Questioning Feminist Authority: Cult Ideology and Mind Control Tactics

Posted on | December 8, 2015 | 40 Comments

“Mind control (also known as ‘brainwashing,’ ‘coercive persuasion,’ and ‘thought reform’) refers to a process in which a group or individual systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s).”
— Michael D. Langone, “Cults and Mind Control”

She is a 19-year-old “dysphoric female” who is a “gender-critical . . . sex-critical, anti-natalist” feminist and identifies as a “transman.” If you met someone in real life who described herself that way, you might wonder if she was out on an overnight pass from the psychiatric ward.

Feminist Tumblr bears little resemblance to real life, however. On her blog, the dysphoric teenage feminist presumes the expertise to deliver her diagnosis of everything that is wrong with society and the normal people who live in it:

Female critique of men and masculinity and male violence and misogyny is about liberation and safety.
Male critique of feminism is about control and domination and validation and entitlement.
See the difference?

Ideological justification of a self-serving double standard, whereby feminists relentlessly criticize men while exempting themselves from any criticism at all, is nowadays so widely accepted that it is seldom even noticed, much less subjected to skeptical scrutiny. Are the problems of “male violence and misogyny” so pervasive as to justify a “critique of men and masculinity,” per se? If a man is non-violent and pleads not guilty to the accusation of “misogyny” (i.e., woman-hating), can he be permitted to object to this categorical condemnation of masculinity?

Well, no, says our dysphoric teenage expert, because any male who criticizes feminism is exercising “control and domination and validation and entitlement.” Feminism accuses all men of oppressing women and, if a man endeavors to defend himself against this accusation, his defense is cited as proof of his guilt. The definition of “misogynist” is a male who criticizes feminism, and any man who defends himself is condemned as an opponent of women’s “liberation and safety.”

This is a rhetorical tactic called “kafkatrapping”:

[Kafkatrapping] is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…}.” . . .
Real crimes — actual transgressions against flesh-and-blood individuals — are generally not specified. The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others.

The success of kafkatrapping relies on our natural instinct to respond to accusations of bad faith (mala fides) by denying the accusation, rather than questioning the authority of the accuser.

What qualifies this person to stand in judgment of others as an arbiter of public morality? Why do they presume themselves authorized to act as a sort of prosecuting attorney, arraigning you on a charge of sexism, homophobia or whatever, because you said something they deemed “offensive”? If you know you are unjustly accused, then the real issue is the motive of your accuser. Who is this person? What motivates them to seek out “racism” and other species of Thought Crime? Are you dealing with an aspiring social justice warrior (SJW) who hopes to pursue a full-time career as an activist? Is it not true that the SJW gains publicity and enhanced status by pointing the accusatory finger at others?

‘The Agents of Our Oppression’

Questioning the authority of the accuser in such a situation usually throws them off-balance, because they take it for granted that you, as the accused, will be be overwhelmed by a sense of “free-floating guilt.” The finger-pointing SJW operates in an echo-chamber environment where no one questions the necessity of perpetual crusades against Thought Crime: “Rape culture”! “White privilege”! “Male entitlement”! Ridding society of such categorical evils is the raison d’être of social justice warriors, and it never occurs to them that these categories can be critically interrogated. Exactly what does the feminist mean, for example, when she denounces the “objectification” of women? Isn’t it fair to say that this is yet another bit of jargon by which feminism generally condemns the normal behaviors and attitudes of heterosexual males? Isn’t “objectification” merely a pejorative term for the normal man’s admiration of female beauty? Why is the feminist so offended by this? Perhaps she would be happy if we sought to better understand her complaints by engaging in a study of feminist theory.

“Women are an oppressed class. . . . We identify the agents of our oppression as men.”
— Redstockings Manifesto, 1969

“Heterosexuality is the institution that creates, maintains, and supports men’s power. . . . And heterosexuality has its ramifications at all levels of society; it is the source of all other oppressions.
“Heterosexuality is the pivot on which men have based the norm and created the origin and measure by which all relationships are structured. . . . Men, through heterosexuality, have devised their own concept and thereby constructed a system that generates all oppressions.”
— Ariane Brunet and Louise Turcotte, “Separatism and Radicalism,” in For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology, edited by Sarah Lucia-Hoagland and Julie Penelope (1988)

