Oh yes. the Oneida community! Wasn't that the one where all adults were expected to have sex with other adults? And the older women were the sexual mentors to the young boys and the older men were the sexual mentors to the young girls? Oh yeah, that one. lol Didn't turn out so well. Just as Janice said.
I kept wondering as I was reading this if the women involved had any children of their own. It's true that it takes a huge amount of energy to parent children but it is also true that the love we have for them will usually overwhelm the exhaustion.
Thank you Janice for another adventure into the craziness of feminist women. Well done.
This same dismantle the family agenda, unsurprisingly, was put forward by BLM, explicit on their website until it was removed after getting a little too much attention. They advocated children being raised by communities of women and ‘other caregivers’, not mentioning mothers or fathers, or men at all. In their own words, they were ‘trained’ Marxists. Now apparently they live in multi million dollar mansions.
The idea goes back to Plato's Republic. Very odd how many believe Plato's notions of an ideal republic would actually be anything other than a nightmare. Sometimes I wonder whether Plato was being critical of Socrates and whether this is why he used Socrates as a mouth piece. . . but that's just an entertaining fantasy.
I have experienced being raised by family until 13 and then in foster care, and I have met others with similar experiences. Nothing could be more brutal than the sort of treatment one receives from those who don't see you as family. Doesn't take much for them to cut you off, and gives rise to the sort of troubled psychology you'd expect. Arguably this is not the same as the communal raising of children, but surely there are lessons to learn from it. The fallacy is that one would feel the same deeply committed way toward all the kids in the community as toward one's own. Instead, one feels less not more commitment toward the whole.
Ironically, your story reinforces many of the points of family abolitionists. If it weren't for privatizing of care into nuclear families, there would be no need for foster care if the nuclear family became unable or unwilling to care for youth.
I was always impressed with how many "performative radicals" encouraged everyone to live in communal structures and lead libertarian lives, but their family lives and they way they raised their children very much resembles the traditional family structure. The traditional family steers them and their children away from drugs, early death, violence, dropping out of high school, dropping out of the labor force, and so many other modern social ills. I used to live in the Glebe, an area of Ottawa, lousy with academics, more likely than not to profess liberalized teachings on family and marriage while personally practicing conservative family values. The number of avowed feminists I have worked with, who have married "unduly macho" types and taken on very traditional roles at home is difficult to count. The Brooklyn Institute faculty looks like a scary place. It should be an interesting an innovative place, but the language used to describe faculty's work is pregnant with so many ideological signals it is difficult to ignore. I am now at the age, when female colleagues are crying how unfair it is an accomplished lawyer cannot get pregnant, but the sixteen year old next door sneezes the wrong when and she about to be a mother. Ideology is hitting reality. The family unit is too efficient when functioning to abandon. Good article. I look forward to your next review.
Nov 30, 2022·edited Nov 30, 2022Liked by Janice Fiamengo
I said it before and I'll say it again, universities are on their way out because it has been taken over by people like Sophie Lewis, which started around the 60s/70s. I read somewhere that liberal professors out number conservative 12 to 1.
Nov 30, 2022·edited Nov 30, 2022Liked by Janice Fiamengo
Well to be clear it was the Maxists who were, and are, most vociferous about dismantling all social structures that prevent their ideal society being formed. The Cultural Marxists and most forms of feminists and indeed socialists all have this core set of aims. As Janice reminds us the communists in the USSR abolished marriage and the family in the 1920s but it crept back as it became obvious this contributed to the chaos of the 1930s. Maoists too had much the same set of efforts, remember the symbol of their enforced equality , the uniform Mao suits worn by men and women? And of course many of the former "Warsaw Pact" regularly get into trouble for their reluctance to step back into socialist ideals of doing away with the traditional family, national pride and Christian religion. I has always surprised me that the old communist world is so little researched in terms of gender equality, when thse were the societies that attempted to implement such theories on a massive scale. Much could be learned by simply observing what happened, particularly as many were reversed or considerably toned down as their social scientists found the negative effects! Certainly in Europe the anti family "western" countries are basically following through on their socialist principles derived from its Marxist roots.
