Category Archives: Culture Wars

Women, from all political sides,  get so hostile and defensive whenever modern feminism is challenged.  Most American women have completely bought into modern feminist dogma, ready to do battle for “equal rights” for women in the workplace and “women’s rights” issues, as defined by feminist mouthpieces.  The few women who don’t cling to modern feminist dogma, usually cite fundamental religious beliefs of various stripes as defining their views on marriage and family.

It’s hard to say anything that counters some of the very negative consequences modern feminism has had on children, families, women, men, marriage and male-female relationships.  And most glaringly, it’s taboo to mention the negatives that modern feminism has spawned culturally, because to do so has to mean you’re misogynistic, trying to keep women down, a right-wing zealot, a hater, or just a meanie.

The issue isn’t about women working or staying home, the real issue is how traditional families were grounded in providing a safe, stable environment to rear children.  Absent a stable family, children end up unruly, undisciplined, at risk to all sorts of dangers being unsupervised and unmoored to any values, and totally at prey to the vagaries of pop culture and peer pressure.

People today define their lives in terms of personal happiness, rather than in issues larger than themselves.  That is what I mean, when I refer to the “I” culture.

Above all else Americans are consumed with finding “happiness” and doing whatever makes them “happy”.  America was grounded in a belief in individual liberty, but the “pursuit of happiness”, that most Americans believe means that they are free to do whatever they want, is not what the clause “pursuit of happiness” really means.

James R. Rogers, department head and associate professor of political science at Texas A&M, writes:

““Happiness” in the public discourse of the time often did not simply refer to a subjective emotional state. It meant prosperity or, perhaps better, well-being in the broader sense. It included the right to meet physical needs, but it also included a significant moral and religious dimension. In correspondence between James Madison and James Monroe in 1786, Madison notes that “happiness” cannot simply be identified with meeting people’s interests, but includes a higher reference:

There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation, than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. Taking the word “interest” as synonymous with “ultimate happiness,” in which sense it is qualified with every necessary moral ingredient, the proposition is no doubt true. But taking it in its popular sense, as referring to the immediate augmentation of property and wealth, nothing can be more false.”

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2012/06/the-meaning-of-the-pursuit-of-happiness

While assuredly, women, just as men should follow their dreams and pursue whatever careers they choose, when one becomes a “parent”, personal happiness must take a backseat to duty to your child.  This sense of duty has become very muddled by modern feminist dogma, where at every turn, there is a promotion of government-funding of childcare, devaluation of mothers who stay-at-home to care for their children and relentless glorification of “women-who-have-it-all”.

The complete devaluation of stay-at-home mothers has led to many women who are stay-at-home moms to not take their duties seriously and to put little real effort into rearing their children.  In turn, many (perhaps even most) men do not take stay-at-home mothering as a serious undertaking.  Instead, many men will respect career women, but disparage stay-at-mothering and equate it to sitting at home watching soap operas.  Modern feminists have worked diligently to promote this image of stay-at-home mothering, as not worthy of respect or dedication.

If you want to be completely discounted as someone worth listening to, be a homemaker. Hardly anyone takes homemakers seriously, even most homemakers themselves, where most of them feel compelled to list other things they do besides caring for their family, that their situation as a homemaker is just temporary, or that they are engaged in some other activities pursuing a career.

Devotion to taking care of your children and home, as serious work, should be promoted as real work and worthy of dedication.  This applies to stay-at-home mothers and to working mothers.

That taking care of  your children and creating a stable home environment should come before your own “happiness”, escapes many men and women today.  The concept of  duty to your children, as the preeminent responsibility as a parent doesn’t even register with many parents and in our consumer-focused culture, the fixation on buying children more “stuff” substitutes for meaningful dedication to teaching children values and manners.

The fact that many mothers don’t really define their primary duty as caring for their children, but rather in terms of career and personal happiness speaks to the success of modern feminism at working systematically to destroy traditional family structure.  It is as much a “long march through the institutions” as communism and other progressive ideologies.  All of them strive to tear down western civilization and replace it with their socialistic utopias (nanny state solutions), under the guise of people being “happy”.

It’s all about breaking through “glass ceilings” and cheering on the “first woman” to achieve another career milestone. Sure, it’s nice that women can pursue whatever careers they choose, but biological reality has not changed and neither has the real necessity that children require devoted, dutiful parents to place caring and nurturing them to adulthood, as the single most important duty of their life.

This isn’t about choosing either a career or staying at home, it’s about that however mothers manage their lives, dutifully caring for their children should be the top priority, not their own  “happiness”.

Motherhood is the most important job you will ever have.  Take it seriously.

