Book Review: First Touch

Title: First Touch

Author: Teyla Rachel Branton

Date: 2017

Publisher: White Star

ISBN: 978-1-939203-99-1 

Quote: "I'm not psychic. I only read imprints."

Autumn Rain, whose late father changed his name from Douglas to Winter when he married Summer, sees vivid moving pictures of the memories other people have left on things they've touched. In this novel, a police detective enlists her in the search for a serial murderer. 

This is not a pleasant story to read but, for somebody Out There, it may address post-traumatic stress. I hope so. I didn't enjoy it because it's far too well written for its subject material. If you are at a point in therapy where you want to think and talk about the details of how someone goes about torturing and killing children, this book is for you. It's intense. Your therapist should probably agree to talk to you at any time you feel a need during the week or so after reading.

There is, by now, a series. Autumn travels with the detective, pointing out the site where her psychic imprints tell her crimes occurred, and they bond by cornering criminals together. They have a slow-burn romance--slow because their involvement with horrific crimes distracts them from wanting to start new relationships. This series was published with the name "Teyla Branton" on the cover, and there's another series of more readable fiction published with the name "Rachel Branton."

I tagged this one "Women's Issues" because hatecrime against women and their children seems to be the most urgent "issue" of concern to women these days.

Bad Poetry: Ella Cook, 19, Shot on a Gun-Free Campus

"Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov — two students whose lives were taken by g*n violence at Brown University" (Facebook report)

Zuckerberg's Sucker got it right. The problem was goon violence...

Young Ella Cook of Mountain Brook,

the pride of Birmingham,

went to Brown University

as meek as any lamb,

the only weapons at her side

her family's respect,

and faith that God would be her guide

her honor to protect.

Into a clutter of huddled buildings

right at the campus's gun-free core

slithered a man, a forbidden firearm,

a brain that saw the whole world as war.

Where Ella and a dozen classmates

gathered just to cram

their brains with facts the night before

the end-of-term exam,

the good and bright and young and green

from all the world around,

standing unarmed by open windows

the killer easily found.

A bang! and a clink! and the window shattered.

The students didn't even know to drop.

They'd been taught that everyone knew they mattered.

The murderer fired and did not stop.

What Northerner had the fortitude

to guard these innocent ones?

What Northerner had the common sense

to know we can't just ban guns?

Nobody stopped him! He fired again!

Like plastic bottles, down

the children went on the bloody floor.

He giggled like a clown.

Down on the floor Ella Cook lay dying.

Did she look out to the evening star,

thoughts to the Star of Bethlehem flying?

Did she remember her home so far?

At last the murderer felt potent

as he'd felt long ago

and in the gloaming's gloom he danced

a step in the scanty snow,

and shouted a blasphemy against

the Name of the Merciful One,

and ran off rejoicing in the evil

he that day had done.

Miles away, then, a man self-murdered.

Was he the slayer of Ella Cook?

Nearer, a man disappeared more quietly

from university registry book.

Young Ella put faith in the hearts of men,

and for that faith she died.

No one ever told her she could defend

others from men's rage and pride.

Not taught to carry or use a weapon

she died like a silly sheep.

All the flags in Alabama fly low

and all the mothers weep.

Meet the Blogroll: Adios Barbie

Adios Barbie was the name of a book about pop culture's ideas of beauty. Then it was the name of a website featuring articles on that topic. 

In the past articles posted at AdiosBarbie.com showed up in my blog feed. In recent years, format changes have caused these articles not to show up in the blog feed. The site is now formatted to feed into e-mail. Don't bother adding this site to your blog feed if you want to follow it.

Anyway, this site invites first-person articles from lots of different women on the general theme of how we relate to pop culture's ideas of beauty. The quality of these articles naturally varies. I've liked some of them, not liked others. Generally I agree with the overall idea that we should try to keep our bodies healthy and let that optimize our looks, rather than worrying too much about who likes our look or prefers a different look.

How far should advertisers go in the direction of celebrating good health and self-esteem, rather than always looking for models who look like the images that were in the news recently--Sydney Sweeney, Candace Owens, et al.? Ideology isn't always helpful. What we see in a picture does not always communicate itself to less informed eyes. 

In the 1990s when hand-knitted sweaters were the height of fashion, I put together a portfolio of satisfied customers modelling things I'd knitted. It showed the diversity of age, size, gender, and color that is found among my close friends and relatives. They were all pretty or handsome in different ways. And then there was a cousin who was in her forties at the time. Her sister had been in some of my classes at school. Both of them had beautiful faces. I thought of them in biblical terms, a Rachel-type and a Leah-type. "Leah" (not to be confused with a younger relative whose actual real-world name was Leah) was more interesting, at the time; Rachel had gone into baby-making mode. Leah had cerebral palsy. She wore thick corrective glasses, and her face had a habit of twitching into alarming grimaces that made no emotional sense. I was used to Leah, liked her, and thought her photo modelling her hand-knitted sweater was excellent; it showed one of her versions of a smile. But nobody else ever came to that picture and said, intelligently, "Oh, that's a satisfied customer who has cerebral palsy." They said, "Oh, my." They said, "Oh, dear."

I thought any intelligent person ought to be able to accept Leah not only as a model but as a friend, a hostess, a church lady, a writer, a teacher...but a lot of people who knew our parents, and us, never really were. They said they couldn't afford to make more buildings more wheelchair-friendly. They didn't say that they also didn't know what to say or do, and felt panicky, in the presence of an intelligent person whose facial expressions and tone of voice really were "crazy." And I could hardly say while Leah was living, "Look, I'm phobic about people who have autism or dementia or schizophrenia too. The fact that I like this woman ought to tell you that all she has is cerebral palsy. Relax! Include her! On an equal basis, except of course when someone needs to help load the wheelchair in and out of cars." 

I didn't want to take Leah's photo out of my portfolio...but when I got a good-quality photo of my boyfriend doing a lot for his hand-knitted sweater, I did. The portfolio looked more effective all right, one conventionally attractive smile after another, no smiles distorted by spastic facial muscles. Urk.

That's the sort of thing people lament at AdiosBarbie.com. If you want to stretch your consciousness of how other people cope with social life as an unannounced beauty contest, that site may help. If you think that that kind of stories have served their purpose and people really need to be reminded that there's nothing wrong with looking like, or looking at, Sydney Sweeney...well, that's where your head's at. Cheers. I think there are too many stories on the theme of "Why don't more people celebrate how healthy and pretty I feel about being only 40 pounds overweight, when I used to be 140 pounds overweight," myself. Then I note that thought as an indication that I need more reminders about this particular kind of eye-judgment.

Charlie Kirk's Daughter and Conservative Messaging

We interrupt the Blog Roll series to bring you this post. This post outgrew a potential Link Log, but it began with a reaction to a link:

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2025/09/16/comedienne-kirk-shouldve-lived-to-see-kid-be-lesbian-witch-n4943758

What the trying-to-be-a-comedienne is quoted saying here is free speech, however poorly timed. It's even a healthy, positive statement of her political beliefs, misguided as those are. And it raises a concern for "conservatives" (even for Erika Kirk) who want to carry on Charlie Kirk's mission in life.

What, exactly, are we trying to conserve? 

I know what I'm trying to conserve. A short list of things I want to conserve in US public life looks like:

* Freedom of movement, for everybody

* Freedom of speech, for everybody

* Freedom of the press, including the Internet, for everybody

* Freedom of association, for everybody

* Right to work, for everybody

* Right to privacy, for everybody

* Rule of law--natural laws that people intuitively understand and know how to follow

* Strict limits on government support for human-made regulations that are changeable and complicated enough that people are probably violating a few of them and don't know it

* No government budget for ongoing employment in jobs that could be done by private contractors

* Enforcement of individuals' rights to property, including earned wages

A short list of things that used to exist in US public life, that I do NOT want to conserve, looks like this:

* Discriminatory policies, especially against women

* Over-regulation that will always amount to injustice against somebody or other

* Government budgets that aren't gone over closely and thoroughly, by everyone who has the time

* Social pressure against personal choices that don't harm others

* Unwanted pregnancies

* Homelessness caused by inflated "property values"

* Epidemics caused by crowded living conditions, polluted water, etc.

