April 11, 2013

In case you’re unfamiliar with this charming childhood ritual, the wedgie occurs when boys ambush a chosen victim, corner him, and then pull up his underwear “from the back and . . . it wedges in,” as the character George describes it to his friends Jerry and Elaine.

“Boys are sick,” says an indignant Elaine.

“What do girls do?” Jerry asks.

“Oh,” she responds blithely, “we just tease someone until they develop an eating disorder.”

As anyone who has spent time in a school, an office, or on Planet Earth can tell you, males and females may differ in their methods, but they can be equally mean. In certain circles, however, this age-old wisdom seems to be dissolving. We may, in fact, be officially entering a new age: the Era of Female Sainthood.

Exhibit A is a new book titled “The Athena Doctrine: How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future.” Based on a global survey of 64,000 people in 13 countries and co-written by two best-selling authors, “The Athena Doctrine” argues that so-called “feminine” values are on the rise, ready to solve our problems and transform global economics, governance, and culture for the better.

“A clear majority of people around the world are unhappy with the conduct of men,” declare John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio. In country after country, according to the survey, people have “grown frustrated by a world dominated by codes of what they saw as traditionally masculine thinking and behavior: codes of control, competition, aggression, and black-and-white thinking that have contributed to many of the problems we face today, from wars and income inequality to reckless risk-taking and scandal.”

Whew! Feel guilty yet, guys? According to this book, you should. You should also probably go out and get a pedicure on your gross toes, learn to cook at least three dishes that feature kale as a central ingredient, and watch famed chick flick “The Notebook” repeatedly until you really, really get it, because you men of the world are utter, backward savages.

If you wonder what values “The Athena Doctrine” cites as “feminine,” the short answer is basically anything that sounds vaguely nice or, alternatively, slightly socialist. Women are “loyal”; men are “proud.” Men are “aggressive”; women are “collaborative.” Women share their success; men see success as a “zero-sum game.” Later in the book, enlightened feminine values are given credit for various wonderful micro-finance programs, cutting-edge technological initiatives, and social entrepreneurship projects in places like Kenya and Bhutan, even when in many cases the featured programs were created, started and run by — you can probably see where I’m going here — men.

Now, if I wanted to be sneaky or wily (which, as a woman, you see, I obviously cannot, as it would run against the core of my very being), I might just want to sit back and rest upon the laurels bestowed upon me by books like “The Athena Doctrine.” Women are pure, wise, humble, flexible, and lovable, if a little communistic; men are smelly, greedy Vikings who ransack companies, countries, and cultures with their violent instincts, grog-covered boots, and dumb ideas.

Unfortunately, instead, “The Athena Doctrine” made me want to go out and give someone a compassionate, selfless, feminine, quasi-atomic wedgie. The authors write, in all seriousness, that “hidden agendas and tightly wound power circles” are associated only with men, not women. I really don’t even know where to begin with that assertion, except to suggest that the authors spend the night at a sixth-grade slumber party or attempt to shortchange their wives on the next birthday or major holiday.

“Reason,” the book notes, is also a feminine trait. Now, I say this not to rip the sisterhood, and I also say this as a woman who scored in the 99th percentile on the LSAT logic section (sorry, but that fact hasn’t really done me a whole lot of good until now, so I might as well use it in a column)—but really? Women are more reasonable than men? Isn’t it at least a tie?

In the conclusion to “The Athena Doctrine,” the authors attempt to rectify the fact that they’ve just engaged in a rather elaborate exercise of gender stereotyping. “Men versus women is not a zero-sum game,” they write. “Men can be as caring as women, and women can be as analytical and assertive as men. Our gender is who we are, not what we can be — and we must all see feminine values not as belonging to one gender but as a new form of innovation for today’s world.”

