The Roman virtues: gravitas

It's becoming clear to me, as I read about the Roman virtues, that the Romans had a well-developed sense of the public virtues that aren't easily distinguished for a modern Westerner.

I'll quote a variety of sources on the meaning of the Roman virtue gravitas which will hopefully give some indication of what the Romans meant by the term.

One definition I found on the web is this:

Gravitas is an expression used to describe a man who shows dignity, character, and a purposeful life. In roman times a male's gravitas determined when he would leave the ranks of boyhood and become a respected man.

Then there's this:

With its origins in ancient Rome, gravitas is understood to be one of the foundational virtues that men were expected to possess as part of fulfilling the proper role in society. Along with pietas and dignitas, gravitas formed the basis for the expression of all other essential virtues.

As a Latin word, gravitas is understood to embody several complementary attributes. Generally, gravitas is understood to mean dignity, duty, and seriousness. All three qualities were thought to be important in male personal deportment, and were often used as a means of determining when a boy could rightly claim to have reached his majority and could be considered a man in both psychological as well as physical stature.

Elsewhere we find gravitas defined as:

A sense of the importance of the matter at hand, responsibility and earnestness.

And:

...the virtue known in Latin as gravitas, or gravity, a deep-rooted seriousness defines Roman character

A few thoughts spring to mind. First, if gravitas makes the Romans sound too serious, it should be remembered that they also thought of comitas as a virtue, which is defined as "ease of manner, courtesy, openness, and friendliness".

Second, the Romans saw gravitas as a distinctly masculine virtue - it was associated with the public role that adult men were ideally supposed to play in society. In other words, being a virtuous man was not only about being a good father or showing character in your personal life. Masculine virtue was expressed to a large degree in the qualities demonstrated in publicly serving your community and tradition.

Finally, the discussion of Roman virtues should be of particular interest to American conservatives. Why? Because the founding fathers are often associated with a liberal world view. But the founders were also strongly influenced, it seems, by the Roman virtues - which then injects a certain preliberal or non-liberal element into their outlook.

From one website we learn:

Cicero, the antirevolutionary orator of the first century before Christ, had an enormous influence on the Founders...The American Founders discovered not only a venerable political system in Roman tradition, but also extraordinary men whom they sought to emulate...The poet Virgil wrote of an ideal that was Rome...His writings during the time of Emperor Augustus helped to sooth the Empire after a century of civil war and recalled to the disordered Roman mind the old Roman virtues: labor, a joy and purpose in one’s work; pietas, knowledge of one’s proper relation to the higher powers inciting devotion to one’s religion and one’s country; and fatum, Rome’s duty to bring peace, order and justice to the world.

Perhaps some of the influence of the Romans was incorporated into a liberal culture, but there is much that is decidedly non-liberal (e.g. the virtue of pietas). Perhaps American traditionalists can restore a sense of those non-liberal virtues held by the American founders.

To be more specific, let's take three Roman virtues: labor, pietas and fatum. Labor is the idea that it is a manly virtue to be self-reliant. This has been, I think, part of a grass roots American culture which perhaps still lives on in the Tea Party movement. It is not the same as the modern liberal belief in individual autonomy. Liberal autonomy talks of self-determination, but in the sense of throwing off limitations on what we can choose to be. Labor does not mean stripping oneself of predetermined qualities, it means not being reliant on the state but being able to take care of oneself. Left-liberals have entirely abandoned this virtue, classical liberals less so.

Fatum was the idea that Romans were virtuous in the sense of taking on the responsibility of bringing peace and prosperity to the world. Again, there is little trace of this left in left-liberals, who believe that America brings exploitation and violence to others. But you can see a modern day version of it in certain kinds of right-liberalism (e.g. neoconservatism) in which it is believed that there is an American exceptionalism involving America bringing democracy to the world (or being a light on the hill).

So the first two Roman virtues, labor and fatum, are embedded to some degree in certain kinds of classical/right-liberalism but are absent within left-liberalism. But the third virtue, pietas, is found in neither. It is a more specifically traditionalist virtue. It includes a sense of duty and connection to your ancestors, to your family and to your own people.

Below is a YouTube video by Dr Shanon Brooks, who is calling for Americans to "revalue" themselves. I have to say that I think "fatum" as expressed in the idea of "manifest destiny" has not served America well and I can understand why some Americans have reacted against it. I don't think it's a good virtue for Americans to "revalue" themselves with. But it is to the credit of Dr Brooks that he includes pietas in his list of virtues which helped to make America. He is not ignoring the more traditionalist virtue that was present in the American founding:

Two stabbings

In today's Herald Sun there are reports of two stabbings that took place in Melbourne over the weekend. In one incident a group of friends walking home from a party in Mooroolbark noticed they were being followed by two men of Pacific Island appearance. One of the Islander men stabbed an 18-year-old girl three times with a knife. In another incident a group of Asian teenagers egged a house in Lalor. The parents jumped into a car to pursue the youths and caught up with them. The father went after the group, leaving his wife in the car. When he returned he found his wife fatally stabbed.

