Tag Archives: Mother

Commentary

Dennis Prager offers the best concise analysis of the effects of feminism ever

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Dennis Prager has summarized many of my viewpoints on this blog in a tiny, tiny little article. He calls it “Four Legacies of Feminism“.

Read the whole glorious thing and bask in its wisdom!

Full text:

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s feminist magnum opus, The Feminine Mystique, we can have a perspective on feminism that was largely unavailable heretofore.

And that perspective doesn’t make feminism look good. Yes, women have more opportunities to achieve career success; they are now members of most Jewish and Christian clergy; women’s college sports teams are given huge amounts of money; and there are far more women in political positions of power. But the prices paid for these changes — four in particular — have been great, and outweigh the gains for women, let alone for men and for society.

1) The first was the feminist message to young women to have sex just as men do. There is no reason for them to lead a different sexual life than men, they were told. Just as men can have sex with any woman solely for the sake of physical pleasure, so, too, women ought to enjoy sex with any man just for the fun of it. The notion that the nature of women is to hope for at least the possibility of a long-term commitment from a man they sleep with has been dismissed as sexist nonsense.

As a result, vast numbers of young American women had, and continue to have, what are called “hookups”; and for some of them it is quite possible that no psychological or emotional price has been paid. But the majority of women who are promiscuous do pay prices. One is depression. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently summarized an academic study on the subject: “A young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.”

Long before this study, I had learned from women callers to my radio show (an hour each week — the “Male-Female Hour” — is devoted to very honest discussion of sexual and other man-woman issues) that not only did female promiscuity coincide with depression, it also often had lasting effects on women’s ability to enjoy sex. Many married women told me that in order to have a normal sexual relationship with their husband, they had to work through the negative aftereffects of early promiscuity — not trusting men, feeling used, seeing sex as unrelated to love, and disdaining their husband’s sexual overtures. And many said they still couldn’t have a normal sex life with their husband.

2) The second awful legacy of feminism has been the belief among women that they could and should postpone marriage until they developed their careers. Only then should they seriously consider looking for a husband. Thus, the decade or more during which women have the best chance to attract men is spent being preoccupied with developing a career. Again, I cite woman callers to my radio show over the past 20 years who have sadly looked back at what they now, at age 40, regard as 20 wasted years. Sure, these frequently bright and talented women have a fine career. But most women are not programmed to prefer a great career to a great man and a family. They feel they were sold a bill of goods at college and by the media. And they were. It turns out that most women without a man do worse in life than fish without bicycles.

3) The third sad feminist legacy is that so many women — and men — have bought the notion that women should work outside the home that for the first time in American history, and perhaps world history, vast numbers of children are not primarily raised by their mothers or even by an extended family member. Instead they are raised for a significant part of their childhood by nannies and by workers at daycare centers. Whatever feminists may say about their only advocating choices, everyone knows the truth: Feminism regards work outside the home as more elevating, honorable, and personally productive than full-time mothering and making a home.

4) And the fourth awful legacy of feminism has been the demasculinization of men. For all of higher civilization’s recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family. That notion — indeed the notion of masculinity itself — is regarded by feminism as the worst of sins: patriarchy.

Men need a role, or they become, as the title of George Gilder’s classic book on single men describes them: Naked Nomads. In little more than a generation, feminism has obliterated roles. If you wonder why so many men choose not to get married, the answer lies in large part in the contemporary devaluation of the husband and of the father — of men as men, in other words. Most men want to be honored in some way — as a husband, a father, a provider, as an accomplished something; they don’t want merely to be “equal partners” with a wife.

In sum, thanks to feminism, very many women slept with too many men for their own happiness; postponed marriage too long to find the right man to marry; are having hired hands do much of the raising of their children; and find they are dating boy-men because manly men are so rare.

Feminism exemplifies the truth of the saying, “Be careful what you wish for — you may get it.”

I wish I could add something to this, but I can’t because every time I think of something to add, he says it in the next sentence.

If you like this short essay, then this medium essay arguing against feminism authored by Barbara Kay would be nice follow-up.

It might be worth forwarding these articles along to your friends. And I highly recommend books on male-female relationships and roles by George Gilder, especially “Men and Marriage“.

News

Canadian Supreme Court refuses to hear appeal on infanticide case

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From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

The Supreme Court of Canada declined last Thursday to hear an appeal in the case of a mother who smothered two of her children. The decision means that a Canadian mother can continue to plead to the lesser charge of “infanticide” rather than “murder” when she ends the life of her newborn child.

The mother in the case, referred to as “L.B,” was 15 years old when in 1998 she smothered her 6-week-old son Alexander. She smothered another one of her children, 10-week-old son Cameron, in 2002.

