Better Late Than Never
As a teenager and self-proclaimed militant feminist, it was simple to fight the patriarchy; I just had to pick fights with my father.
Why, yes, it is a Guardian article. Specifically, A Feminist’s Guide to Raising Boys by Bibi van der Zee.
In the 1970s, from my child’s-eye point of view, it seemed pretty much agreed that boys and girls were essentially the same; it was just society that turned us into “boys” and “girls.” Simone de Beauvoir had said: “One is not born a woman but, rather, becomes a woman,” and the whole planet had nodded in agreement, and that was that.
Readers of a certain age may find that their memories of the 70s, and of boys and girls being supposedly interchangeable, and of the whole planet nodding at this conceit, are somewhat different.
In the early years of my career in journalism, being a woman was no brake on being able to work as late, be paid as little and drink as much as any of the male reporters I knew. Then I had sons. It may sound naïve, but I hadn’t really thought about how that would work. I had a vague plan that… my life would more or less carry on as before.
It does sound a tad unrealistic.
This was not what I had expected… Because I was the one with the womb and the mammary glands, I would be the one carrying the children and then feeding them.
At which point, readers may wish to remind themselves that Ms van der Zee writes political commentary, and guides to activism and protesting, in order to share her insights with the world.
It was a startling window into other times and worlds, where, if you had no birth control and your body belonged to your husband by law, then you could just be impregnated over and over again, side-lined and kept at home.
Ah, yes. The modern marriage.
Suddenly my feminism was visceral.
An intensification brought about by the realisation that babies and small children generate quite a lot of laundry and disorder, and require feeding, bathing and near-continual attention. And by the fact that, if your husband is the main breadwinner, his work will tend to take priority over your own attempts at freelance journalism. In short, that, as a parent, a mother, one’s life will not in fact carry on as before.
And so, complications ensue:
Looking back, there were a lot of things I should have talked more about to the boys. Many of my friends turn out to have strategised. One friend said: “Make it normal to bring up topics around the table – talk about Brett Kavanaugh, the middle-class white male dominance of government, pornography, social media, talk about strong women and men.” Someone else admitted to “constant nagging on my part about how to treat women, with the occasional lecture on systemic patriarchy.”
Lectures on systemic patriarchy. Also, eat your vegetables.
At one meal, when I tried to explain to a table of men and boys why #MeToo was a necessary act of mass civil disobedience, how the ideal of a rule of law actually shielded white men and protected the status quo… The meaning of rule of law was explained to me… it all fell apart… I lost it and walked away in tears.
Empowerment, baby.
When the boys were small… their boy-ness made me doubt what I’d always believed – that it’s nurture, not nature, that underneath, all humans are basically the same. But it was impossible not to notice how differently they behaved to some of the girls we knew.
It occurs to me that feminism could be seen as a kind of doctrinaire retardation – one that often seems to necessitate a lot of subsequent correction and belated catching-up.
None of them ever wanted to go clothes shopping with me. And they absolutely weren’t up for a romcom on a rainy Sunday afternoon either.
For instance.
It also occurs to me that to be shocked by differences in how boys and girls often behave, as Ms van der Zee admitted in an earlier Guardian article – such that “even the suggestion” of innate gender differences, now clearly visible, “felt like sedition,” indeed “revolutionary” – again suggests a practised, almost farcical, denial of reality. One that in turn prompts a suspicion that perhaps one shouldn’t be quite so credulous regarding feminist claims of How Things Really Are.
Happily, and despite heated mealtime lectures on the evils of white men, Ms van der Zee’s children seem surprisingly well-adjusted:
My eldest son, Sam, now 17, likes to talk about films or tell me amazing facts about the stars and the universe. My middle boy is a great cook; we’ve spent hours covered in flour together. My youngest, Joe, is obsessed with music, and some of the happiest times of my life have been spent playing YouTube jukebox with him. They like some of the things I like and not others. It’s almost as if they’re… individuals?
And,
They may yet turn out to be oppressive, patriarchal monsters, but the signs are pretty well submerged for now.
For now.
This narrative – that it did not occur to the author until after the fact that her body was going to be involved in the making and rearing of children – strikes me as rather hard to believe.
This narrative… strikes me as rather hard to believe.
I can’t quite decide if it’s more or less fanciful than a belief that “the whole planet” had “pretty much agreed that boys and girls were essentially the same.”
It occurs to me that feminism could be seen as a kind of doctrinaire retardation – one that often seems to necessitate a lot of subsequent correction and belated catching-up.
LOL. That.
LOL. That.
