A review of The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, by Robert Epstein, Quill Driver Books, 2007, 376 pp, plus appendices, bibliography and index.

At age 14, Andrew Jackson fought in the American War for Independence, was captured by the British. He was also orphaned. David Crockett, hero at the Alamo, struck out on his own at age 12 and returned home four years later a full-grown man. Audie Murphy, who left grade school to support his 11 brothers and sisters, won 33 combat and other service decorations during World War II before he was 20. And David Farragut, chief of the federal navy during the War of Northern Aggression, commanded his first ship at age 12.

Jackson, Crockett and Murphy appear in my own book, Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire, and Robert Epstein, a psychology professor and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, briefly writes about Farragut in his interesting if flawed book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen. Epstein’s thesis is hardly controversial if you know anything about history: Parents who want to know why teenagers are such a mess should look in the mirror. For about the last 150 years, American parents have infantilized teenagers by refusing to let them make decisions. As is usual when society turns in the wrong direction, it wasn’t average Americans who created the problem. Rather, the experts created it—and the problem, Epstein avers, is the imaginary psychological construct called adolescence. While we consider it a given of human maturation, and read back into history the notion of teenage rebellion, the very concept was only defined and given a name in 1904, when psychologist G. Stanley Hall, a biological determinist, coined the word.

Adolescence, the teenage years of rebellion, depression, angst, stupidity and generally incomprehensible behavior, is an accepted fact among the elites and experts, meaning the headshrinkers, eggheads and legislators who want to tell the rest of us what to do and when to do it. The belief in this imaginary developmental stage, which most parents share, explains why young people are such a mess. Or at least they seem to be. For Epstein contends that most teenagers aren’t a mess by nature. They act nutty, stupid and incompetent because we expect them to, and we expect them to because we believe they are nutty, stupid and incompetent—i.e., incapable of making intelligent decisions, incapable of working and incapable of just about anything else that requires a modicum of common sense. We believe that teenagers can’t think, that their brains are screwy. We believe in adolescence.

The result? At best, we delay these young people’s maturation until they are well past the teenage years — and at worst, we drive them into rebellious behavior up to and including drug use, pregnancy and serious crime, not least of which are the major school shootings in the United States over the past few years. Epstein diagnoses the problem, and his prescription is a simple one: Stop treating teens like small children. He’s right about that. And wrong about other things. Not least of those is giving teenagers unfettered rights as opposed to expectations and responsibilities.

Adolescence Is Not Real

Epstein explains that one needn’t read the book word for word to get its gist. The small abstracts opening each chapter will do. Yet understanding the scope of the problem requires reading his historical exposition of adolescence and how this flatly preposterous notion evolved. If you understand the history, you understand why the modern American conception of the teenage years is so outrageously amiss.

Throughout most of human history, he writes, young people were thoroughly integrated into adult society. From an early age, they worked alongside their parents, typically on farms, and were not dragooned into school with dozens or hundreds of peers. They married shortly after puberty began, sometimes as early as 14 or 15. Adolescence did not exist, so a boy or girl went from childhood to adulthood.

In short, our ancestors raised children differently than we do. Few laws restricted what children and teenagers could do. That’s where some of his laconic historical vignettes come in, from a young Alexander the Great to Jimmy Carter explaining that he carried a .22-caliber rifle as a small boy and drove a truck when he was 12.

Beginning in the early 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, the authorities began creating laws to restrict a child’s activities, most of them targeting work. These laws blossomed in the early 20^th-century, concomitantly with compulsory school laws, the idea being to push children into school and prepare them for work in an industrial society.

The biggest push to infantilize children came, surprisingly, from feminists—the most prominent and successful being Jane Addams, a typical late 19^th-century reformer (i.e. busybody). She created Hull House, which began as a measure to help immigrants and children and evolved into a nexus of radical social change.

Epstein quotes a congressional report about this nerve center of crackpot feminism: “Practically all the radicalism among women in the United States centered about Hull House, Chicago, and the Children’s Bureau, Washington, with a dynasty of Hull House graduates in charge of it since its creation.” And according to the Jane Addams Reader, “nearly every major reform in the years 1895-1903 came with Jane Addams’ name attached in one way or another, including labor and housing regulations, employment regulations for women and children, the eight-hour workday, old-age and unemployment insurance….”

What is more, “Addams’ reach was extraordinary. She either founded, helped to found, or was a major player in the American Civil Liberties Union … the Campfire Girls, the National Child Labor Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Consumer’s League, the National Peace Congress, the Women’s Peace Party” and more. No mending or ironing for this world-shaker. She helped concoct the deleterious juvenile justice system, and Hull House “spawned the first Boy Scout troop in Chicago,” as well as the city’s first public swimming pool, playground, kitchen, free art exhibits and college extension courses.

So three major movements initiated the move toward defining and recognizing adolescence: the Industrial revolution, which spawned the first child labor laws; compulsory education, which came next; and the women’s rights movement. As for compulsory education, it “was viewed by leading industrialists as a means of controlling the poor and working classes, and, specifically, for preparing them for work in new Industrial America.”

“The working class,” Epstein quotes a book about the subject, “had imposed upon them a sterile and authoritarian educational system which mirrored the ethos of the corporate workplace,” even as the “agendas of people like Jane Addams overlapped with the agendas of the industrialists.” These agendas of the “child savers” funneled children “off the streets” into a one-size fits all classroom. Epstein explains why compulsory cafeteria schooling is a failed experiment. A child spends almost his whole day separated from adults. What is worse, he writes, quoting John Taylor Gatto, public schools alienate children from their families.

