in the 60s, this really started to breakdown. The Spirit of 1968 essentially rejected all conventions, existential or otherwise, and started society on a path of radical self defined, "if you feel good, do it" type of thinking, inroads into which were already being advanced by the Playboy culture that started attacking the family, in essence, in 1953. Things were well advanced in this direction by the time Tom Wolfe redefined the Boomers as "The Me Generation" in 1976, by which time the Greed Is Good ethos was also taking root. By the late 1970s the WASP culture was so diluted it was already about individual self definition, as long as that also included monetary success. Ties to the land were being lost, in spite of efforts to revive it in an unrealistic idealized sense, so lessons that are plain in nature, were gone.4
With the guardrails removed, it's no wonder where things ended up, but it didn't happen, of course, overnight. Indeed, it really took until the Boomers children raised in the larger WASP culture started having their own, and passed on only a very diluted sense of anything whatsoever, with that mostly being "be yourself" and "be successful". Nobody was a loser, everyone (up until you needed to make money) a winner, and whatever you wanted to do was okay.
Well, nature is nature, sometimes cruel, and that's not the way things work.
And hence we see the fork of a dilemma here, which is impacting the modern age, and the rise of transgenderism in confused, mostly female, adolescents, and confused males in their early 20s.
And that means the root is likely not the same.
The Confused Girls
Luka Hein describes this, having lived through it, about well as anyone can. By and large, what we see with these girls, and that's what they are, is this. They're mostly distressed female teenagers with ADHD, some of whom are Tomboys, who are pushed in this direction or find temporary refuge in the identifier. Totally lacking a community, with parents who are about as firm as milk toast and who have no existential concept of anything, they head that way and then are pushed that way.5
In a society grounded in nature, let alone the existential, they'd get real support from their families, which would like be sports, the outdoors, and a community with external standards. Instead, they get "support" which amounts to pushing them into mutilation.
The big root in this is the lack of a community, combined with an exposure to the perverse early on. Girls this age don't want to be pushed into sex, let alone pushed into sex, which up until very recently was regarded as extremely weird. Now they are. They're pushing back and away. Getting away is the real desire. Given enough time, and support, to realize that they don't have to yield to whatever weird conduct Reddit is boosting at the moment, or appearing on the cover of "teen" magazines, and they'd be okay. Moreover, being somebody like Hein, whose Twitter photo is a baby rabbit sitting on a large caliber handgun, doesn't mean you have interest which mean you have to be a closet male.
Polish mountain climber Wanda Rutkiewicz, Tomboy extraordinaire, difficult personality, married woman, and a real woman. Polish Olympian Maria Magdalena Andrejczyk provides another, very contemporary, example.
The Confused Young Men
Some of what we noted above applies to men as well, but I suspect that we have more often is a cry for attention, or the Laying Flat culture, or both, at work.
While it's not popular in any fashion to say it (although it is being said), it's always been hard to be a man. This is not to say that it's been easy to be a woman, but frankly the burdens of life have traditionally fallen on men and women quite differently. The historical burden on women is indeed tied to their biology, bearing children is dangerous, or at least was up into the 20th Century, and hard on the body. And up until the Government stepped in to be the husband of women who cared not to marry the father's of their children, having even one child tied a man to the father if she kept the child permanently as there was no other economic option for the most part. People have tended to therefore look back and be wistful on the "patrimony".
Truth be known, however, male roles in societies have been blisteringly simple traditionally, if not always easy. Men were expected to take a societally defense role, with their first obligations being to protect their families first, protect women and children in general secondly, and protect their nation last. On that last one, you can put in tribe if you are thinking of a more aboriginal society.
Men were also expected to "provide" for their families. When I was young, it was still the case that people would excuse some other real or imagined failure of a man by stating "he's a good provider". This had all sorts of meanings in context. In one hand, a man might have some real moral failings, perhaps he hit the bars a lot, or perhaps he dallied with other women, but if he made a good income and brought it principally home to his family, that was regarded as excusing a lot of other conduct.
Conversely, it was also used in the instances in which a man might otherwise be regarded as boring, plain looking, or not an otherwise romantically attractive person. "He's a good provider" would be regarded as excusing those failings on one hand, or be used as a basis for suggesting to an unmarried woman why somebody should be regarded as a prospect for marriage.6
This goes back to the dawn of the species and reflects the original genetic dimorphism, physically and psychologically, that our species exhibits. In modern industrial times it reflected itself in a number of interesting ways that directly made, if you will, men's life "hard".