“Heterosexism is maintained by the illusion that heterosexuality is the norm.”
— Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions (fifth edition, 2012)

“Only when we recognize that ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ are made-up categories, invented to control human beings and violently imposed, can we truly understand the nature of sexism. . . .
“Questioning gender . . . is an essential part of the feminism that has sustained me through two decades of personal and political struggle.”
— Laurie Penny, “How to Be a Genderqueer Feminist,” 2015

It is possible to trace the “genderqueer” feminism of Laurie Penny directly back to its ideological origins in the radical Women’s Liberation Movement that emerged in the late 1960s. The movement’s first public protest, in September 1968, was against the Miss America pageant. Beauty pageant contestants “epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women,” feminists declared, denouncing the way “women in our society [are] forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.” The very idea that women should desire “male approval” is offensive to feminists, who consider themselves “enslaved” by “beauty standards” enforced by men. Such remarkable claims are as astonishing to sane people now as they were in 1968, but no one has ever accused feminists of being sane people, and the trajectory of their radical madness is now a matter of history. Within a year, Shulamith Firestone and her comrades had formed the Redstockings collective as a sort of revolutionary vanguard, only to see themselves eclipsed by an even more radical critique of women’s status as an “oppressed class.” In January 1970, a group calling itself “Radicalesbians” disrupted a feminist conference in New York (see “The Long Shadow of the Lavender Menace”) and within a year, Charlotte Bunch had formed the D.C.-based lesbian collective known as The Furies. The radical view that women are oppressed by heterosexuality, per se, has become mainstream within the feminist movement primarily due to the influence of lesbian professors in the Feminist-Industrial Complex of academic Women’s Studies programs. The impressionable young student reading a textbook like Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions (edited by two professors at Oregon State University) probably doesn’t even blink at the editors’ claim that it is an “illusion” to believe heterosexuality is normal. When Ariane Brunet and Louise Turcotte — members of a tiny French-Canadian collective called Amazones d’Hier, Lesbiennes d’Aujourd’hui (Amazons of Yesterday, Lesbians of Today) — issued their condemnation of heterosexuality as an “institution” of male supremacy, “a system that generates all oppressions,” they were considered part of an extremist fringe. Now this extremism is part of the university curriculum, and anyone who questions it is apt to be accused of “homophobia.”

Even the most basic distinctions between men and women are now considered oppressive. Laurie Penny urges us to “recognize that ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ are made-up categories,” an illegitimate and “violent” imposition of “control,” and where is the feminist who dares to dispute these assertions? Not every feminist is “genderqueer,” but no feminist in 2015 would defend the male/female distinction as a valid scientific understanding of biology for fear of being accused of giving aid and comfort to the sexists who “invented” and “imposed” these categories. The totalitarian nature of feminism is most apparent in its ability to silence criticism, enforcing ideological conformity by prohibiting dissent. In a 2001 book, Tammy Bruce dubbed the enforcers of this conformity The New Thought Police. A former president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, Tammy Bruce was purged from her leadership position and denounced by NOW’s national office because she led a protest against O.J. Simpson. NOW leaders were allied with the NAACP in viewing Simpson as a victim of racism, and were evidently willing to ignore evidence (including 911 recordings) of his violent abuse of Nicole Brown Simpson. One might think that feminists would care about a woman being nearly decapitated by a knife-wielding murderer, but Patricia Ireland, the national president of NOW, made clear the organization’s position in December 1995:

“I deeply regret,” Ms. Ireland said at a Washington news conference, that Ms. Bruce “has made public statements that clearly violate NOW’s commitment to stopping racism.”

By such methods do The New Thought Police shield themselves from criticism. Ideological conformity within the feminist movement attracts a certain type of disgruntled fanatic that Eric Hoffer described as The True Believer, and technology has provided an easy means for these fanatics to promote their radical views. It costs nothing for a young feminist to create a Tumblr blog and reach many thousands of like-minded activists around the world. The jargon of feminist gender theory — the concept that male/female differences are socially constructed by the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — was once known only to a comparative handful of Women’s Studies professors and their students. Now anyone with a laptop and wifi hookup can access page after page devoted to these bizarre ideas.

It is tempting to laugh at weirdos like Miriam Mogilevsky, who identifies herself as a “queer, gay, femme, homoflexible lesbian with exceptions,” and is a columnist for the Everyday Feminism site, where she offers heterosexual feminists pointers on how to “Be Better Allies to Queer Women.” However, many unhappy young people are vulnerable to the kind of ideology-as-therapy solution that feminism offers them.