The child-savers’ agenda also overlapped agenda of the labor unions, which wanted to stop children and teenagers from working because they competed with union members—but in any event the anti-work laws kept coming until they evolved into what we have today. A kid can’t work full-time until he is 16, and he certainly can’t work during school hours. Anyone under 16 needs a permit to work.

So Addams and her “child-savers” viewed teenagers as “fragile and incompetent” beings who “need adult protection.” The child savers “defined youth as a troublesome period of life based on their own class-based moralistic biases and created an infrastructure that mass produced young people in the image they themselves had invented: dependent, angry and incompetent. They robbed the young of their independence.”

As this social movement began, American business contributed youth-oriented industries, beginning with manufactured toys and games and metastasizing into the “youth-oriented corporate empires” that plague us today: Hasbro, Milton Bradley, Tonka, Kenner, Toys R Us. Beyond toys, big business now offers teenagers an entire menu of films and music dictating how teenagers think and controlling what they wear. Films typically depict aimless and “infantile teens … defiant and uncontrollable teens … drugged and inebriated and oversexed teens … depressed and suicidal teens.” Teen music is much the same.

American teens, Epstein writes, are the most troubled in the world — despite their wealth and prosperity. Why? Because they are infantilized, and they are infantilized mostly because they can’t work. In California, the age-old newspaper delivery boy is no more; you must be 18 to deliver the daily newspaper. And if teens are too immature to work, they assuredly are too immature to do anything else: sign a contract, buy a home, or get married.

Thus does Epstein catalogue the list of laws on everything from drinking to driving, none of which existed before the early 18^th-century, the Industrial Revolution, compulsory schooling, the child-savers movement or the concept of adolescence.

Before the 20^th-century and even in the early part of it, teenagers didn’t suffer the myriad pathologies they have today, and in many areas of the world, particularly pre-industrial cultures, they still don’t. But as American culture inoculates the world with the plague bacilli of consumption, materialism and adolescence, more young people across the globe misbehave.

Love and Marriage

Apart from the long list of don’ts imposed upon teenagers, society infantilizes teens by prohibiting them from pursuing love and sex. Citing the plethora of incoherent laws that forbid carnal activity to teens, Epstein adds the prohibition on marriage to the prohibition on work as one of the key methods adults use to infantilize teens. The strict laws regulating sexual behavior became necessary because the experts concluded that young men and women were too “immature” for that ultimate of “adult” relationships, marriage.

As with work, until the 20^th century younger teenagers were permitted and encouraged to pursue romance. Epstein explains that modern sensibilities forced an erroneous depiction of Romeo and Juliet as 40-year-olds instead of what they were: not just teenagers but young teenagers. Epstein begins this section of the book with the story of a woman who, at 13, married a 21-year-old man and stayed married for more than 80 years. Today, her husband would be jailed.

What do we know that our ancestors didn’t? Not much. Epstein cites four presidential wives who married as teenagers and stayed married for their entire lives, including Rosalynn Carter and Barbara Bush. In the old days, marriages lasted longer than ours, yet today we reserve marriage for “adults.” However, the divorce rate among adults shows they aren’t much more successful than teenagers might be. Indeed, men who marry young tend to have successful marriages more often than not. This isn’t to say all teenagers are ready for marriage. But obviously many are.

Laws forbidding teenagers to marry, because they are too “immature” to experience romantic love and marriage, cause pre-martial sex and out-of-wedlock births. Forbidding teenagers to marry also helps explain the “high turnover” of girlfriends and boyfriends in high school. So too does the co-ed, compulsory high school itself, where hundreds of teenagers are confined for nine months in an environment offering the obvious cornucopia of carnal delights. Indeed, the two work in tandem: Adults forbid teenagers marriage, the proper outlet for sex, but imprison teenagers in a co-educational environment where they display their wares while consuming raunchy music and movies.

Like forbidding teenagers from working, denying them marriage explicitly tells them they are incapable of adult behavior—even though teenagers can procreate, one of the two purposes of marriage, and human beings reach their intellectual peak in terms of memory and reasoning ability in their teenage years.

As for this last, Epstein provides a list of the accomplishments of kids and teenagers: Louis Braille, blinded by an awl, invented the first version of the Braille reading system at age 12. Mozart was composing at age 7, and composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote A Midsummer’s Night Dream at age 17. George Parker, of Parker Bros. fame, invented his first board game at age 17. A teen-age Walt Disney left home to drive an ambulance in France in the aftermath of World War I. Not to mention Jackson, Crockett, Murphy and Farragut.

Admittedly, Mozart, for instance, was genius and prodigy. And so were many other accomplished young people. But most of them weren’t. Teenagers can work, think, fight and love. The law prohibits all of it.

Where Epstein Goes Wrong

Still, the book is not without a few minor problems and one major flaw: it lacks a moral center.

The minor problems are a few glib, erroneous conclusions. Introducing his argument to show that children can be warriors, he explains that Americans once thought women should not, and could not, fight in wars. He quotes an American soldierette, who claims that a properly trained woman can fight like a man, and concludes that women should be permitted in combat. On this point, Epstein is in over his head. He’s wrong for practical and moral reasons.

Early in the book, Epstein notes that acquisitive capitalists who run globe-straddling businesses created a market for bad music, bad movies and bad clothes that also infantilize teens. At the end, he describes overhearing two gabbling skateboarders, who repeatedly call each other “dude” and wonder whether they might “get air.” “These are the teens we have created:” he writes, “mindless consumers, dressed from head to toe in the garb prescribed by specialized divisions of the music and fashion industries, isolated from their heritages and their elders, producing nothing of value for their families or their society.”