It’s a fitting irony that this week marked the passing of Margaret Thatcher, a true leader and trailblazer. Thatcher recognized the troubling economic realities around her, worked to change them, and, in the course of things, brought Britain back from the brink. More importantly, she was a woman who saw herself as a person first, not as a collection of trite, “feminine” values, identity-centric hang-ups, or gender-based grievances. If we truly want to change the world for the better — to embrace “twenty-first-century progress,” as the writers of this book suggest — Thatcher’s simple formula might be a better place to start.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/04/11/the_age_of_female_sainthood_117905.html

February 18, 2003–More than three months ago, just hours after the U.S. election results rolled in, something rather stunning occurred. On media outlets throughout the nation, before the scarred and trampled body of Campaign 2012 even went cold — indeed, while some votes were still being counted — conservative pundits turned from the too-blue electoral map, flicked the memory of Mitt from their shoulders like a piece of high-end lint, and declared their hope for the future: Marco Rubio.

There was no stop to the campaign season. No time to take a breath. Facing a disappointing loss, many in the right-leaning chattering classes promptly moved on, lining up, as Time magazine recently put it, like ready apostles for the next “Republican Savior.”

Or, as I like to more precisely phrase it, like “slightly crazed 12-year-old girls outside a Taylor Swift concert.” (Ms. Swift, it should be noted, likes to take down her enemies with coy lyrics tied to saccharine songwork. Republicans, as of late, seem to prefer mild panic and a defensive crouch.)

So when (dare I say “if”?) Marco Rubio runs for president in 2016, will his party — torn by squabbles over messaging, marketing, policy priorities, and various factions of social conservatives, libertarians and tea party movement loyalists — finally get their act together? In his new book, “Constitutional Conservatism,” Hoover Institution fellow Peter Berkowitz attempts to chart a way forward.

This is an ambitious task, given that the mixed bag of American right-wingers is the political equivalent of The Bickersons. Hard-core social conservatives tend to think of libertarians as a motley group of impractical Randian atheist anarchists (but then, I repeat myself) who want to start their own country just so they can grow a bunch of drugs.

Libertarians tend to think social conservatives are a bunch of uptight, repressed preppies who mess up every important election with their laser-beam fixation on gay marriage, school prayer, and squelching fun of any kind. (They are also likely annoyed that I haven’t mentioned Rand Paul by now, and fine, I get that. So here’s a big shout-out to Rand Paul and his love of liberty!)

Tea Party activists, meanwhile, tend to think that anyone who is not a Tea Party activist is a weak-kneed, sell-out, establishment pansy-pants.

But without each other, Berkowitz argues in “Constitutional Conservatism,” these groups can do nothing on the electoral stage. The Bickersons are going to have to get along, he notes, or get kicked to the proverbial curb. Tracing evolutions in political thought from Edmund Burke to William F. Buckley Jr. to, yes, George W. Bush, Berkowitz argues that the top priority for conservatives of all stripes is to secure “the principles of liberty embodied in the American Constitution and to pursue reform in light of them.”

The key to political success, he asserts, is moderation: “I do not mean that conniving and cowardly offspring of expedience and ambition that betrays principle to get ahead or just get along. I refer instead to political moderation well understood, which accommodates, balances, and calibrates to translate rival and worthy principles into practice.”

Among other examples, Berkowitz cites the many compromises and balances that went into the making of the Constitution, noting that complete ideological purism can sabotage greater goals.

This translates, he argues, into two big takeaways for today’s right-leaning frenemies. Libertarians need to “come to grips” with the fact that “the era of big government is here to stay.” Any attempt to significantly dismantle the welfare state, for example, is likely to fail, he says; clear-eyed attempts to limit and reform it will be more successful. Social conservatives, meanwhile, need to accept that the sexual revolution has significantly changed our nation’s mores, and that using the federal government to force-feed traditional values is likely to fail, or, worse, backfire.

Berkowitz aims to resolve a dilemma that has faced conservatives for centuries: “reconciling liberty with tradition, order, and virtue.” In broad strokes, his approach makes perfect sense. When it comes to gay marriage, the cultural ship has sailed; social safety nets, it seems obvious to say, share near universal approval.