Nov 30, 2022·edited Nov 30, 2022Liked by Janice Fiamengo
This is an issue that constantly amazes me. Certainly in this country, the UK, there is a completely contradictory set of ideas in public policy. On the one hand we spend literally billions of pounds on trying to reproduce the family through, fostering, adoption, mentoring(Male mentors for female led "families) and have policy built around the child's need to form "secure attachment". Simultaneously our policies in welfare, family courts, taxation and public pronouncements actively contribute to this fair land being one of Europe's great leaders in family breakdown and single parents and children in the care of the state. It's not that there isn't decades of evidence on the importance of secure families, and these underpin the immense effort to place children in the closest to a traditional family as can be managed in such a fragmented society. Yet at the same time the practically world leading proportion of children needing all this appears to be treated as if it happens completely randomly like a weather front. So absolutely nothing is done to even advise on what would be the best situation to nurture and bring up the next generation and certainly nothing practical is done to that end. So year after year, decade after decade our children's services are "swamped" by ever increasing demand to bring children into care and try to place them with as near as they can get to a traditional family. Bizarre. And evidence that actual evidences play very little part in the political sphere.
Interesting that Lewis considers herself a Marxist. The entire concept of "freeing" mothers from childcare, as it's currently framed, is for their greater involvement in the workplace. The World Economic Forum is entirely frank about this. Women are considered by the WEF and by old-guard feminists generally to be wasting their time and damaging the economy by caring for children when they could be toiling in the corporate world, i.e., their true mission in life. The whole point is to feed ever more workers into the capitalist system and thereby bring down wages, hardly a Marxist goal.
A child raised by anyone is a child raised by no one. It is indeed the defining essence of feminism that it places women ahead of children. This is why opposition to feminism is not debatable but a moral obligation.
We have now had several generations of children raised under feminist/marxist government endorsed utopian hell of "feminism" and look where the hell that has got us.
As far as I'm concerned, feminists are just as abusing of children as peadophile preists and should be treated the same ~ with extreme predujice.
Our corrupt family courts claim to act "in the best interest of the child /children" which if they did would be "ample protection for children"... tragically in our family courts (whether Utah, BC or QLD), the children's best interests are submergered beneath all the predatory parasites (judges, lawyers, family report writers, et al) that have vested interests in profiteering from harm done to children in the globalised "family law industrial complex"
The 19th Century sharlitans cited, shilled what modern feminists have taken to heart; women have no responsibility or culpability for their actions.
I would also speculate that many marxist feminist, if forced to live under the ideological tyranny they so readily advocate, would utterly reject this dehumanising regime of hate and class stratification.
Sophie Lewis hasn't wet her finger and held it up to check the direction of the wind. She's trotting out the same old crap about the burden of children and how motherhood holds women back. I don't have kids so I can't say if they are a burden or not, but I can read the news and see what's pissing women off, (I know, I know - it's everything, always).
High on that list is the gender-neutral language that's used to be more 'trans-inclusive'. Phrases like: person with a uterus, mensturating person, chest-feeding, birthing parent. By some bizarre coincidence these are all to do with reproduction and maternity. Who would have thought it? Women appear to be feeling very deeply cut that these words, more than others, are being changed. So I'm guessing from this that women, even if they've never had children themselves, do care about their identity as mothers and aunts. But I could be wrong and Sophie Lewis could be right.
