If we actually lived in a Society that was interested in “social justice,” then we’d be having conversations about toxic femininity and the non-stop sexism expressed by women and girls, all the while claiming the opposite is true. Girls are raised to be a “Princess,” a “higher” form of homo sapien that has no flaws and who only considers others rather than herself. The exact opposite is true.
In the Society I’ve lived in (Generation X) the only message I’ve ever gotten was that the only people who really matter are women and girls, the only interests that should ever be considered are those of women and girls. In work situations, I find that it has been mainly women who create toxic environments, ones that reflect only their interests, and if anyone dare not accept that social contract, then all hell is unleashed. A certain percentage are not this way, but I find that number to be very small.
From the moment Princess opens her eyes at birth, she is coddled and glorified beyond reason, so it is completely unsurprising that she would turn out to be a mean, snotty, condescending Narcissist. The other thing is that they tend to be neurotic by nature, their attitudes and beliefs are typically based on emotion rather than reason, and studies have shown that they prioritize feelings above truth and free speech, probably because it doesn’t serve their interests. Placing them at the top of the hierarchy and we now see a Society that cannot prioritize merit, skill, truth or free speech and free association over selfish, self-serving desires and emotions.
So much for “Daddy’s little girl,” the virtue signaling political correctness that has created most of this mess. Women in my experience are rarely victims of anything, they are at the top of the pyramid when it comes to being an Oppressor class, which is probably why Marxist targeted them so heavily to spread their religion, because they knew that the underlying Narcissism was all that was needed to light their fire to take down reason, logic and common sense. Looks like that calculation has paid dividends -
Thanks Tom, just expressing what I see and experience every day, it's taboo to even talk about these things honestly, and it's driving our Society into the ground and destroying human relationships. Will definitely check out your Substack, there are always things to learn on here and interesting people who move thought forward!
According to psychologist, psychotherapist and author Tom Falkenstein (The Highly Sensitive Man, Ch.1): “Women have thus been understood as the nondominant group, which deviated from the norm, and they have been examined and understood from this perspective. One of the countless problems of this approach is that the experiences and specific challenges of the ‘dominant group,’ in this case men, have remained hidden. ...
“You only have to open a magazine or newspaper, turn on your TV, or open your browser to discover an ever-growing interest in stories about being a father, being a man, or how to balance a career with a family. Many of these articles have started talking about an apparent ‘crisis of masculinity’.
"The headlines for these articles attempt to address male identity, but often fall into the trap of sounding ironic and sometimes even sarcastic and critical. They all seem to agree to some extent that there is a crisis.
“But reading these articles one gets the impression that no one really knows how to even start dealing with the problem, let alone what a solution to it might look like. One also gets the impression from these articles that we need to keep any genuine sympathy for these ‘poor men’ in check: the patriarchy is still just too dominant to allow ourselves that luxury.”
Thanks for womansplaining, but what would you know about my parents, or for that matter me? This behavior in woman is completely typical, it’s what happens when you put Narcissists and fake “victims” in charge, they end up burning everything to the ground -
You accuse me of presuming to tell you about your experience, when I was quite clearly telling you about everyone else's, not yours.
You're so mad that you're not seeing/reading things accurately.
Back to my point - the rest of society doesn't teach its sons that boys/men don't matter. If that's the experience you had, you're an outlier.
What comes across in your post, as with many others here, is an intense, irrational hatred of females. Not a good look, except to other people who also hate women.
I'm in no way trying to diminish what these young boys are going through with this comment, but these mothers are mistreating their daughters too. Discouraging them from apologizing and being concerned for others, encouraging selfish ("empowered") behaviour, treating them like (a) golden child(ren) compared to their brother(s) ... in this kind of narcissistic dynamic, the scapegoats (in this case, the boys) often turn out better than the golden children ... more likely to recognize the unhealthy dynamics and try to break out ... I think? I realize being treated like this could easily lead these boys to grow up to hate themselves and fear/resent/hate women too.
Yes, Meghan, I absolutely agree that the "You go girl! You're wonderful and precious!" attitude is damaging for the girls, breeding narcissism, vanity, helplessness in the face of difficulties, lack of resilience, lack of empathy, and failure to develop one's character and virtues. It is sad too, and it seems that we see the results all around.
It is ironic that Mary Wollstonecraft wanted changes so women could develop the "virtues of men". Those virtues being the reverse of the vain, superficial and self centered women who all too readily relied on men to sort everything out. Sadly "vanity" seems to have passed out of use as a word, but which accurately describes so many feminists and the wider society obsessed with appearance and "feelings" ( and "loving myself").
Sam Vaknin, a controversial writer and YouTuber on narcissism, has argued that feminism encourages women to behave like *psychopathic* men, not healthy ones.
What is just as bad is that it has silenced the women who see it, and thus created the impression that women broadly condone, even encourage that. It has done the same around domestic violence and what would be seen as sexual predation gender-reversed. It has in having silenced good women, or caused them not to notice, created the circumstances for the next generation of women have to contend with the choices to protect, hence encourage predatory women. The attacks on those who tried to point out predatory and abusive women, especially when those were women themselves, will make it hard to frame as accidental, and leaves the massive destruction of trust - for the next generation to contend with.
Yes -- "feminist" women can be incredibly abusive to women who disagree with them. And I've found that the majority disagree with them. Probably the greatest harm is that feminist bullying and lies undermine average women's abilities to choose to be stay at home mothers, when around 75% of women would make this choice (or choose to work only part-time) if they could afford to. But the influx of women into the workforce has depressed wages, and women's academic success (which is largely a product of the fact that women mature a little faster than men) means women have pushed men out of better-paying occupations, leading to a shortage of men who can support a family on a single income. But men also contributed to this problem; go back 50+ years and there's an issue of men leaving their STAH wives for female coworkers.
I would suggest that the effect of affirmative action is at least as important in pushing men out. I noted when I graduated in 1990 from my MBA - that no men (except one who was both minority and deliberately presented as not cis) got interviews with certain companies, but every minority woman did, and a decent number of other women. This was obvious enough that a female Chinese classmate took me to lunch to express her outrage. I had said nothing, but she made clear she thought this was wrong. There has been a steady dribble of this - for decades. Also - the removal of books that appeal to boys from k-3 is much more crucial. Boys prefer books written in the active narrative for the most part (not the internal feelings one) . My wife went into the school library of our kids' school when they were young and was horrified at what she did not find (she has both an education degree and a Master's in Library science, and had looked at the research as had I). The impact on the boys in that school of buying a few hundred appropriate books was very clear. The lack of role models in schools for boys and the reality of them being graded more harshly and disciplined more harshly is also critical. Yes- fewer boys are ready to sit still at 6 and 7, but that is not the only issue.
If they grow up at all. Boys' rates of suicide are alarmingly high, yet feminism seems to want us to believe that it's just their "inherent toxicity" that's responsible. Teaching boys to hate themselves may not be doing girls any favors, but the focus needs to remain on the irremediable and profound damage it is inflicting on boys.
I agree, I wasn't trying to take that focus away. Just observing. Worried. I don't know how many mothers are like this as a percentage, I know several mothers of boys I don't think treat their sons like this at all, fortunately.
Yes fortunately that is my experience. From personal observation I think the only person that behaved a bit like this was the classic middle class (british definition) university educated, college teacher knee deep in "theories" with rather too much time to brood on "injustice" (her lack of money through choosing choosing part time lecturing). Curiously even those who in other contexts declare themselves "feminist" are in fact pretty traditional in lifestyle and expectations of sons, even three lesbian families. I really do think, in the UK at least, the problem is the disproportionate influence of a relatively few feminist women within our institutions.
In my experience they run to HR all the time and contrive to alienate even them eventually. And I've worked in female dominated sectors for over 40 years.
They will fair fine because no matter how fat, ugly, toxic, criminal, psychopathic a women is there will always be some dumb schmuck who will give her a pass if he thinks she will put out.