But the devil, as always, is in the details: “moderation” — whether regarding taxes, spending, or the issues of culture, life and death — is often in the eye of the beholder. In Ye Olde Valley of Unherdable Cats, a cogent, unifying agenda will be difficult to pull together — that is, at least, until the liberal, “blue state” model completely falls flat. Berkowitz also admits the darker side of compromises made in the past, most notably regarding slavery and the ratification of the Constitution.

Quibbles aside — and everyone who hails from the Bickerson family will likely have some small policy bone to pick with this book, ranging from school prayer to the value of George W. Bush’s “freedom and democracy” military agenda — conservatives and libertarians could certainly stand to chill out, step back, and assess Berkowitz’s advice, particularly regarding what government can’t do.

“Constitutional Conservatism” repeatedly notes what Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out nearly two centuries ago: A strong civil society (family, religion, and community groups) is an absolute necessity in a healthy democracy. America’s civil society, at least in terms of competing with the government, seems to be flailing. For people on both sides of the aisle, D.C. often reigns as the go-to, universal problem-solver, which is rather remarkable given that Congress can’t seem to find time to, oh, say, learn math.

So we have our work cut out for us. But to cut everyone a little slack, it’s kind of hard to concentrate these days. Using analysis from the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, the U.K. Guardian recently graded the reading level of every U.S. State of the Union address. The highest score went to James Madison’s 1815 speech, with a grade level of 25.3. It’s all been downhill from there. In 1911, William H. Taft scored a 16.8. In 1963, John F. Kennedy hovered around 12. Barack Obama’s address last week scored a 10.2. “The State of the Union,” the Guardian concludes, no doubt in a self-satisfied, smug British accent, “is dumber.”

Meanwhile, the top media moment from Marco Rubio’s Republican response was his awkward mid-speech gulp of water, which promptly blew up on Twitter and reportedly looped on cable news networks over 200 times. (Keeping things subtle, CNN ran its coverage of “water-gate” with the blazing headline, “CAREER-ENDER?”)

The good news, however, is that Rubio gets the joke. Immediately after his “drink heard ’round the world,” he took to Twitter himself and shot out a close-up photo of the tiny bottle of Poland Spring that started it all. The next day, his campaign started offering Rubio water bottles to donors.

This all may seem silly, given that we’re going bankrupt, watching a North Korean dictator toss nukes around like a crazed drum majorette, and maybe even realizing that the frozen lasagna we ate on our low-budget European vacation is made of horsemeat.

But as the rapper Ice-T once said, “Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.” Or, as author Peter Berkowitz recently told The Washington Post, learn to embrace “the perennial clamor and cacophony of public debate in a free society” and accept “the nature of human beings — very often contentious, narrowly self-interested, and in the grips of passion and poorly-thought-out opinion.”

That, Berkowitz argues, is “for whom the Constitution was designed.”

If you’re not familiar with the show, which follows the largely depressing, sex-fueled lives of four self-centered, fresh-out-of-college Brooklyn women, rest assured: The national media are working industriously to make sure you soon will be very familiar with it, and its importance.

In fact, the year-old “Girls” may have already earned more fevered, deeply analytical reviews than it has viewers. The premiere of the show’s second season, which aired the Sunday before last, earned 866,000 sets of eyeballs, which is rather ho-hum in TV land. By comparison, PBS’s “Downton Abbey,” which apparently features a few scowling British people shuffling about their dusty manor, recently earned a whopping 7.9 million viewers for its third-season premiere.

Pay no attention, however, to that man behind the curtain! “Girls,” which features multiple forms of human degradation in almost every scene (awkward sex, binge eating, mindless drug use, a “funny” abortion, endless f-words, and eyeball-charring, floppy nudity) is, according to New York magazine, “a bold defense (and a searing critique) of the so-called Millennial Generation.” It is “courageous,” asserts the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times calls it is “fresh,” “original,” and “a phenomenon.” It is full of “artistry,” according to a recent Atlantic blog post.

Lest you think that this is some kind of conspiracy — and I do, but more on that later — “Girls” also managed to take home two Golden Globe awards last week. This included a prize for “best comedy,” which makes me think that the Golden Globes might be the Western world’s most elaborate working satire since Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” This is because “Girls” is sad, not funny. Indeed, it is a reintroduction to our old, tired, overworked friend “Sex and the City,” only dusted off, tossed into Brooklyn, and dipped into a grungy, plastic kiddie pool filled with floating bugs, self-referential “meta” humor, and ennui.

