Mothers and sons and masculinity – and Barbie
As part of the war against masculinity, we have this sort of essay. Here’s part of the start of the piece, in which the author establishes her virtue-signaling bona fides:
I’ve been inoculating my son against hate for years. On the morning of Nov. 9, 2016, my then 8-year-old son found me sobbing on our family room couch in a suburb outside Washington, D.C. Right then and there, I gave him a gargantuan task that amounted to “don’t sit by and let people bully others.” I implored him to use his privilege to help. It was a huge ask and perhaps an inappropriate burden for a kid that age, but I’d already put some scaffold in place.
Up to that point, I’d tried to model this behavior by doing whatever I could – and using my own privileges – to help those around me.
As part of her ongoing reaction to the trauma of all the awful things she sees happening in the US (some of which she lists in her essay; I suggest you follow the link if you’re curious), author Wendy Besel Hahn decides to take her 16-year-old son to see the movie Barbie, of course. Here’s her reasoning:
Analyzing the “Barbie” film is as foreign to my son as reading Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was last year in ninth grade. It requires a guide who can explain that Ken’s inferior position in Barbieland is a mere inversion of the patriarchal American society we live in today. I was thrilled to be given the chance to provide that guidance.
This is not satire. At least, it does not appear to be.
More:
The experience of sitting in a theater with my son and watching Ken ask Stereotypical Barbie (played by Margot Robbie) if she wants to have a sleepover offered me the opportunity to point out that consent is important and needs to be honored.
We discussed how the frustration Ken feels at being left out of fun in Barbieland mirrors how women and other minorities feel in America today. Together, we laughed about Barbie and Ken’s trip to the “real world” and the Mattel corporate headquarters, where only men sit in the boardroom. I assured my son that it’s OK to feel slighted and want to be in charge. It’s understandable that after his return, Ken leads a revolt and tries to rewrite the Constitution to put Kens in power. I get it: I’m pretty mad there are only four female Supreme Court justices and a female vice president.
Only four out of nine? Oh, the horror!
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In the spirit of cooperation, my son signed off on this essay about our excursion. It’s just one instance in an ongoing process of negotiations between parent and child. I’m grateful to see glimmers of the man he is becoming, even wrapped in a sometimes surly exterior.
Can’t imagine why this kid would ever be surly. This mother is fortunate he still talks to her at all. But then again, he might be quite in sync with the program – after all, it’s what he’s known since he was born. I don’t know if there’s a father in the mix, but there certainly isn’t one mentioned.
The comments I read – only about the first 20 or so – were uniformly negative. But I think this mother, while somewhat extreme, is presenting an attitude that’s not all that uncommon.
I also reflected, when I read the piece, on something I’ve noticed in many of the interviews with male detransitioners to which I’ve listened on YouTube.
That may seem like a bit of a leap, but please hear me out. Youthful female-to-male transitioners are the most common variety these days, and they (that is, the return to identifying as female, their biological sex) are also most common among detransitioners. But male-to-female transitioners and back-to-male detransitioners nevertheless still exist, and I’ve noticed a pattern among the latter. They very often say that, growing up as boys, they received a relentless message that men are evil – aggressive and hostile, trampling on other people along the way – and that being a man necessarily entails behaving like that. As they entered adolescence, the force of their own sexual drives frightened and confuse them. Will they come on too strong? Will they end up abusing someone, as they think is almost inevitable for men?
And so their flight towards becoming a woman was mostly a flight from a male identity that they had been indoctrinated to hate and fear. Sometimes they have also had direct personal experience of mistreatment at the hands of a man, sometimes an abusive father. And so when these teenagers found an online community that pushes becoming a woman as a solution to the problem of being a supposedly inevitably toxic man, they embraced that as a way out of their dilemma.
Many have ended up regretting that decision, sometimes when they’ve already had irreversible surgeries. It is a tragedy that is at least partly engendered by this war against men.
What better way to destroy the family than to make both young men and women incapable of acting as psychologically healthy parental role models?
What better way to destroy a nation than to make its young men unable to defend it?
“Destroy the family, you destroy the country.” Vladimir Lenin
I didn’t open the article because I know I would get far too agitated in reading it. As I’ve said before, the left has degenerated to the point of absurdity, particularly in leftist epicenters (SF, NYC outside of Queens and Staten Island, DC, etc.). It’s why The Onion and Babylon Bee are only mildly funny. It’s so hard to separate parody from reality.