[…]In a statement to the police, L.B. testified that 6-week-old Alexander’s crying made her “angry.” When he would not stop crying, she placed him in his crib, covered him entirely with blankets and a plastic cover, left the room, and began listening to music. She admitted that she was “very confused” but insisted that she “wanted to help Alexander feel better.”

L.B. also testified to police that on the day she killed her 10-week-old son Cameron, she was “very upset” and feared that she would do her child harm. Police heard how L.B. “wanted Cameron to die,” since she believed it was “the right thing to do.” As Cameron slowly suffocated, she told her son that he was “going to a better place.”

Here’s the prosecutor:

Jennifer Woollcombe, acting for the Crown, appealed Justice Herold’s 2008 decision, arguing that L.B’s “infanticide defence” was based on antiquated laws that were created to give juries an alternative to the death penalty for mentally unstable mothers who killed their children. The Crown argued that the “infanticide defence” constitutes an “unacceptable devaluation of the worth of a newborn child.”

“The trial judge found that these murders were planned and deliberate. There is no principled reason for acquitting her of murder. She made a choice to kill while her husband was at home, called an ex-boyfriend rather than 911 after killing him, maintained a facade that the babies died of SIDS, and accepted and sought out sympathy and attention.”

“The respondent intentionally killed two babies,” said the Crown brief during the mother’s trial, as reported in the Globe and Mail.

Recall the horrifying story about the recent slap-on-the-wrist handed down to the Edmonton woman who strangled her own baby. What is wrong with Canada on the life issue?

News

New trial for father convicted of assault for spanking child

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Map of Maritime Provinces in Canada
Map of Maritime Provinces in Canada

From Life Site News. (H/T Carolyn)

Excerpt:

A New Brunswick father who was convicted of assault for spanking his 6-year-old son in 2009 has been granted a re-trial by the New Brunswick Court of Appeal.

The court found that the original trial judge was too “subjective” in determining the severity of the spanking, and pointed out that Canadian law allows corporal punishment as long as the child is between two and 12 years old and only reasonable force is used.

In the original trial, the father told the court that he, his wife and their three children were driving from their home in Durham Bridge to a museum in Fredericton in August 2009 when his 6-year-old son became unruly. The court heard that the boy was screaming in the back seat, kicking the front seats, throwing things and unbuckling his seatbelt. The father said he repeatedly tried to calm the boy down and threatened to spank him if the bad behavior continued.

The mother eventually stopped the car and the father spanked the boy three times on the clothed buttocks, according to his testimony, adding that he slapped his own leg several times to warn the boy before administering the spanking.

Millicent Boldon, who testified at the original trial as a witness of the event, told the court she called the police after seeing the man slap the boy “at least ten times,” and heard the child yelling, “You’re beating me senseless. Stop. You’re hurting me.”

Another witness, Jim Burns, said he couldn’t tell if the father was striking the boy or not, as their backs were turned to him, but testified that he saw 18 “blows” delivered.

But Justice Richard Bell and Justice Wallace Turnbull said in their decision that they overturned the original conviction because the original judge, who is not named in the appeal ruling, erred in giving more credence to witnesses whose testimony was inconsistent than to the father, stating the original judge “applied a subjective standard when she said ‘no spanking should go on and on to the point that strangers pick up the phone and call the police.’”

According to Justice Bell, “In this case the trial judge’s sole basis for convicting the appellant flowed from the duration of the punishment. In my view she applied a subjective standard by delegating to an onlooker the determination of guilt or innocence.”

The disturbing thing about this situation is that the husband and wife did not make any mistake. Normally, I can blame the man for marrying a feminist who opposes moral judgment and discipline of any kind. But in this case, it’s not the wife who is to blame. It’s some other woman who calls the police. I think it’s significant that the caller in question is female and that the judge was female. It’s similar to the other case from Quebec in which a daughter and mother got a female lawyer and went to a female judge in order to get the father’s grounding of the daughter overturned. This case is much worse than that case, because there was nothing that could be done by the husband and wife to prevent it.

Why would any man get married in a society in which men are not respected as providers or the protectors in the family? Where men don’t have the right to try to form the character the children will have, (instead of the public schools, where a huge majority of the teachers are female)? What is the point of marriage for a man if he is just going to be a sperm donor and ATM? Do men have any role in disciplining children who behave in an abusive and selfish manner – especially to their own mothers? If not, then why should a man bother marrying at all, if he is just going to produce children who start out their lives by not respecting their own mothers? Do people not realize that boys who are raised without fathers are exactly the men who are more likely to treat women badly? No man should get involved in a family if all he is going to do is pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce children who lack self-control and responsibility. What is the point of that?

By the way, I think it would be very ironic if the woman who made the call were pro-abortion, which is quite likely to be the case, in Canada.