There is a certain irony, I realize, in writing about a show while complaining that it doesn’t deserve the attention it already gets. But the real story, it turns out, isn’t even about the show. It’s about how the national media and chattering classes slowly, effectively shape American culture, transmitting social mores and nihilism from a bubble that doesn’t represent most of the real world — yet.

The more one learns about “Girls,” in fact, the more one begins to suspect that it is an elaborate hoax foisted upon an unsuspecting, docile populace. Take the show’s creator, for instance. It stars and is written and directed by twenty-something media sensation Lena Dunham, who was born in New York, made a few videos about herself at Oberlin, and recently appeared in an Obama ad comparing voting for the first time to losing your virginity. (“You want to do it with the right guy!”) All of Dunham’s work is exhibitionist (for no particular reason, she is stark naked in multiple episodes of “Girls”) and autobiographical (Dunham’s character, “Hannah,” is a struggling writer convinced of her own brilliance). Dunham’s real-world mother, according to the UK Independent, is “a photographer who arranges dolls and dolls’ house furniture to create disquieting domestic tableaux.” Her father, meanwhile, is “a WASP painter of overtly sexualized pop art.”

I’ll pause for a moment so we can all soak that in.

“Girls” also stars three other actresses who are complete outsiders when it comes to the New York/Los Angeles media-entertainment machine, and by “complete outsiders,” I mean “born in the belly of the beast”: the daughter of “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams, the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet, and, perhaps most awesomely, the daughter of the former drummer of Bad Company, a fantastically awful ’70s rock band.

To be clear, a person — or a person’s work — should not be discounted based on their parents, whether those parents are rich, poor, or somewhere in between. But when you put the pieces together, this plugged-in lineage does help explain why a bunch of Brooklyn hipsters wandering around like the zombies from “I Am Legend” is presented as important “art.” It also helps explain why Dunham has been heralded as “the voice of her generation” and named among The Atlantic’s “Brave Thinkers” of 2012. And it certainly helps explain why Dunham, who appears to have the moral sense of a mountain goat, just got a $3 million book deal to share her “advice” with a world that I sincerely hope is taking cover.

Media veteran Larry King once recalled his reaction to hearing the f-word at a Friars Club roast back in the early ’60s: “I thought I’d die.” Fast-forward to 2012, and we have no one left to shock — but many inside the secular media bubble didn’t get the memo. This is why “Girls,” a showcase of vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake, is praised as “bold,” and why a solipsistic life, unmoored from morals or meaning, is presented as “normal” and “representative.” Unfortunately, many young people might buy it.

When you think about it, we should all thank Lena Dunham. If you doubt the power of the media to create an alternate universe or push an agenda, witness “Girls.” With its self-referential feedback loop, casual nihilism, and refusal to take anything of value seriously, the show perfectly packages and delivers the secular, “no rules” worldview that many in the media want to sell.

Because of this, all of the hullabaloo — the fawning reviews, the media attention, the Internet hype, the book deal, and even the criticism — in the end isn’t really about Lena Dunham. It’s about a broader, self-reinforcing worldview. Given that Dunham built her career on her own navel gazing, it’s a classic, delicious irony — one that even she couldn’t cook up.

January 14, 2013–

“See, here’s how it works,” he said, drawing a graph. “With a dog, you put in a medium amount of work, and you get a medium amount of reward. If you were to, say, purchase a lion, you’d put in a lot of work, but you’d get pretty much no reward – and you might even get eaten. Horrible deal.” He paused, drawing a straight line that hit each point directly between the axes. “See? With a kid, you put in a ton of work, but you also get a huge reward for years to come. It’s a great deal!”

That was three kids ago, and I can assure you that the “ton of work” part is true. The “huge reward,” happily, is also true. Children are a source of great joy, and, as a bonus, often hilarious. This is especially useful to remember when the preschooler gives you pinkeye, the toddler flushes your contact lenses down the toilet, and the baby cooks up a habit of happily, inexplicably, all-out yodeling at 4:30 each morning.

