The Scaffold For Prejudice

It has been a while since I encountered what is anymore becoming one of the most predictable genres at the intersection of feminism and motherhood (of necessity, a small intersection on the Venn diagram), i.e. that of “mothers raising the enemy”, i.e. third-wave feminists trying to reconcile their generalized and unfocused rage at males with the fact that they have created male life. The first such I found at the now-defunct K.M. O’Sullivan’s blog (link from the Internet Archive), but then there was Wendy Thurm’s baffling “Adequate Man” trash in Deadspin, and Jody Allard’s depressing Washington Post byline that makes me sympathetic to her son who attempted suicide.

This latest example by the extremely unfrolicsome Jan Frolic at Women of Influence provides a kernel of hope that not all such women are so blinkered, but only just a little. Frolic, you see, is not entirely insensible to the idea that collective guilt is a bad idea:

I was just recovering from a year-long depression over Trump becoming President when I found myself at my desk, being turned inside-out, watching Christine Blasey Ford testify in the Brett Kavanaugh hearing. I listened intently as she began to turn her life into a circus for the greater good of humanity. I was concentrating on her tortured face when my 16-year-old son approached me, holding out his phone with some image on the screen, and asked me point-blank: “Why is this me?”

I could feel it and see it in his eyes — a cross between sadness and hurt and anger. What he was showing me was Shannon Downey’s cross-stitched rendition of “boys will be boys,” with the final “boys” stricken out and replaced by “held accountable for their fucking actions.” This craft has gone viral twice, once with Trump and again with Kavanaugh.

I had no answer for my son. No good answer, at least. Part of me was cheering on the inside, but my heart also felt like it was stopping and I couldn’t breathe because I hurt so much. And I was scared.

Well, yes, especially given the vaporous nature of the charges hurled at Kavanaugh, which score ended with zero eyewitnesses to the purported assault and serious questions as to whether the party Christine Blasey Ford claimed to have been raped at even took place. That is to say, Frolic was predisposed to hate Kavanaugh on the grounds that he stood accused of a heinous crime, evidence be damned. So when she asks

How, as a society, have we created a narrative where boys are blamed for men like Kavanaugh and Trump?

it’s actually a complex question, but the answer lies right in Frolic’s mirror. The business of modern feminism isn’t really about understanding men, but about coming up with justifications for hating them — a framework, or scaffold, for prejudice. It’s about blaming men for everything that goes wrong in women’s lives while ignoring the many things men do to lift those burdens. Her boypro-ject (PDF) asks the questions (as though they were new!):

What does it mean to be male today? Who do I want to be when I grow up? Where do I look for role models when it feels like everyone and everything is in question?

Congratulations, Ms. Frolic, you have discovered a core problem confronting humanity everywhere: how to civilize young men. Normally, the strange creature known as a father grapples with this task, but Frolic, a lesbian, appears to have none to hand, and so goes badly armed into the coming battle. She twists in the iron maiden of her own making, caught between the love of her child, and dogmatic rage at men generally.

The Self-Limiting Disease

Another in an occasional series of mothers haranguing their teenage or even prepubescent sons on the horrors of supposed rape culture — except the boys aren't going for it.

“Oh boy,” my son said, rolling his eyes. “Not rape culture again.”

We were sitting around the dinner table talking about the news. As soon as I mentioned the Stanford sexual assault case, my sons looked at each other. They knew what was coming. They’ve been listening to me talk about consent, misogyny and rape culture since they were tweens. They listened to me then, but they are 16 and 18 now and they roll their eyes and argue when I talk to them about sexism and misogyny.

“There’s no such thing as rape culture,” my other son said. “You say everything is about rape culture or sexism.”

As Scott Aaronson so ably observed, we here deal with religious tenets, and there is no dissuading the pious on such matters. So when your child fails to take your catechism to heart — when, in fact, it is obviously, palpably false and wholly irrelevant to their lives — the obvious next step is to shame them in the pages of a large-circulation newspaper. As usual, the author hauls out the feminist warhorses, blaming their disinterest in her gabble on "toxic masculinity", and proselytizing for "enthusiastic consent" (which third parties after the fact have no hope of determining). Her sons, apparently imbued with working critical thinking skills despite their mother's best efforts, remain unmoved.

It is not a little interesting that the author makes no effort to understand the world through her sons' eyes; empathy for the male position in all this simply doesn't matter. A marriage is one long negotiation, not a harangue, and it is no surprise that Jody Allard never mentions a husband in this exposition. If self-described feminists are now in decline in the general population, one can only imagine it is scenes like this one repeated over and over driving it. Feminism as currently practiced is a self-limiting disease, to the extent it requires male assent and cooperation.

Update 2016-09-18: Allard's backlog is a deeply disturbing array of self-indulgence; her excusing her own lousy credit because of her inability to remain unpregnant would be funnier if the life she created wasn't trying to self-terminate. (The former link also confirms my suspicion that she has left behind a trail of failed marriages and poor decision making with contraceptives.)  And while of course the question of nature or nurture here is an open one, constantly hectoring your young sons about how their sex is behind every horrible thing in the world might not have a beneficial effect.

Update 2016-09-19: Seven kids.

I'm Sorry Wendy Thurm Thinks Her Son Might Become A Rapist

I did not grow up in a household as the son of a mother equipped with a vague horror that she might have inadvertently created a rapist, but apparently this has happened to Wendy Thurm's son, who has been getting this sort of indoctrination since he was "three, maybe four years old" (emphasis mine). Her reason for this, such as it is —

Why would I worry that my son would someday force a woman to have sex with him, against her will?

Because outside our family, he has been and will continue to be bombarded with images and words that encourage boys to view girls as weaker and dumber and less worthy of respect. As objects of sexual desire to be judged by their looks and discarded when no longer useful. He's been told that rape jokes are funny and anyone who doesn't think so just doesn't have a sense of humor. That's why.

That is, this is just another rehash of "bad people exist in the world and so he could turn out to be one of them". It's a raging paranoia aimed at men, an undercurrent that pollutes modern feminism from Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will on. K.M. O'Sullivan neatly expressed this attitude in a blog post when she wrote,

A culture of misogynist sexualization and violence against women has reshaped that talk [parents have with children about sex] in ways that make me incredibly sad and, at times, overwhelmingly angry because I am a mother to sons—only sons. I am a mother raising the “enemy”.

Which is to say, I pity the boy who tried to run away from a mother so convinced of his predetermined guilt that she insisted he listen to her harangues

Even when his eyes glazed over. Even when he mumbled, "Yes, Mom, I get it" as his fingers fiddled on his phone. Even when he tried to escape to his room with the door closed.

Yes, I can imagine that. A childhood spent as an enemy, or if not that, a potential changeling who could at any moment become a monster, with a perpetual background radiation of guilt, one from which there is no atonement or absolution. It is one thing to transmit values, and quite another to ceaselessly browbeat.