I've reported the incidents because so often white Australians are portrayed as the perpetrators of violence against non-whites. That's the script that left-liberals like to go with when thinking about race relations. But here we have two women stabbed in Melbourne and, according to early newspaper reports, the perpetrators in both cases are of non-European descent.

Kia Abdullah: competitive womanhood

Kia Abdullah is in the news because of comments she wrote on Twitter. She wrote that she felt no sympathy for three British teenage boys who died in a bus crash in Thailand whilst on a "gap yaar" and that she smiled when she learned two of the boys had double barrelled surnames:

Is it really awful that I don't feel sympathy for anyone killed on a gap yaar? That's awful, right? Yes, I'm a terrible person ... I actually smiled when I saw that they had double-barrelled surnames. Sociopathic?

So who is Kia Abdullah? She's a 29-year-old twice divorced writer who grew up in a Bangladeshi family in Tower Hamlets in London.


Kia Abdullah

Why so callous? She has written that although she is proud of her working-class origins she nonetheless has a chip on her shoulder and that she regrets never having applied to Oxford or Cambridge. Her writing is also peppered with the belief that Bangladeshis like herself are held back in their aspirations by racism. So perhaps she thinks that students with double barrelled names who can afford a gap year are privileged white people whom she can feel no empathy toward.

But she's hardly done too badly out of Britain. She graduated from the University of London, has had two novels published, was appointed an editor of Asian Woman magazine, was then appointed a columnist for Asiana magazine and has recently been a columnist for the left-liberal Guardian newspaper. It's difficult to see exactly how she has been held back, whether by being working-class or Bangladeshi or female.

Here's something else that's interesting about Kia Abdullah. Despite growing up in a Bangladeshi family, she absorbed the modern girl ethos just as thoroughly as any middle-class white girl. In one column she engaged in some self-reflection on why she and other women like her feel the need to be in competition with their boyfriends and husbands:

....a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly prevalent among my circle of friends and acquaintances: ambitious, successful and talented women suffering from an ever-diminishing sense of humour, and an unrelenting need to prove that they are equal, if not superior to, the men in their lives. It seems that showing signs of need, weakness, dependence or sometimes even personality, somehow compromises our quest for gender equality.

This type of behaviour is perhaps necessary in some arenas. When there is still a substantial pay gap between the sexes and people feel comfortable expressing sentiments such as "woman + ambition = bitch" in a public, albeit anonymous, forum, women need their armour of cold tenacity and competitiveness, but professional battles seem to be increasingly spilling over into personal lives.

It's what I refer to as the superwoman complex. So many modern women have fought so hard for freedom and independence that even when we have careers, homes and husbands, we still can't take a back seat and stop trying to prove ourselves. I may be wrong about the wider community of British women, but it's certainly something I see in my generation of British-Asian women who arguably have had to fight harder and longer for independence.

I am certainly guilty of this type of truculence. I react against all forms of dependence, stressing time and time again that I am independent and autonomous. During the course of my most recent relationship, I felt a constant need to prove that I was smart, secure, strong and self-sufficient. I was fiercely competitive and felt a relentless need to prove that I was right: a need that almost emasculated the man closest to me. In short, I couldn't stop fighting. I, like most women, want financial security, comfort, love and warmth, but for those of us who have grown up fighting patriarchy, it's difficult to allow a man to guide and support us, be it a father, lover or a boss.

It's a significant confession. She's saying that women are brought up to value being independent and autonomous and so become competitive with men not only in the workforce ("armour of cold tenacity") but even in their personal lives ("I felt a constant need to prove that I was smart, secure, strong and self-sufficient. I was fiercely competitive and felt a relentless need to prove that I was right"). She understands that this is at odds with her feminine need for financial security, comfort, love and warmth but that if you have grown up "fighting patriarchy" it's "difficult to allow a man to guide and support us, be it a father, lover or a boss."

You get some idea from this how Kia Abdullah managed to be divorced twice by the age of 29. It's also an insight into the mindset of a certain kind of modern girl; it shows how once women are persuaded that they should be independent and autonomous that relationships then become competitive as women won't allow themselves to admit to needing men and become determined to show that they are equal or superior to men in all fields of life. Hence the "harshness" that men sometimes intuit about a certain kind of modern woman.

We are bringing young women up with a set of political values that doesn't allow much of their natural femininity to be freely expressed - and this is particularly true of those young women who spend the longest in the education system and who are best able to discipline themselves to serve abstract ideals.

Problems in the parish

I don't have very high expectations when I attend mass. I accept that there will be some lefty politics and I accept that the dignity of the mass will be disturbed at times. But this morning I left early. It was Aboriginal week and the church was festooned with Aboriginal motifs. The mass opened with a statement of praise for Aboriginal culture and spirituality. That much was OK. But then we got to the "we are living on Aboriginal land" stuff and I'd had enough. It was one intrusive political moment too many. I left quietly. I'm not sure if I'll go back to my local parish.

