PANDERING.

Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller:

This summer, I interviewed Dr. Helen Smith about her book Men on Strike...

I know, off to a bad start already. But wait, as the kids say, it gets better:

Her premise is simple: More and more American men are making the conscious decision to avoid the drama and heartache that comes with relationships. It’s just not worth it, they say. 

The Japanese word for this is “Mendokusai.” How do I know? It turns out this same phenomenon is taking place amongst young people of both sexes in Japan. Not only are many forgoing marriage, they are also skipping... sex. It’s just not worth it, they say.

Number one, there's a huge gap between "I don't want a relationship" and "I don't want to have sex." Number two, the Japan study to which he refers is mostly bogus. But when you're dealing with American conservatives, facts are the least of it. Lewis laments:

Could there be a connection between what Dr. Helen is documenting here and what’s happening in Japan? Japanese culture and American culture are, of course, a world apart, but technology has made that world smaller. And, in fact, technology might just be the common denominator... 

Interestingly, in her book, Dr. Helen also argues that online porn is replacing the need for American women.

Oh well then: A reference to technology, and an assertion by Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser. What more do you need? The angst extrudes -- Erstwhile sex scold Rod Dreher:

How can an entire country lose the will to reproduce itself, which is to say, the will to live?

Glenn Beck's The Blaze:

WILL THIS NATION’S ‘CELIBACY SYNDROME’ CAUSE IT TO ‘PERISH INTO EXTINCTION’?

At Legal Insurrection, neo-neocon:

When nearly all is permitted (sexually, that is), the prospect of sex loses its forbidden fruit aspect and becomes more ho-hum.

Speak for yourself, honey. But let's not miss the big picture here: Conservatives are beginning to reverse their usual pattern, and are complaining about other people not having sex instead of other people having it. It's kind of a breakthrough!

Alas, there are holdouts. From the Patriot Action Network:

The latest 'trend' that has been called for this is that young men and woman are not having meaningless sex, premarital sex or leading the value of sex being the key to their lives... 

The news is saying this is a bad thing...but in the big picture, is that the truth? 

What isn't being reported, is the transformation that is happening with the young... Many are becoming Christians.

Eventually someone from the central office is going to have to come around and hip this guy to the new realities. I predict conservatives will shift over time from nagging paupers to get married to nagging them to have sex. It'll give them something positive to offer voters. I mean, it's not like they can offer them clean air or water.

UPDATE. Comments are always the best part of alicublog but in this case our gloss squad have outdone themselves. Some are understandable bemused by professional slut-shamer Rod Dreher turning into a sex cheerleader. "When Crunchy Rod is asking us to fornicate, the End Times are upon us," observes DocAmazing. But philadelphialawyer rightly points out that Dreher and his colleagues at The American Conservative are addicted to gloomy "the death of" stories -- and that their prescriptions are, for people who profess a concern for our humanity, weirdly inhuman:

For example, folks should have children not because they want to, not because they enjoy children, or because they think they would be good parents, or because society is accommodating to child raising, but because society, particularly Western society, oh screw it, let's just tell it like it is, because the Great White Race needs them to... 

In other words, people should make highly personal decisions which directly impact their life for the good of the collective... And yet they will turn around and accuse "the left" of suborning the individual to the mass, of being purely utilitarian, of running roughshod over individual conscience, and so on.

Or as Spaghetti Lee puts it, "Fuck like your country depends on it!" Meanwhile trex delineates Matt Lewis' logic model:

I like to call this fallacy "The Transitive Property of Cryptids" or "The Six Degrees of Loch Ness Monster:" 

1. Dr. Helen says men are avoiding relationships.
2. Kids in Japan are avoiding sex.
3. Technology exists in both cultures
4. Women use technology look at porn
5. People look for other forbidden things with technology
6. Loch Ness Monster

THE HE-MAN WOMAN-HATERS' BOOK CLUB.

Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser, aka Helen Smith, has spent years coddling sad males on the internet who blame all their troubles on bitchez; she has also spent years on the internet telling us how she's a-fixin' to Go Galt in the most peculiar ways -- by refusing to tip waiters, for example, or by refusing to hire you riff-raff, etc.

