This posting should be paired with the posting below on Parenting Girls. Here we have some parenting advice that might actually do some good. It is a blog post by Penelope Trunk (via Instapundit) about how imperative it is to be clear eyed in How to pick a husband if you want to have kids. It pretty well leaves any notions of love and romance out of the picture and instead offers some practical advice for young girls entering the mating game. Here is the opening para; the rest follows directly from the initial premise:

You cannot pick a husband to have kids with until you know if you want to work full-time while you are raising them. Some women will say they know for sure that they do want to work full-time. Most women will say that they don’t know for sure. But there are actually only two choices: be a breadwinner or marry a breadwinner. Then, within those two choices, there are a few strategies you could use.

The advice is sound and sensible and after you’ve read that, you could go onto why divorce is immature and selfish and should not be done.

There is an article by Kate Figes on the editorial page of The Age that is a wonder to read. It is about parenting girls. First, however, we must introduce Ms Figes. She is obviously a formidable presence and must know a thing or two about such issues.

Kate Figes is the author of Because of Her Sex: the Myth of Equal Opportunity for Women; Life After Birth; The Terrible Teens and The Big Fat Bitch Book.

Now, I am of the opinion that since the sexual revolution of the 1960s being a girl has been a wilderness of terrors with no socially sanctioned refuge. Girls, you are on your own and it must often be terrible. Ms Figes would seem to think the same:

The distress of young girls is clearly visible in the rising rates of mental health problems, binge drinking, eating disorders and the rampant growth of bullying in our schools. Girls are now expected to be all things – attractive, thin, good, successful, happy, kind, loving, self-sufficient; perfect, in other words, within an imperfect world that still does not give women the equal status they deserve.

She does not attribute these problems to feminism itself but comes up with the usual explanation for anyone on the left:

[When author Steve Biddulph states that] ‘never before has girlhood been under such a sustained assault’, he is right. Young girls have become a soft target for big business; messages propagated through television and advertising tend to accentuate female sexualised imagery and their bodies rather than their brains. Consequently, everywhere a young girl goes ‘she sees messages that make her feel that she is not good enough’.

Well that’s one explanation. But this I found quite an admission, if an admission it is intended to be:

My daughters are intelligent, capable, beautiful, ambitious and kind people and I couldn’t be more proud of them. But I also see how they cannot help but internalise the message that they are not attractive, thin or sexy enough, and need regular, repeated reassurances that they are, in fact, utterly stunning. [My bolding]

Do they really need regular and repeated assurances that they are “utterly stunning”? If you ask me, these girls do not seem have the kinds of personalities that would take the hard knocks the world will inevitably and repeatedly rain on anyone in a competitive environment. These are girls unprepared for life but will have a bagful of excuses ready made for any and all occasions.

Then there is this which I will pass over without comment but is pretty indicative of a failure to understand how things work and will always work in the world inhabited by the human species.

I have no doubt that countless girls are growing up profoundly confused by the conflicting messages they are given. Take sex. On the one hand they are as entitled to sexual exploration and fulfilment as the boys. They feel sexy and are understandably interested in sex. They are encouraged by the boys to reveal body parts that can be instantly messaged from phone to phone. But the prevailing ethos is still that ‘good’ girls ‘don’t’. ‘Slag’ is the number one insult hurled at girls by both sexes and rumours almost always trash another girl’s reputation. Boys are never tarnished in the same way. [My bolding]

This is clearly a woman who has had the cushiest human existence, not comparable to any of the women whose stories are found everywhere across the world and who are genuinely oppressed. In Australia, to talk of “a world that is still so profoundly unequal in the treatment of men and women” shows a pampered life with no real adversity, and certainly with few obstacles that have been put in her way because she is a female. She finishes with this, that “every girl is somebody’s sister, mother or wife”. That is a not an untypical logical flaw since there are plenty of girls who are no one’s sister, mother or wife. What she meant to say is that for every male, their sisters, wives and daughters, if they exist, are woman as are their mothers. Which is why for most of us males brought up in this culture, accusations of being anti-women is irritating and completely untrue.

This is from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:

One characteristic of modern feminism is the strong belief that men are not entitled to judge women for anything, coupled with the equally strong belief that women are entitled to judge men for everything.

It comes with this story which ends with these views about the Mr Nice Guy excuse for not finding love:

Why do these guys turn to the Nice Guy™ narrative to explain their predicament? Partly because they’re been weaned on Hollywood love stories where the geeky best friend gets the girl just before the credits roll, and on tough love self-help that urges men to act like douches if they want to get laid.

Partly because, if you’re someone who hasn’t had much luck in the romance department, it’s less heart-breaking to fall back on the idea that you’re ‘too nice’ (or smart, or intimidating) than that you’re too insecure, or that people just don’t find you sexy. And partly, yes, because on some level they’ve bought into the idea that men’s ‘niceness’ can be exchanged for sexual access.

But if it’s wrong to assume that if you treat someone nicely enough, they’ll eventually fall in love with you, surely it’s also wrong to conclude that if someone is a serial sexual reject, it must be because they’re a jerk.

Life is more complicated than that. Sometimes, the person you fall for won’t fall for you in return, no matter how nice you are to them. Sometimes their reasons will be superficial, other times they’ll be deep seated: either way, you will have to accept it. And sometimes, people who make all the same missteps as the Nice Guys of OkCupid will find love nonetheless, however questionable their ‘niceness.’

Better a sexual revolution than no revolution at all as my old mate . . . who was it who used to say that? Anyway, not as bad as other kinds of revolutions would have been but we have been left with a sexual wilderness and little in the way of guidance to the young other than some version of “just do it”. We too were told to just do it too but we had been brought up to know that we shouldn’t so we didn’t. That was a restraint of sorts. Now this generation and probably the one before has had to make up their own rules of restraint. Since every boy is just about ready to do it at the drop of a hat, the discipline has to come from the girls. If they don’t provide it you can be sure the boys won’t.

