Reminder: This is a feminist blog. Comments are welcome, but comments need to be “feminist-friendly”. Contrarians whose primary contribution is to ask “What about the menz” in one form or another may do so elsewhere, please.
Inviting National Review editor Katherine Jean Lopez and right-wing author Kathleen Parker to discuss feminism together is a bit like asking Pat Robertson and the Ayatollah Khomeini to teach a seminar on the French Enlightenment. Whatever gets said, there ain’t gonna be much good.
It’s a confusing discussion. On the one hand, Parker trots out the tired old saw of gender essentialism:
Boys and girls are hard-wired differently, which one notices as soon as the little critters become mobile. Although there are exceptions, girls can sit and focus for long periods and boys need to move around more. In fact, brain research shows that multitasking stimulates the pleasure center of women’s brains, hence 42 years of NOW. The men’s movement has been in gestation for 15 years and hasn’t begun to quicken yet. Ultimately, letting men be men means not insisting that they be our best girlfriends.
I wonder how Kathleen Parker explains the feats of memory undertaken by Torah students for three millenia, who do relatively little moving around and learn with dutiful exactness? Or how the Chinese civil service survived nearly as long with a nearly all-male membership, made up of fellows who spent hours not only committing the law to memory, but learning how to shape complex characters? How could they have done these things, when it is so “natural” for boys and men to be easily distracted and in need of constant physical exertion?
The “save the males” movement, of which Parker is now very much a part, argues that our education system — with its emphasis on rote learning, on obedience and neatness, is designed to serve girls better than boys. And yet in the 19th century English public school, and in Ming China, and in Solomon’s temple, boys showed an extraordinary ability to concentrate and endure. The idea that men “naturally” have a greater attention deficit isn’t born out by a study of global pedagogical history!
Of course, Parker also argues, happily, that biology is not destiny, saying:
I happen to be one of those women who think men are capable of rising above their basest instincts.
Shucks, Kathleen, that’s awful nice of ya. Parker thinks men can control their porn use, but apparently can’t learn to sit still in the classroom, nor learn how to perform domestic tasks as well as women. This is where most conservative gender ideology founders, after all: it insists on great feats of male sexual self-control, while simultaneously denying that men have the capacity to restrict their supposedly natural inclinations towards violence and messiness. In Parker’s world, porn use is a bad thing (for different reasons, I happen to agree). But while she’s happy to ask men to give up porn, she’s not ready to ask them to become sensitive, thoughtful, fully egalitarian human beings with the ability to sit still for five minutes. For Parker, the sex drive is malleable in a way that the attention span is not, but she provides no evidence for such an odd and unreasonable assertion.
But the most unforgiveable line in the NRO piece comes here, in this exchange with Lopez:
Lopez: How did “shame attached to unwed motherhood serve a useful purpose once upon a time”?
Parker: It kept our knees together. Importantly, it allowed girls to hang onto their innocence a little longer until they really were women.
As John Bradshaw and others have pointed out, shame differs from guilt. Guilt is the response to having done something wrong; shame is an intense feeling of personal “badness.” Guilt is the sense that I have done something wrong; shame is the sense that there is something wrong with me. Guilt is sometimes a healthy emotion, a good check on our worst impulses. There’s nothing positive about shame, and sexual shame in particular has the power to corrode the psyche for a lifetime. I know many adults who still carry the shame of what they did in adolescence, and there is nothing positive about shame.
More importantly, shame and innocence don’t go together. Indeed, as anyone who has read Genesis ought to know, shame begins with the end of innocence. Shame doesn’t preserve innocence, it inculcates fear and self-loathing and despair. To suggest that we ought to return to shaming unwed mothers (but not, apparently, unwed fathers) as an instrument for protecting the young is, frankly, an obscene idea. My classes are filled with women who had babies without being married to the father of the child. I’ve taught sex ed to high schoolers for many years. And if there’s one thing I’m convinced of it’s this: theologically, spiritually, and psychologically shame is never, ever, ever, a good thing. It is poisonous, and those who promote it do the work of the Serpent who first taught shame to Adam and Eve.