To be fair, some people do apologize too much and it's good for a mother to teach her children when it's appropriate or excessive. Unfortunately, that girl's isn't getting the proper behavior modeling.
(1) If being young and attractive means a woman can get away with being narcissistic, abusive, entitled, and generally awful, that would be an issue with men, wouldn't it? Women aren't exactly giving other women passes on being bitches because they're sexy (possibly exception for some lesbians). My experience is that women are more likely to give another woman a pass on being kind of terrible if she *isn't* conventionally attractive (i.e. doesn't have "hot", "thin" etc "privilege.")
(2) My experience has been that women who are *naturally* beautiful tend to be, generally speaking, a little kinder and more easy-going than your average woman. This is partially because they tend to be healthy (natural beauty = markers of health), get more exercise (to quote Elle Woods, "Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy."), and, as an exceptionally pretty friend of mine once pointed out, "It's easier to be a nice person when you go through life with people smiling at you all the time."
(3) The kinds of ultra-woke Instagram and TikTok-addled mothers being discussed in this essay would also be more likely to feed their children more junk food in the name of being anti-"diet culture", and less likely to promote healthy activities that result in natural beauty. Their daughters might have youth on their side (at least for a while), but I'm willing to bet that, *on average*, their girls will be less attractive (for various reasons).
(4) Sometimes women who are actually quite sweet and smart and not particularly entitled are bitchy to certain men as a means of self-defence or because they don't want to risk the guy getting obsessed with them and think it's kinder to just establish a boundary and firmly reject them at the get-go. Some men get extremely weird and some pretty scary when an attractive woman is friendly to them.
(5) Multiple things can be true at once. It can be true that throughout history men (and in some countries, in the present) men have raped women with impunity, particularly through warfare and invasions. It can be true that women were treated as property in many cultures, and married off to older men they didn't like when they were teenagers. It can be true that the witch hunts of the Western Christian world (which, really, were not all that long ago) were one of the most horrifying and traumatizing acts committed by males of a culture against their own women, and so thoroughly destroyed women's power and ancestral knowledge (e.g. of plant medicines) that we're essentially still recovering from it. At the same time, it can be true that women, in regaining power through feminism, have at large succumbed to a consumerist, narcissistic, individualistic, elitist reactionary ideology that is causing significant damage, including encouraging them to abuse their own sons and to model their behaviour on the worst of men.
If you are going to write such a giant wall of text in response to a simple casual commentary, it is a bit tacky to prepend "a few things" when you're going to submit me to a "lot of things".
Typical view of a woman viewing history in terms of men and women as if all men and women are the same. Cultures throughout history also had more brutal punishments for rape and related things. And the witch hunts had a lot of women participating as well.
"Plant medicines" was actually known as natural medicine before the Rockefellers took over the medical industry and decided to change it entirely. And it was not done by women alone since they weren't the ones out there picking and testing the plants and ingredients outside.
And feminism too was enabled by the ones in power for their own benefit because women repeatedly kept voting down when asked whether women should be allowed to vote. The 19th amendment in the US wasn't even voted in, it was just put in place.. it wasn't a grassroots movement. And it's not just damage to their sons, it's for them too. Just look at the feminists cheering on women gaining money through onlyfans and how it empowers them.
Huh? My comment was already stupidly long, did you want it to be longer so I could caveat everything and give a detailed history of the Flexner Report? C'mon dude I'm a white mom yammering about plant medicines, I know about the Rockefellers, it's the subject of dozens of crunchy memes. As is the theory that feminism was a capitalist psy-op.
Also this is absolutely hilarious:
"Typical view of a woman viewing history in terms of men and women as if all men and women are the same."
It sure isn't just a theory especially when you look at who controls the federal reserve in America which was put in place since 1913 and the monopolies run by the Rockefellers, they started to have massive influence on the government bodies across the anglosphere. Somehow every woman overlooks this part of history.
And feminists would love to think a less than 5% of female population protested and changed everything lol. It was never in the interests of majority of women.
Err, the word "theory" does not mean "untrue"? Also "every" woman does not overlook this history, I literally see it shared in crunchy memes by women all the bloody time.
consider also, if she breaks out at say - 25 or worse 30, she is already through school, already working, already built a reputation for herself. She reforms utterly, what sane man who knew her before will not presume it is an act, and a trap....
"I will point out sexism to him at every turn..." No she won't. Anti-male sexism is perfectly OK with her and of course she practices it daily. Some of these boys will grow up to think for themselves, see the utter hypocrisy, the frank lies and become the very opposite of what these "mothers" desire.
If women are more sexist than men, perhaps it's because they're rewarded for, or at least not discouraged from, being so. Trashing men, even among otherwise perfectly OK women, is just commonplace and no one ever mentions it.
Yes, this is what I've noticed too. Even women who do not consider themselves feminist and do not seem to harbor strong anti-male views think it is perfectly normal and acceptable to make cracks about their husbands and/or about men in general, with a combination of mockery, derision, and outraged complaint. I've never heard an ordinary man say such things about his wife or about women in general unless he was really in dire straights.
The problem for young women, is that is also defining relationships for a generation of men. It adds to the impressions that it is ok to hit him, and the clarity that has been around informed consent is only material with regards to her consent... so a generation of young men noticed, lying to get pregnant was fine, noticed the pass women who molested were getting, etc. Means they need only a slight cause to drop out of dating entirely.
Men too, although I suspect that has as much to do with currying favor as with actual belief. Although some men do believe in our own corruption, perfidy, etc. I'm rereading The Better Angels of Our Nature and Pinker sinks to that level sometimes.
I think it comes from oxytocin. That makes people more sympathetic to the in-group and more hostile to the out-group. Men have been cast in the role of threat for so long now that women have no inclination to see the male point of view. Men are just objects on the radar for women.
This experience is familiar to me. From a distance, I can only guess, but my guess is that the kind of women who would proudly write about these things in public (and who treat their sons this way) are much more likely to have a Cluster B personality disorder (borderline pd, narcissistic, etc.). I've come to believe that extremist philosophies of all sorts preferentially attract the character disordered.
Feminism reliably attracts a high percentage of Cluster B women, as an example.
What this does to boys is as terrible as you suspect, I can confirm from experience. Boys who've gone through it often end up having a broken relationship to their own maleness; they feel as though they were born bad. Being a man is bad. The only way to be a good man is to be enslaved to mother's concerns and to debase one's self and apologize.
There isn't a tenth of the attention paid to maternal abuse as there is to paternal, but it is just as damaging. In some ways, it's felt more so, as it excused, sometimes applauded, by society. Many can't even recognize that it's real. And if you bring it up being a man, the suspicion blinders come down on onlookers who see you as a likely "misogynist." It's the perfect narcissistic moral reversal: naming and objecting to maternal abuse is itself anti-woman.
This has left millions of us with deep wounds for life.
Traditionally, boys (and men) were taught to be ready to die for their families so it sounds like feminists want this tradition to continue with the twist that girls/women can do what they like and are never responsible for anything.
Indeed there is something very "traditional" about modern feminism. It seems to reflect the high Victorian era society of the bourgeois. Still Hypergamous, convinced work should be pleasant and not too demanding, reeling off a litany of ailments (popular here at the moment is "menopause" , proneness to sports injury just prior to the "period" and climate anxiety) that require special care for women, a conviction that words or even a look can be violence and one can actually die of embarrassment and of course a fear of "sex" and males in general. All built upon the unsaid assumption that in fact males are universally puissant, or should be so, and have to devote themselves to service of the fairer (fragile) sex. Just at the moment the key thing seems to be to put the "sexual revolution" back in its box to get back to the position fair damsels can still "catch" a good man (the sort endless articles say are in terribly short supply).
except like anything - they have massively overloaded it. Men refusing to engage in relationships is a predictable outcome of feminist narratives. The feminists with their twists on consent and domestic violence, have made it clear they endorse abuse by women, and that only her consent matters. Results are predictable.
