The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Never Take Advice From Feminists

Posted on | April 7, 2016 | 72 Comments

 

Peggy Orenstein is a feminist whose books include Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World (2001):

At 34, Peggy Orenstein faced a series of dilemmas shared by many women of her generation: She was unsure whether she wanted children, unsure about the impact of motherhood on her career, her relationship, and her sense of self. Why, when women seemed to have so many choices, did she suddenly feel that she had none? After feminist liberation and its subsequent backlash, she realized that women’s lives, including her own, were now in a state of flux.

Question: Why would a woman wait until she’s 34 to start thinking about “whether she wanted children”? Quite frankly, by the time a woman is 34, she may be past the point where motherhood is even possible. Infertility is a serious problem affecting women in their 30s, the risk of birth defects is substantially higher for older mothers and, beyond this, there are other considerations to keep in mind. Suppose you become a mom for the first time at age 23. You’ll be 39 when your child turns 16 and gets a driver’s license, and not yet 45 when your kid graduates college. If you delay motherhood until you’re 38, well, just do the math.

Is parenthood a task best performed by the young and energetic, or by weary middle-aged folks? When my wife and I babysit our grandsons, we are reminded, as my wife says, “This is why old people don’t have babies.” Children are a blessing, but every parent knows how exhausting the task can be and, whatever prudential arguments you make in favor of delaying parenthood, you cannot pretend there are no trade-offs.

When my wife and I had our first child, we were living in a $250-a-month rental in Georgia, and struggling to keep up. My father came to visit and, when I mentioned our financial difficulties, Dad said, “Son, if you wait to have kids until you can afford to have kids, you’ll never have kids.”

This is the answer to Peggy Orenstein’s question, “Why, when women seemed to have so many choices, did she suddenly feel that she had none?” Somewhere amid their celebration of women’s “choices,” feminists neglected to consider the inescapable realities of human nature. Time moves in only one direction — forward — and you have only one life to live, and the “choices” available to Peggy Orenstein at 34 were limited by the choices she had made at every previous stage of her life.

“It’s not that we’re stupid. It’s that we’ve been misinformed.”

That quote, from a woman who realized she had lost her chance at motherhood by waiting too long, is the brutal truth behind the myth of “choice.” How did things work out for Peggy Orenstein? After years of struggling with infertility, she gave birth to a daughter, Daisy, in 2003.

The influence of feminism tends to steer individual women, and even entire societies, toward “The Darwinian Dead End,” as I’ve called it. The rhetoric of “choice” and “empowerment” is so strongly associated with declining fertility that, nearly a half-century after the eruption of the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1960s, you might suppose this ideology would have perished along with its proponents.

Shulamith Firestone was found dead, alone in her apartment in 2012, after years of mental illness. Andrea Dworkin died in 2005 after years of health problems caused by her extreme obesity. Just last year, another feminist pioneer reached her final destination:

Longtime NYC-based feminist and lesbian activist Sidney Abbott, 78, was found dead Wednesday morning after a fire in her home in Southold, Suffolk County.
The fire was discovered by her next-door neighbor, an off-duty volunteer firefighter who rushed to the burning Cape-style home and found the former member of the “Lavender Menace” and author of “Sappho Was a Right-on Woman” on the floor of her smoke-filled living room. . . .
Abbott was a force for gay women’s rights in New York and beyond since the ’70s, when she helped urge NOW not to ignore lesbian issues.
She had been wheelchair dependent in recent years, and had limited mobility, said Jacqueline Michot Ceballos, a friend for nearly 50 years.
“We were the earliest members of NOW, from day one in New York City, back in 1967,” said Ceballos, a former NOW-New York president and founder of the Veteran Feminists of America.

What all of these women have in common, in addition to being (a) feminists and (b) dead, is that (c) they never had children.

“Pregnancy is barbaric,” Firestone declared in her influential 1970 manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex, and hostility toward motherhood has been a defining message of the feminist movement for decades.