Parker’s right: men do often need saving. But they don’t need saving from feminism, or from family law courts. They need saving from our culture’s absurd notions about masculinity, from an unattainable ideal of physical and emotional hardness. They need saving from the double bind of impossibly high expectations (”Be a sturdy oak”) and asininely low ones (”Boys will be boys”.) And in the work of saving men, feminists are the ones rowing the lifeboats.
Your logic is flawed. A differential performance does not constitute a categorical disqualification. The Chinese could have scholars and the Jews could memorize Torah because both men and women are capable of doing that; it turns out (or so it seems anyway, I’m always suspicious of these types of studies) that women would have had an easier time doing the same job. But they didn’t, because in those societies at those times, those activities were mostly closed off to women.
As for whether men need saving from family law courts, I will simply note that while oppression is a society-wide balance, at the micro level it’s one on one. Women don’t have to be oppressing us all in a dreadful matriarchy, in order for one set of society’s institutions to unfairly privilege mothers. If one of your previous marriages had resulted in children and you’d had a custody fight, I suspect you would have a slightly different take on this.
I personally had a bit of a “I get it” moment regarding the need for one kind of feminism when I was talking about a particularly egregious case of mom-centrism and how unfair it was, and a very fair-minded feminist friend said “yeah, that’s incredibly shitty, isn’t it? think how you would feel if a job opening was administered by someone with that kind of sexist assumption.” Ding; unfairness hurts.
Hugo. Your examples of Torah and the Chinese literate class are nice…but fail.
Because Parker is right. Neurologically, on what might be considered the mechanical or anatomical level, the brains are different. And when stimulated, the brains’ sectors fire differently.
Hugo,
I’m in general agreement with the post, except for the last line:
“And in the work of saving men, feminists are the ones rowing the lifeboats.”
Feminists claim to care about men, but it is really just a marketing scam, using the tired “Patriarchy Hurts Men Too” to win over male allies. In reality, feminists consider women’s interests as paramount. There is nothing wrong with that, but men as a group would be foolish to look to feminists to understand their situation and advocate for them. Men need to start supporting each other.
In response to Robert,
I’ll admit I can’t quite make out what the quoted women are trying to say, but it seems to me that rather than requiring that we help boys strive to do their best, we should just throw up our hands and say they’re simply not capable. And Hugo, with his Jewish and Chinese examples, is saying that they are too capable - whether girls would have been better in those situations had they been allowed to participate is a moot point.
That interview between them is tough for me - most of the things they say make my eyes bleed, and other parts are things I agree with the spirit of (if not the way they stated it). Sweating Through The Fog is right that feminism considers women’s interests as paramount - after all, when men were able to vote and women weren’t, there wasn’t much to say about the men. They could already vote! And while I don’t think that the third wave of feminism has “made them pornstars” it certainly has ventured into areas where we’re not necessarily asking for things that men already have. For example, things like “Boys are dumb, throw rocks at them” t-shirts on the outside look like they’re statements of strong women who don’t take crap from men - but it’s not like men had t-shirts about dumb women that we were trying to gain the right to emulate. As a feminist, I don’t want to earn the right to be as shitty to men as men have been to women - I want all of us to start holding each other and ourselves accountable and being better people. So, for me, feminism IS about the men. It’s about how I, as a woman, treat men, and how men treat me.
I’m not sure what my point is at this point - but since the interview was all over the place, it’s hard to form one solid thought about it.
My first paragraph makes it sound like I think we should just throw up our hands and not require much from boys - that is not my intent, I left out some words - that’s what I think the women in the article are trying to say!
I think the suggestion is that we may as well be throwing up our hands and not requiring boys to become like girls–the preferred feminist outcome. Since it doesn’t work, anyway.
Raising a boy to a man takes a lot of work, and civilizing a muscular proto-barbarian isn’t done by making him play with dolls.
There is no room for throwing up hands if we want a boy to be a man.
I spent Sunday afternoon with an extended family, including five kids. Girls 5 1/2 and 3 1/2. Boys eighteen months and fifteen months. Girl–my grandaughter–eleven months.
I’ve known them since they were born.
The older boy is called “Bam-Bam” because he has a favorite rubber baseball bat with which he hits things. He has cheerfully acccepted the difference between animate and inanimate objects, hitting only the latter. The younger boy found a grill scraper, about a foot long and commenced hitting things with it. Since it had edges, we took it away and substituted something with more give.