Men working themselves to death wasn't really regarded as abnormal and in certain societies with thin resources, such as Finland, men died much earlier than women did. Men in general still generally die younger than women for that matter. And dangerous work was a male role, including not only industrial work, but the most dangerous work of all, war. Indeed, in spite of feminism and a general societal effort to suppress this, this is still largely true.
Much less true, however, is how society reflected this.
Men were expected to respect women in a much more formal manner than they do now, where this is very much no longer the case. They were expected to defend them, even in a situation in which they really didn't know them. They were expected at some point to plan to make a living which "would support a family", or if they didn't feel up to that, and not all did by any means, to drop out of the family raising role for some other societally acceptable one. They were expected to support families if they had one, including marrying a woman if they got her pregnant and were not married. And they were expected to bare arms if need be.
A good example of this in the early 20th Century is interestingly the Titanic. A monument in Washington D.C. introduces to us the reason why on its front and back inscriptions:
TO THE BRAVE MEN WHO PERISHED IN THE TITANIC
APRIL 15 1912
THEY GAVE THEIR
LIVES THAT WOMEN
AND CHILDREN
MIGHT BE SAVED
ERECTED BY THE
WOMEN OF AMERICA
Back:
TO THE YOUNG AND THE OLD
THE RICH AND THE POOR
THE IGNORANT AND THE LEARNED
ALL
WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES NOBLY
TO SAVE WOMEN AND CHILDREN
The men on the Titanic, rich and poor, stepped aside so that women and children would live. This was the traditional expectation, and they fully fulfilled it, stupid modern movies notwithstanding.
The reward, so to speak, for the role was in part simply genetic. Husky's, the dog, are happy pulling sleds, which coyotes would not be. Much of this just worked the same way. Additionally, however, male life tended to result in male societies, formally and informally, going all the way back to tribal society. Membership in them was part of being male, and amazingly universal.7 Indeed, it started off in childhood, with the first "band of brothers" usually being a "band of boys", and later some formal organization, like the Cub Scouts.
Now all of this is shattered. A society that confused equality of the sexes, which existed much more than imagined prior to feminism, but which has been confused by the failure to understand how technology impacted that, with samism, has created a societal requirement that, save for professional sports, the physical differences between women and men are not to be mentioned. Men have become shy about defending women the way they once did, least they receive a rebuke. Well-intentioned government subsidies combined with the society wide adoption of the "Playboy Ethic" has blinded society to the physical and psychological impacts of sex so that not only are men not really expected to take care of any children they cause, or the women who bare them, but they're actually expected to put out irrespective of the consequences. This is so much the case that in a fairly recent notorious event in which somebody was unjustly killed, the press was full of his being a "good father", which in real terms simply meant that he'd fathered a lot of children, and not all by the same woman. Not that he was acting as a parent.
Added to that, the traditional role of "defense" has seen female intrusion as something that must be accepted, although in reality it hasn't gone that far at the armati homines level.
Male societies now are completely verboten. You can't do that. The Boy Scouts must admit girls, and is the Scouts. Men, basically, have no larger societal refuge from their male lives.
And the point of those lives is now warped. The "get a good job" pressure is still there, but point is missing. Getting a good job is supposed to occur, so you can buy toys. In the WASP end of things, many of the upper middle class WASPs avoid children entirely. Ultimately procreation, a reality of earlier years, is just regarded as recreation, and therefore the object of it on the giving and receiving end easily disposed of.
If young teenage women, on the cusp of becoming young women, have been freighted by the Reddit/Internet portrayal of their expectation that they serve as harem concubines for men in general, and have opted out through transgenderism, young men, a little past their early teen years, and perhaps fully past them but still in their very young 20s, have looked at this in some instances and looked for the door out.
In the past, as noted, there was an outdoor, even before much of this became so perverse. In rural societies, bachelor farmers, who often weren't terribly good farmers, were a pretty common and accepted thing. Farming, and ranching, was good honorable work, and not getting married as part of that was more common than a person might suppose.
The unmarried industrial worker was also surprisingly common. A sort of portrayal of this, combined with one man's desire to get married, is shown in the movie Marty. Enlisted men in the Army, with the exception of senior NCO's, sometimes, tended to be unmarried. Indeed, junior officers were usually unmarried, and in some militaries, such as the British Army and, while a bad example, the Imperial Russian Army, marriage was highly frowned upon. Moreover, certain male occupations tended to fall towards unmarried men by default, and some, such as the Catholic priesthood, required it. Just as male society tended to accept the mentally off a bit into it's ranks in the larger group, it accepted unmarried men into it as well.9
With the rise of the societal acceptance of homosexuality as ostensibly normal, this dynamic completely changed. While there have always been people with same sex attraction, unmarried men were not assumed to be "gay", they were assumed to be unmarried. Homosexual men did fall into the categories mentioned, as the wealth in society started to rise mid 20th Century and certain low paying occupations became increasingly societally unacceptable to obviously intelligent men, this increased. But the postwar economic boom, the Playboy culture onset, the Sexual Revolution, and Feminism completely destroyed what had been.
