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- "If Even A Dumb Girl Can Do It, It Can't Be That Hard!"
Some males set themselves up for failure by linking their sense of manhood to how much they're not like half the human race Several years ago I read a book about female aviators and their campaigns to fly otherwise male-dominated planes and later, into space. I can’t remember the title, but the stickiest lesson came from a NASA official who admitted that, after endless obstacles, obfuscations, hurdles, and silly excuses to keep space capsules Kotex-free, the resistance boiled down to this: Astronauts were American heroes who had brought pride to the United States and were everyone’s idea of brave, strong, capable men. The best of the best of the best. While several aviatrixes had clearly demonstrated they could handle space travel, well, frankly… ….If we let women into space, how hard had it been, really, if even a girl could do it? Boys and men, for millennia, have defined their manhood with a pink floral ruler: I am more masculine if I am less feminine. The core tenet is that girls are stupider and weaker than boys, so if a girl can do it, it’s not that hard. To prove you’re a man, do something they can’t do. Girls will be boys American chickie-boos had to wait until 1983 to be permitted a rocket ride more fulfilling than that offered by KISS ’s Gene Simmons. Sally Ride’s came courtesy of Second Wave feminism. Women had redefined themselves as capable and competent, and were proving that females had always had the capacity to be so, it was only until now that they had the freedom. Feminists distanced themselves from fragile flowerdom with the only role models they had: Men. Really, where else could they look? We live on a sexually dimorphic planet. Before Second Wave feminism, women defined themselves by traditional feminine characteristics, but its purpose was to not threaten men, whose reaction to emerging women’s suffrage went about as well as telling the Incredible Hulk No. They were forever reassuring men, who still hadn’t gotten over having to give coloreds!!! voting rights, that they weren’t a bunch of man-hating lesbians. Decades later, women mirrored power in the workplace by dressing like men, not carrying purses, and adopting male sports and military metaphors. Another few decades later, with growing power and a greater presence everywhere, women feel more comfortable redefining themselves and lightening up on the dude-y stuff. Women aren’t using men as their single competency and comportment gauge as much anymore. Especially in the wake of countless financial scandals, pointless wars, and a never-ending stream of sexual imbroglios, all male-dominated. But however much women emulated the accoutrements of male power, women’s conception of themselves was never, and has never been, based in some inherent The less like a man I am, the more of a Real Woman I am. ‘Feminization’ The angry ‘manosphere’ and the rank hatred of transactivists against women who dare to defy them are rooted in a widespread sentiment that the world has become too ‘feminized’. When women invade a formerly male dominion, the males flee. It’s like ‘70s ‘white flight’ when a black family moved into your ‘hood— There goes the neighborhood! Better sell the house before its worth drops to the price of a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken! Teaching and nursing used to be all-male professions. So was insurance sales. And advertising sales (Good morning, Dawn Draper 2024!). Compliance officers too, ironically—I guess women are now better at forcing compliance than being compliant. Who else better to crack the whip over conniving hedge fund managers and sleazy CEOs than Yo Mama? Higher education was all-male until forced otherwise by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the ‘60s and ‘70s males dominated college campuses and manfully led the protests. Today women comprise 60% of college students, and lead the ongoing protests against—the continued existence of Jews. (Uh….yay Catherine Elizabeth Benson Brewer ?) Males are fleeing academia. Celeste Davis notes in her article, Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? , the ratio of males to females has dropped from 2:1 in the 1950s, 1:1 by the ‘90s, and now it’s at 4:6. If even a girl can design a tower or splice a gene, how hard can it be? There are other good reasons males may not be seeking college diplomas, like daunting decades-long post-grad student debt, the ridiculous degree requirements for jobs that really shouldn’t require even one, not to mention the danger of graduating without knowing the difference between boys and girls, or where Israel is on a map, or even how to spell Palestine . But then there’s that old deep-seated fear outed by Davis’s article: Men continuing the long tradition of moving away from formerly male preserves. Davis’s research found that the one variable it boiled down to to explain why men were increasingly staying away from college was the enrollment of women. She wrote, “For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.” How’s this going to work for men as we move into a highly technological, AI-driven, scientific future where knowledge skills and college degrees matter more than ever? Are they going to leave it all to us? Warning, guys, the robots won’t have boobs! I’ve read that one reason men love football is because it’s the one certain male domain from