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The Self-Destruction of Modern Feminism
I grew up as one might imagine the youngest and only girl in a sports-oriented family would: a tomboy who had a never-ending supply of used boys’ clothes, a competitive nature, and a healthy imagination. Role models (both of what to do, and what not to do) were in ample supply. My parents both worked full-time and gave my brothers and me the greatest childhood of which any kid would be jealous. We never had any idea of the financial struggles they dealt with as my father took a risk on starting his own business with no safety net but with a wife, young kids, and a mortgage to support. Although we grew up working-class and didn’t have name-brand … anything, we had our parents’ devotion, dedication, and support. We could do anything we could put our minds to. And I was told no differently because I was a girl.
Even though I was a girl, it wasn’t an exclusionary part of my identity. It was a formative part of my personality (and why I lost all the backyard fights), but never brought up as a weakness. My being a girl – and woman – was never to be used as an excuse for cowardice or timidity or to be a crutch for self-pity. That mindset got me through college, the Marine Corps’ Officer Candidate School, the Marines, and professional life. It’s true there have been many challenges along the way and perhaps being a woman has made some aspects of the journey more difficult, but to have resolve and determination beat into my mind (more or less a consequence of those fistfights with my brothers) makes the challenge more worthy of pursuit.
The lure and deceit of modern feminism are that of indulging victimhood. Modern feminism has turned the idea that woman were capable of pursuing the things to which they were called and twisted it into a sort of egalitarian pipe dream: feminists offered promises of unreserved happiness to the women who rejected traditional gender roles out of spite for the so-called Patriarchal American society. If a woman did not feel fulfilled by delaying marriage and a family, it must be the construct of a sexist society in which all of a woman’s needs can’t be fulfilled by pursuing some “personal enlightenment” through a career.
The feminist movement took a disastrous turn when it shifted from a message acknowledging the inherent strength of women and our capacity to contribute to the diversity of ideas and skills in society, to a herd mentality dictated by a select progressive elite, chaining women to the anchor of a perpetual victim class. It was an open invitation to use gender as a way to avoid responsibility for poor life choices, to use it as an excuse to not pursue one’s potential, and as a weapon to silence critics who happen to be of the opposite sex. Hillary Clinton mastered this technique. She has a complete deck of playing cards emblazoned with “Sexist” and the picture of 52 past and present Republican politicians. It’s now on loan to Elizabeth Warren who played a bold hand during the Iowa debate Tuesday night.
While in college, I went to a political conference by Young Americans for Freedom. One day the young men and women were grouped into separate conference rooms. They did this to speak to the different viewpoints each group would encounter as conservatives out in the political world. Us gals were given a presentation by the Clare Boothe Luce Center. It wasn’t a radical feminist screed on the evils of a patriarchal society. There were no fist-raising chants of “The future is Female.” It was a primer on the contributions of the voices of conservatism’s leading ladies. The lesson was to be strong about your convictions and your ideas. It resonated with me. It echoed the voice of my father who told me I could do anything I wanted because I was strong and determined. It echoed my mother who taught me that even though I was different than my brothers, I wasn’t less than them.
How tragic it is for women who bought into the notion that to be equal is to be exactly the same. What message is being sent by the quota-warriors who insist on filling exactly 50 percent of boardroom chairs or congressional seats with women’s … bottoms just to fulfill an arbitrary requirement? It means exactly the opposite of modern feminism’s message: you are only valuable as your gender, not your ideas. This is where the mask comes off and modern feminism is exposed as a tool of the left. It stretches from behind the desk of Bill Clinton’s Oval Office and extends to Michelle Obama criticizing women who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. She said this at The United States of Women summit: “What is going on in our heads where we let that (Trump win) happen. So I do wonder what are young girls dreaming about.”
Young girls are dreaming about being champions of their ideas because they are good ideas; that their voices are heard and valued because of their content, not their gender; that they won’t be a traitor to their sex because they don’t hold the proper progressive ideas or choose to be stay-at-home mothers who raise kids and lay the foundation for a free and prosperous young generation of thinkers and doers and fighters.
