The State Doesn’t Love You

What we see, basically, is that daughters are more likely to flourish educationally and even later on in life professionally, across class lines, when they’ve had an involved dad who’s engaged with them in their lives
Conversely, it is often the case that the young women who go off the rails have either had no father figure in their lives or has serious Daddy Issues with the one they’ve got. One of the things Chateau Heartiste is always banging on about is the importance of a decent father figure in a young girl’s life to keep her away from scumbags by showing her what a decent man looks like.

Penny Dreadful bangs on about poverty but advocates lifestyles that make poverty more likely.
As lifestyle gurus go, Laurie leaves quite a lot to be desired. (See also, the left in general.) The things that Ms Penny would have her readers disdain and abandon, as both a “systemic lie” and an affront to radicalism, are in fact cultural resources, assets for living. Assets that the state can never replace. And as Mr Wilcox points out, “The data suggests that about a third of the increase in income inequality for families between the ‘70s and the 1990s was related to the retreat from marriage.”
[ Edited. ]

I presume that Penny Plain never had a father,
By her own account, she had a two-parent, middle-class, quite comfortable upbringing. See also this.

Bourgeois for me, but not for thee!
As discussed in the previous thread, Laurie’s own education, career and globe-trotting adventures would have been much less likely without the bourgeois values and upbringing that she publicly disdains and urges others to abandon.

“I presume that Penny Plain never had a father”
Might she have been extruded? Or perhaps assembled from equal parts of noise, bluster, outrage and pretence? [ Please feel free to add your own guess at possible raw material ingredients ]

Incidentally, the adverts mentioned in the interview – the ones that don’t portray dads as incompetent, irrelevant or buffoonish – can be seen here, here and here.

Conversely, it is often the case that the young women who go off the rails have either had no father figure in their lives or has serious Daddy Issues with the one they’ve got.
I’ve often wondered how much of this “fathers are meaningless/marriage is oppression” stuff is due to the fact that the purveyors of same only associate with people from dysfunctional backgrounds, i.e. no father or one who is a shit. Do they even know someone who’s life experience includes a loving, involved dad? If they do know such people, then how much of their vitriol is simply a desire to destroy institutions which failed them simply in order to make sure everyone shares their misery?

If they do know such people, then how much of their vitriol is simply a desire to destroy institutions which failed them simply in order to make sure everyone shares their misery?
Laurie’s status and career, and that of other self-imagined revolutionaries of the left, depend on the resentment and disaffection of others, and of course credulity. It’s what they feed on. Our supposedly radical gurus have little to gain from successful, functional people with a grip on their own lives. And they have no incentive to offer advice that would result in more functionality and success.
There’s also, I think, a conceit – fashionable among such people – that a dysfunctional life, a life at the margins, teetering on the brink of poverty – is somehow more “authentic,” more real, than the lives of those more comfortable, more suited to the task of living. As Theodore Dalrymple noted, this conceit tends to go hand in hand with a belief that bourgeois prosperity and success are something to be ashamed of, and disdainful of, as if they could only be a result of injustice and oppression.

David: I like your point about life at the margins etc.
I’ve noted in many acquaintances a need to be (or be seen) taking risks. Some try to start a business. Some try for that Phd in physics. Some try to climb el Capitan. Some go to extremes, and put unconventional materials in a heap on a floor, or even dance wearing black leggings.
“Look at me. I am different. I am struggling. I am at risk.”

There’s a line in Dick Francis’ “Longshot” where a wealthy successful author chides the protagonist, a barely-surviving author, for being “unaware of the redemptive nature of poverty.”
My own idea is more in line with your comment.

Well, I’ve watched the videos now. I notice the word “welfare” never entered the discussion, but (I believe) it’s a fundamental reason marriage is in such dire straits nowadays. When it’s more cost-effective for a woman to bear children out of wedlock and then go to the State for support rather than to the father (if she even knows who he is), then more and more women will choose that route.
Add to that factor the abusive treatment of men in divorce courts, and many men, who’ve seen it happen to their own fathers, or the fathers of their friends, will simply opt out rather than face the risk of losing their children, their homes, and a big chunk of their future incomes to women who decided to Eat, Pray, and Love Someone Else.
Interesting interviews, but I really think they were soft-pedaling the issue in a lot of ways.

Piper, your backup got trashed cuz you forgot the First Rule of Test: Always mount a scratch monkey.
(Upgraded to what? The last OS I really liked was SunOS with X on top, circa 1990.)

The last OS I really liked was SunOS with X on top, circa 1990.)
PCBSD does rather well.
Pop it in, continue on with whatever else, not have to worry about invasive upgrades based strictly upon some corporate account executive’s fantasies of a bottom line . . .

