As IF Times

link  Is pornography driving men crazy? – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.

Boy, this is good party chit chat.  Naomi Wolf is a self styled ‘third wave feminist’, whatever that means, who has written a number of books on the state of women.   So expert is Wolf on women that she was a paid consultant to Bill Clinton and Al Gore on how to get their votes during their respective campaigns.  In the rareified air of the New York intelligentsia, her utterances are met with rapturous acceptance by the limosine liberal set who think that anything offered in pretentious english must be sage prose.   Here is her descripton of beauty as taken from her famous book, The Beauty Myth:

“…”beauty” as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the goal of reproducing its own hegemony…”

??  Who speaks in such babble? Anyway, her point is that society (which means men ) dictates what is attractive when it comes to women, a condition she finds abhorrent.  Interestingly enough, in another commentary on the attire required of women in middle eastern countries, she says:

“…The West interprets veiling as repression of women and suppression of their sexuality. But when I traveled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women-only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women’s appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one’s husband. It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channeling – toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home…”

Only liberals can fail to see the comic contradictions in these two opinions, from the same person.  In Western societies, women are free to dress any way they wish, anywhere they want.   Despite Wolf’s contention that the manner of dress reflects men’s oppression, the only oppression stems from the fact that women’s fashions are predominantly a reflection of the tastes of gay men. Very few straight men have much control over the vagaries of women’s fashions.  In the case of Middle Eastern women, appropriate channelling or not, their attire is exclusively dictated by that patriarchal society.  In fact, this is exactly the circumstance described in her Beauty Myth.  Somehow, in the middle east, this is noble.

What does this have to do with the proliferation of pornography?  Only that men are men and most men like women.  The implication from her article is that men in the west have become more dysfunctional in the wake of unfettered access to porno.  I suppose that this same argument can be applied to dope smoking, but I digress.  What I can say with confidence is that if men in the middle east were provided access to the unfettered supply of porno that’s available in the West, they’d be just as dysfunctional.   Maybe it’s just me, but to mandate that the women in your society be enshrouded completely from head to toe in the latest burlap chic already seems just a bit dysfunctional.   It’s a very tenuous link to ascribe rampant pornography to bad behaviour of men.  In the west at least,  both men and women are free to decide what’s attractive.  In middle eastern societies, that choice is not afforded to women.  It’s a laughable stretch to say that men are more ‘functional’ there.  If we are going to draw tenuous links, I suggest that men  in the west are more likely driven to strange behaviour by being exposed to images of women such as Rosie O’Donnell or Joy Behar.

News for Wolf, men like women; and they like them in all shapes and sizes.  They’re funny that way.  Society has little to do with it.  They’ve been behaving badly long before the explosion of accessible pornography.  She may get more traction for her argument in a society that wraps up their women like aliens in garbage bags.

link Liberal Frankensteins – Victor Davis Hanson – National Review Online.

In my opinion, one of the best, succinct summaries of the malaise that affects free societies in our time.  Hanson points out the various big fibs and spurious policies that have been circulating since the end of World War 2.  Wrong headed policies that were pursued with the ‘best of intentions’ have grotesquely morphed into the cancer like manifestations of liberal thought threatening the very survival of free society today.  Unlike Al Gore’s version of how it’s all going to end, this article clearly illustrates the various prongs of stupidity that are surely pointing to the demise of free people.

At the root is the hijacking of the education system, which has veered sharply away from teachings of core values and absolute results to political brainwashing and elusive conclusions and questionable sensitivities.  This is one of the best lines from the article:

“…Modern university education has achieved the dubious result of turning out a self-described sensitive, caring mind that has never been more ignorant of the past and the present…”

While there are certainly voices that point out the insanity of what’s happened, they are vastly outnumbered by the endless cacophony of the delusional left.  Life so closely parallels George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that you can use the book as a roadmap for a glimpse of Christmases future.  It’s as if the people who gained the most from social and economic policies of the past 50 years are the people most likely to pursue policies that are the exact opposite of what brought success to them.  Paradoxically, the more obvious the failures of these policies are, the more ardently they are pursued and defended.  Unfortunately, those that make the most noise tend to get the most attention, regardless of how inane their viewpoints.   This is expected to appeal to young people, since their minds are susceptible to information of all kinds and they have yet to measure what’s told to them against the realities of genuine experience.  But how then to explain the ongoing ignorance of the older generation, those who should have passed the naive phase of their lives towards a more reasoned view of how things work?  Somehow, many in this group of aging hippies have never grown up.  There are many that have been allowed to live their lives in an extended adolescence.

As I have opined previously, there must be a self destruct gene that takes hold once a certain level of affluence is achieved.  If so, that’s sad.  It’s doubly sad when these people achieve positions of power and are then able to take others down with them.  They then bring their dubious logic and naive sentiments to impact public policy.  They somehow work their way to become political leaders and teachers or even worse, get a job on MSNBC.  The fact is, big political and social issues are not that interesting to young people.  Most are more consumed about their next Iphone than the next President.  For many, there is no direct link between what happens to them and what is happening on the big world stage.  They don’t have to worry about the big picture because things have always been benign for them.  It will be a severe shock when the adults stop paying the bills.