Even as the notion of the importance of fathers for children breaks through, the context feminists left for the women who care is such that, the impression left with the next generation may be, that while fathers matter to kids, women do not care about the humanity of men. The feminists left too many impressions and fronts to engage on, for young women to successfully engage quickly.
“… But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the need to be quite direct and explicit about his responsibility to be a young man who always treats girls and women with respect—on the street and everywhere else.”
Does that include during Slut Walks and Vagina Monologues performances? The feminist gender narcissistic mirroring and projection of shame are fully exposed in this post—thank you, Janice.
Bravo Janice! Thanks for pulling this together and exposing the network of hate. The most amazing thing to me is that ordinary people look at this stuff and say nothing. People read in the magazines and newspapers the sorts of things you are describing and they don't bat an eye. These mothers are doing great harm and no one cares....as long as it is boys.
Funnily enough I was relaxing watching a film version of Nicholas Nickleby. The intro includes the casual observation that at 19 Nicholas becomes the "head of the family" responsible for the welfare of his mother and sister. Of course the good Nickleby and other gentlemen in the tale both revere the good women are are generous and extravagant in praise of worthy females. Of course Dickens was a spirited teller of tales, but it struck me how much of modern "feminism" has actually much the same assumptions of the Bourgeois 2 centuries ago, that males should carry the burden of supporting fragile and fearful females. Gynocentrism may have different shifts in society and societies but it does seem present most everywhere.
Throughout elementary schools around America, boys are taught feminist ideology. They are even "taught consent" starting in middle school. The horrific implication that they are innately rapists is obviously.....horrific.
Throughout a boys life, if he is put through the average western public school, he is subjected to continuous ostracism and shaming.
Repeated social defeat is a concept where a subject is continuously ostracized. In male mice, it is shown to impede proactiveness and problem solving. Social ostracism is also shown to decrease men's testosterone level, which probably causes the lack of proactiveness.
For all of feminists and tradcon moaning about "lost boys", they never get to the (fucking obvious) root of the problem.
The systemic emotional abuse that all boys are subjected too.
Rather, cons would rather bitch about feminism somehow actually making men less responsible and less chivalrous, and feminists just bitch about toxic masculinity.
And further yet, gurus on YouTube will talk about fucking plastic water bottles before they talk about repeated social defeat.
I'll never forget a panel by the Daily Wire about abortion in which every single one of the speakers, most of them conservative men, made it out that abortion was something men did to women because men are such selfish brutes. It was incredible.
Hardly surprising given that the assumption, certainly from early medieval times, is that men are sexual beings and women are not. So both social attitudes and the law reflected, and still reflect this. There was decades ago a form of feminism that challenged this passive notion of women. But in general the huge advantages of claiming to be helpless putty in men's hands (so never responsible for you bad behaviour and choices) outweighed the wish to be seen as capable of sexual desire and making good or bad choices.
This is incorrect; the medievals saw women as the lusty sex. They had a much more balanced view of women, not falling into Islamic-style subjugation of women (because they revered Mary as God's greatest creature, and honored numerous female saints), but also not lapsing into Victorian-style "women are angels" nonsense.
I take your point about the generally more earthy view. However in terms of secular and ecclesiastic law there were many more statutes about male sexual behaviour. As was typical the Victorians spent some time tidying these up. It is often missed that Oscar Wilde went to prison for procuring 12 "rent boys", part of a then recent law against prostitution in general. " The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (48 & 49 Vict. c.69), or "An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes,""
I think its probably always been women have manipulated the publics opinion about female sexuality for those benefits you mention.
I don't think women actually want to be perceived as agentic. I think they want to be perceived as whatever will give them the most utilitarian benefit.
"My hope of hope, before you even are able to form a sentence, is that you will never form a sentence that makes someone feel ashamed or embarrassed.” She hopes this while doing exactly that to him and of course will again and again and again throughout his life. The profound stupidity, the utter unwillingness to question their own beliefs just goes on and on and never ceases to amaze.
It probably shows my age Maoism was a "thing" when I was at University. Its feature was that it was a species of Marxism that was/is particularly concerned with "culture" as well as economics. In its most extreme form its what drove the "killing fields" in Cambodia. Basically that everything of the old culture (false ideological consciousness) had to be obliterated. Hence the "Cultural Revolution" in China and things like the mass "re-education" of the Uighurs currently. Of course Leninists had much the same idea however by WW2 Stalin had realized that few would fight for an "ism" and so revived notions of motherhood and patriotism.
Of the multitude of heinous feminist behaviors, this is the one that infuriates and sickens me the most. Boys are already twice as likely as girls to commit suicide by the age of ten, yet feminists continue to prey on them, inflicting the most vicious psychological torture they can muster. Their hypocrisy is palpable: whereas we're to be horrified if any girl anywhere has her conception of womanhood influenced by any man anywhere, boys are to accept without question the disgustingly twisted portrayals of manhood that feminists thrust upon them; otherwise they are castigated as monsters. Our culture is already loading school-age boys up with behavior-controlling drugs the moment they exhibit symptoms of being male. I won't be surprised if feminists now want to start drugging boys who refuse to kowtow and grovel in servility to every feminist whim, no matter how casuistic.
Really goes to show that all of the "toxic masculinity" stuff is just absolute gaslighting.
A 10 yr old boy has pretty much no testosterone. Less than an adult woman that's for sure.
The reason they are more likely to kill themselves is obvious.
Social shame and discrimination at public school, which is vehemently feminist.
Single mother raised, and single mothers tend to be more abusive in general and tend to abuse boys significantly more than girls.
Not to mention that boys are more often victims of abuse and neglect in general.
Sometimes I wonder if single mothers alienate their sons the same way that ex wives often alienate their ex husband's. It wouldn't be unbelievable for women to make their son an "other" in the home if she doesn't care for his father.
Regardless, the case is clear.
Boys kill themselves because they are emotionally abused. In the home or out of the home.
A very insightful article. There are a few assumptions that feminist women make that create the problem being described:
1. There is an assumption that women deserve to be respected while men do not.
This is absurd...respect is earned based on one's conduct and actions, not their gender. Much of what these feminist mother's object to is actually young males correctly calling out poor behavior by girls and women that the feminist refuses to criticize or call out for the poor conduct that it is. The idea then men see women as sex objects is a prime example. It is WOMEN who overspend massively on clothing and make up to get the "right" man to look at them that drives this situation. Contrary to what many women believe, most men are NOT barely holding back from jumping on your to breed. Women flatter themselves far, far, far too much in this way!
2. There is a disparate allocation of responsibility and rights by gender.
Men are assigned responsibility for everything, even when they have no power in a situation, while women are never assigned responsibility for their own conduct. The reverse applies with rights. The prime example is the phrase women use when contraception fails: "He got me pregnant." indicating that the woman refuses to acknowledge her own culpability for the sex act and the hardly shocking result of a pregnancy. Indeed, given that women have insight into their time in the cycle that a man cannot have, it is WOMEN who have far more culpability here than any man could possibly have. This steadfast refusal for women to take or be held responsible for anything, unsurprisingly, drives men to lose respect for women.
So...inconclusion....feminist parenting is inherently child abuse to both young men and women.
Penises are already regulated through laws about rape, sexual harassment, and child support. What more regulation is desired? Involuntary sterilization?
Indeed. One of the very obvious untruths that feminists spout is that women's sexuality is policed in history much more than men. Whereas in fact the reverse is true. We know quite a lot about men because there has always been explicit policing of male sexual behavior by ecclesiastical and secular authorities. What is fascinating is feminist "evidence" that men were 'condoned' by "society" in sexual license is actually the parade of recorded legal cases over centuries and tirades by Religious leaders and others in authority, all very definitely not condoning the sexual misbehaviour they proscribe and even prosecute. That sometimes some aristocrat "got off" with exile rather than execution or a fine rather than jail shows money and status could gain some privileges but still that "society" had written statutes and was alert to policing men's sexual behaviour, but sometimes was less effective in punishment. And there are very few such statutes about women, other than those about marriage and assuring legitimacy of children. The very evidence used to say men were "condoned" actually contradicts the thesis because the authorities clearly were busy policing male sexual behaviour and in doing so actually generated information about what the policed and prosecuted!
