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Notes
on Books by
NO GOOD MEN
LEFT?
The women she interviewed, researching the book,
reveal their cultural milieu in the language they use to describe the loss of
romance. The poetry and song of
traditional courtship has disappeared. The
traditional system, rooted in the concept of covenant, maintaining vows for a
lifetime, has been replaced by a libertarian system, characterized by momentary
interests. One no longer “falls in
love” or finds the “love of my life.”
Instead, there is much talk—using the more cerebral and
“scientific” jargon of psychology—about “relationships,” about
“being in a relationship.” The
“M” word, marriage, is rarely mentioned—“perhaps because they’ve been
warned that talk of marriage can seem needy or desperate” (p. 4).
And that’s precisely what the young career women resist being!
To admit one actually needs a man, that one cannot live a fully
satisfactory life one one’s own, rubs against all the feminist ideology most
of them have absorbed.
They illustrate the enormous success of the “Girl
Project” launched in the ‘70’s and symbolized by the application of Title
IX to athletics. “Rather than
prepare girls for future adult lives as wives and mothers, the Girl Project’s
aim has been to prepare them for adult lives without dependence on marriage”
(p. 77). So girls began studying
harder and now constitute a majority of students in colleges and universities.
Rather than look for husbands, increasing numbers of them focus
singularly on preparation for work. They
have successfully moved into medical schools, law schools, business schools, and
in some of these graduate programs now constitute a majority of students.
They engage in athletics and serve in the military.
Success in the workplace has come, with bewildering speed, to
Yet, when the truth is told, most of these young
women really want to marry and have children.
Indeed, a 2001 Gallup Poll indicated that 89 percent of them thought it
“extremely important” to do so (p. 6). The
novels they voraciously buy and read reveal the depth of these young women’s
hunger for a spouse. Whitehead
seriously studied the “Chick Lit” which has proven so popular in recent
years. Great literature it is not.
But it does demonstrate the indestructible desire in the heart of most
women. Thirty years ago, when nearly
90 percent of the nation’s women married before they reached the age of 30,
such aspirations were obviously satisfied. Today,
nearly one-fourth of all women are unmarried at that age.
There are today 2.3 million college-educated single women in the 25-34
age group—compared with 185,000 in 1960 (p. 25).
Not finding
a husband, however, does not mean these women are sexually chaste!
The average age of their first sexual intercourse is 17, and “the
majority of young women today will live with a boyfriend before they live with a
husband” (p. 11). Cohabitation has
become a widely practiced—and socially acceptable—pattern for folks in their
20s. It’s the “signature
union of the emerging relationships system” (p. 116), and more young women
first live together with a man than marry one.
“Women often have sex with their boyfriend before they get to know him
well as a human being” (p. 29). Though
initially exciting and satisfying, women (unlike men) ultimately find
cohabitation a dead end road. All
too often, what they thought was a commitment that would merge into marriage
was, from the man’s perspective, simply an attractive arrangement providing
free sex and homey comforts. Understandably,
“the benefits of cohabitation for men help to explain why there is no
courtship crisis for high achieving young men” (p. 124).
Indeed, Whitehead laments: “If
a corps of mischievous social engineers had deliberately set out to create
confusion and uncertainty in the new single woman’s search for love, they
couldn’t have come up with a more effective device than
cohabitation-as-courtship” (p. 127).
Single women frequently find themselves dating—or
living with—“Mr. Not Ready.” After
investing much energy and attention to a series of “Mr. Not Readys,” they
remain unwed in their 30s. Conversely,
the family-oriented single men, rather than courting career women, more often
select “younger women who are not as committed to serious careers or not as
far along in their careers as she is” (p. 36).
They discover, as a greeting card says:
“’Why are men like parking spaces?
All the good ones are taken’” (p. 40).
Putting marriage on hold while you pursue a career until you’re 30 may
very well mean losing the opportunity to marry and have children.
By consenting to cohabit women discourage their
“lovers” from marrying them. “Because
men see marital commitment as a status, they take seriously the formal, legal,
and public events, ceremonies, and rituals that mark the change in their status
from ‘not married’ to ‘married.’ They
assign far less weight to the informal, intimate, and private gestures and
understandings that serve, for a woman, as benchmarks along the way to
marriage” (p. 143).
Having described and explained the plight of the
women she’s studied, Whitehead has little to say concerning a solution.
She—like her two unmarried daughters, now in their 30s—resolutely
defends the career track that seems to create the very problem she laments.
Though she observes the problems associated with cohabitation, she makes
no moral judgment concerning it. If
what Christians traditionally called “living in sin” is wrong to Whitehead
it’s only because it fails to lead to a more permanent “relationship”
wherein children can be born and reared. Her
morally indifferent social science simply fails to provide any reason to condemn
the very social patterns so manifestly harmful to both men and women.
Yet, for painting an honest portrait of women without “good men” she
must be praised.
