Sociologist Charlotte P. Gilman once said "A concept is stronger than a fact." But I couldn't find the concept in this circle of haze.

I tried. I plodded thru that article, plowed thru sections and diagrammed sentences. Is Poulos Master of the Meaningless Essay? Does he simply rummage thru the Thesarus to an excess?

The read is circumrotating, winding, tortuous. Are these generalizations, opinions presented as facts, an effort to confuse? An unsolicited exercise in pageantry from the right? A contemplative mess?

Conclusion: It's offending both in written style and in its frustrating audacity to wonder about the purpose of women. And--of all things to say-- "The purpose of lifting the left's Potemkin skirts is not to score tits for tats." How ironic this choice of a phrase, given the long-winded, complicated verbiage of this essay!!
(P.S.--- women don't want to see the word 'tits' or even "skirts' used in an article by a man uninvitedly exploring our female role!!! --gasp!!

As to the sum of the parts otherwise ,I am less offended by Freud's wonderment of the female being,
and hand him the benefit of a different time.

I think Poulos is auditioning to be the next David Brooks.

This will surely be the last time I attempt to read anything by James Poulos. Ugh. Pretentious semi-academic pseudo-philosophy. This guy comes off like a 19-year-old who's got his first taste of Russell Kirk and Eric Voegelin and can't resist showing it off. He's just too smart to realize he never learned how to write.

If only the Daily Caller would hire someone to translate this stuff into English!

PS Remember the old days when the left would publish Marxian versions of this kind of nonsense? Ah, those were the days!

His ideas and the way he enumerates them not withstanding, could you please put a moratorium on him returning to the show until he learns how to suppress that smug prickish smirk?

It is very curious what Goldberg asks: Why now?

Is this the frog in the pot of water thing except that at some point the human frog notices and jumps? To shift metaphors, is it that at some tipping point the body recognizes it is losing battles not to localized infections but to something posing a systemic threat and it needs to react with a general mobilization of the auto immune system?

It is a bit biological isn't it? People notice the small signs here and there are part of something larger- that something is rotten in Denmark. Something stinks. Of course, the odd thing about offensive smells is that if it is our smell, we are not offended. Baby diapers are impossibly offensive to anyone but the parents or those in the tribe carring for the infant. Disgust is a defense mechanism- it tells us what to feel about what is foreign, it warns us away from threats by disease or interlopers who might threaten our interests. It is a primal emotion- but as cognitive scientist Rachel Herz points out in her recent book "That's Disgusting", the associations with disgust are largely learned. Compare for example the welcome smell of a favorite cheese versus smelling mold in an alley.

Herz is interesting because of her insight that this mechanism is re-purposed by our minds, forming the substrate of moral disgust (see article by her). Hamlet is disgusted by his mother's behavior- Is he oversensitive about something he should just get used to? Last year in March, Carol Alvorado stood in the Texas House of representatives waving a transvaginal probe exclaiming, "This is government intrusion at its best.”

I am sitting in a coffee shop- next to me a college age woman is being flirted with- I am not paying much attention, it is something more than warm friendship- some playful kisses- nothing too demonstrative- a romantic couple spending a morning working on their laptops. The man next to me is becoming more and more agitated and finally abruptly leaves. Maybe he didn't come of age in a hippie school and or live and work in a progressive city like San Francisco. The romancing was between two women. One middle aged man thought it was tender and sweet reminding him of his youth. The other middle aged man looked on those precious moments as something evoking a great deal of visible disgust. To him it had reached a trigger point.

At some point the Right wing feels compelled to vomit. At some point, the disgust is too much and there is political vomit in Zuccotti park. At some point the smug holier than thou patriarchy can no longer be tolerated like the eccentric uncle at the dinner table making some off color remarks.

Why are we surprised. Why did we think all this was settled. Didn't we all come to a collective agreement on birth control? It's like thinking that the civil war settled the question of race in America, or that maybe it was settled after the Civil Rights Act in the 60s, or maybe it was settled by the election of a Black man to the presidency. Many progressives have an optimistic view of the struggle as something more akin to immaculate conception, believing in the myth of clean demarcations- of historic periodicty divided along clean lines.

Any culture historian will tell you the period we call the "Renaissance" was the Renaissance for only for a relatively small handful of artists scholars and politicians. The masses of people of the Renaissance still lived in a period of a hundred years prior. Periods heavily overlap, and just as the romanesque and Gothic heavily interpenetrated each other, so too do the worlds of June Cleaver and Murphy Brown. Today's fragmentation is more pronounced stretching between multidimensional polls and the opportunities for discovering the depth of alien perspectives, and of evoking our mutual disgust of each other's moral stances are more frequent.

To some, the mosaic of our pluralistic society suggested that the enemy was disgust itself. Those like Santorum who indulged in its tribalistic power for political gain were fools to be silently suffered. It was thought that eventually such children would tire of their folly, and confronting them would only prolong their obsession. Such tolerance and the optimism that past progress was a series of done deals led to suspicion even of liberals expressing moral disgust. From this perspective, legislators like Alvarado were regarded as "oversensitive"- as if only she would be more level headed she would understand that a few pathological right wing laws posed no real threat.

Should liberals reject disgust? Is it really a viable strategy to be tolerant of conservative aberrations? That is, if we passively allow conservatives the time to digest and adapt to progress to feminism and civil rights legislation, is there any guarantee they will they finally be dragged into the twentieth century as we continue to explore the frontiers in the 21st?

The events of the last three weeks suggest that we as liberals stopped smelling what our noses have been telling us. That we have become accustomed to the stench of right wing efforts at dominating groups of people exercising their fundamental rights. We payed little attention to the continued struggles of fighters like Alvorado- to many of us, it is old news, a curiosity like a Japanese soldier found on some remote island still fighting a war long ago victoriously won. - Goldberg remarked on the GOP messaging that the goals of movements like feminism and civil rights activism have been achieved and are now superfluous.

Goldberg has her finger on why we have been asleep so long.