The next closest parish is even worse. I had a look at their website and the front page featured a very biased SBS documentary on refugees. They have a social justice group which is connected to left-wing activist groups like GetUp and Avaaz. GetUp is currently campaigning for gay marriage, a climate tax, and against refugee detention centres; Avaaz is a bit less biased to the left, but it nonetheless campaigns on issues like drug decriminalisation.

I'm not going to give up. There are a few more parishes I can attend in my quest for a normal mass.

A few thoughts on this issue. First, my local parish is in the doldrums. Despite having a school attached to it, I am usually the youngest person in attendance. Nearly everyone attending is older than 60. It seems that the current strategy of the parish is to adopt left-wing politics as a way of attracting more parishioners. But that seems to me to be a mistake. You can get left-wing politics anywhere - you don't need to go to church for this. Furthermore, the majority of young lefty types are irreligious. Worse yet, left-wing politics is usually directed against white, middle-class heterosexuals - but our suburb is mostly composed of exactly this demographic. Does the church expect large numbers of people to voluntarily attend an institution which is set against them?

All of this makes me wonder if the Catholic Church is going to follow along the path of the Anglicans. The Anglicans set themselves up as a church of the left-liberal middle class, but in doing so they put themselves in a position in which the values of liberal modernity came increasingly to clash with Christian orthodoxy - leading to division within the church and the ever present threat of schism.

Things do not seem to be well at the parish level of the Catholic Church in Melbourne.

How do Swedish courts treat the family?

OK, so maybe it is Swedish month at Oz Conservative. The stories from that country keep piling in. The latest one concerns a father and mother who decided to punish their children by placing tabasco hot sauce on their tongues when they were caught out lying.

The parents were brought before a court, found guilty of assault and each fined the equivalent of 60 days wages. But that's not what really struck me about the story. It's the following bit. As well as the fine and a suspended jail sentence the parents were ordered to pay $2,222 to the children.

Now, even if you are fiercely opposed to these kinds of punishments for children, what the Swedish court has done goes way beyond setting limits to how parents can discipline their children. The parents were not only ordered to pay fines to the state, but to their own children. And that, to me, means that the Swedish courts no longer recognise the distinct relationship between parent and child nor what you might call the "internal unity" of the family.

The Swedish court is treating the parents and the children as if they are unrelated citizens. The court is, in other words, pretending to be blind to the real relationship parents and children have with each other as part of a family.

If the court were aware of the culture of family life, then it would never order adult parents to pay a "fine" to their own young children. That not only ruptures the sense of parental authority within the family, but it also breaks apart the sense of the family as a cohesive unit, rather than just a collection of individuals sharing a roof together.

What else do prominent Swedish politicians want abolished?

No, it's not Swedish month here at Oz Conservative. I just couldn't help but include one more post about Sweden. This time it has nothing to do with the attempt to abolish sex distinctions in that liberal country. It's about the attempt to abolish Sweden itself.

Let me start with a photo of Tanja Bergkvist, the conservative Swedish blogger. Why is she making a point of holding up a Swedish flag? Because it was recently Swedish National Day. Tanya pointed out at her blog that some political Swedes have been unwilling to celebrate their national culture. One newspaper recently tried to reassure them that it was OK to do so:

Tomorrow is National Day. A day causing more anxiety among the public in Sweden is hard to find...

... Long established common frame of reference that creates belonging and security. Herring, Midsummer, Lucia, meatballs and the right of public access. That some of these things are also available elsewhere is less important. For many, they are equal to the place on earth they call home. It is Sweden.

The Swedish culture is just as rich, exciting and worth protecting as Somali dance, or Persian New Year. Especially on a day like June 6. Being proud of their country's history is not the same as to violate others'. So let us celebrate Sweden tomorrow. Without anxiety. She is the host, Mother Svea.

Well, at least one newpaper is encouraging Swedes to celebrate their own culture. That's a big improvement on an article printed on Swedish National Day back in 2001. Birgitta Ohlsson, the current Swedish EU Minister, used the day to promote the abolition of Sweden:

Swedish Minister for World State

Abolish Sweden!

Blue and yellow banners, royalist significant fjäskeri and patriotic whirl of happiness. Today in the Swedish National Day, we are supposed to be good citizens to pay attention to our nation. The most enthusiastic become pilgrims to the homesteads, sing the national anthem and celebrate as if it were a close relative who completed the 50th. But what is celebrated, anyway? Democracy and openness that characterizes this part of the world? By no means. Rather, we see an automatpatriotism and conservative passion of the nation state. Despite that chance determines where a person is born, a nation-state is rarely the ideal decision-making level and the world becomes more globalized keeps mankind desperately stuck in the nation. This phenomenon has downsides. "Nationalism is a children's disease, the measles of mankind", said Albert Einstein . Einstein was a convinced world federalist, an idea from ancient times to explain that people are members of a universal community.

