Category: Cultural Survey

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“Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret”

A Once-Controversial Story Now Appears Conservative

A wonderful review of a movie I’ve not seen, but you might want to. Two actresses you may recognize are Kathy Bates, and Rachel McAdams.

The reviewer is Mark Judge. The movie is “Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret“

While the film is based on the seminal book of the same title by Judy Blume, in the 1970s the book was controversial for its honest depiction of religion and female puberty. Today the same story comes across as downright conservative. 

After all, one of the dramatic themes driving the story, and something that was scandalous even in the 70s, was the tremendous, life-altering significance of being a young woman after getting her first period. The girls in Are You There God? ask each other constantly if they have gotten “it.” They write notes about “it,” they see cringe movies about “it” at school, they buy the proper supplies at the local drug store in anticipation of the moment “it” finally arrives.

The message is clear: girls are different from boys in a cellular, soulful, and metaphysical way. The difference is not slight, it is vast. It is life changing for them in ways puberty cannot be for boys.

Transgender women do not get periods. Despite makeup, dresses, and surgery, in an elemental way they can never be part of the sisterhood. This is the kind of argument one hears these days on Fox News, not MSNBC.

[A Once Controversial Story Now Appears Conservative]

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Celebrate Real Girls & Women! And Have Compassion For The Rest (Including Mountain_Men)

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The Return of Paganism

The spiritual crisis afflicting contemporary America has ancient and enduring roots—and so does the cure

Liel Leibovitz: The Return of Paganism

To the pagans, change is the only real constant. Just consider the heathens of old: Believing, as they did, in the radical duality of body and spirit, they enjoyed watching their gods breathe the latter into a wide array of incarnations. To please himself or trick his followers, a god could become a swan or a stone, manifest himself as a river or adopt whatever shape suited his schemes. Ovid, the greatest of Pagan poets, captured this logic perfectly when he began his Metamorphoses with a simple declaration of his intentions: In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora, or, “I am about to speak of forms changing into new entities.” This was not understood as fickle behavior by the gods’ cheerful followers. To the contrary. With no dogma to uphold, the sole job of deities was simply to be themselves. And the more solipsistic a deity chose to be, the better. Nothing, after all, radiates inimitable individuality more than marching to the beat of your own drum and no other.

If that’s your understanding of the gods, or whatever you’d like to call the hidden forces that arrange the known universe, how should you behave? Again, lacking a prescribed credo passed down from generation to generation, pagans began answering this question by casting off the tyranny of fixity. The gods are precarious and ever-changing? Let us follow their example! We should sanctify each sharp transformation in our behaviors and beliefs not as collective madness but as a sign of the wisdom of growth.

Sadly, this is happening within some sectors of Protestantism.

Companion Post

First ‘Gender-Queer’ Priest in the Church of England

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The Good Creator Will Not Be Mocked Without Consequence

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The Culture of “Crybullying”: Using Claims of Victimhood to Harass Others

Helen Joyce has “penned” a vigorous reply to our “traumatized” culture.

In their 2018 book The Rise of Victimhood Culture, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning describe how honour and dignity cultures are giving way to a moral code which elevates the oppressed. Call-outs and cancellations, they explain, are status-raising tactics, in which people claim to have been harmed by problematic views and to have suffered micro-aggressions in order to don the mantle of victimhood.

The spread of victimhood culture has helped popularise novel gender identities (non-binary, agender) and sexual orientations (aroace, pansexual) since they allow people to claim membership of oppressed groups without experiencing any actual hardship. It is also driving the self-diagnosis of mental illnesses, from quotidian conditions such as anxiety and depression, to boutique ones such as multiple-personality disorder or a novel form of Tourette’s transmitted by TikTok. 

More generally, this is a culture that encourages young people to regard themselves as traumatised. According to Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, US schools and universities have started to promote three pernicious falsehoods: that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; that feelings are a good guide to reality and action; and that life is a battle between good people and evil ones.

These dysfunctional beliefs, which Haidt dubs “anti-cognitive behavioural therapy”, promote mental fragility. They encourage people to feel fearful of ordinary words and to regard censorship as virtuous. The logic goes like this: being dis-agreed with makes you a victim; victims are good; people saying things you disagree with therefore deserve to be silenced and punished. This is the culture of “crybullying”: using claims of victimhood to harass others.

Why do we give veto power to the weakest, most immature members of society? Why are they allowed to control what can and cannot be discussed? Or which words may and may not be spoken? What if they are not merely weak, or immature, but delusional?

When it comes to Gender Ideology we must love without submitting to bullying blackmail. And the denial of reality.

Adults. Resist. Lovingly. But resist. With integrity.

Companion Post

Coddling Generation Safety Blankey? Or Affirming Shared Truths?

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Love Refuses To Affirm Confusion