What we see, basically, is that daughters are more likely to flourish educationally and even later on in life professionally, across class lines, when they’ve had an involved dad who’s engaged with them in their lives
I have flourished educationally and professionally. I had a father in the home while growing up, and my mom stayed home with us until after I (the oldest) went to college (and she worked to help pay for it).
My father was emotionally abusive because he had NPD, but I STILL benefited categorically from having a father in the home.
I grew up in a home where someone got up every day to go to work, whether he wanted to or not. (My dad was raised on a farm: his work ethic was impeccable even if he was an emotional chipper-shredder.)
I grew up in a home where I was expected to do well in school, and I lived in a neighborhood where all the other parents expected the same of their kids.
I was never exposed to gangs or drugs or any other toxins so common in some neighborhoods.
Does that mean that I was raised in a privileged environment?
You’re damned right I was, and my ancestors busted their keisters to make sure I had what I had.
That makes me GRATEFUL, not guilty. Anyone who works as assiduously as the left to deprive others of the kind of upbringing I had should be taken out and horsewhipped.
Right now.

this conceit tends to go hand in hand with a belief that bourgeois prosperity and success are something to be ashamed of, and disdainful of, as if they could only be a result of injustice and oppression.
And the only way to right that wrong is to take TOTAL CONTROL of everyone and everything.
Evan Sayet, call your office.

Anyone who works as assiduously as the left to deprive others of the kind of upbringing I had should be taken out and horsewhipped. Right now.
It’s where vanity meets vandalism. So a pelting with soft fruit at the very least.
Laurie probably DID grow up in a middle-class, two-parent family, which means that she’s a rotten little shit by choice.
I’m still trying to process something Laurie wrote in her recent article, in which she describes attending a lover’s wedding celebrations:

Next week, one of my partners is getting married, and this week I went to his stag night as part of the groom’s party. I’m happy for him, and for his fiancée… I love weddings. I love watching people I’m fond of build a future together, however they choose to organise it, and I also love getting dressed up and drunk on cheap champagne with their mad relatives. There’s not a lot I’d rather do than be a wedding-guest for a weekend – it’s just that I also happen to believe in dismantling the social and economic institutions of marriage and family.

Setting aside the ostentatious quirk of attending the wedding of one of one’s own multiple, non-exclusive lovers – how terribly modern – there’s an air of dissonance. I’ve attended several weddings and generally had a good time, even felt a little touched. But I’ve never done so while denouncing all marriage – including, presumably, the one I’m attending – as a “small, ugly ambition,” an act of “oppression,” as Laurie does, and while publicly disdaining the participants’ feelings of love as “a systemic lie designed to manipulate women into lifelong emotional labour.” The dogmatic, rather adolescent denunciation seems ill-suited to the spirit of the event she’s attending.

Setting aside the ostentatious quirk of attending the wedding of one of one’s own multiple, non-exclusive lovers…
Oh boy. I’m deadfully sorry to keep banging on about this, but the similarities with my pal “Angela” just keep piling up: her own wedding (or what passed for it, it was a gaggle of weirdos in a park reading off scraps of paper) was attended by her other lover (man), his wife, her other lover (woman), and her husband’s other lover (woman). And those were only the ones I could identify from the photos. Sadly, the other lover who was back in her home country probably couldn’t make it. Nor, inexplicably, could any of her family.
This is attention-seeking, nothing more. It’s “look at us, look how *radical* we are” because they have no other means of standing out from the crowd (say, by achieving something worthwhile).

I just couldn’t do it.
But Laurie tells us, repeatedly and with an air of great earnestness, that “love needs to be freed from the confines of the traditional, monogamous, nuclear family.” Anything else is oppressive, an affront to both womanhood and radicalism, says she. Because the repeated swapping of multiple, transient partners is never, ever a recipe for insecurity and neurosis. It’s the only way to be “free,” apparently. At least until someone gets pregnant and the arguments begin.
Though the fact that Laurie says so many things with the same, rather implausible, air of earnestness – as if desperate to be believed – makes me think one shouldn’t take her seriously about anything.