Bingo! Perhaps its time we start speaking truth...that we don't have a "rape" culture...but a culture of female irresponsibility and false accusations.
Now I have to know. What type of regulation are they recommending for penises? As far as I can tell, the present regulatory regime seems fairly sufficient. I very rarely encounter problems due to lack of penis regulation. Are they suggesting some kind of licensing requirement or something?
You say that "respect is earned based on one's conduct and actions, not their gender." At one level, that's true. Every child must grow up by earning respect at the personal level (and encouraging children to enter the larger world by doing so is an essential task of fathers). At a deeper level, though, it could be argued that every person deserves respect simply as a human being (and many would argue that all animals and even plants deserve respect as forms of life).
Very true. But whether that base level of respect is retained, added to or lost depends on how that party behaves. A woman who is being disrespectful to others should get the disrespect she has earned by her actions just as a man would.
We are entitled to politeness and civility. THAT is the social contract. Anybody demanding my respect based on their mere existence goes to the back of the queue immediately and gender has nothing to do with it.
Yes, Greg, but "politeness and civility" ARE respect. I wasn't referring to anything more than that. And much more is possible. Love, for example, is something else entirely. In a specifically theological context, Christ commanded his followers to strive for a particular kind of love (agape). which refers to a freely chosen of self-sacrificial love. But that's an ultimate (divine) standard, not the minimal standard that we all depend on to make communities possible.
“this same woman had written about the suicidal depression of one of her sons, stating that ‘My son’s depression doesn’t belong to me. I didn’t create it and I am not responsible for it.’”
"Bully tears" is exactly right. My mother terrorized me and everyone else with her crocodile tears for decades. When I finally figured out (as an old man, unfortunately) what she was doing, I started calling her on her emotional abuse and the tears and sobbing would stop as if I'd shut off the tap. She would literally go from breathless sobbing and tear strewn cheeks to calm rationality if I simply laughed at her histrionics. She would be, like, "hmmm . . . why doesn't this work anymore and what form of manipulation will?"
My mother was similarly manipulative. My earliest memories are of her telling me that she didn't want me, that she only wanted girls. She repeated this to me on a weekly if not daily basis throughout my childhood. She wasn't a feminist, she just wanted to ensure that I didn't feel entitled to any maternal affection, that I would have to earn it by finding ways to please her despite being a boy. This generally meant that I was to support her in her campaign of hatred toward my father, who--she was quick to insist--would have had me aborted if she hadn't objected.
Jesus, mine was nowhere near that bad--just a run of the mill narcissist who chose me as her main source of narcissistic supply. You have my deepest sympathy.
Heh. I had a female try that on me. I directly called her on her manipulative shit. It literally never happened again, unlike every other instance of female behavior where it'd either never stop no matter what I said and did, or prove more persistent than herpes. As soon as I called her on it that light switch flipped off and broke off.
The female in question is currently dying alone somewhere, as even other females aren't interested in that shit.
Boys must be taught to respect (i.e. submit to) women and girls because they can be shaped mentally by their mothers. Boys raised in that way are still horribly misogynist. Boys are inherently evil. Full stop.
Feminism is committed to the belief that human identity, behavior, mental, and physical development is alterable by whatever method of nurture the mother adopts. It is also committed to the belief that masculinity is inherently negative.
So, if we follow the feminist model, men are both capable of being nurtured, and inherently evil despite their upbringing. This is the weirdest approach to the nature/nurture debate I’ve encountered: It is simultaneously both all nurture, and all nature.
I posit that the reason for this is simple: Feminists are fundamentally opposed to manliness, but are committed to nurture over nature. In consequence, they fly up their own assholes.
The mother/son dynamic is often the first salutary lesson the boy receives where he is the unwitting recipient of never-ending psychological warfare from the woman who bore him, whilst believing she must love him the most. Of all the tragedies he might experience in his life, this must surely be the most cruel.
If she carried her own wounding in the form of negativity towards men (like, “all men are bastards,” “all men are emotional midgets,” etc), whether she expressed it or not, spoken or unspoken, this would have an impact on the boy’s undefended psychology. He might go on to develop a self-loathing of his own masculine essence. Or he might feel that he could never trust a woman because they were inherently contemptuous of the masculine in him. Because his mother is essential to his nourishment, because of his need to receive her intimacy, he might reconstruct himself, so as not to jeopardize the relationship, by becoming amasculine. He can’t allow himself to become the thing she dislikes even if it means rejecting his true nature. The mother gets to mold her boy into the ideal version of the kind of man she craves, and he never evolves into the man he was “destined” to be.
This dynamic is also then encountered in adult relationships. Because of emotional wounding (as well as narcissism and entitlement), modern women demand that his attention be focused on her and her issues. She may not openly do so, but she will have unspoken expectations that he magically fix her. But the wounding that some women carry is such a “bottomless pit,” it will either leave him exhausted or distracted from his own life purpose, or both. Such women feel that he should prioritize her needs above his own long-term goals and the true expression of his life force. She becomes a succubus—a woman who will suck a man’s energy and pull him down.
Men, in general, recover more quickly from physical abuse than emotional abuse, either because nature designed them to be physically resilient or because being able to “take a beating” is an aspect of manhood that is socially normalized. Possibly, it’s part of the warrior aspect of masculinity to take physical injury, hold it, carry it, and move forward with it. Men have no shame in displaying their physical scars—quite the contrary. But no one sees his emotional scars and there is no pride in displaying them in the same way as those physical scars. This is so little understood that it is assumed that when men protect themselves, largely unconsciously, from women, it is because they are deficient in emotional intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The man has simply locked off his vulnerable heart because he knows instinctively that the emotional environment is unsafe, and perhaps he has had many salutary lessons already. In order for men to be vulnerable, there needs to be a reasonable expectation of safety (for a woman to surrender to a man sexually, she needs the same expectation). He needs to be confident that his vulnerability won’t be used as ammunition with which to attack him. Modern women, consciously or unconsciously, are playing a dissonant game with men. They want men to open up and be softer and more vulnerable yet have little to no expectation of themselves as having a sacred obligation to hold his vulnerability with delicacy.
And thank you, Janice. You've been instrumental in bringing a trove of scholastic reportings of feminist shenanigans, and was one of the key voices which inspired me to write my book.
If we actually lived in a Society that was interested in “social justice,” then we’d be having conversations about toxic femininity and the non-stop sexism expressed by women and girls, all the while claiming the opposite is true. Girls are raised to be a “Princess,” a “higher” form of homo sapien that has no flaws and who only considers others rather than herself. The exact opposite is true.
In the Society I’ve lived in (Generation X) the only message I’ve ever gotten was that the only people who really matter are women and girls, the only interests that should ever be considered are those of women and girls. In work situations, I find that it has been mainly women who create toxic environments, ones that reflect only their interests, and if anyone dare not accept that social contract, then all hell is unleashed. A certain percentage are not this way, but I find that number to be very small.
From the moment Princess opens her eyes at birth, she is coddled and glorified beyond reason, so it is completely unsurprising that she would turn out to be a mean, snotty, condescending Narcissist. The other thing is that they tend to be neurotic by nature, their attitudes and beliefs are typically based on emotion rather than reason, and studies have shown that they prioritize feelings above truth and free speech, probably because it doesn’t serve their interests. Placing them at the top of the hierarchy and we now see a Society that cannot prioritize merit, skill, truth or free speech and free association over selfish, self-serving desires and emotions.