Some of us well remember Gus Hall. He was the front man for CPUSA for decades and was it’s Presidential nominee multiple times. He was an unrepentant Communist and Stalinist up until his death in 2000. Gus was the of Finnish immigrant stock in the Iron Range of Northeast Minnesota (an area I know well). He was a hardscrabble union organizer in the 30s and 40s, working with lumberman and then steel workers. He had developed kind of a romantic aura around him by the time I first heard of him in the late 80s. Even if you weren’t a communist or a socialist (I was neither; but rather a mainstream Democrat), you had to kind of respect the man.
That was Gus. And now we have people like this woman (who’s views are entirely in line with contemporary American leftism). It’s not hard to imagine what Gus would say about the contemporary left.
Make no mistake, Gus Hall was not someone to romanticize; he was a Soviet sympathizer (and probably an agent). He agitated for overthrow of the United States government until he realized this wasn’t going to happen, then he tepidly endorsed revolution by means of the ballot box.
That said, with Gus (and most of the “old left”), you understood, mostly, where there were coming and what they aimed for (a classless society, “from each; to each”, etc…). Absurd and unrealistic? Yes. In part, the cause of millions of deaths? Yes. But at least a clear and noble (in the abstract) goal. The right could respond in kind, explaining why the left’s ‘means’ would never achieve its ‘ends’ and indeed why all such efforts were counterproductive.
What is ultimate goal for people like this woman? Barbieworld? It’s just exhausting to even fathom such inanity, let alone try to adequately respond to it.
I get it: I’m pretty mad there are only four female Supreme Court justices and a female vice president.
________
She doesn’t even mention that the women on SCOTUS make only .77 for every dollar their male counterparts make. And they still have to make the sandwiches.
Dollars to donuts, this is a single mother. Who would want to remain married to a woman so focused on emasculation? The poor kid will either go full on revolt and display true toxic masculinity, or be in therapy for a long time. Very sad.
I guess everybody noticed the date in the second sentence of Neo’s first excerpt, but just in case you didn’t: it was the morning after the 2016 election. She was “sobbing” because evil had triumphed. She was one of those.
I always hear a sort of passive-aggressive implication in that kind of thing–“shaking,” “sobbing,” “felt faint,” etc. It’s like you’re expected to respect and honor their extravagant emotionalism.
Sad and awful fact though is that she is no doubt in many ways a genuinely Good Person in down-to-earth ways, actively helping people in concrete ways. I know someone very much like that. Genuinely kind and generous, but utterly unhinged about politics.
Anyway I feel sorry for her son, and am trying to resist being pleased by the possibility that he might right-wing in some ugly way.
A mutant species is evolving on the left, aggressively mutilating and mutating toward an uncertain but clearly antihuman goal.
Are they self-destructing, or will we eventually be forced to deal with them?
Hearing their growls in the distance, we watch and wait.
These kids that are being subjected to this will someday cause real problems, most likely of a violent nature. Not going to be pretty at all.
Wonder if the “manifesto” of the school shooter will shed some light on this.
One of our sons passed along a link to this podcast interview by Chris Williamson. Clark points out that there is absolutely NO bias against women anywhere in America (some exists in other countries), and IMO the continued victim-ploy is noxious in addition to being abusive.
She has reports and studies that are not getting published – big surprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKJ5wqKjous
5 Forbidden Topics That Psychology Won’t Discuss – Cory Clark | Modern Wisdom 665
Aug 10, 2023 Full Length Modern Wisdom Episodes
Cory Clark is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a social psychologist and an author.
Academia is supposed to be a bastion of intellectual purity where curiosity and the truth reign supreme. But what happens when the findings of research start to become inconvenient? What happens when conclusions may be scientifically accurate, but politically incorrect?
Expect to learn what happens when you conduct a study on self-censorship in academic psychology and get reported for it, whether pervasive misogyny is actually a myth, why there is such an apparent anti-female bias, how women have fundamentally changed the culture of academia, whether men are psychologically different because of the patriarchy, which two areas of psychology are the most hated by academia and much more…
00:00 The Myth of Pervasive Misogyny
04:49 Why Does the Media Focus on Anti-Female Bias?
18:18 How the Influx of Women in Academia Has Changed Education
23:06 Why Women Are More Egalitarian Than Men
31:53 Should We Still Trust Mainstream Science & Media Today?
42:18 Are Gender Disparities Caused By the Patriarchy?
49:38 The Gendered Differences in Slut-Shaming
53:06 Why Do People Hate Evolutionary Psychology?
1:03:08 Which of Cory’s Conclusions Has Been Most Controversial?
1:09:53 Why Academia is Censoring Studies Like Cory’s
1:22:41 The Middle-Aged, White, Female Overlords of Academia
1:32:33 What’s Next for Cory
Some of the comments at the YouTube podcast I linked resonated with me, as the mother of five boys — mostly well-adjusted men, as their youth predated the really toxic attacks on masculinity.