In 2006, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said, “These women who act like staying at home, leeching off their husbands or boyfriends, and just cashing the checks is some sort of feminism because they’re choosing to live that life. That’s bull[expletive].” My Grandma Joan, who was a real-life Rosie the Riveter during WWII but went back to being a mere housewife after the war would disagree. She would probably recommend Sen. Sinema take a short walk off a long pier.
Modern feminists have fought to drown out and silence any dissent within their ranks and maintain their power over women’s issues by convincing women and girls they are born victims and, therefore, are entitled to special protections and privileges. We are doing irreparable damage to our young women when they hear the message that to be equal to men, women must be the same as men. We should be embracing and celebrating what makes men and women different and how each contributes to society, the community, and their families with their unique strengths.
It’s wrong to condition women into lives of low expectations by convincing them they are judged solely on their gender. The tired, worn, suffocating old notions of feminists desperately need a new generation of victims. We need to deny them their source and empower young women by encouraging them to follow their hearts and minds because they are women, not despite it.
*Please make note I consider gender to be immutable. Thank you!
Published in Policing
@jennastocker, I was on the staff at OCS from 91-92. What I saw there was that the women who graduated did very well indeed. The interesting part is that a high percent didn’t pass, not because of physical fitness, but because they couldn’t tolerate the stress, which was considerable.
I have to add a caveat that the command was investigated a lot for being abusive to candidates, even being forced to commission a candidate who was kicked out for bad behavior, so perhaps my experience is atypical. Our Colonel (Wes Fox) was a bit senile and our XO and Ops officer were fairly evil.
I was assigned to be the Candidate Admin Officer (I know, I’m not an admin guy, I still don’t know how it happened, I was a fish out of water) and one of my responsibilities was to be the R&S Platoon Commander. R&S meant Recycle and Separations, or something like that. It’s been a while.
Candidates in the R&S platoon were usually quite unhappy. They felt like failures at something they really wanted to succeed at. The general policy was to leave them alone and keep them unstressed, but get them to meals and medical appointments until their transportation was arranged to go home.
Some of the candidates were being sent home because of mental health issues. Of the men, that percentage of the people in the platoon (that is, among those that had failed) was probably 1% to 5%, the remainder being injuries (about 95%) and a smattering of integrity violators. For the women candidates, it was more like 80% to 90% were for mental health, and the remaining 10% to 20% were for injuries. I don’t recall any female integrity violators.
The male mental health failures were usually quite dramatic. (I am not a mental health professional.) I recall one candidate used all the pillows in the squad bay to make a machine gun bunker, then ran out into the woods and wouldn’t come out until the Colonel came by to get him. When I was a candidate a peer turned himself into various animals, ran like a deer through the woods, swam in the Potomac like a dolphin, crawled onto the air field like a crab, and then hid inside one of the HMX-1 helos.
The women mental health failures were different. They were not quite catatonic, but they shut down and were very skittish.
What I was told is that the women had never in their lives had anyone yell at them. People had always treated them like ladies. So if they had problems and couldn’t keep up with the stress, they collapsed. Men handled stress better. Why? You tell me. Perhaps it has gotten better since then.
I am waiting – with bated breath – for a discussion about @arizonapatriot‘s questions…
Apparently the mature, wise ladies aren’t touching this one…or they just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I think we should teach our daughters and sons that they are likely to be happier with a husband or wife and children. I not only love my children, but I really like them. I think we should counter-act messages they get from popular culture that children are a burden by showing them that they are blessings. I also think they need to develop their potential and pursue their passions so that they are worthy of being someone’s wife or husband. My parents focused on my education and career goals more than prioritizing a husband, probably because they just figured I would find one along the way. Thankfully I did, but we should let young people know that it’s a good idea to put an effort into finding a good spouse. In college, I had disdain for the idea that women would be in school only to get their “M-r-s” degrees, and I don’t think a women with that attitude would be terribly attractive. Neither do I think that women or men should look to marry only after they achieve career success.