Well, it does seem to obscure much more than it reveals. And to a degree that seems close to hallucinatory.
It’s almost as if they’re… individuals?
We can’t have that, comrade, only thoughts and behaviors approved by the central committee.
I am probably still getting everything wrong
Why did I find this so hard to write? Because it involved admitting that I was naive, that I didn’t put nearly as much thought into the business of rearing good feminist boys as it deserved.
No, what she is getting wrong and didn’t put thought into is the realization, and subsequent refusal it believe, that her entire system of beliefs that men and women are the same and interchangeable and that there is a patriarchy to “smash” is utter horse manure.
LOL. That.
I mean, if you’re an avowed feminist and become a mother, and you find that your own children – their behaviour and psychology – have “exploded all the ideas I had treasured as a feminist” – then some reflection seems in order. Say, regarding your own credulity, and the degree to which feminist dogma veers from reality in other respects too.
your body belonged to your husband by law, then you could just be impregnated over and over again, side-lined and kept at home.
A legitimate, if biased, description of marriage. It’s also incomplete. The husband gained ownership of his wife’s reproductive system (thereby gaining equal parental status with the woman who is indisputably the mother of the children she bears) while she gains ownership of his surplus labor (of which there’s a lot if the man only has to support himself).
Both parties gain something valuable and give up control of something which the other values (she loses her sexual and reproductive autonomy to gain a lifelong provider and protector for herself and her children, while he loses his surplus leisure time and work-related autonomy and gains recognized paternal status and thus a biological legacy: ie bloodline immortality).
Division of labor and mutual benefit. What a notion.
In the 1970s, from my child’s-eye point of view, it seemed pretty much agreed that boys and girls were essentially the same; it was just society that turned us into “boys” and “girls.”
As I recall, in the 70’s John Varley wrote a whole series of science fiction stories premised upon that idea, and in which people casually change from one sex to the other with mere outpatient surgery. This may explain why feminists liked him.
their boy-ness made me doubt what I’d always believed – that it’s nurture, not nature,
Losing her religion.
Losing her religion.
It does sort of have that air about it. I’ve known several left-leaning parents who were not entirely comfortable with the realisation that, despite their efforts and expectations, their children tended to behave quite differently, from a very early age, according to their sex. I once remarked on this, with a hint of amusement, but it soon became clear that the subject was probably best avoided. I got the impression that they thought the alternative to their own feminist assumptions was to insist that tree-climbing girls be sent off to corrective embroidery courses. As if no middle ground were possible.
If it’s any consolation leftist dads despise their children too:
https://twitter.com/sams_antics/status/1105148747594584064?s=21
If it’s any consolation leftist dads despise their children too
Link tweet has been deleted already. Did you save a copy?
Bibi Van Der Zee
Even her name is high maintenance…
Link tweet has been deleted already. Did you save a copy
Screengrab here:
Take that, Dad!
Jesus England, stop making me regret my heritage
SCENE: Dinner
MOM: Time for tonight’s discussion! I’ll go first, okay? Because it’s important for you to learn to let women always go first. Except through a door, because that is sexist. OK, here we go. Brett Kavanaugh blah blah blah Me Too blah blah patriarchy blah blah.
SON: (banging his spoon cheerfully on high-chair tray). Goo goo blah [squeal] [giggle]!
Mom flees table, sobbing.
Such articles always, always, always feature a scene in which the heroine is “sobbing” or “lying on the floor crying.”
I swear these articles are unrecognized parody.
Losing her religion.
100% this. “Faith” is defined by valuing feelings over facts and logic. No offense to the traditionally religious, whose feelings are at least tempered by long tested traditions, and whose faith society is allowed – if not encouraged – to question.
Sam, dude, that kid WILL find your tweet.
That kid will also select your nursing home. And when he parks your sorry ass in the worst nursing home in Florida, where you spend your days sitting in a pool of your own piss and watching mouse-sized cockroaches run across your feet, I’ll applaud him.
Link tweet has been deleted already. Did you save a copy?
I think this screenshot here is the tweet in question.
Meanwhile, related to the topic in that it deals with people who get upset when their notions are challenged, we find in the Clown Quarter, Students of Color at Sarah Lawrence ($51,000/tear tuition) go off the rails with a 9 page list of demands because they were triggered by a professor who suggested there was a lack of intellectual diversity.
RTWT, but the demands include free laundry supplies, free housing and food, being able to eat in the mess halls as much as they want (item 2iii), mandatory first year struggle sessions, free storage for international students, race specific mental health counselors, “indigenous land acknowledgement at all orientation and commencement ceremonies” (whatever TF that is), a struggle session for nigh the entire staff and, of course, canning the prof in question.