All true, of course, but he also says he doesn’t oppose the acquisitive greed and centralization of business and commerce that created the problem. Why not? If avaricious entertainment tycoons peddle smut and stupidity to kids, he should oppose it. Instead, he avers, teenagers have a right to consume the very poison killing their souls.

This is why the book lacks a moral compass. Indeed, the word isn’t mentioned. Epstein never concedes that certain laws ought rightly to apply to everyone, one example being abortion restrictions, which he opposes. Epstein argues that a child who can demonstrate competence, as determined by tests, should be permitted to drink, smoke, purchase contraceptives, read pornography, have sex and abort a child.

It is true, as Epstein argues, that telling a soldier who earned the Medal of Honor he cannot buy a beer or pack of cigarettes is not only ridiculous but also oppressive in the extreme. But abortion is another matter. Pro-lifers want abortion banned for everyone, not merely teens, because they believe abortion takes an innocent life; i.e., it’s murder. Of course, Epstein opines in a milieu of legal abortion, and because his argument turns on the point that adult women can abort, perhaps it contains a perverse logic. If teenagers can make adult decisions, and abortion is a legal procedure, why can’t a teenager get one without parental consent? But that isn’t, of course, the problem. The problem is abortion, an odious crime whatever the age of the girl or woman.

Epstein only observes that a girl might want an abortion, but never examines why a girl might want to abort, which invites rehearsing the assessment of a very wise priest:

“The Nazis and Communists ran death camps, which they concealed, and which employed at most a few hundred thousands of guards. “We” have killed 45 million, with the locations advertised in the Yellow Pages, with approximately 100 million people directly involved in the killing. I think it’s self-evident that our society is much sicker than Germany was in the Spring of 1945. The process by which 100 million people were brought to that point? Anything that infantilizes people; i.e., anything that creates people who have reached that age at which they can procreate, without having the minimum of adult instincts that would cause them to recoil at the notion of killing one of their own children. The influences that have brought about this level of infantilization are obviously many. I would name, primarily: government schooling and all other instances of socialism. The sexual revolution — the normalization of fornication, pornography, and contraception.”

So perhaps the very infantilization of teenagers Epstein decries leads to abortion. If so, eliminating parental consent laws would not help solve Epstein’s problem, and neither would giving teenagers the “rights” to fornicate, buy contraceptives or consume pornography.

The false assumption behind Epstein’s argument flows from the libertarian ideology of rights: that individuals, not families, are the basic unit of society. This is why Epstein insists that teenagers should operate as rootless adults exercising “rights,” regardless of the effect on family or society. But this is precisely what he complained about, having listened to the skateboarding cretins, and it contradicts his point that teenagers are “isolated from their heritages and their elders, producing nothing of value for their families or their society.” Handing them rights will further isolate them, just as exercising those rights isolated their parents. And that’s because the American fixation on individual rights vitiates those obligations to elders and heritage.

Epstein certainly has a point: We’ve infantilized teenagers by refusing to treat them like adults, by permitting big business to create a global teen culture encouraging rebellion and crime, by compulsory schooling with peers and separation from parents, and by forbidding work, marriage or even drinking a beer. And he echoes pedagogue James B. Stenson, who writes that parents should raise good adults, and says parents and teenagers are adversaries because the latter have not only the sexual but also the intellectual powers needed to function as adults. But repealing laws and turning teenagers loose upon society to exercise their “rights” isn’t the answer to infantilization. A Christian cultural and moral order, after all, must replace those laws.

Epstein should have explained what curtailing the state’s power over teenagers requires. Granted, before the experts created adolescence and government passed the behavioral statutes Epstein opposes, those things did not exist. But no one believed teenagers or children had free-floating “rights.” Rather, they had duties. Loyalty and obedience were expected. They worked because they had to. As well, familial and cultural customs and religious canons firmly governed society. Young people married with the advice, careful consideration and blessing of their families, who sought to protect their own interests. Parents decided when a boy could smoke or drink. They firmly guided their children in choosing their life’s occupation. Were control of these matters returned to parents, communities and religious authorities, adolescence would wither away. Teenagers would grow up.

And they would learn what learned so long ago: They are not individuals who need the license to smoke, drink and fornicate, but members of families, which require adults, teenagers and children to fulfill duties to each other and the kith and kin to whom they are tied by blood, marriage, tradition and religion.

The Case Against Adolescence is full of interesting, and arresting, facts and ideas. Jackson, Crockett and company, with about 1900 years of history before Hall concocted adolescence, make Epstein’s point. Yet his attachment to “rights” and “individuality” undermine his argument and will not help us “rediscover the adult in every teen.”

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know And Admire (Cumberland House).

CAIRO, EGYPT — Al-Azhar University, one of Sunni Islam’s most prestigious institutions, ordered one of its clerics Monday to face a disciplinary panel after he issued a controversial decree allowing adults to breast-feed.

Ezzat Attiya had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying adult men could breast-feed from female work colleagues as a way to avoid breaking Islamic rules that forbid men and women from being alone together.

In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers. It means the child could not marry the nursing woman’s biological children.

Attiya — the head of Al-Azhar’s Department of Hadith, or teachings of the Prophet Muhammad — insisted the same would apply with adults. He argued that if a man nursed from a co-worker, it would establish a family bond between them and allow the two to work side-by-side without raising suspicion of an illicit sexual relation.