‘Girls Who Suddenly Decide They Are Boys’

Where does the “dysphoric female” on Tumblr learn to speak her “gender-critical” jargon? The Internet, of course. As a result, many parents are being confronted by teenage children who “come out” as transgender. This has become such a fad among some young people that even feminists have begun criticizing it. One woman whose daughter got caught up in the transgender craze started a blog called 4th Wave Now, and makes an entirely common-sense surmise about how and why this is happening to so many teenagers now:

Are teens influenced by what they imbibe, what’s in fashion, what celebrities (like Jazz Jennings and “Caitlyn” Jenner and Laverne Cox) are doing, what their peers are saying and doing? Might socially isolated teens be even more swayed by what they see on social media, while they sit for hours, alone in their rooms? . . .
My daughter, like so many others I’ve now heard about, emerged from months of self-imposed social isolation and YouTube/Reddit binges, to announce, out of the blue, that she was transgender.

A few excerpts from the commenters on her blog’s “About” page:

My precious 17 year old daughter has been sinking into the FTM cult for the past 18 months. I know of 7 other girls locally too, all of similar age. Many of them are on Tumblr, enjoying Facebook notoriety, anime loving, asexual, and claiming BPD or aspergers traits. . . .

I have been fearful and alert to my daughters’ trending towards FTM. . . . I am a hetero mom who has balked at stereotypes, most often alone, and fear that my inability to cope with my own marital constraints has affected my daughter’s understanding of how to be a female. . . . I fear my daughter doesn’t have good role models and turns to friends for answers. . . .

And still more comments:

My daughter, who is 17, told me last year on Mother’s Day that she was now my son. Since I suspected that she might be a lesbian, it wasn’t too much of a shock. However, when I began researching this subject I was extremely concerned with the medical intervention that takes place with these children. Then when I went to a meeting for parents with transgender children, I was shocked about how all of these parents were jumping on the bandwagon of drugs and surgery without questioning. . . .

Tears stream down my face as I read the entries. Until now I have felt so alone and helpless. I was beginning to think I was a crazy, terrible parent, as the loud and clear (and virtually the only) advice available when confronted with this parenting nightmare is to immediately and absolutely — without question — accept what the child is saying and get them started transitioning.

Add myself and my daughter to the growing (exploding?) list of concerned parents with girls who suddenly decide they are boys after puberty. Some day I might take the time to add my story to your blog, but honestly, it reads so much like the others already here: quirky, socially awkward girl who had always identified as a girl (although never a pink sparkly princess) suddenly decides that because she loves science, pokemon and video games rather than makeup, hairstyles and clothes she MUST actually be a boy. She says she is a gay boy, as she is attracted to boys.
She is a beautiful girl with lovely figure — my gut feeling is that my daughter wanted the attention she was getting from boys to stop. In addition to her rejection of the princess culture, she hated being objectified, ogled, pawed at and cat-called to. She has made herself as covered up and unattractive as possible, lost a good deal of weight (the curves are mostly gone) and declared herself a boy. Of course, the Tumblr culture and current Caitlyn Jenner worshiping by the uber-PC entertainment media have urged her along in her pursuit to disappear and cease existing as a female. . . .
[M]y smart, feminist, skeptical, open-minded daughter has fallen hook, line and sinker for the trans-cult scam.

Has “gender theory” become feminism’s Frankenstein monster? The “quirky, socially awkward girl” hits puberty and is horrified by the result — her “lovely figure” attracts unwanted attention from boys who, it seems, are poorly parented and inadequately supervised in schools. A mother’s tale of her adolescent daughter “being objectified, ogled, pawed at and cat-called to” raises a rather obvious question: Where are the mothers of these boys? Or for that matter, where are their fathers?