The proper response to this is, obviously, “GFY, you don’t like it here, you know where the exit is, there are a lot more to take your place”. I am sure, however, the actual response will include groveling.
Losing her religion.
Still, could be worse.
Much worse.
I was referring to the Sam who wrote the vile tweet, not our father-to-be Sam. When I typed the remark it was right under the one about Bad Sam.
Looking back, there were a lot of things I should have talked more about to the boys. Many of my friends turn out to have strategised. One friend said: “Make it normal to bring up topics around the table – talk about Brett Kavanaugh, the middle-class white male dominance of government, pornography, social media, talk about strong women and men.” Someone else admitted to “constant nagging on my part about how to treat women, with the occasional lecture on systemic patriarchy.”
Tenner says their kids become raging misogynists when they grow up.
Original Mr. X, that seems to have been what happened with blogger Adam Piggott, raised by a feminist mother, who now despises women. (Although he’s Australian, he has the common American tendency to assume that female=feminist.)
No worries, they’ll do something that will have them branded as ‘oppressive, patriarchal monsters’.
Feminism, and pretty much every branch & twig of progressivism is a systematic denial of reality.
Bad Sam
Strange, he doesn’t have a goatee. Should I grow a goatee? I’m confused.
[ Rummages under bar, produces box of clip-on goatees. ]
I keep them in case of a raid. Or a transporter malfunction.
Farnsworth: “indigenous land acknowledgement at all orientation and commencement ceremonies” (whatever TF that is).
It means acknowledging the original occupants of the land.
For example, I recently went to a show at Sydney Opera House. Before the performance, a recorded voice said something like “We acknowledge that this building sits on the land of the Gadigal people. We respectfully greet their elders past and present, and through them all the indigenous peoples of Australia”.
Signs outside the building express similar sentiments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JTvhcFG9ws
No doubt woke parsing of the exact wording used could be an endless source of controversy and resentment.
I read this bit and thought of the old nugget about “beating the gay out” of one’s kids, or sending them to “camp” to be made straight. Which then lead to all of the “transitioning” crap going on these days, as though any of it can change one’s intrinsic nature.
No worries, they’ll do something that will have them branded as ‘oppressive, patriarchal monsters’.
Like, one day buying a muscle car, asking a girl out on a date, or — the worst monstrousness of all — not asking a girl out on a date (if the girl in question really wanted one of them to, but he took no notice of her).
CJ Nerd: They do that all the time in Canada now also. Annoys me no end.
Now I’m sorely tempted to fabricate some signs in Official State Typography that read: “This land once belonged to [tribe], before it was taken away by badass white dudes with superior firepower. The land now belongs to us, and shall remain ours until such time as we are overcome by a stronger tribe.”
Maybe add a little “Sod off, swampy!” at the end. I’m still deciding.
If it’s any consolation leftist dads despise their children too:
Coming to a “Democratic Socialist” agenda near you: the retroactive abortion. After all, children can be a burden inside and outside of the womb.
No doubt woke parsing of the exact wording used could be an endless source of controversy and resentment.
I suspect that at least some of the descendants of these Saintly and Noble Indigenous Populations™ might actually be grateful that their ancestors’ Stone Age civilisation had been upgraded somewhat. Such that it includes dentistry, health care and opera houses.
Bibi and her husband and sons. Note the hesitant, wary expression on the husband’s face. The poor bastard’s probably had that look on his face since the day after the wedding. Edina Monsoon made flesh.
“At one meal, when I tried to explain to a table of men and boys why #MeToo was a necessary act of mass civil disobedience, how the ideal of a rule of law actually shielded white men and protected the status quo”
#metoo was a campaign started by the agency CAA, to obscure the fact that the initial batch off revelations of Hollywood scumbaggerry exposed that two thirds of the perpetrators with Jewish movie execs, and that narrative want going to be allowed to get established….
“indigenous land acknowledgement at all orientation and commencement ceremonies” (whatever TF that is)
It means stating as fact that those whose ancestors took a boat 3400 miles from London to New York stole the site on which they built Sarah Lawrence from people who took a bus 3300 miles from Guatemala last Tuesday.
One is not born a woman but, rather, becomes a woman,
provided only one is born a girl.
Readers of a certain age may find that their memories of the 70s, and of boys and girls being supposedly interchangeable, and of the whole planet nodding at this conceit, are somewhat different.
