Tuesday, November 12, 2019

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.

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