The same laissez-faire parenting attitude that permits a teenage girl to engage in “self-imposed social isolation and YouTube/Reddit binges” is mirrored by the abdication of adult authority that permits teenage boys to behave crudely toward girls at school. Yet progressives have spent decades lecturing parents against the “authoritarian” family (an incubator of fascism, according to Adorno, et al.) and one might be accused of child abuse for giving unruly teenagers a bit of old-fashioned discipline. Grown-ups have ceased to require respect from young people and, having no fear of parental authority, the insolent brats now expect grown-ups to give them whatever their adolescent appetites demand. (Recommended reading: The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family by Dana Mack.) Any adult who asserts the legitimacy of parental authority risks being branded an oppressive ogre, but what are the alternatives? If Mom and Dad are unwilling to set limits to their child’s behavior, it is entirely predictable that the child will be swayed by peers, and by whatever trends emerge from the popular culture, whether the trend is hip-hop, heroin or homosexuality.

Am I the only adult who objects to being lectured by teenage weirdos like the dysphoric gender-critical feminist who expects us to silently accept her “critique of men and masculinity and male violence and misogyny”? Who appointed her to lecture us? What is the basis of her authority?

We are not supposed to ask these questions, you see, and there is something strangely suspicious about the silent acceptance of feminist claims to moral authority. One suspects many men have fallen prey to the “free-floating guilt” produced by feminism’s kafkatrapping rhetoric and that many women are quite eager to exploit male guilt for their own benefit. The man who perceives the nature of this game recognizes that he cannot object too strongly to feminist rhetoric without being accused of “misogyny” and, as Tammy Bruce discovered, feminist leaders are viciously hateful toward any woman who openly criticizes them. Because so few people do speak out against feminism, it is easy for the few vocal critics to be demonized, marginalized and effectively silenced.

Once you understand feminism as a totalitarian ideology, the less likely you are to be surprised by the movement’s tactics, and the more you will recognize the importance of refusing to be silent about feminism’s lies.

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

40 Responses to “Questioning Feminist Authority: Cult Ideology and Mind Control Tactics”

Evi L. Bloggerlady
December 8th, 2015 @ 11:15 pm

Trump has to be to blame for this…
Daniel Freeman
December 9th, 2015 @ 12:06 am

Still reading, but wanted to mention that BPD is basically the extreme female brain and Asperger’s is essentially the extreme male brain, so someone who claims to have both is wrong. Between the two, BPD is more prone to public revelations by far; and NPD, which is also in Cluster B, could be mistaken for the autistic spectrum (despite its vast differences) by someone that doesn’t want to acknowledge their narcissism. Therefore, the average expectation should be that a self-professed neuroatypical borderline is really just Cluster B.
Fail Burton
December 9th, 2015 @ 4:05 am

Ah, yes. The cult which prides itself on being pro-science believes saying one is a woman makes it so and that heterosexuality was “invented,” maybe by an ancient steampunk scientist with an arrangement of poles of bamboo connected to wheezing dinosaur bladders connected to the shinbone of Wilma Flintstone spread-eagled on an alter made of an obsidian lens of man-focus.

An alternate explanation is there was no Adam and Eve and that men are nothing more than the Devil which fooled Lilith into biting into the apple of heterosexuality.

A few noble lesbians emerged in the ’60s with ancestral memories of their primordial Amazon true selves and have since taught young girls pronoun chants to ward off evil. Now they hypnotize each other on Twitter and Tumblr by trading the secret knowledge of blue hair, nose rings and tattoos Boudicea used to kill Roman man-baby legionaires.

It all makes perfect sense.
Quartermaster
December 9th, 2015 @ 7:43 am

Heterosexuality was invented. By God.
NeoWayland
December 9th, 2015 @ 8:02 am

I’m not a parent. If it’s not life threatening, I don’t approve of surgery and drugs to modify your body before adolescence ends.

That being said, a lot of this strikes me as a fad enabled by the adults around them. When Wicca “broke though” into public consciousness, much of the attraction was the instant power. But like anything else, it takes discipline, time, and practice to achieve mastery. You don’t casually scan a book on karate and instantly start breaking boards. You don’t cook a gourmet meal after flipping through the Betty Crocker cookbook. So you ended up with underage kids claiming the authority of Wiccan priests and then were confused when no one took them seriously.

If you never encountered the star children, the indigo children, or the crystal children a few decades back, count yourself lucky. Not only was the same behavior encouraged, but the kids were Destined To Save The World. That was a mess, some of it still is.