It is time for us who call ourselves citizens of the world to dust off world federalism as a vision for a more just world by pursuing a global union of federal government. Every country must give up parts of their national sovereignty. Through a global legal order can people conflict be resolved peacefully. A global law be passed by a democratically elected world parliament, and upheld by the World Police. The idea of peace is central in world federalism as well as the belief in international law and our common responsibility to ensure that human rights are respected everywhere.

Albert Einstein's analogy between nationalism and childhood diseases is apt. They are both difficult to cure. We may disagree about what means to use in battle. But we know that in both cases await any healthier in the end. The World Federation is not a utopia - but a goal of practical politics. Maybe I'm a naive reformer.

Birgitta Ohlsson,
Federal Chairman of the Liberal Youth (LUF)

You might think that writing such stuff would disqualify you from representing your country. Not so in Sweden. Birgitta rose through the ranks of the Liberal People's Party to become a minister in the current coalition government.

The Liberal People's Party is strongly in favour of the European Union. But note that in Birgitta Ohlsson's case this is not because of a love of Europe but because of a belief that society should move from nations to a world government. She sees herself as a citizen of the world rather than as a patriotic Swede.

Anyway, Sweden needs more of the Tanya and less of the Birgitta. Let's hope it moves in the right direction in the years ahead.

Swedish Egalia Kindergarten mocked on Australian TV

A comedienne on the 7pm Project mocks the Egalia Kindergarten in Sweden:

Swedish push to abolish sex distinctions hits mainstream media

I know I've been pushing this theme lately, but I thought it worthwhile noting that the mainstream media is starting to pick up on the efforts to abolish sex distinctions in Swedish schools.

Yahoo news is running a story on the "Egalia" preschool in Stockholm. At this preschool students are not addressed as boys and girls, nor are there books which show a traditional family with a father, mother and children. The staff don't use words like "him" and "her", having invented a gender neutral pronoun to refer to both sexes.

The reason for this social engineering? Predictably it's based on two aspects of liberalism. One of the preschool teachers says that Egalia allows students to 'be whoever they want to be'. That's the liberal idea that we should, as the highest aim in life, be autonomous and determine our own self. Our sex is not something we get to self-determine so it's looked on negatively as a limitation or a restriction on what we can choose.

But why then did sex distinctions exist in the past? Left-liberals answer that it was because one group in society, men, wanted to get an unearned privilege (more autonomy) at the expense of an oppressed group (women). Therefore, left-liberals also assume that sex distinctions are based on inequality and should be redistributed more evenly amongst girls and boys. Tanja Bergqvist, a Swedish blogger critical of the preschool policy, believes that,

Those bent on shattering gender roles "say there's a hierarchy where everything that boys do is given higher value"

The Swedish policy does allow for the idea that boys and girls have different anatomies. But that's it. For everything else, they are held to be the same. The director of the preschool believes that to be equal the sexes must be held to be the same:

What matters is that children understand that their biological differences "don't mean boys and girls have different interests and abilities," Rajalin says. "This is about democracy. About human equality."

A few observations. First, I'm not suggesting that ordinary Swedes are as committed to these ideas as the political class. The fault in Sweden is with the state ideology that is being imposed on children.

Second, note how radical the state ideology of liberalism is. In a previous post, I compared it to indoctrination with Marxism-Leninism during the communist period in Russia. But a reader who had been brought up in a communist school thought that indoctrination in Russia was not quite as extreme:

I have gone to school in Soviet Union in the 1980s and we had less indoctrination than that. At least ... they did not try to convince us that there were no sexual distinctions.

Third, note the importance of political ideas. Whatever the political class of a society adopts as the highest good is going to be gradually implemented as social policy. So political theories like liberalism need to be fiercely contested.

Fourth, Tanja Bergqvist shows what can be done with the independent media. She's an intelligent Swedish woman who runs a blog criticising Swedish gender policy. She's become something like the official opposition within Sweden and now she's even being quoted in the foreign media. Well done Tanja!

Here's the text of the yahoo article:

STOCKHOLM – At the "Egalia" preschool, staff avoid using words like "him" or "her" and address the 33 kids as "friends" rather than girls and boys.

From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don't fall into gender stereotypes.

"Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing," says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. "Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be."

The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged 1 to 6 is among the most radical examples of Sweden's efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward.

Breaking down gender roles is a core mission in the national curriculum for preschools, underpinned by the theory that even in highly egalitarian-minded Sweden, society gives boys an unfair edge.

To even things out, many preschools have hired "gender pedagogues" to help staff identify language and behavior that risk reinforcing stereotypes.

Some parents worry things have gone too far. An obsession with obliterating gender roles, they say, could make the children confused and ill-prepared to face the world outside kindergarten.

"Different gender roles aren't problematic as long as they are equally valued," says Tanja Bergkvist, a 37-year-old blogger and a leading voice against what she calls "gender madness" in Sweden.

Those bent on shattering gender roles "say there's a hierarchy where everything that boys do is given higher value, but I wonder who decides that it has higher value," she says. "Why is there higher value in playing with cars?"