So much for “Daddy’s little girl,” the virtue signaling political correctness that has created most of this mess. Women in my experience are rarely victims of anything, they are at the top of the pyramid when it comes to being an Oppressor class, which is probably why Marxist targeted them so heavily to spread their religion, because they knew that the underlying Narcissism was all that was needed to light their fire to take down reason, logic and common sense. Looks like that calculation has paid dividends -
Well said! You might use this comment as a post on your substack. Would love to see more of your writing.
Thanks Tom, just expressing what I see and experience every day, it's taboo to even talk about these things honestly, and it's driving our Society into the ground and destroying human relationships. Will definitely check out your Substack, there are always things to learn on here and interesting people who move thought forward!
According to psychologist, psychotherapist and author Tom Falkenstein (The Highly Sensitive Man, Ch.1): “Women have thus been understood as the nondominant group, which deviated from the norm, and they have been examined and understood from this perspective. One of the countless problems of this approach is that the experiences and specific challenges of the ‘dominant group,’ in this case men, have remained hidden. ...
“You only have to open a magazine or newspaper, turn on your TV, or open your browser to discover an ever-growing interest in stories about being a father, being a man, or how to balance a career with a family. Many of these articles have started talking about an apparent ‘crisis of masculinity’.
"The headlines for these articles attempt to address male identity, but often fall into the trap of sounding ironic and sometimes even sarcastic and critical. They all seem to agree to some extent that there is a crisis.
“But reading these articles one gets the impression that no one really knows how to even start dealing with the problem, let alone what a solution to it might look like. One also gets the impression from these articles that we need to keep any genuine sympathy for these ‘poor men’ in check: the patriarchy is still just too dominant to allow ourselves that luxury.”
My most sincere condolences. However, you appear to have a firm grasp on the problem. Now you must go and become part of the solution.
Ech dude, sorry about your parents but your experience isn't typical. Thankfully.
Thanks for womansplaining, but what would you know about my parents, or for that matter me? This behavior in woman is completely typical, it’s what happens when you put Narcissists and fake “victims” in charge, they end up burning everything to the ground -
I laughed out loud reading her reply - she validates your original comment with official certification. Lol - text book
Indeed. Incredible arrogance.
Face it, your problems with women are looking at you in the mirror son 🤡
The rest of us get along with them fine.
You're not making sense dude.
You accuse me of presuming to tell you about your experience, when I was quite clearly telling you about everyone else's, not yours.
You're so mad that you're not seeing/reading things accurately.
Back to my point - the rest of society doesn't teach its sons that boys/men don't matter. If that's the experience you had, you're an outlier.
What comes across in your post, as with many others here, is an intense, irrational hatred of females. Not a good look, except to other people who also hate women.
lol - case in point - amazing
😂 You can't even get people's sex right dude. Not a good look for your credibility 🤡
And you apparently assume everyone who doesn't agree with incel orthodoxy must be a woman 🤡
I'm in no way trying to diminish what these young boys are going through with this comment, but these mothers are mistreating their daughters too. Discouraging them from apologizing and being concerned for others, encouraging selfish ("empowered") behaviour, treating them like (a) golden child(ren) compared to their brother(s) ... in this kind of narcissistic dynamic, the scapegoats (in this case, the boys) often turn out better than the golden children ... more likely to recognize the unhealthy dynamics and try to break out ... I think? I realize being treated like this could easily lead these boys to grow up to hate themselves and fear/resent/hate women too.
Yes, Meghan, I absolutely agree that the "You go girl! You're wonderful and precious!" attitude is damaging for the girls, breeding narcissism, vanity, helplessness in the face of difficulties, lack of resilience, lack of empathy, and failure to develop one's character and virtues. It is sad too, and it seems that we see the results all around.
It is ironic that Mary Wollstonecraft wanted changes so women could develop the "virtues of men". Those virtues being the reverse of the vain, superficial and self centered women who all too readily relied on men to sort everything out. Sadly "vanity" seems to have passed out of use as a word, but which accurately describes so many feminists and the wider society obsessed with appearance and "feelings" ( and "loving myself").
Sam Vaknin, a controversial writer and YouTuber on narcissism, has argued that feminism encourages women to behave like *psychopathic* men, not healthy ones.
What is just as bad is that it has silenced the women who see it, and thus created the impression that women broadly condone, even encourage that. It has done the same around domestic violence and what would be seen as sexual predation gender-reversed. It has in having silenced good women, or caused them not to notice, created the circumstances for the next generation of women have to contend with the choices to protect, hence encourage predatory women. The attacks on those who tried to point out predatory and abusive women, especially when those were women themselves, will make it hard to frame as accidental, and leaves the massive destruction of trust - for the next generation to contend with.
Yes -- "feminist" women can be incredibly abusive to women who disagree with them. And I've found that the majority disagree with them. Probably the greatest harm is that feminist bullying and lies undermine average women's abilities to choose to be stay at home mothers, when around 75% of women would make this choice (or choose to work only part-time) if they could afford to. But the influx of women into the workforce has depressed wages, and women's academic success (which is largely a product of the fact that women mature a little faster than men) means women have pushed men out of better-paying occupations, leading to a shortage of men who can support a family on a single income. But men also contributed to this problem; go back 50+ years and there's an issue of men leaving their STAH wives for female coworkers.
I would suggest that the effect of affirmative action is at least as important in pushing men out. I noted when I graduated in 1990 from my MBA - that no men (except one who was both minority and deliberately presented as not cis) got interviews with certain companies, but every minority woman did, and a decent number of other women. This was obvious enough that a female Chinese classmate took me to lunch to express her outrage. I had said nothing, but she made clear she thought this was wrong. There has been a steady dribble of this - for decades. Also - the removal of books that appeal to boys from k-3 is much more crucial. Boys prefer books written in the active narrative for the most part (not the internal feelings one) . My wife went into the school library of our kids' school when they were young and was horrified at what she did not find (she has both an education degree and a Master's in Library science, and had looked at the research as had I). The impact on the boys in that school of buying a few hundred appropriate books was very clear. The lack of role models in schools for boys and the reality of them being graded more harshly and disciplined more harshly is also critical. Yes- fewer boys are ready to sit still at 6 and 7, but that is not the only issue.
If they grow up at all. Boys' rates of suicide are alarmingly high, yet feminism seems to want us to believe that it's just their "inherent toxicity" that's responsible. Teaching boys to hate themselves may not be doing girls any favors, but the focus needs to remain on the irremediable and profound damage it is inflicting on boys.
I agree, I wasn't trying to take that focus away. Just observing. Worried. I don't know how many mothers are like this as a percentage, I know several mothers of boys I don't think treat their sons like this at all, fortunately.
Yes fortunately that is my experience. From personal observation I think the only person that behaved a bit like this was the classic middle class (british definition) university educated, college teacher knee deep in "theories" with rather too much time to brood on "injustice" (her lack of money through choosing choosing part time lecturing). Curiously even those who in other contexts declare themselves "feminist" are in fact pretty traditional in lifestyle and expectations of sons, even three lesbian families. I really do think, in the UK at least, the problem is the disproportionate influence of a relatively few feminist women within our institutions.
You’re absolutely right. It will be interesting to see how young women brought up to be rude and brusque will fare in the world of work.
In my experience they run to HR all the time and contrive to alienate even them eventually. And I've worked in female dominated sectors for over 40 years.
Unfortunately, before they alienate HR people, they often target men for re-education and job loss with HR support.
Bingo! HR... the "community" police.
They will fair fine because no matter how fat, ugly, toxic, criminal, psychopathic a women is there will always be some dumb schmuck who will give her a pass if he thinks she will put out.
It is completely misguided and impacts everyone. Almost criminal as it encourages 'hate' between people
To be fair, some people do apologize too much and it's good for a mother to teach her children when it's appropriate or excessive. Unfortunately, that girl's isn't getting the proper behavior modeling.
The problem is that being like that, while you're young and/or attractive works very well in our current society for women.
But would it still work in post-depression scenario? Our current economy is inexorably headed towards a strong correction.