which women can only watch and cheer from the sidelines: Women aren’t physically capable of invading football teams, and you’ll notice that biological women identifying as men aren’t exactly beating down the locker room doors with their muscly hairy arms to bring diversity, equity and inclusion to the manliest of sports. Perhaps the goal of the female-by-identification crowd is to discourage women from bothering with competitive sports at all. If Title IX withers away from a feminine famine, because there’s no longer any point, sports becomes a manly domain again! And the federal money returns, too. Maybe, in a female-dominated world, every little boy will aspire to be a professional football player rather than a girly astronaut. The only men that out-enroll women at this point, says Davis, is gay men. Fifty-two percent hold college educations, while only 36% of American adults do. Maybe the robots will be boob-less and have a massive, uh, ‘secret attachment’. A matriarchal world? Really? If men aren’t careful—and I say this observationally—the more they drop out, the more feminized the world will continue to become. Speaking as a confident, assertive, innovative female—I’m not down with that. Now, I can envision a world in which women can bring fresher values and priorities to female-dominated business, entertainment, and high finance. We already dominate academia. Male flight has partially enabled the unfortunate takeover of educational institutions by overly-liberal females with values and priorities almost no one is happy with. A female-dominated corporate world may well offer better parental leave and perhaps subsidized or in-office child care. Perhaps less insane working hours. Like, you know, less than thirty-five a day. Women directing more Hollywood-financed movies may introduce a little reality, like heroines who don’t wear ridiculous outfits for physical activity. That silly-ass strapless Wonder Woman teddy and chunky high heels have got to go. C’mon, man, she’s fighting Nazis! How about a little chest protection, dollface? Also kaput will be tight dresses and high heels when you’re on the run engaged in some madcap highly-contrived adventure with your equally-hot gal pals. But—a female-dominant society would also bring unintended consequences. Like reduced productivity from a desire to achieve consensus rather than making executive decisions others have to accept. Failed DEI initiatives will continue, and probably become even more discriminatory. I believe with all my heart that if dudes allow us to take over, we will completely screw it all up just as they have. I already detailed how here . When any one tribal group dominates, others, including the dominant group, suffer. Patriarchy harms men, too How’s life at the top treating men? Men today, particularly white men said to be at apex privilege, are committing suicide at four times the rate of women, and account for 79% of suicides (and women are the more depressed sex!) White men kill themselves at higher rates than black men. They’re less likely to seek mental health treatment. Um, maybe because it’s something women are more prone to do? Because women aren’t afraid to ask for help which shows you just how weak they really are? In 2022, white men accounted for nearly 16 suicides out of a population of 100,000, whereas black men only accounted for 8.6. One theory is that women and black men are better at handling stress because they lack white men’s easier way in the world. I damn not white men, or even men. I accuse ‘patriarchy’. It’s not good for men, either. It’s literally killing them. No one’s getting laid, and Elon Musk is freaking out about a birth dearth while J.D. Vance worries cats are replacing babies for childless women. (Hey, someone’s got to protect the beastie s from those ravenous immigrants!) Patriarchy encourages men to disconnect from their emotions, although I’ve recently learned they don’t actually experience emotions as strongly as women, and don’t cry as much, partly due to biological reasons. It’s not that they’re cold, unemotional robots; it’s ate least somwhat evolutionary. Consider how counterproductive it might have been for a Neolithic tribe’s survival if men felt the death of a friend or kin as keenly as women do. What if no one wanted to go on a mammoth hunt because it was ‘too dangerous’? Male aggression and unemotionalism likely evolved as a survival strategy. And it didn’t in women because it would be counterproductive to not care if your baby died, nor is much aggression required to hunt for roots, herbs, and other crucial plants for survival. Men today experience a shorter life span than women, by about 3-4 years. It might help if they had trusted friends they can talk to, but many men can’t experience deep friendships with other men when the patriarchal spectre of homosexuality looms over them. Homophobia is based in misogyny. A man who acts like a woman isn’t a ‘real man’. Gay men act like women by having sex with other men, and the worst are those who allow themselves to be penetrated. Passively accept, not actively rise to the occasion, so to speak, and pound away—like a man. Obviously, none of this pertains to all men, although if you dig deep enough, you may well find the seeds of The less I am like a woman, the more of a man I am. What I’ve observed, after forty years of active feminist living, is that women today are more free to grow in ways that are more like men, in