Because the repeated swapping of multiple, transient partners is never, ever a recipe for insecurity and neurosis.
Although “Angela” angrily defended polyamory to the hilt, even she conceded that it usually doesn’t work out well in practice and all sorts of petty jealousies come to the fore. Speaking to others about it, she says one of the downsides is that despite the claims that people can love others equally, it often ends up with a man or a woman being No.2 with several partners and No.1 with nobody. And this leads to bitterness and insecurity. I think that’s what happened with Angela, she got married thinking she’d be No.1 and turned out to be No.2 (or possibly even further down the list). It really is quite something to see a grown woman complain that she was “supposed to be No.1 because I was his wife, but he spent all the time with this other woman who was my friend”. It took a few slugs of Gentleman Jack Daniels for me to take it all in, let me tell you. Speaking to others, they say it often ends up that one partner gets all the fun and sex while the other gets the emotional shit and the headaches. None of which is particularly surprising. She also said it left her unable to have sex for years – even with her husband – without a condom. Initially he was her “safe” partner, but it turned out he was not using protection with others, leaving her paranoid about HIV.
Angela’s official reason for allegedly quitting the practice was the logistics are a nightmare: the ground rules say no partner can be left alone while the other is off shagging, so in order to spend a night with somebody each person needs to make sure their regular partner is similarly catered for. She said it was a full-time operation, “totally exhausting, especially with a job”, and eventually she got tired of it. I could well believe all this was true, but I was never quite convinced this was a proper explanation as to why she quit polyamory (and now I am fairly certain she hadn’t). What I would like to have asked, but alas never got the chance, is who takes responsibility for the laundry what with all the different partners coming (ooh-er) and going. I initially thought the washing machine would be going full-time, and then I realised that this lot probably don’t bother. Yuck.
In any event, when she first brought it up I asked her how many of the people she was in this relationship with are still married or with the same person. She immediately told me they all were, but alas that turned out to be a lie. All the partners got divorced or split up, with her own marriage lasting just 2 years having gone off the rails *before* the wedding, but Angela insisted that the polyamory aspect had “nothing to do with anyone splitting up”.

Fools like Laurie are made when neurosis meets an ideology that justifies the neurosis. So, for example, a teenage girl rebels against her daddy, and then comes across some rhetoric about the family being a patriarchal conspiracy. Thus she forms a hostility to the institution of the family, and then, as this assumption deepens her alienation, she is tempted to conclude that all institutions are oppressive, that ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ can only be achieved by withdrawing from the old, oppressive, capitalist and patriarchal institutions – because somehow the individual is prior to all social institutions. And, at university and elsewhere, she will find spurious ideological justifications for this radical liberationist smorgasbord of marxism, existentialism and feminism, which ossifies into worship of negation – a pan-galactic spirit of opposition to the status quo.
Most adolescents go through a phase of rebellion against parental authority. Unless they are very neurotic – and Laurie with her eating disorder was very neurotic – most soon grow out of it. I remember my daughter aged 17 screaming at me that I was a fascist because I would not let her go out in red stilletoes. But that soon passed; and, happily married and prosperous, she now cringes with embarrassment at the memory of her teenage self.

Most adolescents go through a phase of rebellion against parental authority. Unless they are very neurotic – and Laurie with her eating disorder was very neurotic – most soon grow out of it. I remember my daughter aged 17 screaming at me that I was a fascist because I would not let her go out in red stilletoes. But that soon passed; and, happily married and prosperous, she now cringes with embarrassment at the memory of her teenage self.
Yeah, this is absolutely crucial, and worthy of an essay in itself. We *all* act like idiots when we’re young, and we all did shameful or stupid things: I have a ludicrous tattoo of what looks like a farting cartoon bird on my shoulder which I thought was awesome – when I was 19. By 25 I wish I didn’t have it, by now it serves as a useful reminder of the folly of youth. Learning from these stupid mistakes and looking back with embarrassment is an essential part of growing up and learning to exercise proper judgement and tact and accumulating wisdom. I always thought it was good that English girls get their hearts broken by a cad in university when they are 21 because by the time they reach 27-28 they know what an asshole looks and sounds like.
The problem I have with Penny – and Angela and her mates – is not their past, but the fact they don’t look back with shame or embarrassment on certain episodes and haven’t learned a damned thing, which means their judgement is still flawed, more mistakes will be made, and a train-wreck beckons. You can make mistakes at 20-25 and recover, past 30 and this stuff starts to have a lifelong impact. These people, as you say, have never grown up.
And yet some people evidently get stuck there, emotionally, psychologically, excusing their mindset with ever more perverse and implausible, and rather desperate, rationalisations.
Yes, this. This times a million. This is Angela in a nutshell. Who knew this site would be so therapeutic? David will be sending an invoice at this rate.

Play nicely. And for God’s sake, use coasters.
*starts working on combination to liquor cabinet*

Groan. Trust me to fuck up the HTML tags when David is reinforcing the patriarchy by attending a barbecue.

@dicentra
Some might, but the end game here is explicitly the expansion of State power over individual lives, and the primary obstacle to that degree of power is the family.
I’d recommend reading The Whisperers by Orlando Figes. It details the Soviet Unions undermining of family life right from its inception. Many of the same policies i.e the insistence on both parents working and the takeover of childcare by the state from an early age, have been implemented in much of the West.

Some might, but the end game here is explicitly the expansion of State power over individual lives, and the primary obstacle to that degree of power is the family.
There is no question that that’s true. My point is, these “Tumblr-inas” who loudly denounce marriage and the family are not part of the “Inner Party.” They’re simply idiots who cite each other’s blog posts. It seems inconceivable to me that they could go through life and never encounter one (or more) stable, happy families, even if those families were not their own.