You wonder what the La Leche League has to say about this, or whether too little time at mama’s breast really could cause psychosexual frustration, but that aside, the brouhaha over the “Lactation Fatwa” conjures a disturbing picture of what Moslem men think of their women, and what those women face in their quotidian intercourse with those men, social and otherwise.

One example of what Moslems think of women is the so-called honor killing, the murder of women who disgrace a Moslem’s family. This estimable practice, occurring with alarming frequency in Islamo-Europe, has Western elites wringing their tremulous, uncalloused hands. On one hand, they fear offending the feminists seeking justice for their Moslem sisters. On the other, they fear offending an unassimilable racial and religious minority that is demanding, and getting, all manner of “rights,” not least of which is the “right to castigate” a disobedient wife.

Given the refusal of Moslems to assimilate, as well as the range of successful Moslem demands upon European elites for heretofore unimagined “rights” and public and corporate policies, one wonders when Christendom’s benighted lands will relent and sanction not only honor killing but also bride burning, genital mutilation and the other merry folkways the Islamic horde brought with them.

Honor Killings And Other Islamic Practices

An honor killing involves the brother, father or uncle of a girl killing her for besmirching the family “honor.” The possible list of offenses inviting a young woman’s murder is a long one. It includes trying to flee an arranged marriage to an older man, often a cousin or other relative, merely writing love notes to a boy in class, and falling in love (or merely conversing) with an unapproved suitor. A pregnancy out of wedlock demands swift and brutal retribution. Worse yet, other women, typically mothers and mothers-in-law, often help the men commit murder.

On Feb. 7, 2005, The Boston Globe reported last year, 23-year-old Hatun Sucuru was standing at a bus-stop in Berlin when her brother walked up and shot her to death. Her crime? She fled her husband, an older cousin in Turkey whom her parents forced her to marry, and returned to Germany with their son. And, “further enraging her family,” the Globe reported, “she abandoned the hijab — the traditional head scarf worn by some Moslem women — in favor of earrings, makeup, and blue jeans.” The German cops charged her three brothers with the murder; the youngest had pulled the trigger. At a largely Moslem school outside Berlin, the Globe reported, “students greeted news of her slaying with loud approval. Her brothers were hailed as local heroes.” In its article on the subject in 2005, Der Speigel put an even finer point on schoolboys’ approving these killings. “One boy said, ‘She only had herself to blame,’ while another insisted, ‘She deserved what she got. The whore lived like a German.’”

Another infamous honor killing occurred in London in 2004. Holding his daughter over the bathtub, Iraqi Kurd Abdullah Yones slashed his 16-year-old daughter’s throat because she’d written love letters to a classmate. In Birmingham in 1998, 19-year-old Rukhsana Naz, pregnant by her lover, made the mistake of trying to leave an arranged marriage. Her brother strangled her with a jump rope while her mother held her down. In 2002 in Stockholm, Rahmi Sahendal shot his 26-year-old daughter, Fadime, in the head because she too refused an arranged marriage and instead planned to marry a Swede.

Such honor killings are so prevalent among Moslems in Europe that police met in the Hague in 2004 to discuss the matter. As Der Speigel reported, women are dying by the dozen: “The Turkish women’s organization Papatya has documented 40 instances of honor killings in Germany since 1996. Examples include a Darmstadt girl whose two brothers pummeled her to death with a hockey stick in April 2004 after they learned she had slept with her boyfriend. In Augsburg in April [2005], a man stabbed his wife and 7-year-old daughter because the wife was having an affair. In December 2003, a Tuebingen father strangled his 16-year-old daughter and threw her body into a lake because she had a boyfriend.” Last year’s article in the Globe disclosed that police in Germany and England are reopening suspicious cold-case murders. Eight women were murdered in Berlin in 2005, with some 47 slain in the six years before the Globe article was published. Also in 2005, British police reclassified 18 of 22 reviewed murders as honor killings: “Scotland Yard has reopened probes into 109 suspicious deaths, covering a 10-year span, that seem to have been family conspiracies to kill Moslem women.” In 2004, the BBC reported that London’s metropolitan police were combing decade-old files to investigate 52 murders in London and 65 across England and Wales.

Yet Moslem women aren’t the only victims of Moslem men. White Swedish women are suffering a wave of unprecedented rape and mayhem at the hands of their country’s Mohammedan guests. Unsurprisingly, an Islamic mufti’s comment about it jarred the Swedes. Women who don’t wear headscarves, he averred, are “asking to be raped,” a view prevalent among the young Moslem predators teeming in Sweden’s streets. But the Swedes didn’t get beyond a little indignation. Neither have the Dutch. After a Moslem murdered Theo Van Gogh because he directed a film called Submission about misogynist Moslem violence, the authorities wanted to sweep the connection to Islam under the prayer rug.

But even worse is the German judge who refused to give a horribly abused Moslem woman a divorce because the Koran sanctions wife-beating. As Srjda Trifkovic of Chronicles magazine reported, the judge cited the “right to castigate” in refusing the divorce, and even used a few lines from the Moslem holy book to justify the decision:

Men have the authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.

Unsurprisingly, the paper of record was quick to exonerate Islam as the fountainhead of misogyny among Moslem men.

The New York Times had a bone to pick with the German judge mainly because of her suggestion that Islam justified violence against women. It stated matter-of-factly: “While the verse cited by Judge Datz-Winter does say husbands may beat their wives for being disobedient—an interpretation embraced by fundamentalists— mainstream Moslems have long rejected wife-beating as a medieval relic.”

