SelwynDuke.com

She’s No Fluke: Is the Word “Slut” Still Relevant?

By Selwyn Duke

A woman close to me once characterized the sea change in our society well. “Years ago you knew who the bad girls were,” said she. “Now you know who the good girls are.”

And the good boys get condemned for not pretending the bad girls are good.

When Conservatives Wax Liberal: Is Sex a Qualification?

By Selwyn Duke

Is it a conservative position that only women are qualified to comment on abortion?  A writer named Leann Horrocks certainly seems to think so.

In an American Thinker piece titled, "Contraception, the New Useful Passion," Horrocks does make some good points about how the left could turn the birth-control issue to its advantage and expand contraception to include even abortion.  Yet she also makes this claim:

"As a woman, I am qualified to state the following very clearly: there is no issue less suited to public discussion than abortion.  Like it or not, it is a personal decision."

“Gender-neutral” Childrearing: When a Sexual Hang-up Leads to Child Abuse

By Selwyn Duke

First there was “Pop” in Sweden, then “Storm” in Canada. Now out of Britain comes Sasha, a boy, we hear, who is being raised by his parents in a “sex-neutral” fashion. And this isn’t just your modernistic grandmother’s neutrality, where she didn’t want to push toy guns and trucks on her son. Sasha’s parents, Beck Laxton and “partner,” as he’s described, Kieran Cooper, are going the full feminist monty. 

On Sasha’s birth announcement, there was no indication of sex; and for years Laxton wouldn’t use the pronoun “he” when referring to him on her blog, but instead just indentified him as “the infant.” She explained why in an interview with the Cambridge News, stating, “I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping. Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Therefore, writes Piper Weiss at Shine:

Sasha dresses in clothes he likes — be it a hand-me-downs [sic] from his sister or his brother. The big no-no's are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha's dressed in a shiny pink girl's swimsuit. "Children like sparkly things," says Beck. "And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?"

Laxton clearly doesn’t know — and doesn’t seem to care. After all, writes Weiss, “[Laxton is] open to her son pursing any career or sexual preference he chooses….” Yes, well, as long as, I suppose, it’s not “hyper-masculine.” This brings me to my first point.

Read the rest here.

The Security Sex

By Selwyn Duke

We have all heard about the sex gap in voting patterns.  This is the phenomenon whereby, in every election, women are far more likely to support liberal candidates than men are.  For instance, in 1996, Bill Clinton captured 54 percent of the women’s vote but only 43 percent of the men’s.  And in subsequent elections, the male-female gap has been as follows: in 2000, Al Gore, 42-54; in 2004, John Kerry, 41-51; and in 2008, Barack Obama, 49-56.  In fact, even in the watershed election of 2010, during which we heard about the rise of the conservative woman, the fairer sex favored Democrats by 1 point, 49 to 48.  The Republican victories were attributable to a sex gap (I don’t use the word “gender”) that was as wide as ever, ranging from 4 to 19 points.

Only National Collapse Will End America’s Spending Problem

By Selwyn Duke

While many are complaining about the recent debt-ceiling deal, is it really the issue? Sure, statists say that the Republicans steered us toward crisis with their initial unwillingness to compromise, while traditionalists complain that the GOP folded and “let us down again.” Our problems, however, lie not in our politicians but in ourselves.

Just so you know, my solution to our spending woes would be to once again limit the central government to only that which our Constitution dictates it may do, which would cause its budget to immediately shrink by at least two-thirds — and probably far more. Of course, this would involve eliminating bureaucracies such as the Department of Education, Environmental Protection Agency, and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and programs such as Social Security and federally provided food stamps. There would be nothing to fear, either, as there is much duplication here; for example, states have their own environmental and education agencies and other bureaucracies/programs that render the feds’ corresponding ones redundant. And why are we paying for two different levels of government to do the same thing? As for third-rail program Social Security, it could be devolved to the states, whose residents could then decide what its future would be.

Oh, this is unrealistic and will never happen, you say?

You’re right.

And it was just as unrealistic to think that Republicans, who control only one-half of one-third of the government — and very little of the media, which shapes public opinion — would deliver a Tea Party plan in a spending-party culture.

