The Other McCain

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Feminist Motherhood Advice (and Other Reasons to Avoid Jody Allard)

Posted on | July 14, 2017 | 3 Comments

 

Jody Allard is a feminist and a bad person, but I repeat myself. Last fall, Ms. Allard gained notoriety when she published a Washington Post column about “rape culture” that targeted her own teenage sons:

They’ve been listening to me talk about consent, misogyny and rape culture since they were tweens. They listened to me then, but they are 16 and 18 now and they roll their eyes and argue when I talk to them about sexism and misogyny.
“There’s no such thing as rape culture,” my other son said. “You say everything is about rape culture or sexism.”
I never imagined I would raise boys who would become men like these. Men who deny rape culture, or who turn a blind eye to sexism.

This provoked a memorable headline at Ace of Spades HQ:

Amazing: Angry, Bent Feminist Shames Her Own Sons
as Being Insufficiently “Anti-Rape” Despite
One of Her Sons Being at Risk For Suicide

Instapundit called Ms. Allard’s column “media-based child abuse,” and you might suppose that a sense of human decency would have caused her to avoid causing further embarrassment for her sons, but if she had any sense of human decency, she wouldn’t be a feminist, would she?

 

Last week, Jody Allard continued her anti-male jihad, this time in the form of recounting the reaction to her column last September:

I didn’t think it would be controversial when I wrote it; I was sure most parents grappled with raising sons in the midst of rape culture. The struggle I wrote about was universal, I thought, but I was wrong. My essay went semi-viral, and for the first time my sons encountered my words about them on their friends’ phones, their teachers’ computers, and even overheard them discussed by strangers on a crowded metro bus. . . .
One of my sons was hurt by my words, although he’s never told me so. He doesn’t understand why I lumped him and his brother together in my essay. He sees himself as the “good” one, the one who is sensitive and thoughtful, and who listens instead of reacts. He doesn’t understand that even quiet misogyny is misogyny, and that not all sexists sound like Twitter trolls. He is angry at me now, although he won’t admit that either, and his anger led him to conservative websites and YouTube channels; places where he can surround himself with righteous indignation against feminists, and tell himself it’s ungrateful women like me who are the problem. . . .

In other words, her son has taken the Red Pill, and it was the experience of being publicly humiliated by his own mother that led him to it.

Way to go, feminist mom!

Not content with this predictable failure (and let’s not forget her lack of basic human decency), Ms. Allard extends her indictment to all men:

As a single mother, I sometimes wonder whether the real problem is that my sons have no role models for the type of men I hope they become. But when I look around at the men I know, I’m not sure a male partner would fill that hole. Where are these men who are enlightened but not arrogant? Who are feminists without self-congratulation? . . .
If the feminist men — the men who proudly declare their progressive politics and their fight for equality — aren’t safe, then what man is? No man, I fear.

We may notice, en passant, that Ms. Allard uses the adjective “feminist” as though it were a synonym for good. That is to say, in her mind, words like “feminist,” “progressive” and “equality” express the summum bonum, the highest moral ideal, the essence of all virtue. Most parents might hope their sons would grow up to be hard-working, honest, courteous and so forth, but such ordinary common-sense virtues are worthless in the eyes of a fanatic like Jody Allard. The only measure of virtue she recognizes is feminism, so unless her sons are whatever she conceives a “feminist man” should be — “enlightened but not arrogant” — she regards her teenage boys as the enemy, an existential menace.

As interesting as that is, however, more important is Ms. Allard’s description of herself as “a single mother.” Elsewhere, she explains that she has seven children and has been divorced three times:

My first husband and I got married pretty much entirely because we were both Catholic, and I got pregnant. Oops. I was madly in love with my second husband, but that ended. For my third try at marriage, I married a much older man whom I met at work and trusted would take care of me and my kids, but that didn’t work either. Yikes.
Needless to say, after three excruciating forays into marriage, I have no desire to get married again. In fact, when I left my last husband, I decided to stay single until I got my life together. I’m not sure how long I expected that to take, but I definitely didn’t anticipate still being totally and completely single five years later.

There are clues here, my friends. Husband No. 2 was her favorite, “but that ended,” she says without explanation, leaving us to wonder why, whereas she has written extensively of Husband No. 3, whom she labels an emotionally abusive narcissist. Also, apparently Husband No. 3 cheated on her with a woman “frizzy hair and skin covered in acne.”

Jody Allard is now 38 years old and, to judge from her own writing, her entire adult life has been an unbroken series of bad decisions. Anyone may peruse the archives of her writing at contently.com and evaluate her fitness to provide others with advice on parenting (or anything else).

Ms. Allard’s writing represents an expression of the feminist slogan, “The personal is political.” She recounts her failed marriages as a way of establishing her status as a victim of male oppression. If such personal revelations also support the conclusion that Ms. Allard is emotionally disturbed and/or lacking sound judgment, this self-inflicted damage to her reputation is acceptable as necessary to advancing the feminist cause. As I have observed about young feminists on Tumblr, “Like Catholicism, feminism turns confession into a sacred ritual, so that the feminist obtains a kind of holiness by telling her inmost secrets and desires.”

