Deal W. Hudson

Madam As A Woman-Hero

Marjorie Campbell, marjorie@marjoriecampbell.com

I was distressed to read about the suicide-by-hanging of DC Madam Deborah Jean Palfrey.   She worked in DC, had 52 years of age and knew a lot of hookers ~ me, too - although I am not quite 52, and I did not arrange dates for hookers, but only defended them when they got busted.  Still, when you have dabbled in the dark side, these sorts of stories can provoke a deep sense of gratitude ... but for the grace of God go I.  (Read Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy from the Loyola Classic Series, by Rumer Godden if you doubt me.)

I read, today, Ms. Palfrey's suicide notes.  She left one for her sister, one for her Mom.  In both, she expressed great love for each of them, and regret for the pain her actions would cause them.  But, she assured her Mom "I can't live behind bars" and promised her sister there was no other "way out".  She commended them to each other, and left them "surprise" money.  This, alone, is her legacy - unless you count Hustler Magazine's Larry Flynt's bizarre insistence that the Madam was murdered. 

Good grief.  Thanks, Larry for your posthumous support, but ... this is not what God intended for women - as John Paul II described in Mulieres Dignitatem - that a "woman is left alone, exposed to public opinion with "her sin", while behind "her" sin there lurks a man . . . she alone pays and she pays all alone! "

All of which brings to mind my February 10 2007 post, a letter addressed to Amanda Marcotte, who, at the time, was fool-hardily potty-mouthing her way to dismissal from the Edwards' presidential campaign.  As I said to her,  "At age 29, you might think you have the political world by the horn.  But, dear, that's a tail in your hand - and the ride you flirt with will not be what you expect.  May I make a suggestion?  Identify a woman-hero with all the characteristics your anger holds dear:  someone who has lived a long life of promiscuity and multiple abortions; someone who has repeatedly taken the "morning after" pill and viewed having a baby as a "punishment' for having a uterus; someone who spent a lifetime publishing cuss words and hatred of religion.  You can't think of anyone?  Hmmm.  I wonder why."

If you were keeping a list of heroines, lives you would love to lead, Amanda, go ahead and cross through Deborah Jean Palfrey, who died, sadly, by self-hanging.  Was hers a life anyone would dub "woman-hero"? 

Exploiting Women

Marjorie Campbell, marjorie@marjoriecampbell.com

Radical feminism promised "equality" to women, right?  Instead, it continues to ignore new forms and flavors of exploitation that compromise the health and well-being of our young women.  Consider this headline "Egg-donor business booms on campuses:  Five years after a trade group tried reining them in, fertility clinics and brokers are bidding up prices for eggs sold by cash-strapped college women with top test scores and picture-perfect looks."

But some women are speaking up.  Michele Clark and Jennifer Lahl have published an important article today in First Things, exposing the oppressive and growing practice of "harvesting" eggs from young women:  "Egg Donors and Human Trafficking".  We will be hearing more about this subject, which, like abortion, contraception and other lucrative products peddled to women, pursues commercial exploitation, not the well-being, of women.

Whenever most people hear the term “egg donor,” they usually consider this a good thing, as most of us assume that anyone who donates is altruistically motivated and thus engaged in something intrinsically good. And besides, it’s for a great cause, so everything is all right, yes?

Nothing could be further from the truth. Sadly, egg donation has less to do with altruism and more to do with the exploitation of women–particularly young women and often poor women who are usually facing large debts or just trying to make ends meet.  (Read more here.)

Women I Admire: Wendy Shalit

Marjorie Campbell, marjorie@marjoriecampbell.com

I heard the precocious, witty Wendy Shalit speak some years ago at Commentary's annual dinner.  Impressed, I dashed out, bought and read what ranks now as one of my most favorite books to share, the very funny, poignant A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. 

So I was extremely pleased to see this year's Independent Women's Forum  "Women Who Make the World Better" award go to Ms. Shalit.  Ms. Shalit's new book, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good has unleashed another round of vitriol so often directed at these brave young women reasserting their dignity against the "equality is sameness"  legacy still pathetically peddled by the kinky-graying radical feminists of my generation.  "Shalit . . . quotes a feminist lawyer barking: 'I am very suspicious of telling girls they need to be morally good—that’s sexism right there!'” (Read full review) 

What a perverse generational reversal these young women have suffered - losing perhaps for the first time in human history, the protective maternal care of older women in favor of further social experimentation the seniors crave for validation.  As Ms. Shalit points out in her interview with IWF:

So there's a very interesting tension now, where the older generation, they're the ones organizing the co-ed sleepovers; they're the ones renting the hotel rooms for the prom; they're the ones buying the skanky clothing for their "prostitots."

