One of the most
disturbing facets of the wave of hysteria sweeping half the nation in the wake
of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory is the recent trend of feminist
confessionals about their problematic feelings for their male children.
In a
recent opinion piece for The Sydney
Morning Herald, self-declared feminist Polly Dunning, herself the daughter
of a prominent feminist, expressed difficulty “reconciling my biology with my
ideology, particularly when I discovered that my baby, my most-beloved Alfred,
would be a boy.”
As an aside, if
your ideology is at odds with your biology, that’s a sure sign that your ideology
is at odds with reality, and a life reevaluation is in order.
“I had never wanted
a son,” Dunning continues, an admission that isn’t in itself damning; many
parents start off preferring to have a daughter rather than a son, or vice
versa. But Dunning’s unsettling reasoning is that a daughter would “fit in with
my feminism better.” She admits to “dark moments in the middle of the night…
when I felt sick with worry.” “In this patriarchal world,” Dunning worried,
“how will I raise a son who respects me the way a daughter would? Who sees
women as just like him? As just human beings?... How do you raise a white,
middle-class boy not to think his own experience is the default experience of
the world?”
Despite this disappointment,
Dunning is determined to “raise a feminist boy... He will be immersed in
feminism by a family who models it in their everyday life.” She ultimately
concludes that “[b]y having sons, we do feminism a great service.”
Similarly but more
hysterically, Elle magazine ran an
article with a title that plunges into parody: “I'm Terrified of Raising a Boy in Trump's
America,” which raises the
burning question, “How can I explain to a little boy that the year he was born,
the President of the United States was an admitted sexual predator?”
“The thought of
having a boy terrified me, paralyzed me even,” but what really panics Piazza “is
the idea of raising a boy with good values when a man who represents the male
stereotypes we've been fighting for generations is in the White House.”
As with Dunning,
Piazza’s liberal white guilt, a malignant side effect of their identity
politics, weighs heavily on her: “As a white boy who will become a white man,
he'll be starting with a lot of privilege; how do I make him realize that?”
Piazza and her
feminist husband have come to accept that “raising a good man in the age of
Trump is a burden,” and that they “need to raise children who defy these base
stereotypes of what is masculine and feminine.”
On the celebrity
front, Mad Men’s January Jones, a
single mother, recently
stressed her intent to surround her son, like a defensive moat, with strong
women “to teach him to respect women.” She defiantly dismissed the critical
importance of fatherhood altogether: “He doesn’t have a male person saying
‘don’t cry’ or ‘you throw like a girl. All those shitty things that dads
accidentally do. I just don’t feel I need a partner.” How sad for her son that
she believes he’s better off without a father – a “male person” – in his life.
Because it has been
culturally acceptable for decades to bash men openly and celebrate single
motherhood, women like these are under the mistaken impression that only
feminists can teach boys respect for women because fathers – irredeemably
sexist in their eyes, particularly in the so-called “age of Trump” – cannot or
will not. It does not seem to occur to them that a boy’s most powerful
influence is a father, not the President, and that a good father does not have
to be self-loathing to believe in respect for and equal rights for women.
This is not to
presume that Jones or the writers of the aforementioned articles don’t love
their sons deeply; in fact, Polly Dunning concludes her piece by stressing that
her son is her “sun, moon and stars,” and that her “love for him swells my
heart.” That is as it should be. And most parents believe it’s important to
inculcate the values and beliefs that are meaningful to them in their children.
Christian parents, for example, naturally want to raise their children to be
good Christians.
But if you see
child-rearing primarily as an extension of your ideological mission, if your fervent
dream for your children is to weaponize them in the service of your utopian
political ideals, then you’re not parenting, you’re indoctrinating. This is
unhealthy for everyone involved and for society at large.
It’s a cliché but true
nonetheless: children – daughters and
sons – are a humbling, miraculous blessing. If your instinctual, bottomless love
for your own son is diminished or warped by your ideological distaste for their
gender or your color, then you need to find a belief system that is grounded in
love and gratitude instead of political dogma.
From Acculturated, 1/10/17
