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Dumb White Dads and Vanished Role Models
Occasionally I will play a card game on my computer to waste time, and to increase my time wastage, I have to endure ads before I can play another.
One of those ads that comes up rather frequently is an Adobe software ad. It portrays a dumb, incompetent white Dad who tries and miserably fails at a number of routine house maintenance items. The final scene shows a black man entrepreneur who is not only capable of performing all of those mundane maintenance tasks (plumbing, electrical, window blind installation, etc) but also can easily set up a website to advertise, bid on projects and e-sign proposals. Genius.
This made me reflect on the other ads and shows that media “experts” inundate our culture with. From Dylan (look at me I’m a gurl), to woke, deaf, indigenous, amputee, female super hero (is there a box unchecked?), to pajama boy obamacare salesman; all portraying weak, effeminate, incompetent white men, contrasted with strong, smart, capable, women, and POC.
When your children and grandchildren are creating their own self-image, their own identities, these are the role models that they have to call upon to formulate their own identity. Where is the strong male role model in today’s culture? Lloyd Austin is not it… 
Today, when boys dress up for Halloween, they are banned from dressing as a cowboy, police man, firefighter, GI Joe, or any other robust strong “manly” figure. Six-year-old boys are suspended from school if they point a finger at another child in kindergarten play.
What is left for the boys? Drag Queen story hours, and teachers that inculcate the virtues of transgenderism, now required by law to be part of the curriculum.
UCLA did a survey in 2017 – seven years ago – that claimed 27% of adolescents experienced some level of gender dysphoria. Based upon recent trends and observations, it seems that number today is much higher.
I have no solution, but I do feel a strong sense of despair as I watch our civilization and culture devolve into this cesspit. Our children and grands need better cultural role models in their lives, so they can have a chance at normal, healthy development and relationships.
As a grandparent and member of our local community, I feel an obligation to stand up as an example of a healthy, capable, strong male who shows respect for women, children, animals, property, who lives by codes of honor, courtesy, chivalry, integrity. It’s all I can do. No, that’s not true. I also pray for our country and our children.
Published in Culture
More role models from DC
I’ve noticed the denigration of fathers in commercials for years, and you make a great point. Without good role models, boys don’t have much of a promising future. I’m hopeful, though. I think there is a growing awareness among young women that men “who live by codes of honor, courtesy, chivalry, integrity” are much more attractive than the soy boys the dominant culture promotes.
Thank you for your commitment to being an honorable male role model. We need more of you!
Susan, you just posted about courage. One instance is simply standing for truth instead of kowtowing to the woke crowd’s demands for using preferred pronouns. It is difficult.
Last weekend, Mrs Nohaaj and I attended a wedding in N Hampshire. The groom’s mother’s sibling was what I believe properly called a cross dresser (His pieces were reportedly still intact) He, his wife(!), and all of the family were very careful to call him a “she/her/ Carrie’s sister”. I did too, for the most part. I slipped once, while repeating a drink order – “he gets a Southern Comfort Manhattan” and was immediately corrected by his wife who emphasized “SHE knows her drinks”. I was not brave. I then referred to him as a her/she/sister.
Mrs. Nohaaj is fully indoctrinated into the culture. She has her doctorate in Psychology, and teaches at the local college. This semester in addition to normal, child, and abnormal psych, she has a new course, “womyn’s psychology”. it is full of women’s reproductive rights (aka abortion), man hate, and the evils of heteropatriarchy stuff. It also glorifies trans men as living their true brave selves. go figure.
Later this year we have been invited to another wedding of a fully dysfunctional family. The bride ( a 50+ yr old) had removed her breasts because she was always uncomfortable with them. Her Father divorced her Mom and is living with a another gay. Her 19 yo niece is transgender, and living “happily” with her boyfriend. (Does that make them both gay? Very confusing. These people would be belligerently aggressive if I slipped up on a pronoun. I have asked not to attend. outcome still to be determined.
I want to be courageous… I would love to attend, smile and simply call the girl who is trans a she/her, but that would unquestionably lead to a physical attack by the family. (Their hobby is fighting in the SCA). I am principled but physically not interested in getting my butt kicked by a gang.
If they really would assault you then they sound like Antifa-level lunatics.
I don’t think a family event is the place to be confrontational. Some years ago a nephew married another man. I communicated that, while I love them both and would welcome them into my home, I would attend their reception but not the wedding, because I wouldn’t recognize it as a marriage. Unfortunately I confused the dates and wasn’t able to attend either function.
Nohaaj, It would not be courageous to attend. It would be foolish. By attending you are honoring their dysfunction, and I don’t think you need to do that. I hope you can easily bow out. Insanity.
All I can think of to comment would probably be considered “unkind,” at minimum. Such things seem to have infected Ricochet too, so better not.
“So it goes,” as Vonnegut used to opine when there are few words left to describe the sense of being overwhelmed.