* Epidemics caused by chemical pollution, and tolerance for corporate failure to show responsibility for same

* Mandates on matters of personal choice that don't clearly and directly harm others, including vaccination, school attendance, insurance, use of banks or credit cards, use of property, etc.

* Participation in the mental illness of those who think they have been anointed to make personal decisions for others

Some of Charlie Kirk's published speeches, which have been recirculated so incessantly this week, seem to verge on at least three of those bad things--discrimination against women, social pressure against personal choices, and unwanted pregnancies. 

I don't think there's any real excuse for pretending that even the feminist movement of the 1970s limited women to conformity to one of two stereotypes: the "Happy" Housewife who had no job skills and no reason to live after the last baby doctors extracted from her worn-out body went to school, or the grim and probably mannish corporate wage slave who had no family and no reason to live after the value of her work rose above what the company wanted to pay. I was there. I remember. It was about choices other than either of those, both of which impressed most of us as being fairly horrible. 

Feminism is simply the belief that women are of equal value with men. There are different "schools of" feminist thought. There were "conservative" feminists who thought full-time mothers ought to be paid, though that line of thought didn't get far due to a consensus that what full-time mothers do is priceless. There were Republican feminists who thought that, as long as the average woman was content to do part-time pink-collar jobs, the average woman's earning lower wages than the average man of similar age and education was not a problem. There are Muslim feminists, like Fatima Mernissi, who think it's liberating for women to have separate schools and hospitals and conceal themselves from most men. In the modern world, believing that women are of at least equal value with men is supported by objective facts, so "feminism" is synonymous with sane perception of one aspect of consensus reality, and does not obligate all feminists to agree on their priorities or even on their specific goals. We don't.

Abortion became identified as a "feminist issue" or a "woman's right" because it was supported by irresponsible men. What women counselling women who are considering abortion report is that abortion is a "choice" usually urged on women by irresponsible men--husbands who don't think they can afford the child, or other people's cheating husbands who don't want their wives to see a "honey" with a child who might look like them. Because Gloria Steinem tried to appease her own guilty conscience by presenting abortion as a "choice" swinging chicks of the 1960s were happy about making--which obviously wasn't altogether true, even for her--I've known people who assumed that any independent woman supported abortion and, if she'd travelled or if she'd gained and lost weight, she'd probably had one. 

There are actually local lurkers who've heard quite detailed versions of this slanderous story, whether they've heard and apparently believed that the fetus I supposedly aborted was the product of interracial sex or of incest. If I weren't a feminist I could be deeply hurt by such stories. As things are I laugh at them, because they are ridiculous. The fact is that I was a baby-faced, preposterously sheltered, teenaged princess during the very few years when I might have been able to conceive a baby if I'd worked at it. Around the time I was old enough to vote, I developed polycystic ovarian syndrome. Some people may care enough to pay for an autopsy when I'm dead to prove this, for all I know. I've never had any reason to worry about what to do with a baby. I've never wanted to bring more celiacs into the world, but, even with the celiac gene, I don't believe in wasting babies. But that's my belief, based in the confidence that if I'd had a baby I didn't feel able to keep I could have made decent arrangements for it (not everyone can) and recovered from the horrors of being pregnant while celiac (not every body can do that, either). I don't judge women who've thought they needed abortion. I, personally, never have had any reason to think about it.

The choice responsible, intelligent women make is not to be pregnant unless, and until, they want babies. This is definitely one reason why such women choose late marriage or no marriage at all. If we might have thought we liked men enough to marry them, and then after the engagement was announced and private pleasure was being shared a man started whining "But I want to 'go all the way'," the engagement was over. Making babies is "better" than merely making pleasure if, and because, and insofar as, it celebrates a commitment to be together rearing a child for twenty years. Otherwise, in the deplorable slang my generation used, third base is home. End of discussion.

Should people wait for marriage to have babies? Absolutely. Should they wait for marriage to experience carnal pleasure? Well...if they happen to be HSP, even if that were ideal, it's not going to be possible, but this web site's contract wouldn't let me go there if I wanted to.

Anyway, now that it's been made clear to the young that "feminist" does not mean "person who thinks she should be paying taxes so that irresponsible men can bully the idjits who rut with them into having abortions," let's consider the more serious question of what young women should plan to do with their lives. 

 

There's an assumption, from times when the human-friendly parts of the world were less crowded, that most young people want babies. The good news, considering the conditions in which so many young people live, is that this seems not to be true. There are simply too many people on this planet at this time. We don't need to become extinct but we need negative population growth. 

Both of the major political parties are in denial about a fact that ought to have been obvious on the day a movement for homosexuals' rights came to exist. I don't think homosexuals deserve blame for this, any more than people with cancer deserve blame for the cigarette industry, but the fact that enough people are homosexual to generate a movement is an indicator that people are badly overcrowded. That might be true for only a few households, or schools, or at least cities--but the fact that it's true for most cities these days, and that people living in the habitable rural areas don't want to build more or bigger cities where they are, tells us: too many humans. We don't need to start paying to increase the rate of suicide, for Heaven's sake. All we really need is to support young people's righteous choice to have one child or none. That means the existing population level will not continue to replace itself. There will be fewer, healthier, happier humans in a cleaner, safer world, after we're gone, and I personally am all for that.

"But I want babies, plural. I want a house full," some people still say. Cheers to them--that probably means they've been living in healthier conditions where their hormones are still telling them they can afford a house full. Their hormones are wrong. Hormones are not well informed. But they can indulge their hormones by choosing to produce one child of their own and adopt some more. There's no shortage of homeless babies to choose from. I personally would rather make a mutual choice to keep an adoptable foster child who chose to stay with me, but some people think they have to have a "White Newborn," or maybe some other variety of infant. There are enough homeless children that couples with reasonable incomes can make that decision for themselves.

"But, but," both major parties sputter. Shortsighted Democrats think we can pack in more immigrants as second-class citizens who will pay more to support our Social Security "retirement" than they'll get out of it. Shortsighted Republicans think we can wall out immigrants and just breed more babies who will look like us. Both parties want, for selfish and venal reasons, to deny the fact that we can't afford to do either without inflicting chaos and anarchy and probably cannibalism on the next generation. Many people in both parties can afford to want this, in a biological sense at least, because they won't live to see what either of their disastrous policies will do to their children. I'm not too old to anticipate that I may have to share the consequences of whatever we do to The Nephews' generation, so I cannot afford, even in the biological sense, to support either shortsighted Ds or shortsighted Rs. Neither can anyone who is still in the fertile part of a human lifetime. 

"Conservatives" are gaining political momentum from life's having handed them, us, two fine-looking poster children this summer. Respect for the lives of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska demands that people not waste that momentum. And it will be wasted if Rs are allowed to twist "conservative" rhetoric away from freedom of speech, which is still sustainable, into a message about making more babies at a time when that's not sustainable. 

"So what are young women to do with their lives if they marry late and have only one baby?" Well, I married late and had no babies at all, and I remember my young adult years as highly satisfactory. I was one of those girls who consider only fluffy "humanities" majors in college (in addition to English and psychology I considered "library science," education, music, religion, and radio broadcasting) and then didn't even finish a degree. If I hadn't had that wretched vaccine I would probably have finished a degree but it would not have been for a job that's still paying top salaries today. Y'know what, I don't think I would have minded that. Very likely I would have had my own business in Washington and married a nice well-off diplomat, around age thirty or thirty-five, just the same. And two or three years studying the subjects college girls enjoy didn't do me any harm. It did qualify me to be a Washingtonienne and find a nice well-off diplomat. The main difference not having been in the Michigan Group of survivors of "chronic" mononucleosis might have made is that I might have remained fertile and thus attracted a younger diplomat, also fertile, and had babies. I can't say that dilettante-ing around in fashionable circles, travelling, reading and writing, helping rear and educate my sisters, and then being happily married until cancer did us part, was anything I wouldn't recommend to young women today. Quite the contrary, thank you very much.

But I think women should, absolutely, expect to have "careers." Marriage and children are optional. Life hands those to some of us, not to others. What we all have to plan on doing is earning a living. 