Truth is, the Koran is explicit on the subject of disciplining women in general and wives in particular, as critics of Islam, former Moslems in particular, observe. And while the Koran may not suggest “honor killing” per se, Islamic societies and culture, as well as its men, have absorbed its sacred injunctions on the subject of women. No wonder a “French” Moslem gouged out his wife’s eyes for refusing sex.

The Western Response And The Death Of The Faith

The New York Times and others—quick to assert that Islam does not sanction such violence, which is a falsehood—wish to explain away honor killings, the rape wave and the Islamic domestic violence that has beset Europe. It’s a crime problem. Or their host societies refuse to “integrate” them. Or whatever. It can’t possibly be the fault of the resentful, alien host that sent Paris up in flames two years ago.

The reason the Western elites, particularly the media and politicians, refuse to condemn these explicitly Islamic outrages is the fear of being called “racist” or “Islamophobic.” As one Moslem woman explained to Der Speigel, “People were afraid they would be called Nazis if they dared to bring up issues of human rights in the Turkish community.”

Serap Cileli, a Turkish writer and filmmaker, “forced into an arranged marriage” at just 15, couldn’t get published in Germany. “Everything I wrote from 1994 to 1999 was rejected, even by newspapers,” she told the magazine. “They told me I was writing about a minority issue and they were afraid of appearing racist.” There you have the cult of diversity: suppress the truth because it might inspire a charge of racism. These same anti-Christian elites love nothing more than ridiculing evangelical Christians or devout Catholics and do not fear being called “Christophobic,” but in any event their infatuation with diversity came with a stiff price: Their fear of criticizing Islam precludes them from defending the sisterhood. A Swedish feminist has said women must bow to the wishes of Moslem men and dress more modestly. Thus does Islam’s war against Christendom, as Trifkovic observes, inspire the silence of those who would otherwise condemn Islam’s inherent misogyny:

Such treatment of women might be expected to make Islam abhorrent within the cultural milieu epitomized by the equal-rights obsessed European Union and the neofeminist New York Times, but this has not happened. There is a reason for this. It is the refusal of Islam to accept the wife as her husband’s closest and inseparable loving partner and companion. Islam therefore challenges Christian marriage in principle and in practice. Moslem teaching on marriage and the family, though “conservative” about “patriarchy,” denies the traditional Christian concept of matrimony. Islam is therefore an “objective” ally of postmodernity, a few beatings here and a few rapes there notwithstanding.

In other words, the leftist, feminist elites of the West will not oppose Islam because it helps undermine Christian marriage, itself as much an institution of patriarchal oppression as Islam. That is a lie, of course, and those elites now know what they have permitted to enter their house, even if their pusillanimity in the face of name-calling, or worse, riots and wanton murder, offer psychological refuge for their denial.

The question is who, or what, opened the door. Pope Benedict answers indirectly, or perhaps not, when he calls for a restoration of faith and fecundity in Europe. The inevitable Islamic conquest of Europe and its affiliated horrors would never have been possible had Europe remained true to its Catholic faith, the bulwark that stood firmly against Islamic conquest for 10 centuries. Islam’s triumph first required the repudiation of the Faith and its traditions, as well as the steady dissipation of Europe’s Catholic culture, which not only included chivalry, or defending the honor of women and assuring them an esteemed place in home and hearth, but also elevating the most admirable and worthy of the fairer sex to sainthood, a practice that finds its spiritual apex in devotion and prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary. That mighty edifice of the Church Militant in Paris, Notre Dame, arose for a reason. Clearly, one faith cannot live comfortably next to the other. Part of Trifkovic’s point is that Islam is the anti-Christian elite’s ally in the latter’s quest to destroy the Faith they hate but which gave them everything they have. The late atheist Oriana Fallaci recognized this truth, which inspired her to spend her final years denouncing the coming Islamic conquest of Italy.

The likelihood is that anti-Christian elites would be more explicit about helping Islam conquer Europe were honor killing and rape not part of the bargain. This brings to mind such neocon allies as Christopher Hitchens, one of the leftists who think a good reason for going to war in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East is liberating the Arab sisterhood. The Hitchensians would use the American military to establish “women’s rights” in a part of the world that has never known them or indeed ever known women as anything but domestic slaves and fertile soil for the seed corn of Mohammed’s future disciples. It sounds chivalrous, but don’t be fooled. This, too, is anti-Christian in its motive. Feminism is an appendage of atheist leftism, an enemy of Islam and Christianity. Indeed, that Americans are fighting against Moslems in Iraq and Afghanistan, not as Christians but as secular democrats, is the principal reason Hitchens and his anti-Christian, neocon tribe can support the Bush Crusade in Iraq. They wish to defeat Islam not because it is anti-Christian, but because it strives to destroy leftist secular democracy in the West, which dethroned the Christian polity, culture and religion they so despise.

Thus, unlike Fallaci, who, while an atheist, understood that the Church built Western Civilization, the Hitchensians see the global projection of American power as a means to spread anti-Christian democracy and further undermine the Faith. If they don’t wish Islam to succeed, it is only because one oppressive religion, in their view, would replace another. But secular democracy cannot defeat Islam. Only the Faith can. Then again, as Bush clearly says, the war in Iraq is not a war against Islam, a “religion of peace,” but a “war against terror,” which cannot be won because a tactic cannot be defeated. Either way, the war in Iraq is lost.

