‘Gender-Neutral Parenting’ and the Problem of Unintended Consequences

Posted on | August 18, 2018 | 1 Comment

Megan Fox and her ‘gender-neutral’ sons.

The actress Megan Fox and her husband, Brian Austin Green, have three sons, but things are a little weird at the Green-Fox household:

Growing up in the South, Fox was labeled a tomboy. When her peers were playing dolls, she was playing outside, climbing trees and getting dirty. Being called a tomboy informed her sense of self and is still present in her life.
“Much of my ego has been constructed around this idea that I’m not like most girls”, says the 31-year-old mother of three boys with husband Brian Austin Green, 44. “I’m somehow more masculine, tougher, less permeable or feminine.”

(Look, “tomboy” behavior is a phenomenon that existed long before feminism, and which certainly predates this kind of Gender Studies discourse about what “masculine” and “feminine” mean. Why do people believe that constantly jabbering on like this about “gender” signifies superior intellect or moral virtue? But please, continue . . .)

Fox is not into labeling herself or others, especially her children. The “Transformers” actress faced backlash in the press and on social media after her oldest son, Noah, now 5, was photographed wearing princess dresses.
“When I became pregnant with Noah, I could feel, through my mother’s intuition I suppose, that he was not subscribing to gender stereotypes, so I decided to provide an environment for him early on that would allow him to discover how he wanted to express himself,” she says. . . .

(OK, I’m going to rant about this at length later, but just note that Fox invokes “mother’s intuition” — a highly gendered concept — as authority for knowing that her son “was not subscribing to gender stereotypes” before he was even born! But please, continue . . .)

“If a boy loves princesses and a girl loves baseball, that’s not indicative of their sexuality,” Fox says. It’s indicative of their communication and creative expression. We can’t limit children by telling them how they should play.”
Trying to control how kids play sends them subtle, constant messages that their instincts are wrong. All those attempts to control, “will only lead them down a complicated and difficult path full of self-criticism and emptiness,” she says.
Her advice? If a child’s innocent play triggers a negative emotion, use the situation as an opportunity to expand their awareness and heal old wounds.
Fox encourages other parents to implement non-gender binary lifestyles for their children. Start by giving kids “the space to find the things that resonate with them,” she says. Then encourage them.

(Pardon me for interrupting again, but what is the basis for assuming that Megan Fox is an expert qualified to advise other parents? For all we know, 20 years from now, he children might be drug addicts or violent felons. But please, continue . . .)

For example, when a boy shows interest in painting or dancing, he should be given an art set or signed up for a dance class.
“Don’t insist on buying him a football for Christmas,” she says, explaining a child’s soul is pure and knows what feels right.
She emphasizes parents need to respect children as individuals and not try to control them.
“It’s not our job to shape them into the people we think they should be,” says Fox. “It’s our job to receive, with grace, the lessons they bring us. Children are mirrors that reflect back to us our shadow selves, our shame and our insecurities.”

(What deranged nonsense is this? It most certainly is the job of parents to shape our children “into the people we think they should be,” to equip them for success in life, to teach them proper behavior — courtesy, moral virtue, etc. — for otherwise we might as well just abandon them to foster care and let them be raised by strangers hired by the government social-services bureaucracy. But I remind myself I intend to rant about this at length later, so please continue . . .)

“I think most mothers feel a pull on their hearts to let their children be who they are but because of their own conditioning and because of their current environment they acquiesce to pressures to raise the children in a more rigid traditional way,” says Fox.
She wants other parents to know it’s okay to let kids be themselves. “If by speaking out, I can validate any of those latent feelings, any of those small whispers in a mother, then I am incredibly grateful to have used my voice for something so honorable.”

Where to begin excavating this mountain of bovine excrement?

It might help to know that (a) Megan Fox’s parents divorced when she was only 3 years old and (b) she doesn’t have any brothers. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but she’s kind of kooky. In a 2010 interview with Allure magazine, she used the F-word 24 times, described herself as afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder and said she has such a fear of germs that she won’t eat in a restaurant or use public toilets.