It's not really fair to say, as Charlie Kirk infamously said, that when young men (on average, as a survey group) rated family life ahead of professional success and young women (ditto) rated professional success ahead of family life, that means that young women are "choosing childlessness and loneliness." For one thing, what people want most is what they don't already have. Large numbers of young men are already earning good money, if only on construction jobs, while young women are more likely to be earning "entry-level wages" and paying off college loans. And also, despite all the effort that's been put into bringing girls up to be fools for love, females are biologically programmed to be more cautious about when, where, and with what they reproduce. 

Men imagine they can, as Kirk happened to be able to do, take one look at a pretty girl with a good resume and decide they want to marry her. That's not a righteous act; in fact, although the Bible describes marriages where young men chose their own wives, following their eyeballs, it goes into considerable detail about the problems in those marriages. At best they became entangled with dysfunctional in-laws, like Jacob. At worst they were seduced by their enemies, or tools of their enemies, like Samson. Young men need no encouragement to imagine that they can count on having Charlie Kirk's extraordinary good luck. Michael Jordan and Bill Gates and everyone else who had extraordinary success at an early age had extraordinary good luck, as well as extraordinary talent. Their stories can be inspiring but they can't be depended on to predict outcomes for anyone else.

Women know that, if babies are going to be happy and healthy and a source of joy, they have to be born into a well feathered nest. Not all women seem to be able to control themselves well enough to sublimate their energy into preparing a comfortable home for any babies they may have, by birth or adoption, but that behavior is obviously to be encouraged.

The more conservative a woman is by temperament, the more her instincts will tell her to wait, be sure of a husband's adult character, provide a wholesome environment for children, and plan on a good long life after any children she rears are grown up and gone. "Professional foster mother," or adoptive mother, of one child after another is a valid career option but it's not for everyone. Most women do better in skilled professions and that's what they should prepare to do with most of their lives, even if they take time off to have a baby. 

As for marrying early...let's say, first of all, that there are a very small percentage of humankind for whom that works, and cheers for them. But we have to consider the majority.

I consider the majority of my acquaintances when we were very young adults...I won't go into all of my friends' stories, but I'll say a bit about myself and the boys I liked in college. I was young enough to have indiscriminate hormone reactions to a lot of different ones; I'll limit this consideration to three boys who were pretty close school friends, who seemed worth watching to see whether they became men I might want to marry.

There was the commitment-phobic. "Fun, and good-looking, when he's around," was a line I remember from a novel that's become cringe-inducing and deserves a decent burial, because it described the first boy I liked in college so well. We were friends who shared secrets, which included a physical attraction. Perfect--for school friends. Now, projecting into the future: He thought he wanted to major in education. It was the early eighties, so not everyone recognized...I have never met anyone who sounded more like the "gay young man" stereotype than he did. That stereotype was just an exaggerated, affected version of a Southern Preppy accent and manner, so at the time people could say "Well, he is Southern and he is preppy," but a few years later everyone would recognize a line, and he was across the line. If that boy had settled down and earned a teaching license, he would probably have become a teacher just in time to be fired, banned from teaching, and permanently embittered, on suspicion alone--though here I stand to testify that he liked women. Lots of different women, only he was honorable enough to admit it and not be overly intimate with one woman in particular. Wherever he is and whatever he's doing now, I hope he's still enjoying it as much as we all used to enjoy his presence among us in college, I'm sure he's happier than he would have been if he'd tried to marry one woman and settle down in one job. Especially teaching. Even as a dishwasher-and-garage-band-singer he would have done better than that.

Then there was the nice, sober, steady chap so many people thought was so much better for me than the commitment-phobic was. And he was another excellent school friend...until I'd dropped out of university and the busybodies in the church had decided I was no longer good enough for him. I don't know to what extent they were to blame for his being the one who "had to" marry a student on his first teaching job. All I know is that he became the topic of discussion about why the rule against teachers dating their students is not that all students are necessarily children, or even younger than teachers, but that teachers aren't supposed to be much closer to one student in a class than to the others. And he didn't get another teaching job, either. And, fifteen years later, when massage had become one of my odd jobs, my voice mail included a painfully familiar voice. He'd not been referred by any doctor--he was in pretty good condition, actually, just stressed--he was looking for someone who could understand the problems in his marriage--and by the way my recorded voice reminded him of someone he used to know! I'm not proud of this, but I played the message for my husband, shrieking with malicious glee, and then erased it. If I never see him again it'll probably be the best thing.

Then there was the cute boy at university. His student labor job was groundskeeping and he made sure the snow was cleared off the pavement I used, first. We grabbed quick lunches together enough times that, one day when we had time, we had a leisurely, chatty lunch, during which he asked whether I was from Scotland or Ireland. "Your accent, I mean, you speak so clearly." I'm from Virginia, I said. "But you seemed so nice!" Let's just say that it takes more than that kind of attitude to interest anyone in moving to Nova Scotia, which I probably wouldn't have done in any case.

And then...me. Readers don't need to know what a nineteen-year-old mess I used to be, though, rest assured, I was nineteen years old once just like everybody else. Probably messier than the boys were, if they're still alive, and read this, and my admitting to being a mess too makes them feel better. All that needs to be said is that after having the vaccine in order to stay at university, I became ill, dropped out of university anyway, and was asexual and unhealthy and jaundiced and absolutely no fun for anyone to be around for years. I next kept a job longer than three weeks, two full years after the jab. The ability to feel interested in men or sex returned, by fits and starts, starting about two more years after that. 

(In the Awesome Eighties the vaccine college kids were required to have was against measles, mumps, and rubella. It was a live-virus vaccine, subject to contamination. Due to political differences five groups of victims of contamination were counted. I think this was a mistake. I suspect the Michigan, Ontario, Quebec, and New York Groups had the same disease, and different doctors gave it different names. The Georgia Group had a different and more serious thing.)

Anyway, that's four people who clearly should not have married early, and thank goodness if three of us had the good fortune to marry late, skip the "first divorce," and have marriages worthy of the name. One poor booby married early and has evidently regretted it. 

This story needs to be told, because young people need not to be encouraged to be the poor booby. It's much easier to have one child or none if you wait until you're full-grown and debt-free (at least 25 years old) and, preferably, until you own a house with separate bedrooms for each child you may want to rear. It's also easier to be sure you're marrying a man or woman whose character can withstand the hardships of life. Little Ms. Promising and Mr. Possibility very often don't have even their good looks left by the time they're 25. 

And if "conservatives" apply pressure to young people to have those disastrous first marriages, and have surplus babies, just so we can "retire" on the earnings of miserable, oppressed, exploited young people who look like us...then those "conservatives" will indeed deserve to see their children become transgendered Marxists, which are further from salvation than the average Neo-Pagan "Witch." With shaved heads, cocaine noses, and satanic pentagrams dangling from their nose rings. Not because those things are new or fun or attractive, but because they represent rejection of "conservative" parents. By the time the next generation recover from that stage, if they do, those "conservatives" will be dead. And it'll serve'm right.

I get to say this because I'm 60. If you're under age 60, don't even quote me, lest anybody think you said it. I, personally, think able-bodied seniors should not "retire." I think we should give thanks if we're able to quit the 40-to-60-hour-a-week corporate-wage-slave jobs and spend our time doing work we enjoy. Con suerte we might even be able to do work that's not paid in money, being full-time grandparents or new unknown artists. But we should work, because when people don't have work to do they start to decompose. And we should continue to pay into the disability pension fund we need, and should keep. Automatic "retirement" at any age is unsustainable and unhealthy. We should abandon it as a failed idea. If we do, it should be easy to provide decent pensions for those who aren't able to do any kind of work--at whatever age they may be--until they either recover, or die, or get bored enough to find ways to work around their disabilities. Only seniors should talk or think about this. If you're a mere child of 50, forget I mentioned it. Read something else.

By accepting this tweak to the "conservative" ideal of family life, with extended families and entailed property and real communities where people know each other's names and all, I think even those who've always identified as "conservatives" can agree with those of us who actually like "liberal, as distinct from left-wing" better...and focus on the message, which is freedom of speech, and freedom of association, and all that. 