Now she's brought these two great ideas together in a book, Men on Strike, about how women can't find husbands because all the menfolk are "consciously and unconsciously" on strike -- relaxing in their Galtgulch Barcoloungers, watching the game and beating off. And it serves you bitches right, because feminazis.

So far it's a big hit with exactly the crowd you'd expect. At Legal Insurrection, Leslie Eastman is pleased to learn that you can get with the Movement without expending any conscious effort whatsoever:

A few years ago, I rejected donating to a breast cancer charity in favor of one focused on prostate cancer. 

I recognized that there was a vast disparity between the funding amounts and promotion levels for the two cancers — despite the nearly equal number of deaths from each of these illnesses. Knowing men would never organize to complain, I decided to “rebel against the matriarchy” for them. 

Little did I realize I was engaging in “men’s rights” activism, as outlined in Dr. Helen Smith’s new book...

Are you the kind of person who contributes to one charity to spite another? DMOP's your gal!

Let's see, what else -- someone called Wintery Knight wants clergymen to read the book because even "conservative pastors who claim to be pro-marriage" are nonetheless "working against social conservatism even as they praise it, because they have completely discounted how feminism and socialism have impacted men in every area." I guess he hasn't thought this through; why would men leave their soiled sheets and fleshlights to hear preachers who sound like Rush Limbaugh when they can get the same thing at home via radio with having to do any faggy warshin'-up?

The Angry Dad gets right to the nub:

A reader sent this infographic about how single black women cannot find a suitable black man because they are all unemployed, fat, high-school dropouts, gay, prefering non-black women, or already have kids with another woman. And they don't even count the criminals and drug users! (Correction: They did count criminals.)

Gotta give him credit for updating, right?

These figures sound impressive, but the truth is more nearly the opposite. The typical black girl is a sex maniac at age 14, has had a couple of abortions by age 17, a couple of kids by age 20, and is morbidly obese by age 25. Furthermore, they have a tradition of unstable matriachal families, and they are undermined by bad welfare incentives for illegitimacy.

The perfect Dr. Mrs. reader! She should hire him to act the text out at bookstores -- or better yet, on the legitimate stage: This is just the hybrid we've been needing to reenergize the American theater: Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and Byron de la Beckwith.

There are others, but I'll wait until David Brooks picks up on it.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP....

...a miscellany of rightblogger sad trombones over Benghazi, the Roe v. Wade 40th anniversary, Bobby Jindal, etc.

Not making the cut was this plaint from a contributor to the new improved Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser page, pimped by the Perf himself:

Forgive me if this is the wrong place to put this. 

But this is an observation after using Okcupid futility for a few years now. Pretty much every single women on the site is a liberal who doesn't want to date conservatives. (They have a match question for this) 

Even women who are Ayn Rand fans. Even women who are hard core Christians, anti-abortion, anti-sex before marriage, etc, etc, etc 

The few exceptions are "centrists" who don't want to date conservatives. 

What gives? Is it just the web site? Are most women who lean conservative already married? Are women just more prone to be liberal?

Who wants to tell him? Dr. Helen double-dipped on this one and got some of her legendary commenters to weigh in. waxwing01 is my favorite for far, but the night is young.

Oh, but please read my thing too.

GEORGE SODINI LIVES! Latest hot-button at Dr. Helen's place: irate ladies crazy-glue cheater's penis. Dr. Helen is against (so, as a practical matter, am I, and so is local law enforcement, which has charged the gluers, though not so strongly as Dr. Helen prescribes). Comments commence:

I think marriage is a joke (I have never been married and will likely never be married).Back in my casual sex days before AIDS (early 1980s), I remember how many slutty married women were around. Left, right, everywhere. I thought at the time, "What man is stupid enough to PAY FOR this woman not to work, while she's doing whatever she wants sexually?". I'd be in favor of penalties for adultery in marriage, it just is not going to happen. The trend is in the OPPOSITE direction (i.e. no-fault). There won't even be a return to Pumpkin leaving the marriage without most of the man's assets if she cheats. Sorry, it's just all a bit silly. And men can be incredibly gullible and naive.

