Oh good, an article on NRO entitled "What Happened to Manliness?" The chances of this going well are simply excellent.
It was written by someone named Hadley Arkes, which sounds like an unfortunate sneeze. And that is a cheap shot, yes, but will I feel badly about it? On the whole I rather think I will not.
His article is remarkably bizarre, even by the appalling standards of conservative meditations upon how swell it is to own a penis. He wishes to inform us that it is absurd to believe that the wife of a disgraced politician has any choice in the matter when it comes to appearing with her husband at press conferences, and thus it logically follows that women who decide to end a pregnancy are not really acting of their own free will.
Don't blame me if that sounds apeshit bananas; I'm just passing it along. Speaking of Silda Spitzer's appearance by her hooker-lovin' hubby's side, Arkes writes:
This was one of those decisions welling up from that hallowed ground of "privacy." It was Silda Spitzer’s decision, and her decision alone, to make, and no one should claim the standing to question it.
It was another version of "the woman's right to decide" — and as with that other slogan (also invented by men) it obscured the role of the man who put the woman in this position.
He is thinking here of how Jim McGreevy's wife was supposedly put up in front of the press with him without knowing what was up. What on earth this has to do with abortion is more than a little obscure, though. I'm sure he'll explain...
The plain truth that dare not speak its name is that these are mainly not decisions made by women to stand by their men.
Er, this is not helpful. A Lord Alfred Douglas reference?
But the brute fact, curiously unremarked, is that these spectacles are usually ordered up by the husband taking counsel with his political advisers, the people who really do count foremost in his life at that moment when his future hangs in the balance. The humiliation suffered by such a woman, and that her presence during the public acknowledgment only deepens the humiliation, are matters of less moment than the political ends to be served by the spectacle. Her presence may be taken to extract the lesson that was floated about Hillary and Bill: "She has forgiven him; it is a matter about their marriage — and why should it be anyone else’s business?" Why should it surprise us that a political performance has a political point — to overcome the crisis? But then why is the heart of the matter not recognized in the same way: that this is an expression of his narcissism; this is all about him and his needs. He has not called her there to apologize to her in public and publicly ask her forgiveness. This has nothing to do with her needs, her feelings, her interests.
Oh, I see. It's becoming clear to me. This is really to do with Hill and Bill, so it's OK to just make stuff up. Gotcha. Anyway, I'm not going to say that male politicians who do Bad Things aren't narcissists; they probably are. But I'm also not going to be a self-righteous prick and assume I know what the woman in question must be feeling. I don't see how it's especially compassionate or high minded to assume she's a robot slave.
And what does this have to do with abortion again...?
Bernard Nathanson has told the story often that the mantra "her decision," on abortion, came from the men who founded the National Abortion Rights Action League. It was to be "her decision" because it was "her problem." It was a conception that put discreetly out of the picture the man who had his own, distinctive role to play in creating the problem in the first place, or the man whose refusal to take responsibility and stand by her now made the problem hers alone to manage.
Hmmmm... sorry, he lost me again. Until the arrival of technological advances permitting certain alterations of fundamental biological facts, it's her body, no matter how much "responsibility" the man takes. So it's her choice. Putting the man back in the picture doesn't change that, though I guess he's welcome to stand around over there in the picture not carrying an unwanted pregnancy as long as he likes. It's a free country.
And then we get this paragraph, which is where the article gets kind of peculiar:
It would have been the right thing for Eliot Spitzer to do, even if it were the case that his wife, as it was reported, urged him not to resign. The manly thing to do here would have remained the same even if the wife in question had turned herself into a version of Lady Macbeth, or better yet, Hillary Clinton. For this is the other side of the story that has gone without remark — a sea change in the mores of public life has actually been brought about by the Clintons. The best analogy may actually come from basketball: The Harlem Globetrotters showed some remarkable, dazzling things that could be done in the handling of a basketball, in the style of shooting and dribbling and passing. With the infusion of black players into professional basketball, the style was transformed, and it would be there now, for good, for whites as well as blacks.
Uh... what?
Eliot Spitzer to Lady Macbeth to Hillary Clinton to... Meadowlark Lemon?
What?
Anyway, Arkes seems to be saying that Silda Spitzer was forced against her will to appear at a press conference because Hillary Clinton deliberately decided, because her husband made her do it, to prevent Bill Clinton from being impeached, which is just like the Harlem Globetrotters, who someday want to be president, just like in a Shakespearean tragedy. Therefore, abortion should be illegal, and nobody is ever allowed to be manly anymore, even the women. But yet white people are now legally allowed to play dazzling basketball, so it kind of balances out. Bosie and Oscar Wilde round out the cast.
Or something...
Sounds like a very, very special, if very, very confusing Gilligan's Island. In other words, your standard NRO fare.