Looking back on Alan Bloom looking back

In Alan Bloom’s book, "The Closing of the American Mind” (1987)--a book that began as an essay and became a best seller--he discusses how the meaning and acts of sex and sexuality changed between the 50s and 60s and the 80s, and that the college students he knew saw a sexual arrangement as convenient, but not lasting or a commitment. “They are roommates with sex and utilities included in the rent.” (p. 106). 

With the looming strike of women (they are angry about the election of Trump and mad at the Electoral College) and the January 21 Women’s March in DC, I think he missed his mark in thinking the “rights” push was over.  It’s not over because it's never over for the Left which needs a victim, and over 50% of the population are women and 57% of the college graduates since the 90s are women.  For the Left  no matter what progress women, homosexuals or transsexuals make, there’s always a new victim to be found which can be folded into the original goal.  The push to normalize sex with children is the most recent one, as polygamy or polyandry will just be too boring and acceptable since sex with adults has lost all meaning. Relativism, Bloom said, makes students conformist and incurious. Their supposed open-mindedness closes their actual minds. And that continues as the students of the 80s are the parents and professors of today's college students.

Bloom writes about relationships in the mid-80s: “Men and women are now used to living in exactly the same way and studying exactly the same things and having exactly the same career expectations.  No man would think of ridiculing a female premed or prelaw student, or believe that these are fields not proper for women, or assert that a woman should put family before career.  The law schools and medical schools are full of women, and their numbers are beginning to approach their proportion in the general population.  . . The battle here has been won. . . They do not need the protection of NOW (p. 107)  And he goes on to note that not only do his students have nothing to learn about sex from their parents, but also believe they have nothing to learn from old literature or history  [and I would add the Bible, but he doesn’t] so when they have problems with relationships, they have nothing to go back to.

Although Bloom's book was a best seller, other academics became alarmed--he was called a racist, sexist, homophobe (although he was probably gay said a close friend after Bloom died), a Nazi--well, you know the routine.  He was practically Trump!  After 200 reviews of the book, the academics began having conferences about it!  Which makes me think, maybe I should put it back on the shelf and choose another title to withdraw.  Since I've blogged about this a year ago (at my book blog) I'm not making much progress reducing the crowded bookshelves.

Sally Jenkins on the Tebow Super Bowl Ad

It's easier to just provide a link rather than copy the whole thing (which is probably in violation of copyright). But Sally Jenkins, Sports writer for WaPo, is one tough dude!

"I'm pro-choice, and Tebow clearly is not. But based on what I've heard in the past week, I'll take his side against the group-think, elitism and condescension of the "National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time." For one thing, Tebow seems smarter than they do.

Tebow's 30-second ad hasn't even run yet, but it already has provoked "The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us" to reveal something important about themselves: They aren't actually "pro-choice" so much as they are pro-abortion. Pam Tebow has a genuine pro-choice story to tell. She got pregnant in 1987, post-Roe v. Wade, and while on a Christian mission in the Philippines, she contracted a tropical ailment. Doctors advised her the pregnancy could be dangerous, but she exercised her freedom of choice and now, 20-some years later, the outcome of that choice is her beauteous Heisman Trophy winner son, a chaste, proselytizing evangelical.

Pam Tebow and her son feel good enough about that choice to want to tell people about it. Only, NOW says they shouldn't be allowed to. Apparently NOW feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikinis selling beer is the right one. I would like to meet the genius at NOW who made that decision. On second thought, no, I wouldn't. . . If the pro-choice stance is so precarious that a story about someone who chose to carry a risky pregnancy to term undermines it, then CBS is not the problem." Read the whole thing.