Sort of political Monday

How in the world did that come up?
Let me preface this by saying I think the whole men are acting like frat boys because women are too threatening or something thesis is a crock. I suspect a lot of men are behaving like frat boys for the simple reason they can. It doesn't seem to be making them happy—a point I'll came back to next Monday—but it's not hard to see why they might try it just as it isn't hard to see why some women decide to be real-life Samantha Joneses.

That said, the author of the latest book pushing the men are being pussy-whipped into permanent frathood drew a really strange response the other day. The response is below the fold because I want readers to see the quote that caused the response naked first. Here it is:

Before [today], the fact is that primarily, a 20-year-old woman would have been a wife and a mother,” author Kay Hymowitz told the crowd of about 100 for the Manhattan Institute in New York City. Men would have been mowing lawns and changing the oil in their family sedans instead of playing video games and watching television. In previous decades, adults in their 20s and 30s were too busy with real life for such empty entertainment, Hymowitz says. “They didn’t live with roommates in Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Dupont Circle in D.C.

Read it a couple of times and try to imagine different things you might see to criticize in that quote (and I can see several myself). Then click the link and lean what Amanda Marcotte saw.

I think it’s important to remember that no matter how much huffing and puffing and rationalization goes on, a great deal of conservative ideology can be summed up as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”. Or even just the fear that someone might just be having fun, at least without clearing it with the authorities first that they’re the right race and income level to feel pleasure. 

Emphasis added.  How could any sane person (and Marcotte is clearly sane) read the Hymowitz quote above and think that race is a motivating factor? And note that this is someone whose last name is "Marcotte" responding to someone whose last name is "Hymowitz". This is just a hunch but I suspect that Hymowitz knows a thing or two about being a victim of prejudice that Marcotte doesn't.
But really, the level of race obsession here is staggering.

This would be of middling interest if it involved only Amanda Marcotte, but there are two entire generations of intellectuals out there who see everything in terms of race. I recently finished a book called Hole in Our Soul that was completely ruined because author Martha Bayles had this bizarre need to understand every single thing she didn't like about popular music as a product of racism.

You get the feeling that when Bayles or Marcotte trip over the cat they turn around and accuse it of being a racist cat. And there are sports writers who do the same thing.

This would be funny exempt there are very few ways to keep real racism alive than to insist on seeing everything in terms of race.

Why do they do it? Obviously to gain the moral high ground. Any other issue you can think of is a mixed bag.  But pick race and you are automatically on the side of the angels.

This is cruelly easy but the same Amanda Marcotte who sees other people's racism so easily, well she published her first book in 2008. It was called It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. Hmm, it's a jungle. Gee I wonder what sort of image Marcotte chose to use in her book. Here's the link (swallow your coffee before clicking).