Are Men Failing?

New York Times columnist David Brooks's recent "Why Men Fail" merits attention. Mr. Brooks's column summarizes a recent book by Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, to the effect that during the last 40 years, men in our culture have failed to demonstrate sufficient flexibility and have accordingly lost ground, while women have exhibited greater adaptablilty and, relatively speaking, have prospered.

Men's hyper-rigidity has doomed them to dropping out of the labor force in disturbing numbers, says Mr. Brooks, echoing Ms. Rosin. They more and more find themselves collecting disability compensation, and they are ceding the lead in jobs and, in some cases, even pay to women.

All because women are more adaptable.

Brooks contrasts Ms. Rosin's hypothesis with the older theory that men and boys have disadvantages that are at once cultural and genetic/neurological: so they fidget and daydream in school; they aren't "emotionally sensitive and aware of context" as adults; they can't "communicate smoothly" as employees.

I don't really know whether Rosin's hyper-rigidity thesis explains why little boys get more D's and F's in school than little girls do. Perhaps the old theory and the new hypothesis are both telling us something we need to know.

But Brooks's column says something else that is of great interest to me:

Rosin also reports from college campuses where women are pioneering new social arrangements. The usual story is that men are exploiting the new campus hookup culture in order to get plenty of sex without romantic commitments. Rosin argues that, in fact, women support the hookup culture. It allows them to have sex and fun without any time-consuming distractions from their careers. Like new immigrants, women are desperate to rise, and they embrace social and sexual rules that give them the freedom to focus on their professional lives.

"Desperate to rise" seems a bit wide of the mark. Desperate? Yet I bet Brooks is right that the hookup culture in colleges is chosen by women as a surrogate to committed relationships that might truncate their professional aspirations.

* * * * *

What if as a woman professional — specifically, a university professor — you are breast-feeding a baby, and you need to teach a class at baby's feeding time?

Under normal circumstances, working mothers can cope by pumping their breasts and feeding baby on expelled milk while in public. But American University professor Adrienne Pine ran into a situation where her baby was sick one morning and she had no good child-care options, so she brought her infant along to a 75-minute class she was teaching. I'm guessing that pumping was for some reason not an option in this situation. Once in the classroom, the baby grew restless, and "Pine breast-fed her while continuing her lecture in front of 40 students." So says this article in The Washington Post.

That sparked a controversy. "Some students [who were interviewed] said breast-feeding doesn’t belong in the classroom."

This was a feminist anthropology class, and Pine has since written that "I fed my sick baby [in it] without disrupting the lecture so as to not have to cancel the first day of class. I doubt anyone saw my nipple, because I’m pretty good at covering it. But if they did, they now know that I too, a university professor, like them, have nipples."

A sign of the times, I think. Beyond that, I'm not sure how I feel about this.

* * * * *

Another Washington Post story points up that both women and men today are, uh, desperate to enhance those bodily features that distinguish them from the other sex. "NJ woman charged with fatal penis enlargement injection pleads not guilty to manslaughter" says a 23-year-old man died the day after Kasia Rivera, 35, injected silicon into his penis, supposedly to lengthen it.

Kasia Rivera, charged with
reckless manslaughter in
penis-enlargement botch

According to Dr. Daniel S. Elliott, an associate professor of urology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.:

Enhancement procedures performed by unlicensed practitioners or people with no medical training are more commonly seen among women ... Liquid silicone is sought on the black market by women seeking to enhance their figures, even though it is not approved for cosmetic injections. Besides liquid silicone, injections of substances including paraffin, petroleum jelly and hydrogel have been illegally used to enlarge women’s breasts, hips and buttocks.

Of course, silicone breast and buttock implants (not liquid silicone) are often used cosmetically by women today.

Many men resort to other techniques to enlarge their penis. As far as I know, none of them work.

But why? Why the need for a bigger sex organ (men), bigger boobs and booties (women), and buffer bodies (both sexes)?

Both sexes, I think, realize they have to attract and then hold onto mates not just once or maybe twice in a lifetime, but maybe once or twice in a college semester. There's a continual lottery going on, from both sexes' point of view. A survival-of-the-sexiest, if you will.

It's a reflection of how long it takes to get a first-class education these days, a factor that affects both sexes, but also of the gender-specific need of today's women to hold firmly onto men's interest while at the same time keeping them at arm's length as they go for that advanced degree.

Meanwhile — dare I say it? — men feel increasingly emasculated. A bigger male member seems entirely in order. It makes them (us) feel more of a man.

As a 65-year-old, unmarried Catholic man, I personally favor chastity and abstinence. But I think it's unrealistic to expect that of young women and men who must wait many long years for marriage and children, owing to how long they're in school.

That same situation as it affects women, primarily, seems to be driving all I reported above. Young women must be abstinent — fat chance, for most of them — or use contraception. If contraception fails, then abortion is in order. Those are two realities today that Catholic authorities resent and reject.

But they and many other Catholics likewise resent the hookup culture, not to mention the seemingly excessive emphasis women and men are putting on their physical attributes.