Promoting this notoriously neurotic woman as a parenting expert is so irresponsible that only the liberal media would think it’s a good idea.

We cannot at this time know how Megan Fox’s children will turn out, and this is a fundamental problem with any innovative theory of parenting.

It is rather easy for anyone — whether a professor or a neurotic actress — to deride “a more rigid traditional way” of raising children, to wax enthusiastic about the need for parents “to let their children be who they are,” or to praise “not subscribing to gender stereotypes.” This kind of rhetoric sounds benevolent and caring, positing an implied contrast to those bad parents who, supposedly, are forcing their children into “rigid” stereotypical gender roles, limiting their self-expression. However, we can point to functional, successful, happy, well-adjusted adults — actual living human beings — as evidence of what outcomes are likely (or at least, optimally possible) as a result of more traditional parenting. The argument for so-called “gender-neutral” parenting, on the other hand, suffers from a lack of evidence, simply because this “non-binary” approach is a recent fad among a small group of trend-conscious parents.

Megan Fox has told us why she’s raising her children in this unusual manner, avowing her idealistic goal of letting her son “discover how he wanted to express himself” — good intentions, which proverbially pave the road to Hell. The problem with any such innovation is not benevolent intentions, but unintended consequences. For more than a century, Americans have been subjected to a series of social-engineering projects that liberals have foisted upon us by via court rulings, legislation, bureaucratic regulation and the public school system. Many of these innovations have yielded obvious catastrophes (e.g., public housing projects like Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green) whereas in other cases, we have more difficulty identifying a cause-and-effect relationship between liberal good intentions and various social problems. In some cases, the catastrophic outcome still looms in the future, as with the unsustainable actuarial basis of Social Security and Medicare. Liberals may claim certain projects have “succeeded,” but conservatives must stipulate that (a) anything might “succeed” if one had many billions of dollars of taxpayer money to spend on it, (b) the beneficial outcome you claim might have been achieved by less costly policies, and (c) the whole thing could go disastrously wrong at some point in the future.

However, why must we concede that liberals always act in good faith? Liberals certainly do not extend this courtesy to their opponents. Disagree with a liberal and you’ll be accused of malign intentions — racist! sexist! homophobe! — without any evidence whatsoever. In the case of Megan Fox’s enthusiasm for “gender-neutral” parenthood, why should we suppose that her justification of this is sincere? As I’ve pointed out, Ms. Fox came from a dysfunctional family backgroound and has publicly described herself as suffering from serious psychiatric problems. She speaks of herself using therapeutic jargon, recounting a youthful “tomboy” phase as explaining why her “ego has been constructed around this idea that I’m not like most girls.” In justifying why she has publicly displayed her son wearing a princess costume, Ms. Fox speaks of her fear of leading her children “down a complicated and difficult path full of self-criticism and emptiness” — as if dressing a boy like a boy was inherently harmful. All of this suggests that Ms. Fox’s unusual parenting methods are not the result of any noble concern for her children’s well-being, but rather are an expression of her own personal frustrations, neurotic impulses and leftover resentments about her own unhappy childhood.

It is by no means a great leap of logic to guess that her son is “not subscribing to gender stereotypes” (something Ms. Fox claimed she knew before he was even born) because his mother has deliberately encouraged this behavior: Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Having a “gender-non-conforming” (GNC) child is very en vogue among a certain clique of liberals, who are perfectly willing to exploit their children as a sort of political fashion accessory: “Hey, mom, turn your son into a ‘girl’ and get your own cable-TV reality show!”

This isn’t just about transgenderism, however. Remember how creepy it was the first time you saw those photos of Jon-Benet Ramsey dolled up for kiddie beauty pageants? And who can forget the weird pedophile vibes emitted by the TLC series Toddlers and Tiaras? Or what about that popular exercise in trauma-inducing childhood, Dance Moms?

When we see children exploited as a public display for the sake of TV ratings or to satisfy some weird parental whim, our common sense tells us that this is wrong. It may be legal, and it may even be popular or fashionable among certain people, but we ought to trust our gut instinct that there is something basically wrong about TV shows like I Am Jazz or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Whatever justifications are offered to rationalize this kind of programming, it offends our sense of human dignity that parents would permit their children to be exhibited like carnival sideshow freaks for the amusement of a TV audience. We expect bad things to result, both for the young reality-TV “stars” themselves, and also among viewers, a consequence of the “monkey-see-monkey-do” effect as such programming serves to normalize deviant behavior.