the right ways. We don’t consider ourselves ‘less feminine’ for adopting certain aspects of masculinity. We don’t worry we might be gay if we prefer to be less girly. Women are learning to take more risks, assert themselves, start their own businesses, enter politics, and join (or ‘invade’ as the manosphere would put it) formerly male professions, held back only by one’s own lack of will, resilience, or ability to compete. I wish for men to be able to do the same. To adopt the best qualities of being a woman, feel a little bit more, even if they never cry much. Recognize, as some already have, that there’s deep emotional satisfaction in bonding with one’s children, taking care of them, and helping to raise them. That allowing themselves to feel more emotion doesn’t make them girly, but human. Have we not just learned that women are fuller human beings when they don’t restrict themselves to passive gender-based conduct and personal goals? Emulating the best things about being a man has made us richer, fuller human beings. Those men who eschew women, who hide, cringing in the ‘manosphere’ from the other half of the human race, will never grow or achieve their full potentiality. What men have got to work on is this insane notion that half the human race is less than themselves. That anything a girl can do isn’t worth doing, even after men have claimed the initial laurels. Maybe there will never be ‘equity’ in STEM if males tend to be overall better suited to those professions, but if more girls with the aptitude like foremother science chicks Hedy Lamarr, Marie Curie, the ‘Hidden Figures’ ladies, Elizabeth Blackwell and Jane Goodall are encouraged to enter where their talents are best suited, that’s best for everyone. If men can work besides the men of color their fathers and grandfathers despised, they can make the jump to recognizing that females have turned out to be every bit as capable as these men who were once considered ‘inferiors’ and too stupid to educate. Those men who still cling desperately to their pink floral yardstick marginalize themselves. Andrew Tate looks like a winner only to those fellow losers who haven’t managed to amass, legally and illegally, as much money as he. Thirty-plus Bugazis for a man who can only drive one at a time looks impressive only to those who measure manhood by penis size, whether by nature or credit card. If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed over millennia, it’s that many men don’t like women no matter how competent and capable they are, or how compliant and non-threatening. They hate us for being weak, but they hate our strength, too. We can’t win for losing. Patriarchy harms everyone, and I hope men will soon return to the halls of higher education. Fifty years ago male-led campus unrest protested an unjust war getting American men and innocent foreign citizens killed. Today female-led protests support filthy terrorist groups and chant for the obliteration of another group of people. Matriarchy sucks too. Trust me on this, guys. I’m a woman. I know. Masculinism 2.0: What Would A Positive, Healthy New Men’s Movement Look Like? What Greta Thunberg Teaches Us About How To Handle Small Dick Energy How Can Men Tell Their Stories And Challenge Toxic Feminism? Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts of more recent articles there too!
- The Annoying Sarcastic French Jackass Who Pissed Off Powerful Elites
The Enlightenment gadfly Voltaire was a true social justice warrior who infuriated the comfortable and powerful and actually got shit done I fell in love with a French guy in college. When my history class got to the European Enlightenment my ditzy college kid self was like, okay, whatever. But mah man Voltaire expedited my germinal liberalism forming around constitutional rights and my growing dislike for autocratic religion. These old rationalist dudes questioned authority, not to mention the existence of God, or at least the authority of God, and whether God even wanted authority over us since maybe He only really interfered in human affairs when it was absolutely necessary to keep us from FUBARing everything. (It also sounded like a good argument to my mom for not going to church anymore.) When we were assigned Candide, the work he’s most famous for, I cheaped out by borrowing a book on Voltaire’s collected works at the library. Candide didn’t blow my mind. But. That semester I spent my free time mostly alone, reading in the cafeteria or the Student Center. I read some of Voltaire’s other works. Like his Lettre on why the French should inoculate their kids against smallpox like their hated, sworn enemies the British. Did you know they had smallpox vaccinations back then? Well, they did. They were cruder and riskier, but Voltaire noted the English were dying less of smallpox than the rest of Europe, which regarded the Brits as ‘mad…maniacs’ because they deliberately infected their infants by making a small cut and inserting some virus. The English noted (just like, Voltaire observed, ancient Circassian mothers) that infants stood a greater chance of surviving smallpox, with less scarring, than older children or adults. Sure, some died, but many more survived, and regardless of what else might kill them at a young age, it wouldn’t be the scourge of Europe. I was totally ready to vaccinate my 18th-century baby! How logical. How exceedingly rational. Voltaire’s reasoning was impeccable. I think he inoculated