Beyond the blessings of confessional holiness, Ms. Allard says she has spent five years in therapy “recovering from complex trauma”:

I suffer from PTSD-like symptoms as a result of both individual isolated childhood traumas and the relentless experience of growing up in an abusive home. It has only been in the last few months that I have begun to recognize that I simply do not know how to nurture anyone, much less myself. I ache and yearn deep inside for the experience of being nurtured, and I’ve spent my adulthood looking for a mother. And as much as that has hurt me, I fear that it has hurt my children, too.
I began my personal journey in therapy almost five years ago. In the beginning, I thought that I needed help communicating with my then-husband. I thought that I could fix what was wrong with me and proceed through my life without so much as a single scar. I thought that I could do anything and be anything, and that my past didn’t define me. My life was my own, and I was determined to conquer it.
Therapy led me somewhere entirely different. In therapy, I finally recognized the failures of my relationships that had nothing to do with me. I learned to stop taking on the pain of others and to establish healthy boundaries.

Let us briefly note three points:

  1. Feminists and the psychotherapy establishment have, in recent decades, reached a consensus that millions of women suffer from the effects of emotional “trauma” akin to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Of course, PTSD originated as a diagnosis of the psychiatric problems of U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War, so that feminism now teaches women that their misfortunes are as “traumatic” as the experience of Marines who survived the siege of Khe Sanh or POWs tortured in the Hanoi Hilton.
  2. We need not doubt Ms. Allard’s description of her childhood as “abusive” in order to be skeptical of her claim that this experience has been the source of all her problems in life as an adult. She has written about her biological father, who allegedly abused her, although she has no memory of him, and hasn’t seen him since she was 5. Ms. Allard is also estranged from her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken since 2012.
  3. The effect of her therapy, Ms. Allard says, has been her discovery that she is not responsible for the failures of her relationships. Evidently, everybody she has ever known is toxic and dysfunctional, and she alone is without fault, a martyred saint suffering for the sins of others.

Therapy is to the 21st-century woman what church was to her grandmother. Psychology offers a sort of secular salvation, whereby patients are absolved of responsibility for their faults and failures.

“[T]herapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning capacity for self-help . . . between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence.”
– Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

Lasch’s analysis of the effect of “therapeutic morality” was published the same year that Jody Allard was born. The Culture of Narcissism was a national bestseller, and Lasch was credited for his prophetic insight as the 1980s became known as “The Me Decade.” Yet it is apparent that Ms. Allard has never bothered to read Lasch, or else she might be cognizant of Lasch’s critique of feminism, in a chapter titled “The Flight From Feeling: Sociopsychology of the Sex War.” Feminism is part of the larger cultural problem, and not a solution. While I will not bother the reader with a psychology lecture, the key point is that pathological narcissism is not mere arrogance or ordinary selfishness. Rather, narcissism involves a process of rationalization — excuse-making — in an attempt to protect the damaged ego from a sense of shame. One of the ways this is done is by blame-shifting and scapegoating, so that the narcissist never has to admit fault or accept responsibility for his own failures and shortcomings. The narcissist may become a cunning sociopath, but this scapegoating tendency may also result in paranoia, as I explained in a 2010 column, “Whatever Happened to Crazy?”

Attempting to comfort people by flattering their sense of blamelessness — ‘It’s not your fault’ — therapeutic morality ultimately undermines the vital sense of agency, in effect telling people that they are neither culpable nor competent. It promotes the notion of innocent victimhood, the blameless self, and encourages people to avoid responsibility for their failures by wallowing in self-pitying rationalizations.”

In order to become responsible adults, we must learn to accept blame for our own failures and must resist the temptation to self-pity and scapegoating. The intelligent reader can see how feminism, which tells women that patriarchy is to blame for all their problems, thereby offers them a permanent exemption from personal responsibility.

Here, then, we find Jody Allard proclaiming that all males (including her own teenage sons) are complicit in “rape culture,” a paranoid conspiracy theory that views every manifestation of male heterosexuality as a potential threat of violence from which no woman is safe. When her sons (quite naturally) protest against this insulting anti-male rhetoric, Ms. Allard responds by turning their claims of innocence into proof of guilt: To deny blame for “rape culture” is . . . rape culture.

Good luck trying to use facts and logic with Jody Allard. She is engaged in a tactic known as “kafkatrapping,” where the accuser claims to know that the accused is guilty of ThoughtCrime — racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. — and denial of guilt is treated as evidence of guilt.

Speaking of which, is Ms. Allard still abusing helpless animals? According to a 2013 report, she was accused of adopting and then “dumping” pets:

Allard often attains animals on Craiglist and other online groups, gets bored within a couple of months, and dumps them a couple of months later.  Victims have included dogs, cats, chickens and at least one rabbit.

Allegedly, I hasten to add, because I cannot verify such an accusation, and don’t know if Ms. Allard has denied these animal-abuse charges. But considering how she treats her own sons . . .

Professor Glenn Reynolds comments on Jody Allard:

You think men are bad because you make bad decisions. You let yourself off the hook for those because “empowerment,” but you judge your sons with microscopic harshness. You lead a life that ensures your sons will have no close positive role models. Angry feminist single moms, I suspect, are disproportionately the mothers of the alt-right.

Did you know Washington State has a toll-free 24/7 child abuse hotline?



 

Category: Sex Trouble

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3 Responses to “Feminist Motherhood Advice (and Other Reasons to Avoid Jody Allard)”

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