In terms of the harsh reality of the biological clock coinciding with career building years, young women really ought to know that the men their age can stay single and work for 10, 15 or 20 years and still have a large potential dating pool of women when they are ready to settle down. If women want children, they should understand how much more difficult it might be to wait until later in life. I had a professor tell our class that for each of us, our most valuable asset was our lifetime earning potential. That’s not necessarily untrue, but it ignores the enormous value of fertility that young women possess. Sex and the City was a big hit when I was dating my husband, and I remember the show sparking a conversation about career and marriage. It seemed to me at the time that there were a lot of women about 10-15 years older than me who were realizing the huge costs of having prioritized their careers over marriage. This was Time Magazine’s cover:
I’m not sure who these wise (why do I think there’s an implied “old” in there somewhere?) women of Ricochet are, but AP will get no argument from me on this premise. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone, I don’t think. I also think we should teach our sons that being a good husband and father is a sacred charge as well.
And I think @lillyb has put it about as well as it can be put, in #33. Love your children. Like them. Model the values you’re trying to instill in them. Teach them that “it is not good for man to be alone,” nor women neither, and show them what that looks like when it works. Be honest with them about the facts of life, biological clocks, and the dangers of trying to have it all.
And above all, encourage them to grow and reach their full potential (which isn’t, in and of itself, a recipe for feminist oppression), so that they will be informed, educated, curious, and interesting people. (Those are, after all, the ones that make the best parents.)
My reading of Proverbs 31 (which I wrote a post about last year, and which is probably my more in-depth answer to APs question regarding the role of women) is that she must have been educated, must have been brought up to realize her potential, that she was quite a girl, an excellent role model, and not a shrinking violet at all. I think she’d have made a wonderful friend.
When it comes right down to it though, we can only do what we can do. If a daughter of mine (I have a step and a grand–the fact that I have none of my own is due to a medical issue, not a lack of will, missing the temporal window, or rampant careerism) made different choices for her own life, and if they were were kind, honest, productive, and loving, and in the case of her family, what she thought were the absolute best things she could do, I wouldn’t reject her, I wouldn’t think any the less of her, and I would try not to think of myself as a failure as a parent/mentor. Above all, I wouldn’t (at least, I would try not to) make her feel, at any point, that she’d somehow let me down. Because life’s a process. And you never know what’s around the next corner. (And I do know that because I’m old.)
I guess it’s up to me to be the grammar police, or whatever.
It would be a LONG walk off a SHORT pier.
Yes! Good eyes. My mistake. I always appreciate the police, thank you for your service! 😉
@arizonapatriot @LillyB @skyler I think you (and others?) had a few very good questions.
These are valid and good questions. I will attempt to answer them to your satisfaction and to the best of my ability (and keep in mind these apply to my service over a decade ago.
1) important question, and really requires a two-part answer. As far as the USMC was concerned, passing the PFT was required for all officers (all Marines) to be physically qualified to be active Marines. I consistently passed with a perfect 300.
But that is very different than physically qualified to lead Marines in combat. Keep in mind the USMC OCS is (was?) the only service branch to have a separate female platoon, but we did everything in training integrated with the males. This included carrying men across football fields over our shoulders, same obstacle courses, same quigley, same combat courses. Same standards applied for males & females. But- and this has since changed as per the Obama Administration- I do not think females should be in combat. Full stop.
So I really don’t argue with you regarding your thoughts on women in combat. However, there are many opportunities for female officers in the Corps servings in other capacities. I really wasn’t cut out for being a desk jockey, but loved being a Marine. There are roles females are fully capable of doing-and doing well that frees up a male counterpart to be in the fight.
I think that covers most of your questions, but
What was you MOS? What unit(s) were you with? I’m interested in your experiences.
I started as an aircraft maintenance officer from 1985 to 1993, and then came back in the reserves as a communications officer from 2004-2016. I found I liked the ground side better, even though I made terrible fun of them when I was with the wing.