 

The impact of this anti-natal ideology has been reflected in a decline in birth rates and an increase in childlessness. However, this logical result of the Feminist Death Cult has not been random in its effects. Because feminism is relentlessly promoted in higher education, where university Women’s Studies programs function as the intellectual/activist core of the Feminist-Industrial Complex, the sharpest declines in fertility have been among college-educated women. Consider the Census Bureau data on fertility by educational achievement:

Not a high school graduate
Lifetime births (average) ….. 2.6
Childless ………………………….. 11.6%

Bachelor’s degree
Lifetime births (average) ….. 1.8
Childless ………………………….. 19.9%

High-school dropouts, on average, had 44% more children than women who had college diplomas. Childlessness was 72% more common for college graduates than for high-school dropouts. Over the course of decades, as feminism discourages motherhood among highly intelligent women, fewer children will be born to educated mothers and, inevitably, the overall percentage of children born to less-intelligent mothers must increase. While there is not a total correlation between (a) intelligence and (b) years of school attendance (as college dropouts like Bill Gates prove), data suggesting the “dumbing-down” of motherhood should concern any student of demographics and public policy. (See “The Value of Motherhood” and more about The Contraceptive Culture.) Despite the dangerous consequences of feminism’s bizarre hostility toward normal human behavior, proponents of feminist gender theory now have so much power among the “progressive” elite that the White House on Wednesday held an event about “breaking down gender stereotypes in children’s media and toys” so as to “encourage all of our young people to pursue their passions and interests without regard to their gender.”

What this talk of “stereotypes” means is that the federal government is committed to promoting an anti-human ideology that has caused many young people to become hopelessly confused about their “gender.”

Do you want your child to be a “genderfluid polyamorous demiromantic grey-ace” when they grow up? Probably not. Why do you think feminism in the 21st century attracts so many confused weirdos?

“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”

“Right now, today, as of writing this, I identify as queer. But I didn’t always. And no, I’m not referring to that awkward, uncomfortable time in my life where I knew that something felt ‘off,’ but I couldn’t quite place it, and so I paraded around in the charade of ‘straight.’ I mean that a few years ago, I identified as homoflexible. And before that, a lesbian. And even before that, bisexual.”
— Melissa Fabello

“The labels I currently use for myself are queer, gay, femme, and homoflexible. (Basically, I’m a lesbian with exceptions.) The label bisexual doesn’t work for me right now. . . . I’m on the asexual spectrum somewhere . . . I don’t experience primary sexual attraction.”
— Miriam Mogilevsky

Why do you think the Everyday Feminist website, edited by Ms. Fabello, features Ms. Mogilevsky as a columnist, sharing advice like “5 Ways Straight Women Can Be Better Allies to Queer Women”?

If it is “sexism” to believe men and women are different, as Ms. Penny insists, and if feminism teaches that these “made-up categories” are “violently imposed,” then are we surprised that Ms. Fabello condemns heterosexuality as a “charade”? Do we need to speculate why the “homoflexible” Ms. Mogilevsky cannot “experience primary sexual attraction” and thinks it an important task of feminists to teach women how to “be better allies to queer women”?

No, these are all entirely logical consequences of feminist theory. Once “progressive” parents (and schools, and media, and even the White House) decided that there are no meaningful differences between male and female, and that “gender stereotypes” must be destroyed, this kind of pathetic confusion was an inevitable result. When I describe feminism as a War Against Human Nature, does anyone think that this phrase is hyperbole? Am I a misogynist, a bigot, an enemy of “equality”? Or rather is it the case that Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver warned, and that crazy ideas have crazy consequences?

Never take advice from a feminist, and certainly don’t let feminists tell you how to raise your children. Feminists hate children.