At some point, by the late 1980s, society would no longer let men who wanted to basically drop out of things, for whatever reason, do it. A couple of decades prior society accepted that a guy could take an industrial job, for instance, and work it his entire life as a single man, with a single dwelling, and not be homosexual. By the late 80s, no longer. And no longer was such a person really even allowed to peaceably dwell in that condition, but an absolute need for sex of some sort was presumed. Such people were presumed to be homosexual and if they were younger, relationships they might not really want were forced on them. The Friends and Big Bang Culture had arrived.
At the same time, the rise of the Me Generation meant that money for individual hedonistic purposes was now the point of being. You needed a "career" so you could live well, even if living well really meant that everything was for entertainment, including other people.
How do you get out of that?
Well, "transitioning" will work.
Based at least on some observation, young men just getting ignored in their plight, with parents who aren't going to provide any guide rails, is a big factor in this. They aren't really seeking to change genders, they're trying, ironically enough, to get back to the 1950s.
How does this end?
I'm usually pretty cautions about quoting Rod Dreher. I like some of his stuff, and not so much others. Be that as it may, he's spot on here:
There will be no justice until every damn doctor, hospital, and medical association responsible for this atrocity has been sued into the ground, and some of them imprisoned. Forgiveness? Yes, in time (though that's easy for me to say, as I have not suffered what this father has suffered) -- but only after full lustration, only after Nuremberg-like tribunals, only after the trials, only after utter and complete shame shattering all the luminaries and the institutions -- including the Democratic Party, the TV networks, the major newspapers -- which brought this evil onto the lives of American children and their families.
Those who did this to young women like her -- people like Dr. Gallagher above, who revels on social media in her success in slicing the healthy breasts off of women -- God willing, they will pay within the limits of the law for what they have done. As evil as the Tuskegee Experiment was, this is even more damaging, because it has created, and is creating daily, thousands of more victims.
He's exactly right.
Indeed, it's already happening. Chloe Cole has filed suit. My prediction is that if she doesn't win, somebody soon after her will. And like the Opioid lawsuits that are now so common, they'll drive this out of the societal field by litigation force and judgements. In the meantime, the same society that was just lately pushing pills will be "oh my, oh my, how could this terrible of thing have happened.
But that won't solve the larger problem.
Their end is destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their “shame.” Their minds are occupied with earthly things.
Philippians; 3:19.
This pretty much defines where we are, even though's worshiping their stomachs and glorifying in their shame don't recognize it. That has to change, and changing that is a tall order.
Because in order to do that, the lens, in society has to be turned back to me, towards the whole, and the existential.
Footnotes:
1. I really haven't tracked the library debate much and have discounted it, but Cole's posting makes it plain how far things are gone. The book clearly illustrates the author's descent into homosexual conduct and is frankly pornographic. It shouldn't be in a school library, and it does amount, intentionally or not, to transgender propaganda.
At no point prior to our current era would there even been a debate on whether a book which graphically depicts sexual acts, let alone homosexual acts, should be available to be checked out of a public school library. The fact that there is such debate now is a sign of how far gone things really are, and additionally how entrenched certain interests are that not only want to defend their contra natural lifestyle, but actually promote it.
2. To state this bluntly, what people feared about the Obergefel decision has not only come to pass, but it's surpassed those fears.
This should not have surprised anyone. Many years ago the homosexual book After the Ball, according to those who have read it, and I have not, not only argued for the normalization of homosexuality, but apparently for the dismantling of marriage and the traditional and long-established incidents of male/female relationships. Presently, not only are those campaigning for the normalization of transgenderism, but campaigning for it, which is accompanied by foisting medial "treatments" upon the very young, and the accompanying large-scale transfers of cash that entails.
This has happened before with other industries. Think, for example, this:
3. Shepherd noted in one of his books how the men in the Indiana city in which he grew up all subscribed to Field & Stream, even though they largely were not outdoorsmen. It was a retained desire.
4. One of the odder examples of this, very widespread, is the change in our relationship with animals.
Our species is one of those which has a symbiotic relationship with other ones. We like to think that this is unique to us, but it isn't. Many other examples of exist of birds, mammals and even fish that live in very close relationships with other species. When this occurred with us, we do not know, but we do know that its ancient. Dogs and modern wolves both evolved from a preexisting wolf species starting some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to the best evidence we currently have. That likely means it was longer ago than that.