Talk to the Jewish people about lumping all the children and parents in together in the Kibbutz. They have long experimented with this and some like it and some don’t. Offer an alternative by all means and those who wish take it up shall, but don’t take totalitarian steps to abolish the family unit if people wish to have that family experience. Let’s veer away from the sort of thinking that could have Stalinic consequences. When there is a need, and there always is, to find fair balance it’s best not to use a sledgehammer when a little knocking will do 😊
A little signal boost and some related mutterings:
'So far as I can tell, and despite Ms Lewis’ theorising, mothers-to-be don’t generally feel a need to parse their pregnancy in terms of “abolishing the private nuclear household” and “global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation.” Or indeed to champion abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, as a form of “anti-violence.” But that’s probably because – to borrow a phrase from Joan – they haven’t been tugging on the intersectional crack pipe.'
Most professors and administrators in American and Canadian universities, like Sophie Lewis, have adopted Marxism and its radical feminist version. In this regard, our universities are corrupt to the core. It is merely descriptive to say that our universities are now institutional enemies of the people. And they have done a very effective job of corrupting schools, business, the military, medicine, law, and all other sectors of the society. Universities would, if they could, transform the U.S. and Canada into Khmer Rouge and North Korean territory to free the people from their traditional constraints. My advice, as a long time professor at an elite university, would be, instead of burning down the family, to burn down the universities and their Sophie Lewises.
I struggle to understand why people like these women, would want to destroy the very thing that gave them all the advantages that they have had in their lives. They weren't working class wondering where their next meal was coming from.
I sense an undercurrent something that is covert that hasn't been discovered yet.
Is it about Power? Their power?
Is the fantasy belief of utopia, the Shangri-La.
Just maybe they don't want to take responsibility for the consequences of their behaviour?
Oh yes. the Oneida community! Wasn't that the one where all adults were expected to have sex with other adults? And the older women were the sexual mentors to the young boys and the older men were the sexual mentors to the young girls? Oh yeah, that one. lol Didn't turn out so well. Just as Janice said.
I kept wondering as I was reading this if the women involved had any children of their own. It's true that it takes a huge amount of energy to parent children but it is also true that the love we have for them will usually overwhelm the exhaustion.
Thank you Janice for another adventure into the craziness of feminist women. Well done.
Note just "feminist women" but also the woke drones that enabled them
Amen.
Funny
This same dismantle the family agenda, unsurprisingly, was put forward by BLM, explicit on their website until it was removed after getting a little too much attention. They advocated children being raised by communities of women and ‘other caregivers’, not mentioning mothers or fathers, or men at all. In their own words, they were ‘trained’ Marxists. Now apparently they live in multi million dollar mansions.
The idea goes back to Plato's Republic. Very odd how many believe Plato's notions of an ideal republic would actually be anything other than a nightmare. Sometimes I wonder whether Plato was being critical of Socrates and whether this is why he used Socrates as a mouth piece. . . but that's just an entertaining fantasy.
I have experienced being raised by family until 13 and then in foster care, and I have met others with similar experiences. Nothing could be more brutal than the sort of treatment one receives from those who don't see you as family. Doesn't take much for them to cut you off, and gives rise to the sort of troubled psychology you'd expect. Arguably this is not the same as the communal raising of children, but surely there are lessons to learn from it. The fallacy is that one would feel the same deeply committed way toward all the kids in the community as toward one's own. Instead, one feels less not more commitment toward the whole.
Ironically, your story reinforces many of the points of family abolitionists. If it weren't for privatizing of care into nuclear families, there would be no need for foster care if the nuclear family became unable or unwilling to care for youth.
I was always impressed with how many "performative radicals" encouraged everyone to live in communal structures and lead libertarian lives, but their family lives and they way they raised their children very much resembles the traditional family structure. The traditional family steers them and their children away from drugs, early death, violence, dropping out of high school, dropping out of the labor force, and so many other modern social ills. I used to live in the Glebe, an area of Ottawa, lousy with academics, more likely than not to profess liberalized teachings on family and marriage while personally practicing conservative family values. The number of avowed feminists I have worked with, who have married "unduly macho" types and taken on very traditional roles at home is difficult to count. The Brooklyn Institute faculty looks like a scary place. It should be an interesting an innovative place, but the language used to describe faculty's work is pregnant with so many ideological signals it is difficult to ignore. I am now at the age, when female colleagues are crying how unfair it is an accomplished lawyer cannot get pregnant, but the sixteen year old next door sneezes the wrong when and she about to be a mother. Ideology is hitting reality. The family unit is too efficient when functioning to abandon. Good article. I look forward to your next review.