...But then this goes with what I've always said about women all along. When you play with women, you're playing with fire...

...Men pay for women. Period. If women ever pay for men, for any reason, the man is a thief.

A story: My daughter has been married twice and divorced twice. She made off with money and treasure each time. She has taken after her mother (a very good teacher) in that for her whole adult life she has been taking money from men for her sexual favors. Including the two times she was "married". She has never once been punished or reprimanded for her behavior. She is now almost 46 y/o and finds that her body's sexual appeal has left her stranded.

This is why I approve and endorse Dr. Helen's place: so that these people have a better public forum than a Pittsburgh health club at which to address their grievances.

ROTTING FROM THE HEAD. A perfect wingnut storm, straight from the Old Perfesser and his imaginary friends:

ANOTHER UPDATE: A New York reader emails:

Govt demanding shareholders be kept in the dark . . .was a hot topic at a *parents* meeting at my daughter’s school tonight. Moms who are, well, moms, were talking about how the crowd in Washington “is a bunch of damn socialists”. It ain’t just the finance crowd.

Interesting. There seem to be a lot of upset moms out there.

And cab drivers! I suspect this scene was actually enacted by Dr. Helen and bunch of dolls.

It goes on:

MORE: Reader Fernando Colina writes:

Upset moms are a formidable force. Salvador Allende’s government was essentially brought down by a bunch of upset mums banging pots and pans every night in the streets of Santiago. Obama may want to take notice.

Kissinger and Nixon had something to do with it too. But as is the trend in wingnut-land, the tea partiers get all the credit.

Accusations of socialism, threats of an Allende-style assassination... the Perfesser really seems to be losing his robot cool.

STILL BITTER, STILL CLINGING, AND STILL BEATEN. Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser has apparently not yet gone John Galt, alas, with the Perfesser in an armed compound. So now she's taking advice from Ted Nugent -- specifically, become a public nuisance. She gives it a spin:

The other day, I was at a drugstore and the clerk was talking to what looked like a Baby Boomer who was discussing how he voted for Obama. They both scoffed that not many in Tennessee voted for him, "what do you expect?" said the older guy, "this is Tennessee we're talking about." They both chuckled in agreement. I looked at the clerk and said in a loud voice, "So what you're saying is those of us here in Tennessee who voted for McCain are rednecks, is that right?!!!!" There were several people milling around in line at this point and the clerk turned red and stammered, "No, ma'am," and went on to give some lame explanation about what he meant. But I knew I had him. He was visibly shaken and I hope the next time he decides to diss Tennesseans while at work, he'll think twice.

He'll certainly think twice about saying it around Dr. Helen (or, as she will swiftly become known around the stores of Knoxville, "The Screamer").

I see also that their new comfort object is a video that alleges everyone who voted for Obama is stupid. And bragging about how many new guns they're bought since, you know, things got a little dark in Washington.

To be fair to these lunatics, I don't think this program of contempt for most of their fellow citizens, expressed in public rages at service employees and gun fetishism, is meant to win the hearts and minds of their fellow countrymen, but to soothe their own. Hell, even liberals have been known to get a little snide with their countrymen right after a defeat. Of course, there are a few differences: for one, liberals don't generally respond to defeat by stockpiling weapons, and for another, conservatives act the same way when they win.

Of course, they're much easier to take when they've lost.

SNOTCHOS FOR DR. HELEN. Balloon Juice told us the other day that the new apocryphal cab driver conversation among conservatives is the Bum/Waiter with an Obama Tie story, following the tale of a puckish right-winger who sees a beggar with a "Vote Obama, I Need the Money" sign, eats in a nearby restaurant, stiffs the waiter because he's wearing an "Obama '08 tie" (?) and tells the astonished server he will give the money instead to the bum as a "redistribution of wealth." BJ traced it from a mass email to a McCain spokesman to the letters page of the Chicago Tribune. The story has since been heavily disseminated among the booboisie.

Leave it to Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser, who has been threatening to "go John Galt" and deprive an Obamafied America of the fruits of her psychoanalytic labors, to escalate this silly bit of wish fulfillment into an action plan for angry wingnuts:

Should you tip less in an Obama Administration?...

