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I was in a restaurant a few days ago and had the misfortune of sitting next to a table with a young woman whose voice I hated--flat, unemotional, uninflected, self-involved, self-centered. My wife thought it was a New York thing but my daughter agreed with me that the voice is now absolutely standard. There are, of course, variations. My wife was watching The Bachelor last night, and I listened for a few minutes. It seemed to me the voices of the women were somewhat coarser and less smug, but otherwise generally similar.E either way, the effect is (among other things) extremely anti-erotic.

That's an obvious general principle. In particular, though,

• Why was Spitzer's use of prostitutes such a big deal when Bill Clinton preys on interns and everyone else, Teddy Kennedy is a masher who murders (or at least manslaughers) mistresses, and Barney Franks has homosexual prostitution rings running out of his bedroom?
• Why are Jeremiah Wright's sermons a big deal now and they weren't before now?

The explanation on Spitzer, I suppose, is that when everybody hates you any excuse is good enough. If someone claims to be Mr. Righteous, and he's grossly abusive and people get tired of him, they like to stick it to him. On Jeremiah Wright, all I can say is that discussions relating in any way to race are always grossly irrational. You have to say this and you can't notice that. The Right is anti-science because they have ethical problems with stem cell research but the Left isn't anti-science because they got rid of James Watson for saying something obviously true about Africans. Predicting what's going to be allowed as an issue is like predicting an eddy in a turbulent stream. It just can't be done.

Isn't it obvious that the point of present-day education is to make people nonfunctional except as parts of a bureaucratic machine? "Tolerance," "inclusiveness," and the eradication of "prejudice" simply mean that the social connections and ideas about things people ordinarily pick up if left to themselves are worthless and even evil. People can't tell for themselves what things mean and are. They have to be told by experts. Otherwise they'd just screw up.

One consequence of that situation is the death of outrage. People accept whatever they're told to accept. Otherwise they'd be "resisting change," which means there's something psychologically wrong with them. Another is the passivity shown in sudden uncontrolled situations like school shootings.

Still another is the favoritism now shown by schools and employers for women. Women are good at making nice within situations someone else has set up. They believe in picking up on social cues and doing the done thing, and can't conceive of any other way of being except minor sorts of rebellion that are purely personal, socially accepted and maybe constitute a sort of fashion statement.

I'm writing a book, and I find that subjection to an editor gives me an appreciation for the woman's point of view in the relations between the sexes:

• The writer needs attention from others--like editors, who can accept or reject his project as they wish. So he's always worrying about how he's being received.
• The editor is basically a practically-minded guy who just wants to get a job done in a way that makes some kind of sense. His demands aren't nearly so elaborate or idiosyncratic as the writer's. In fact, they mostly aren't really demands.
• As a result, the editor thinks the writer is necessary and probably has a lot to offer, but is terminally vain, basically somewhat insane, and likely to explode or get weird at unpredictable intervals for no obvious reason. So he avoids plain speaking, slathers on the soft soap, and hopes for the best.
• The writer, for his part, welcomes the flattery--it certainly shows something, and it would be horrible to do without it--but also finds it somewhat annoying. It's too transparent. He also gets the uncomfortable impression that the editor doesn't understand and basically just doesn't care. Boo hoo.

A striking feature of overweight people, at least some of them, is that there's nothing at all they can do about it. Here's why:

• There is no single bite of food that causes anyone to be overweight. All eating however is eating single bites of food. So nobody ever does anything that causes him to be overweight.
• Some overweight has a genetic aspect. Some people need very little food to maintain a normal weight, and are constantly hungry if that's all they eat. Any overweight person can say he is that kind of person. Who's to say he's wrong?

I know it's nice to have a confidante, and it's flattering in a way to be chosen as one. What I don't understand though is the need women have for someone to pretend to listen while they deliver an unedited stream of consciousness about their worries, insecurities, jealosies, frustrations and whatnot. Why would that kind of thing be interesting to either side?

Maybe women actually do take an interest in that sort of thing. After all, "you're not really listening" is the standard complaint they make to men, so it must seem natural to them that someone would listen. The difference between the sexes comes out most clearly when there's a solution to the problem. The man presents the solution and thinks that should be the end of the matter. The woman isn't really interested in a solution, she just wants to vent.

