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From Christianity Today:

The words husband and hint don’t belong in the same sentence. I maintain there’s a perfectly good explanation for why guys are clueless. It’s because wives like to hint around at what they mean; then they wonder why their husbands aren’t responding.

Take last Thanksgiving, for instance. Jeanette and I had a houseful of guests, some of whom were watching football in the family room. Being a good host, I figured I’d watch it with them. Just then, from the kitchen, Jeanette said, and I quote, “Ron.” She used that tone that means I’d messed up—without specifying the infraction.

“Should I feed the fire?” I asked. That wasn’t it. “Do you want me to help you get the dishes out?” Not that, either. “Is it time for me to take drink orders?” Wrong again. Finally, I hit on it. “You don’t want me to watch football while other guests visit in the living room, do you?” Bingo! At last I’d guessed correctly. But it would have been less frustrating if Jeanette had just said, “I don’t think you should watch football while the other guests entertain themselves in another room.” If she’d uttered those words, I would have caught on. Honest.

I absolutely hate this sort of thing, not because it’s a marriage issue but because it can be a massive problem in business. (Although I don’t see the point of that stupid guessing game, it would make as much sense to start in with charades while you’re at it.) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to some clueless executive or manager – usually a man, by the way – express some vague notion about the desirability of an event coming to pass. At no point does he explicitly tell the person he’s secretly thinking will be responsible for making it happen to actually do anything, he merely rambles on about how wonderful things will be once the task is accomplished.

Weeks later, wonder of wonders, he is both furious and mystified that not only is the task incomplete, but the people he’d thought were working on it haven’t even begun to do anything. Of course, it’s always their fault, the incompetent bastards. Why can’t they follow a simple order?

I once showed a good friend he was doing this by asking the guy I knew he thought he had just given orders to what his action items were. My friend was shocked when the guy correctly replied “nothing” and said that he was going to keep doing what he’d been doing before. So, when making a request or issuing an order, three elements should always be there:

1. A specific address, by name, directed at the individual.
2. A precise and comprehensive request or order. If you want three boxes moved from the south office to the east office, you must accurately describe all of the necessary elements involved in the task. “You know, someone should do something with all that stuff back there sometime” does not begin to suffice.
3. Ask them when they expect to begin and request an estimated time of completion. This gives you a means of holding them accountable. If it has to be done by a certain date, let them know, and if possible, keep a day or two in pocket.

No one can properly anticipate another’s desires on a reliable basis and no one can read minds. If you’re frustrated that people don’t seem to listen to you or appear to regularly ignore your requests, the chances are very high that you have a communications problem.

Men who have wondered how to reduce their risk of further divorce finally have an answer:

Once, couples put their children’s needs first. Today, significant numbers are less willing to do so. Asked, “Should a couple stay together for the sake of the children,” 81 percent of today’s women say no, a jump from 51 percent in 1962.

This is an almost perfect identification point. If you’re involved with a woman, be sure to have one of her female friends ask her that question. If she answers no, then don’t even think about marrying her, since it’s clear that she puts herself ahead of her children. If she’s willing to do that, let’s just say that her concern for abiding by any commitment to you will rank somewhere around the level of her interest in Zambian water table levels.

And note, never ask anyone a significant question about relationships yourself if you want an honest answer. It’s like asking people if they’d vote for a gay, black woman president. No one is going to publicly confess that they’d never vote for Condoleeza Rice one, but that doesn’t mean they would actually consider doing so for a second.

Every so often, I find myself curious about a piece of formerly popular fiction that I had, during the height of its popularity, assiduously avoided. I don’t know if my tendency to avoid bestsellers stems from a perverse instinct to avoid following the crowd or an instinctive understanding that anything that appeals to a large number of people is likely to be underwhelming, if not unpleasantly odiferous.

For example, I had not read a single Stephen King novel until I found myself ensconced in a hotel room for a weekend with no other reading material about eleven years ago, and while I found that he was clever enough with a plot, I also felt he badly needed an editor to weedwhack about forty percent of his overstuffed prose. I didn’t start reading Harry Potter until the fourth one was out – same deal there, actually, it’s telling to compare the size of the first book with the size of the fifth one – and I will probably continue to avoid Dan Brown for at least another decade or two.

I’d downloaded a bunch of novels written by authors whose names begin with “A” some months ago, and with no other knowledge than a) her big fat books were very popular some years ago, and b) a memory of a friend’s fond recounting of the scene in which Daryl Hannah gets banged in the movie, I decided to read Jean Auel’s “Clan of the Cave Bear”. Although, come to think of it, b) may have actually been “Quest for Fire” and not involved Miss Hannah at all. Anyhow.

