you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

So it seems that girls are supposed to write, or to make up stories. At least, there is a certain tradition of this being the case. (This is actually kind of related to what I wrote yesterday.) Is this because girls are inherently prone to fancy whereas boys are inherently realistic? Of course! Not to mention that girls are designed for quiet pursuits like reading and writing, boys for activities like physical play*. That's why Muscular Christianity had to come along: all of that studying scriptures and being kind to thy neighbor was just too feminine for real men.**
*Early medieval noblewomen were much more likely to be literate than their male counterparts, in fact.
**This I am not making up.

One would think that we would not find this sort of thing on the editorial page of the New York Times. But between John Tierney's periodic "women are actually happier to cook, clean, and raise children while their husbands support them" columns and David Brooks' "we are ruining America's boys by forcing them to become girly and intellectual when they clearly aren't meant to be" ones, one is uncertain what decade we are in already.


Yesterday, Brooks took up a new thread in this argument that was strangely familiar to someone who has been getting increasingly more furious at him for the last year or so:

( Virtues and Victims )