I said it before and I'll say it again, universities are on their way out because it has been taken over by people like Sophie Lewis, which started around the 60s/70s. I read somewhere that liberal professors out number conservative 12 to 1.
Great video on this topic: https://youtu.be/nCX_5H2atBI
I'm constantly amazed by leftist who constantly favour theory over seeking for evidence. They create more problems than solutions.
Destroying the family is a very stereotypical communist temperament, even Karl Marx wrote about the destruction of the family.
Well to be clear it was the Maxists who were, and are, most vociferous about dismantling all social structures that prevent their ideal society being formed. The Cultural Marxists and most forms of feminists and indeed socialists all have this core set of aims. As Janice reminds us the communists in the USSR abolished marriage and the family in the 1920s but it crept back as it became obvious this contributed to the chaos of the 1930s. Maoists too had much the same set of efforts, remember the symbol of their enforced equality , the uniform Mao suits worn by men and women? And of course many of the former "Warsaw Pact" regularly get into trouble for their reluctance to step back into socialist ideals of doing away with the traditional family, national pride and Christian religion. I has always surprised me that the old communist world is so little researched in terms of gender equality, when thse were the societies that attempted to implement such theories on a massive scale. Much could be learned by simply observing what happened, particularly as many were reversed or considerably toned down as their social scientists found the negative effects! Certainly in Europe the anti family "western" countries are basically following through on their socialist principles derived from its Marxist roots.
Well if you really want be clear, we might as well go to the source: communism and Marxism are Jewish ideologies.
Robust peer reviewed evidence destroys theory, particularly feminist theory.
This is an issue that constantly amazes me. Certainly in this country, the UK, there is a completely contradictory set of ideas in public policy. On the one hand we spend literally billions of pounds on trying to reproduce the family through, fostering, adoption, mentoring(Male mentors for female led "families) and have policy built around the child's need to form "secure attachment". Simultaneously our policies in welfare, family courts, taxation and public pronouncements actively contribute to this fair land being one of Europe's great leaders in family breakdown and single parents and children in the care of the state. It's not that there isn't decades of evidence on the importance of secure families, and these underpin the immense effort to place children in the closest to a traditional family as can be managed in such a fragmented society. Yet at the same time the practically world leading proportion of children needing all this appears to be treated as if it happens completely randomly like a weather front. So absolutely nothing is done to even advise on what would be the best situation to nurture and bring up the next generation and certainly nothing practical is done to that end. So year after year, decade after decade our children's services are "swamped" by ever increasing demand to bring children into care and try to place them with as near as they can get to a traditional family. Bizarre. And evidence that actual evidences play very little part in the political sphere.
Interesting that Lewis considers herself a Marxist. The entire concept of "freeing" mothers from childcare, as it's currently framed, is for their greater involvement in the workplace. The World Economic Forum is entirely frank about this. Women are considered by the WEF and by old-guard feminists generally to be wasting their time and damaging the economy by caring for children when they could be toiling in the corporate world, i.e., their true mission in life. The whole point is to feed ever more workers into the capitalist system and thereby bring down wages, hardly a Marxist goal.
A child raised by anyone is a child raised by no one. It is indeed the defining essence of feminism that it places women ahead of children. This is why opposition to feminism is not debatable but a moral obligation.
Yeah, I agree! Only men should be placed ahead of children, not women. The order goes:
1. God
2. Men
3. Children
4. Women
Everyone knows that!! The whole point of women is to raise children, what else are they good for??
God is love and so your order is inconsistent
Man answers to God and woman answers to man, that's why I put the order that way.
