Barrel Strength

Real men iron their shirts. At least I like to think so. 

Ironing has many advantages.

The activity is mindless in the zen sense, a series of repetitive actions of flattening fabric with the hands and passing the iron over it to bring perfection to wrinkled matter. Like ritual of any kind, the activity misleads the mind strategically, so that the mind thinks that it is busy doing something while it empties itself. It is a whole lot easier than sitting in a chair contemplating one’s thought processes. It involves less social self-presentation than church. It involves less risk from inattention than driving. It is far less expensive than fly-fishing, being able to be conducted in your basement with a minimum of equipment.  It conduces to large amounts of spousal approval, while permitting serious listening to one’s favourite music. 

As I ironed my wife’s blouses, I considered the fact that the buttons of women’s shirts run down the left side rather than the right. I speculated whether some bored housewife in the late 1950s used this same fact to argue that the differences between men and women were merely conventional, like the placement of buttons on a shirt. It would have marked the humble orign of one of the world’s stupidest and most damaging ideas, that has trampled through society like King Kong in a rage.

A friend of mine who went to university after me, in the 1980s, said that there were two large unquestionable ideas reigning in his day: 1) Reagan was stupid and capitalism was evil and 2) the differences between men and women were merely conventional. You will recall in the seventies and eighties  that mothers gave their boys girls’ toys and their girls’ Tonka trucks, in the attempt to demasculinize the male and masculinize the female, though they did not use those terms. There was also the doctor who used some poor boy who had lost his penis in a medical accident. The boy, used as the poster child for the notion that a genetic male could be raised as a female, subsequently resumed his male identity, got reconstructive surgery and married. There were many attempts of a similar nature to eradicate male-female differences.

How come these experiments, when conducted by social engineers, are never labelled ideological? When parents  support spanking children , they are being “ideological”. When parents oppose spanking children, they are called “progressive”? A recent study from social researchers at Calvin college supported the benefits of spanking between the ages of two and six for the later development of responsible adults. I do not know whether any such study can prove anything useful, but I did remark that the Usual Suspects sniffed that the Christian origin of Calvin college maight have induced a bias into the experimental method. As if the leftist assault on society by Horkheimer, Adorno and their successors and imitators proceeded from some Burkean satisfaction with hierarchical social arrangements.

There was always an  ambiguity in the argument too, of the socially constructed view of  male-female differences. They could never quite get it clear whether the differences were socially constructed, or whether the male was, in essence, just violent and evil. We men were all supposed to wear the red ribbons of shame for twenty five years because some abused Algerian boy, Gamil Gharbi, renamed Marc Lepine, killed the fourteen women engineering students at the Universite de Montreal. Even in 2010 it takes a brave newspaper to publish an article suggesting this tragedy might have been about Islamic male contempt for women than reflective of a general male hostility to female success.

This might be a cheaper way to get high for the NASA astronauts.

A bag of cocaine has been found in a Space Shuttle hangar – sparking a Nasa investigation.

US space chiefs fear an employee was seeking a different kind of out-of-this-world experience in the restricted area at Kennedy Space Centre, Florida.

No details yet if the Commander-in-Chief lost his stash.