The Other McCain

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Tumblrina Hot Take

Posted on | December 14, 2017 | 1 Comment

 

Political commentary from a 27-year-old feminist:

also progressive white men can go ahead and worry about the 72% of white men who voted for roy moore before they start in on the 63% of white women who did so, thanks

She wants everybody to know she’s a Scorpio.

Party of Science™ . . . And oh, she’s been on Tumblr a lloonnngg time, so here’s one of her rants from 2011:

Within our lovely little feminist community bubble, and with people I don’t know, I tend to just take a “live and let live”, “they may well have their reasons,” “I would never but it’s none of my business if you do” stance.
But my god if I haven’t had this conversation in real life so many times and been treated like an angry pariah for daring to suggest that the tradition of taking your husband’s last name is patriarchal and silly. Been told I’m “Thinking about it too much,” etc etc.
It’s all very well to encourage choosing your choice; and my feelings on the matter are that you should think about what you want to do and wherever your thoughts lead you is fine by me. But a lot of the time it isn’t a choice. Isn’t that the point we’re all trying to make here as feminists? That just because no one is saying to some women, “We will ostracize you or call off the wedding if you don’t take my last name,” just because they go along with it with no second thoughts, that doesn’t mean they are making a real choice. And most of the people I know who have changed their last names, it wasn’t necessarily a choice made with agency.
And considering we’ve all seen the statistics where ridiculous numbers of men say their future wives will have to change their last names… I don’t know. If a man said that to me, I’d bail on the wedding and never look back. For a lot of you it might be the same. But for some people that kind of entitlement to their wive’s identity is just so expected and it wouldn’t even make them flinch, but does that mean they’re really making a choice?
These thoughts are pretty scattered so I don’t know if what I’m saying is really coming across. But it’s kind of like the shaving-body-hair thing. We aren’t here to judge and hate on women, especially when it comes to women doing the sort of behaviors the whole enormity of the patriarchy is set up to make them do. But the best way to force someone to do something is to not force them at all, but to make them not even realize they’re making a choice, or to make them think it was their idea all along. So I think there is a lot to be said for speaking out to encourage women to think about whether or not to replace their name with their husband’s last name and urging them to strongly consider not doing it, since we still live in a society where it is so ingrained that women should be absorbed into their husbands’ identities and standing up against that is important.

Such arguments are, and always have been, utter nonsense. A woman’s maiden name is . . . what? Her father’s surname. There was no implied disparagement of my wife’s father when she took my name, nor was it any insult to me when my married daughter took her husband’s name. What this tradition represents is not “that women should be absorbed into their husbands’ identities,” but rather that marriage represents a perpetual unity of man and wife (“one flesh,” Genesis 2:24, Mark 10:8, Ephesians 5:31) and the family therefore shares a single identity.

Considered in historic context, as a custom arising among tribal herdsmen from Mesopotamia, the reasons for uniting husband and wife under the husband’s name, and passing that unitary identity along through their sons, are so obvious that I won’t bother with an explanation, as any educated person with a modicum of common sense already understands it perfectly. Why should anyone resent it? My mother’s family was certainly no less honorable than my father’s family, and my family is not less deserving of honor than my son-in-law’s family. In fact, two of our sons — James and Emerson — are named for ancestors on their mother’s side of the family, and Emerson’s middle name is Kirby in homage to my mother’s family. It is only a narrow-minded selfishness, disdainful of the value of inherited tradition and without regard for larger social interests, that inspires idiotic feminists to claim a married woman is being “oppressed” when she takes her husband’s name.

If a Tumblr feminist is really serious about eschewing “patriarchal” tradition, of course, she would never marry at all, and might emulate certain radical lesbians of the 1970s, e.g., “Elana Dykewomon” (née Nachman). This would not only spare the Tumblrina the dreadful experience of direct male oppression (because “PIV is always rape, OK?”), but it would also decrease the likelihood of her reproducing and thereby afflicting the rest of us with her offspring. Insanity is hereditary, as seen in the Tumblrina’s conversation with her mother:

last night I drank a bunch of whiskey with my mom, we talked about amazing women of color authors and my call to catholicism, and she showed me she has an intuitive understanding of intersectionality, anti-blackness, and the paradoxical position of white women in our society that makes us in so many ways “better off” than black men despite the existence of sexism bc of how we are protected and put on a pedestal
it was pretty interesting (she has no formal relationship to any of these kinds of politics, just personal relationships with loads of different people) and reminds me that people CAN overcome socialization and see on an intuitive and empathetic level that these complex forces of oppression exist, without the help of the “intellectual”/academic elite, so basically racist white feminists do not have ignorance as an excuse and are just parroting white supremacy because deep down they don’t want to lose their special status

Do you see what sort of schizophrenic word-salad young people are being fed by the education system? If your daughter ever started spewing this kind of gibberish, would you just play along with her? Or would you tell her that “these complex forces of oppression” are a politically inspired delusion, and ask her where she got these crazy ideas? It is mentally unhealthy to worry about problems beyond your control. Whatever you might say about “the paradoxical position of white women in our society,” you’re not going to solve that problem with your Tumblr blog. Her save-the-world sense of herself as a secular missionary for “social justice” is therefore symptomatic of psychiatric problems.

No surprise, really, that this Tumblrina has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and is prone to anxiety attacks. Why is she worrying about what percent of white people voted Republican in Alabama? Because other people on Tumblr are talking about it? Because her professors taught her that being concerned about racism is synonymous with moral virtue?

If you want to talk about “complex forces of oppression,” let’s talk about the oppression that compels taxpayers to provide money for an education system that turns kids into emotional cripples. Because that’s the real root of this woman’s problems. As with so many other people who share her “social justice” obsessions, she has been miseducated, taught that progressive activism is the whole purpose of human life, an attitude that is incompatible with success and happiness.

 

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  1. Tumblrina Hot Take | Welcome to my Playpen
    December 17th, 2017 @ 9:07 am

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