I agree with RSM on this one, kids need parents to set boundaries. Kids don’t have fully developed BS filters. They need to know that there aren’t instant cures for their problems. They need to understand that almost everyone who promises a quick and easy way with happiness and rainbows forever after either doesn’t know what they are talking about or is out to make some money and power off of people’s ignorance.
robertstacymccain
December 9th, 2015 @ 8:11 am

Alternatively — and the 4th Wave Now blogger mentions this — we are actually looking at a new phenomenon, “Facebook depression,” a disorder caused by excess time on social media. As someone who spends a vast part of his time on Twitter, and also plowing through Tumblr in search of cases like the “dysphoric gender-critical” 19-year-old feminist, I recognize the dangers of excessive online time. It’s an occupational hazard for me, but now think of the unwary teenager who plunges head-first in social media. They have little or no experiential basis of knowledge against which to judge the truth-claims they encounter, or to evaluate the character of the people they meet. It is easy to see how a 15- or 16-year-old kid, especially an introvert who has few friends in school, could immerse themselves in an echo chamber environment. The fan-fiction cliques around “Stephen Universe,” for example — WTF? And the vast online world of “Muggles” — also, WTF?

Most parents are clueless about what their kids are doing online, and some kids are spending 20 or 30 hours a week in these unsupervised Internet playpens. People need to wake up.
robertstacymccain
December 9th, 2015 @ 8:14 am

“Kids don’t have fully developed BS filters.”

Which is why the “youth vote” is always so important for Democrats.
RS
December 9th, 2015 @ 8:46 am

You mention “laissez-faire parenting” and it’s worthwhile analyzing how we got here. While some of us are older (i.e. late “Baby Boom”) with teenage kids, I think most parents of teenagers are early to mid “Generation X.” It seems to me that generation incorporated their parents’ self-absorption and doubled down with it. Children ceased to be a responsibility in favor of becoming accessories to one’s own lifestyle. Children are no longer nurtured as works in progress toward a meaningful adulthood but are rather displayed evidence of how successful the parents are. Is it then any wonder that parents don’t pay attention to their children until it’s too late?

While I empathize with the distress experienced by the commenters at Fourth Wave Now, I also have a lot of questions. Where were you ten years ago? Where are the fathers? Were you a parent to your child or merely a “buddy” in order to be deemed sufficiently “cool” and to avoid feeling old? The truth of the matter is, kids don’t want parents as peers; they want parents as adults. Now we’re reaping what we’ve sown. The parents were never an anchor when the kids were growing up. Now they’re drifting aimlessly into the arms of every nutcase with access to the internet.

Aside: None of my kids have/had social media accounts . I wouldn’t allow it until they were off at college. Each one of them has told me how much easier their lives are without them, inasmuch as they’re insulated from all the goofy drama that goes one minute by minute, plus saves them from having to purge weird teenage crap when they want to get a job.
Fail Burton
December 9th, 2015 @ 9:24 am

It is not kids taking a Laurie Penny seriously who claims heterosexuality was invented but adults. I personally find it hard to believe anyone takes an ideology seriously which has been put forward by the likes of Robin Morgan, Charlotte Bunch, Andrea Dworkin, Dee Graham, Mary Daly and Kate Millet, all of whom are collectively willfully and obsessively stupid women.

How does a society sink so low as to fall for the same obvious pattern of hoaxes and in-group, out-group supremacist behaviors of Black Lives Matter? If I call the KKK “social justice” will people start supporting it? If I call a rock a pie will people eat it? Where are our principles?

To me the greatest shock is the SFF community, which used to be some of the sharpest people around when it came to being wary of identity vs. principle. After all, Orwell’s warning novel was about the danger of a trusted “Big Brother,” wasn’t it? I’m not surprised at the colleges. Ever since the mid-70s when the trend to hire Master’s Degree and higher as teachers came along the naive bureaucrat began to trump actual talent and experience. True eccentrics aren’t likely to have the patience to gut out 2 years of something they know they don’t need.
Fail Burton
December 9th, 2015 @ 9:36 am

I agree and for the following reason: growing up heavily into SF literature I was well aware of the theory that an obsessive immersion into technology could negatively affect one’s life.

I liked TV and lolling about as much as the next guy but I was wary of two things: pornography and video games. I always saw those as a benchmark which meant it was time to use that doorknob which leads to the outside world. There, real women and adventures await.

By the time the internet came along I saw both it’s good side – information – and its dangerous side – virtual interactivity with other people. There is no rain on your face, no smells of humidity, no sweat, no learning; there is nothing.