Liberals expect us to believe that Megan Fox’s son Noah just “wanted to express himself” by wearing a princess costume in public, and to believe that more boys would do this if parents weren’t afraid to “let their children be who they are.” We are also expected to remain silent while we are lectured by this self-declared parenting expert, rather than to express our common-sense hunch that this child’s abnormal behavior is being actively encouraged by his abnormal mom.

Here’s a question: If the only reason boys exhibit masculine behavior is because parents raise them in “a more rigid traditional way,” why is it wrong to believe that Megan Fox’s son exhibits effeminate behavior because of how his mother has raised him? That is to say, doesn’t her own explanation of how she thinks traditional parenthood operates imply that Ms. Fox has deliberately trained her son to be effeminate?

Parents shouldn’t buy their son a football for Christmas, Ms. Fox tells us. Why not? She doesn’t really explain that, does she? Where is the evidence that you are harming your son by getting him a football for Christmas? The parenting “expert” Megan Fox offers us no such evidence, even while expecting us to believe that it is entirely harmless for her to take her son out in public wearing a princess costume. Common sense tells us that there is something deceptive about these claims.

Skepticism is not paranoia. As a general rule, it is correct to suppose that abnormal behavior doesn’t emerge randomly in children, but rather is symptomatic of some disturbance in the normal developmental process. Something has gone awry in Megan Fox’s son’s life, but in a liberal community like Hollywood, it’s doubtful that social workers at Child Protective Services would intervene in this case. In fact, given how widely the idea of “gender-neutral parenting” is now promoted in academia, you’d be more likely to be reported to Child Protective Services in California if you were raising your son to be normal.

“Hello? . . . Yeah, there’s a family in my neighborhood who are stifling their children’s self-expression. . . . Well, I’ve noticed the boy spends a lot of time playing football, and they’ve got a little girl who always wears dresses. It must be abuse!”

The decadent cultural elite — including academics, journalists and Hollywood liberals like Megan Fox — have embraced a worldview where normal behavior is stigmatized, and perversion is celebrated.

Category: Celebrities, The Transgender Cult

In The Mailbox: 08.17.18

Posted on | August 17, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.17.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Rome, You Have A Problem
Twitchy: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Attempts To Explain Her Town Hall Press Ban, Makes It Hilariously Worse
Louder With Crowder: Trevor Noah Slams Leftists, Peter Strzok Raising Money Over Trump Hate
According To Hoyt: From Where You Dream
Monster Hunter Nation: August Update Post
Vox Popoli: 75% Certainty

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Spartan 300 Edition
American Thinker: Donald Trump & The Professional Conservative Class
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five WTF Vermont Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For August 17
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Don Surber: The Official Trump Schadenfreude List, also, HUD Sues Facebook – Could Jeopardize All Internet Ads
Dustbury: Feel The Shrink
The Geller Report: Massive Muslim Brotherhood Show Of Strength To Be Held In Minnesota, also, John Brennan’s CIA “Acted Like An Office Of The Hillary Campaign”
Hogewash: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means, also, The Evolving Universe
JustOneMinute: Just Don’t Call It “Fake News”
Legal Insurrection: Keith Ellison’s Accuser Karen Monahan Describes Alleged Abuse To CBS News, also, PragerU Claims They’ve Been Shadowbanned On Facebook
The PanAm Post: The United Nations – A Bastion of Corruption & Scandals
Power Line: Democrats Frighten Manafort Jurors, also, How The Left Is Outsourcing Censorship Of The Internet
Shark Tank: Jacksonville’s Mayor Curry Endorses Ron DeSantis
Shot In The Dark: Disastro
This Ain’t Hell: Horsing Around Southwest Airlines, also, Air Force Veteran Reality Leigh Winner
Victory Girls: John Brennan Steps On A Rake
Volokh Conspiracy: Fifth Circuit Rejects Constitutional Challenges To “Campus Carry”
Weasel Zippers: Fauxcahontas’ Batty Plan To Nationalize Everything, also, Louisiana Denies Citibank, BofA $600 Million Over Gun Control Push
Megan McArdle: We’re Not Doing Enough To Fully Integrate American Cities
Mark Steyn: The Constitutional Right To A Security Clearance