(Hmm...that'll do for an end line, but one more thought needs to be expressed...)

You may have been thinking all along, if you've read all along to this point, "What about freedom of religion?" I don't think that's a public issue. Nobody but you and God, as you understand God, can tell you what to believe or how to serve and worship. Nobody else ever really knows. Freedom of religion is truly unalienable. Freedom to talk about what you believe, in groups of people who believe something similar, is what we all need to be eternally vigilant to protect. We can afford to include those who don't like the name "God" as deserving freedom of speech and freedom of association.

Bad Poetry: Living with Parity

This was provoked by the Poets & Storytellers United prompt to use three innovative words in a poem.

Can men live without oppression?

Fight that urge toward regression!

In this age of equal rights, men can survive,

Without those systems of repression 

That cause female-type depression.

(Losing those will help a man's "love" life to thrive.)

Now, one thing you must not do

Is indulge feelings that you

Are more competent than women in this life:

Each objective factual measure

Took away more of that pleasure,

So if you don't understand it, ask your wife.

Long as half of humankind

Feel restricted or confined

By the other half's propensity for violence,

Your "equality" is fiction;

What you feel about that's addiction,

So control your anger, listening in silence.

Nobody believes he's wise

If a man ever even tries

To dispute that women know what we are saying.

Pictures in our minds aren't hazy

If a man says "She is crazy"--

We can guess the sordid truth he is betraying.

So if you think she's delulu 

Then, dear brothers, what can you do?

Very quietly and quickly walk away!

Unless women feel disgusted

By her falsehoods, you're distrusted,

And so nothing's quite the best thing you can say.

If she tells you that your lewk's 

One of those unfortunate flukes

That occur when haberdashers in despair

Ask designers to drive sales

Of their buyers' greatest fails,

Silently make your own choice of what to wear.

Broligarchy must come down;

Never should have left the ground.

(If not done by women, should a thing be done?)

As each decent person hates

Even once-admired Bill Gates,

Jobs men dominate will never again be fun

Save, perhaps, for the young Real Man

With his muscles and his tan

Showing heavy labor's what he most enjoys.

In those jobs men still excel,

And those jobs must be done well,

So the future's bright for active, healthy boys.

But the geeks who would be god?

Leave them lying on the sod,

Drugs or STDs devouring each one's brain;

Let economies of debt

Crash, caught in the Internet,

While we and our husbands build one that's more sane.

(I call my favorite young people, collectively, The Nephews because a majority of them are nephews, as distinct from nieces. I love my nephews. I want their lives to be wonderful...at no expense to the nieces' lives.)

Regretful Book Review: Perspectivas de Mujeres

Title: Perspectivas de Mujeres en Direccion de Proyectos en Latinoamerica

Author: Angelica Maria Larios Arias

Date: "Si bien la ultima decada mostro un aumento constante en las mujeres gerentes de proyectos, todavia hay mucho espacio para que mas mujeres asumen estos roles y desarrollen su carrera profesional." 

When I reviewed the English edition of this e-book I noted that what I'd received was more of a book proposal than a book, and looked forward to reading the rest of the original Spanish version. It is a sad duty to report that what I received in Spanish is still a book proposal not a book. 

The policy of this web site is not to reward writers who promise readers e-books and send us book proposals. It's understandable that, before investing a lot of time and money in researching and writing a book, writers want to know that the book will be published, sold, and read. However, if writers want to enlist reviewers to help market a book proposal to publishers, they need to pay for our time--and frankly they'd be cheating themselves; a reviewer has a different job and skill set from an agent. 

Book Review: The Female Transformational Leadership a Pygmalion Effect

Title: The Female Transformational Leadership, a Pygmalion Effect

Author: Angelica Larios

Date: 2022

Quote: "I honestly believe that women and their leadership have made a complete difference."

That statement's not fully defined. Businesses have been made aware that overt discrimination against women is suicidal; they're not exactly rushing to hire women who don't completely fit a stereotype that includes "successful experience doing exactly the same job for another company where everyone was deliriously happy but she just took it into her head that she'd rather work here." Well, they're not exactly rushing to hire men either, but in any case the market for this book is probably limited to the relatively few individuals who have been promoted to "leadership positions" in corporations. The Waste Age is over and we're getting to a point where corporations can hardly afford to exist. Oprah Winfrey (profiled in the Spanish edition of this book, and probably by now in the English translation) became her own industry but, if she hadn't, she too might be fired because some innovative top management type wants to try replacing her with a computer.

I think we all need to be shaking off the science-fiction-fantasy aura evoked by the phrase "artificial intelligence," demanding that the plagiarism programs be identified as what they are--programs that compile and remix the products of human intelligence--and that the programmers pay the people whose words, pictures, etc., they're feeding into these programs. This can and should be done in a way that discourages the misbelief that business, or writing, or even military defense can be entrusted to computers. It's not my issue but it needs activists working on it now, before we blow up a friendly country's embassy because a military plagiarism-bot has stolen ideas from Bill Clinton, or some other awful consequence of imagining that computers have been taught to think rather than mix-and-mash.

Anyway...what can I say about this e-book? I think it was sent to me as a courtesy, for which I think the author, along with the Spanish version. What I received, in English, is completely unready to be marketed even as an e-book. It's incomplete--it cuts off at page 35. It's not been completely translated, and the translation reads as if it's not been fully edited by a human after being done by Google. American English and Spanish are sufficiently similar languages that automatic translation usually yields readable results. I didn't find any howling language mistakes in the English edition, but did find some cognate words--words like "biographical" and "biografica"--with the accent marks for the Spanish spelling still showing. The table of contents doesn't give page numbers for the last three-quarters of the book, which, after all, hadn't been translated yet. What I have is a very rough first draft.

By now the English edition has probably been completed, and if you are willing to read detailed discussions of business leadership but not willing to read them in Spanish, you probably should read this study of how women in top corporate positions, mostly but not all Spanish-speaking, are making employees feel that their leadership style is "softer" but not flabby. 

The English e-book I have contains only a general introduction to that study.

Book Review: Powerfully Likeable

Title: Powerfully Likeable 

Author: Kate Mason 

Date: 2025 

Publisher: Penguin 

ISBN: 9780593797228 

Quote: "We...must choose between being powerful and being likeable, and also...we're destined to lose." 

This book offers little in the way of useful tips for today's 25-year-old corporate-ladder-climber. I'm not sure that useful tips for her exist. There are not a lot of opportunities for anyone to climb any corporate ladders these days. 

Being female may actually work for today's 25-year-old more than it works against her, with employers and account managers trying to raise their "diversity" scores, but even when the people hired or awarded contracts are chosen for demographic reasons, being hired is no guarantee of being promoted and landing a contract is no guarantee that they won't back out of it. 

 Up to a point, Mason says, a young woman who pays attention to her audience may be able to impress some people as being likeable if she gains perceived "power" by being promoted, or even hired, much less by actually accomplishing something and getting a corporate superordinate to admit it. Everyone now agrees that women are capable of doing responsible jobs and earning good money. But, when they think about an individual woman, many people still choose envy over even the kind of philosophical support that might see her success as conducive to their own. The woman who jumps through all the hoops to qualify for the promotion isn't likeable any more. 

 A few of the things women seem to do with the goal of reducing hostility, Mason can point out as counterproductive. But everyone probably has a different list and, even when we agree that mannerisms are off-putting, there's no clear consensus on the relative badness of "upspeaking" (making each phrase? sound like? a question?) or using buzzwords. 

 The same off-putting mannerisms, Mason observes, still seem to be judged more harshly in female speakers than in male speakers, though generalizations are never perfectly accurate for individuals. Mason names a male TV speaker who says that nobody seems to mind his "fried" voice. Watching TV only socially, I don't recognize his name but, when the idea of "male vocal fry" was suggested, I thought of a game show host I've seen who is so not as easy to watch as Alex Trebek, Pat Sajak, or Steve Harvey. Yes, when a man speaks at the high end of his voice range, and grins too much, and generally projects "oh please like me," the hand does reflexively reach for the remote control gadget, though the behavior doesn't fit a traditional pattern when a man does it, and seems peculiarly off-putting. "Pathetic Jaleel" can be read as trying to project a nonverbal message like "Please don't hate me because I'm Black," and succeeding in projecting something more like "I am not qualified for my job. I'm not having fun and neither is anyone else. If I had any sense I'd go home." Would I call his voice "fried" or just "not ingratiating, but merely grating"? I'm not sure. 