*
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Providing a very personal perspective, bringing to
the discussion the wisdom of a lifetime, incorporating
insights derived from rearing four children and taking delight in 10
grandchildren, Midge Decter has written a “memoir of my life as a woman,”
An Old Wife’s Tale: My
Seven Decades in Love and War (New York: ReganBooks,
c. 2001). Born to a Jewish family in
She especially pondered “the true Woman Problem.
Not the oppression of women, to say the least a laughable proposition in
the United States of America, nor the glass ceiling that so many have been
relentlessly calling attention to, but rather a seemingly never-to-be-mediated
internal clash of ambitions: the
ambition to make oneself a noticeable place in the world and the ambition to be
a good mother” (p. 51). She began
to discern the problem when highly successful women, in private conversation,
overflowed, like broken dams, with assorted grievances regarding their husbands
(or their lack thereof). She then
began to study women’s literature, such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique, a best-seller that she found “both intellectually and stylistically
very crude. It was also unbelievably
insulting to ordinary housewives, written on the level and in exactly the kind
of lingo previously used by a number of pop sociologists to denigrate the
postwar lives of the ordinary people” of America (p. 69).
At the time, Decter failed to see that Frieden’s book was more than
simply “another in the series of generally left-inspired attacks on the nature
of American society” (p. 71). It
was, in fact, along with the anti-war protests and other manifestations of the
rebellious ‘60s, a thoroughly pernicious attack on the culture only strong
families can sustain.
Decter sensed that as women following Frieden
became more vitriolic and aggressive, men retreated into silence, lest they be
judged anti-female. And yet,
ironically, “the movement that began with the claim that it was out to make a
real revolution in women’s lives began to define the various forms of male
withdrawal from combat as victories, whereas the truth was they were for the
most part expressions of the deepest (and in most cases to this day
unrecognized) contempt” (p. 90). As
she read and thought and observed, staying at home with her youngsters, she
decided to write a book, titled The New Chastity, “in which I faithfully stuck
to the movement’s own sources and then compared it with the truths I knew on
my own pulse about what women want and how they feel” (p. 93).
Published in 1972, calling into question the most passionately held
articles of faith in the feminist movement, this book instantly catapulted
Decter to something of a celebrity status—a woman willing to dispute the
claims of the women’s movement! For
her efforts NOW gave her its “Aunt Tom” award, a badge of honor for her in
the culture war just begun!
Her militancy solidified during the following
decades as she watched the children of her “liberal” friends suffer under
their parents’ ideological fantasies. “It
is,” she laments, “harrowing to remind oneself of the wreckage visited upon
the children of the famous baby boom who grew up among the so-called enlightened
classes” (p. 106). Drug
addictions, psychiatric treatments, lesbian experimentats, diet disorders—all
symptoms of something seriously awry in the nation’s homes.
Summing up her views, she wrote Liberal Parents, Radical Children, an
indictment of those who give children everything the need, of a material sort,
and neglect the most important things, such as teaching them manners, how to
treat members of the opposite sex, how to live right
At the same time she began to critique feminism,
she and her husband slipped away from the liberal political ideology they had
long espoused. The McGovern
presidential campaign in 1972 signified the “capture of the Democratic party
by the hard Left” (p. 122). A
personal conversation with President Jimmy Carter revealed an intransigent
opposition to the moderate views of Decter and her husband.
So in the ‘70s they left the Left!
They “had to rethink most of what we had once thought, not only about
politics but about a whole slew of things that fall under the category of what
you might call the Natue of Man and God” (p. 125).
Consequently, Norman Podhoretz’s “neo-conservatism,” articulated in
Commentary, helped guide the ascendant conservative movement that triumphed with
Ronald Reagan.
Because she’s known both the satisfactions of
professional success and family bonds, she weeps to watch young women choosing
careers rather than marriage: “How
sad it is,” she says, in a passage that rather sums up her treatise, “that
the movement claiming to liberate women and given them control over their own
lives should have adopted a program in which they deprive females of one of the
most significant means of tasting power and control.
All the law and medical degrees in the world will not make up for what
women have been losing in their relations with men, for to become tough and
demanding as feminism has defined the process of their taking control is as
nothing compared with being hungered for and, later on in life, indispensable”
(p. 196).
Astute, engaging, filled with the wisdom of a
maturity, An Old Wife’s Tale could help young women hoping to discover how to
become one!
***********************************
If you need to be alarmed about the future of the
nation’s youths, read Meg Meeker’s Epidemic:
How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids (Washington:
LifeLine Pressc. 2002). A
medical doctor who practiced pediatric and adolescent medicine for 20 years, a
fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a fellow of the National
Advisory Board of the Medical Institute, she brings to this treatise both the
data and the passion needed to alert us to a momentous problem.
In Elayne Bennett’s judgment, “I truly believe Epidemic is the most
important book that anyone who lives or works with teenagers should read, and
read now. Not only does Meg Meeker
vividly explain the problem, she explains the solution.”