me against a lifetime of falling for dogmatic tripe. Voltaire was a gadfly, an anti-elitist, pro-intellectual asshole. He became my kind of asshole with giant brass balls. He was forever on the run, one step ahead of the enemies of reason, rationalism, and calling out abusive power-mongers. He challenged oppressive 18th-century Catholicism, and the puffery of nobility and clergy remaking society to benefit mostly themselves, much like our self-appointed academic elite masters and politicians today who think they know better than us critically-thinking rabble. Voltaire’s privileged, effete enemies were to perish twelve years after his death on the business end of the guillotine, but I’ll bet he would have vigorously condemned Robespierre and his Reign of Error. I marvel at and admire his massive uncommon strength and courage at a time when cancellation meant the strappado, the rack, the wheel, and the thumbscrews, not just people calling you ‘Catholiphobic’. Today he would revile the left’s and right’s censormonkeys and blast XTwitter with a power greater than Elon Musk’s rocket ship. The radical Christian disdained most religions, but called for universal religious tolerance, never advocating obliterating them. In fact, nothing pissed off his nation’s elites as much as his intolerable calls for religious tolerance. “I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire’s attributed quote is actually a more succinct synopsis of a longer and klutizer written expression. What made my First Amendment heart pound was his delightfully sarcastic essay On The Horrible Danger Of Reading , an evisceration of Turkey’s recent edict banning printing, and weaving in criticism of French censorship to boot. I printed it out and taped it over my typewriter, since I was working on a Great American Novel, that, had it ever gotten published, would have mightily pissed off the Republicans and their Christian Right masters. In the early 1980s, the Religious Reich Right was on a tear, banning books and, if I recall correctly, although I can’t find evidence of it today, burning them. But they were definitely banning them, often classics that called for universal tolerance. (Sound familiar?) So of course I read many of them. Never tell me what I can and can’t read. Nothing pisses off power-mad elitists more than reading forbidden books. In Voltaire’s day the go-to list for your next great read was the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, who made him yesteryear’s equivalent of a regular on the NY Times bestseller list. Today books forbidden by agitating activists against Amazon and other book purveyors can be downloaded somewhere or you can boycott them until they return Abigail Schrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters right the hell now! Voltaire was a rebel. A maverick. Sometimes, he was a racist, antisemitic, ‘anti-mahometan’ asshole, but he believed in free speech, freedom from censorship, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion, freedom from religion, and freedom from torture and any sort of oppression. He was the scourge of pompous asses, the intellectual Scarlet Pimpernel of freethinking. He did time in the Bastille for pissing off the king. Twice. He was forever dodging the Church, which didn’t measure up to his moral and intellectual standards. He detested their power, and unchecked power in general. He wrote a devastating article condemning the Church for the arrest, hideous torture, and execution of a Huguenot named Jean Calas in a deeply Catholic country, after examining the appalling French system of jurisprudence: “As there are half-proofs, that is to say, half-truths, it is clear that there are half-innocent and half-guilty persons. So we start by giving them a half-death, after which we go to lunch.” He succeeded, after a years-long campaign, in getting the French government to re-open the case and re-try Calas posthumously. This time he was acquitted. Voltaire didn’t like Huguenots much, but he didn’t want to see one tortured and executed for something he didn’t do. It’s why I think he’d stand up for Jewish students in the face of the Islamofascist (‘Mahometan’) Reign of Terror. “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.” Voltaire didn’t suffer fools gladly, which is why he was such a wolverine about Jean Calas. The case had snowballed when Calas, accused of murdering his own son who’d pretty clearly hung himself, initially claimed his son was murdered to avoid his naked corpse getting dragged through the streets as a suicide. The local gossips, though, were like, “Oh, that sonofa chienne Jean murdered him!” and there he was, broken on the wheel and suffocated with an early iteration of waterboarding, declaring his innocence until the blessed end. Voltaire’s obsession with exonerating him embarrassed the Church mightily. It’s no wonder he was always hustling out of France to avoid being assassinated or executed. He pissed off fellow philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a very bright man who could nevertheless go off on weird hippie tangents about how people should maybe go back to nature and just get it on with the wild and offer a massive collective finger flip to civilization. Voltaire wrote him a sarcastic letter saying that, even at his own advanced age, he’d like to get down on all fours and crawl around the forest. Rousseau got all snowflakey about it and the two feuded, in the sense