The older boy is off the charts in height, weight, and, apparently, is benching more than his weight. Looks like it, anyway. The younger boy is barely on the charts and both are the biggest kids in the pediatrician’s practice, ever.
I have no desire to soften these two. Civilizing them is different.
When my granddaughter brings a young man to a family function in a decade and a half and introduces Gibson and Tyler, I don’t want him to see a speck of softness in their suspicious gaze.
American Enterprise Institute has an article on androgynous marriage in 2004. Their conclusions are their own, the research is not. And much of it supports the hard-wired view of certain behavioral propensities.
Both guilt and shame can be a helpful and/or harmful emotion. Shame, like guilt, can be a beneficial restraint on someone’s worst impulses.
Shame is a social emotion, similar to how ridicule is social one. Shame is imposed from other’s negative opinions of your behavior, not from violating your own moral compass. You could feel guilt for your actions on a deserted island, but not shame. Similarly, you might laugh at yourself for having a pratfall on that island, but no one would be there to ridicule you for it.
For people with an immature or incomplete moral compass, shame may help them from continuing to commit self-destructive behaviors.
Problem with a shame culture is that you can get away with whatever nobody can pin on you and suffer not at all. No conscience to bother you. Or whatever nobody is brave enough to admit knowing you did.
And what some people would do to erase the shame–as opposed to either not doing it in the first place or repenting and repairing in the second place–rises quite easily to murder.
Brilliant analysis, Hugo. I plan to devote a post on my blog on this statement very soon:
Shame doesn’t preserve innocence, it inculcates fear and self-loathing and despair.
As someone who has been slut-shamed by her father in a public restaurant, (in his words, he is “concerned about my ‘immortal soul’” because he suspected that I was sexually active before marriage, that sentence makes so much sense to me.
If you don’t have a conscience and nobody can pin any wrongdoing on you, you will always get away with whatever wrongdoing that you did. Being in a shame culture, or not, has nothing to do with that. I don’t understand how murder can erase shame. I guess if you murder all the people that were trying to shame you and get away with it, it would work.
In shame cultures, like ancient Greece and medieval Japan, suicide was the ultimate method of erasing shame. For example, the shame of Ajax caused him to commit suicide.
However, honor cultures are a different story. In honor cultures, someone causing you or your family to lose honor can be murdered to regain that loss of honor.
I think Fred and I are talking about two different kinds of shame. There’s the ancient sense, in which shame acts as a social inhibitor on those (like the Greeks) who are “outer directed”. Hector, as my students know, goes out to fight despite Andromache’s pleas not out of sense of private duty but out of a longing to win public honor and avoid private shame.
But to talk about how shame functions in our lives today is very different; the Judeo-Christian notion of shame is not the Homeric one. For modern folks, shame is a deep wound — a sense that regardless of what they have done or not done, they are “bad” people. There’s nothing positive abou tit.
Hugo, on your Chinese, Jewish, and British examples, I don’t know if you caught that you’re identifying rather unusual and problematic examples. In the Chinese case, for most of Chinese history, becoming a scholar was, official meritocracy and the few notable examples of its actual practice aside, overwhelmingly the exclusive province of the gentry. The vast majority of Chinese men lacked the personal or family financial resources to study for and pass the tests to join the bureaucracy, and never even learned to read until the modern era. 19th-century British public-school boys were another select population, likewise sons of the gentry, and likewise selected to rule an empire. Public-school boys did not comprise nor represent the majority of British boys, not today and certainly not in the 19th century. You can’t not be aware of the historical status of Jews as a similar select minority living among a Gentile minority, and one in which education and intellectual pursuits provided a transportable asset, a social role and livelihood in occupations forbidden to Gentiles, and social standing within the Jewish community. The specific example you raise, the Kohenim in Solomon’s temple, were an even more select and non-representative sample.
