Christina Hoff Sommers: "The Affordable Care Act mentions 'breast' 44 times, 'prostate' not once."

"It also establishes an elaborate and expensive network of special programs to promote women’s health. Programs for men are nowhere to be found. What explains the imbalance?"

Possible answers:

1. Focusing on breasts works for everybody: Men love breasts and women feel cared for.

2. Treating women's bodies as a special problem, requiring special attention, works for the most retrograde traditionalists and for progressive feminists.

3. Women tend to monitor their health and consume more health care services, especially these preventive programs. There are no programs for men, because men wouldn't respond to programs. The main use of men is getting them into the insurance pool to contribute to the cost of caring for women and children.

4. Women actually need and deserve more care. Men are expendable. There is a shared social interest in preserving the women for reproductive purposes, for the maintenance of stable households, for the nurturing of children, and for looking after the elderly.

5. Gender politics work, but only on women.

"Our whole society is based on... making women nod."

Video found after a search for "making women nod" — which I knew was a longstanding Bill Maher theme — which I got the idea to do after writing about Barack Obama saying 51 times in "Dreams From My Father" that people "nodded". It was probably a meaningless writerly tic from a neophyte writer, but perhaps it's significant. Whatever you think of Maher, listen to the montage about  the emasculation of men as manifested in the behavior of making women nod. Then think about the agenda of the Democratic Party, their asserted pacifist position in the so-called War on Women, their mascot "Julia," and things of that sort.

Christina Hoff Sommers rails about the establishment feminists who didn't care about the "man-cession."

They argued for a balanced cure to an imbalanced problem.

IN THE COMMENTS: John Althouse Cohen said...

Do you stand by your earlier critique? "I think Obama must respond to this problem. If a huge federal jobs program is really what we need — and I'm not willing to say it is — then how can nearly all the job be men's jobs?"

In other words, weren't you one of the feminist critics that Sommers is talking about?

I did add "Is it enough of an answer to say that it's up to women to take up the hard physical labor of building roads and bridges and the like?" Those were 2 questions. Generally, I will stand by my preference for good solutions tailored to actual problems.

Manliness.

I've been ignoring that book "Manliness" by Harvy C. Mansfield, but Christina Hoff Sommers is writing about it -- in the Weekly Standard -- so I'm going to pay some attention:

After almost 40 years of feminist agitation and gender-neutral pronouns, it is still men who are far more likely than women to run for political office, start companies, file for patents, and blow things up. Men continue to tell most of the jokes and write the vast majority of editorials and letters to editors.

(And blogs.)

And--fatal to the dreams of feminists who long for social androgyny--men have hardly budged from their unwillingness to do an equal share of housework or childcare. Moreover, women seem to like manly men: "Manliness is still around, and we still find it attractive," says Mansfield.

We? Harvey's a guy. And while I'm here, let me say that the arithmetic on the housework sharing question is always screwy. There is no whole from which to figure out what half is. If you think an hour a day is the right total and your partner thinks an hour a week is the right total, how much does he need to do to avoid the charge that he hasn't done his share?

Skipping way ahead in the article (past a long section on philosophy that I won't try to summarize):

What would Mansfield have us do?...

First of all, he thinks we should clearly distinguish between the public realm and private life. In public we should pursue, as best we can, a policy of gender neutrality. He firmly believes that the law should guarantee equal opportunity to men and women. However, "our expectations should be that men will grasp the opportunity more readily and more wholeheartedly than women."

Though he mentions it only in passing, it follows from his position that our schools should be more respectful and accepting of male spiritedness; they must stop trying to feminize boys. A healthy society should not war against human nature. It should, he says, "reemploy masculinity." That means it has to civilize it and give it things to do. No civilization can achieve greatness if it does not allow room for obstreperous males.

In the private sphere, his advice is vivé la difference! A woman should not expect a manly man to be as committed to domesticity as she is; nor should she assume that he is as emotionally adept as her female friends. Manly men are romantic rather than sensitive. They need a lot of help from females to ascend to the higher ethical levels of manhood, and Mansfield urges women to encourage them in ways respectful of their male pride.

A classic feminist question is why must it be women's job to make men good? One answer is that men will be so horribly bad if we don't.

ADDED: I hate when I have to get out my sledgehammer, but some hotheads writing about me elsewhere don't get my sarcasm. I heartily resist the notion that it is women's work to make men good.

Countering V-Day with P-Day.

Christina Hoff Sommers describes the College Republicans' response to the overpromotion of "The Vagina Monologues" at Roger Williams University and the predictably repressive/humorless response from the admininstration. Read the whole piece (in the National Review), but here's a funny excerpt:

The week before V-Day, the Roger Williams campus was plastered with flyers emblazoned with slogans such as “My Vagina is Flirty” and “My Vagina is Huggable.” There was a widely publicized “orgasm workshop.” On the day of the play, the V-warriors sold lollipops in the in the shape of–-guess what? Last year, the student union was flooded with questionnaires asking unsuspecting students questions like “What does your Vagina smell like?” None of this offended the administration or elicited any reprimands, probations, or confiscations.

The campus conservatives artfully (in the college sense of "artful") mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the school with flyers that said, “My penis is majestic” and “My penis is hilarious.” The caption on one handout read, “My Penis is studious.” It showed Testaclese [the P-Day penis-shaped mascot] reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America....

It is easy to understand why school officials would not want a six-foot phallus wandering around campus; nor why they would ask students not to paper the college with posters describing all the things it likes to do. But that is just the sort of thing the vagina warriors have been doing, year after year, on hundreds of campuses.

Very funny! Seems to me the university shouldn't be engaging in viewpoint discrimination. There should be vagina/penis parity. Quite aside from all of this, why isn't everyone tired of "The Vagina Monologues" by now? It was always a bad play.

UPDATE: Be at Bebere has an answer to that last question.

Most laughs ever received by a right-leaning guest on "The Daily Show."

I'd say it was Christina Hoff Sommers, this past Wednesday, promoting her book about how the self-esteem movement in schools has gone too far. The tales she had to tell -- about "Circle of Friends" replacing tag and the demand that the red correction pen give way to lavender -- really connected with the audience, who seemed quite eager to receive this info. They were prepped, I think, by some combination of their own school experiences and "South Park." And Stewart did not make it easy for her. His approach was to challenge whether her little anecdotes represented anything other than some highly affluent enclaves. Every time he made this move, she shot out some little thing -- "The Girl Scouts have an anti-stress badge" -- that made the audience burst into spontaneous laughter. And you know it would not be their normal thing to give a warm welcome to a right-ish guest.

Regrettably, the Sommers interview is not included on the best interviews page at the "Daily Show" site. (You can, however, see the Dennis Miller interview. He, too, did well. I felt bad for him when he expressed his envy of the "Daily Show's" audience, which was, apparently, visibly way hipper than the crowd he's stuck with out in California.)