At Egalia — the title connotes "equality" — boys and girls play together with a toy kitchen, waving plastic utensils and pretending to cook. One boy hides inside the toy stove, his head popping out through a hole.

Lego bricks and other building blocks are intentionally placed next to the kitchen, to make sure the children draw no mental barriers between cooking and construction.

Director Lotta Rajalin notes that Egalia places a special emphasis on fostering an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. From a bookcase, she pulls out a story about two male giraffes who are sad to be childless — until they come across an abandoned crocodile egg.

Nearly all the children's books deal with homosexual couples, single parents or adopted children. There are no "Snow White," "Cinderella" or other classic fairy tales seen as cementing stereotypes.

Rajalin, 52, says the staff also try to help the children discover new ideas when they play.

"A concrete example could be when they're playing 'house' and the role of the mom already is taken and they start to squabble," she says. "Then we suggest two moms or three moms and so on."

Egalia's methods are controversial; some say they amount to mind control. Rajalin says the staff have received threats from racists apparently upset about the preschool's use of black dolls.

But she says that there's a long waiting list for admission to Egalia, and that only one couple has pulled a child out of the school.

Jukka Korpi, 44, says he and his wife chose Egalia "to give our children all the possibilities based on who they are and not on their gender."

Sweden has promoted women's rights for decades, and more recently was a pioneer among European countries in allowing gay and lesbian couples to legalize their partnerships and adopt children.

Gender studies permeate academic life in Sweden. Bergkvist noted on her blog that the state-funded Swedish Science Council had granted $80,000 for a postdoctoral fellowship aimed at analyzing "the trumpet as a symbol of gender."

Jay Belsky, a child psychologist at the University of California, Davis, said he's not aware of any other school like Egalia, and he questioned whether it was the right way to go.

"The kind of things that boys like to do — run around and turn sticks into swords — will soon be disapproved of," he said. "So gender neutrality at its worst is emasculating maleness."

Egalia is unusual even for Sweden. Staff try to shed masculine and feminine references from their speech, including the pronouns him or her — "han" or "hon" in Swedish. Instead, they've have adopted the genderless "hen," a word that doesn't exist in Swedish but is used in some feminist and gay circles.

"We use the word "Hen" for example when a doctor, police, electrician or plumber or such is coming to the kindergarten," Rajalin says. "We don't know if it's a he or a she so we just say 'Hen is coming around 2 p.m.' Then the children can imagine both a man or a woman. This widens their view."

Egalia doesn't deny the biological differences between boys and girls — the dolls the children play with are anatomically correct.

What matters is that children understand that their biological differences "don't mean boys and girls have different interests and abilities," Rajalin says. "This is about democracy. About human equality."

Let's not get too nostalgic for Rudd

It's a year since Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as Australian PM. Gillard has very low popularity ratings and the press is beginning to talk about a Rudd comeback:

Voters in key marginal seats have forgiven Kevin Rudd and are clamouring for him to return to the Labor leadership.

I do understand Gillard's unpopularity. She is proposing a carbon tax at a time when many families are already having to cope with rising costs. But Rudd? He was the guy who sent immigration levels to a record high.

In 2008 under Kevin Rudd net migration hit 316,000. Given that there are usually around 80,000 departures, that means that even on official figures there were about 400,000 arrivals. That's an enormous number of arrivals for a country with Australia's population: it would be the equivalent of about 5,500,000 arrivals in the USA in single year.

It led to a welcome backlash with both the Labor and Liberal parties backing away from Rudd's commitment to a "big Australia". And the Labor Party under Gillard does seem to have drawn the figures back down a little, with net migration being cut to 171,000 in 2010 - which, if I remember correctly, is exactly the figure Tony Abbott promised the Liberal Party would cut the number to.

So whatever Gillard's failings, I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to turn back to Kevin Rudd.

A Swedish school wants to make conception gender neutral

Sweden has embarked on an effort to abolish sex distinctions. I reported this week on preschools in Sweden which proudly offer princess costumes for the boys to wear. And now comes the news that there are youngsters in Sweden who are getting "gender neutral" sex ed lessons:

"The teaching of sex and relationships has fallen behind. This fall a new curriculum was introduced requiring the topic be included in more subject areas. But Freya School in Gnesta is one step ahead. "Activities in this school are likely to constitute a model for other schools in the country that must operate in accordance with the curriculum that takes effect in autumn 2011 and that "includes clearer descriptions of how sex education should be integrated in the different subjects in school." Both municipal strategists and math and science teachers are engaged in the work:

"The important thing is that students can see how it all fits together, says Maja (math and science teacher) and Karina (Municipal equality strategist). How sexuality is often influenced by others' standards and values. Therefore, teaching is also done in a neutral manner. In the anatomical teaching, they try to be as clear as possible.

"We want to get away from metaphors that sperm are active and eggs passive in the fertilization process, or that men's and women's genitalia are described as complementary. Such descriptions serve only to reinforce traditional gender norms and heteronormativity", they say.