Whether accidentally or not, you’ve identified the world’s two most significant diaspora communities, ones commonly associated with education, trade, and often identified as “market-dominant-minorities” (a phrase originating with Amy Chua of Yale Law who wrote on the case of overseas Chinese), as well as a small subset of a population selected to be the future administrators of history’s largest empire. It’s fair to wonder whether there are confounding factors in play. Some would take your example to search for that factor in directions that you probably wouldn’t countenance (e.g.: biology, culture). The 19th-century British gentry certainly thought that there was “something” fundamentally different between them and the people whom they ruled, both within the British Isles and abroad. I’ll leave that very problematic argument well enough alone. I will suggest, however, that historical cases of extraordinary academic achievement by very small, select and “high-investment” populations of boys may not tell us much of relevance to the modern case of universal public education. The most significant concerns about boys’ educational performance in contemporary America are certainly not about challenges faced by very many Chinese-American, Jewish, or preparatory school boys, nor about the question of how a very small and select subset of men may successfully function at a very high academic level, as opposed to why such a large and disproportionate share (relative to girls) are functioning at such a low level, if at all.
So boys can’t sit still? Try being a girl with (suspected) ADD.
I believe I read that there’s more difference within each sex than between them.
I should have clarified the above: “You can’t not be aware of the historical status of Jews as a similar select minority living among a Gentile minority, and one in which education and intellectual pursuits provided a transportable asset, a social role and livelihood in occupations frowned upon by Gentiles and in response to opportunities forbidden to Jews, and social standing within the Jewish community.”
Further corrective, I should have said “Gentile majority”. Whew, long day!
Tom, I picked examples of groups in which education and memorization were valued for millenia — so of course I’m going to be selecting from small, distinct groups. What other groups could I have chosen? The point is, boys could do it when pushed to do so; up until recently, only a tiny subset of such boys were.
By that logic, Hugo, any boy can benchpress 500 pounds, or be trained to do so, because a tiny subset of boys have been thus successfully trained.
The question isn’t, “what are the best-practice pedagogies for training elite groups of intellectual superheroes”, it’s “what are the best practices for training everyone”. When you’re talking about one end of a bell curve, you will reach different conclusions than when you’re talking about the whole curve.
To put it in concrete terms and frame it in gender terms, I’m almost certain that the exact same pedagogy will work for the most brilliant male mathematics student in the world, and the most brilliant female mathematics student in the world. I am not at all certain that the same is true of the math students at the 50th percentile. The first case are freak outliers. The second case are typical samples. You’re trying to use freak outliers as a counterexample to a 50th percentile argument.
Shorter Kathleen Parker: Boys will be boys naturally, and feminists are getting in the way of us teaching boys to be boys, which they won’t be without interference because it’s natural.
Interestingly, part of boys “nature” that Parker wants to be respected is being a rapist. Since we have to teach them their “nature”, presumably she’s all about teaching boys to rape.
Robert, I’ve dealt with the issue of the “boy crisis” elsewhere. The ennui and distractedness manifested by boys has many roots and many possible solutions, but the notion that feminism is somehow to blame is absurd.
Women were the majority of elementary school teachers fifty years ago, after all, and from what I hear, schools in this country were more strict than they are today. We’re much more appreciative of differing learning styles today than we were in the 1950s, and yet boys are still under-performing. My own theory, oft-expressed, is an absence of healthy male role models in the broader culture. That’s not feminism’s fault; it’s the fault of a generation of men who have disappearad from the lives of their children.
I agree. It isn’t feminism’s fault. There are some ideas with feminist origins that are contributing to the problem, but there are also ideas with traditionalist origins that are huge pieces of it as well. Who cares about blame? Let’s fix it.
“Tom, I picked examples of groups in which education and memorization were valued for millenia — so of course I’m going to be selecting from small, distinct groups. What other groups could I have chosen?” No other groups Hugo, and that was my point. In those past eras, in Ming China, 19th century England, or the Kingdom of Israel, far fewer boys were going to become scholars as were going to become farmers, artisans, or soldiers who would never need and never receive an education defined by quiet, patient, rote work.
What’s changed is that our economy and technology have altered the relative life opportunities open to those able to pursue a “life of the mind” versus one of the hand, namely much greater in the first case and much lesser in the second. Except that our pedagogical philosophy has not kept pace (even 50 years ago in the United States, there were more opportunities open at least to be a tradesperson, so how well the system actually did work back then didn’t matter as much as it does today. And few people were taking much public notice or concern about the opportunities and performance of minority students or girls at all). We’re essentially on new ground here as a species. So far as I can see, no one has yet figured out how to turn an entire society into Lake Wobegon (where all the children are above average).