It depended on your parents and the circles they were moving in. I was moving in probably similar circles to the author, in that I was a 1970s child of parents who had been on the margins of hippiedom, and saw themselves as slightly more countercultural than their suburban neighbors, with a mother who read Simone de Beauvoir and was determined to bring up feminist sons. The “spontaneous” conversation topics and teachable moments that the article bandies about as novel strategies, me and my brothers were getting at the dinner table forty years ago. I spent my 1980’s teenage years developing a self-concept as being “different from other boys” and “in touch with my feminine side”.
By the 1990’s, I was a Gen-X Sensitive Guy. The mentality of the type, including the priggishness and passive aggression, is well depicted in the films of Richard Linklater, who must have come across a lot of “not like other boys” boys in Austin, Texas. The body language and physical presence of the type is perfectly depicted in this Counting Crows video, where even the “snowflake” millennials in the comments are mocking the fact that the singer looks like he needs help putting his coat on – whatever it is he thinks he’s projecting, the Sensitive Guy actually projects that he’s a little boy who needs to be mothered.
The early 1990s was also the time when Iron John became a bestseller. The media had a lot of fun with scenes of middle class men going into the forest to bang drums and get in touch with their masculinity. It was mocked as a macho backlash, but the book had been written by a feminist man who’d socially engineered the prototype Sensitive Guys, had seen their “production faults”, and was trying to re-engineer a backbone into those men without compromising the feminist principles of the project of Making a New Feminist Man.
And the early 1990s was in some ways the peak influence of the project of raising boys to not be like boys, because there was no internet to offer an alternative view to the media/education establishment, and to give men ways of comparing notes. The current generation of teenage boys may get a more aggressive dose of anti-male programming from their schools than we got in the 80’s, but they have alternative theories and Hate Facts available to them on the internet, which we didn’t have.
So this is old stuff by now, the feminists have influenced the bringing up of boys for half a century, and if it hasn’t worked out for them they should take some responsibility and reassess their principles. But to the feminists, it’s always 1975 and a blank slate, and the next generation of boys will definitely be the one to be Not Like Other Boys.
Bibi and her husband and sons. Note the hesitant, wary expression on the husband’s face
[Insert political variation}’s project?
The writing is narcissistic, the photo seems a standard variety Yes, photographer, you’re attempting to take a still shot of three objects in motion, take the shot Now. . . . .
When will these people recognize we are mammals, we are primates, and as such our roles in reproduction, as well as life, have been tuned by evolution. We are happiest when we run with our biology. You’d think the ‘natural is best’ crowd would understand that.
As someone long ago said ‘mother nature is no feminist’
As someone who was actually an adult by the 70s, I can assure her (and you younguns) that ‘everyone in the world’ did NOT believe boys and girls were interchangeable, Only the wing nut feminists did.
[ Rummages under bar, produces box of clip-on goatees. ]
That’s odd. Last month you said they were merkins.
Here’s a lady who was not just crying on the floor, but crying in a pile on the floor:
https://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/06/why-being-broken-in-a-pile-on-your-bedroom-floor-is-a-good-idea-julie-jc-peters/
I’m with her. Who has NOT felt like crying at the sight of the laundry pile?
The childless are mistaken. Emancipation Day is not when the last kid leaves the nest. Emancipation Day is when the last kid learns to do his own laundry. I think manufacturers should come up with washers and dryers that 4-year-olds can operate (and reach). They’d sell by the millions.
Screengrab here:
Good Lord.
I was a teenager in the ‘70’s, and I remember the controversial (really!) Time magazine cover, “Men And Women Are Different.”
Well, stop the presses.
Hi Monty,
He’s thinking, “Let’s see, if I work two part-time jobs, one weekends, one evenings, plus my day job, never eat out, and do my laundry by hand in the sink…yes! I could afford to unload her!”
And she’s thinking, “One or two more articles ought to do it…he’ll finally file for divorce and the house is ALL MINE!”
😄
where even the “snowflake” millennials in the comments are mocking the fact that the singer looks like he needs help putting his coat on
He must have had some help. He wears two different jackets and two different T-Shirts in the video. Too cool for school; a shearling lined jacket for outdoors and frontier fringe for indoors. Ah the 90s pretentiousness.
…and the whole planet had nodded in agreement…
When a Guardian or NY Times columnist tells you what tout le monde is thinking about restaurants or interior design or the upbringing of the next generation, they don’t mean the deplorable masses, they mean everybody whose opinion matters, with the implication that the columnist also moves in such circles.
Bartender: a double Night Nurse to Anglepoise’s table forthwith if you please. If they ask who bought it, just knowingly point to your goatee.