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Amazon Renewed – Guaranteed Refurbs

Category: Linkagery

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | August 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

“It’s wet,” he mumbled, working with a patient fury. Innocuous.
Guards scowled. The forty prisoners in the castle bailey were to work on pottery for their own use, and for Geneva Convention reasons of fair treament, they were told. They knew a trace element in the clay was killing them.
He shaped his piece with shaking hands. It’d been obtained and smuggled in at great risk while they were out burying the dead. They’d little time or energy. He looked at his conspirator, pale and feverish, who’d the detonator.
Nodded.
Ran to the wall.
Guards yelling.
Charge set.
(BOOM)
Freedom!
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Godless Commies: ‘The Concealed Enemy Against Which We Are All Fighting’

Posted on | August 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Godless Commies: ‘The Concealed Enemy Against Which We Are All Fighting’

“The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge or motives of revenge or hatred. I don’t hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise.”
— Whittaker Chambers, testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Aug. 25, 1948

One reason I become so frustrated with politics in the 21st-century is that so many young people — and, alas, not a few old people, too — know next to nothing about the history of the previous century. You cannot speak intelligently about public policy if you don’t know history, and far too many Americans simply cannot pass that test.

Some years ago, when my oldest daughter was a teenager, I was driving her and a friend to a Christian music festival in Pennsylvania. Trying to make conversation to while away the time, I began to talk about Communism, and the decades-long ordeal of the Cold War, which young people can scarcely imagine. At one point I shouted, “Godless Commies!” in a vehement tone, which phrase has since entered into family lore.

The point I was trying to make in that rant was that the reason Americans so strongly opposed Communism was because we are a Christian people, and Marxism is an atheist ideology, whose adherents have persecuted God’s people wherever the specter of Communism has gained power.

My generation grew up with the fear of nuclear Armageddon, citizens of a nation leading what President John F. Kennedy called a “long twilight struggle” to save the world from the Communist menace, and our children’s generation knows almost nothing about what that meant.

America’s triumph in the Cold War, which consigned the Soviet Union’s “evil empire” to the “ash heap of history,” to quote Ronald Reagan, has been followed by a sad retreat from the values that enabled freedom to prevail in that long ordeal. We are today less of a Christian nation than we were when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, and part of the reason for this loss of values is that our nation’s education system is now to a shocking extent controlled by godless Commies. Although they generally do not identity themselves as such, we should be under no illusions about the ideological loyalties of our nation’s university faculties, and the Democrat-controlled public-education bureaucracy. Recall that Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who now wants to “nationalize everything,” as Kevin Williamson says — once taught at prestigious Harvard University, and this should give you a general idea of what sort of latter-day Bolsheviks are now teaching America’s impressionable youth.

It is easy to joke about this. When a Red State blogger writes an article entitled “Why The Left Hates Western Culture,” Ed Driscoll quips, “You’re gonna need a bigger blog,” but it’s not really funny. Our nation’s youth are being quite literally indoctrinated with an anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-constitutional worldview that threatens to destroy the legacy of liberty bequeathed to us by our patriot forefathers.

Yet there is still hope. At least one young man has kept the faith, and studied the history that our schools don’t generally teach. Only 26 years old, and an alumnus of Hillsdale College, Caleb Whitmer has taught at Sacred Heart Academy in Michigan, but now lives in the D.C. suburbs. He has written an excellent article for The Federalist:

Seventy years ago this month, Washington politicians were trying to sort out a case involving dodgy characters and Russian collusion. One man involved described it as “a tragedy of history” (Following Marx’s maxim, Paul Manafort’s trial would be the farce). Like today, it was a time of growing sympathy for harder leftist ideology, one that provides some clarity to our own socialist moment.
In early August 1948, a senior editor of Time magazine was subpoenaed for testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. That editor was Whittaker Chambers, a former member of the Communist underground who had coordinated the infiltration of various government agencies by Soviet sympathizers in the mid-1930s.
Among others, his testimony unmasked Alger Hiss, a former senior State Department official. Their subsequent legal showdown, recorded by Chambers in his 1952 memoir, “Witness,” would become a classic saga of the Cold War, a minor epic in the larger struggle between the United States and Soviet Russia.
At first glance, in the eyes of this millenial born six months after Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation dissolved the U.S.S.R., “Witness” appears dusty. On my copy, Regnery brands the book a “Cold War Classic,” a true, if limiting, title. Part of the appeal of “Witness” is undoubtedly historical: Chambers drops us into a world of fedoras and smoke-filled rooms. On cold nights, the oblivious drivers of Ford Model-Ts pass plotting Soviet agents tramping in the rain between Manhattan street lamps, and the voice of a relatively unknown congressman from California, 35-year-old Richard Nixon, crackles with mid-century professionalism in packed and sweltering D.C. court rooms.
Just barely predating Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Chambers’ story shows us 1930s Soviet espionage unpolluted by either cliche or nostalgia. . . .

You definitely should read the whole thing. I’m going to print out copies for my kids. This should be required reading for all young people, lest they fall prey to the indoctrination of those godless Commies.

Category: Education, History

More News About ‘Rape Culture’ That Feminists Won’t Notice, for Some Reason

Posted on | August 17, 2018 | 2 Comments

Huddersfield is a town in northern England, about halfway between Leeds and Manchester. Authorities say at least five girls ages 12-18 in this Yorkshire community were systematically raped and prostituted over a span of several years by a gang of Pakistani immigrants:

Thirty men have been charged with raping and trafficking five girls in West Yorkshire.
The allegations against the defendants relate to non-recent sexual offences dating back to between 2005 and 2012. They relate to five women who say they were abused as children in the Huddersfield area between the ages of 12 and 18.
One woman, Fehreen Rafiq, 38, from Huddersfield, is charged with two counts of facilitating the commission of a child sex offence.
The 31 accused will appear at Kirklees magistrates court on 5-6 September 2018. They are:

Banaras Hussain, 37, of Shipley, charged with one count of rape of a female over 16.
Banaris Hussain, 35, of Huddersfield, charged with one count of rape of a girl aged 13-15.
Mohammed Suhail Arif, 30, of Huddersfield, charged with rape of a girl aged 13-15.
Iftikar Ali, 37, of Huddersfield, charged with attempted rape of a girl aged 13-15 and three counts of rape of a girl aged 13-15.
Mohammed Sajjad, 31, of Huddersfield, charged with four counts of rape of a female aged 13-15, one rape of a girl under 13 and facilitating the commission of a child sex offence.
Fehreen Rafiq, 38, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of facilitating the commission of a child sex offence.
Umar Zaman, 30, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Basharat Hussain, 31, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Amin Ali Choli, 36, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of rape of a female over 16 years old.
Shaqeel Hussain, 35, of Dewsbury, charged with rape of a female aged 13-15 and two counts of trafficking.
Mubasher Hussain, 35, of Huddersfield, charged with rape of a female aged 13-15 and sexual assault.
Abdul Majid, 34, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Mohammed Dogar, 35, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of facilitating the commission of a child sex offence.
Usman Ali, 32, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Mohammed Waqas Anwar, 29, of Huddersfield, charged with five counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Gul Riaz, 42, of Huddersfield, charged with rape of a female aged 13-15.
Mohammed Akram, 41, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of trafficking with a view to sexual exploitation of a female and rape of a female aged 14-15.
Manzoor Akhtar, 29, of Huddersfield, charged with trafficking and three counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Samuel Fikru, 30, of Camden, charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.

Recall that Tommy Robinson was imprisoned for reporting on another trial of another Pakistani sex-trafficking gang in England. When feminists talk about “rape culture,” “misogyny” and “violence against women,” it is always in the context of demonizing “privileged” white males. Therefore, when crimes against women are committed by those who do not fit this template — e.g., Muslim immigrants — feminists have nothing to say, except perhaps to lament the “backlash” of “Islamophobia.”