A few things:
(1) If being young and attractive means a woman can get away with being narcissistic, abusive, entitled, and generally awful, that would be an issue with men, wouldn't it? Women aren't exactly giving other women passes on being bitches because they're sexy (possibly exception for some lesbians). My experience is that women are more likely to give another woman a pass on being kind of terrible if she *isn't* conventionally attractive (i.e. doesn't have "hot", "thin" etc "privilege.")
(2) My experience has been that women who are *naturally* beautiful tend to be, generally speaking, a little kinder and more easy-going than your average woman. This is partially because they tend to be healthy (natural beauty = markers of health), get more exercise (to quote Elle Woods, "Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy."), and, as an exceptionally pretty friend of mine once pointed out, "It's easier to be a nice person when you go through life with people smiling at you all the time."
(3) The kinds of ultra-woke Instagram and TikTok-addled mothers being discussed in this essay would also be more likely to feed their children more junk food in the name of being anti-"diet culture", and less likely to promote healthy activities that result in natural beauty. Their daughters might have youth on their side (at least for a while), but I'm willing to bet that, *on average*, their girls will be less attractive (for various reasons).
(4) Sometimes women who are actually quite sweet and smart and not particularly entitled are bitchy to certain men as a means of self-defence or because they don't want to risk the guy getting obsessed with them and think it's kinder to just establish a boundary and firmly reject them at the get-go. Some men get extremely weird and some pretty scary when an attractive woman is friendly to them.
(5) Multiple things can be true at once. It can be true that throughout history men (and in some countries, in the present) men have raped women with impunity, particularly through warfare and invasions. It can be true that women were treated as property in many cultures, and married off to older men they didn't like when they were teenagers. It can be true that the witch hunts of the Western Christian world (which, really, were not all that long ago) were one of the most horrifying and traumatizing acts committed by males of a culture against their own women, and so thoroughly destroyed women's power and ancestral knowledge (e.g. of plant medicines) that we're essentially still recovering from it. At the same time, it can be true that women, in regaining power through feminism, have at large succumbed to a consumerist, narcissistic, individualistic, elitist reactionary ideology that is causing significant damage, including encouraging them to abuse their own sons and to model their behaviour on the worst of men.
If you are going to write such a giant wall of text in response to a simple casual commentary, it is a bit tacky to prepend "a few things" when you're going to submit me to a "lot of things".
Please tone down your womensplaining.
Typical view of a woman viewing history in terms of men and women as if all men and women are the same. Cultures throughout history also had more brutal punishments for rape and related things. And the witch hunts had a lot of women participating as well.
"Plant medicines" was actually known as natural medicine before the Rockefellers took over the medical industry and decided to change it entirely. And it was not done by women alone since they weren't the ones out there picking and testing the plants and ingredients outside.
And feminism too was enabled by the ones in power for their own benefit because women repeatedly kept voting down when asked whether women should be allowed to vote. The 19th amendment in the US wasn't even voted in, it was just put in place.. it wasn't a grassroots movement. And it's not just damage to their sons, it's for them too. Just look at the feminists cheering on women gaining money through onlyfans and how it empowers them.
Huh? My comment was already stupidly long, did you want it to be longer so I could caveat everything and give a detailed history of the Flexner Report? C'mon dude I'm a white mom yammering about plant medicines, I know about the Rockefellers, it's the subject of dozens of crunchy memes. As is the theory that feminism was a capitalist psy-op.
Also this is absolutely hilarious:
"Typical view of a woman viewing history in terms of men and women as if all men and women are the same."
It sure isn't just a theory especially when you look at who controls the federal reserve in America which was put in place since 1913 and the monopolies run by the Rockefellers, they started to have massive influence on the government bodies across the anglosphere. Somehow every woman overlooks this part of history.
And feminists would love to think a less than 5% of female population protested and changed everything lol. It was never in the interests of majority of women.
Err, the word "theory" does not mean "untrue"? Also "every" woman does not overlook this history, I literally see it shared in crunchy memes by women all the bloody time.
consider also, if she breaks out at say - 25 or worse 30, she is already through school, already working, already built a reputation for herself. She reforms utterly, what sane man who knew her before will not presume it is an act, and a trap....
Perhaps the man who was also a disaster and a bit of an asshole in his youth, and also reformed utterly.
"I will point out sexism to him at every turn..." No she won't. Anti-male sexism is perfectly OK with her and of course she practices it daily. Some of these boys will grow up to think for themselves, see the utter hypocrisy, the frank lies and become the very opposite of what these "mothers" desire.
Seems like it isn’t “sexism” unless its anti-female!
Women are far more sexist than men: https://www.apa.org/monitor/dec04/women
People prefer to hear good things about women: https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/people-are-more-sceptical-sex-difference-research-when-findings-favour-men
If women are more sexist than men, perhaps it's because they're rewarded for, or at least not discouraged from, being so. Trashing men, even among otherwise perfectly OK women, is just commonplace and no one ever mentions it.
Yes, this is what I've noticed too. Even women who do not consider themselves feminist and do not seem to harbor strong anti-male views think it is perfectly normal and acceptable to make cracks about their husbands and/or about men in general, with a combination of mockery, derision, and outraged complaint. I've never heard an ordinary man say such things about his wife or about women in general unless he was really in dire straights.
The problem for young women, is that is also defining relationships for a generation of men. It adds to the impressions that it is ok to hit him, and the clarity that has been around informed consent is only material with regards to her consent... so a generation of young men noticed, lying to get pregnant was fine, noticed the pass women who molested were getting, etc. Means they need only a slight cause to drop out of dating entirely.
Men too, although I suspect that has as much to do with currying favor as with actual belief. Although some men do believe in our own corruption, perfidy, etc. I'm rereading The Better Angels of Our Nature and Pinker sinks to that level sometimes.
I think it comes from oxytocin. That makes people more sympathetic to the in-group and more hostile to the out-group. Men have been cast in the role of threat for so long now that women have no inclination to see the male point of view. Men are just objects on the radar for women.
Thank you for writing this, Janice.
This experience is familiar to me. From a distance, I can only guess, but my guess is that the kind of women who would proudly write about these things in public (and who treat their sons this way) are much more likely to have a Cluster B personality disorder (borderline pd, narcissistic, etc.). I've come to believe that extremist philosophies of all sorts preferentially attract the character disordered.
Feminism reliably attracts a high percentage of Cluster B women, as an example.
What this does to boys is as terrible as you suspect, I can confirm from experience. Boys who've gone through it often end up having a broken relationship to their own maleness; they feel as though they were born bad. Being a man is bad. The only way to be a good man is to be enslaved to mother's concerns and to debase one's self and apologize.
There isn't a tenth of the attention paid to maternal abuse as there is to paternal, but it is just as damaging. In some ways, it's felt more so, as it excused, sometimes applauded, by society. Many can't even recognize that it's real. And if you bring it up being a man, the suspicion blinders come down on onlookers who see you as a likely "misogynist." It's the perfect narcissistic moral reversal: naming and objecting to maternal abuse is itself anti-woman.
This has left millions of us with deep wounds for life.
I just knew you were going to show up on this thread, it's like crack to misogynists.
Traditionally, boys (and men) were taught to be ready to die for their families so it sounds like feminists want this tradition to continue with the twist that girls/women can do what they like and are never responsible for anything.
Indeed there is something very "traditional" about modern feminism. It seems to reflect the high Victorian era society of the bourgeois. Still Hypergamous, convinced work should be pleasant and not too demanding, reeling off a litany of ailments (popular here at the moment is "menopause" , proneness to sports injury just prior to the "period" and climate anxiety) that require special care for women, a conviction that words or even a look can be violence and one can actually die of embarrassment and of course a fear of "sex" and males in general. All built upon the unsaid assumption that in fact males are universally puissant, or should be so, and have to devote themselves to service of the fairer (fragile) sex. Just at the moment the key thing seems to be to put the "sexual revolution" back in its box to get back to the position fair damsels can still "catch" a good man (the sort endless articles say are in terribly short supply).
