Never Take Advice From Feminists

Posted on 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.

+ + + + +

Thanks to the many readers whose contributions have supported the Sex Trouble project. Your prayers are always deeply appreciated.




 

 


72 comments

  4. The childlessness chart is interesting. Rolling the lines together, about 20% of women will be childless. That’s quite a hit on the fertility rate and the number of children we need to maintain a stable population (not that the feminists consider that, of course).

  5. . . . the sharpest declines in fertility have been among college-educated women.

    What’s interesting is that the decrease exists primarily among the lower socio-economic strata within the cohort of college educated women. That is, women in the wealthier classes tend to leave their careers sooner to rear children (and stay married, BTW) at closer to replacement level. They can rely on their husbands Wall Street arbitrage job to provide sufficient support for their family. (“Sufficient” being in the eye of the beholder, of course.) Think of this as the “Sorority Cohort.”

    Women with B.A. at lower income levels, for whatever reason, i.e. that double major in Women’s Studies and Chicano Literature, don’t have the resources to rear children correctly. ( Again, the level of resources required is subjective, of course.)

    The bottom line, is most women are brought up with the “you can have it all, baby” lie and only realize that fact when it’s too late.

  6. The most knowledgeable conservative thinkers have been warning about the demographic crisis for decades. Go find Ben Wattenberg’s book “The Birth Dearth,” for example.

  7. I posted a warning to young women about this along with a practical workaround so they can avoid the fate of childlessness.

    Girls! The Work-Life Balance Plan the Feminists Don’t Want You to Know

    You don’t have to follow the feminist’s flawed plan for your life. You can have children early during your peak fertility, enjoy the happiness they provide, and enter the workforce after they have grown.

    http://wp.me/p6QFjS-3B

  8. Feminists have sold young women a glamorous idea of “careers.” But what is a career? It’s just a fancy word for a job, a way to pay your bills. What’s weird is that I have had a “career” in journalism almost entirely by accident. This was never a plan I had, but one day in March 1986 I walked into a newspaper office, talked myself into a job as a $4.50-an-hour staff writer and … stuff happened.

    So, about 18 months after I got my first newspaper job, I was working my third newspaper job and met the woman who soon became my wife and, in May 1989, she gave birth to our first child. We later had five more and, rather accidentally along the way, I had a “career” in journalism. People just need to get their priorities straight, is what I’m saying, and never take advice from feminists.

  9. Feminists have sold themselves a phony menu where the entrees aren’t available for consumption. Starting with Betty Friedan they have convinced themselves that everyone is special and that no woman’s life is complete without a fulfilling “career.”

    What they have failed to account for is that not everyone is in fact special and that most “careers” involve drudgery like working a forklift at a monotonous distribution warehouse, selling insurance, sitting in a cubicle, driving a taxi or drawing blood at a clinic. The idea of the rewarding career where you will split atoms, write that successful novel or find a Mayan temple is mostly a myth. What you will do is do what it takes to earn money or not. That can be more soul-destroying than raising kids, if that’s the way your mind runs. What fun is there in being stuck in traffic after having woke up at 3 AM to plug in your car on a 10 below zero night? I’ve seen commuters on buses going to work at 8 AM and they look anything but happy.

    That’s right; you can’t have everything. Get used to it. Dream and dream hard if you must but leaven that with some reality, or the grass will always be greener wherever you happen to not be. I learned early in life to be content with who I am and that I am not special. I went on to do more “special” things than that daffy feminist will ever do in 10 lifetimes. It’s riskier to think you’re some exception in the universe that it is to settle down and be content.

    Friedan Mary Sued her own failed career and failing marriage to millions of naive women as “their story.” You’ve seen the result. Our colleges are insane asylums of confused women. Everywhere you look in the arts you see bitterly complaining women, not people who are happy and fulfilled. That’s going to happen when you scapegoat men rather than yourself with fantasies of how the world SHOULD work. Feminism is ideological self-pity.

  10. “…you cannot pretend there are no trade-offs.”

    Yes they can. And they do. And eventually women such as Peggy Orenstein find that is not the case. Whether they reach the inescapable conclusion that “having it all” was a deliberate lie is by then a moot point. End of road, reached. Options, gone.

