Men at Work

April 3, 2006

Redneck Peril finds candidates for Husband of the Year.

And the very intelligent Michael Liccione is trying to feel his way past "Men Do; Women Be," not helped by the musing of the overcrowded Benedictine longing to be Hindu...

Men need to create a 'caste' something like was done in the time of the jesuit high times of 17th 18th century...men who wish to pursue wisdom for that purpose alone...ultimately to seek god....there needs be a social status something like the hindu grant the brahmin class.

A response from a bemused off-site female reader:

Incidentally, unlike the Raccoons' Lodge upstairs from the neighborhood saloon, no "brahmin" caste was ever open to all and sundry men. Who will be the elite permitted to so self-define and escape the henhouse?

And isn't that what the Desert Fathers and all the contemplative orders were about? Isn't the commenter in one? If not, can't one be found? Hermitages still exist, in one form or another.

The legitimate anguish of men over female encroachment and their own failed headship is painful to see, but, without diminishing the search for solutions, mightn't it be regarded part of this century's Cross to be borne, the consequences of the Fall, an ambiguity that has to be lived? It's not a picnic for orthodox women, either, especially given its impact on the men and the charmlessness of so many of our Roaring Fellow Women. And yet the Purdah bottle has not only popped its cork, it has rolled under the curb past the grate and is gone. That tube of toothpaste is flattened as if by a steamroller -- uncircumcised unsilenced spinsters parade on every public street.

None of the solutions sound much like the Kingdom to come. Premature optimization doesn't work here, either.

Slippery slopes in the other direction, sparse antique maps in tiny print, no presumptive utopias for the desperate. Earplugs, prayer, and a new sense of individual purpose -- magnifying love not power -- is about all the bright ideas we have at this late hour.

Update:
All in good gender-referential fun:

Japanese robot wrestling. This ought to clear the room of women, other than photographers on assignment, after a few minutes. Via YARGB

Today's Rose is Rose:

We'll bet he will.