“I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding . . . time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . . This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 2014

The road to feminism’s utopia of “gender equality” is paved with dead babies. Yet these Death Cult fanatics still expect to be taken seriously when they offer parenting advice to those of us who consider our children a blessing from God. Peggy Orenstein has published a new book, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, that is being hyped by the liberal media, including the New York Times:

Advice on Boys and Sex, From
the Author of ‘Girls and Sex’
I invited readers to submit questions to Ms. Orenstein. Amid all the questions about our daughters — how do we talk to them, how do we teach them, how do we protect them — were a flurry of questions about our sons. Ms. Orenstein understood. “Obviously you’re only having half the conversation if you only talk about girls,” she said. “Boys absolutely need to learn the same things.”

Here’s some advice from me: Warn your sons to avoid feminists and, while you’re at it, teach your daughters to avoid feminists, too.

What kind of fool would believe that a feminist like Peggy Orenstein has any useful advice to share about boys, girls or anything else? If you need advice on how to avoid motherhood until your ovaries have nearly withered away, well, I guess maybe she’s an expert on that. On the other hand, if you’d prefer to have children before you’re on the cusp of menopause, and hope that your children will do the same — so that you might become a grandparent before you’re in the nursing home or the graveyard — then maybe you need to seek advice elsewhere.

By the way, since I’m sharing advice here, don’t ever let feminists talk to your kids about sex. Feminists are all perverted freaks — “genderqueer” nutjobs like Laurie Penny, “homoflexible” weirdos like Melissa Fabello, etc. — and guess what? They want your kids to be freaks, too.

“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

Anyone who thinks it is an exaggeration to describe feminism as a satanic menace might want to read the 1997 book Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America by Peter Jones. A professor of theology, Professor Jones pointed out that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “spiritual adviser,” Jean Houston, was closely associated with so-called “New Age” paganism. Professor Jones is also author of the 1992 book The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age, and thus has been warning for more than two decades about this kind of degenerate neo-pagan trend.

Most feminists are atheists, of course, and I doubt Melissa Fabello or Miriam Mogilevsky would describe themselves as “spiritual” in any way. However, it is worth considering a theological understanding of 21st-century feminism, if only because the lunacy of Laurie Penny and the bizarre evil of Amanda Marcotte can scarcely be explained rationally.

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Category: Abortion, Family, Religion, Sex Trouble

Comments

72 Responses to “Never Take Advice From Feminists”

  1. Fail Burton
    April 8th, 2016 @ 3:31 pm

    The police can come after you for your kids playing outside but insane parents can give children drugs to turn them into the opposite sex. That should be against the law.

  2. Steve Skubinna
    April 8th, 2016 @ 3:35 pm

    Part of that, I think, is the old Bohemian need to shock the squares.

    Part may be an excess of supposed open mindedness, a refusal to say that anything is off the table or outside the realm of the permissable.

    And finally, once you decide that all of society, including morality and ethics, are constructs of the patriarchy designed to keep wymyn in subjugation, there’s no reason to respect any taboos. Even those that have solid practical reasons, such as the one against incest or the one against pedophilia.

  3. dance...dancetotheradio
    April 8th, 2016 @ 4:09 pm

    That’s vaudeville Aerosmith.

  4. Daniel Freeman
    April 8th, 2016 @ 9:14 pm

    As an aside, Kara Kratcha above looks more like me than my own sister does. Not even kidding.

  5. Daniel Freeman
    April 8th, 2016 @ 9:20 pm

    Their problem is economic. They have bad loans from a real estate bubble collapsing decades ago, so men are (and feel) unattractive due to not having stable jobs.

    But at least they aren’t blaming the victim and importing rapists. Well, not many. Just a few. And then they decided against importing more.

  6. Daniel Freeman
    April 8th, 2016 @ 9:31 pm

    One of my favorite memories of my childhood was riding one of those two-speed bikes where you brake by pedaling backward. I rode down the hill as hard as I could, finding the biggest dirt clod to catch air from, over and over until I fell.

    My parents let me do my own thing; and I got really good at letting go, tucking and rolling. I don’t really have a rational explanation for that — but if I ever have kids, I plan on giving them the same experience.

  7. Finrod Felagund
    April 8th, 2016 @ 10:24 pm

    As I’ve pointed out many times recently, Intelligence and Wisdom are separate statistics. There are many examples of people with the former but not the latter; Ben Carson for one.