Which leaves just one observation. Until the West awakens from its spiritual slumber and raises the Cross, it will continue losing the fight not against “terror” but against Islam itself. Until then, the honor killings, rapes and riots will continue with customary ferocity. Brothers shooting sisters. Fathers slashing throats. Husbands gouging out eyes. Mothers strangling daughters. Next to these, grown men suckling a co-worker’s breast is but a mild indignity.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans To Know And Admire (Cumberland House). His articles appear regularly in The New American and Chronicles. His last article for Taki’s Top Drawer was “Cowards, Bullies and Killers.”

The point’s truth is self-evident. But it also skirts over an underlying pathology: the liberal fear of and disdain for Americans’ using guns or even their fists to defend themselves against criminals. Columnist Mark Steyn called it the “culture of passivity,” asking why no one tried to stop the gunman. The answer isn’t just that Tech students were unarmed thanks to the campus’ being a “gun-free” zone, that just last year, the Virginia General Assembly scuttled a bill that would permit state college students with valid permits to carry firearms. Point is, guns or no, except for the 76-year-old professor (and Holocaust survivor) killed trying to defend his students, and perhaps the boys who shoved a table against a classroom door to prevent the gunman from entering, the men did nothing.

So Steyn doesn’t go far enough. It isn’t merely “a culture of passivity” that paralyzed the victims at Virginia Tech and elsewhere, but a culture of emasculation. As I argue in the preface to my book Real Men: Ten Courageous American to Know and Admire, modern American culture has emasculated, feminized and homosexualized the American man. Thoroughly imbued with feminist ideology, the culture-at-large teaches that raw masculinity and nearly all physical violence must be eliminated to overcome “male dominance” and “sexism” and “oppression” and “patriarchy.” The average American never heard this ideological poppycock before the original Ugly Betty got mad about the ironing and put her castration shears to the sharpening stone. But now, our anti-Christian, feminist cultural elites, meaning Hollywood, the media and big business, expect men to think and behave like women. Many of them do.

Yet even as the petticoat tyrants gelded the American man over the past half-century—mostly because he laid down for the operation—an evil, faux masculinity has arisen, best exemplified in the antics of Don Imus and Howard Stern, other shock-jocks and the talk-show bloviators. They routinely insult guests on their programs. They mercilessly ridicule anyone they choose, behind the safety of a microphone in a sound-proof studio somewhere in New York or Washington, D.C. Many are the notorious, neoconservative, chickenhawk agitators we’ve all come to know and despise. Others spray the airwaves with scatological and pornographic fare that would, 50 years ago, have meant a term at Leavenworth.

Question is, how did we arrive at this pass?

Modern Men And Men Of Yore

Before answering that question, it’s worth observing that young Cho Sheung-hui, the student who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech on April 16, isn’t the first of his ilk. He had “heroes” on which to model himself—the Columbine killers, for instance. And Steyn’s “passivity” isn’t merely a feature involving a determined, heavily-armed fruitcake with a history of stalking, homemade apocalyptic videos and writing violent plays. Granted, the heroes who crashed United Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field on 9-11 were sadly anomalous. But showing passivity in the face not only of certain injury and death but also garden variety thugs and bullies is standard fare for American males. It’s what they’re trained to do.

Consider the tale told by Richard Poe at www.lewrockwell.com., recounted in Real Men. Poe writes about the night he was in a Kinko’s copy center in New York City, when a scuffle broke out at a copy machine. A black man, hurling epithets as he walked out the door, stole a white man’s materials. “Look, he’s leaving with my stuff,” said the victim, “wringing his hands in frustration.”

“Behind the counter,” Poe wrote, “were three or four young men in their early twenties, all white, all sporting some combination of bizarre haircuts, earrings, pierced noses, and other countercultural appurtenances. All stared blankly at the customer who was complaining. No one made a move to help,” except the “chubby bespectacled” manager, a woman less than five feet tall.

“As I stood in Kinko’s that night,” Poe wrote, “it occurred to me that those glassy-eyed young men behind the counter with their earrings and pierced noses did not know this fear. They had probably been taught to fear accusations of ‘racism, ‘sexism’ and ‘homophobia.’ But the word coward was not in their vocabulary. They were feminist men.”

Yes, men used to worry about being called a coward. Which is no small point. A skeptic might well answer that a few sheets of paper weren’t worth fighting over, and maybe that’s a valid point. But certainly your life and the lives of your women are worth fighting for, which invites discussing the behavior of three men on a spine-chilling night in December 2000 that culminated in The Wichita Massacre.”

On Dec. 14, two black brothers set upon five young whites, three men and two women, spending the night at one of their houses. The criminals, Jonathan and Reginald Carr, ending a week-long feral rampage, subjected the victims to an orgy of sexual torture nearly beyond description. They forced the women to have sex, forced the men to have sex with the women, then raped and sodomized the women. They robbed them and drove the naked victims to a field, having graciously allowed the women to wear sweaters, and executed four of them. One woman, having been shot in head and run over with a truck, survived and escaped. The men did not fight back. The men did not attempt to escape. The men did not protect their women. This is curious, given that one of the Carr brothers forced each victim, one at a time, to drive him to an ATM machine, which left two or three men at the home with the other brother who was raping the women. But the men did nothing.