If Obama is elected, maybe in lieu of a tip I should leave a note like the following:

HOPE AND CHANGE FOR AMERICA: Spreading the Wealth Around...

If enough people leave notes like this, I'm sure it will galvanize waitpeople everywhere in support of The One!

It also might galvanize them, in the close-knit community of Knoxville, Tennessee, to pre-emptively spit in Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser's food.

YOUR MOMENT OF DR. HELEN. Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser throws more bait to the poor souls who have despaired of finding love in this cold, cruel, gynocracy. "Men are being told not to get married because of the bias in the courts there and are, with good reason, reluctant to get married," says the Doc. But as usual, the pre-comments content is barely relevant. At this point I don't know why she doesn't just use a dog whistle. The stuff we get in her comments is par for the course. Take the first one:

Some people are wildly unrealistic. I have a friend who got fleeced online thinking that a Siberian super model 15 years his junior had chosen him of all people in the Western Hemisphere to fall in love with. This guy is not stupid, far from it. But when a complete stranger asked him for money so that “she” could get a visa to visit him in the USA, he was blinded by a picture. Men are more easily governed by their vices than their virtues.

Yyyyeah, well... that's too bad, friend. Next!

Most men are simply priced out of the marriage and dating market. If you dropped a mere $100K in the yearly bank account of those lonely, "shy" men women would be all around and over them. Because the men would have higher RELATIVE status. Which would make them sexy instead of losers.

A "mere $100K"? Sounds like homeboy has a hard target. I dream, I plan, I can!

Let's face it, there's also blame & shame at play here! All of our media now specialize in blaming and shaming males. That effects how males behave in dating & marriage.

I hear you, pal. I was doing all right with this girl, and then I suddenly remembered that Subway commercial where the guy acts so foolish. Totally blew my cool; I started talking about my hunting knife collection and she went to the ladies' room and never returned.

Some commenters do break the mold a bit:

The modern woman harbors all manner of contradictory desires. She lives in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. By satisfying one desire, she is logically bound to leave the other unsatisfied.

Common female contradictions:

“I want equality, so treat me special just because I’m a woman.”
“I want an assertive guy, who always does what I want"...

Let women figure out their own shit. Have lots of sex with them in the meantime.

If I was writing a relationship book for men here would be the thesis: don’t have them.

This laddybuck has suggested a bold new direction. It should work out fine for him, so long as he can find willing partners, which would be facilitated by keeping his mouth shut about what he really thinks of them, which, I'm guessing, he will find difficult to do.

The sex before marriage is not worth it with them and after marriage it will be non-existent. Why? Well sex makes you happy if reasonably well done and moderately frequent (2-3 times a week). What is the down side for a such a woman with that? It ruins her life story. It kills the narrative. It also ruins her status at pity parties. Way more important than being happy or keeping a husband.

I think I saw this one on Everybody Loves Raymond. But at least he's better off than the guy whose wife decrees that "the sex is over when she has an orgasm."

The reductio ad libertarian:

BTW men have the internet now.

It is not as good as sex with a competent woman but it is a heck of a lot cheaper and you get Instapundit, Dr. Helen, IEC Fusion Technology, and Power and Control at no extra charge.

I like your thinking, broham! May your message spread throughout the internets, and keep the pussy surplus at optimum levels for the rest of us. Oh, wait; it already has.

UPDATE. Accidentally took this post down last night -- was going to say something related to the troll infestation that it engendered, but I'll get to that later...

...actually there isn't much to say about it. We have a guy in comments doing the standard supervillain impersonation, including the old "Are you projecting a bit? Do YOU think that a woman also becomes a castrating bitch , etc." switcheroo that he probably learned from "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," and calling female posters with whom he doesn't agree ugly. He also identifies himself, in some of his aliases, as a liberal, which wrinkle I'm sure he prizes as his own personal Jedi Mind Trick.

I suppose it was good to deprive him of a forum for awhile, so that some other shiny surface might attract him away. But eventually we may have to avail the expedient of banning. Yeah, a misogynist teenager who thinks he's George Sanders is probably going to count that a perverse victory, but at this moment I judge the devotion of a gazillion posts in one comments box to the care and feeding of a single disturbed COINTELPRO volunteer to be too much charity work for this blog.

