Bits and pieces, 9/25/05

Hot? Or not?

Rich Lowry has written a dead-on op-ed review of Ariel Levy’s book, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (the “pornification of feminism"). I found it in the local newspaper but it’s online at National Review Online. Some great quotes:

No lustful man would’ve looked at Gloria Steinem in the 1970s and thought, “She is going to help fulfill my most absurd voyeuristic fantasies."

We live in a world seemingly designed to gratify the teenage boy in the movie Animal House who is looking at a copy of Playboy when miraculously a cheerleader is thrown through his window and onto his bed. “Thank you, God!” he exclaims.

Among the forces supporting this pornified culture that gleefully objectifies women, according to Levy, is women...“Raunch culture is not essentially progressive,” Levy writes, “it is essentially commercial.”

This, ladies, is the scam! You may think that your provocative appearance is giving you real power and value, but in truth you are being duped into making yourself a mere commodity for consumption, an object for possession. The joke is on you! Don’t fall for it!

“As long as the feminist left associates sexual restraint with outdated prudery, there won’t be any pressure for change from that quarter, either. So Levy cries in the wilderness, while all around her lascivious men ogle the movable bimbonic feast of American culture and lift their voices to the heavens: “Thank you, God.”

(Is that a bacchanale I hear playing in the background?)

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It’s apple harvest time

Today my family and I went to the annual Busti Apple Festival held by the Busti (pronounced “bust-eye”) Historical Society. Not only were there plenty of apples, cider, and other local products available as well as items at an endless line of craft booths, there were historic displays of life in earlier times and the days of the original Busti Gristmill, which is now a museum. As I am currently reading Eric Sloane’s Diary of an Early American Boy with my son, these displays were timely for us. One of the exhibitors is a gunsmith who told us he had been inspired by Sloane’s books as a youth.

On display in the museum was a brass/bronze button from the coat given to Chief Cornplanter as a gift at George Washington’s inauguration in New York City. The man attending the display, who was the discoverer of the button, wouldn’t tell me where he found it. He told me that only five people -- elder Indian women -- know where Cornplanter is actually buried. (It’s somewhere in the Kinzua area of PA).

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Buttered up

Said to my three-year-old daughter: “Oh, no, don’t eat the butter, Honey.”

My daughter: “I didn’t eat the butter –- I just swallowed it.”