Time was, it didn’t take such an attack to provoke a man’s violent reaction in self-defense. Consider a few stories from Real Men. A few years ago, the Anchorage Daily News reported, an octogenarian veteran of the 82nd Airborne, which jumped into Normandy on D-Day, stopped two teenagers from burglarizing his house. Roy Lee Hendricks shot himself in the finger, but he beat the daylights out of the two punks, then drove himself to the hospital. “I never ran in my life, and I don’t intend to now,” the rough-and-ready Alaskan told the paper. “I’d rather be a dead hero than a live coward.” Hendricks cared about something more than getting hurt or even killed. He cared about his honor. About his obligations as a man.

Audie Murphy, who received 33 battle decorations, including the Medal of Honor, during World War II before he was 20, was another American to be feared and respected. Thanks to a friendship with Jimmy Cagney, he became an actor after the war, but he never lost his sense of what it meant to be a man. In his excellent biography of Murphy, No Name on the Bullet, Don Graham recounts two stories that today would invite Oprah or Dr. Phil to spend an hour chewing the rag about overcooked machismo. At a party in Beverly Hills, a drunken actor named Lawrence Tierney was cursing around Murphy’s girlfriend. Audie politely approached the man.

“Mr. Tierney, you don’t know me, my name is Murphy and I’m here with my girl, and please, don’t do that anymore.”

“Get away from me,” said Tierney, who towered over Murphy.

Tierney persisted, and Audie returned: “Mr. Tierney, this is very disturbing, please don’t do that anymore.”

Murphy went away again, but the blotto thespian persisted, an invitation for a third conversation. Murphy tapped him shoulder.

“Mr. Tierney, I’ve told you twice and I’m not going to tell you again. Get your hat and coat and leave right now.”

“Tierney looked at those eyes,” the witness said, “and got his hat and coat and left.” Murphy’s steel gray eyes, Graham writes, “were the thing that everybody remembered. They were cold, almost deadly.”

Another time at the racetrack, Murphy was reading the racing form, but glanced up as two women walked by. He quickly went back to the form, oblivious to anything but handicapping the ponies. “So about five minutes later,” a friend of Murphy’s told Graham, “here comes a big Dago guy about two hundred and something pounds and he says, ‘Hey, next time my wife ever comes here again and you make eyes at her ...’

“Are you through?” Murphy replied.

“No, I’ll tear your head off.”

“So Audie just leaned back and pulled out this gun and laid it right here and said, ‘I killed three-hundred fifty of you guys [during the war]; one more wouldn’t make any difference.’”

Real Men is full of such encounters, which are less indicative of “violence” or the “gun culture” than a culture that expected men to defend themselves, their women and, yes, their honor. Consider the gunfight between James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok and Dave Tutt, who won Hickok’s watch in a poker game. It was July 21, 1865, in Springfield, Mo., and Tutt threatened to wear Hickok’s watch on the town square to humiliate the storied plainsman and Indian fighter. Wild Bill suggested that such effrontery would not be amusing or appreciated. When Tutt appeared in the square at 6 p.m., Hickok showed up as well. Tutt drew first, and Hickok put a bullet in his chest.

The Feminist Victory

So back to the original question. American society has descended from one that whelped men who threw punches if a woman heard the lame profanity of a drunken lout, to one that whelps men who watch their women suffer rape and murder. How did we come to this pass?

The answer lies in the steady stream of propaganda from the feminist cultural elites that have equated masculinity—and the healthy and righteous violence that goes with it when necessary—with evil. They taught men to behave like women. Television and films, of course, helped.

In 50 short years, we have descended from the American man as represented in The Rifleman and Father Knows Best to the feminized men on Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond. Once upon a time, television fathers were solid. Like Lucas McCain. Or Jim Anderson. No more. Now, the American man on television is a clown, a helpless, pathetic sissy whose wife and children have all the answers and order him around. Dan Conner, the slovenly, dull-witted husband and father on Roseanne, is just one fine example. Hollywood once offered us The Rifleman. Now we get Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will and Grace. Not to mention preposterous films with lady warriors, such as G.I. Jane and Courage Under Fire.

No wonder we now have the news media’s latest hero, the “metrosexual.” “Male executives find feminine traits pay off in the workplace,” a headline in the Salt Lake Tribune aptly put it. Metrosexuals “are very secure in their sexuality,” ran one report on the phenomenon, and getting a facial or a pedicure “doesn’t make them feel any less masculine or any less heterosexual.” Metrosexuals are true pioneers, “finding the courage to explore the female domain,” another report averred, without losing their ‘status’ as real men.” Time was, our pioneers were Lewis and Clark and Kit Carson, who traversed and tamed the American wilderness. Now, they “explore” the “female domain.”

Yet Hollywood and the news media aren’t the only factories manufacturing this this cultural poison. Schools are another front in the war against masculinity. Illinoisloop.org posts a list of 22 practices in grade schools that harm boys in myriad ways. Where the subject matter of genuine manhood is concerned, the site scrutinizes curricula and makes several observations. “Assigned literature,” it reports, “is skewed lopsidedly towards social issues, and away from novels of high adventure, courage, patriotism, etc.” And boys also face an “almost total absence of fact-based biography and non-fiction in literature and reading classes.”

In short, don’t give a boy The Killer Angels, a novel about the battle of Gettysburg, or a biography of Gen. George S. Patton. Let him read a story about a girl who makes the football team and the boy who shows real courage by admitting he takes ballet lessons.