TO BRIGHTEN YOUR HOLIDAY. Courtesy of Dr. Helen, the mother of all awful-liberals yarns -- not told by one of those legendary taxi drivers, or even Alan Bromley, but in my judgment outstripping them all:

My sister and brother-in-law are D.C. area residents and wear their politics on their sleeves. I quit arguing with them some 20 years ago when they stated that Reagan was responsible for the Yellowstone Park forest fires. I realized then I could not have a rational discussion with them.

The problem I have with this stuff is that my brother-in-law starts yelling. Who wants to converse with someone who’s attracting attention from all the other diners in a restaurant. I finally decided that he doesn’t really want a reasoned conversation. He just wants to shout down anyone who disagrees with him, so why bother?

So far, so what, you may be thinking: we've seen better in any old Dr. Helen comments thread. But hang on -- the guy's just getting warmed up:

My dad is as mean as a snake. All 8 of his kids bear the scars and deal with them in different ways. The last time I saw him was 5 years ago at the rehearsal dinner for my younger brother’s wedding. He was picking on my niece, and she not being used to that treatment slapped him in the face. I told my Dad to knock it the f—k off. He took exception and we started a fistfight in the restaurant. My dad was so bent out of shape that somebody stood up to him that he didn’t show up for the wedding, and I gladly stood in for him, next to my Mom, in all of the wedding pics.

I cherish Christmas with my family: A day with the estrogen poisoned females of my clan; children yelling and grubbing for the bounty that comes with the crass commercialism of the holiday; the ever present fear that my brother, four Christmases banished from the family for alcohol related lunacy, will crash his drunken, six foot, four inch body through the front door and spray the room with lead. Ah, Christmas! I strap an Officer’s Compact Colt .45 into a pancake holster on my hip in case the door comes off its hinges at the party, pack up my hastily purchased gifts, and I wade into this thing called Christmas. Ho, ho, ho, who wouldn’t go?

And now the kicker:

Through the years of Republican bashing followed by Kumbaya sing alongs (I kid you not), I have found the best strategy is to simply keep my mouth shut.

Surely you see the genius of it. Instead of trying to seed little quotes and anecdotes throughout the story to preserve the political through-line, our author veers into seemingly unrelated tales of spectacular family violence, and at the climax, with a last sneer of contempt for the enemy, retreats into Norman Bates muteness...

Wait -- what? These paragraphs are separate anecdotes?

Well, maybe it's like Casy says -- maybe a Dr. Helen commenter ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to every Dr. Helen commenter. Maybe the individual miseries of the poor wretches who come to Dr. Helen's door for a bowl of soup and maybe some rational emotive behavior therapy are hopeless by themselves, but together they gain stature, dignity, and hilarity.

May all of you enjoy a Thanksgiving free from fistfights, gunplay, and Kumbaya. Unless, of course, that's your idea of a good time.

UPDATE. "Guys," says commenter Craig, "that block quote from Dr. Helen is four different anecdodes from four different respondents. Don't try to mash them all up."

Admitted and addressed in the original post. (See the last three grafs.) And what's wrong with mash-ups? Larry Lessig would approve!

KONSERVETKULT UPDATE. The Friday after Brad Reed's and my American Prospect article appeared, I could find no film reviews at National Review Online. Shaming works! I thought; advantage: blogosneer!

Hubris, my friends, that's what that was. Conservatives still see culture war in some unlikely places.

The encouraging thing about this Weekly Standard article is it focuses on conservative artists who are actually trying to do work. You may think actor Steve Shub silly to say "I don't want to know what [movie actors'] agenda is in life because the whole idea is that you're supposed to seduce people into suspending their disbelief, just see the character," when of course he's in the article because he has consented to lay out his own agenda ("radical Objectivist") to the reporter -- but at least he's working a venerable show-biz PR hustle (like the actresses of olden times who annnounced they would only do nude scenes if they had artistic merit, whether or not anybody was observably asking them), and I can respect that. If artists can con moneyed wingers into giving them financing -- "the Human Rights Foundation will sponsor Schub's 'Afro-Celtic Yiddish ska' band, the Fenwicks, on a mini-tour this fall" -- I say swindle, comrades, and God go with you.