Especially for those who tend to shyness, this fake interactivity can be a pitfall. Going back again to the SF community I have studied, one quickly becomes aware that the worst of the SJWs are and have been weird shut-ins all their lives. The arrogance and certainty one can see the world and its oppression through a screen only becomes readily apparent if you have been around the block a few times.

One of SFF’s worst SJWs claims she realized she was a “racist” when her pizza delivery guy was a Latino who spoke perfect English, a thing which startled her. She is of course not a racist but an incredibly naive and sheltered woman reared in a media world of sombreros and Speedy Gonzalez. Naturally these SJWs project their own stupidity onto us all and begin to preach on Twitter at the speed of light.
NeoWayland
December 9th, 2015 @ 9:38 am

I did say it was a fad enabled by the adults.

At a hunch, I’d say we put more faith in institutions than the people.

But I’m a big one for personal responsibility. When you shield people from the consequences of their own actions, there’s no cost to bad choices.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
December 9th, 2015 @ 9:42 am

It is a great invention!
Finrod Felagund
December 9th, 2015 @ 10:22 am

Video games were better in the 1980s when they couldn’t dazzle you with graphics so they had to keep you interested with playability. I still play nethack (and I have since 1987) which makes an entire world out of a 24×80 ASCII screen.
kilo6
December 9th, 2015 @ 10:22 am

Most parents are clueless about what their kids are doing online, and some kids are spending 20 or 30 hours a week in these unsupervised Internet playpens. People need to wake up.
Some folks talk about a future of FEMA camps or some other type of hard, overt, Orwellian totalitarianism. In reality people are voluntarily sending their children to the actual reeducation camps (public schools) and enthusiastically viewing brainwashing propaganda via mass media.
Fail Burton
December 9th, 2015 @ 11:14 am

Children don’t read Laurie Penny.
Fail Burton
December 9th, 2015 @ 11:19 am

I have nothing against gaming per se, but I’ll take those thousands of hours and bank them into sitting atop a pyramid at El Mirador at dawn and listening to the Howler monkeys below in the morning fog. Multiply that accordingly. Multiply video gaming hours and you have nothing. It’s just passing time until you die.
NeoWayland
December 9th, 2015 @ 12:28 pm

But teens do.

Penny isn’t the problem.

Teens experimenting with new ideas isn’t the problem.

Adults that refuse to set boundaries and let the kids run the show without criticism, that’s the problem.
Steve Skubinna
December 9th, 2015 @ 1:37 pm

I would like to know how many of these precious flowers have actually been diagnosed by mental health professionals. It appears to me that many if not most of them have self diagnosed themselves after a cursory study, in order to gain the instant cachet that comes from being a victim.

My suspicion is fueled by their claims to have conditions which are, as you note, polar opposites or otherwise contradictory.
Steve Skubinna
December 9th, 2015 @ 1:37 pm

Ummm… “anti-natalist?”

That doesn’t actually mean what it sounds like it should mean, does it?
concern00
December 9th, 2015 @ 1:46 pm

It seems to me that transgenderism is an expression of Munchausen syndrome for the older children and Munchausen by proxy for the younger ones. Regardless it is absolutely a mental problem. I really feel for those parents that express frustration that the only option society now provides is to transition.
Steve White
December 9th, 2015 @ 1:53 pm

Any adult who asserts the legitimacy of parental authority risks being branded an oppressive ogre, but what are the alternatives? If Mom and Dad are unwilling to set limits to their child’s behavior, it is entirely predictable that the child will be swayed by peers, and by whatever trends emerge from the popular culture, whether the trend is hip-hop, heroin or homosexuality.

And that’s the rub. Stacy’s deep dive into the dumpster of feminism has had me a little worried over the last couple of years. There’s only so much of Tumblr that any sane person can withstand. If it were just a continuing series of posts by mixed-up, looney young women, at some point we’d all say, “enough, Stacy! We get it!”