A 1973 card I bought in my early teens, when I first began collecting quotes.

The Thoreau quote above struck a chord with me when I was around 13 years old.   Most people go with the flow, but I’ve always been a contrarian.   Sometimes, well, make that most of the time, life is probably easier if you don’t march to a different drummer.  The thing about refusing to buy into things, just because “that’s the way it’s always been” or “experts say it is so” or “what makes you think you know more than all the brilliant people, who have come before you” is perhaps they never challenged the “accepted wisdom” or thought about it in the way I am thinking about it.  I refuse to go along to get along if something doesn’t make sense to me.   Of course,  I keep trying to understand the “accepted wisdom,” but if I believe that is not right, then I will not say I accept it.  I might be completely misguided in my views, but until I believe something makes sense, I’m not going to say I believe it.

One thing I tell my kids repeatedly is: Don’t ever buy into other people’s bullshit.

I believe America needs a whole lot more people to adopt a more contrarian viewpoint.

A few posts back I wrote about Charles Eric Maine’s 1958 dystopian sci-fi novel , World Without Men, which amazon.com’s blurb describes as:

Maine’s bases his vision of an ideological dystopia not on criticism of socialism or communism per se, nor of technocracy per se, but rather of feminism. Maine saw in the nascent feminism of his day (the immediate postwar period) a dehumanizing and destructive force, tending towards totalitarianism, which had the potential to deform society in radical, unnatural ways. Maine believed that feminism, as he understood it, derived its fundamental premises from hatred of, not respect for, the natural order. He also believed that feminism entailed a rebellion against sexual dimorphism.”

https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-Charles-Eric-Maine/dp/1614272271/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1488252667&sr=8-1&keywords=world+without+men

Not being a fan of science fiction or novels about dystopian societies, I felt relief when I finally received my copy of World Without Men.  The novel is only 190 pages and a quick read.  However, many themes in the plot evoke deeper questions about women, women in groups, men, and men’s influence on women’s behavior that left me pondering modern feminism.  I’m already rereading several sections.

Before I begin the book report on an imaginary society in a 1950s sci-fi novel, consider that talking about males and females shouldn’t be complicated, yet many things in our culture today require a concentrated effort at suspending rational thinking to believe in the bizarre “gender issues,” because frankly, they’re made-up and have no basis in the world as we know it, scientific facts, or historical evidence.  The feminist revolution spawned not just a battle for women to have equal access to jobs and equal pay for equal work, but an endless war against the patriarchal system (code for western civilization) and at its core a hatred and complete disdain for men and all things that are traditionally considered masculine, manly, or male attributes, beyond mere differences in genitalia.

I reject feminism, because it’s not just some benign battle for “fairness” in the workplace or expanding opportunities for women, it’s about tearing down the entire framework of western civilization.  Maine’s novel, set 5,000 years into the future, describes a world literally without men.  Although sounding totally implausible at first glance, Maine offers snapshot-like short chapters into the past, that lay out frightening events along the way to how this “world without men” came to be.  While novels like this aren’t to be taken literally or as prescience for what is to come, like 1984, Maine touched on some issues that are worth thinking about.

Parthenogenesis, asexual reproduction where an embryo develops from an unfertilized egg cell, becomes the means of reproduction in this futuristic, totalitarian, lesbian world Maine created.  The society, 5,000 years into the future, begins the story of a world of only women, who are controlled by government committees and artificial intelligence from computers, to believe in the Parthenogenetic Adaptation Syndrome (P.A.S.), that teaches women that nature has evolved to allow women to have babies without men.  The official history teaches that men, over time, died out and offers some glimpses into a world with war, expensive space exploration and conflict in those ancient times.  The P.A.S. requires rigid, cradle to grave conformity to all rules decreed by the government departments, like the Department of the Written Word and the Department of Social Stability.

All women are told when it is their duty to produce babies, which they never see and which are raised in government institutions.  The women are told that these babies are born naturally through parthenogenesis.  Relationships in this world are superficial and geared toward physical pleasure, not deep emotional bonds.  Along with government committees tightly controlling reproduction, the governmental Department of Mortic Revenue controls who dies and when they die, to maintain a stable population.  Even in this peaceful world, where no one is allowed to make waves or disrupt the social stability, rabble-rousers and contrarians keep emerging.