To the extent either is worth thinking about, it's worth thinking about their relation. It's obvious there is one. The first feminists appeared about the same time as Sade. Both were part of the radical Enlightenment. We're the heirs of the radical Enlightenment, so we've got plenty feminism and plenty porn. What's the exact connection though?

• Opposition. Feminism says that sexual differences have no legitimate role in human relations. That means, I suppose, that sex has no legitimate role. So emphasizing sex, which pornography does, is antifeminist.
• Identity. Both feminism and pornography extract sex from any network of social expectation and duty. Each says that sex is what individuals freely make of it. At bottom, they're the same.
• Tit for tat. Women become feminists because men are such gross animals. Men turn to porn, especially non-respectful porn, because female standards are self-involved and anti-male, and it's fun to take those bitches down a few pegs. That makes women all the more feminist, which annoys men all the more, and so on.
• Separation. Feminism makes women difficult and convinces them that no man is good enough. Sex becomes hard to get, except for virtual sex, which turns out to have advantages over actual women. After a while it actually becomes true that the men aren't good enough. For lack of a kiss, the handsome prince turns back into a frog.
• Fusion. Women dress like sluts etc. as a way of approprating their own sexuality. Men pretend to be feminist as a way of getting chicks into the sack. Then the women have to act like porn stars. On the other hand, they can make their own absurd demands, so it's an even deal.

TV commentators and others are viewing with alarm the use of Obama's middle name by some right-wing talk show hosts. The "Hussein" business strikes me as a rather childish dig of the sort you expect in politics and on talk radio. Not inspirational, but no big deal.

If you're inclined to take it seriously, though, why is it worse than Howard Dean's comment that the Republicans look like the 50s? In both cases you're referring to some aspect of candidates' personal identity as a way of bringing into play a general social situation--diversity versus a strong sense of the normal and expected--that some people find reassuring and others alarming. Of course, we're all expected to find diversity wonderful and normality oppressive, but why is that view more sensible than the opposite view?

According to Howard Dean, the Democrats contending for the presidential nomination "look like America." Sounds about right. America is mostly populated by lawyers with longstanding left-wing sympathies who went to Yale or Harvard law school. I suppose if you extend the field to Bill Richardson you have a graduate of Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. If you bring John Edwards in you do get a little diversity, a B.A. in textile technology from North Carolina State University followed by a J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One out of four ain't bad, even if it's another lawyer.

Freehold, a short documentary that won an Oscar this year, deals with a lesbian detective who is dying of cancer and wants to transfer her pension to her live-in lover. The local authorities turn her down.

The comparison, of course, is to married couples, and the situation is supposed to be a patent injustice perpetrated against sympathetic victims. Mockery and cat-calls won't be enough to respond to the issue.

There's no substitute for having something to say. In particular, conservatives have to be able to say what is so special about marriage and the family that makes them worthy of social support other arrangements don't get. In fact, they have to be able to say what's wrong with same-sex connections, and why it's bad to give any sort of recognition to them. There's a long road back before they'll be able to do that, though.

I suppose there are other more neutral points that could be raised:

• Isn't the whole idea of transferable pensions a relic of the sole male breadwinner?
• How about a brother and sister living together? A woman and her aged mother, who she's looking after? A man and his son, who's got problems and isn't self-supporting? Are those all "justice" issues? And if you can transfer the pension to anyone you're living with, how about people you're not living with but feel responsible for in some way? And how about people with cancer who support some cause, that to them is just like "family"?

Those may be OK as wonkish debater's points, but they're not likely to get anywhere with normal people. The first one in particular may be a good point, at least when made against "progressives," but it probably isn't one a social conservative would want to raise.

I thought I'd pass on a piece of a discussion passed on to me from an email discussion list:

A: "England has the phenomenon of young women getting themselves murdered, by whoever it is who rapes and murders young women. It's as bad as Long Island. Every time you pick up a British paper, you see a story about a young woman getting killed or the body of a young woman being found, and you know that in most instances the girl let herself get into a dangerous situation she shouldn't have, because the instinct of fear and self-protection has been trained out of them by modern society.

"Here's a story (sorry if I've told it before), not about a young woman, but indicative of the general liberal attitude. A woman, a distant relative, was out for a walk in a park. A strange man began walking along beside her and talking to her. She didn't try to get away from him but continued walking with him at her side. Then she continued following the path where it entered into a concealed bushy area, with the man continuing with her. He pulled out a knife and slashed her throat. Thankfully, she survived.