The reporter, alas, opens the show with a smoke-and-flashpots vision of Hollywood evil: Larry David.

...the very attractive female lead in the musical invites Larry into her dressing room for a quick fling. The liberal New Yorker is game, making out with the starlet until he notices something not quite right: a picture of George W. Bush beside her vanity mirror. Disgusted, he turns away, deciding he'd rather let his gift expire than have sex with a Republican.

To many conservatives, this vignette neatly sums up Hollywood's ideological monomania: Left-wing politics trumps even a good old fashioned roll in the hay.

I'm surprised his editor didn't query this: a TV star turning down sex? Maybe it's part of this "comedy" thing we've been hearing about.

At Red State we are encouraged to consider "Is Fight Club a 'Morally Serious' Movie?" Not necessarily a ridiculous topic, but get a load of author Leon H. Wolf's terms:

The moral objection to the first half of the movie typically goes that the movie is violent, and that violence on the screen is objectionable. This is an idea in which I find little merit, from a Judeo-Christian perspective. Recall that in the Old Testament, stonings (a particularly violent form of execution) were to be performed in front of the entire community, so as to encourage the rest of the community would learn to have the proper fear...

Why all those people in the multiplexes are cheering the Dolby explosions when they should be running in terror to their pastors is beyond me.

Later the author admits that "the movie pays homage to objectionable Rousseauian ideas concerning the primitive state of nature." C.S. Lewis is quoted -- the bit about men without chests. You can smell the rat there. Not all his observations are crazy, but his idea of the "morally serious" comes out of the same stew-pot as a thousand conservative essays on the Dark Age of feminazism and self-esteem. It gives the whole thing an air of peg-cramming to make an obstreperous film fit into depressingly standardized value hole.

And guess who Dr. Helen doesn't like anymore? Drew Carey. He made jokes about Bush, and speciously interpretted data on feminism ("The questions may be phrased in a way that does not allow one to know why the pollee answered the way he or she did"), which is of course vitally important in a freaking TV game show, from which these offenses are culled. Carey "was much more politically incorrect" a few years ago, sighs Dr. Helen; "I wonder what happened to him?" Some commenters suggest his Big Media masters jerked his chain. (Does that explain Leno's Bush jokes?) Another suggests his taste for "pron" is "starting to have a negative impact." Finally someone says "TV is a waste." In the kingdom of the blind, etc.

BOO FUCKING HOO. Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser encourages readers to open their hearts to oppressed Republicans. She even reenacts the last scene from Bent with an "R" instead of a pink triangle.

What prompts this gesture of righteous solidarity? What indignities have been visited upon Republicans? Are they forced to pay a jizya, crowded into ghettos, forbidden to intermarry?

No, sometimes people say mean things about them.

Really, that's it. No Kristallnacht, no rubber hose, no cars being rocked back and forth by angry mobs. People sometimes write uncivil posts.

It's not like conservatives ever do that.

A windier alternate version of this nonsense by Mark Bauerlein can be read at the Chronicle of Higher Education. This one's yet another complaint about the treatment of conservatives in academia and intellectual professions generally. Bauerlein at least semi-admits that "conservative ideas aren't disengaged from power, or conservative intellectuals from paychecks." But what does all this power and influence mean if conservatives cannot have love -- from the right-brain of the academy?

If a set of ideas and writings are missing in the classroom but present in the marketplace or government, we tend to explain them by their instrumental value. They owe their clout to their usefulness to business or politics, the reasoning goes, not to intellectual substance. If the university doesn't put those works and ideas on the syllabus, they aren't subject to the free analysis and contemplation that respectable works and ideas merit. When they crop up off campus, then, they seem to have no independent validity, no import separate from the interests they satisfy...

Count the names Hayek, Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, etc., on syllabi in courses on "Culture & Society." Tally how often, in left-of-center periodicals, those names are linked to moneyed interests. The framing is complete. Heralds of conservatism start and finish in the messy realm of politics and finance, never rising into the temple of reflection.