We now have the bourgeoisie attacking the proletariat, that is the affluent suburbanites and the inner city gentrified neighborhood dwellers completely marginalizing the people who work for a living and who live by traditional values.
The proleteriat class can be blue collar workers, or business people who come in all stripes and colors. The latter can especially be found among people who have very successful companies but remember how hard it was to get where they got, on account of all the many restrictions, requirements and societal dictates that they had to either work with or overcome.
One thing of interest is that several latinas I know who only recently became US citizens have thought long and hard about things and have come to understand that the open border situation is a farce.
They suspect this farce is intended to destroy our society. They arrived in the 1980’s and were taught by both parents that being here means you work hard, learn English and advance in life.
But due to the ever increasing inflationary forces that have kept them from new home ownership, as well as their having to send the older teen to a community college, their view of the new arrivals coming into Calif and receiving as much as 44K for a household of three to live on annually as well as a guaranteed acceptance at Univ of Calif schools plus its pricey tuition covered by the Golden State is causing their blood to boil.
This push to communist domination is not going to end well. We are losing the ocean front state of Calif to CCP forces. Also New York State and Illinois, both states possessing influential ports.
So now The Uni Party has two separate flavors, with bold announcements arriving each election season to explain how it is necessary to vote for them and against the other guys. But the parties, with few exceptions, really are all one force – simply cloaking the two separate batches of candidates in different disguises.
It is important to wear the different disguises. Elections are a big business – how else can some lowly worker making 30 K a year manage to accumulate a vast war chest, and then allow half of that war chest to pass on to the relative handling the “printing and media costs” of said campaign? Then whether the candidate wins and loses, as long as they announce the commitment to stay steadfast in their goal of achieving another office, they can keep all that delicious money close at hand.
Now that you mention it… I don’t think they put on black masks and have a stock of black umbrellas and frozen water bottles. But they do actively support the antifa wing. They have opened their homes to provide temporary housing for the bussed in Antifa and posted GoFundMe accounts for their defense costs during the periods of mostly peaceful rioting.
I would only attend to support Mrs. Nohaaj, they are clearly not my crowd. She wants to go, because she wants to reach a higher level of recognition in the SCA and the bride is her mentor. So she needs to play that game.
I would like to read your comment, even if directed at me – unkindly. If you’d rather not post publicly, feel free to send a PM. I can occasionally learn even from unkind remarks. Sometimes they have a kernel of reality and truth, that I would rather not personally acknowledge, but need to get slapped across the side of the head with to see.
Monstrous. On the same moral level as Nazis and Klansmen. Stalinists and Maoists.
I have been hearing scattered reports of toxic levels of “wokeness” in the SCA.
Politely and Mildly understated.
I am obligated to be cautious in what I say because I have very little contact with SCA people.
It appears to me this strange turn of events is probably linked to the success of our all volunteer military.
If someone in a commercial is dumb, dishonest or inept and there’s a guy in the commercial – he’s the one. Every time.
Women may have been short on rights in the past (before my mid baby boom arrival), but the overcorrection has been incredible. Putting the ladies out to work in order to own the bigger house or car has a serious drawback in terms of family formation, as the children frequently happen in smaller numbers and later in life (if at all.)
As long as there are no children involved the work life is not much different from a man (except for preference in hiring and promotion), but once a child enters the picture the woman’s life becomes much more difficult. I never met a mom who said she wishes she could spend more time at work.
It’s a trap.
Not just when a child enters the picture but also the prospect of having a child.
Jordan Peterson did consulting work for Canadian law firms on how to retain highly talented women: They would rise in the ranks but upon reaching partner–or before–they would quit because they didn’t want to work 60 hour weeks and preferred to be home raising kids while they still could. In general, he observed, men were much more likely to be willing to work long hours–different preferences due to different personality patterns. All this was common knowledge in, say, 1960, but feminists attacked such knowledge as mere sexist prejudice calculated to exclude women. (The same feminists who denigrated women who openly expressed a preference for raising families.)
I may have missed it but what is SCA?
Ad men probably have no choice, the idiot in commercials to whom things must be explained cannot be a female or a POC or there would be hell to pay, which leaves only white men who have no lobby. While reading this with the ball game on a commercial came on about a wife coming in and finding her husband has smashed a hole in the wall to get better WiFi. There’s an SUV commercial in which the wife is driving with teenage daughter in the front seat and the father is relegated all the way back to the third row of seats.
Jimmy Walker once explained that there can never again be a Good Times or Sanford and Son on TV. Black people can never again be portrayed as poor, and so the Huxtables became a doctor and a lawyer.
When I was a kid in the 50s the idiot was always from Brooklyn.
Society for Creative Anachronism. People who pretend to be knights and lords and ladies and all of that. Staged jousting fights on horseback etc.
I like how dumb conclusions can be from a study when you add in a zealous devotion to the narrative. This is from that UCLA study.
Kids who say they are gender nonconforming are more likely to be distressed but it can’t possibly because they were gender nonconforming but because their parents aren’t Woke enough. Aristotle, we have need of thee.