Rod to the Rescue

How can we heal lonely hearts?

I was so happy to see, this morning, that my friend Rod Dreher has tackled the Orthobro situation. I was coming to see that I really didn’t have the skills to encompass it; I’m an essayist, and this topic needs a journalist. Just last night I wrote in an email:

My friend Rod Dreher has those journalism skills, and he worked on a case like this some years ago. He found that the principal of his kids’ classical school was writing, under a pseudonym, material that was frankly racist and demeaning to women. He was boasting of his position at the school, saying that he was planting these ideas in the students’ heads and they would go out into the world and spread them.

Rod wrote about it and posted excerpts from the principal’s blog, and pursued it till the man resigned. Rod is tenacious. Likewise during the Catholic scandals in the early 2000s, he was a bulldog on corruption and cover-ups in the Church. He will be moving back to the US in a few months and maybe I can interest him in this issue. Unlike me, he can take in reams of material and synthesize it.

He was several steps ahead of me:

Orthobro Revenge P*rn & Digital Stoning

Rod is an old friend, since 1994. Here we are with Paul Kingsnorth at a party a couple of years ago. We had been drinking some good red wine; does it show?

My last post has gotten lots of attention, and had more views than any other post I’ve written since I started this Substack last July. If I were to pick one corner of the issue to focus on (and I am so glad others are focusing on other parts—we need to be a team), it’s the inability of young men and women to match up, give their hearts, and sustain a marriage.

You can protest that men are put down and women elevated in our culture, and I can recognize that’s true. But as a Boomer I saw the reverse, growing up. Take a look at a movie like Life with Father, which treats the wife’s imbecility as a given. Or Heaven Can Wait, which treats a husband’s infidelity as a minor flaw that a wise wife will ignore.

In college, I remember friends saying their mother taught them to hide their intelligence on a date, because men don’t want to marry girls who are as smart as they are. (My parents never told me that, God bless ‘em. On the contrary, I was scolded for by B & C & even D report cards.)

I remember sitcoms about how funny it is that women are bad drivers, and that they can’t understand money or learn how to fill out a check. A whole episode might revolve around the husband deciding whether to add his wife as a joint holder on his checking account.

I was an early feminist and, in the ‘70s, it really was good time for a rebalancing. But we shouldn’t go on acting as if women have had no gains in these 50 years. Men are generally very good sports in taking mockery and laughing at themselves. But there needs to be a time when they are affirmed, too. Everyone needs self-respect, and the respect of their culture, to function in a healthy way. They need to know that a man and woman can live together for a lifetime, respecting and loving each other. I don’t know how to do that except by being an example and showing how it’s done.

Pres. Jocelyn & Fr Stephen Mathewes, me and Fr. Gregory Mathewes-Green, Sdn. David & Marcella Mathewes, on our multi-anniversary trip to Paris, October 1994.

This photo is meant to be an encouragement, but it can instead feel judgemental and painful to those who are divorced, or who haven’t formed the match they hoped for. There’s such a tremendous amount of pain, among men and women, whether divorced or never-married. So much loneliness. I hope we can find ways to help men and women meet and match, and find love that lasts a lifetime. It’s possible; it’s been the very foundation of our civilization. But if you never see a real-life example, how are you supposed to know how to do it?