That’s about right.
except like anything - they have massively overloaded it. Men refusing to engage in relationships is a predictable outcome of feminist narratives. The feminists with their twists on consent and domestic violence, have made it clear they endorse abuse by women, and that only her consent matters. Results are predictable.
Even as the notion of the importance of fathers for children breaks through, the context feminists left for the women who care is such that, the impression left with the next generation may be, that while fathers matter to kids, women do not care about the humanity of men. The feminists left too many impressions and fronts to engage on, for young women to successfully engage quickly.
“… But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the need to be quite direct and explicit about his responsibility to be a young man who always treats girls and women with respect—on the street and everywhere else.”
Does that include during Slut Walks and Vagina Monologues performances? The feminist gender narcissistic mirroring and projection of shame are fully exposed in this post—thank you, Janice.
I neglected to add narcissistic (gender) grandiosity as also being clearly evident.
Bravo Janice! Thanks for pulling this together and exposing the network of hate. The most amazing thing to me is that ordinary people look at this stuff and say nothing. People read in the magazines and newspapers the sorts of things you are describing and they don't bat an eye. These mothers are doing great harm and no one cares....as long as it is boys.
Funnily enough I was relaxing watching a film version of Nicholas Nickleby. The intro includes the casual observation that at 19 Nicholas becomes the "head of the family" responsible for the welfare of his mother and sister. Of course the good Nickleby and other gentlemen in the tale both revere the good women are are generous and extravagant in praise of worthy females. Of course Dickens was a spirited teller of tales, but it struck me how much of modern "feminism" has actually much the same assumptions of the Bourgeois 2 centuries ago, that males should carry the burden of supporting fragile and fearful females. Gynocentrism may have different shifts in society and societies but it does seem present most everywhere.
No doubt about it.
Feminism is systemic child abuse against boys.
Throughout elementary schools around America, boys are taught feminist ideology. They are even "taught consent" starting in middle school. The horrific implication that they are innately rapists is obviously.....horrific.
Throughout a boys life, if he is put through the average western public school, he is subjected to continuous ostracism and shaming.
Repeated social defeat is a concept where a subject is continuously ostracized. In male mice, it is shown to impede proactiveness and problem solving. Social ostracism is also shown to decrease men's testosterone level, which probably causes the lack of proactiveness.
For all of feminists and tradcon moaning about "lost boys", they never get to the (fucking obvious) root of the problem.
The systemic emotional abuse that all boys are subjected too.
Rather, cons would rather bitch about feminism somehow actually making men less responsible and less chivalrous, and feminists just bitch about toxic masculinity.
And further yet, gurus on YouTube will talk about fucking plastic water bottles before they talk about repeated social defeat.
I'll never forget a panel by the Daily Wire about abortion in which every single one of the speakers, most of them conservative men, made it out that abortion was something men did to women because men are such selfish brutes. It was incredible.
Hardly surprising given that the assumption, certainly from early medieval times, is that men are sexual beings and women are not. So both social attitudes and the law reflected, and still reflect this. There was decades ago a form of feminism that challenged this passive notion of women. But in general the huge advantages of claiming to be helpless putty in men's hands (so never responsible for you bad behaviour and choices) outweighed the wish to be seen as capable of sexual desire and making good or bad choices.
This is incorrect; the medievals saw women as the lusty sex. They had a much more balanced view of women, not falling into Islamic-style subjugation of women (because they revered Mary as God's greatest creature, and honored numerous female saints), but also not lapsing into Victorian-style "women are angels" nonsense.
I take your point about the generally more earthy view. However in terms of secular and ecclesiastic law there were many more statutes about male sexual behaviour. As was typical the Victorians spent some time tidying these up. It is often missed that Oscar Wilde went to prison for procuring 12 "rent boys", part of a then recent law against prostitution in general. " The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (48 & 49 Vict. c.69), or "An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes,""
I think its probably always been women have manipulated the publics opinion about female sexuality for those benefits you mention.
I don't think women actually want to be perceived as agentic. I think they want to be perceived as whatever will give them the most utilitarian benefit.
Well it certainly looks like it
"My hope of hope, before you even are able to form a sentence, is that you will never form a sentence that makes someone feel ashamed or embarrassed.” She hopes this while doing exactly that to him and of course will again and again and again throughout his life. The profound stupidity, the utter unwillingness to question their own beliefs just goes on and on and never ceases to amaze.
It is a "religion" and its extremists behave as religious zealots (including other secular religions such as Maoism).
It probably shows my age Maoism was a "thing" when I was at University. Its feature was that it was a species of Marxism that was/is particularly concerned with "culture" as well as economics. In its most extreme form its what drove the "killing fields" in Cambodia. Basically that everything of the old culture (false ideological consciousness) had to be obliterated. Hence the "Cultural Revolution" in China and things like the mass "re-education" of the Uighurs currently. Of course Leninists had much the same idea however by WW2 Stalin had realized that few would fight for an "ism" and so revived notions of motherhood and patriotism.
Of the multitude of heinous feminist behaviors, this is the one that infuriates and sickens me the most. Boys are already twice as likely as girls to commit suicide by the age of ten, yet feminists continue to prey on them, inflicting the most vicious psychological torture they can muster. Their hypocrisy is palpable: whereas we're to be horrified if any girl anywhere has her conception of womanhood influenced by any man anywhere, boys are to accept without question the disgustingly twisted portrayals of manhood that feminists thrust upon them; otherwise they are castigated as monsters. Our culture is already loading school-age boys up with behavior-controlling drugs the moment they exhibit symptoms of being male. I won't be surprised if feminists now want to start drugging boys who refuse to kowtow and grovel in servility to every feminist whim, no matter how casuistic.
Really goes to show that all of the "toxic masculinity" stuff is just absolute gaslighting.
A 10 yr old boy has pretty much no testosterone. Less than an adult woman that's for sure.
The reason they are more likely to kill themselves is obvious.
Social shame and discrimination at public school, which is vehemently feminist.
Single mother raised, and single mothers tend to be more abusive in general and tend to abuse boys significantly more than girls.
Not to mention that boys are more often victims of abuse and neglect in general.
Sometimes I wonder if single mothers alienate their sons the same way that ex wives often alienate their ex husband's. It wouldn't be unbelievable for women to make their son an "other" in the home if she doesn't care for his father.
Regardless, the case is clear.
Boys kill themselves because they are emotionally abused. In the home or out of the home.
A very insightful article. There are a few assumptions that feminist women make that create the problem being described:
1. There is an assumption that women deserve to be respected while men do not.
This is absurd...respect is earned based on one's conduct and actions, not their gender. Much of what these feminist mother's object to is actually young males correctly calling out poor behavior by girls and women that the feminist refuses to criticize or call out for the poor conduct that it is. The idea then men see women as sex objects is a prime example. It is WOMEN who overspend massively on clothing and make up to get the "right" man to look at them that drives this situation. Contrary to what many women believe, most men are NOT barely holding back from jumping on your to breed. Women flatter themselves far, far, far too much in this way!
2. There is a disparate allocation of responsibility and rights by gender.
Men are assigned responsibility for everything, even when they have no power in a situation, while women are never assigned responsibility for their own conduct. The reverse applies with rights. The prime example is the phrase women use when contraception fails: "He got me pregnant." indicating that the woman refuses to acknowledge her own culpability for the sex act and the hardly shocking result of a pregnancy. Indeed, given that women have insight into their time in the cycle that a man cannot have, it is WOMEN who have far more culpability here than any man could possibly have. This steadfast refusal for women to take or be held responsible for anything, unsurprisingly, drives men to lose respect for women.
So...inconclusion....feminist parenting is inherently child abuse to both young men and women.
On a country road near me, there's a house with a sign in front. All black background, capital white letters:
PREGNANCY BEGINS WITH A PENIS
REGULATE THAT!
I can well imagine it.