The official P.A.S. history teaches:

“There never could have been a Utopia while man survived and controlled human affairs, for his innate aggressiveness and insatiable curiosity forced him restlessly to pursue the ever-widening boundary of knowledge without giving a thought to the application of his newly found powers in the service of humanity.  In abolishing man, nature had opened the way to the permanent establishment of peace and plenty.  Several women scientists had pointed out that man had been necessary to nature’s purpose; he had tackled, with considerable energy and ingenuity, the problem of adapting his environment to himself, and had succeeded in wresting from the blind forces of the cosmos all the power he needed to secure the supremacy and ultimate survival of the human race as an entity.  And at that point man became redundant. Worse he became an obstacle to the wise and peaceful exploitation of natural power for the benefit of his species.  So man ceased to exist, and woman became mistress of her planet, and nature provided parthenogenesis to replace the outmoded reproduction mechanism that had vanished with the male sex.”

p. 35, World Without Men, Maine, Charles Eric

While the official belief is in P.A.S., secretly the government has scientists working tirelessly on trying to produce living male babies, because human parthenogenesis is a lie.

Maine has chapters that provide historical glimpses into how this all female world developed, beginning with a contraceptive drug called Sterilin, which creates temporary sterility in women, to allow women sexual freedom.  Keep in mind this novel was written before the Pill was introduced.  Another chapter moves further ahead where a reporter wants to break a big story to expose that the governments of the world are hiding an alarming decline in male births, attributed to nature overcompensating for artificially sterile females, by overproducing females.  The imbalance at this point in the story is reaching critical mass, but to avoid widespread panic, governments are suppressing the demographic statistics.  The reporter is assassinated before he can break the story.

Further along in the progression to a world without men is a short chapter on an old man, kept locked living in isolation, with caretakers.  This man has been told he is the last living man on earth and his memories of younger days, being kept locked up with other men to provide, basically stud service and genetic material, sounds like how scientists today work to preserve endangered species.  The male embryos keep dying off.  Many aspects of this story fit perfectly with how scientists react to existential challenges and with how most people adapt and conform easily to whatever rules they are indoctrinated into believing.  At each historical point in this story, there are people who rebel and believe in exposing the lies.

I don’t want to give away the ending completely, but like so many other epic stories throughout history, a male child is born and his birth rocks the entire system. The committees and artificial intelligence, reach the verdict that the male baby must be destroyed. He will disrupt the stability.  A revolt begins.  Maine writes:

“It is strange how a small thing can unbalance a perfectly planned society.  Perhaps stability is geared in some way to purpose and direction, and perhaps the stabilizing was research into the synthetic creation of a male human.  Without that focal point of endeavor, like the nucleus of a cell, it may be that society tends to lose its purpose, to disintegrate.  The psychology of a social perversion-neurosis in very complex.”

p. 189, World Without Men, Maine, Charles Eric

Although, this story is science fiction, modern feminism does tend toward totalitarianism, where whatever “gender theories” and  pseudo-science, manufactured among feminist academics, get crammed down our throats through “experts” lecturing us in the media and through the K-12 public school system.  Any who disagree are shouted down and ostracized.  While no catastrophic decline in male births has occurred due to widespread use of contraceptives since the advent of The Pill in 1960,  in Russia and several Western European countries that embraced both contraception, small families and abortion, demographics have reached  a critical stage.  These countries are not reproducing enough children to sustain their ethnic groups.

As bizarre as the P.A.S. belief in this story sounds, truthfully it’s no more bizarre than the current transgender myths and endless “gender variations” being sold by “experts” and LGBT activists.  A very small fraction of the population was homosexual before the massive efforts to mainstream gay marriage and gay rights, but along with the mainstreaming is a full-court effort in Hollywood to produce movies and TV shows with gay characters to normalize homosexuality.  As homosexuality is mainstreamed and promoted, more young people will engage in homosexual behavior.

The activists have carefully packaged all of their radical gender agenda as “civil rights,” casting any who don’t buy into their beliefs as “haters”.  With the rapid successes with gay activism, the current transgender activism is intended to mainstream transgender behavior and teach children that despite being born male or female, they should feel free to choose their “gender.”   The push to “treat” children before adolescence with hormones to stop puberty is already happening and some doctors also have begun administering hormones to cross-sex, beginning the sex change process in children as young as 12.

Maines’s fictional all-female society was thousands of years in the making, but looking at the LGBT transformation in society in the past 20 years shows how quickly people can be brainwashed, manipulated and led by relentless mass media saturation and social engineering  to normalize just about any behavior.

As for me, I’ll remain a contrarian and insist that boys and girls should be allowed to be just boys and girls again, without all this gender-bending, destructive,  pseudo-science robbing so many children of the innocence to just be kids.  And we shouldn’t feel like we are being insensitive to politely say , “I don’t believe in 50+ genders” or “I believe transgenderism is a mental disorder.”

The powers that be, in any human system, try to silence and squash disrupters, who challenge the system.  Maine got that part completely right.