But it’s not us who need to get the point, it’s all the parents out there. They need to hear this, they need to know what the solutions are, and they need to know that it’s time for them to stand up and be parents to their looney daughters — and require their sons to measure up to a higher standard as well. Not sure how to send that message in a way that they receive it, but a book isn’t a bad idea.
Steve White
December 9th, 2015 @ 1:57 pm

I like that — pithy, true, and guaranteed to set off any prog-tard on whom I use it. Thanks!
Quartermaster
December 9th, 2015 @ 2:22 pm

Teens experimenting without parental guidance and boundaries is a serious problem.
Quartermaster
December 9th, 2015 @ 2:22 pm

And keeping them dumb and indoctrinated absorbs so much energy from the Dims.
Quartermaster
December 9th, 2015 @ 2:23 pm

You’re welcome. Steal it all you like.
NeoWayland
December 9th, 2015 @ 2:29 pm

Teens are going to experiment. That’s what they do. But they need a safe retreat when stuff goes BOOM.

Yes, I do think there needs to be parental guidance and boundaries.
Stephanie Davies-Arai
December 9th, 2015 @ 2:37 pm

It’s only liberal feminists who support the whole trans ideology, it’s part of the rise of lefty-liberal thought policing, and it tends to be other feminists who get no-platformed for being ‘transphobic’ (ie challenging it). I think you’re right that a ‘child-led’ parenting culture has led to so many young people being unable to accept any challenge to their immature ideas – and parents now are urged to go along with even small children saying they’re the opposite sex because ‘kids know themselves best.’ We are diagnosing kids as trans in place of looking at the real issues, which range from ‘just being a child’ to emotional/psychological problems. The link to autism is recognised, this post is good on that: http://4thwavenow.com/2015/10/29/insistent-consistent-persistent-autism-spectrum-disorder-seen-as-no-barrier-to-child-transition-or-sterilization/
Finrod Felagund
December 9th, 2015 @ 2:56 pm

How many teenagers growing up in small towns in the Midwest ever get a chance to sit atop a pyramid at El Mirador at dawn?

For one example, video games have gotten use in nursing homes to help keep the minds and reflexes of the elderly sharp. (Though I remember a college friend of mine joking about heart patients playing Millipede: “We just lost another one!”) I taught myself how to program which I parleyed into a valuable career because I was typing in game programs out of magazines which I would then hack to death.
robertstacymccain
December 9th, 2015 @ 4:17 pm

“… it’s time for them to stand up and be parents to their looney daughters …”

The problem is multi-layered. In many cases, the “looney daughters” are the children of divorced couples where the mother’s bitterness toward her ex-husband fosters an attitude in the daughter that men are untrustworthy. In other cases, you have the two-career household where the children were dumped into daycare at an early age and never formed strong emotional bonds to the parents, and the child’s needs are neglected. Wherever you see a severe disturbance in the adolescent personality — and “transgender” identity is certainly a severe disturbance — it is certain that there is something deeply wrong in the child’s home environment or early upbringing. Sometimes it is abuse; sometimes it is parental alcoholism; sometimes it is divorce. But a normal, healthy home usually produces a normal, healthy adolescent, and it is important to consider the issues of home environment when analyzing adolescent problems of any kind. You’re not looking to blame somebody — it’s not about guilt-tripping the parents or giving the child a scapegoat — rather you have to help the disturbed adolescent develop an objective understanding of how and why she experiencing problems, so that she can deal with the problems. And in a society where the family has been breaking down, where religion is under attack and basic morality is challenged, some of these problems are so commonplace now that it is hard for young people even to understand what’s wrong with them, much less try to understand why.

By the time a teenager starts “acting out,” they have usually been experiencing internal struggles for many years, and often the “warning signs” went unnoticed or were misinterpreted. Parents are too busy with their own lives to pay attention to what is happening in their child’s life. As long as the child is making good grades and otherwise going through the motions of a normal life, the signs of trouble are easy to ignore. If you read the comments at the 4th Wave Now blog, you see so many mothers say their daughter “suddenly” took a drastic turn at 16 or 17. But when you read the personal “coming out” narratives of LGBT people, they usually talk about experiencing a sense of being “not like other kids” — a misfit, feeling alienated or isolated from peers — at 11 or 12. Late childhood and early adolescence is when the child becomes aware of these issues, however vaguely, and if there is no one perceptive enough to recognize the behavioral signs and intervene, this “misfit” self-concept tends to be reinforced by experience (peers will often ostracize or ridicule the misfit) so that by the time the child is 15 or 16, he or she has built a system of defensive rationalizations around their “outside” identity.

Understand that this applies to many adolescent issues other than LGBT sexuality or identity. You could go back and study, for example, how Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold became alienated enough to commit the Columbine massacre. At one point, both of them seemed very promising and reasonably well-adjusted kids. At some point, however, the process of identifying as “misfits” and “outsiders” took hold, with deadly results.