Hugo, your point about role models is an interesting one. A few months ago, something had me thinking on this topic. A family friend got in contact with me about her nephew, who was planning on joining the Marines after high school. Having served in the Marines in my early 20s, before going back to college, she wanted advice and possibly for me to talk to the boy (my advice to him boiled down to that it was his decision and his alone, but that he had to make it carefully and because it was something that he was totally committed to and believed in, and not out of a need to personally compensate for something or an absence of alternatives; that it wasn’t and never would be for everyone or even most people; and that he would have to face and take responsibility for changes, most of them positive but not necessarily all of them, that could leave his life in a very different place four years later, and that he would almost certainly do a rotation in Iraq). There were family and cultural issues in play as well. He had two older sisters in college, was a good student, and came from a successful professional-class family, where enlisting in the Marines wasn’t exactly expected.
The episode got me to thinking a bit myself though about why someone would join the Marines when they had other opportunities, as I had eight years before. I hadn’t performed so well in high school, though did well enough years later at a JC to transfer into and get through Cal, and well enough there to now be in at first-tier law schools. What I remember from back then was being sick of school, bored, restless, and wanting to make my mark on the world then and there, and not spend another 4-8 years sitting at a desk, just for the opportunity to spend 30 years as a faceless, white-collared wage slave. (Never having been one, I can’t speak with any intelligence as to whether very many young women have similar experiences) In some times past, I think that young men may have had relatively better alternatives. You could apprentice at a trade and learn by doing, sail to a distant shore and seek your fortune there, go be a cowboy on the frontier, whatever. Then the country de-industrialized, all the distant shores got developed, and the cows were fenced into feedlots.
These days, young men who aren’t sure if they want to stay in school, who don’t know how different higher education is from high school, or who simply aren’t prepared, and may in fact never be prepared, for college-level work, don’t have so many answers to the question about what they want to be. The United States today has a record number of adults with bachelor’s degrees of any society in history, but that only comes out to about 25%. The military has a ready-made answer to the “ennui and distractedness” you mentioned, and especially the Marines. I’ve always said that, as a rule of thumb, people join the Army and Air Force for a job they can learn and benefits they can earn, the Navy for places they can go, but the Marine Corps for who and what they could be. It’s a ready-made answer for someone trying to find one, and it’s the reason that, as far as I know, alone among the services, the Marines have never failed to make their annual recruiting mission in the 30-year history of the all-volunteer force.
But most people couldn’t hack it as Marines in the first place, and given that we’ve had an Administration that’s pursued a breathtakingly foolish and ruinous foreign policy over the last seven years, maybe that’s not such a great opportunity these days anymore either. Further alternatives look even less promising. Only very, very few people will have the natural gifts to be movie stars and platinum-selling rappers and NBA players, the idols we worship today. The bottom of the service sector economy is a dead-end, on life support up until they can figure out how to outsource or import the labor for a call center or a haircut or a car wash. Our fathers who did do the white-collar symbolic-analyst route usually weren’t much in the way of role models themselves, as they were usually too busy building their own little empires and careers to have much “quality time” with us, and we aren’t likely to be much better. And then there are the many negative and destructive paths for aimless young men to follow: gangs, extremist groups, religious cults, or even just the “pot, porn and video games” that you decry.
So, Tyler Durden has the gun to our heads in the alley, asking us what we wanted to be. I’m not interested in, and don’t much see the point to, issuing damnations against feminism, which even if it were partially responsible, couldn’t have had an impact equal to even a miniscule fraction of the broad sweeps of technology, culture and economics. At the same time, against that, I don’t see what opportunities there are for sua sponte voluntarism, that all we need to do is to change ourselves into something else, that will somehow overcome the situation we are in. We have no idea what to be, or what to tell someone else to be, and nobody else seems to either.
It’s fine if you wish to take issue with the gender-differences point they’re trying to make, but could you please tell me why you (and others here) tend to spell “men” with a “z”? Are you suggesting that men, themselves, have difficulty spelling the word?
Hugo, I’ve already pointed out that if you buy the existence of a “boy crisis”, writing off a whole category of young men as “over-medicated hyperactives” (your words from a previous post) won’t do a whole lot to help alleviate it.