It wasn’t entirely awful. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the grunting Anita K. Hamilton-style sexfest with Neanderthals in the place of vampires and werewolves that I was expecting. It was actually an occasionally touching tale of a lonely outsider doing her best to fit into a place she didn’t belong, and the construction of Neanderthal society was more fully fleshed out and credible than most alien constructions I’ve read. There were, however, more than a few signs of problems to come, the most notable of which is that “Clan of the Cave Bear” is the most overtly Nazi book since Mein Kampf. While “feminazi” is usually little more than a jibe, it is a literal description of the worldview in this book, even if it is apparently an unconscious one. (The author seems to have realized this later and threw in a sympathetic black character in a feeble attempt at some sort of balance two books later.)

After finishing “Clan of the Cave Bear”, I managed to slog through two and one-quarter more books before finally abandoning Mrs. Auel with a snort and a roll of the eyes. I’m not sure which I found more tiresome, Ayla’s discovery of the theory of relativity or her accidental creation of the game of chess. Or perhaps it was that dreadful Jondolar – the original Sensitive Progressive, who will stick around for an entire year living in the same cave as the love of his life and watching her get pounded to shrieking orgasms every other night by the aforementioned non-Aryan rival – uttering what appear to be the only four words in his vocabulary for the ten thousandth time: “Ayla, you’re so amazing!”

(This varied occasionally. Sometimes it was “Ayla, do you know how amazing you are?” Or, “Ayla, you’re so beautiful” and its variant, “Ayla, do you know how beautiful you are?”)

I usually stop reading a book when I realize that I have begun actively rooting for the protagonist to die. I was so depressed when Jondolar couldn’t even successfully wander off in despair to get eaten by a cave lion without getting saved by the amazing, beautiful Ayla, thanks to her timely invention of the Maxim gun, that I knew I wasn’t going to get far into “The Plains of Passage”. I made it with them to the Big Water on sheer literary momentum, but there I left them. I think they’ll be okay, though, since he’s always stimulating her “hard little node” and she is the only woman on the Neolithic planet amazingly deep enough to take the fullness of his gargantuan “manhood”. Perhaps it is a mark of my own shortcomings, but I had no idea that women seek to be appreciated for their depth….

Anyhow, I now understand the reason for Mrs. Auel’s literary success. The books are nothing more than romance novels, disguised by virtue of their length and paleontological trappings. What I found particularly revealing is what books like these reveal about the average reader’s psyche, namely, that the fantasies of women are every bit as shallow and embarrassing as those revealed by books favored by men. Men harbor adolescent dreams of saving the world, killing hosts of bad guys and racking up a sexual conquest or seven, women, on the other hand, apparently dream of being lauded to the skies for every word and deed, being ardently pursued by the most handsome man and still being able to get it on with another, albeit lesser admirer without being held responsible for it and losing the primary devotee.

Seriously, most of the popular women’s novels I’ve read in the last five years feature a woman torn between two admirers and somehow getting to have both of them without any cost to herself. But whereas Auel’s protagonist can only dally with the secondary devotee for a time before eventually being forced to choose between them, Hamilton’s, appearing some twenty years later, is miraculously able to retain the continuing affections of both. It’s an interesting psycho-literary evolution and one that any writer with a desire to write bestsellers should definitely note.

By the way, I have a theory to explain Mrs. Auel’s motivation in writing these books. I see them as being an anguished woman’s cry for help, as they are all dedicated to her husband and feature pages upon pages drawing attention to where the Center of Ayla’s womanly Pleasures can be found. Sadly, after 25 years, Mrs. Auel has announced that two more books are required to complete the series, so it would appear that despite the impressive book sales, her undertaking has been unsuccessful.

To read a hilarious and, as far as I can tell, accurate description of the movie, check this out. It serves as a fair summary of the book as well, which to be honest, isn’t quite that bad.

I mean, we all know the British government issues licenses to kill:

No police officers will face criminal charges over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Crown Prosecution Service said yesterday. He was shot dead at Stockwell Underground station, south London, last July by anti-terrorist officers who mistakenly feared that he was a suicide bomber….

“In order to prosecute those officers, we would have to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that they did not honestly and genuinely hold those beliefs. In fact, the evidence supports their claim that they genuinely believed that Mr de Menezes was a suicide bomber and therefore, as we cannot disprove that claim, we cannot prosecute them for murder or any other related offence.”

If I ever wanted to start a career as a hit man, the first thing I’d do is join the police force. You could probably nail three or four people for profit, then retire early claiming post-traumatic stress disorder and collect a disability pension.