So why bring this up? you ask. Well, there’s this article in The Mail Online with the title, “I’ve lived through the greatest revolution in sexual mores in our history. The damage it’s done appals me”. That’s my view exactly and you have to be something like our age even to be young enough to notice that things have changed since only those my age or older would have been there before the sexual wilderness we now find ourselves in. Adultery (what’s that?), sexual disease, abortion, divorce – misery enough to go around.

The truth is that the Sexual Revolution had the power to alter our way of life, but it could not alter our essential nature; it could not alter the reality of who and what we are as human beings.

It made nearly everyone feel that they were free, or free-er, than their parents had been — free to smoke pot, free to sleep around, free to pursue the passing dream of what felt, at the time, like overwhelming love — an emotion which very seldom lasts, and a word which is meaningless unless its definition includes commitment.

How easy it was to dismiss old-fashioned sexual morality as ‘suburban’, as a prison for the human soul. How easy it was to laugh at the ‘prudes’ who questioned the wisdom of what was happening in the Sexual Revolution.

About one-third of marriages in Britain end in divorce.

Yet, as the opinion poll shows, most of us feel at a very deep level that what will make us very happy is not romping with a succession of lovers.

In fact, it is having a long-lasting, stable relationship, having children, and maintaining, if possible, lifelong marriage.

But does he have a solution? No, not really. He thinks it will peter out as the next generations find a new equilibrium and work to maintain stability, peace and a happy home in its midst.

I have not conducted a scientific survey, but my impression, based on anecdotal evidence and the lives of the children of my contemporaries, is that they are far less badly behaved, and far more sensible, than we were.

My guess is that the backlash will be even greater in the wake of the whole Jimmy Savile affair, and in reaction against the miserable world which my generation has handed on to our children — with our confused sexual morality, and our broken homes.

Our generation, who started to grow up ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP’ got it all so horribly wrong.

We ignored the obvious fact that moral conventions develop in human societies for a reason.

We may have thought it was ‘hypocritical’ to condemn any form of sexual behaviour, and we may have dismissed the undoubted happiness felt by married people as stuffy, repressed and old hat.

But we were wrong, wrong, wrong.

Two generations have grown up — comprising children of selfish grown-ups who put their own momentary emotional needs and impulses before family stability and the needs of their children.

However, I don’t think this behaviour can last much longer. The price we all pay for the fragmentation of society, caused by the break-up of so many homes, will surely lead to a massive rethink.

At least, let’s hope so.

Maybe. But I talk to enough of these young women to make me despair that anyone can convince them that when they get to fifty say they will want to have children around and when they get to around seventy what they will want around are their children, grandchildren and someone they have been married to for about forty years. But if they’re going to arrange that they had better do it in their thirties, and that is just the wrong time to tell so many of these people how to prepare for that bleak future that will be upon them soon enough.

This is quite extraordinary. It is a post about an environmentalist, Mark Lynas, who according to the article had led the fight against GMOs [genetically modified organisms (I’m guessing what the “O” stands for)] who now says he was completely wrong!

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering—what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

He’s not totally Mr Seen-the-Light since he makes this analogy, “to vilify GMOs is to be as anti-science as climate-change deniers” but it is remarkable all the same. No one on the left does this. Usually, to keep their friends and get invited to all the right parties, they just go quiet. Seldom do they put out 5000 word manifestos about how wrong they had been. Maybe it’s enough that he has swapped over to global warming to stay onside with the rest of his crowd. But still, you must give him credit for this, late to the party though he may have been:

The GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe. . . . You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food.

That’s about the same likelihood as drowning because the seas have risen, but that’s still an issue in play. Maybe twenty years from now we will hear from Michael Mann about how wrong the global warming scares had been (around the time the next ice age begins). In the meantime, this will have to do.

The left is past all caring about what you or anyone else might think. They protect themselves by wrapping themselves in a miasma of smug complacency about their goodness and virtue and its absence in others. It is a confidence trick on the poor, the young and the productive. Why any of these would vote for parties that only make them worse off while pretending they care oh so much is the great question of our age.

If the parties of the right cannot work out how to explain to the lower half of the income distribution on which side their bread is buttered they will seldom win elections and our social and economic conditions will continue to crumble. The predatory activities of our elites under the name of socialism or progressivism or liberalism or whatever else they decide to call their covering ideologies will pick the bones of our societies clean until there really is collapse.

This is Roger Simon via Instapundit looking at this same problem.

Leftism has devolved into a kind of scam run not only on others but also on the self. Leftists are brilliant at convincing themselves of their own altruism and then broadcasting it to the public, thus providing cover for the most conventionally greedy and selfish behaviors. We see that in our society all the time: the quondam Marxists of Hollywood, the media, and the academy blathering on about economic equality while living lives the Medici could not have dreamed of.

Part of this construct is a ‘prevent game,’ a public persona and system erected so privilege cannot be questioned or undermined. A nomenklatura more successful and sophisticated than anything ever conceived in the Soviet Union. The result of this is a highly stratified society. As is well known but scarcely reported, blacks and Latinos have actually done worse under Obama than other groups. Normally, that would be unconscionable, considering the rhetoric. But as we know, it’s all about the rhetoric. Reality is unimportant — an inconvenience.

Relatively unbridled capitalism has always the best way out of this, the best way to true social mobility, but our nomenklatura doesn’t want to admit this because it might threaten them and their perquisites. It would blow their cover.