I can say, though, that some of the mannerisms of insecure female yuppies are less often observed in men because they're more unfavorably perceived in men, such that few men are clueless enough to use them. Who ever saw a man wearing shoes that clattered on the floor, as if to say "I'm smaller but I'm just as noisy and clumsy as a literal bull in a china shop"? 

 Some things Mason suggests that women try only point up how subjective the whole topic is. When do women, themselves, feel most helpless and most powerful at work? It depends on whom she asks. Being the only woman in the room intimidates some women (they can't possibly fit in with a crowd of men) and empowers others (they can't be expected to conform to a group norm, they're supposed to stand out in the crowd). Some things seem like common sense and should work for anyone who fits them into her style of doing her job, whatever that might be. 

One of Mason's "\try this" points that I may have seen, but don't remember seeing, in a self-help book in the 1980s is: Call attention to other people's good work. Celebrate other people who are like you in some way. It's subtly self-aggrandizing (you're claiming the authority to recommend them), it's perceived as unselfish and therefore likely to be trustworthy, and it recruits the other people onto your side. When someone does it as a calculated strategy, it might be described as diabolical. If it's sincere, if you do like and can honestly recommend the other people, it's a total win-win, whether the goal is to make a very small business grow or to shoehorn yourself into a big one. 

Some of Mason's observations point up an ongoing conversation among different individuals, sometimes one that's been going on for a long time. Does the choice of expensive, "traditional," less than optimally comfortable clothes show respect for your job and customers, or does it merely suggest that you're lost in some previous decade you don't even remember? (Or worse. For a very long time my city had decriminalized prostitution; high-heeled, pointy-toed shoes do not only suggest "Why on earth would anyone be lost in the 1930s?" to me.) Are you showing sincere and appropriate deference to seniority or expertise, or screaming "I don't want or deserve any respect! Please spit on me!" with excessive displays of deference? Is your way of "being friendly" with clients an admirable revival of classic Dale Carnegie business principles (remember not only clients' names, but the names of their dogs), or an aggressive display of extroversion that really annoys and alienates clients? People don't always agree on where the line between these kinds of things should be drawn. 

Some of Mason's words highlight changes in word usage. The use of "role" to mean "job" may be a signal that the speaker belongs to the younger generation. Is it possible to "do a role"? Baby-boomers play roles. As Cub Scouts or perhaps as gymnasts some of us "did rolls." How, exactly, the young might "do a role," I'm not sure I want to know. Even "playing roles" in the workplace makes the speaker sound like a sociology major. This has nothing to do with race or sex; sociology majors are perceived as the lightest of the lightweights. If I used sociological jargon in the workplace it would be with a goal of signalling "I'm just a poor little rich girl whose parents sent me to college, but I wouldn't have had a chance in any of the classes you took." For me and probably for most of Mason's readers, this would be an outright lie. Calling their jobs "roles" may be trendy among the young, but it's the sort of thing that might elicit cutesipation from older people, whether the person talking about "roles" can be cutesipated as a girl or a boy. 

"Job," as the word for what people do for a living, is not as old as some older people may believe. In books from the early twentieth century "job" appears as a word for a specific task an employee might do in a position or situation of employment. In the late twentieth century, when "job" was the universal word for the position or situation, some people urged the young, "Don't just do a job--have a career!" and others favored "job" even as the word to use to summarize someone's career, because planning a career seemed arrogant and hubristic in subcultures that weren't dominated by the "aggressive salesmanship" mentality. There were also jokes about exactly what house pets' "job" was and, inevitably, about taking the dog out to "do his job" or "do his business." Then there was the hatespew directed at anyone whose primary occupation the speaker considered to be useless, unprofitable, or in any case too much fun to be serious work, "Get a job!" 

I can see how any of these phrases might motivate the young to want not to call what they do jobs. I just can't understand where they ever got the idea of calling what they do "roles." The ease with which people born between approximately 1965 and 1985 fitted themselves into the culture of people born between 1945 and 1965 used to puzzle some baby-boomers. When P.J. O'Rourke spoke on a college campus where even the slang was still familiar to him, he fantasized about going back to his own college, and the time when he attended it, and finding his school friends all lost in the 1940s. When "millennials" want to have their own subculture, any fair assessment of whatever slang and fashions they adopt has to conclude that, as long as they're staying out of political extremism and hate, they're doing well. However, my sisters' demographic group's tendency to try to blend in with the baby-boomers may have served them better than any new trends that make those of us who are still working, or the generation after us, feel "old." 

Mason's language, therefore, pushes an edge. As an Australian in the US she probably gets away with it; some people may see her word usage as exotic rather than trendy. Not all. We don't like feeling "old." Some of us wanted and expected to enjoy "seniority," the general condition associated with being 45 or 50 years old in the workplace, for another fifty years. When we admit to feeling "old" we usually mean feeling ill. This is not generally a way to build rapport. Possibly we should think about getting over it. As long as we can keep up with the young on a job, we probably should; not all of us can. There is some dignity about stepping aside to hand down responsibilities to the person we've taught as much as can be taught of what we know.

There is some pleasure, nevertheless, about reporting that although Mason has done a lot of research on the situation confronting millennial women at work, and presented a lot of new material, she's not really reached any conclusions that weren't familiar to Deborah Tannen, Suzette Haden Elgin, or even Joyce Brothers. Women in the workforce today have won various protections from misogynist practices of the past, a legal right to be as successful as we want to be. Rape-terrorism and the need to care for young children are nothing like the obstacles they once were, either. Women now face obstacles to success that are more similar to the ones men have always faced: our own fitness for the work we do, our own willingness to work in groups where "social loafing" and interpersonal relationships distract us, our own vulnerability to those social relationships. There will never be an end to communication problems, and while the abilities many women have to bog down in social quagmires of "I'm sorry I apologize so often" may always slow down scientific progress, (1) slowing down scientific progress may be a good thing, and (2) at least women's endless misunderstanding and rehashing and reconciling is unlikely to destroy the planet with a nuclear war.

Book Review: The Estrogen Alternative

Cheerful Rant and Book Announcement

Title: The Estrogen Alternative

Author: Steven R. Goldstein

Date: 1998

Publisher: Penguin Putnam

ISBN: 0-399-14453-6

Length: 184 pages with 5-page index

Quote: “[A] study in June 1997...reported that women who take hormone replacement therapy for ten years re­duce their risk of dying from all causes by 37 percent.”

Meh. This looks like a book, but it’s one big long infomercial. Summarized in a sentence: “I’m a doctor who’s been supplied with new patent medicines, specifically synthetic hormones made by the very generous Lilly Pharmaceutical Corporation, and here’s what my patients like about them.”

It’d have more credibility if Lilly hadn’t leaned on the newspapers to stop reporting that almost all people who “suddenly, senselessly” commit mass homicide followed by suicide, or who plot such things, have been using certain drugs, including Lilly’s well publicized product, Prozac.

If teenagers were making in their basement a drug that seems like a safe “high” for some users, has no effect on some, has mixed effects of pleasant mood swings and physical pain for most, and produces intense pain and violent insanity in three to ten percent of all users, by now those kids would have burned their supplies and begged to be locked up where the lynch mobs couldn’t get at them. Lilly, however, rolls on...and we have let it.

So when I read that Lilly’s synthetic hormone pills seem to be helping many of Goldstein’s patients, I am skeptical. What kind of results would Lilly be hiding for this study? With hormone replacement, the big risk is cancer: Estrogen is a growth hormone, and when bones and internal organs have stopped growing and there aren’t any babies to be nourished along, estrogen is fairly likely to encourage cancer cells to grow.