Read the rest here.

U.S. Students Ignorant of History; Will Repeat Mistakes of Past

By Selwyn Duke

Once again, a study has show that American students are woefully ignorant of history. Test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress demonstrate, writes the Wall Street Journal, that only “20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’…” and only 12 percent of 12th-graders were so. In fact, their knowledge is so lacking that fewer than “a quarter of American 12th-graders knew China was North Korea's ally during the Korean War, and only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence,” the paper continued. Other studies have shown similarly stunning results. In 2008, the New York Times wrote about how fewer than “half of American teenagers…knew when the Civil War was fought, and one-quarter thought that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World sometime after 1750, not in 1492.” The Times also reported that “[a]bout a quarter of the teenagers surveyed were unable to correctly identify Adolf Hitler as Germany’s chancellor during World War II, instead identifying him variously as a munitions maker, an Austrian premier and the German Kaiser.”

Now, of course, this educational dysfunction inspires many to sound the alarm about America’s decline. And we hear many proposed solutions. Unfortunately, though, the typical ones will do nothing to right the ship.

Read the rest here.

Desexing Children: The Acceptable Abuse

By Selwyn Duke

“We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...).” So wrote parents David Stocker and Kathy Witterick after the birth of their third child, who they really did name “Storm.”

This isn’t the first story about parents who don’t want their children to be influenced by others’ sex-role expectations. In 2009, a Swedish couple, citing the feminist philosophy stating that “gender is a social construction,” refused to reveal the sex of their 2 ½-year-old child “Pop” (I have it on good authority, from Snap and Crackle, that it’s a boy).

Witterick says her inspiration came from “X: A Fabulous Child's Story,” a fictional account of a character who hides his biological sex from others. Well, we can only be thankful that she didn’t read a story about Carthaginian infant sacrifice.

Read the rest here.

Barack Obama’s Paycheck Unfairness Act

By Selwyn Duke

If you’re a stay-at-home mom, I don’t think you’ll like a policy that makes it harder for your husband to support your family. Yet Barack Obama is advocating just such a policy — it’s called the “Paycheck Fairness Act” (PFA).

While pushing the legislation in a radio address this past Saturday, Obama said, “Today, women still earn on average only about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s a huge discrepancy.” It certainly is, and the implication is that it’s a function of discrimination. But is this true?

Read the rest here.

Wrestling with Morality: Boys vs. Girls on the Mat

By Selwyn Duke

Imagine that you’re a young adolescent boy.  Like many your age, you’re shy around girls, perhaps to the point at which even talking to one might make your heart race.  You also like sports, so you go out for your school’s wrestling team.  Then, lo and behold, you’re at a meet, and something hits you like a load of bricks.

Your opponent is going to be a girl. 

You’re going to have to grapple with her.  In front of spectators.  Touching—and being touched in—intimate places.

The Feminocracy: Phony Rape Claims against Julian Assange

By Selwyn Duke

You can believe me when I say that I have no affection for Julian Assange. It’s clear that he’s a self-centered publicity seeker who, in grand leftist style, will subordinate the good of others to his own ambitions. But this doesn’t mean I’m incapable of judging him fairly, and, frankly, I’ve never heard anything more preposterous than the “rape” charges currently leveled against him.

Here’s a thumbnail version of the story that was presented in The Daily Mail: On August 11, Assange arrived in Stockholm, Sweden to give a speech at a seminar hosted by the left-wing Brotherhood Movement. His contact person — a woman the newspaper will identify only as “Sarah” (owing to ongoing legal proceedings) — had invited him to stay in her Stockholm apartment, and, you guessed it, they ended up sleeping together. Unbeknownst to Sarah at the time, however, Assange had already slept with another, much younger leftist admirer the Mail calls “Jessica.”

Jessica was worried, however. Because Assange refused to wear a condom, she was concerned she might be pregnant or have contracted a disease. Seeking an ear to bend, she placed a phone call to Sarah, who, as luck (or bad luck, from Assange’s perspective) would have it, she happened to have met during the Brotherhood Movement meeting. The women ended up comparing notes and realized they had been two-timed. That’s when the trouble began.

Read the rest here.