It makes perfect sense. A person – male, female, black, white, Jew, Christian – who wants to be something puts that something in the crosshairs and goes for it without the adjectives . . .
Jenna—beautiful . My son joined the Marines around the same time you did, and I’m proud of you both.
And, by the way, since Marines (or any other service member) can find themselves in combat situations regardless of MOS, “Every Marine a Rifleman” applies to women too.
This is a great discussion. I agree with Jenna: There are lots of things that women can do in and for the military, and freeing males up for the fight is a great way to describe it.
Having said that, relatively few women have much interest in joining the military, or for that matter in being cops and firefighters. @Skylar’s experience is similar to my observations at the police academy: relatively few women enter, and while both men and women wash out, the women are often simply unwilling or unable to endure the stress. That’s okay, by the way. We’d rather wash them out of the Academy than have them discover, months and thousands of dollars of investment in them later, that they aren’t really up to the demands of law enforcement.
My immersion in feminism as a young woman thankfully did not get in the way of marrying and having kids early (23 and commencing at 24) when fertility was, to put it mildly, not a problem. It did, however, make me much more unhappy than I needed to be, and contributed to problems in my marriage which, fortunately, we overcame before my beloved husband died. (In other words, I stopped being a whiny, self-involved jerk, just in time).
Men and women are different. The trajectories of our lives can be different, too. What I know now is that there are parts of life that are time-sensitive, and parts that really aren’t. Even as a single (widowed) mother of four, the really time-intensive —as opposed to anxiety-intensive—parts of motherhood were completed by the time I was forty. Forty is young. We have people going through the police academy at forty+, including women: there are forty year old medical students, forty year old law students, forty year old entrepreneurs, with at least twenty years of working life ahead of them, and lots of wisdom and maturity. Heck, I’ve had National Guardsmen try earnestly to recruit me to be a Guard chaplain, the kind that deploys with the unit to Afghanistan! “You can get a waiver on the age thing,” they say.
As the wiser feminists used to say, you can have it all, just not all at once. There is time for just about anything you might want to do on the other side of motherhood, with a few obvious exceptions.
What irritates me most about feminism’s second wave is that we (it was my generation of feminists who blew this) stopped trying to change the culture in ways that would make a life of sequential fulfillment not just possible but normal, and allowed itself to be volunteer advocates for Planned Parenthood and not much else. What other “women’s issue” were all those pink hat people marching for? Well, of course, now they’re all marching for trans “rights,” a fairly obvious sign that the professional feminists believe and fear that all the problems of womanhood have been solved. They haven’t.
I shall skip over the burdens that the masculine model of sexual liberation has imposed upon female sexuality, the one that Planned Parenthood finds so lucrative, and focus on the work-life balance problem.
I might have told this anecdote before, but I’ll repeat it: During “Prayers of the People” (Joys and Concerns, etc.) at a church service, we were invited to offer prayers of thanksgiving for a member’s niece who’d just given birth to healthy triplets. After the service, the new mother’s aunt told me that there was a bit of a problem: Her niece’s law school tuition had been paid for by a program that obligated her, in return, to work for the organization for ten years. I can’t remember if the organization was public or private, and it doesn’t matter: the problem was that the ten years had to be continuous. She couldn’t take a few years off to look after her babies.
This struck me as so obvious a case for old-school feminist intervention that I couldn’t believe that it, or any similar program, had gone unchallenged. But…of course it had. The solution to the work-life conflict that feminism has signed on to is that the niece should put her babies in daycare or, better still, not have had them at all (#IstandwithPP).
One of my kids and his fiancee are both lawyers: Smart, ambitious, driven people. They plan to have children soon, even though they both work 60-80 hours a week. “Um…how are you going to take care of the baby?” I ask, to which the answer came, quickly and confidently: “Oh, everyone we know just gets a nanny.”