It’s one of the many difficult decisions we make in life. Personally, I inherited a tendency to hyperestrogenemia and haven’t noticed any symptoms of estrogen deficiency yet. I noticed midlife simply as life without the nuisance of cycling through lust, weariness, and mess. When I think about the Change of my Life, so far all that comes to mind is “Change for the better! Thank God!”

Y’know...there are good and bad things about the transition from child to teenager, and the bad things can include illness, but everything we tell children about adolescence is “Ooohhh, growing up is so wonderful! You get to do so many more things, you won’t even miss being expected to give up lots of things you now enjoy doing! Hurry up and be a teenager! Here, have a training bra to practice putting it on before you have anything to support with a real bra, an air rifle to practice annoying rabbits before you’re allowed to join the Army! You’ll be going to war and making babies before you know it! Oh goodygoodygoody!”

Yet nobody ever tells young adults about midlife in terms of “Ooohhh, growing up can be so wonderful! You get to think without all that carnal commotion and mood cycling! You can no longer be led through life by your private parts! You get to wear black all the time and never be asked who died (because it’s a rare middle-aged person who didn’t attend a friend’s funeral during the past year), and cover your mouth when you laugh (because if middle-aged people have pretty teeth they’re plastic), and write from the Truth Pedestal (because you’ve finally lived long enough to occupy it), and have intimate relationships only if you really want them rather than just craving to get close to any body of the right physical type, and just generally enjoy all the things that intense youthful sexuality interfered with doing! Hurry up and be middle-aged! You’ll be almost completely able to rise above all emotional moods before you know it! Oh yabbadabbadoo and yippiyippiyaaay!”

Well, here I stand to testify: Reaching postsexual maturity is, like reaching sexual maturity, not entirely a matter of pure undiluted fun. Concerns and responsibilities gradually change, and that has its sobering aspects. But when sexuality becomes a pure rational choice rather than a constant struggle with temptation, when you can trust your body not to gush personal “honey” even when you’re awake and fully clothed, when you can just get to work and get things done without the emotional distractions of which you may have been tired before you were even fifteen years old, and as a bonus your face hardly ever breaks out any more...I say yabbadabbadoo and yippiyippiyaaay, myself.

So, would I consider hormone replacement therapy? Yes...if I were, or were to become, one of those women whose bodies show that they’re badly undersupplied with estrogen (and don’t forget the progesterone): little wispy-looking skinny things with dry skin, thin brittle hair, no curves; they go from “cute little girl” at 25 to “Why can’t we have a baby?” at 30 to “She was born middle-aged” at 35. They never were passionate about sex and now, like their male counterparts, they can’t Do It, no matter how they try. This is sad, and bodies that are no longer cranking out any E or T at all are bodies that lose the ability to recover from injuries, which is even sadder. I might be tempted by an occasional hormone boost to prevent that.

What feminists find so objectionable about most discourse about hormone replacement is the tone in which it’s usually conducted—the idea that midlife is a disease process, that all reproductive parts that have stopped reproducing are “pre-cancerous” and need to be surgically removed right away, that even if you’re looking forward to lowered levels of hormones that’s not normal and you’re going to wake up feeling that your hormone levels have dropped right through the floors, all of them, penthouse to basement overnight if you don’t start “replacing” them now because those procreative parts need to be constantly ready to procreate, at any time, day or night, on demand, and there’s nothing romantic about slowing down and taking time to get each other into the mood, nosiree, so to be on the safe side what might need to be firm should be stiffened up so that it rubs painfully against your clothes for hours, and what might need to be moist should be hyper-moisturized so that it may drip onto the floor if you don’t wear padding...and that is just not true. Normal midlife, male or female, does not call for any kind of therapy. It’s actually pleasant!

And what Goldstein has wrought...I once received payment for doing a sort of parody of it. “I was dripping sweat onto the floor when the temperatures were freezing! I was catching myself bawling and howling and screaming for no reason! What blessed relief I found in Priceypilz!—wrote Mavis and Sally and Barbara and Doris, in documents discovered by their heirs, written shortly before they succumbed to metastasized cancer...”

No. That was the parody. Goldstein is a doctor whose patients were in fact ill. That was why they came to him for treatment, took the new pills Lilly provided him, and reported feeling less ill than they were before. They were by definition not normal. It is to be hoped that, beyond the point of “Jane Doe was fifty-five,” none of their experiences ever sounds much like yours.

If you’re ill, who am I to say that synthetic hormones may not work for you? Ask your own doctor. Let us hope that she’s not getting any kind of promotional benefits from Lilly and can discuss the success and failure rate, over the past twenty years, more impartially than Goldstein could.

If you’re healthy, or at least if your health problems are not age-specific even though you happen to be fifty or more years old, join me in giving thanks to God. All we did, in order naturally to enjoy middle-aged years in which we look and feel exactly the way we wanted to look and feel at twenty-five—strong muscles, solid bones, hair still describable as black/red/blond more than grey, but no mood swings and no acne, at last, at long-awaited last!—was to inherit a certain genetic type. That means we probably grew up among people for whom this was normal, and we think of “old” starting at eighty and see nothing unusual in the existence of Senior Games, sixty-plus or seventy-plus classes in marathons, and starting new relationships or business ventures at seventy. We still have plenty of hormones of our own, thanks just the same, Dr. Goldstein. And we still have sex when we want to, which will not be under any circumstances that could possibly include you.

I did not choose this book even at a dime-a-dozen sale; it was tucked into a basket. I don’t mind reselling it since it may be useful for someone Out There, but I will add one caveat: Lilly. Nufsed.

Should a Husband Ever Tell a Wife to Breastfeed?

The question actually came up in a blog post on Sunday. My answer outgrew the Link Log.

My answer is, of course, NO. Like starting the baby in the first place, feeding the baby naturally is a personal decision about which only the owner of the body involved has anything to say. 

In the blog post linked below, a young Christian, concerned for his baby's health, spirals into a panic he feels able to express only by trying to bark out orders to guide a process he's not even capable of understanding. His angry rant shows how scared, helpless, and shamed he really feels, and how, like a typical male, he thinks trying to turn his real emotions into anger and blaming someone else is "rational" and "manly." If it weren't so likely to lead to violence it would be funny. Manly? The whole post was written by a kicking, screaming inner infant.

https://toolsofrenewal.com/?p=21026

He thinks he can tell a woman to lactate? Well, every girl learns, as part of the process of growing up to be a woman, that most of the non-lactating half of humankind are incompetent most of the time. Just a peek at just a fraction of the body part that wields the power they don't have is usually enough to reduce them to drooling idiocy. Women have been pardoning displays of male irrationality, not to mention presumption, even blasphemy (only the Creator ever told anyone's milk to flow), for a long time. Perhaps we shouldn't pardon them so easily. At the very least a man needs to know, before there is any chance of his becoming a father, that since men are incapable of doing any of the actual feeding of a baby, that's an indication that they are meant to do all of the getting up at night to bring the baby to its mother, to return it to the cradle, to fetch clean diapers, and generally to do all the other housework unless, and until, the wife reclaims it. And what men have to say, as they bow in awe before the miracle that is motherhood, needs to be "Humble me, O Lord, so I can do Thy Will."

Reading the Bible as a whole, of course, quells the male fantasy that some of the apostles advised wives generally to submit to their own husbands because that was part of the natural order of things. It was not. It's what many of us actually want, bur, like sunshine, it's not naturally available to even half the people who want it.

Adam was rebuked for obeying his wife immediately after receiving instructions directly from God, and disobeying God. Though Adam's choice was wrong, God's response to it was compassionate, because Adam's obedience to his wife was part of the natural order of things. Abraham was not rebuked for obeying his wife, even though she seems to have been the only one in their family who did not receive guidance directly from God--and was that why she was the one who gave orders to other people? In front of strangers, at least, Sarah showed conventional courtesy to Abraham, addressing him by his title (of which she was no doubt very proud); this was how Jewish Christian wives were told to treat their husbands, though there were probably times when it seemed like mockery to Abraham, who, we are told, obeyed Sarah even when it caused him pain. Then there was Nabal, remembered as "The Fool," which is what the nickname "Nabal" meant, for bawling out bad ideas to servants who had learned that his wife's directions were the ones it was prudent to follow...