that Rousseau hated Voltaire who thought the former was just freaking hilarious. Sarcasm kept Voltaire in a steady state of trouble throughout his long life, which ended at eighty-three, by natural causes rather than someone finally whacking him. Although in his various letters to friends, Voltaire the Hypochondriac spent the last fifty years complaining of his ills and warning the end may be near. No one took longer to die than Voltaire, no, not even PeeWee Herman at the end of the movie Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Writing ‘to act’ Voltaire’s polemics against religious intolerance included extolling King Henry IV for bringing peace to England and converting from Catholicism to Protestantism. While in England, he scrawled out essays about how great the English government was although, not, to my knowledge, similar paeans to the food. Without explicitly mentioning how poorly the French government fell short, it was still wickedly obvious who he was excoriating yet again, so the French government banned his Letters to the English . His most unforgiveable up-yours was his observation that England’s Royal Exchange brought together men of all faiths and the only ‘infidels’ were those dumbasses who went bankrupt. Religious tolerance was definitely a non-non for French authorities and this peaceable observation was, therefore, intolerable. He wrote ‘to act’, to change opinions which can bring about social justice, and he did. I expect today he’d notice and call out how religious-y progressive politics have gotten, with mandated dogma and severe consequences for deviation. Can you imagine what he’d make of today’s Transquisition? Betcha he would have read the WPATH Files and the Cass Review! Afflicting the comfortable His first stay in Club Bastille began with an essay criticizing the government. Not being one much for learning his lessons, he wrote yet another one while warming his cell bench, this time criticizing rather than praising Henry IV for some damn thing and, just to be a gadfly pissant, he trash-talked religious extremists some more. It got published after his release which led to a violent brouhaha with an angry nobleman and, well, they’d saved his cell for him, the bench still warm from his butt. Getting rather tired of this whole prison thing, he asked if he could spend the rest of his sentence in England, which was almost as bad for a Frenchman used to food that doesn’t taste like paste. But it’s where he learned to love freedom of speech and religion, so it all worked out. For us, anyway, less so for the French government and the Church. The 21st-century Voltaire What still strikes me, forty years after I fell in love, is just what a courageous maverick Voltaire was. He dodged his enemies while throwing over his shoulder ever-more-vitriolic condemnations. Voltaire was his pen name, but 18th-century anonymity didn’t exist when you were the most famous and read writer in Europe. He couldn’t gush virulence at night disguised as @ecrasezlinfame and wander down to the market in the morning for breakfast without being recognized—or potentially stabbed. Pissing off the Church was akin to irritating Hamas today. If they’d gotten their hands on him, he might have wished for a death as ‘easy’ as Jean Calas’s. Which ended broken on the notorious Wheel. He afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted, the genuinely marginalized victims of his day. His most detested sin was irrationalism. He would have adored the downfall of TV evangelists and assured them God had ordained it. He stood up, unpopularly, for an executed man in an unpopular religion, one Voltaire himself scorned, but his dislike of social injustice far exceeded his dislike of Huguenots. He spoke what the masses didn’t dare say, the most vicious gadfly up the arses of all their enemies. What would he and his Enlightenment buddies make of the chowderheads and peabrains running the GOP and the Democrats, how much they’d eviscerate wokeness and MAGAtry with their sharpest of verbal rapiers. How much their words would crush the anti-semites and hateful elitists. Voltaire would fulminate relentlessly against academic, journalistic, and political doxing, SWATting, and deplatforming of public speakers. He’d condemn everyone’s book-banners. He’d likely recognize woke ideology as a mind-numbing religion, and call it out for paying lip service to the weak and helpless while elitely obsessing about whether the term ‘field work’ is racist. He’d call out the semi-literate morons on XTwitter far more sarcastically, and with better spelling and English syntax. Voltaire died before the French Revolution which is a shame; I strongly suspect he’d have condemned Robespierre and defended the very nobles who loathed him. I wonder if he could have saved lives by ripping Robey a new anal exit, maybe from England. (Critics blamed Voltaire posthumously for the French Revolution.) Thanks to freethinkers like Voltaire, the monarchy eventually disappeared and the Catholic Church lost much of its power. They inspired The Founding Fathers’ nascent democracy in the American Colonies. The same can be done to the woke and MAGA, both the enemies of free speech, free thought, and universal tolerance. Because bad ideas never last. Although, pretty arguably, maybe for the next four years. Good luck with the election next week. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts of more recent articles there too!