@darkrebel123 (male)
3 days ago (edited)
I came up with a term that we can use to describe a certain kind of pernicious behavior. Vicarious victimhood. This describes people who feel the need to play the victim, but have never actually been victimized, so instead they choose to experience it vicariously through others that they perceive as marginalized. This vicarious victimhood feeds directly into empty virtue signaling.
@cosmicmuffet1053 (male)
4 days ago
What’s really mind boggling to me is how I’m in a good marriage with a woman who’s smart and listens to me, and we’re concentrating on how we can make each other happy and better–and then I go out in the world and hear this stuff, and immediately get resentful. It’s got to be happening everywhere, and it’s obnoxious that it seeps into the relationships that are working. It has to be 100 times harder for someone who doesn’t have a decent partner or counterexample in their lives.
@savannahwatson2384 (female)
2 days ago
Slowly raising my hand on being a women who just wants what is “empirically correct”. Morals and values change with the tides. The truth is not harmful. Men (and women) have twisted the truth since the beginning of time. So if we can’t know what is basic truth we (society at large, not just one group) will be washed to and fro and we can’t stand on solid ground. I want solid ground.
@johnsalmons4724 (male)
4 days ago
Interesting conversation. As someone in academia and psychology, a lot of this is very recognizable. There is this weird culture where female academics are given all the priviliges and advantages, while still being seen as the victims and oppressed group. Both men and women overwhelmingly participate in this illusion.
I’ve done a few (five I think) job interviews for after my phd and I couldn’t help noticing that all the comittees that interviewed me were either 100% or at least 80% female. In the building I work there are posters that say “no means no” regarding sexual conduct or other such matters, I checked the stats in the area I live, sexual harassment is extremely rare here, as my experience indicates as well. Which is why I always found these posters so odd, probably a HR decision. The HR department has tried to equalize the number of male and female student in computer science more by reducing sexism (of which there is no indication) for over 5 years now, without any success. There were many programs available during my phd that were only available to women. And I could give many more examples like this. I don’t necesarrily mind it either, I was never obstructed in my own work because of being a man, but it always seemed really odd to me that my female and male colleagues still really wanted to participate in this victimhood role of women in academia. It seems like a complete delusion to me.
@Swift016
4 days ago (edited)
I’m a recent PhD and everything she asserts about the politicization of research is absolutely true. Left-leaning academics have divided and conquered the editorial boards of essentially every reputable publication, meaning that science (and therefore the literal future of human knowledge) is now dictated by these people. If your topic is even slightly controversial, it doesn’t get to the review stage, let alone published.
In 2016, I literally heard social studies educators argue that poor conservatives should have their right to vote taken away. These people despise anyone who doesn’t hold their world view, and are ironically the fascists that they themselves warn others about. They go on and on about how power structures have been historically oppressive, and are now leveraging those structures for the exact same purposes.
@texfromro
4 days ago
Errors in a life and death situation end up in death. So if you are interested in preserving life, finding the truth should be your utmost priority.
Her writing tells us she is psychologically abusing her son. Reminds me of the essay a while ago from a woman raising her son and seriously worried he would grow up to be a rapist. These woman are abusing their children and they should be taken away from them. These types of essays tell me putting females in charge, as they tell us would end war and all sorts of other awful things, is completely and categorically wrong. Signed a serious tomboy, who was allowed to grow up. Thank goodness, still have all my original parts.
Red State ran several posts about the new viral song hit by formerly “unknown” country singer Oliver Anthony. Comments on one of those posts are relevant here.
https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2023/08/14/the-leftist-attacks-on-rich-men-north-of-richmond-begin-n2162620#comment-6254821920
Weminuche45
9 hours ago edited
“A family member who watched a young man they know commit suicide isn’t going to suddenly not feel the song because Matt Walsh does. ”
Confirmed by my personal experience.
Nor will it do anything to assuage for me, the fact that boys and young men kill themselves at 3x the rate of girls and young women, yet very few people even know this,
and of those who do, few care enough to say or do anything to address the problem.
Anthony did.
MizRando Weminuche45
8 hours ago
It is the young men for whom my heart aches. Imagine being a young man today, as is Anthony Oliver, and not believing you have the world at your feet. I know my generation believed that and it is a stain on our souls that our youngsters do not.