And professors breast-feeding in front of their students will seem, to most Catholics, an affront to common decency.

We Catholics really need to come to grips with how much society has changed! That much I'm sure of, and for that change in Catholic attitude, I earnestly pray ...

Exalting the Vagina!

Yes, you got that right. This sixty-something, male, never-married Catholic blogger is blogging about something that, in common parlance, is often deemed "naughty," or worse.

The vagina.

I'm writing in response to Ariel Levy's book review in the September 10, 2012, New Yorker, that discusses Naomi Wolf's new book Vagina: A New Biography.

Herewith, a brief summary of what I take Levy to be saying about what Wolf is saying (since, sadly, only New Yorker subscribers can view the full review).

Levy says Wolf slots into the continuing evolution of feminist thought. We who are not exactly frontline feminists may not realize that feminism bifurcated somewhere around the early 1980s over the question of whether to revile pornography as culprit number one in the crime of men "objectifying" women.

Some feminists sided with Susan Brownmiller in working politically to expunge porn from the cultural scene. Others objected that the women of the movement ought not to be "patrolling the erotic imagination": policing what goes on in the heads of, yes, even those feminist sisters who choose to pleasure themselves sexually while looking at porn.

The first group were the "anti-porn" feminists. The latter group became known as the "pro-sex" feminists. (Who knew?)

Now comes Ms. Wolf, who in earlier books had railed against how "strictly and heavily images of female beauty have come to weigh on us." Reducing women to their bodies stood in the way of full women's liberation, thought Wolf. Except ... in this new book, Wolf has it that, "To understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain but it is also part of the female soul — it is a gateway to, and medium of, female self-knowledge."

Naomi Wolf

This "profound brain-vagina connection" dawned on Wolf after undergoing successful surgery to remedy spinal compression that was impinging on her pelvic nerve. She knew something was wrong when sex stopped giving her "the usual postcoital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive."

Apparently, Wolf's pelvic nerve that was amiss connects to the vagina but does not connect to the clitoris, since her clitoral orgasms were still "as strong and pleasurable as ever."

I take the following from this deeply personal experience of Wolf's: Each of us, male or female, is tasked by our human nature with the responsibility of construing ourselves. A big question is, do we construe ourselves as something separate and apart from the rest of "everything alive"?

Another big question is, do we construe our interior selves as separate from our bodies?

The history of western thought — and therefore Catholic thought — runs through the teaching of 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, who famously wrote, "I think, therefore I am." Descartes construes himself fundamentally as a disembodied rational being who can be certain that he exists only because he thinks, because he has the capacity to doubt. His body, perceived through sense experiences, is to him less certain to exist because his senses are notoriously unreliable.

Descartes' interior self is construed by him as separate from his body.

Naomi Wolf's interior self is construed by her as intimately connected to her body, and specifically to her vagina. When her vagina is working properly — when the stimuli arising from sexual pleasure successfully reach her brain — she is infused with creative energy and worldly delight. She feels richly interconnected to one and all.

I can't imagine anything more true of the way I feel about myself. True, I don't have a vagina. I have a penis. My lifetime sexual experience is not extensive, but I can say that sexual feelings of arousal and satisfaction for me are not just in my penis. They suffuse my whole pelvic and perineal area. According to Wikipedia:

The perineum is the region of the body inferior to the pelvic diaphragm and between the legs. It is a diamond-shaped area on the inferior surface of the trunk that includes the anus and, in females, the vagina. Its definition varies: it can refer to only the superficial structures in this region, or it can be used to include both superficial and deep structures.

It's there that sexual arousal begins. The penis may or may not heed the call and get stiff.

The penis is analogous to the clitoris, as the two organs arise from the same embryonic tissue. I have no idea what the female embryo does to create a vagina, but I'd say there has to be an analogy between it and the male perineum. So what Wolf says about her vagina comes to me as no surprise. For me, there is nothing that gives me a God's-in-His-heaven-and-all's-right-with-the-world feeling more than the pelvic-perineal response I feel when a lovely woman smiles at me.

Here, then, we have a topic that I feel needs to be talked about more in Catholic circles: the connection between our bodies, and especially our sexual organs, and how we construe ourselves. Can we break our habits as thoroughgoing Cartesians — victims of the mind-over-matter thought of René Descartes?

Jesus Preaching a Sermon

At stake is an understanding of how we ought to see ourselves in relation to our world. I believe Jesus wanted us to stand together, all for one and one for all. "Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me" (Matthew 25:28). God bless us, every one — no exceptions!

It's a lot easier to get to that beneficent all-inclusiveness from "a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive." I think Naomi Wolf is on to something!

Not Enough To Go Around? Let's Remedy That!

"There's not enough to go around!"

In this presidential election year, that's the overarching worry that's driving voter behavior, I take it.

Not enough income. Not enough wealth. Not enough jobs. Not enough economic opportunity.

When we hear President Obama's forces snipe at Mitt Romney about the girth of his bank account and the secrecy surrounding his tax returns, that's the not-so-hidden theme: Romney has gotten more than his fair share, and, as head of Bain Capital, he acquired it by zeroing out American jobs.