I also don’t find your “sturdy oaks” rhetoric very helpful. Ignoring the cross-cultural issues, controlling the expression of our emotions has a survival value for women and men in so many situations that it really doesn’t do to sneer at it. Perhaps you have some definition of “sturdy oaks” that doesn’t encompass coolness in stressful and dangerous situations or plain courage; in that case, I’d like to hear it.
“Sturdy Oak”: not revealing pain even when the pain inside is immense; “sturdy oakness” manifests as an unwilling (and even an apparent inability) to disclose hurt snd seek help.
See below for an example of the use of public shame to reduce domestic violence. However, public knowledge of his domestic violence may cause self-loathing in the perpetrator and make him fear the public reaction if he commits the violence again. It is much better for him if shame tactics are not used and none of the neigbors know what he has been doing.
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Bill is a retired police officer who worked in many Chicago neighborhoods. He made a list of, in his words, “the things that cops do to keep the peace that no one wants to know about.”
3. Always deal with domestic violence on the spot. Make sure that when you catch a perp, all the folks on the block see you drag his sorry a– to court. Shaming somebody can sometimes be your greatest weapon. Hell, sometimes we will cuff the perp to the car, turn on the lights, and just keep him there until all the people get a chance to see him.
On sturdy oak, I think that two things happen. One is an issue of situational appropriateness. The shop floor, the pitch meeting, or the line of scrimmage are not places to have a personal moment. “Sturdy oak”, when it comes to facing challenges and situations with courage, steadiness, and level-headedness, is a good thing. We could call that stoicism or “having a pair”. There’s probably not enough of that, people having the sand to forthrightly face and deal with life (including getting help for problems when they need it). When that pattern extends to a 24/7 endeavor, such that, off-line and away from whatever times and places require dry, clear eyes and straight spines, we can’t deal with our problems, then it’s a problem itself.
The other thing I think is that few men have much of an understanding and vocabulary to deal with personal problems. A lot of us couldn’t honestly say how we feel or how we’re doing most of the time any given day, and honestly don’t much know. Hugo, you’ve talked about anger being the default substitute for hurt in a lot of cases.
I am uncertain how I feel about public shaming, even of perpetrators whom I would like to see executed. I guess it is something that could get out of hand real quick, the sort of weapon that could be so addictive to the user that the user might start overusing it. I don’t know for sure, I just know it makes me uneasy to read of Bill the ex-cop’s tactics.
Do we really want to go back to the days when floggings, brands and hangings were the main entertainment?
I guess I always thought of corrections in terms of reparation, and re-education of the offender, rather than just making them suffer. Even if I had to kill someone I wouldn’t torture them. Mabye it is when we are the angriest that we most need to stay in control of ourselves. As for situations for which there is no reparation–how do you un-molest someone?–well, that’s one that could start a whole new set of arguments; I know what I think ought to be done to them, but I’m not keen on making a tailgate party out of it, even though relief and “closure” are okay. And so with shaming, which is kind of a tailgate party for everyone else, to begin with.
I haven’t got it all thought out, I’ll admit this. It’s a start.
–I think “menz” was someone’s attempt at sarcasm, that happened to catch on. Now, just what is sua sponte voluntarism?
Fred, I find that an appalling way of dealing with domestic violence, one step above taking a suspect out and beating him senseless.
And the term “menz” has become a trope that is widely used.
Why is it widely used, though?
If a male poster disrupted a thread here by saying, “Oh, here we go! ‘The poor womenz!’” I imagine that wouldn’t go over real big. By using the “word” “menz,” the user seems to be trying to invalidate someone else’s concerns. Can’t you announce that a thread will focus on women without using an insulting term?
It refers, b, to a habit of thread-hijacking, in which MRAs come into feminist discussions to talk, invariably, about how “men suffer too”. It’s a derailing tactic and thus fair game to lampoon. It doesn’t mean men don’t have legitimate concerns, it just means that it’s not fair to insert those concerns into a completely different discussion.
Well to be fair, given that the post was prompted, in part, by a book recently published by one of the principal subjects entitled “Save the Males” (or should that be “Save the Malez”?) and contained discussions, among other things, male experiences with education and sexuality, the menz are not entirely irrelevant or tangential to the discussion.