  11. “Career” is a more glamorous way of saying “paying the bills.” Men have known all along that their real career or avocation was taking care of their families. The “career” was nothing more than a means to that end.

    Most men have also known, maybe instinctively, that you are not what you do. You are who you are. Right now in my life I can point to many things that I have done, but I still am what and who I was four decades ago when starting my adult life.

    In the immortal words of one sage, “I yam what I yam, and that’s all what I yam.”

  12. BTW, as always, the Progressive Left’s prescriptions for a “great society,” have mutually inconsistent end results. That is, you cannot celebrate female infertility, while at the same time hope to establish a socialist nirvana where there are lots of people collecting checks from the government. (If you wish the checks to be worth something, that is.) You have to have more bodies working that those collecting the “free” money, or the whole thing collapses. That means women have to have babies at a higher than replacement value. These problems are appearing in Europe and Japan already. The Europeans thought that unfettered immigration is the answer as does the political elite in this country. We’re seeing how that’s working out.

  13. Thanks for letting me know that I did better financially by not pursuing a career in journalism. In 1986 I was making $7.00 an hour when my wife became pregnant. My earnings have fluctuated over the years but I am thankful we made some babies. I have always been able to scrounge up work.

  14. The logical conclusion of an argument that begins with the premise that half the human race is “oppressed” by the other half is never a good idea.

  15. …as feminism discourages motherhood among highly intelligent women, fewer children will be born to educated mothers…

    If being a “genderfluid polyamorous demiromantic grey-ace” is what intelligent people do; if “intersectional feminism” is where educated people arrive, then this low birth rate is a good thing.

    What does “intelligent” mean? What does “educated” mean?

    Couldn’t they better be referred to as “gullible” than “intelligent”? Or instead of “educated,” isn’t “easily programmable” a better term?

  16. Ah, the age thing. I’m 60, my wife 58. Our youngest is a HS junior this year, another full year to go. But our first born was when she was 23. It’s different having young ones, again, when you’re older then having them for the first time when you’re older.
    A significant number of couple our age I know were done having grandchildren by the time we had our last child. Most of them are in far worse shape then my wife and I. Having kids around and staying active with them keeps you younger.

  17. Our oldest was born when my wife was 25, the youngest (of six) born when my wife was 38. So, yes, having teenagers when you’re middle-aged (our youngest three are now 17, 15 and 13) is kind of a neat thing, keeps you young in some sense.

    By the time our youngest turns 18, we will have been parenting for 31 years. Think about that.

  18. I was just telling my daughter the other day that I had given up half of every day since I was 14 years old in the effort to earn money for food and shelter for the other half of the day, and guess what, it wasn’t worth it. Having a “career” sucks.

  20. With all that experience, you’ll be in a good position to advise your kids on parenting. 🙂

  21. That is why birth technologies, along with surrogates, are so important to feminists, as well as to homosexuals.

  22. Birth technologies are only important for feminists to prevent. Tehnically, the only one they need is artificial insemination.

    They’re really just anti-natal.

  24. A good way of putting it,
    “whats your job”
    “providing for my family”
    Everything else is details.
    When i was earning well and single i managed to get both my brother and sister into houses. It was my way of helping my family.
    Its a very satisfying thing to be able to do.

  25. Here’s the thing: Parenting is not rocket science. You don’t have to be the World’s Greatest Parent to raise good kids. I believe a lot of the angst from young feminists — their ambivalence or hostility toward motherhood — stems from the fact that they’re just overthinking it. The cartoonist Kate McDonough, for example, has also written extensively about her struggles with anxiety and depression — typical problems of the overthinker. While I am to some degree prone to that, my reckless youth helped me to understand that “Fortune Favors the Bold,” as I like to say. Basically, you’ve got to be willing to roll the dice and take your chances, and realize that children are actually more durable than the “experts” would have you believe. There is no need to coddle kids the way experts tell you to coddle them, and in fact it is the coddled child who is most likely to develop debilitating neurotic fears. Encourage your children to take a sanguine optimism toward their future, rather than to imagine themselves victims of societal forces beyond their control.

  29. Peter said “save yourselves from this perverse generation” in Acts 2.

    I think that phrase is applicable to much of modern academia and all of feminism.