What’s strange about our dining room child-planning summit, from a historical perspective, is that we considered it at all. “A few generations ago, people weren’t stopping to contemplate whether having a child would make them happy,” wrote Jennifer Senior in her much-discussed parenting treatise, “All Joy and No Fun,” which ran in New York magazine in 2010. “Having children was simply what you did.”

But not, apparently, anymore. Around the globe, fertility rates are plummeting. Countries like Japan and Russia teeter on self-imposed fertility cliffs, facing dramatic population shrinkage and the potential collapse of their welfare states. Europe, with stagnant birth rates, isn’t far behind — and, contrary to popular opinion, neither is America, according to Weekly Standard writer Jonathan V. Last. His new book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, documents a remarkable demographic shift: the global baby un-boom.

Last has good timing. A new Pew report shows the traditionally robust American birthrate falling to record lows. Recent data from the Census Bureau and other studies suggest that the world’s population, once a source of widespread hand-wringing, could stop growing within our lifetimes. Meanwhile, in its latest annual report, Planned Parenthood cited a record number of abortions: 333,964 in 2011 alone.

The magic fertility number, if you want the population to remain stable, is 2.1 children per woman. Today, the U.S. fertility rate perches at 2.01. Compared to countries like Poland (1.32), Germany (1.36), and Singapore (1.11), that might seem impressive. But as Last points out in What to Expect, America’s buoyant fertility may be a statistical mirage.

Break the numbers down demographically, and the trends seem less promising. For college-educated women, for instance, the fertility rate is roughly 1.6. As education goes up, fertility shrinks. Hispanic women, meanwhile, pull far more than their own weight, with an average rate of 2.73. The problem? Their fertility numbers are falling fast as well, and continue to plummet as immigrant women assimilate into the larger U.S. culture.

For certain environmentalists, misanthropes, and frustrated motorists in Los Angeles, less people on the planet might sound appealing. But as Last argues, “Very Bad Things” have historically accompanied depopulation, including disease, war, and economic disaster. In the case of the United States and Western Europe, the latter seems to be the most pressing. In the case of our other global neighbors (China, Iran, or Russia, for instance), the second-to-last may loom equally large.

When people, particularly males, start talking about how other people should have more babies, certain ladies start freaking out. In December, when Ross Douthat published a New York Times column titled “More Babies, Please,” shrieking erupted in various corners of the Internet. “Douthat,” wrote one outraged Slate.com commentator, “is clearly irritated at his countrymen and especially his countrywomen for their persnickety desire to enjoy life rather than see it as a dutiful trudge to the grave.”

Upon reading this, I must admit, I laughed out loud. Perhaps it was because, just moments before, my toddler had taken a giant mouthful of applesauce, coyly turned my way, and sneezed. But perhaps it was also because, in its own way, laced between the paragraphs of hysteria (Overpopulation! Climate change! Women chained barefoot in the kitchen!), this snippet of Internet hyperbole really said it all. What does it mean to “enjoy life”? What is our purpose? Why do we have kids, anyway?

Not so long ago, people had children for simple economic and religious reasons. Some people had children just because everyone else was doing it, or, most obviously, because they lacked reliable birth control. Today, “a thousand evolutions in modern life” — Last cites education, delayed marriage, the Pill, urbanization, abortion, modern capitalism, insane parenting costs, secularization, and even car seat laws — have shifted our view of children. For some, Last notes, having children is almost an “act of consumption.” For others, it’s an “act of self-actualization.” For many, it’s simply a lifestyle choice. The individual, in short, reigns.

But as we’ve seen, those reasons aren’t enough to inspire multiple babies, probably because having kids isn’t exactly a trip to the Four Seasons Bora Bora. It’s not even a trip to the grungy Super 8 off the local highway — there, at least, you can sleep in. To have kids primarily as a “lifestyle choice,” in fact, would border on insane, considering it’s a lifestyle largely devoid of “me time,” leisurely breakfasts, spur-of-the-moment plans that don’t involve going to Target, and, as my dad liked to hopelessly request when I was a kid, “peace and quiet.”