Penises are already regulated through laws about rape, sexual harassment, and child support. What more regulation is desired? Involuntary sterilization?
These bitches would absolutely have men's genitals cut off if they could. No, I'm not making hyperbole.
Indeed. One of the very obvious untruths that feminists spout is that women's sexuality is policed in history much more than men. Whereas in fact the reverse is true. We know quite a lot about men because there has always been explicit policing of male sexual behavior by ecclesiastical and secular authorities. What is fascinating is feminist "evidence" that men were 'condoned' by "society" in sexual license is actually the parade of recorded legal cases over centuries and tirades by Religious leaders and others in authority, all very definitely not condoning the sexual misbehaviour they proscribe and even prosecute. That sometimes some aristocrat "got off" with exile rather than execution or a fine rather than jail shows money and status could gain some privileges but still that "society" had written statutes and was alert to policing men's sexual behaviour, but sometimes was less effective in punishment. And there are very few such statutes about women, other than those about marriage and assuring legitimacy of children. The very evidence used to say men were "condoned" actually contradicts the thesis because the authorities clearly were busy policing male sexual behaviour and in doing so actually generated information about what the policed and prosecuted!
Bingo! Perhaps its time we start speaking truth...that we don't have a "rape" culture...but a culture of female irresponsibility and false accusations.
Now I have to know. What type of regulation are they recommending for penises? As far as I can tell, the present regulatory regime seems fairly sufficient. I very rarely encounter problems due to lack of penis regulation. Are they suggesting some kind of licensing requirement or something?
Excellent idea.
You say that "respect is earned based on one's conduct and actions, not their gender." At one level, that's true. Every child must grow up by earning respect at the personal level (and encouraging children to enter the larger world by doing so is an essential task of fathers). At a deeper level, though, it could be argued that every person deserves respect simply as a human being (and many would argue that all animals and even plants deserve respect as forms of life).
Very true. But whether that base level of respect is retained, added to or lost depends on how that party behaves. A woman who is being disrespectful to others should get the disrespect she has earned by her actions just as a man would.
We are entitled to politeness and civility. THAT is the social contract. Anybody demanding my respect based on their mere existence goes to the back of the queue immediately and gender has nothing to do with it.
Yes, Greg, but "politeness and civility" ARE respect. I wasn't referring to anything more than that. And much more is possible. Love, for example, is something else entirely. In a specifically theological context, Christ commanded his followers to strive for a particular kind of love (agape). which refers to a freely chosen of self-sacrificial love. But that's an ultimate (divine) standard, not the minimal standard that we all depend on to make communities possible.
“this same woman had written about the suicidal depression of one of her sons, stating that ‘My son’s depression doesn’t belong to me. I didn’t create it and I am not responsible for it.’”
Judy Allard disgusts me.
Dude. She was uncomfortable because you were 38. Unless someone had died, that stuff peters out when you're like 10.
"Bully tears" is exactly right. My mother terrorized me and everyone else with her crocodile tears for decades. When I finally figured out (as an old man, unfortunately) what she was doing, I started calling her on her emotional abuse and the tears and sobbing would stop as if I'd shut off the tap. She would literally go from breathless sobbing and tear strewn cheeks to calm rationality if I simply laughed at her histrionics. She would be, like, "hmmm . . . why doesn't this work anymore and what form of manipulation will?"
My mother was similarly manipulative. My earliest memories are of her telling me that she didn't want me, that she only wanted girls. She repeated this to me on a weekly if not daily basis throughout my childhood. She wasn't a feminist, she just wanted to ensure that I didn't feel entitled to any maternal affection, that I would have to earn it by finding ways to please her despite being a boy. This generally meant that I was to support her in her campaign of hatred toward my father, who--she was quick to insist--would have had me aborted if she hadn't objected.
Jesus, mine was nowhere near that bad--just a run of the mill narcissist who chose me as her main source of narcissistic supply. You have my deepest sympathy.
My mother warned me about womens' propensity for manipulation whilst I was a teenager.
Heh. I had a female try that on me. I directly called her on her manipulative shit. It literally never happened again, unlike every other instance of female behavior where it'd either never stop no matter what I said and did, or prove more persistent than herpes. As soon as I called her on it that light switch flipped off and broke off.
The female in question is currently dying alone somewhere, as even other females aren't interested in that shit.
I am consistently amused by feminist misandry.
Boys must be taught to respect (i.e. submit to) women and girls because they can be shaped mentally by their mothers. Boys raised in that way are still horribly misogynist. Boys are inherently evil. Full stop.
Feminism is committed to the belief that human identity, behavior, mental, and physical development is alterable by whatever method of nurture the mother adopts. It is also committed to the belief that masculinity is inherently negative.
So, if we follow the feminist model, men are both capable of being nurtured, and inherently evil despite their upbringing. This is the weirdest approach to the nature/nurture debate I’ve encountered: It is simultaneously both all nurture, and all nature.
I posit that the reason for this is simple: Feminists are fundamentally opposed to manliness, but are committed to nurture over nature. In consequence, they fly up their own assholes.
And in the TERF vs Trans debacle they are busily doing exactly that.
The mother/son dynamic is often the first salutary lesson the boy receives where he is the unwitting recipient of never-ending psychological warfare from the woman who bore him, whilst believing she must love him the most. Of all the tragedies he might experience in his life, this must surely be the most cruel.
If she carried her own wounding in the form of negativity towards men (like, “all men are bastards,” “all men are emotional midgets,” etc), whether she expressed it or not, spoken or unspoken, this would have an impact on the boy’s undefended psychology. He might go on to develop a self-loathing of his own masculine essence. Or he might feel that he could never trust a woman because they were inherently contemptuous of the masculine in him. Because his mother is essential to his nourishment, because of his need to receive her intimacy, he might reconstruct himself, so as not to jeopardize the relationship, by becoming amasculine. He can’t allow himself to become the thing she dislikes even if it means rejecting his true nature. The mother gets to mold her boy into the ideal version of the kind of man she craves, and he never evolves into the man he was “destined” to be.
This dynamic is also then encountered in adult relationships. Because of emotional wounding (as well as narcissism and entitlement), modern women demand that his attention be focused on her and her issues. She may not openly do so, but she will have unspoken expectations that he magically fix her. But the wounding that some women carry is such a “bottomless pit,” it will either leave him exhausted or distracted from his own life purpose, or both. Such women feel that he should prioritize her needs above his own long-term goals and the true expression of his life force. She becomes a succubus—a woman who will suck a man’s energy and pull him down.
Men, in general, recover more quickly from physical abuse than emotional abuse, either because nature designed them to be physically resilient or because being able to “take a beating” is an aspect of manhood that is socially normalized. Possibly, it’s part of the warrior aspect of masculinity to take physical injury, hold it, carry it, and move forward with it. Men have no shame in displaying their physical scars—quite the contrary. But no one sees his emotional scars and there is no pride in displaying them in the same way as those physical scars. This is so little understood that it is assumed that when men protect themselves, largely unconsciously, from women, it is because they are deficient in emotional intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The man has simply locked off his vulnerable heart because he knows instinctively that the emotional environment is unsafe, and perhaps he has had many salutary lessons already. In order for men to be vulnerable, there needs to be a reasonable expectation of safety (for a woman to surrender to a man sexually, she needs the same expectation). He needs to be confident that his vulnerability won’t be used as ammunition with which to attack him. Modern women, consciously or unconsciously, are playing a dissonant game with men. They want men to open up and be softer and more vulnerable yet have little to no expectation of themselves as having a sacred obligation to hold his vulnerability with delicacy.
Well said, thank you.
And thank you, Janice. You've been instrumental in bringing a trove of scholastic reportings of feminist shenanigans, and was one of the key voices which inspired me to write my book.
My childhood and my life until 41 when I cut my personality disordered mother out of my life.
The best way to teach boys how to interact well with women is not lecturing, it's having an adult male in the house who models that behavior.
Monkey see, monkey do