  31. The more ‘rewarding’ the career that the woman obtains — and, of course, the feminists are all thinking about law and medicine and banking and some other professional career with cachet; laundresses and convenience store clerks, not so much — then the more that has to be given up for motherhood.

    The less educated women, who are, on average, the lower-earning women, have less to give up by becoming pregnant and having a family: there are fewer, or no, promotions that would have been in their futures, and a smaller paycheck to sacrifice, and thus having a family is not only not as much of a financial sacrifice, but not as much of a professional one as well.

    The college grad who lands that entry-level with possible promotions in sight sees a much greater personal and professional sacrifice if she chooses to have children, and even if she’d like to have children someday, such can always be put off for another year, and another year after that, while she becomes more firmly established in her career. But, as an old professor at the University of Kentucky used to say, tempus is fugiting, and pretty soon those years putting off a family to get her career established become too many years.

  33. Don’t rule out cloning. Given the deep strains of narcissism running throughout all of progressiveism, having an identical duplicate would be a dream come true for many of these people.

    But then, given the equally deep currents of self loathing in the movement, that would not work out well at all.

  34. Most men, or those who have been round the block a few times, would say that their highest avocation is to be a good husband and father.

  39. Honest men have been conned since time immemorial. Intellect and honesty have never prevented people from being gullible.

  40. At least she doesn’t dream of a world where she can have sex with kids, like Shulamith Firestone, one of the founding mental cases of this sick movement.

  42. Mental efficiency and rote memorization are no substitute for street smarts, common sense and basic wisdom.

  43. Our esteemed host wrote:

    Here’s the thing: Parenting is not rocket science. You don’t have to be the World’s Greatest Parent to raise good kids.

    The easiest and simplest parenthood rule is to not do things you don’t want your kids to do. You don’t want them to drink or use drugs? Then don’t drink or use drugs! You don’t want them screwing around with anyone who will say yes? Then don’t screw around on your wife! You don’t want them to cheat or lie or steal? Then don’t cheat or lie or steal yourself!

  44. What I was getting at was that all successful cons fool the mark into thinking he’s on the inside. The mark knows things aren’t on the up and up but believes he’s got the inside scoop.

    That’s how Bernie Madoff ran his scam – his victims knew the numbers didn’t add up but assumed that what he was really doing was insider trading. And so they trusted him, erroneously thinking that he was letting them in on his action.

    It’s akin to the old poker saw “If you look around the table and can’t spot the sucker, it’s you.”

    Honest men can be fooled – it’s invariably because they assume the other party is also honest. But the best way to gull somebody is with a wink and a nudge, let him think you’re letting him in on something.

  45. I always had some small degree of pity for Bill and Hillary Clinton when imagining them having The Talk with Chelsea.

    But being Hill and Bill, they probably just told her “never give a sucker an even break, sweetheart” and winked.

  48. The overwhelming majority of the time I’ve seen honest people conned is they have thought they could trust the person selling them on the deal. In many cases, there was no reason not to trust the person, but they were gulled into turning off their critical thinking by the rep of the scammer. Too many times the scammer has done good, honest work in the past.

  49. My initial inclination is to feel sad for these lonely, misguided, old (or dead) women. But then I think of the many young women whose lives have been and are being ruined by listening to these hags.

  50. There’s at least some reason to believe she did. Towards the end of her Dialectic of Sex, she claims that in her feminist utopia “relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of – probably considerably more than we now believe…”

    Her perverse vision aside, what is this “we” stuff? What is she basing that on? She adds “Adult/child and homosexual taboos would disappear…” The paragraph before that she writes that with the incest taboo gone, there’d be no reason for a guy not to bang his mother.

    Elsewhere she claims “Sexually, too, ghetto kids are freer,” and then claims to have talked with some black guy who said he couldn’t remember an age where he didn’t have sex with other kids and everyone did it.

    You see this throwing aside the incest taboo as a repeated pattern in feminist writings, as well as lowering the age of consent. In sci-fi, I’ve often wondered why so many self-declared “genderqueer” 30-something women are so attracted to young adult fantasy. I was probably 10 years old when I lost interest in that sort of media. There is something terribly wrong with this “feminist” movement.

Comments are closed.