We have now had several generations of children raised under feminist/marxist government endorsed utopian hell of "feminism" and look where the hell that has got us.
As far as I'm concerned, feminists are just as abusing of children as peadophile preists and should be treated the same ~ with extreme predujice.
Our corrupt family courts claim to act "in the best interest of the child /children" which if they did would be "ample protection for children"... tragically in our family courts (whether Utah, BC or QLD), the children's best interests are submergered beneath all the predatory parasites (judges, lawyers, family report writers, et al) that have vested interests in profiteering from harm done to children in the globalised "family law industrial complex"
The 19th Century sharlitans cited, shilled what modern feminists have taken to heart; women have no responsibility or culpability for their actions.
I would also speculate that many marxist feminist, if forced to live under the ideological tyranny they so readily advocate, would utterly reject this dehumanising regime of hate and class stratification.
When I read the synopsis of Lewis' book, I quickly went to check my calendar. Nope, it's not April 1.
LOL every day can be 1 April; you just have to adjust when the calender year starts :-)
Sophie Lewis hasn't wet her finger and held it up to check the direction of the wind. She's trotting out the same old crap about the burden of children and how motherhood holds women back. I don't have kids so I can't say if they are a burden or not, but I can read the news and see what's pissing women off, (I know, I know - it's everything, always).
High on that list is the gender-neutral language that's used to be more 'trans-inclusive'. Phrases like: person with a uterus, mensturating person, chest-feeding, birthing parent. By some bizarre coincidence these are all to do with reproduction and maternity. Who would have thought it? Women appear to be feeling very deeply cut that these words, more than others, are being changed. So I'm guessing from this that women, even if they've never had children themselves, do care about their identity as mothers and aunts. But I could be wrong and Sophie Lewis could be right.
I think it's both. Women like to complain about their burdens, but they want to make it impossible for men to claim the same burdens.
Talk to the Jewish people about lumping all the children and parents in together in the Kibbutz. They have long experimented with this and some like it and some don’t. Offer an alternative by all means and those who wish take it up shall, but don’t take totalitarian steps to abolish the family unit if people wish to have that family experience. Let’s veer away from the sort of thinking that could have Stalinic consequences. When there is a need, and there always is, to find fair balance it’s best not to use a sledgehammer when a little knocking will do 😊
This is mentioned in the article at the bottom.
Have you ever talked to kids who were raised this way? Those I've meet and talked to have nothing nice to say about this toxic social engineering
A little signal boost and some related mutterings:
'So far as I can tell, and despite Ms Lewis’ theorising, mothers-to-be don’t generally feel a need to parse their pregnancy in terms of “abolishing the private nuclear household” and “global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation.” Or indeed to champion abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, as a form of “anti-violence.” But that’s probably because – to borrow a phrase from Joan – they haven’t been tugging on the intersectional crack pipe.'
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2022/11/lets-do-that-thing-that-doesnt-work.html
Most professors and administrators in American and Canadian universities, like Sophie Lewis, have adopted Marxism and its radical feminist version. In this regard, our universities are corrupt to the core. It is merely descriptive to say that our universities are now institutional enemies of the people. And they have done a very effective job of corrupting schools, business, the military, medicine, law, and all other sectors of the society. Universities would, if they could, transform the U.S. and Canada into Khmer Rouge and North Korean territory to free the people from their traditional constraints. My advice, as a long time professor at an elite university, would be, instead of burning down the family, to burn down the universities and their Sophie Lewises.
I struggle to understand why people like these women, would want to destroy the very thing that gave them all the advantages that they have had in their lives. They weren't working class wondering where their next meal was coming from.
I sense an undercurrent something that is covert that hasn't been discovered yet.
Is it about Power? Their power?
Is the fantasy belief of utopia, the Shangri-La.
Just maybe they don't want to take responsibility for the consequences of their behaviour?
Exactly so