Tag: feminism

Lazy Sunday XXXIV: The Desperate Search for Meaning Series

The Portly Politico47 Comments

Next to Halloween and Christmas, today is the most wonderful of the year—it’s the day that the clock falls back an hour!  Sure, that means I’ll never see the sun for the next few months, as I’ll spend the dwindling daylight hours inside a classroom, but at least I got an extra hour of sleep this morning.

This week saw a good bit of reflecting on what is important in life (like ghost stories), so I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on “The Desperate Search for Meaning” series of posts.  It will also help to aggregate those posts into one place.

  • “The Desperate Search for Meaning” – The post that started this impromptu series (and the subject of this week’s Flashback Friday featurette), this essay was about a New Age healer, Audrey Kitching, who exploited vulnerable women into working in slave-like conditions.  Kitching bamboozled these women with her gauzy, neo-spiritualist babble; her thin sense of meaning of belonging roped them in, as they desperately attempted to fill a void in their lives—and that doesn’t even include all the women who bought Kitching’s fraudulent products.  It’s a sad story, one I think is indicative of our times.
  • “The Desperate Search for Meaning, Part II” – This piece was about a crazy old lady who believes that cancer can be extruded from the body through a series of energy-channeling motions—at least on the surface.  The real focus was that, while this old loon was going through her bizarre ritual, she espoused a cult of death:  having babies is bad because of overpopulation.  It’s the religion of environmentalism, one of the several cults of modern progressivism.  It is a deadly ideology that is, essentially, anti-human.
  • “The Desperate Search for Meaning, Part III: Progressive Power Crystal” – This post looked at an LA Times piece on New Age spirituality, and how it was replacing traditional Christianity as the “faith” of young Americans.  That’s all tied up with progressivism’s imperial and totalitarian ambitions—all off these anti-Christian, anti-American movements are of a piece, serving similar ends.  As I write at the end of the post:

    “Even if our elites aren’t specifically Satanists, they’re certainly not Christians.  Their religion is progressivism, an jumble of ideologies that, at bottoms, rejects Christianity and its view of human nature.  Their gods are power and envy—just like Lucifer.”

  • “The Desperate Search for Meaning IV: Vanity” – This piece pulled from a sermon my pastor gave on Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books of the Bible.  Ecclesiastes is a work of philosophy, in which King Solomon examines his life and finds that all of his pursuits are, ultimately, meaningless:  he will die, and everything he experienced and built will eventually disappear.  Therefore, his only true meaning comes through God.  It’s the earliest form of Christian existentialism ever written (with apologies to Søren Kierkegaard).  It’s also a powerful reminder that this world, in which we are so involved, is fleeting.

That’s it for this Sunday.  Going back through this posts really makes my soul ache for the people that fall for New Age nonsense and neo-paganism.  Good thing I’ve found the One True Faith—the Southern branch of the Free Will Baptist denomination. 😀

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Unspeakable Horror

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Blogger photog has a piece up at his blog, Orion’s Cold Fire, entitled “What I Took Away from the Weekend Horror Fest,” which sums up the root causes of this weekend’s two terrible shootings: fatherless, isolated young men with few prospects, few role models, and an excess of narrow ideology.

As I wrote way back in January, I don’t typically write about shootings, because I don’t have much to add, and because the discussion always (incorrectly) focuses on controlling guns, not on addressing the real underlying issue.  The United States doesn’t have a gun problem; we have a God problem.  More precisely, we’ve jettisoned any sense of a transcendent moral order in favor relativism and a form of neo-paganism.

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Reblogs: Of Grills and Men

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Traditional Christian blogger Dalrock wrote two posts Monday about grilling, specifically grilling in the context of traditional masculinity and fatherhood.  The occasion for these posts is the infamous Gillette razor ad, which basically scolds men for not being noodle-wristed soy boys and pliant betas.

I really thought that after 2016, when a swaggering alpha male with a supermodel wife won the presidency, we’d see fewer of these hectoring, pedantic social justice ads.  Sadly, feminized, postmodern Corporate America still allows radical feminists to scare off their customers.

If you’ve seen the ad, you’ll recall there’s a scene with a row of dads grilling in an endless backyard, intoning “boys will boys” while two kids wail on each other (as if that’s an accurate depiction of fatherhood).  Dalrock’s first post Monday, “The symbolism of the line of men grilling in the Gilette ad,” quotes from a piece from Post Millenial, in which the author points out the significance of that scene (Dalrock’s quotation of Barbara Kay’s “‘Toxic Masculinity’ in Advertising:  Keeping Women Scared and Men Shamed“):

For what does a neatly-dressed man standing behind a barbecue signify? Think of every Father’s Day ad you have ever seen. How many of them feature barbecue tools? Maybe 50%? Why? Because when men barbecue, they are usually in a back yard. If men have a back yard, it means they live in a house. If they have a house, they are generally married with children. When men barbecue, they are usually feeding their families and friends and having fun doing it. In other words, barbecue men are deeply invested in family life.

They are, in short, fathers. And what is the easiest way to produce boys who do not understand or respect the boundaries between positive and negative masculinity? Take away their fathers.

…

The barbecue men are the reason most boys with loving fathers grow up to be strong, productive men: men who will never be a threat to anyone—except to bad guys who never learned the boundaries for—or how to positively channel—aggression, because so many of them had no fathers to teach them.

The ad is not just an attack on men, per se, but on married fathers, a key demographic in the war against unruly hooligans.  Let’s be clear here:  the problem isn’t “toxic masculinity”; it’s a lack of masculinity.  Boys without fathers are the major problem.

Consider the male child of a single mother:  outside of an uncle or grandfather, his formative years will be devoid of male influence.  Nearly all of his teachers will be female until at least middle school.  His absent father will be a lingering shadow in his life, unconsciously imprinting him with the idea that men are unreliable and that he has no obligation to his hypothetical future offspring.  Such a child has a higher propensity for loafer-lightening flamboyance (probably).  There are a host of negative consequences of fatherlessness.

Dalrock’s second piece looks at a 2015 Slate “think-piece” about a man who hates himself for loving to grill.  It is painful to read the quotations from the essay.  It affirms a central tenant of postmodern political philosophy, especially radical feminism:  you’re not allowed to enjoy anything.

Dalrock elaborates in that piece that the point is to feminize grilling; that is, to bring women into a traditionally male space, and to make men feel bad if they want to keep it a male space.  This topic is a major theme of Dalrock’s writing:  the forced infiltration of men’s private spaces, such as social clubs, with women, depriving men of any kind of separate world they can enjoy on their own terms.

Check out the pieces linked (caution:  you will cringe incredibly hard reading that Slate piece, but it is from Slate, after all) and leave your comments below.