Several things spring to mind. First, at the same time that they are ramming a political ideology down the throats of youngsters, they are telling themselves that they are teaching "in a neutral manner". Swedes have to start calling them out on this. It has to be openly recognised that Sweden has a state ideology into which students are being involuntarily indoctrinated.

Second, regardless of how active the sperm and the egg are in the fertilisation process, it shows how far things have gone in Sweden that this is all a politically sensitive subject. In other words, it shows how radical and far reaching the Swedish authorities intend to be in carrying out their programme of abolishing traditional sex distinctions.

Third, how would you like to live in a place which has a "municipal equality strategist" wanting to mainstream such ideas not just in sex ed classes but throughout the curriculum, even in maths classes? It would be like living in the Soviet Union and having every subject area taught within a Marxist-Leninist perspective.

Anyway, this is how one Swede suggests that the gender equality people would prefer to imagine the process of fertilisation:

The idea that sperm actually swim to the egg is a social construction produced in the mind of the patriarchy. The egg is not only there, but it actually swim into the penis, where it immediately "takes its share" of life by grabbing the nearest confused sperm, abducts it, runs over everything in its path and then returns with the passive sperm to the womb where it locks into it, and then drills into it, causing a fusion, if the sperm does not die during the egg's wild rampage. If so the egg goes back into the penis and takes a more capable passive sperm that can withstand some beating - it's so evolution favored the swift eggs and rugged sperm that do not dare move a muscle.  

The Greek crisis

The Melbourne Age has run as its main opinion piece today a column on the Greek crisis. Unusually for The Age the piece, by Simon Jenkins, has a hint of traditionalism about it. Jenkins's argument is that closer European union is a mistake because it is an attempt to force uniformity on significantly different cultures:

Closer European union, so called, was a bad idea for precisely the reason now seen on the streets of Athens. It was an attempt by a supranational economic authority to supersede national democracy. Bluntly, it assumed the commercial culture of ''greater Germany'' could be imposed on a wide variety of cultures by virtue of geographical propinquity. Countries with a high propensity to work and save would discipline those with a lower one. Banks would finance it all. It was fantasy born of utopia, the perfect precondition for a sovereign credit bubble

He writes too:

The lesson is clear. Sovereign states with distinct political cultures should never surrender control over internal affairs to foreign agencies

Federation can make sense when people share a common tradition, as was the case when the Australian states federated. But that's not so much the case in Europe. The English have a long history together distinct from the Russians who are again distinct from the Spanish. The European project ought to have been one of co-operation between sovereign nations rather than an imposed, top down, bureaucratic move toward federation.

Mayholes and Swedish boy princesses

I don't know how seriously we're meant to take this story. But even if it is meant humorously, it says something about the modern world.

Swedes have traditionally danced around a maypole during midsummer festivals. But now a feminist group wants them to dance around a "mayhole" instead. Why? Because they regard the maypole as a phallic symbol, and because other aspects of the festival are too heteronormative and patriarchal:

Chamberland ... who launched the group on Facebook in 2008, believes the traditional Midsummer maypole is a sexist phallic symbol that should be replaced by something of a more feminine flavour.

Rather than erecting a maypole, he and other members in the group want Swedes to spend time fashioning 'mayholes' by digging a hole in the ground or arranging tree branches in the shape of a vagina.

“It could be all different sizes, laid on the ground, or erected into the sky. It could be built from flowers, fabric, leafs, stones or glass," says Chamberland, who believes Sweden's current Midsummer tradition is too "heteronormative".

“It’s not just the pole," he explains.

"The tradition of girls picking seven different flowers to put under their pillow to dream about their future man is also very heteronormative and patriarchal."

Some Swedes have responded that men and women are represented equally in the maypole tradition because the earth represents the woman, but:

such explanations fail to convince Chamberland, who has just finished his master degree in gender studies, that Midsummer celebrations don’t need changing.

“That still reflects the different gender roles and the view that there are only two genders and that sex should only be vaginal and between a man and a woman when in fact there are lots of different ways to have sex,” he argues.

Stina Svensson, a spokesperson for the feminist political party Feminist Initiative welcomes Chamberland's efforts.

“I think it seems like a creative new way to celebrate Midsummer and I think it’s good when people celebrate the way they want to instead of how they should,” she says.

Another story from Sweden concerns the efforts to deconstruct gender roles in Swedish preschools. A reporter from the Dagens Nyheter went to a preschool and spoke to the boys about wearing princess costumes. The reporter then interviewed the staff about their efforts to break down the sex distinctions between the children:

Sanna Karlsson and Mia Smith's preschool teacher at Årstaberg. Mia is in charge of operations and works in a young group, True is working with slightly older children.

In the pre-school curriculum, it is clear such that we will offer boys and girls the same opportunities and that we should discourage children from being confined by gender stereotypes. An awareness of gender is part of the pedagogue mission, says Sanna Karlsson.

The assumption is that all children should have access to the same material regardless of sex, says Mia Svensson.