More recently, and in some ways more perplexingly, a young LEO told me that his wife—mother of their three month old baby—is headed off to spend two months at Federal cop-school in Georgia. They thought about having her take the baby with her. She could probably find daycare down there, and the program is more or less like going to college, with no “drop-and-give-me-forty” stress-inoculation stuff…but she wants to be able to focus on her training. So the baby is going to stay with her parents here in Maine, Daddy will take the baby on his days off, and the two of them will fly down to Georgia twice to visit Mommy.
“Wow,” I said.
As it happens, I was pregnant with my first child when my husband went to that very Federal academy; I flew down and visited him twice. Our son was a month old when he went to the academy here in Maine. He was gone five days and nights a week, home on weekends, and it was really hard, for him and for me. In other words, the demands of a career and the deprivations they inflict on family life can be tough on men, too. How many of those male Marines, “freed up for the fight” would prefer to be home every night instead? What makes life good and meaningful is self-sacrifice; giving rather than having it all.
Well that stress anyway. Many women give birth to multiple children. Pregnancy and childbirth is a stress I suspect few men would put up with (at least not more than once), based on what wimpy patients we guys are when we get sick or injured.
Thank you for your service! And thank you for your detailed response. I’m so impressed and so grateful that there are men and women who are willing and able to serve our country. Certainly most women (and men) could not perform at that level. My husband was in the Army, but was injured and got out before 9/11. He felt a strong pull to be in again afterward, but he did not want to be at a desk.
For all the new feminism and woke generation, there are still challenges to protect women and children. I’m glad the metoo movement happened. The pendulum may have swung too far to one side, but it will balance out. I’m glad to be rid of Jeffrey Epstein, and Weinstein and all those news people and actors who were really abusive to women. Even the food industry with some of the famous chefs and the restaurant industry has abuse! Change is good in that respect.
I was in CVS the other day and over the speaker a commercial that CVS will no longer be using air-brushed images of women in their ads. On the local news the other day, the new year and decade are starting with Bay County schools adding new protection to their kids, with education on child trafficking, and other abuses so kids are forewarned and forearmed. This program is in conjunction with a newly staffed health facility.
We know kids live by their cell phones and social media. Porn is rampant and not filtered – boys are getting this trash along with young girls who are trashed on Facebook for appearance or personal views. Perverts being busted are always on the news – it’s sick. It is also wrong to bash boys and men – there has to be a healthy respect taught once again, and boundaries. Look at music, especially rap and hip hop – they glorify the degradation of women, but so do other music sites like MTV. I grew up with feminism at its beginnings and I think women were respected more back then than now.
And an important percentage of those arrests are based on false allegations, but the man’s life is destroyed regardless.
Did anyone see on the news recently the little boy around 10 or 11 that walked home from his coach’s – he was in his hockey outfit n Salt Lake City, and was being followed by two men in a car – he was screaming for his mom, the door was locked, and he screamed at them to get away and started throwing rocks at the car. They were not deterred and he ran to a neighbor’s house. He and his parents were on the national news. He now will have to have a designated buddy and not allowed on streets by himself, because this is our world.
Thanks to everyone for the discussion.
I absolutely agree with She’s comment above that we should teach our sons that their top priorities should be to be a good husband and a good father. The roles are different, but the rules are the same for both men and women.
I don’t want to hijack Jenna’s thread any further. I think that there are some interesting follow-ups to the responses from Lilly, She, and GrannyDude about the different biological clocks faced by men and women. Maybe I’ll do a post on it some day.
I asked some difficult and controversial questions, and the responses were civil, thoughtful, and insightful. Special thanks to Jenna, who was hit with a blast of tough questions by a grouchy old lawyer, and handled it with the poise one would expect of, well, a Marine. God bless and Semper Fi.
Thank you for your questions. I think it really added an important aspect to the discussion. A healthy back-and-forth is the lifeblood of learning. If we can’t challenge each other- or ourselves- how can we expect to expand our understanding and knowledge. And I hope handling the barrage of questions like a Marine was meant as a compliment 😉