  8. Finrod Felagund
    April 8th, 2016 @ 10:28 pm

    I remember a comedian saying once: “My parents tried everything to get me to stop smoking marijuana. Finally, they stopped selling it to me.”

  9. Quartermaster
    April 9th, 2016 @ 9:42 am

    The APA has yet to discover either, sadly.

  10. Quartermaster
    April 9th, 2016 @ 9:43 am

    Carson has wisdom inside the profession he has practiced for many years. In that context it’s called professional judgement. He’s a babe in the woods outside of that.

  11. Steve Skubinna
    April 9th, 2016 @ 9:56 am

    We used to build ramps with scrap wood and see how high and far we could jump our bikes.

  12. Jeanette Victoria
    April 9th, 2016 @ 12:07 pm

    Many moons ago when I was oh so young I went to a meeting of National Pagan groups called the Council of Themis. When I suggested that we should all have more babies they became outraged and I was ostracized. The reality is most pagans have few if any kids. Those that do are rare.

  13. Jeanette Victoria
    April 9th, 2016 @ 12:22 pm

    I so agree, with my daughter I never read a parenting book I did what was right I was afraid to discipline as well. I has the best behaved kid of all my friend.

    Her father was born in1935 and didn’t suffer from baby boomer angst as well.

  14. Jeanette Victoria
    April 9th, 2016 @ 12:26 pm

    I MADE my own skateboard with wood and old roller skate.

    I also made a sextant and a pinhole camera as well. This was on my own not in some “science class.”

  15. NeoWayland
    April 9th, 2016 @ 12:42 pm

    I was making the distinction that not all pagans act as described in the two books that RSM mentioned. While I think there is some overlap between pagans and feminists and especially certain RadFems, one label doesn’t necessarily predict the thinking of groups that may only be tangentially related. It’s much the same argument that I’ve made before.

    As for the number of kids, I admit I don’t have statistics. I do know that pagan gatherings are becoming more and more “family friendly.” So much so that casual nudity and open sex are now discouraged much more often than not.

  16. NeoWayland
    April 9th, 2016 @ 12:47 pm

    Sadly, I have to agree with you on that.

  17. Steve Skubinna
    April 9th, 2016 @ 1:09 pm

    Did that too, with one of those old steel skates that you tightened over your shoes.

    The vibrations of those steel wheels on concrete would make you numb up to your knees.

  18. Daniel O'Brien
    April 9th, 2016 @ 2:50 pm

    Not all feminists? Then you haven’t been paying attention.

  19. NeoWayland
    April 9th, 2016 @ 3:06 pm

    I’ve been paying enough attention to know that the the FamousFeminists™ don’t speak for everyone who claims the label feminist.

    Hey, I like that! I think I’ll use that instead of RadFems. Thank you, I don’t know if I would have thought of it if not for your comment.

  20. Daniel O'Brien
    April 9th, 2016 @ 3:40 pm

    Who is teaching the next generation of feminist? The RadFem. Your FamousFeminist are hardly feminist by the RadFem definition. EQUALITY is merely the exoteric message of Feminism.

  21. NeoWayland
    April 9th, 2016 @ 4:21 pm

    ?Who is teaching the next generation of feminist??

    For the non-RadFems/FamousFeminists™, I imagine it’s the same people who teach young children that it’s NOT okay to hit or take other people’s stuff.

    The FamousFeminists™ hijacked the label feminist. They derive their Moral Authority® from their control of the label. That’s it. They have nothing else except pity.

  22. Feminism as Psychological Warfare (Because @FFigureFBust Asked) | Living in Anglo-America
    April 19th, 2016 @ 11:14 am

    […] Never Take Advice From Feminists, unless your goal in life is to become a Crazy Cat Lady, which is one of the few subjects where feminist expertise is useful. “Feminism is a movement of crazy women, by crazy women, forcrazy women,” and you should doubt the mental health of any woman who calls herself a feminist. Therefore, never talk to a feminist: […]