What an entirely predictable joke. By this logic, until the UK police possesses retroactive mind-reading technology, the British public is completely fair game so long as the cop can think up an excuse.

I wonder what they’ll turn out to be selling. It stinks of viral marketing:

It’s a personal message for everyone to read. Thanks goes out to my husband who chipped in on the price tag. Golly gee honey, I would’ve never been able to tell the world about your exploits with my best friend without your contribution! Gotta love joint bank accounts. Oh, sorry Steve, I had to splurge on the lights, too. Some people work late, like you. And they’re always driving home when it’s dark. Burning that midnight oil, Steve-o. Just like you.

So for the next two weeks, starting with today, I will exact revenge on my whoring husband. And who knows what a disparaged woman with lots of resources at her disposal might do?!

It’s always interesting to see how difficult it is to convincingly write in a false voice. A good fiction writer can do it at times, but most people can’t. Anger, in particular, is difficult to write persuasively. I was sure that this whole thing was a fake after watching the video, as the two people clearly appeared to be actors and I don’t know how any private investigator would manage to get that near-upskirt shot at the restaurant without them noticing, but even the text of the purported billboard rang false.

UPDATE – apparently my BS detector is in good working order.

The number of men in here who seem to think that marriage gives a man a certain amount of ownership over women is going into my growing Marriage Sucks For Straight Women file. Congrats! Men who think that they have ownership over their wives’ bodies have forsaken their right to said wives’ honest communication.

And, as the White Buffalo astutely pointed out, wives who think they have no ownership over their husband’s bodies abandon any right to protest his decision to insert any part of his body into another woman, or anything else, for that matter. It’s his body, after all, why on Earth would she have any say over what he does with it if he has none regarding her body.

It’s strange, especially in light of how so many women simultaneously hold the position that marriage gives a woman a certain amount of ownership over his possessions. How does Cthulhu’s Coven explain those claims in the apparent absence of any male claims on the married woman? Furthermore, Amynda is expressing an overtly anti-Christian point of view, as the Bible is quite clear on the fact that the husband holds a claim on the woman’s body, and the wife holds a claim on the man’s body. Since these claims are given voluntarily, even an atheist libertarian couldn’t possibly object to them.

The intellectual poverty of these mental midgets is truly astounding. But amusing, it’s always amusing. One merely wonders what is wrong with those young women who actually find this sort of thing to be persuasive.

In which a mild admonition is administered to Zapata King:

And then there’s Vox. He’s allows dissent, but he does make sport of his readers. Here he’s getting rather brutal with Jonathan Birge. This, though, could just be a case of him casting stones at the high and mighty. It all depends on who is attacking who. The little guy should be given more lattitude in how he can attack the big guy. So, is this a case of equals attacking each other, or, as they say, is their asymmetry involved? Either way, we can assume that Dr. Jonathan Birge regreted his decision to send Vox an email.

Notice, though, the use of one of Vox’s favorite words. I hate that word, and I never use it to refer to women. Vox, on the other hand, uses it very often to refer to women. That’s one reason Vox Day is a punk. But punk is a soft insult to Vox, or not even an insult to Vox. His former days were the life of a punk.

Yes, punk is not so much the insult to any aficionado of William Gibson or the Original Cyberpunk his own bad self. And while I’m less openly enamored of the essential ethos of punk, Do It Yourself, most days I still live by it.

My blog creed is clear: thou shalt criticize in the mode which thou shalt receive criticism. (I except punctuation and grammar, as I simply don’t possess the Pan-Gargler’s innovative, free-associating approach to such things required to respond to him in like manner.)

In any event, I must take exception to Zapata King’s assertion that I use the word “bitch” very often to refer to women. The truth is that I usually use it to refer to men. When I wish to slur a woman, I refer to her as a “feminist”.

We shall eagerly await word of an appropriate edit. We apologize if the strong language or adult subject matter contained herein has offended any tender sensibilities. No animals were harmed during the production of this post.

Vox Popoli is an Equal Opportunity Offender.

that I killed your baby…. Unsurprisingly, the High Priestess of Cthulhu’s Coven is primarily worried about the woman’s mental health. Screw the kid. Screw the guy who would otherwise have been expected to provide for, protect and love that child. Because it’s all about what women want right now… in nine years, that same woman will probably be single and getting shot up with fertility drugs and anonymously donated sperm.