Paul advised the wives of Greek and Roman Pagans to submit to their husbands with the sort of "fear" that was proper to the authority their laws granted those husbands. Peter advised Jewish Christian wives to speak politely to their husbands in public, as Sarah did to Abraham. They were talking about how Christians could best approach different cultures, not about what every marriage is meant to be.

The idea that women's liberation from abusive marriage laws could wait is enough to offend some readers today. The idea that men generally are entitled to any position of authority is analogous to the idea that, because Moses was directed to speak to a rock and reveal a spring of water behind it, the general method of finding water should be to go out and talk to rocks. Most men are dumb animals who, if women didn't maintain control of relationships with them, would produce babies they'd never even help to feed. The minute we reposition your hands, boys, the game is over. A man who can represent Christ to his household maintains complete control of himself. No haggling for "more" before marriage. No suggestion of starting babies before the wife feels fully prepared for motherhood. No raising his voice or giving orders, ever. No talking back--a woman's No means No and, if the man thinks there is a chance that she didn't really mean it, he should back off and wait for her to realize that for herself. Men who want respect need to be respectable. Responsible. Honorable, even. And one little moment of Nabalite bluster destroys that; presents the man as no more of a godly leader than the screaming infant is. 

But is there some reason to blame a specific person, maybe someone like Gloria Steinem who never dared to be even a foster mother but sets herself up as a career mentor, for discouraging a woman from naturally feeding a baby who is failing to thrive on artificial food? There may be. Still, a godly leader does not squirm around in impotent rage, throwing blame at other people. He says things that are honest and self-respecting, like "Hearing that baby scream that way tears my feelings all to pieces. I know we need the money from your job but, if human milk can make the baby strong and healthy, I don't care what else we have to do without; I don't have to eat every single day," and "I never thought about the possibility that my baby might not live. I feel so helpless I don't know how I can bear it. I don't know what to do to save my son," and "I don't know whether there's a way to reconcile feeding the baby naturally with doing your job, but there ought to be. Maybe someone who knows more about natural child care can help."

If this poor frightened boy ever wants his wife to feel that Christian submission to the likes of him is possible, what he needs to do is exactly what he feels so afraid of doing. He must confess his sin. (Submission to a spirit of selfish egotism, as shown by anyone's demanding his or her own way over anyone else's, is a positive sin too. He sinned by telling her what to do, and she sinned if she gave his infantile bawling any more attention than she gave a bird singing outside the window.) He must confess his shame. (It is a shame for a grown man to demand his own way over anyone else's.) He must confess his helplessness, his confusion, and his fear. (He doesn't know that natural feeding will keep the baby alive, or that artificial food is what's making it sickly. Some children thrive on artificial food. He doesn't say whether his child has been exposed to, e.g., glyphosate vapor drift.) 

He must consciously look for ways to identify what he might want, what would be "his way," and to mortify his selfish ego by giving up that--whatever it may be. Months or years need to go by during which he can be seen to be guided entirely by Revelation, or in its absence by Reason, with no regard whatsoever for his preferences. That is the only way anyone can expect to be seen as a leader whom anyone of his own generation has any reason to follow. Christian men are indeed called to the "headship" of their households...and that is, as Lewis observed, the crown of thorns, because they can get it only by self-sacrifice. The husband and father who wants to channel Christ to his wife and children must love them "as Christ also loved us, and died for us." 

But why on Earth does the foolish boy imagine that "feminists" ever discouraged natural childbirth or natural childcare? Most people who rail about "feminists," these days, have no idea what they are talking about. A feminist is a person who believes that women are at least equally as valuable as men. That's pretty much a synonym for a rational human being. Needless to say, there is room for a lot of disagreement among feminists. 

There have been socialist feminists who thought all women needed to be employed in the service of a totalitarian state, yes. They did not have enough influence, in the United States, to get women strapped down and knocked out and, if possible, carved up by surgeons, to deliver healthy babies, nor to add the anti-lactation injections during the mandatory ten-day hospitalization. Who actually did that was the 1950s incarnation of Big Pharma. In the 1950s the sort of people who have more recently screamed that vaccines were the world's only hope of surviving COVID were screaming that women needed that utterly unnatural, male-directed approach to motherhood...to preserve their beauty! The focal point of 1950s fashion was the perky bosom. There are exactly two ways a woman can fit into 1950s fashions: exercise to maintain muscle tone in her upper body, or wearing 1950s lingerie. Neither of these things was affected by lactation, but apparently a critical mass of Americans, in the 1950s, were clueless enough to think they were, presumably because their mothers thought it wasn't nice to talk about such things with them. Anyway it was very profitable for the doctors and manufacturers concerned, though harmful to the babies.

I don't know whether any of the women who literally had to fight for the right to reclaim control of the natural processes of motherhood would have called themselves feminist activists in the early 1960s. I'm sure the women who were making the most noise, at the time, preferred not to think or talk about those women at all. Women like my mother surely would have made women like Gloria Steinem feel as inadequate as they made them look. Mother didn't need a political movement to "have it all" before that was what other women dared to dream of. She had her own business, with full support from her husband. She could bottle human milk for my brother and me and leave it at home, or take us to the shop, cradle and all, and nurse us in between appointments, as she saw fit. She could also, even as an undiagnosed Irish celiac, work Gloria into the ground before breakfast. She also naturally had the sort of figure poor old Gloria could only say, enviously, "seemed so vulnerable"...to someone who didn't have it. Mother was not asked to lecture to the consciousness-raising groups of that day. Not that she had time for them. She was a La Leche Leader. I think, in historical hindsight, she was a feminist activist.

(Mother, of course, was vulnerable--not in the sense Gloria Steinem had in mind, but as an undiagnosed celiac. After giving birth to my natural sister she was disabled by thyroid failure for the next fifteen years. But in youth, as in old age, she was a real storybook heroine...lovable, too.) 

Late baby-boomers grew up aware of our options and so, while choosing not to have babies of my own, I knew how to induce lactation when a friend was having difficulties feeding a baby who didn't tolerate Enfamil. I expected it to feel nice; it did. I expected it to have an effect on my metabolism; I didn't anticipate how dramatic the effect would be. I know firsthand that, while lactating women usually want to do other things besides lactate, nobody has any right to expect that they will. 

Women, too, can be deceived by our emotions into thinking we're speaking as wise mentors and elders when we're really venting our vulnerabilities. It can sound like "You're not a cow! This is what scientific progress is all about! You have a right to bottle-feed the baby. Never let anyone at the office notice that you have a baby. No baby stories, no baby pictures, no emergency calls from the person watching the baby, and never let the baby be visible from the office door! In order to deserve equal pay women need to be equally as neglectful of our families and ourselves as men do--to put their careers first."

More confident and competent women, however, say "Wrong. Both men and women need to put their and their families' physical needs ahead of any corporation. The traditional ideal for all parents to be self-employed, negotiating their own terms of employment directly with their customers, is still by far the best. People who want to make a career of being employees should think twice about having babies. Even so, employers need to work with employees as human beings, with bodies--finding work for employees whose physical abilities change, or finding ways to help employees put babies first for the short time that the future generation are babies."

Should Christian women who choose to give birth also choose to feed the baby naturally? It's hard to imagine why they wouldn't--if the choice is available. Human milk is the best food for human babies. Lactation is also the most efficient way for the body to get rid of the surplus fat pregnant women store in places where, if it's not converted into milk, that fat does nothing at all for the baby. Lactation also balances the hormones that, when  artificially altered, become involved in postpartum depression. It's empowering; it's a statement of independence from the whole wretched corporate universe. It's also a way of bonding with the baby. (And no, apart from a little temporary increase in top-heaviness, my figure didn't change. It lost its youthful perkiness only after age 50, when I was too sick to eat or exercise for two weeks. The key to a youthful figure is exercise.) And also, although there are no absolute guarantees, lactation is the closest thing we have to "immunization" for breast cancer. Nobody should wait for a baby's health to deteriorate on an artificial diet, or allow herself to be browbeaten by a foolish young husband, to choose natural food for a baby. 

