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Arcturus Press

At last--the neglected case for manly virtue and chaste honor gets a full, fair hearing!

The Cultural Conservative's Antidote to Propaganda About Boys and Violence

The mass media just don't get it.  They echo whatever extremist propaganda is fed them by Harvard's disgraced School of Medicine, for instance, which engineered such mirages as the William Pollack "study" and, more recently, another report on boys and violence.  The Aug. 13 (2001) issue of U.S. News & World Report cites a JAMA study which ties date-battery of teenage girls to several "high risk" behaviors.  The last word goes to Harvard sachem Jay Silverman: "There is a historical entitlement of boys and men to control the behavior of their female partners, and we are dealing with that legacy."

Really?  But the study doesn't show that guys clobber girls: it shows that sexually active, drug- and alcohol-fueled dating is often accompanied by physical abuse; and in turn, this surely hints that kinky sex habits destroy the self-respect of both participants... whence the resort to mind-numbing intoxicants.

What's going on here?  Why does the ultra-feminist (often anti-woman) machine consider the issue of boys and violence congenital to the male sex, yet balk at notions of chivalry, manly virtue, and chaste honor? Is the sexual revolution's legacy of promiscuity and bestiality so important to conserve?

 

 

 

ISBN: 0-9676054-4-X 

paperback, 120 pages + iv

     "The recent epidemic of high school shootings has elicited panic, anger, terror, bewilderment, political posturing, and academic theorizing in more or less equal proportions.  Some voices are far more sincere than others, but the uproar as a whole suffocates critical details.  Everybody wants something done, and done now.

     "The contributors to this volume, however, offer no such quick fix.  Each of them sees the present crisis involving our boys and homicidal violence as a mere symptom of an illness bred in our culture's marrow.  Though their essays do not diagnose the disease in quite the same way, each analysis is consistent with the others.  Radical feminism inciting girls to promiscuity, leaving boys without the traditional motive to behave like gentlemen... the 'relevance' craze of the sixties draining the curriculum of everything that called students to model their fragile identities around visions and convictions centuries old... the dizzy acceleration of time in electronic entertainment sending out the message that only shock effects are impressive... these are circumstances which we cannot soon set straight.  In every case, the basic yearning of the human soul for something higher-- something otherworldly--is perverted by the apparent comfort and ease of modern living: quick sensual pleasure, instant identity, amusement without investment.  The problem goes to the very roots of how we view our heart's true desire.

     "The contributors are all scholars who have taught at the college level in some capacity.  Some are now devoting most of their efforts to rearing a family or to writing about issues whose interest extends far beyond the narrow limits of academic specialization.  Though their essays are footnoted, their work is not clinical in tone, but highly readable and full of conviction.  In fact, their heavy reliance upon the Western literary tradition is probably this volume's most extraordinary feature.  They argue, not with statistics and jargon, but with the two millennia of human experience available to us all through classic poets, novelists, and philosophers; and they do not wield this tradition with a careerist's diplomatic anxiety over the demands of political correctness, but with a deep respect for of its power to magnify perennial human truths."

from the back cover

    

 

contributors:

Helen A. Andretta, Ph.D.

Gianna DiRoberti, Ph.D.

John Harris, Ph.D.

Peter Singleton, Ph.D.

 

 

 

For several excerpts, please click here.

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