What this suggests is that feminists aren’t actually interested in improving the lives of women, in general. Rather, what feminists seek is to increase their own political power, a goal they expect to obtain as members of a broader coalition of the Left. Because the Left — in England, as in America — is organized on the basis of identity politics, appealing to the grievances of minorities, this requires feminists to avoid any criticism of their left-wing coalition partners.

Feminists expect us to believe that it is only “privileged” white men who are responsible for the oppression of women, just as white men are also to blame for the oppression of racial minorities and homosexuals. This “intersectional” analysis, based on the scapegoating of white males, is convenient for the political Left, providing a preemptive excuse to ignore any wrongdoing committed by anyone (including white men) who supports their destructive left-wing agenda. All of this is derived from a rigid ideology of “social justice” in which human beings exist only as members of collective groups (not individuals, responsible for their own lives) in a world defined by systemic oppression. This theoretical conception becomes a sort of cult religion, and any evidence that does not support this worldview is ignored or explained away as irrelevant by the cult priesthood (politicians, academics, journalists, etc.) who bombard their disciples with atrocity tales of wrongdoing by the demonized scapegoats — “privileged” white males who are, to the Cult of Social Justice, what Satan is to Christian theology.

Certainly, I do not mean to demonize Pakistani Muslims the way that feminists demonize white heterosexual males. I do not assert that all Pakistani Muslim immigrants are complicit in the crimes committed by Hussain, et al., whereas feminists habitually assert that “rape culture” is a universal phenomenon for which all men are to blame.

What I mean to illustrate, by calling attention to such cases as this, is a very simple fact — feminist ideology is wrong.

The world does not work the way feminists say it does. Their mindless adherence to a theory of “social justice” — collective privilege, collective victimhood, systemic oppression, etc. — leads feminists to propagate falsehoods, with results that are harmful to women.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.

RECENTLY:

July 30: Illegal Alien Sentenced for Raping Girl
July 29: Pimp Who Trafficked 16-Year-Old Girl Sentenced to 30 Years in Federal Prison
July 29: Two Men Sentenced to Federal Prison for Sex Trafficking of ‘Fun Size’ Girl, 15
July 29: Suspect Charged With Trafficking Girl, 17
July 29: ICE Seeks Fugitive Sex Trafficker

Category: Great Britain, Immigration, Islam, Sex Trouble, Violence Against Women

Poll Finds Most Young Women Do Not — Repeat, DO NOT — Identify as Feminists

Posted on | August 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Poll Finds Most Young Women Do Not — Repeat, DO NOT — Identify as Feminists

Imagine their screeching fury:

Feminist website Refinery29 got more than it bargained for when it teamed up with CBS to poll 842 women ages 18-35 about — among other things — feminism. When asked, “Do you consider yourself to be a feminist, or not?” over half (54 percent) of respondents said, “No.” Not only that, only 19 percent of respondents identified as Republican. In fact, the largest group of women polled (34 percent) identified as Democrat, with 27 percent identifying Independent, and 20 percent unsure of their political party.
“These are surprising results,” writes Refinery29’s Ashley Alese Edwards. “Feminism seems to be more en vogue than ever,” she insists, “even men call themselves feminists now.” And what about “the Women’s March, the ‘resistance’ (which is largely women-led) and #MeToo,” Edwards laments. How could you not be feminist?!
To her credit, Edwards actually interviewed some of these strange non-feminist creatures, presumably to find out what on earth was wrong with them. Leah, a 22-year old independent, told Edwards, “I feel like the movement has been largely taken over by far-left wing activists that make it nearly impossible for me to identify with.” She also called feminists “disingenuous” for denying “any negative emotional backlash or health risks for women having an abortion.” She continued, “Although not all women suffer emotionally or physically after an abortion, many do, and their stories are ignored by mainstream feminism because it doesn’t fit the narrative of abortion being a good thing for women.”
A 25-year-old Republican named Stephanie, whom Edwards spoke to, even went so far as to say, “I don’t think women in the modern western world are oppressed.” Stephanie continued, “I think modern feminists try to create a boogeyman out of what they call the patriarchy and hunt it down, but it’s not necessary…. Men and women have different strengths and weaknesses. Acknowledging that is not sexist.”

