Lynn Parramore and What Are Men For? Male Minds and Corset Stays

I love how Lynn Parramore's mind works--perhaps because she's a fellow Southerner and I understand its quirks a bit more than I understand the quirks of some other minds.  I find her response to James Poulos's recent "sophomoric and risible" (her terms) essay "What Are Women For?" brilliant.

Parramore's thesis: conservative American men are fighting a 19th-century battle about women's rights while the rest of the world has moved on to the 21st century.  The poor things have permitted their minds to be corseted and they are so frightened that they may be becoming irrelevant that they don't see much beyond the corset stays in which they've entrapped their heads.

Here's a taste of her brilliant response to Poulos (and who taught this young man at Georgetown, I wonder?!--what are women for, indeed): 

Poulous is like a cat spitting up a hairball, unaware of what has irritated his tummy and looking around in vague embarrassment at the mess he has made on the living room floor. 

So let’s play the veterinarian and find out what brought on the attack. 

Is the question of “what women are for” a significant cultural battle? Well, yes. But not of our time. In the Victorian era, however, it was quite the rage. Conservatives have a particular affinity for the mores of that period and like to recycle them. Conservative author Marvin Olasky pawed around the 19th-century shelves of the Library of Congress to unearth an outmoded view that poverty could be cured solely through private charities. Known as the “turkey basket” approach after the Victorian custom of bringing the poor baskets containing turkeys at Christmas, Olasky renamed this relic “Compassionate Conservatism.” A bestseller rose from the dust. 

Despite his “postmodern” pretensions, Poulous has similarly channeled the era of corseted minds and bodies. But unlike Olasky, he’s not even aware of it. Through the medium of his rather silly blog, a revenant of the 19th century has made a ghastly appearance on the public stage. This ghost is called the “Angel in the House.”

Read and enjoy: read and enjoy the whole essay.  You won't regret doing so.  As Parramore argues, if right-wing men could ever get those darned corset stays off their heads, they might well discover that what really has them worried is the question, "What are men for?"  It's not really about women at all, not primarily, except insofar as women are necessary fall-out in the war for continued male entitlement and control.