- The Rise Of Unhappy 'Trans Kids' And The Role Of Progressive Parenting
Liberals need to ask some hard questions about why conservative kids are happier--and a lot less 'trans' Conservative children have higher levels of happiness, joy in life, and enjoy greater mental health than kids in liberal families, according to moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. It wasn’t always so, his research found; prior to 2012 there were minimal political differences. After 2012, depression and anxiety digressed politically; liberal kids’ mental health sank, most markedly for teenage girls and young women, with boys not far behind. While many theorized they were depressed about the state of the world, Haidt notes that Barack Obama was President and had enacted liberal-friendly laws like gay marriage. The author of the bestselling book The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Leonard Sax, notes the role political leanings play in the ‘gentle parenting’ style that many left-of-center parents have adopted. In the last ten years, he says, permissive parents are almost always on the left and they push back against advice regarding children’s needs for structure and boundaries. The best form of parenting, Sax argues, backed by many other researchers, is that which is both strict and loving and denies that’s a particularly conservative slant. It’s a practice that works on both sides of the political spectrum; only strict, or only loving, isn’t good for children. He encourages moving away from the ‘Children Rule’ model. He quotes a NY Times writer who predicts the next generation can “anticipate blaming their high rates of depression and anxiety on the over validation and under correction native to gentle parenting.” Haidt has drawn a direct line between the decline in liberal kids’ mental health issues and the rise of social media which began around 2012. His book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness extrapolates on this. What it barely mentions, though, is perhaps the most mystifying phenomenon to arise from the Social Media Revolution: The rise of ‘trans kids’, in which a generation of children became convinced of a seemingly ludicrous idea no prior generation had entertained before: That they were ‘born in the wrong body’. The desire to be the opposite sex has manifested itself in many ways over the course of human history, but never before had anyone thought that children could ‘know’ who they really were at a very early age and need to medically transition. It seems a uniquely progressive position; conservatives largely don’t support this and you don’t find too many ‘trans children’ in conservative families. I’ve covered what I call the progressive ‘Project 2012’ , the already-underway and highly successful effort to remake America ideologically in a ‘woke’, social justice image, in contrast to the far right’s outlined ‘Project 2025’, downloadable for free . What has been overlooked is a subset contribution to this bizarre ‘trans kid’ phenomenon that’s received little attention so far: The role of permissive, progressive parenting. It’s in progressive families where young girls and women suffer the highest rates of mental distress, with liberal males not far behind, and both notably higher than conservative kids of either sex. Although females have always suffered especially from depression and anxiety, more so than males, and that’s regardless of political persuasion. The The Mental Health Of Liberal Girls Sank First And Fastest - Jonathan Haidt , After Babel Liberalism is not a mental disease as some allege, and life isn’t necessarily hunky-dory for kids in conservative families, either. Every parent brings their own quirky craziness and emotional issues to the family, not to mention biases and prejudices. Try growing up gay and conservative Christian. But it’s arguable that some liberal families, in an effort to raise tolerant, inclusive, independent kids, have allowed their unformed children too much freedom, and are afraid to exercise any sort of authority. Nor to think critically about what they hear at school, particularly after the rise of the gender-switching hucksters. The result is a growing number of of young people detransitioning, and parents grappling with the lifelong problems their formerly healthy children now face. A hard look at progressive parenting Children are treated by many progressive parents as mini-adults even as they’re sheltered and coddled and denied freedom . Haidt points to, as a major contributor to current Gen Z mental distress, the end of childhood filled with mostly unsupervised play, which is how the rest of us grew up before the rise of helicopter parents. ‘Mini-adults’, whose opinions must always be addressed and respected, in which children are asked to do things rather than told with no backtalk, is in contrast to the way my brother and I, and most kids we knew, were raised—regardless of familial political affiliation—little people with feelings, wants, desires, and certain rights, but not adults with the ability to make all our own decisions . We were, after all, still children. Not a single one of us grew up in families which would have taken seriously, “I’d rather be a boy/girl.” Likely the most liberal parents would have said, “Fine, you can get a sex change when you’re an adult.” For progressive parents today who aren’t at all happy about the kiddie transgender craze, and don’t believe their child was born in the wrong body, but dare not speak up, they’re often powerless against the authoritarian indoctrination of children in public education. Some self- and group-analysis is in order for these parents, along with—and some are not going to like hearing this—maybe examining how conservative parents raise their own kids, particularly those who are concerned their kids might go 'trans'. The genderwoo claptrap starts in school. So questions progressive parents need to ask are: How are conservative parents counteracting it? Are they sending their kids to private and charter schools? What do they say when their kid comes home and says they want to go on puberty blockers, or their pronouns are some weird collection of phonemes? Conservative parents won’t have all the answers--having come from the United States, I can testify how many people raised in political and religious conservative families created distance upon adulthood, if not necessarily estrangement. If progressive parents may be dunned for over-permissiveness, plenty of conservative families lean towards authoritarianism, which isn’t easy to grow up with, either. But not all conservative families are as authoritarian