(Hat-tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

Let me say that the arguments for feminism have not improved one iota since 1871, when R.L. Dabney published “Women’s Rights Women”:

In our day, innovations march with so rapid a stride that they quite take away one’s breath. The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is to-day the audacious reform, and will be to-morrow the accomplished fact. Such has been the history of the agitation for “women’s rights,” as they are sophistically called in this country. A few years ago this movement was the especial hobby of a few old women of both sexes, who made themselves the laughing-stock of all sane people by the annual ventilation of their crotchet. Their only recruits were a few of the unfortunates whom nature or fortune had debarred from those triumphs and enjoyments which are the natural ambition of the sex, and who adopted this agitation as the most feasible mode of expressing their spitefulness against the successful competitors. To-day the movement has assumed such dimensions that it challenges the attention of every thoughtful mind.
If we understand the claims of the Women’s Rights women, they are in substance two: that the legislation, at least, of society shall disregard all the natural distinctions of the sexes, and award the same specific rights and franchises to both in every respect; and that woman while in the married state shall be released from every species of conjugal subordination. The assimilation of the garments of the two sexes, their competition in the same industries and professions, and their common access to the same amusements and recreations, are social changes which the “strong-minded” expect to work, each one for herself, when once the obstructions of law are removed from the other points. . . .

Read the whole thing. It might help to know that Dabney, a Presbyterian theologian, served as Stonewall Jackson’s chief-of-staff.

Category: Sex Trouble

Denver Teenager Murders Nephew, 7, After Argument With Lesbian Girlfriend

Posted on | August 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Denver Teenager Murders Nephew, 7, After Argument With Lesbian Girlfriend

Jennie Bunsom (left) is accused of murdering Jordan Vong (right).

On the evening of Monday, Aug. 6, Denver police were alerted to the disappearance of 7-year-old Jordan Vong. Police went door-to-door searching a 20-block area around the home and called in the FBI. A police spokeswoman said: “We’re asking everyone, if you’re up this morning, you’re having your coffee, take a look in the backyard, look in your shed, check in your car, check anywhere you think a little 7-year-old who is 3-foot-7 could hide because he could be hunkered down somewhere cold. So if he is in the area, please give us a call.”

Tuesday night, Aug. 7, police found Vong dead, his body hidden in the family’s home. The accused killer was his own teenage aunt:

The 16-year-old girl accused of killing and hiding the body of her 7-year-old nephew Jordan Vong names her girlfriend as an accessory to the crime, according to the arrest affidavit.
The Denver Police Department said 16-year-old Jennie Bunsom suffocated the boy, wrapped his body in a blanket and placed him in her bedroom closet.
Bunsom was scheduled to be in juvenile court Tuesday morning, but because the Denver District Attorney’s Office is charging her as an adult, her appearance was waived until Thursday morning.
Bunsom was charged Monday as an adult with first-degree murder after deliberation and first-degree murder of a person under the age of 12 by a person in a position of trust.
Court papers say on the afternoon of Aug. 6, Bunsom got in an argument with her girlfriend over the phone and was upset.
Jordan came downstairs and asked her to play video games. She said no. He then laid down on her bed, according to the affidavit.
Bunsom asked him to leave and when he didn’t, she reportedly shoved Jordan, causing him to hit his face on the floor.
He began to cry. Bunsom allegedly told police she placed her hand over his mouth and plugged his nose. Jordan was struggling to breathe, then stopped moving.
The affidavit says Bunsom put his body under her bed, then called her girlfriend and told her what happened.
In an interview with police, Bunsom said her girlfriend “told her she had to hide Jordan’s body and told her to put his body in the closet.”
The girlfriend has not been identified because she is 17-years-old and a juvenile. The district attorney’s office said as of now, no one else is facing charges.

“Love is love.” “Diversity is our strength.”

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Category: Crime