Often, it is about offering princess costumes to the boys and building materials to the girls. Although the response of individual children is something you think about.

How do the staff work?

We are in constant discussion, says Mia.

The boys in young departments will be happy about being in a skirt, coming to preschool in nail polish and want to make themselves beautiful. But somewhere along the way something happens.

The older the children begin to comment on each other, become more aware of what they and others are wearing. Just the clothes are clear markers of status as they get older.

Yet there is a lot of experimentation with different roles among the boys.

A good example is that when they dress up as Batman or in very masculine attributes, but it does not seem to control the game. Maybe they stand there in the Spiderman costume and prepare food or walk around with dolls, says Mia Svensson.

The staff works consciously so that the boys should dare to speak freely outside of gender conventions. But much is also about the attitudes they encounter at home. Both she and Sanna Karlsson face sometimes bad parents.

Even if they think it's OK that the boys dress as a princess, they are worried that they will be teased or about the negative response of other adults and children.

Awareness of gender is a fair question, and gives tremendous gains in the environment among children, says Sanna. We notice it becomes a more tolerant atmosphere in which children signal to each other that you can be who you are.

For the staff at Årstaberg it's not about trying to get kids to do something they do not want, but about individual freedom.

This is liberal autonomy theory in action (Dagens Nyheter describes its editorial stance as "independently liberal"). If the highest good is autonomy - a freedom to self-determine - and our sex is something we don't get to self-determine, then sex roles will be thought of negatively as something that limit us. That's why the article talks about children being "confined by gender stereotypes", whereas boys dressing as princesses is held to signal an "individual freedom" to "be who you are".

Swedish preschool teachers are bound to follow this view of the world:

Preschool curriculum developed in 1998 is a guiding document with legal bearing capacity as all the staff at the country's pre-schools must consider.

It says: "The pre-school is to counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles.

As I've noted before, the Swedish state is not neutral. Liberalism is the state ideology.

How does an 8-year-old girl please her kickboxing daddy?

This is not Australia at its finest:

There were tears in the ring when two little girls went to toe to toe in a kick-boxing bout at the weekend.

But one of the girls' fathers says his eight-year-old daughter loves the rough and tumble of the sport.

Jasmine Parr cried during her first Muay Thai fight, on the Gold Coast.

She admitted she had been scared of her opponent, seven-year-old Georgina "Punchout" Barton, from Brisbane.

Health experts had criticised the fight, saying the girls were too young to be slugging it out and could suffer brain damage.

But kick-boxing world champion John Wayne Parr has defended his decision to allow his daughter to glove up and step into the ring.

Parr, who has eight world titles, said the fight was "beautiful to watch" and Jasmine had "loved it".

"My daughter and I shared an experience which no medical expert will ever understand," he said.

"It was amazing, it was history and something we'll never forget.

"Jasmine is already talking about her next fight."

...Parr said Muay Thai was safer than ordinary boxing because it involved body kicking as well as punching.

"She might have two fights a year - I'm not trying to smash her," he said.

A seven-year-old girl named Georgina "Punchout" Barton kickboxes a crying 8-year-old girl in front of an audience of mostly adult men.

My theory is this: there are some men who want sons to mentor and when they end up with daughters they treat them like the sons they don't have.

I don't think they're respecting the unique qualities of their daughters in doing this.

Nor are they looking ahead to their daughters' future lives. A childhood spent violently fighting other girls is not exactly going to cultivate the feminine qualities these girls will need as wives and mothers.

Feminists: cherishing women is sexist

Two academic feminists have come up with some interesting research. Julia Becker and Janet Swim believe that not enough attention is paid to the hidden sexism suffered by women. So they got their male and female students to keep a diary recording the daily incidents of sexism they observed.

The idea was that keeping a diary would help to make the students more aware of sexism in everyday life and to feel more empathy toward the female victims.

But what qualifies as sexism? This is where things get truly interesting. According to our two academic feminists all the incidents below are to be considered sexist. I have copied them directly from the diary list:

• Heard paternalistic stereotypes about women (e.g., women should be cherished and protected by men).
• Heard traditional beliefs about relationships (e.g., men are incomplete without women and that every man ought to have a woman whom he adores).
• Heard complementary beliefs about women and men (e.g., men and women are different but complement each other).

The feminists call these traits "benevolent sexism". They want to abolish them by engaging in what they call "empathy manipulation" in which men are taught that women experience hurt feelings when they encounter such attitudes.

So there are no longer to be close, complementary, romantic relationships between men and women as these are thought of as being forms of hidden sexism.

What else gets judged as sexist in the diaries? Well, there's this:

• Heard negative things about feminists

That's interesting. Feminists here are putting themselves beyond criticism, since such criticism is assumed to be sexist.