In less technologically advanced societies, where men and women define their value to society in terms of hand-to-hand combat, digging coal, and felling trees, and so it's possible for rational people not to be feminists, the historical fact is that many, often most, babies don't survive. If people living in such conditions are able to keep records, their records will show how many more babies were born than children lived to grow up. Women in such societies have no alternative to natural feeding, but that in no way implies that all women produce enough milk or good enough milk to rear strong healthy babies. Many don't, because the usual thing in such societies is that parents are malnourished, themselves. For humans as for other animals, the absence of an overwhelming desire to keep, feed, and cherish babies is often an indication that the babies aren't going to live. (That's one of the reasons why calling abortion murder is so stupid;  the mother of a viable fetus will usually guard it with her life, so if a woman can say "I choose abortion" there's a high probability that the abortion is more like euthanasia.) Other family members should not blame a woman who is unwilling, and probably unable, to feed a baby naturally. Whether or not she wanted the baby as much as its father and grandparents did, wanting babies does not guarantee viable babies. 

In humans as in other animal families, the baby whose own mother can't feed it may be adopted by another female, may seem to thrive on the natural food for its species, and may then die, just the same, before or after it starts eating solid food. Malnutrition used to be the most common reason for this. Today it's unusual for anyone to be malnourished due to simple lack of food, but we're seeing more infant mortality, across species, where glyphosate and other chemicals interfere with babies' ability to digest food. Even in my cat family I've watched it happen; normal cats don't allow other adult cats to see their kittens for the first six weeks, but social cats often rear kittens communally, like lions; one cat's milk dries up while she waits for kittens to starve out enteritis, another cat feeds the kittens when they seem to be recovering, and then glyphosate vapors blow past them and the kittens die. The only difference for humans is that, because we're bigger, the process is likely to take longer. 

If I were the mother of a baby who was not doing well on artificial food, I'd do whatever I could to induce lactation. (It has to be induced, as if it never started, if the woman didn't feed the baby naturally from the beginning.) It would be an inconvenience but 

(1) human milk might save the baby, and 

(2) if lactation didn't save the baby it would at least give me some precious moments of hope and bonding, and

(3) if it didn't work at all, if I didn't produce anything the baby recognized as milk, at least I would know (and the rest of the family would know) I'd tried. 

But I'd be patient with myself, and move away from any family members who weren't patient with me, about the fact that that willingness to let the baby be artificially fed, on the day it was born, may have been an indication that the baby had no chance. I might need to find ways to become healthier, making better food choices, getting glyphosate and glufosinate banned, etc., before trying to have another baby; otherwise the second baby would probably be sicker and sadder than the first one.

Young women may want to keep this kind of discussion between themselves and their husbands, but they don't have to if they don't want to. Bleep is a young man in any position to know about the practicalities of mothering? An organized group of women who've nursed babies, and are willing to help younger women, currently has chapters in 89 countries. If your country is not listed at 

https://llli.org

...they can probably make a referral, even for you.

Do Men Have a Complaint?

It is necessary that men be held to account for their actions. That means that they can be allowed to do what makes babies only if they are willing and able to take full responsibility for rearing the said babies; it means that any other sexual pleasure they enjoy must occur with the free and informed consent of any and all women involved; it means that they understand that "reasonable" is a word that has to be defined by women and "emotional, illogical, irresponsible" are words that, in reality, presuppose the masculine gender; it means that when human beings want to be in control of our lives, we don't even hold eye contact with other human beings, and when we want to interact with other human beings, we surrender at least half of all control of what goes on during those interactions to the other human beings, and we accept that we are hard-wired to feel that this shared control and interaction are fun. 

Yup. That's right, guys. If at any time you feel that you are in control of a situation, you should be at home alone. If you are on a date, trying to be in control of anything outside of your own skin is abusive, as is losing control of what's going on inside your skin. 

Men could always try to change the actual record on this...I don't see how it's possible to judge a situation objectively without being able to think about it in two successive weeks, in two different states of hormone balance, and see what, if anything, changes. I think the lack of a hormone cycle in early adult life prevents the male brain from developing the capacity for objective thought. "Testosterone-poisoned" may sound harsh but, although some men are intelligent, the fact is that men don't develop much ability to separate their emotions from their thoughts. They have relatively few emotional moods, so what they think is logical and reasonable is their emotionality. This has historically been how men have been able to "reason" their way into war. Too bad for them. Even when people try to change their physical sex, there is a half of humankind that have stronger arms, and there is a half of humankind that, if not universally more intelligent, are at least consistently more able to reason themselves away from violent reactions. That is the half of humankind we can reasonably describe as being rational. "Let's discuss the matter reasonably" means "Anyone with testosterone in their blood waits to be told what is reasonable by someone who's learned to judge between estrogen and progesterone moods." (The minority of women who have testosterone in their blood already know this.)

It would be pleasant if holding men to account for their actions could be done without an assumption that, if a man has any money, he must have had an abusive relationship with some woman somewhere. 

https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2025/01/breaking-silence.html

Sadly, although I'm inclined to suspect that the accusations against Bill Cosby were politically motivated while the accusations against Neil Gaiman are more about money, the historical reality has been that economic inequality did use to inject an abusive quality into all heterosexual relationships. If you were able to earn money because you were hired for a better job because the company didn't want to be responsible for a woman walking to and from the commuter train, there was in fact something abusive about your relationships with any and all of the people who were not hired for that job. "Not my fault"? That's what abusers always say, and tends to be understood to mean that it was. "Certainly seemed consensual, at the time, when she was calling me on my cell phone and heavy-breathing 'I want you now'," is plausible but non-consensually ending a relationship is also abusive, especially if the end of the relationship has something to do with a child. A man who did not take advantage of an abusive situation to have abusive relationships with women has been the Partner for Life of one wife who is not complaining. Of course the male culture of our youth taught men that, if they were becoming the Partner for Life of one wife who would never have a serious complaint, they were being cheated out of their share of "fun." Well...if you had fun participating in a culture that was abusive, that does not generate a lot of sympathy. Life is just full of trade-offs.

Some men today have taken the effort to make amends for the sins of their past, when society was positively encouraging them to sin. I used to know an older man who had some money and said he wanted to acknowledge all of his natural children before he died. In the Vietnam War years, when he was in the States he used to go into a local bar, play his guitar, sing sad songs about being in the Army, and be invited to spend the night with some sentimental young woman. In those years young women always wanted "The Pill" for birth control, although it was new and untested and had some horrible side effects for some users, but it did not actually work for all of them. After the war ended and the man settled down with one wife, he'd had several children, and acknowledged a few more in the neighborhood, but his obituary was quite shocking. He claimed, and left bequests to, about a dozen additional children besides the dozen people knew about. Only five of the children he claimed had ever used his family name. He claimed a child in California, a few on islands... I think it might be helpful if more survivors of the so-called "sexual revolution" did as much toward making amends as that man did.

I will say, though, that women should search their hearts before thinking "Well, it was an open-ended relationship, which were all inherently oppressive and abusive, and he's got money now, and I need some money." You knew men who did worse things than that. What about the company that thought it was acceptable to allow rapists to be on the street? The dating game as it was played in the 1980s and 1990s was set up to be all about what guys wanted with no real benefits for girls, but let's face it, if only because the social penalties for being mistaken for a lesbian used to be so much worse, we did play the game. Some of us had the confidence to set up rules that worked for us. Some of us took matters into our own hands to restore reason to scenes of male emotionality, stayed in the friendzone until men wanted to commit to being husbands and fathers, and stayed married once we were married. Some of us took the emotional risk and said, "No baby-making before marriage and I didn't say I was in any hurry to marry anybody," laughed at the boys who bolted, and waited confidently for men who wanted marriage. Some of us wore flat shoes and showed our real unpainted faces to the world, even in the 1980s, to tell the world "I'm not looking for an abusive, exploitative relationship." If you didn't, why didn't you? If you consented to an inherently abusive relationship, if you paid for pills that are 98% effective while you were at the age where that 2% failure rate occurs, is the person to whom you heavy-breathed "I want you now" really the person from the 1980s you need to be going after now? Are you sure going after the abusive bank and the exploitative utility companies and the oppressive insurance companies, who are gouging you for money now, wouldn't be more satisfying?