as some might imagine. Just as not all liberal families are ultra, well, anarchic. Neither type is perfect, but conservatives have a helluva lot fewer trans kids, who concomitantly report higher levels of happiness. It’s possible, as one essay points out, that liberals simply tend more toward depression than conservatives. It may not be easy to be gay, atheist, or insufficiently patriotic in a conservative family, but at least parents aren't ruining their children’s bodies with puberty prevention and cross-sex hormones, with zero knowledge as to how it will affect their fertility, sexual pleasure or lifetime happiness. Progressive parents must think more critically than many are. Sex transitioning offers children a temporary and false fix for their perfectly normal adolescent turmoil, which they’ve not been taught adequately to handle. Cheerfully counseled by garish social media influencers, children are led to believe that whatever fears, anxieties, and concerns they have, the answer is quite simple: You were born in the wrong body! Transition now, and all will be well! Except it’s not. As The Anxious Generation notes, social media is one of the primary, perhaps the primary reason liberal young people are experiencing a steep rise in mental distress. Liberal girls, he notes, spent more time in person with friends than conservative girls until the early 2000s, but after social media, that dropped below conservative children’s time. Liberal kids spend more time than conservative kids on social media, the negative mental health detriments of which are described quite thoroughly in Haidt’s book. Haidt advocates parents limit their children’s phone time to maybe an hour or two a day, but not on how to give them the backbone to do it. That would be a whole ‘nother book! Disempowering messages Social media, he notes, teaches a loss of locus of control— which describes a ‘malleable personality trait’ in which those with the locus “feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them.” Sixty years of research, Haidt notes, shows that those with internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. The lie kids receive from influencer purveyors of ‘woke’ ideology, which pervades social media, is that the world is divided between good and bad people, the ‘marginalized’ are helpless and can’t do anything about it, white supremacy and patriarchy and transphobic TERFs and blah blah blah. It removes, in other words, the locus of control from children (and adults) who consume such messages. Haidt notes Tumblr’s pioneering work in disempowering a generation of kids, described in the powerful Free Press podcast series, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling , which I highly recommend. Megan Phelps-Roper interviews Rowling over the course of six podcasts. Rowling watched from the beginning as her superfan base evolved with ‘streaks of cruelty’ and ‘exclusion’ present from the beginning, and how, as other experts pointed out, exploded with Tumblr’s popularity in the early 2010s. It’s within Tumblr where the nascent ‘woke’ ideas of fragility, victimhood, language, and harm ‘evolved and mixed’. It’s where the youth trans movement was essentially born, with endlessly-generated labels applied to permutations of feelings and mere personality quirks, and a growing self-invented notion that its adherents were endlessly persecuted. And here we are today, because progressive parents seemingly don’t pay as much attention to where their kids are spending their time online. The ‘trans kids’ phenomenon is a direct result of the explosion of social media, not some weird modern evolutionary aberration. I will elaborate on that one glaring gap in Haidt’s book—the near-complete omission of the youth trans movement. It gets, literally, a brief mention on page 165 of the hardcover edition. Haidt is mystifyingly uncritical, noting, in an entire book on the impacts of social media on youth life, that social media trends ‘may’ be related in part to kiddie sex changes. He faintly parrots the woke party line, noting that ‘gender dysphoria’ has ‘long existed’ around the world, and that estimates of it may be lower because they were based on people who sought gender-reassignment surgery, which he calls ‘a vast understatement of the underlying population,’ harkening to the early movement responses to the question of where all the gender-confused kids suddenly came from: “Maybe many people always felt this way but they didn’t know what to do about it!” I have an urge to feed him a cracker. Haidt pays lip service to the idea that kids might just be ‘coming out’ in an era where the social stigma was less, and doesn’t address the political angle at all. I commented on one of his articles recently pointing his blindness out, seemingly ignorant of the horrendously toxic effects the social media-driven trans movement has had on clearly emotionally disturbed children and their families. I don’t know if he saw it but I’m fairly certain his assistant did. Family as the enemy The trans cult is every bit as powerful as the religious cults of the olden days—their heyday in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There are forces at work today greater than the parental ability to resist, and children are taught to cut off their ‘toxic’ parents for daring to challenge or question in the slightest, however respectfully. In fact, ‘estranging’ from one’s parents has become the new ‘cool’ thing to do for many children and young people of privilege, who seek the slightest excuse to blow off their parents, go off on their own, and whine about how bad they think they had it. As a writer at The Distance magazine notes, “Gender ideology treats the family as the enemy and enlists the state to enforce its edicts over families.” Liberals, far more than conservatives, have brought this on themselves by clasping the mental health-destroying disempowerment messages to their bosom. Perhaps what progressive parents face with a kid with alternative pronouns, dodgy new friends and a cheerleader teacher, is not an overhaul of their parenting skills, but a course correction , with help from right of center, non-overly-authoritarian conservative parents, rebuking the false notion that children are ‘little adults’ or that putting your foot down and uttering the forbidden word ‘No’ makes one Mommy or Daddy Dearest. Conservative parents who believe more in strictness than loving could learn a few things too. Remember: It’s a balance, strictness and living, and it’s not a woke-style either-or choice. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts of more recent articles there too!