We treat them like shopkeepers, though they have the souls of poets! Perhaps they should try wearing berets and playing acoustic guitar.

I've said it again and again and again but I'll repeat it: if those mean children at Brown and Columbia and Penn State won't play with them, why can't conservatives built their own New Academe? Let Bob Jones and Liberty University be their Yale and Harvard!

Really, it's almost as if they didn't believe in the Marketplace of Ideas.

UPDATE: Ace O'Spades -- dean of the "we're not technically allowed to kill liberals... so that leaves us with that faggy defeat-them-in-their-minds thing" school of interpartisan relations -- agrees with Dr. Helen that liberals are mean.

PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE. I see Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser has gotten into the gay-straightening racket. It takes a little effort to navigate her plausible-deniability screens, but readers of her husband's work will recognize the method.

We can say one thing for the group for whom Dr. Helen shills, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality: it is less overtly homo-hating than competitors such as Love In Action. "We believe that clients have the right to claim a gay identity," quoth NARTH, "or to diminish their homosexuality and to develop their heterosexual potential."

This is new-age gay-straightening -- nonjudgmental and affirming (at least in the advertising!) -- and at first blush seems like a reasonable alternative for self-loathing same-sexers. One would like to give NARTH a break: after all, it's a drag being so negative all the time -- wouldn't it be nice to find one group of dehomofiers you could invite to dinner?

Unfortunately, under its fluffy spa robes NARTH has a sadly familiar political advocacy program: they think Washing the Gay Away should be taught in schools, and their position on gay marriage is simply that "social science evidence supports the traditional model of man-woman marriage as the ideal family form for fostering a child's healthy development" -- which I guess means no. (Ex-Gay Watch has much more, and much uglier, on NARTH.)

In other words, they're just a straight-up anti-gay group who will also do you a wash and rinse for a fee.

But their style is a keeper, I'll admit. They plead their cause in the name of a "multicultural society" and "tolerance." The merest opposition to their program of libidinal reengineering is plain persecution. They even have an official persecutor: the American Psychological Association, which has refused to endorse their bullshit -- and in the topsy-turvy world of conservative victimhood, that's the same thing as the Iron Maiden and the Thumbscrew and the Bridle.

Or should we say "objectively the same thing as the Iron Maiden and the Thumbscrew and the Bridle," because here we transition smoothly into a familiar Reynolds rap, only this time in distaff edition:

Well, the APA (American Psychological Association) is at it again playing the activist role rather than the social science one when it comes to homosexuality...

The beef? APA refused to give continuing-ed credits for a NARTH dequeering conference, and called the whole thing unethical.

A professional association making a professional judgement! What is this, Russia?

Here the Dr. falls into rhythm with NARTH's shimmy-dance: "Personally, I'm skeptical about turning gay people straight." Students of this sort of locution -- Personally, I'm all for equal pay for women -- know it usually ends up with what we call a double-reverse demurrer -- but some of these bra-burning kooks -- half of them couldn't land a man anyway! -- meant to turn the tables, though in this case the Dr. merely bruises her thigh on it:

But shouldn't the client be the one to choose, not the APA? The APA has decided that the answer is no.

Hello, my boy is a big fag and me and Lutiebelle decided to de-fag him but good. First I gotta ask: is your program approved by the American Psychological Association? It hain't? Shoot, Lutiebelle, guess'n we all gots to take dick up the ass! Th' APA has spoken!

The whole Dr. Mrs. post is full of laugh lines -- e.g. "How would the APA act if someone else were trying to shut down therapists who assisted formerly 'straight' clients with getting in touch with their 'gay' feelings?" (I hope we find out, because I think coupons for dick-sucking lessons would make a great gag gift for bachelor parties.)

But the important thing is that she is a worthy practitioner of her Ole Man's passive-aggressive schtick: for example, if the liberals complain of racism, respond that they're the racists because someone called you a cracker. Now we have professional gay-straighteners portrayed as champions of tolerance, and harried by the cruel APA. I admire their nerve, if nothing else about them.