Cats, in contrast, self domesticated some 7,000 or so years ago, according to our best estimates.
Cat eating a shellfish, depiction from an Egyptian tomb.
We have a proclivity for both domesticating animals, and accepting self domestication of animals, the truth being that such events are likely part and parcel of each other. Dogs descend from some opportunistic wolves that started hanging around us as we killed things they liked to eat. Cats from wildcats that came on as we're dirty. Both evolved thereafter in ways we like, becoming companions as well as servants. But not just them, horses, pigs, sheep, cattle. . .the list is long.
As we've moved from the natural to the unnatural, we've forgotten that all domestic animals, no matter how cute and cuddly they are, are animals and were originally our servants. And as real children have become less common in WASP culture, the natural instinct to have an infant to take care of, or even adore, has transferred itself upon these unwilling subjects, making them "fur babies".
It's interesting in this context to watch the difference between people who really work with animals, and those who do not. Just recently, for example, our four-year-old nephew stayed the night due to the snow, and was baffled why our hunting dog, who is a type of working dog but very much a companion, stayed the night indoors. The ranch dogs do not. . . ever. The ranch cats, friendly though they are, don't either.
5. Both Hein and Cole have been reluctant to criticize their parents, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be criticized. These strong daughters honor their parents by providing the backbone that their parents completely lacked.
Having said that, this illustrates the point I noted above. These young women are roughly in their early 20s, which means they were born either in this century, or the tail end of the last one. This means that their parents were likely born in the 70s or 80s, to parents who had come up in during the 60s. So in effect they are the grandchildren of Boomers whose children were often raised with the ethos of the 60s and 70s, which combined would be there are no standards and your goal is to make money. Additionally, their parents came up during the GOP's gutting of science funding in schools. So they were born to parents whose grasp of the physical and metaphysical is weak, and whose principal world view is that it's nice to be nice to the nice.
6. While citing to fiction is always dangerous, an interesting example of this are well depicted in the fiction of Jane Austen. Not really intended for wide circulation, and limited to the concerns of her class, they nonetheless demonstrate the basic nature of male and female relationships across the ages, which is why they remain incredibly popular, particularly amongst young women who tend to see themselves in the characters.
A feature of this is the "provider" aspect. Tending to focus on families made up of women, the unmarried women are the concerns of their parents and concerned themselves. Finding a suitable match, to so speak, dominates the novels, with tension between that and romantic love. An example in Pride and Prejudice, her best novel, is found in the character of Charlotte Lucas, the protagonist close friend, who opts to marry the Episcopal Churchman, William Collins, who is the epitome of boorish and overbearing, as she's 27 and has no other prospects, and his position is secure.
7. An example of this given that at some point, it must have been in the 1950s and perhaps early 60s, my father was a member of the Knights of Columbus.
Now, my father was not a joiner by any means, but in the 50s and 60s a man would almost by default be a member of some organizations. He was the President one year of his profession's statewide professional association, which means that he had been active in it. And based on some recollections he related to me over the years, he'd been a member of the Knights when the Knights still had a downtown clubhouse. So had two of my uncles, at least. Maybe, and probably, all four of them were.
The Knights were a much different organization then, at least locally, than now. Now I know that they act as a mutual benefit society, as I am sure they did then, and I note them most frequently for having pancake breakfasts at one of the parish churches every Sunday after the early morning Mass. They may have done that then as well, but the big difference is that their clubhouse, like most men's clubs of the day, had a bar, and it could get a little rowdy. The long serving Parish Priest of the era stopped in every night at closing time to make sure that they were actually closing, and their St. Patrick's Day parties were legendary.
Be that as it may, it's almost impossible to imagine my father in that setting. Probably after he married, or at least after I was born, he chose not to be, which was in keeping with his character. Still, it's interesting that you pretty much had to be a member of some social club, probably male only, if you were a man prior to the 1970s.
I've never been a member of anything like that, really, although when I was first practicing law the county bar association was amazingly active and often met one evening, right after work, in a bar, ostensibly to present a CLE. My enduring memory of one of those meetings was getting there in time, but just in time, and having to squeeze into the back row of table seating, only to have one notoriously rude female lawyer saying something like "so you think you can get around my fat ass?"
She later was subject to a scandal when her husband turned her over to the authorities for molesting him when he was a minor.
9. This is reflected back to us by the culture of earlier eras in some odd ways.
For instance, in cartoons, an unmarried male character was really common. Gasoline Alley's central protagonist was, at first, unmarried, with this changing as female readership was low.
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