Sua sponte voluntarism - Sua sponte: Latin: “Of one’s own accord”, spontaneous, done without outside prompting or inducement. Voluntarism: A theory or doctrine that regards the will as the fundamental principle of the individual or of the universe. e.g.: as practiced in Maoist China, where public campaigns (such as the Great Leap forward) and other measures predicated on will and public action were held to be capable of overcoming objective structural social conditions.
I’ll concede that it was a clumsy and obscure construction.
Hugo,
Wow! I agree that this line in the NRO piece (shame attached to unwed motherhood) is reprehensible.
Parker: It kept our knees together. Importantly, it allowed girls to hang onto their innocence a little longer until they really were women.
What is she thinking!!! When I read stuff like that it’s difficult to give anything she says much credibility. I thought Bradshaw also discussed healthy shame. I don’t know how I feel about public shaming, because I do know that abuse is generally conducted secretly and not out in the open. I doubt my mother would agree with her views about our education system serving girls better. According to her I suffered attention deficit, climbed trees and was generally quite a handful. I generally agree with your post…
On innocence, I would seriously protest against the notion that I was still innocent when I lost my virginity. I was out of college, for Christ’s sake! I think I lost my innocence around the time I learned what blow jobs were from two girls in my seventh grade homeroom who were talking about doing it with their ninth grade boyfriends. I think that’s when I heard shattering glass.
Hugo,
“To suggest that we ought to return to shaming unwed mothers (but not, apparently, unwed fathers) as an instrument for protecting the young is, frankly, an obscene idea.”
I have lots of sympathy and understanding for single mothers, and for young people that have to deal with a pregnancy that they didn’t plan. I surely don’t want to go back to the way things used to be.
But on the other hand, I’m very unwilling to say that the choice to be a mother is always, and under all circumstance, a choice that must never be criticized in any way. I’m very disturbed by this recent story of the group of high school girls and their “pregnancy pact” (please, let it be a hoax!)
In your view, does the prohibition on shaming mean that unconditional support must be given?
Yes, once a woman has made a decision, the support should be unconditional. The argument against teen pregnancy needs to be couched not in terms of shame, but in terms of lost opportunities.
Shaming unwed mothers is s continuation of the misogynistic social belief that females should not enjoy and have sex. A girl who gets pregnant has no choice available that does not lead to social shaming - therefore societal shame cannot steer her to a socially ‘correct’ option. Once you are unwed and pregnant, you are socially declared shameful. Have an abortion? Baby Killer! Have the baby and keep it? Irresponsible slut! Have the baby and give it away? Irresponsible unfeeling slut! Get married, then have the baby? Slut who got lucky.
When I see a pregnant teen, I hope that she has a good support network. I wonder what set of life circumstances lead her to her current state - ignorance? Purposeful choice? Bad luck? When I was pregnant, my husband and I went through a 6 week pregnancy and childbirth education class offered by the hospital where I chose to deliver. There was a young girl, somewhere between 14 and 16, who attended the classes with a girlfriend. I overheard her speaking with the instructor the first night about getting a court document signed that proved she had attended the class. I don’t know what her circumstances were, but I assumed that they were not ideal. In a room full of fellow pregnant women, she never relaxed, she never participated, she never spoke, and she never seemed to be excited by having a baby. I sincerely hope she was cared for at home and by her friends and family.
1. “[The word ‘menz’] refers, b, to a habit of thread-hijacking, in which MRAs come into feminist discussions to talk, invariably, about how “men suffer too”. It’s a derailing tactic and thus fair game to lampoon. It doesn’t mean men don’t have legitimate concerns, it just means that it’s not fair to insert those concerns into a completely different discussion.”
K, but it seems that one (I’m not singling you out here) can make that point without a deliberate non-word that sends that very message (that another’s concerns aren’t legitimate).
2. Nav: “On innocence, I would seriously protest against the notion that I was still innocent when I lost my virginity. I was out of college, for Christ’s sake!”
Nav, one of the best compliments I’ve ever received is that I’m an innocent, but that “innocent isn’t the same as naïve.”
3. “When I see a pregnant teen, I hope that she has a good support network.”
So do I. I’m tired of liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, pro-choicers and pro-lifers, all having a contest to see who can be the meanest to teen moms (and dads). That’s the very stigma that causes more babies to be killed (whether in the pre-natal or post-natal stage of development). There are no “human mistakes,” and teen pregnancy should be billed not as a dead end, but rather as a detour.