And increasingly it's the younger generation that's saying: You know what? No, we don't want this; this is too much, and we want something more than this. I think that's encouraging; it's really encouraging.

I think it's encouraging too.  Increasingly, I find the women I admire in my daughter's generation.  You go, girls - don't let the old biddies fool you!

Talking About Unplanned Joy

Marjorie Campbell, marjorie@marjoriecampbell.com

The dysfunction of prevailing options foisted upon women by the Culture of Adult Desire finds full expression in the heart-breaking misery of many women, so bizarrely celebrated in fascinated obsession with the self-destruction of young women like Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton. As I posted earlier, George Weigel ably tagged the core intellectual problem to radical feminism's insistence "that biology counts for nothing and means nothing" ... offering "desperately defective ideas of the human person, married to modern technology."  Thus, choices that minimize, manipulate or disregard the fundamental nature of the human female predictably bring suffering, while, as JP II so beautifully put it, choices rooted in the human person offer . . . joy.

My earlier post on one young woman's decision to honor her nature and pursue "unplanned joy" in her "unplanned" pregnancy brought to mind this YouTube which I had intended to post.  Here's more unplanned joy - as these 200 women of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia Congregation in Nashville TN respond to God's call away from the Culture of Adult Desire, to . . . holiness, where prayer can "well up in us" and "we can change the world" and "set it on fire".

The only surprise to me is that anyone is surprised by women finding joy in their fundamental calling. 

  ">

Radical Feminism Is Soooo Gross

Marjorie Campbell, marjorie@marjoriecampbell.com

Deal, you are right that "radical feminism . . . is still out there making plenty of trouble."  And George Weigel specifically cited the very same institution of clinginess:  tenured faculties.  But are you both miscalculating the influence of these equality-means-sameness dames of the academy?  Last week, a Santa Clara freshman moaned to me about a required reading:  Rubyfruit Jungle.  "Rubyfruit Jungle," I yelped, "surely you are joking me?"  If you never read this piece of bad Lesbian pseudo-literature in the 1970s, count yourself lucky.  "Why," I asked this young woman, "do you have to read that thing?  It was trite 25 years ago - it must be downright boring now."  Nodding, this peppy young woman shrugged it off, "The teacher's an old feminist.  It's soooo grossssss."

. . . which is not to say, Deal, that unmorphed radical feminism persists only at college campuses.  Another bastion of the beast, Planned Parenthood, keeps trying to make itself central and relevant to young people.  In SF, for example, PP is currently running a "Design a T-shirt, Win an Ipod!" contest for the best slogan to capture the themes:  Prevention, Safe is Sexy and Planned Parenthood is For Everyone.   But, really, who's fooled by this nonsense?

It brings to mind a recent bus whirl I took across Heathrow to change terminals, amid the chaos and clang of franticly paced terror-proofing construction there.  In route, a video blasted hopes that we were "enjoying your Heathrow experience" - showing happy people breezily passing through a stream-lined modern airport system, unlike anything actually happening outside the bus windows, within the miles of concertina-wired fencing, or in the now-renowned inefficient, congested terminals.  The whole bus burst into laugher.

At some point, radical feminism propaganda grew silly and irrelevant, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese detailed with intellectual precision in Feminism Is Not The Story of My Life.  That broad-based, continuing decline explains Mrs. Clinton's schizophrenic efforts to portray herself as a Jesus-loving, hymn-singing politician motivated by "the scriptural imperative to love our neighbor as ourselves" (according to my recent Faith, Family and Values email campaign update) while still clinging to the radical remainders in her base.

We will have to live with the fallout of radical feminism, I know, but the contamination is being contained and shrinking fast, in my opinion.  All of which brings to mind an entry for the Planned Parenthood T-shirt contest:  Great & Powerful Planned Parenthood (Pay No Attention To That Man Behind the Curtain).

New Spin on 5-4 Supreme Court Decisions

Deal Hudson

I could help but be struck by the opening line of this morning's Washington Post article on yesterday's Supreme Court decision:

"A Supreme Court once again split by the thinnest of margins ruled yesterday that workers may not sue their employers over unequal pay caused by discrimination alleged to have occurred years earlier." (Italics added.)

I may have a faulty memory but I don't recall previous 5-4 decisions, when they were settled by Sandra Day O'Connor, being described as "the thinnest of margins." 

Now that the new Court is ruling against the sacred cows of feminism the journalist spin has changed -- Ruth Bader Ginzberg is now the "lone voice," etc, etc, etc.

Look for Ginzberg to be elevated to sacred martyr status.