Parents (and other adults, including teachers and coaches) have to do more than “stand up” to the out-of-control teenager. They have to monitor the child’s development prior to the point that these problems become a crisis. Parents cannot “check out” and let their children operate on autopilot.
Steve White
December 9th, 2015 @ 4:19 pm

Great response. That should be in the book too 🙂

In all seriousness, this is a point I don’t see articulated very often. It clearly makes sense that the ‘pre-teen’ years are when a lot of issues pop up, and you have to deal with them pro-actively. My wife commented recently on how ‘hard’ high school was for girls these days. Perhaps we’re looking in the wrong place to figure out why high school is the problem.
Steve Skubinna
December 9th, 2015 @ 5:05 pm

I think the SJW community is riddled with Munchausen syndrome. It isn’t simply transgenderism, it’s the whole litany of mental health diagnoses they proudly trot out to establish their bona fides, because in their universe crazy people, and only crazy people have authority to dictate everyone else’s lives.

Of course, if a libertarian or conservative-libertarian (what used to be called a “liberal”) argues that outside of narrowly defined special circumstances (children, the mentally incompetent, imprisoned criminals) nobody has authority over another’s life it’s hate speech and “violence. And, um, Rape Culture.
Daniel Freeman
December 9th, 2015 @ 5:17 pm

It means anti-birth. The baby-haters are open about it now, instead of pretending concern for pregnant women.
Daniel Freeman
December 9th, 2015 @ 5:29 pm

I’ve read that we make our decisions emotionally first and then construct justifications for them — that the brain is essentially a rationalization engine — and I believe it. Supposedly there are studies using medical imaging of brain activity, but I haven’t sought them out to confirm, since it just explains so much.

For example, it explains both why misfits become fixated on the idea that they were born the wrong sex — because it’s a plausible explanation for them of why they’re so uncomfortable in their own lives — and also why surgical transition doesn’t make them any happier, since the reason was false.
Questioning Feminist Authority: Cult Ideology and Mind Control Tactics | Living in Anglo-America
December 9th, 2015 @ 7:34 pm

[…] http://theothermccain.com/2015/12/08/questioning-feminist-authority-cult-ideology-and-mind-control-t… […]
Steve Skubinna
December 9th, 2015 @ 7:40 pm

I think that’s certainly the case if you isolate yourself, as so many of these people appear to have done. Once you shrink your universe down to a tiny circle of like minded people you set up all sorts of feedback loops.
tricknologist
December 9th, 2015 @ 9:27 pm

I just found an excellent article on feminism courtesy of Instapundit. looks like something you might be interested in.

http://judgybitch.com/2015/06/09/feminists-dont-challenge-radical-islam-because-real-misogynists-are-terrifying/
Who is the modern Jezebel? Rev 2. – Dark Brightness
December 10th, 2015 @ 2:42 pm

[…] Ideological justification of a self-serving double standard, whereby feminists relentlessly criticize men while exempting themselves from any criticism at all, is nowadays so widely accepted that it is seldom even noticed, much less subjected to skeptical scrutiny. Are the problems of “male violence and misogyny” so pervasive as to justify a “critique of men and masculinity,” per se? If a man is non-violent and pleads not guilty to the accusation of “misogyny” (i.e., woman-hating), can he be permitted to object to this categorical condemnation of masculinity? […]
Your Sunday LinkaPaloozaFestMania | If You're Left
December 13th, 2015 @ 8:01 pm

[…] The Other McCain: The Cult of Feminism […]
News of the Week (December 13th, 2015) | The Political Hat
December 13th, 2015 @ 10:14 pm

[…] Questioning Feminist Authority: Cult Ideology and Mind Control Tactics She is a 19-year-old “dysphoric female” who is a “gender-critical . . . sex-critical, anti-natalist” feminist and identifies as a “transman.” If you met someone in real life who described herself that way, you might wonder if she was out on an overnight pass from the psychiatric ward. […]
The Feminist-Industrial Complex: Lesbians ‘Learning How to Scream’ : The Other McCain
December 22nd, 2015 @ 2:27 pm

[…] toward men. The indoctrination process in Women’s Studies programs can best be understood by studying cult “mind control” methods. It may be assumed that all women who enroll in these programs are inspired by some level of […]