The best arguments for having children, unfortunately, run opposed to modern, secular American culture. Good reasons to have kids tend to be about delayed gratification, prioritizing family, putting others first, transmitting serious values and beliefs, focusing on something larger than yourself, and understanding the difference between joy and fun. Perhaps this is why, as Last notes, “American pets now outnumber American children by more than four to one.” It’s also why, if American fertility continues to slide — and, as the author notes, that’s still an “if” at this point — there’s little the government can do.

What to Expect When No One’s Expecting discusses potential policy solutions to the global fertility drought. Many are vague, and few are convincing. When it comes to pro-natalist government policy, welfare-state support for parents seems to work a bit; outright bribery, as recently attempted in Singapore, does not. But the main driver of faltering global fertility — and the reason Last’s book is so interesting — is based on culture, not policy.

The good news is that culture can be engaged and changed. The bad news is that change can be plodding. America still has time to adjust its priorities in terms of marriage, community, and family. Other countries, having already jumped off the fertility cliff, may not have that luxury.

http://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2013/01/14/when_babies_disappear_39.html

July 23, 2012–Marissa Mayer is young, blond, attractive, and six months pregnant. She’s also, as of last week, the new president and CEO of Yahoo, a Fortune 500 tech company, and—much to her chagrin, I’m guessing—the fevered subject of dozens of angst-laden feminist blog posts.

As a woman, Mayer is a rarity in the world of Silicon Valley power players, but she’s not too hung up on the whole feminism thing. The term itself, she pointed out in a PBS-AOL interview, is tainted with “negative,” “militant,” “chip-on-the-shoulder” connotations. “I was always very gender blind,” she told a recent audience. “I think if I had felt more self-conscious about being the only woman along the way, it would have actually stifled me a lot more.”

Mayer, in other words, got over it, got a job, and got on with her life—and this does not sit well with the sisterhood. According to Slate’s Amanda Marcotte, Mayer’s rejection of the feminist label boils down to pure cowardice: “Those who take up the mantle of social justice have always been people who, for whatever reason, are willing to be hated and willing to suffer repeated losses that affect them personally. . . . Someone who would rather do what’s right than what’s profitable simply isn’t going to climb very high on that corporate ladder. ” Mayer, feminist writers seem to agree, is ditching the ideological date that brought her to the dance.

Luckily for disgruntled, abandoned-feeling female advocates, there’s another woman burning up the Internet, boldly embracing all things feminist. Caitlin Moran, a quirky, often drunk, often foul-mouthed, often much-too-candid British writer, has earned gushing praise for her new manifesto, “How to Be a Woman.” Her goal is “to jump-start a new conversation about feminism,” and indeed she has, collecting rave reviews along the way.

Moran, whose book is half autobiography, half women’s-lib instruction manual, and was just released in the States, has been described as a “rock-star feminist,” “totally brilliant,” “a feminist heroine for our times,” “outrageous,” “delightful,” and “precisely what feminism has been waiting for.”

So, I read “How to Be a Woman,” and here’s the thing: I consider myself a feminist, and I was definitely not waiting for this book. I was certainly not waiting for excessive information on Moran’s excruciating journey through puberty; intimate details about her gross dog; her annals of awkward sexual exploration; and, most mystifying, her passionate defense of abortion and pornography, irrationally paired with her equally passionate condemnation of strip clubs and Botox.

The problem, I suppose, is that most “real” feminists I know of—Caitlin Moran and Slate writers like Marcotte likely among them—would probably consider me a weapons-grade woman betrayer with a full-time residence on Planet Patriarchy. I am, after all, pro-life. I have been known to vote for Republicans. If you want to be a stay-at-home mom, I think that’s fine. If you want to be the CEO of Yahoo and say you’ll only take three weeks of maternity leave—interestingly, Mayer is getting pilloried for this decision as well—that’s fine too. I believe that casual sex is destructive, not empowering. I often don impractical footwear crafted by male oppressors.