"When I first heard this story about ten years ago, I said, 'She behaved like a typical liberal. She doesn't believe in the existence of evil or enemies. She didn't want to discriminate or be mean by getting away from the man. The normal instinct of self-preservation was not active in her.' Again, thankfully she wasn't killed, but she easily could have been.

"Of course, there's the specifically racial aspect of this -- young white women getting involved with, or otherwise making themselves accessible to, black men, and getting raped or killed as a result. This is a significant phenomenon that hasn't been written about in any mainstream publication.

"In the mid '90s I received for a while a white racist newspaper, I forget the name of it. The editorial content was primitive and fairly vile, but the one worthwhile thing about it was that it reprinted from mainstream newspapers around the country news stories about black men killing white women. It was just remarkable. It is almost as if there is this 'gene' in a certain type of white woman that keeps bringing white women into relationships with black men who then kill them. And the phenomenon keeps going on and on, with nothing in the society warning white women against it."

B: "You brought up a tragically widespread phenomenon. I think the cause of this aside from the liberal post-white brainwashing is that some (a small minority, thank G-d) white girls consider black guys to be more masculine than young white men. It's the same with Oriental girls and white guys, you always see a lot of white-Oriental couples where the guy is white, but almost never the other way around."

It seems to me the exchange raises some points worth thinking about. The 16+ years of education middle-class people go through these days does seem designed to root out responses most people would otherwise have as a matter of course. It includes a huge amount of propaganda. The idea, apparently, is to create a new type of human being for a new and vastly improved society. Can that possibly work? Dealing with the world around us in a realistic and effective way involves an enormous complex of attitudes, reactions, implicit beliefs and whatnot. How much can that be tinkered with and still remain functional? Does thought control really mean better thinking?

Then, of course, there are the particulars -- Oriental girls and white guys, the naive middle class-white chick from the 'burbs and the black dude with 'tude, etc. We aren't supposed to notice any of this or think anything of it, or if we do notice something like young women getting abused and murdered the answer isn't bringing back what unreconstructed types always considered common sense but rather massive reconstruction of human nature so no-one has to accept or even think about anything so gross and un-PC. Does that make sense?

Right wingers spend their time trying to stave off defeat. They believe that a single loss--"gay marriage," an immigration amnesty, an EU treaty--will wipe them out forever, by destroying marriage, their country, their whole civilization.

That's a sure-fire losing strategy in a war in which the battles constantly repeat themselves with no end in sight. What's needed is to lay out a permanent line of action toward goals that can survive any number of defeats. That will require a much more comprehensive and flexible understanding of our situation. Conservatism is notoriously concrete. It must become less so.

It seems clear that any intelligent, informed, honest and public spirited person today will be racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic and xenophobic. That is to say, he will accept that ethnic, sexual, religious and similar distinctions and connections matter and have always mattered to people, and there are good reasons why that should be so:

• Sex has been around for a billion years. It seems to affect people, and they seem to think it's important. If that's so, why shouldn't it be thought to mean something? And why shouldn't people have customary ways of dealing with sexual connections, distinctions and meanings? Such claim, though, are sexist and homophobic.
• As a practical matter, culture is generally connected both to religion and to ancestry and thus race. Culture however is a network of common attitudes, beliefs, habits, loyalties and the like that grows up among people who live and deal with each other for a long time. As such, it facilitates cooperation. To say "diversity is a challenge" is to say "diversity causes problems." It makes it harder for people to cooperate.

  Why not avoid problems? Why not at least recognize that they are problems? If culture has a function, and cultural differences actually exist and sometimes cause problems, then it must sometimes make sense to prefer to associate with people of one group defined by ethnic and religious background rather than another. But that's racist, antisemitic and xenophobic.

It seems that Mrs. Obama felt ill at ease when she was at Princeton. No surprise. It wasn't people like her who made it what it is, and she didn't even satisfy their normal requirements for admission. (She's said people thought her grades and scores were too low, even with the benefit of affirmative action.) If she thought there was something valuable there that's OK, it might have made sense for her to go there, but why be surprised when she felt out of place?

The idea, I suppose, is that Princeton should give up the past that made it valuable and become a generic 21st century place totally run by careerists, bureaucrats and therapists where nobody is at home. That's what's happened on the whole, and not only to Princeton. It's done a world of good for careerists, bureaucrats and therapists, but not, I think, for our universities or anything else.