Romney snipes back that Obama is clueless about how wealth is created, which is why the current economic recovery is so anemic.

I have yet to hear either side tell how America can be returned to truly robust economic vigor. I think the president has, sadly, been notably silent about this topic.

Yes, we do get to see a few pieces of the respective economic jigsaw puzzles each candidate would try to put together if elected. Obama would let the "Bush-era" income tax cuts lapse for top earners, but leave them in place for the middle class. Romney would reduce all brackets' tax rates by 20 percent.

Obama would preserve Medicare's current way of doing things — though he hasn't really said how he'd head off the program's eventual insolvency. The Romney-Ryan ticket wants to convert Medicare to a voucher program for most yet-to-arrive-at-65 Americans.

Romney wants to solve the debt threat by drastically cutting programs, a full list of which which he has yet to announce, while generating more tax receipts (at albeit reduced tax rates) by "broadening the base" — eliminating or reducing itemized deductions and loopholes. Obama would cut federal programs more sparingly, while increasing tax rates sharply on upper incomes.

One approach or the other, or a mix of both, could shrink the deficit and thus keep the public debt from ballooning out of control, and that's a good, even necessary, thing.

Problem is, neither solution is aimed at enlarging the "economic pie." They represent two approaches to how after-tax income is allocated, addressing fairness-of-income-distribution concerns in two contrasting ways.

The two parties likewise exhibit two different attitudes toward expensive government entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid.

But what about making the economic pie much bigger than it is? Can't we agree that this is a goal we ought to pursue?

Can't we at least discuss it?

Here is problem number one with that, in my opinion: neither candidate really seems to have a clue about how to open up opportunity in this land to its fullest throttle, so more people could become better equipped to hold down ever more challenging jobs, thus enlarging the economic pie with their enhanced productivity.

Romney claims his experience as a businessman gives him the ability to manage the economy better than Obama. Well ... maybe.

But we know he killed or offshored jobs while at Bain; that was, supporters say, simply a much-needed bout of "creative destruction." I'm willing to accept that that kind of thing — putting American enterprise on a slimming diet — may sometimes be necessary for reasons of competitiveness abroad. But it's not the whole answer to growing our economic pie.

So, Mitt, what is the whole answer?

And how about you, Mr. President? Don't you have a plan to once again make America the fecund "land of opportunity" it once was?

If so, I for one haven't heard it.

Here's the kind of thing I think we need: How about a G.I. Bill, not just for servicemen and -women who have risked much in America's wars abroad, but for their children, too? The volunteer military is heavily weighted toward lower-income recruits whose kids may not get the opportunities Barack Obama's daughters and Mitt Romney's grandchildren will enjoy. Let's endow them all with the means to go to the very best schools for which they can qualify.

Meanwhile, I think we all need to get behind those conservative hobbyhorses, school vouchers, along with the parallel education revolution that seems to be exploding today, charter schools. True, vouchers-plus-charters needs to be augmented by serious reforms to traditional public schools, so they don't turn into warehouses for the least educable. And — sorry, NEA — I think teachers' unions will have to stand aside on this.

A G.I. Bill for "servicekids," as a variety of income redistribution, is a liberal notion. Mitt Romney could never embrace it. Vouchers-plus-charters-plus-union-disempowerment is a conservative notion. Barack Obama would never endorse that.

But if there's really not enough to go around these days, enriching opportunities for all demands that a lot of conventional orthodoxies be ushered into unceremonious retirement.

For instance, I propose that we get busy and pass the DREAM Act, the long-stalled-by-GOP-hard-liners congressional legislation that offers conditional amnesty to illegal immigrants in exchange for obtaining, or working diligently toward, a bachelor's degree or higher, or serving honorably in the U.S. military. They'd be helped along (this is not part of the current bill, unfortunately) by eligibility for Pell grants. If they go the military route instead, they'd come away with a sizable amount of training in IT, engineering skills, and the like, that will look great on their civilian résumés.

In addition, I'd pass state laws allowing children of illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuitions at state universities. Even Rick Perry, the conservative GOP governor of Texas, thinks anyone opposing this doesn't "have a heart."

Conservatives who blanch at those two proposals will grin at this one: I suggest we end the practice of affirmative action in hiring and college admissions based solely on race. Race-based affirmative action has outlived its usefulness, and it now just produces jealousies based on skin tone. In its place I would put affirmative action based strictly on socioeconomic factors. Smart working-class kids of any race who'd otherwise lack the slick résumés of the upper crusters would be given a leg up.

Get the point? We need to create a ladder of opportunity for all who now face an unadorned blank wall. This approach to the country's problems would tap the highest potential of all who live and work here, boosting their productivity and enlarging the economic pie for every one of us to feast on.

It would thus dispel the current atmosphere of fear, envy, class jealousy, financial greed, and worse. From the point of view of a Catholic voter like me, it would be a very Christian thing to do, since the current rancid, not-enough-to-go-around atmosphere is inimical to the spirit of Christian charity and poisonous to the milk of human kindness.