What's interesting too is that these feminists reject male protection of women as "paternalistic" but then attempt to set up their own kind of paternalistic shielding of women. All of these are considered sexist:

• Heard comments about sexual behavior someone would like to engage in with you or another person.
• Unwanted flirting.
• Heard comments about parts of your or someone’s body or clothing.
• Heard that women interpret innocent remarks as sexist.
• Heard that women are not able to have a fair competition because when they lose, they typically complain about being discriminated against.

And on it goes. So it's not as if the researchers believe that women can stand robustly on their own two feet without special protection. They want special protection for women alright, but via speech and behaviour codes implemented by feminists. (Exactly how they imagine such codes would abolish unwanted flirting remains a mystery - are men supposed to know in advance if their flirting is going to be received positively or not?)

One other quick thought. The feminists are kidding themselves if they believe that the sexual polarity between men and women can be abolished. The polarity will always be there, what changes is how it's expressed. When I was quite young, it was expressed in everyday life (men giving up their seat etc) which favoured a "gentlemanly" (and gentlewomanly) expression of the polarity - one that tended to foster more refined forms of community life.

But with the decline of those everyday expressions of polarity (polarity in manners and mores), it seems to be expressed now more directly as a physical and sexual polarity. This means that men do well who are sporty and fit and who participate in masculine type sports; women are expected as part of the polarity to appear hot and to be relatively overtly sexual.

Maybe feminists like this shift in the expression of sexual polarity. But I think they'll have a hard time controlling it by "manipulating empathy". What's more likely is that the decline in manners and mores will reach a point that people find demoralising (as an example consider the ladette culture that is developing amongst women in England).

Profound intellectual discomfort

Deborah Orr has done a rare thing. She's written a column for a left-liberal newspaper, the Guardian, in which she discusses why so many women don't identify with feminism. She writes that many women like herself feel a "profound intellectual discomfort" when it comes to feminism.

Why would a left-liberal woman feel doubt and uncertainty about feminism? I'll quote the relevant passages in a moment. But her argument seems to be this. Women feel vulnerable in life. The feminist response is to empower women by making them autonomous careerists. But this autonomy is, first of all, illusory as it has to be propped up by the state on which women then become dependent. Second, women were ushered en masse into the workforce just as much to supply cheap labour as to make women economically independent. Third, when women have children their priorities often change and they can become less ambitious at work and more committed to caring for their children.

Here's the first relevant passage:

The archetypal feminist of the 80s and 90s had a fulfilling and dynamic career, wonderful children, a lovely home and fabulous grooming. Consensus on the impossibility of such a lifestyle for any but the wealthiest has been long-since reached. But the recession and its subsequent deficit have shown all too starkly that even the seeming achievement of more modest autonomy for women is heavily subsidised by the state.

The stock response is that the state has, and should have, a duty to support parents and their children, and that's true up to a point. But it is hard to foster dependence without fostering vulnerability as well. Feminism, in truth, is entirely concerned with limiting female vulnerability, real as well as perceived. But its rhetoric can seem instead to be all about asserting and celebrating female strength.

In the next passage she correctly notes that women were fast-tracked into the workforce for economic reasons:

The mass entry of women into the workplace in the latter half of the last century was claimed too unequivocally as a purely feminist achievement. Yet the door opened so easily when pushed because the needs of capitalism had undone the bolt. Everyone knows the Empire Windrush didn't dock at Tilbury in 1948 to promote multiculturalism. It arrived to provide cheap labour in the employment marketplace, as women did too. Likewise, the fast-burgeoning demand for professionals did as much to usher women into flashy jobs as female liberation did.

Deborah Orr then admits that the wage gap as it exists today is due more to women's preferences than to discrimination:

But equal opportunity in the workplace has not resulted in equal achievement, and not all of this is the fault of continuing chauvinism. Women bear the children and, far more often than not, they wish to be the primary carer for those children. At its most strident, feminism can be mistaken for an ideology designed to make women feel they are wrong to want that.

Worse, feminism has accidentally promoted the idea that it's pretty easy to work and have children, with the right support in place. On even an average income, it's never easy, even once children are at secondary school (though it's certainly easier then). Your priorities change. Work is no longer the most important thing, for a while anyway. Ambition can dissipate.

Finally, she criticises feminism for being unwilling to openly discuss these issues:

For many women, that's a self-evident truth. But feminism forbids women from admitting too many self-evident truths, for fear that the utterance of them will encourage discrimination.

I'll finish with a thought of my own. Deborah Orr writes about women feeling vulnerable and seeking economic and material security by being autonomous career girls. She is aware, though, that this kind of independence has to be propped up precariously by the state.

Why not seek security through marriage to a man who is committed to supporting his family? Feminism tells women that men, far from being protectors, are a threat. Men are portrayed as exploiting women and as being the perpetrators of domestic violence and rape. Feminists suggest that it is average men who are committing such acts to a threatening degree.

That's why it's important for traditionalists to continue to scrutinise the statistics that feminists throw around when it comes to family life. When feminists come up with the "1 in 3" statistics, they do so knowing the effect that it will have - that it will make women feel as if they cannot rely on a man and that being a mother at home will be too great a risk to endure.