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- Don't BE The Victim Blog | Grow Some Labia
Don't BE The Victim Take back your power and get off (or avoid) what relationship counselor, TED talker and author Dina McMillan calls 'the hamster wheel' of abusive relationships. Recognize you now have choices, and resolve to make more informed ones. If more women stood up to toxic masculinity and refused them entry into their lives, or booted them out early, abusive men would be forced to shape up or jack off. Every abuser an incel! Dina McMillan's book "But He Says He Loves Me: How to Avoid Being Trapped in a Manipulative Relationship" offers rock-solid advice on how abusive men think and strategize, and how to avoid them. If you read no other book your entire life on abuse and men, read THIS one. McMillan claims she can teach women and young girls to avoid a lifetime of abuse in two hours, and she's not kidding. Dina McMillan's Book Review How To Not Get Abused It really is a lot simpler than most women think. Don't allow these guys into your life in the first place. Don't let them back. The first time he hits you must be the last. Click here to see my advice and education think pieces. May 21 Bitch: When I Was The Abuser (Part II) It takes two for an abusive relationship. Because an abuser can't abuse a person who isn't there. This is Part II. Bitch: When I Was The... May 18 Bitch: When I Was The Abuser (Part I) When I say, 'Don't LET anyone treat you like that,' or 'Don't BE the victim,' I speak from personal experience. As a temporary ex-abuser.... May 8 "Don't Be Like Me"--One Man's Escape From Abuse (Guest Post by Jim McCoy) Acceptance of reality means understanding you were abused. It can happen to men too. It's not funny or cute. And God help us all, it is... Apr 29 What Both Women & Men Can Learn From The Sordid Andrew Huberman Affair(s) He was good at playing women, but he offers further lessons on red flag recognition, as well as a helpful lesson for single men who don't... Apr 13 Some Rape Victims Emerge Stronger, Not Permanently Debilitated There, rape activists. We said it. Some decide NOT to let this ugly event define them. Too bad feminist theory teaches women little of... Apr 6 How I Grew a Pair (Of Labia) And Left An Abusive Marriage: Guest Post Part I Persephone Phoenix shares how women need to follow their own hero cycle. 'You go through hell and you triumph in the end. No one will... How To Not Get Abused BOOKS I RECOMMEND FOR Avoiding Abusive Relationships I've found five stellar resources to help women identify their psychological weaknesses and inoculate themselves against the sort of toxic man who manipulates and abuses, but also to better understand men and thereby become better partners themselves. After all, she may be no walk in the park either. Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair This is the antidote to Generation Snowflake and everything 'woke'! Schulman dives into the modern-day confliation of conflict or disagreement with abuse and explores the way misstating conflict and overstating harm hurts the individuals involved and further divides the society. Read this before you venture onto Facebook or Twitter! More Info Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men A male therapist who works with couples in abusive marriages details the roots and core of entrenched male misogyny and exactly how these men's minds work. Read this and you'll have a far more informed understanding of how you're not likely to ever change him, and how these manipulators can fool even trained psychologists and therapists to believe they've changed when they haven't. I can't recommend this book enough to women in abusive relationships or who want to avoid them. More Info The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society Of Pickup Artists - Neil Strauss (My Review) The best psychological analysis of the female mind and its many weaknesses was written, believe it or not, by a former Pickup Artist. The short bald average-looking author became a pickup artists of southern California's hottest women and details the secrets of his success--not to brag but to show women how easy they are to 'play'. Controversial when it was published in 2004, feminists condemned it for the PUAs' poor treatment of women, but Strauss came to regret his life and shows us the uglier aspects from the men's side too--including a friend who suffered an emotional breakdown and men unprepared for adult, functional relationships once they outgrew the desire to sleep around. There are no better experts in exploiting women's psychology for their advantage than the men in this book, and it's inadvertantly a handbook for women to avoid manipulative sexual predators. Strauss has since given up the PUA lifestyle and is married with children. More Info What Was He Thinking?: The Woman's Guide to a Man's Mind Another great book on how men's mind's work, but in general, not from an abuse standpoint. Sometimes bad relationships happen because the woman is dysfunctional too, or simply doesn't understand that while men's minds work differently, that doesn't necessarily mean wrongly or manipulatively. We just don't process information the same way, and this book teaches women what's good about men's minds. Bechtle is a Christian writer and doctor but I only learned that many years later. You can't tell from this book. More Info Emotional Intelligence 2.0 This is a book for all of us! Did you know only 15% of us are actually emotionally intelligent? Oh, don't look so smug, almost everyone overestimates how EI they actually are! It's also a bit of a workbook too. 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