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!
More:
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.