I also generally shy away from celebrations of meaningless vulgarity, which, sadly, seems to be the leading theme in both Moran’s book and in the gigantic, flaming, multi-car pileup that is modern-day feminism. In “How to Be a Woman,” it’s OK to be a “slag” or a “slut,” as long as we’re “simply being honest about who we really are.” In interviews, Moran expresses approval for the recent rash of mortifying “Slut Walks,” in which young women strut down the street in ill-fitting, body-baring “clothing” in order to prove that they are empowered, not sexual objects. Which totally makes sense, if you’re crazy.

Moran has also gained applause for the book’s “fearless” description of her own abortion, which ended a “surprise,” inconvenient pregnancy. (Surprise! You can get pregnant when not using birth control on a trip to Cyprus! Who could have seen that one coming?) Two children past that pesky baby stage were just fine for Moran—“My two girls,” she writes, “are all I want”—but three would cramp the style. Bye-bye, baby.

What makes the account especially horrifying is Moran’s blithe insistence that abortions just aren’t that big of a deal—they are, she writes, merely “an operation to remedy a potentially life-ruining condition”—coupled with her clear awareness that she is ending a human life. At least in the bad old days, abortion defenders used to pretend they didn’t know when life begins, endlessly debating that magic tick of a clock when a fetus with a beating heart suddenly becomes a person. Many of today’s abortion-happy feminists are, to their credit, more honest, but the implications are scary.

When it comes down to it, whether addressing abortion, sex, or any otherwise self-indulgent behavior, the message of “How to be a Woman” is this: “If it feels good, do it.” How on earth is this retread of a failed 1960s mantra, known for its disastrous legacy, “brilliant” and “original” (Publishers Weekly)? How is this “entirely necessary” (Elle magazine)? How can this possibly be “engaging” and “brave” (The Independent)?

It’s quite telling that one of Moran’s “heroes,” the recipient of several glowing pages in “How to Be a Woman,” is the pop singer Lady Gaga. If you listen to Moran, Lady Gaga is a feminine hero for our time, breaking boundaries, creating new social spaces, clearing the way for young people to cast off the shackles of oppression. Of course, if you’re really paying attention, you’ll notice that Lady Gaga is an updated Madonna clone in a meat dress, desperate to shock, mistaking vulgarity for creativity: the musical equivalent of an old, dying system’s last gasp.

No wonder certain feminists are getting so wound up. They have reason to be worried. Something new is out there—conservatism, decorum, chastity, and respect are downright radical these days—but it’s not poor Gaga.

It also shouldn’t be all that surprising that more and more high-profile women are shrugging off the traditional “feminist” label. It’s gotten kind of embarrassing. “How to Be a Woman,” celebrated as it may be, shows off that fact in spades.

February 3, 2012–Americans, the saying goes, don’t like to talk about class — but they certainly enjoy reading about it. They also love to see how they stack up against their peers.

One of the most notorious and snobby books on the topic, Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, capitalizes on this repressed American passion with its “Living Room Scale,” which measures social class based on your décor. A worn Oriental rug will earn you eight points; a new one (and, by extension, new money) will lower your score. A ceiling 10 feet or higher is good; the presence of Reader’s Digest, framed diplomas, or “any work of art depicting cowboys” (sorry, pardners) is not.

Charles Murray, the prominent political scientist, doesn’t shy away from awkward subjects — he’s best known for The Bell Curve, which stirred up a progressive hornet’s nest in the mid-1990s — and he tackles the charged issue of class in his new and important book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. America, Murray writes, “is coming apart at the seams — not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.” Culture, not money, divides the new upper and lower classes, which live in increasingly different worlds: one rarefied, walled-off, and at the helm of the country; the other dysfunctional, adrift, and hapless when it comes to the game of life.

Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.

America’s working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty — and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up.

Elites, meanwhile, have quietly embraced traditional values, segregated into upper-class residential enclaves, and largely lost touch with the realities of those who haven’t. Murray sees this as ominous, particularly for public policy. “This growing isolation” of the elites, he writes, “has been accompanied by growing ignorance about the country over which they have so much power.”