Although I am constantly bombarded by such feminist claptrap spewed in the media, especially on line, in my real life, I seldom encounter it. Out here, people mostly live what would be called “normal” lives, seldom fretting about the things that seem to so preoccupy online/media personalities like transsexualism and gender equality, etc. What the people I encounter worry about are generally the same things we have always worried about. I have yet to personally encounter a single transsexual, cross-dresser or militant homosexual. Of course, my life’s orbit involves family and church by-and-large, so unless I go out of my way, the rantings and posturings of the world’s misfits exist only on my computer or television screen. I can make these ephemera disappear with the touch of a button. Easy-peasy. Follow me for more tips on how to avoid stress and live a happy, satisfying life.
These woman are abusing their children and they should be taken away from them.
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You can very seldom improve a child’s situation with institutional care or foster care. In New York as we speak, the share of juveniles in foster care is about 0.6% of the total.
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What’s odd about this creature is how contrived are her concerns, expressed in journalistic / academic language. At bottom, though, she’s a self-centered twit with emotional problems. Such women are as common as sand among the population of mothers. The male analogue is the father who is contemptuous, dismissive, angry, steeped in alcohol, or some combination of these. A sorry aspect of growing up is navigating the emotional life of the damaged goods who brought you into the world. And if you escape it growing up, you often marry it later.
It’s great how that woman is using her “privilege” to impose her views on others. My politics don’t require anyone else to do anything. Yet her politics authorize the government to take money from me under the force of law and give it to people of whom I don’t approve to use for purposes I abhor. Yet in her eyes, she’s the good person and I’m a deplorable. Things that con’t continue, won’t.
Sounds like child abuse to me—turning your son into an emblem of your own virtue.
And what’s with these women who are all the time “sobbing” about this, that, and the other, and then drenching their kids in that emotional tsunami? I was raised by a single mom and while I can recall some crying, it was always context-appropriate and my mother never tried to pull me into her misery, or turn to me for comfort. Moreover, when my mother DID cry, it was pretty distressing for me simply because my mother was all the security I had in the world. Why would you want to deliberately cause your child emotional distress?
Finally, although I hate bullying with a passion, I can’t help but question the sincerity of the author’s dedication to anti-bullying as I fear she would only see bullying through her social-justice lenses. Would she have stood up to those three black teenaged girls who verbally and physically assaulted five Asian-Americans just because they were Asian and because it’s fun to pick on people?
Just tell her to calm down.
When I get done crying on the couch about the latest indictment, I will tell the kids not to let anybody bully them. I’ll also point out to them that Joe and Kamala’s America is much more like Barbie’s gynocentric world than it is like a traditional patriarchy. I’m thrilled to be able to give them this guidance.
Gus Hall was very into woodworking and had a workshop in his basement. There was an article back in the 70s or 80s by a New Leftist wondering if he and his colleagues would be like Gus in old age, resigned to their defeat and concentrating on hobbies and the private life. I suppose the writer and his peers got tenure and are now emerited, retired, or dead, but their students are in the government now. Norman Thomas stopped running for president 70 or so years ago, claiming that the country was already quite far on the road to socialism. While America isn’t completely Maoist yet, the 60s/70s left can be contented that we’ve gone quite a way on their road.
There is no way a culture and nation such as this could have won World War II.
The poor kid will either go full on revolt and display true toxic masculinity, or be in therapy for a long time. Very sad.
Or, no one asks Ann Althouse why both her sons are gay.
Or, no one asks Ann Althouse why both her sons are gay.
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Both?
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They are 42 and 40, respectively. One’s a lawyer in New York, the other a massage therapist in Austin, Tx. Of an age that it would still have been status-lowering among high school students as a rule (if not in their particular circles). I think both attended the University of Wisconsin (one certainly did).
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Indubitably, Althouse herself moves in circles where it would be considered outre to ponder the question, much less ask.
Finally, although I hate bullying with a passion, I can’t help but question the sincerity of the author’s dedication to anti-bullying as I fear she would only see bullying through her social-justice lenses.
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I think it’s generally an excuse for school officials to promote homosexuality on company time.
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The problem with the anti-bullying discourse (apart from such subterfuges) is that it betrays no sense that there are trade-offs involved in intervening in disputes between the young.
Mike K; Art Deco:
No one actually knows WHY anyone is gay. Research indicates some nature/nurture combination, as with most things human.
But regarding Althouse’s sons, I believe (if memory serves me) that one is gay and not secretive about that (nor is she secretive about his sexual orientation), and one is not gay.
Research indicates some nature/nurture combination, as with most things human.
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I suspect nowadays that’s a subject wherein promising lines of inquiry are suppressed by peer reviewers and the usual enforcers on faculties.
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Althouse had ample opportunity to observe her sons and their circle of friends. The question would be how adept an observer she is, particularly in regard to matters which carry a great deal of emotional freight. No, she doesn’t know why her sons are the way they are. She indubitably has an idea.