In schools, masculinity is out. Commentators such as Diane Ravitch argue that reading material has been feminized. In her article “Education and the Culture Wars,” published in Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ravitch described reviewing test material as one of the board members of a federal agency. She learned that reading selections on one standardized test were not only racially biased against whites but also sexually biased against boys. “In one story, a white boy in a difficult situation weeps and says plaintively, ‘If only my big sister were here, I would know what to do.’” Ravitch also reviewed one publisher’s guidelines for standardized tests: Among the taboo items were:

Men shown as “strong, brave, and silent,” women shown as “weepy, fearful, and emotional;” boys playing sports, or girls playing with dolls; ... men working as lawyers, doctors, or plumbers; women working as nurses or secretaries; ... men playing sports or working with tools; women cooking and caring for children; ... men portrayed as breadwinners; women portrayed as homemakers… Illustrators must not use pink for baby girls or blue for baby boys. Out is the old-fashioned idea that females care more about their appearance than males do: today’s illustrator must portray both sexes “preening in front of a mirror,” with Dad using a blow-dryer.

Thus is a metrosexual made, and Ravitch and others aren’t just describing obvious propaganda. They are describing the cultural elite’s manipulation and alteration of traditional symbols to remake boys and reorder society. By replacing those traditional symbols, they have changed the moral order from what it was 50 years ago to what is now.

Phony Masculinity

Given the subversion of masculinity, it’s unsurprising that the emasculated, homosexualized man evolved concomitantly with the phony tough guy. His exemplars are Imus and other radio blowhards such as the increasingly popular neoconservative, Mark Levin. Levin expresses a few opinions with which many conservatives agree, yet he incessantly berates his guests in particularly sophomoric terms, such as “moron,” “jerk” and “idiot.” He has labeled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “stretch” because she has, he assumes, undergone a few face lifts. Another such insufferable crank is Glenn Beck.

The comments that finished Imus, as so many have observed, are nothing new and not confined to the Left, where Imus made the bed he’d have to sleep in. Many of the radio commentators who dominate conservative talk radio are chicken-hawk gas-bags who do little, apart from goading America to send other, braver men off to war, than defame callers, public officials and celebrities who do not share their ideological obsessions. They say things about others that, in a civilized country, would invite a pistol-whipping in the street.

But perhaps phony masculinity is best represented in the obsession with carnality among celebrities and the hyper-sexual swamp called radio and television, perfectly represented by Howard Stern and something called The Man Show, now mercifully moldering in its richly-deserved grave. Stern is known for “Black Jeopardy” and other racial capers, but his stock-in-trade is filthy sexual banter and monkeyshines that reveal him to be a full-blown pervert. Anyone familiar with Stern needs no rehearsal of his pornography (which includes, for instance, incestuous lesbian encounters). It suffices to say no subject, no matter how perverted or repellent, is off limits.

The Man Show was tamer, but it too presented a false and perverse image of masculinity that offers feminists the inventory with which to peddle their lies and fantasies about “sexism” and “oppression.” The Man Show defined masculinity in terms of belching, flatulence, drunkeness, and watching scantily clad, large-breasted women hop on trampolines. Such filth was lower octane than Stern’s, which perhaps explains its commercial failure. The Man Show lost the race to the bottom.

These two examples don’t come close, however, to some of the gratuitous and malevolent sex and violence in many Hollywood films, which is, again, precisely how feminists wish masculinity to be depicted. It proves their point that masculinity is a pathology to be feared, rejected and erased.

Men Are The Problem

Of course, real masculinity is none of this. And tempting as it is to blame feminists for what’s happened to men, one unsettling truth is that men were in charge of society’s major institutions, cultural and otherwise, when the feminists began their equivalent of Sherman’s march to the sea. Men ran the courts and legislatures when women demanded war on fathers and husbands. Men ran the universities when the feminists demanded bogus academics such as “gender studies.” Men ran the military when women demanded “the right” to fight on the battlefield. They ran the movie studios, law firms and newspapers.

One explanation for their surrender is that feminists exploited the very quality in men they claim to deplore, meaning chivalry and a man’s natural desire to please women. Men don’t like to tell women “no.” I saw this dynamic up close when I served on the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. Highly-decorated military men, to use an apt cliché, were putty in the hands of women, even the bitter, snarling crones who hovered about the commission to monitor and subvert its gathering of facts.

But the feminists offered something else, and looking back, we can see what that something was: doing it. In return for giving the feminists the political, cultural and financial clout they wanted, the feminists offered easy sex. The agreement was implicit in the exchange. Paradoxically, as sexual morals gradually disappeared over the last 40 years, and more and more women offered casual sex, men have been less willing and able to assert their masculinity. The sex, allegedly, is great. But masculine control over society’s major institutions collapsed. Maybe when the feminists launched their campaign for free sex, they knew exactly what they were doing. But the men knew what they were doing too.

So we have what we have. Imus, Stern and the rest of the tough guys—hollow men whom Audie Murphy would have torn to pieces. We have the men who do nothing when a remorseless killer loads up and shoots, like the professor at Virginia Tech who, located in another building, hid under his desk for six hours, and left his students alone in a basement laboratory.

Which brings us back not just to the wounded campus, but to the massacre in Wichita, and myriad other scenes where men fully capable of fighting back did nothing. The culture has told men loud and clear that defending themselves, their women or families, with a gun or without, risks professional and financial ruin. Or worse, prison time. Men have learned that raw-boned masculinity is a psycho-sexual disorder. They have learned, as one observer said, that men are just big women; that women are little men. They have learned to “explore the female domain,” that “feminine traits pay off.”

Indeed they do. At a very high price.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men Ten Courageous Americans to Know And Admire (Cumberland House). This essay reprises material that appeared in the book.