While he declines to rate the rug in your living room, Murray does include a quiz to determine your upper-class street cred: “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” It’s rather entertaining, delving into your NASCAR knowledge, hard-knocks childhood stories, and more, but I actually think it could be shortened into one question: Do you become horrified when you enter a Wal-Mart, not just because of an alarming selection of T-shirts with dramatic white wolves howling in a lightning storm airbrushed on them (also a staple at truck stops), but because of America’s raging obesity problem? Done, done, and done. (If you have never entered a Wal-Mart, well then, we’re also done.)
And here we get to an odd anthropological trait of the new upper class: a rather contradictory mix of high-level snobbery and quasi-religious “nonjudgmentalism.” Your typical elite enjoys saying snooty things about cultural middle America (Obama’s infamous “clinging to guns and religion” comment, for instance, or David Carr of the New York Times spouting off about “low-sloping foreheads” in “the middle places” of America). But when it comes to judging things like, say, rampant divorce, or having children out of wedlock, or being on welfare while also having children out of wedlock (just writing that, by the way, feels terribly judgmental) the new upper-classers tend to bite their tongues.

“Nonjudgmentalism is one of the more baffling features of the new-upper-class culture,” Murray writes. “If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself. The new upper class knows the secret to maximizing the chances of leading a happy life, but it refuses to let anyone else in on the secret.” Ultimately, he argues, the key to American success will be the willingness of the upper class to preach what they practice when it comes to marriage, children, religion, work, and more. But first, members of the upper class have to believe that their values actually matter — and to understand why they do.

Coming Apart is a must-read for many reasons, but its main value comes from its insistence on drilling down beyond materialism. In a book ostensibly about class, Murray spends much of his time exploring the things that really matter in life, fighting against the presumption that we’re here to merely pass our days as pleasantly as possible.

“If we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life — achieve happiness,” Murray writes, “the answer is that there are just four: Family, vocation, community, and faith.” The advancement of the welfare state, he argues, results in the slow gutting of these domains, as well as personal responsibility, which are “the institutions through which people live satisfying lives.” This cultural disintegration has had a disastrous human cost for the working class. It’s a cost that many in the new upper class don’t experience or understand.

Unfortunately, in today’s political landscape, the idea that government “help” can sap human virtue is a radical concept. “Those in the new upper class who don’t care about politics don’t mind the drift toward the European model,” Murray points out, “because paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience — much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens.”

Even the American political right, often caricatured as welfare-bashers, can fall into this trap: Republican front-runner and much-maligned rich guy Mitt Romney recently stepped in it by declaring he wasn’t worried about the very poor, because, well, “we have a very ample safety net.” Ah, then! Nothing to worry about. Everything’s fine!
Murray ends his book with a bit of optimism, confident that “the more we learn about how human beings work at the deepest genetic and neural levels, the more that many age-old ways of thinking about human nature will be vindicated.” A more accurate understanding of human nature, he argues, would lead to an understanding of the importance of traditional values and virtues — for everyone, not just the new upper class — and a restoration of the American experiment.

I hope he’s right, but I’m a bit skeptical. In the pages of Coming Apart, we often find Murray bending over backward to explain obvious points, either to avoid offending his more sensitive readers (or to make sure no one thinks he’s a racist). But certain facts — say, that some people are smarter than other people, or that smart people who marry each other tend to have smart children — tend to infuriate a certain sector of the population, polite explanation or no.

In another instance, Murray points out that children clearly do the best with two married, biological parents, but also acknowledges that “I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.”

Some of this stems from good intentions: People don’t want to make struggling single moms or divorced parents feel worse than they already do. Much of this comes, as do many of the building blocks of hyper-progressive politics, from plain old wishful thinking. And some of it stems from a subtle hostility toward the idea of universal virtues existing at all.

“Discussing solutions is secondary to this book, just as understanding causes is secondary,” Murray writes. “The important thing is to look unblinkingly at the problem.” That task alone, it seems, is more than a big enough challenge for today.