I strongly suspect that my wife’s miscarriage last year was intentional, i.e., she had an induced abortion. At the time we were both 31 years old with a combined income of just over 100K. We were married for about a year. My wife was on medication for depression and anxiety (Paxil with the occasional Xanax). The pregnancy was unplanned and she expressed a desire to terminate the pregnancy a few days after we found out, saying she wasn’t ready to have kids yet, maybe in another year. I really wanted to have a baby and was very upset that she felt this way. We made an appointment for counseling about two weeks out. However, prior to that she claims she had a miscarriage.

From the sound of his letter, I suspect he’s right that his wife is lying to him. He doesn’t really sound like the kind of guy you can tell the truth to, since the options he gave her when she told the truth were, “Have a baby against your will” or “Be harangued until it’s too late for you to terminate.”

If he harbored such serious doubts as to her veracity, this guy should have gone ahead and examined his wife’s medical records, because as Amanda clearly demonstrates, merely believing that you have the right to an opinion about your wife’s desire to murder your unborn child makes you an evil person anyhow. You’re already there, dude, might as well learn the truth.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend an immediate slashing of ties to a man whose wife secretly aborted his child, much less one who is evidently a neurotic murderess. (I’m sorry, perhaps you’d prefer “is receiving chemical treatment for mental instability and was not ready for motherhood”.) The first duty of a man is to protect his children, and that includes protecting them from their mother if necessary.

As usual, feminists want it both ways. They want women to be able to murder a child if she doesn’t want it, but they want to use Big Daddy Government to make a man who doesn’t want a child to provide for it and its mother for 18 years. This makes no sense, but then, if feminists were capable of grasping logic, they wouldn’t be feminists. Equality demands that a man have an equal right to reject responsibility for a child he does not want, which is only one of the many reasons that I reject the concept of equality.

Anyhow, I don’t see why anyone would ever marry a woman who believes in abortion rights in the first place. If she buys into that reasoning, she’ll buy into the idea that marriage is an outmoded, unnecessary and Patriarchal institution oppressive to women too. Run that one past her a few times along with a few strategically-timed Friedan quotes and she’ll soon feel guilty for even wanting to get married, let alone pressuring you for it.

UPDATE – Coven member JBR adds this:

Does my husband have an interest on whether I take birth control pills for menstrual suppression? Whether I have an epidural for my child’s birth? Whether I breastfeed? How far does his opinion hold when it’s my body?

Well, I’m sure men will be glad to relinquish any interest in that sort of thing just as soon as women relinquish their interest in what men put in their bodies. It seems to me I’ve heard more women expressing a strong belief that they have some say in what their men eat, drink, smoke, dip and snort in a week than I’ve ever heard about epidurals in a lifetime.

So remember that the next time your girlfriend makes a disapproving face and a comment about how she doesn’t think you need that tequila shot. “Keep your matriarchy off of my body!”

It’s not enough that they’re bringing the wage rate down and helping force other mothers into the workforce, but they can’t bother to spend as much time with their kids as I do with my exercise bike:

A typical working parent spends just 19 minutes a day looking after their children, official figures revealed yesterday. The startling research shows the devastating impact that working full-time has on children who hardly see their parents. With less than 20 minutes spent with their parents every day, this is only enough time to eat a quick breakfast together or have a couple of bed-time stories.

The Office for National Statistics looked at nearly 4,950 people over the age of 16 in Britain to find out what they do all day. The findings make grim reading for working parents who already worry that they spend too much time at work – and too little at home. Parents who work full-time spend just 19 minutes every day “caring for [their] own children”, according to ONS’s “Time Use Survey”, published yesterday.

A further 16 minutes is spent looking after their children as a “secondary activity”, but this means that they are doing something else – such as the weekly supermarket shop – at the same time.

While I’m sure those 19 minutes are serious quality time, it is telling that the average amount of time spent watching television is much greater. One ray of hope is that only six percent of working mothers actually want to work full time, indicating that they’re not quite the self-centered psychopaths that the one statistic seems to indicate.

Obviously, single mothers have no choice but to work, barring the sort of supportive family structure that is increasingly rare these days. And given the flexibility that the Internet provides, there’s no reason why many other mothers can’t work part-time, ideally from home. Any employer with a modicum of human decency should do what he can to accomodate such women, who are often completely dedicated to their families and make excellent employees. But to idealize the Hollywood dream of the fashionable mother with fabulous career and a fabulous relationship with the children with whom she spends 19 minutes per day is as ludicrous and as childish as a man who thinks he’s going to be James Bond.

I think we should all try to do our part in helping these women see the benefit of spending time with their children. So, any time you see children with a full-time childcare provider, be sure to address the nanny as “your Mommy”.