In Part One Meeker declares “the epidemic is
here.” She blends both personal
anecdotes and statistics to point out the pervasiveness of Sexually Transmitted
Diseases. In 1960, syphilis and
gonorrhea were the two STDs that concerned physicians, and both of them could be
treated if detected early. Forty
years later, there are dozens of them—perhaps 100!—and some have no known
cure. “Every day, 8000 teens will
become infected with a new STD” (p. 3). Of
the sexually active teens, fully one-fourth carry a STD.
A British study indicates “that almost half of all girls are likely to
become infected with an STD during their very first sexual experience” (p.
12).
More than 45
million Americans carry an incurable herpes virus!
And kids engaging in oral sex, taking it to be “safe” since no
pregnancy results, easily spread herpes throughout the population.
Sadly, President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky “gave new
meaning to the word ‘sex,’ and taught an entire nation of teenagers that as
long as you didn’t have ‘vaginal penetration,’ you really weren’t having
‘sex’” (p. 145). “HPV, one
of the most prevalent sexually transmitted diseases,” directly causes “99.7%
of cervical cancer cases and the deaths of nearly 5000 women each year” (p.
16). Some 75% of sexually active
people now carry HPV! AIDS continues
to haunt us, and increasing numbers of women how carry the HIV infection.
Accompanying the physical problems, STDs also inflict grave emotional harm on youngsters. Amazingly, Meeker has “asked hundreds of teenage girls whether or not they like having sex, and I can count on one hand those who said they did” (p. 78). Severing the act from the lasting context of love and marriage renders it heartbreaking, for sex is ultimately “a spiritual experience” (p. 81). Consequently, one of the main reasons for teen “depression is sex” severed from its proper context (p. 63). Suicide now ranks as the third leading cause of young people’s deaths. Fully one-third of our teens have contemplated suicide! Rather than a joyous experience, sex has become a source of incredible pain!
"One
classic example of how kids turn this rage inward is the preponderance of body
piercing. Punching holes in intimate
parts of their bodies, such as their lips, tongue, belly button, or even vagina,
sends a message to the world: ‘I
am hurting this intimate part of myself because I don’t like who I am.’
When girls pierce the sexual parts of their bodies, their labia and
nipples (some so severely that they’ll never be able to nurse a baby),
they’re saying: ‘I am cutting on
my womanhood. This is anger turned
upon the self’” (p. 72).
All of this results, Meeker declares, from the
sexual revolution birthed in the ‘60s. “With
the coming of that revolution, my own generation demanded previously
unheard-of-sexual freedom and promiscuity. We
may have gotten what we thought we wanted, but the ride wasn’t free.
Countless children are now paying the price” (p. 33).
Yet it’s reinforced by the dominant powers of our culture.
Young women are “encouraged to expose every inch of skin they can get
away with,” but “in doing so, girls are taught that their bodies are not
worth protecting” (p. 73). This,
Meeker says, violates one of the most basic feminine instincts, for like
self-preservation the preservation of one’s virginity is “hard-wired into
our psyches” (p. 73).
Television,
arguably our most influential medium, broadcasts highly sexualized programs,
with men and women sexually active, but only one percent of folks having sex on
TV are married! (p. 126).
“On television today, teens are exposed to homosexual sex, oral sex,
and multiple partner sex” (p. 126). All
this is done under the artifice of “artistic expression” or “free
speech.” How, ironic, Meeker
notes, for “Selling sex to teens is just as bad as selling them cigarettes and
alcohol. Can you imagine the public
outrage of parents if movies, magazines, and music incorporated glamorous
smoking imagery to the same degree they do sexual content?” (p. 140).
The sexual revolution, of course, has been fueled
by birth control devices. For years
Dr. Meeker cheerfully prescribed contraceptives for teenagers, thinking they
would insure the vaunted “safe sex” encouraged by the culture.
She failed to envision how contraceptives would contribute to the
proliferation of STDs. “While we
physicians handed out oral contraceptives, chlamydia rates rose.
While we gave injections of Depo-Provera, the numbers of HPV rose.
And while we handed out condoms to teens, we say syphilis outbreaks and
genital herpes climb” (p. 95). The
proverbial law of unintended consequences seems demonstrated herein.
For though contraceptives prevent births they routinely fail to provide
even minimal protection against STDs. Condoms,
especially, though they may protect against some diseases, have little value in
preventing the spread of many of them. Importantly,
in giving teenagers condoms, adults have informed them that they aren’t
expected to control their desires. Since
they’re going to “do it,” just make sure their activities cause the least
harm!
Epidemic paints a bleak portrait!
What little hope there is for our kids, as one might expect, comes from
better parenting. Kids need
trustworthy parents who know what they believe and live in accordance with their
beliefs, who care for them, who insist on good behavior.
Importantly, kids want strong family structures.
“Kids like having someone they love set high standards because it
demonstrates faith that they can meet these standards” (p. 220).
Other adults—in family, church, school, or neighborhood—also help.
Sexually active teens are seeking something lacking in their lives.
If that something is satisfied by loving adults, they are less likely to
go astray. And they will be spared
the anguish of the epidemic sweeping the nation.