Keith Burgess-Jackson

I printed this essay a couple of years ago, when it was published. The other day, while searching my stacks for essays on ethical egoism, I saw it, extracted it, and read it. The thing that bothers the author the most, judging from the number of times she mentions it, is that the teenage girls performing fellatio aren’t receiving cunnilingus in return. Here are quotations:

1. “the oral sex is ‘almost always unilateral (girls on boys)'”

2. “casually and without any expectation of reciprocation”

3. “we see a group of young girls who have in effect turned away from their own desire altogether”

4. “unreciprocated oral sex”

5. “a girl may derive a variety of consequences, intended and otherwise, from servicing boys in this manner, but her own sexual gratification is not one of them”

Would the author’s objections dissipate if the oral sex were reciprocal?

Here is Peggy Noonan’s latest column. Here is Peg Kaplan’s latest post.

Richard John Neuhaus reviews a new book by philosopher Austin Dacey.

I continue to be fascinated by the European fascination with baseball. Judging from the frequency of baseball references in news reports out of Europe, Europeans must love this sport. But they seem not to be well schooled in the precise rules of the game and the proper use of its equipment, which however is readily available in Europe.

—Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)

Science is discovering what anyone with common sense has long known: that there are innate (biological, and therefore psychological) differences between men and women; that these differences generate different value structures; that these value structures generate different choices; and that these different choices manifest themselves in different employment patterns. Will progressives accept these findings? Of course not. They’re ideologues! Anything that doesn’t conform to their expectations is false.

Martin Amis and Terry Eagleton are feuding.

Paul Krugman¹ is doing his damnedest to portray Barack Obama as a lightweight. Krugman likes Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan because it strikes just the right totalitarian note. Everyone, according to this plan, will be coerced into purchasing health insurance. Nobody will be allowed to make this important decision for himself or herself. Why? Because people might decide differently from their progressive superiors. Father (mother?) knows best.

__________

¹“Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults” (Daniel Okrent, “13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did,” The New York Times, 22 May 2005).

To the Editor:

I’m a biracial female Democrat, and I’ve never been tempted to support either Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton because of their genes. Perhaps because my loyalty to the female experience equals my loyalty to the black experience, neither trumps the other.

While some struggle to wrap their heads around which minority to support—or which historical wrong to right—others take the view that (1) no single election will rectify wrongs like slavery and disenfranchisement, and (2) what’s really interesting is that the Democratic Party produced a field reflective of this country’s rare and real diversity, while the Republican Party, well, didn’t.

That Maureen Dowd framed her thoughts in terms of loyalty to aggrieved groups is disappointing—yet not as disappointing as the news media’s befuddled obsession with voters who do base their decision on genetics.

Given that centuries passed with white men being elected to office at least in part because they were white men, you’d think we’d find the like-supports-like logic utterly mundane.

Savala Nolan
Santa Rosa, Calif., March 6, 2008

Note from KBJ: By the letter writer’s logic, I should be loyal to the male experience and to the white experience. What does that mean?

The Use and End of Reason, is not the finding of the summe, and truth of one, or a few consequences, remote from the first definitions, and settled significations of names; but to begin at these; and proceed from one consequence to another. For there can be no certainty of the last Conclusion, without a certainty of all those Affirmations and Negations, on which it was grounded, and inferred. As when a master of a family, in taking an account, casteth up the summs of all the bills of expence, into one sum; and not regarding how each bill is summed up, by those that give them in account; nor what it is he payes for; he advantages himself no more, than if he allowed the account in grosse, trusting to every of the accountants skill and honesty: so also in Reasoning of all other things, he that takes up conclusions on the trust of Authors, and doth not fetch them from the first Items in every Reckoning, (which are the significations of names settled by definitions), loses his labour; and does not know any thing; but onely beleeveth.

(Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, rev. student ed., ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Raymond Geuss and Quentin Skinner [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], chap. 5, p. 33 [first published in 1651])

Here.