Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education. Sobering facts about women’s declining fertility after their 20s are being withheld from ambitious young women, who are propelled along a career track devised for men.Of course, teaching girls the facts about fertility and the demand curve for their sexual attractiveness flies directly in the face of both feminist ideology and the Female Imperative. So, young women are deliberately being kept in the dark in order to ensure that their choices are uninformed.
The refusal by public schools’ sex-education programs to acknowledge gender differences is betraying both boys and girls. The genders should be separated for sex counseling. It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease. Boys need lessons in basic ethics and moral reasoning about sex (for example, not taking advantage of intoxicated dates), while girls must learn to distinguish sexual compliance from popularity.
Above all, girls need life-planning advice. Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion. Adolescent girls must think deeply about their ultimate aims and desires. If they want both children and a career, they should decide whether to have children early or late. There are pros, cons and trade-offs for each choice.
How very empowering! Empowering for whom, exactly?
30 comments:
Empowering for the patriarchy that wants women in the workforce, suppressing wages, enforcing conformity, preventing unionization, and rendering superfluous the only group the patriarchy fears: white men. Superfluous in the sense of fatherhood, responsibility and familial patriarchy. Feminism is a tool of the patriarchy in its war on all other patriarchies, most especially that of the family. That the patriarchy is ensuring its own destruction, since its power and wealth depend completely on the continuing work of white men means less than nothing to them. So the truths of fertility will continue to be suppressed and the degringolade of the West will continue apace.
As a millennial, I can attest to this: they absolutely do teach that pregnancy is the worst possible result. I'm old enough that they weren't addressing abortion at that time, but more time was spent discussing how your life was basically over if you had a baby. There were movies and stories about the horrors of motherhood and how you couldn't go to the mall when you wanted or hang out with your friends, etc. You grew into adulthood believing that you didn't want to be pregnant for a very long time, if ever.
They never once showed having a baby as a beautiful blessing or a grave responsibility. It was always as a burden that ruined your life forever.
Clearly brainwashing girls against their biological function is a more desirable alternative to teaching abstinence and personal responsibility /s
Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion.
Pregnancy is defined as a disease by the M.D.s,
the obsessive public school interest in sexually indoctrinating young boys and girls, the one thing they don't see fit to teach the girls is the basic realities of fertility:
It isn't about education.
But Paglia is honest, if a feminist - though at this point, it would be interesting to ask her if the destruction of western civilization was worth it.
Rome had the germanic tribes, we have universities with "women's studies". Barbie-barians in our midst.
PatrickH: "Empowering for the patriarchy that wants women in the workforce, suppressing wages .."
It isn't the 'Patriarchy' that wants women in the workforce, it's the Political class, they have spent the last century destroying currency after currency, so that a man who could have supported a family on £3 per week in 1913 can barely do so on £300 per week in 2014.
Feminism, is part and parcel of the Political class, if the Political class is the Patriarchy, then Feminists are the Patriarchy. Cognitive dissonance alert.
"It isn't the 'Patriarchy' that wants women in the workforce, it's the Political class"
Witness this week's Spectator (UK) editorial – a supposedly conservative, centre-right publication – advocating more women in the British workforce, at the expense of mothers spending time with their kids. To "help the economy", naturally. No mention given to whether the economy is actually helped in the long-run by the bahavioural problems caused by industrial daycare centres, or whether it's desirable for intelligent women to prioritise careers, meaning that they don't have kids (or if they do, just one) at later stages in their lives, when there is a higher risk of health problems for her and the newborn.
Because of course, all that matters are next quarter's GDP figures.
The political class is dominated by men, as are all hierarchies, including media, business et al. Women are incapable of rebellion, revolution, taking over, any hierarchy dominated by men. A hierarchy of men can only be defeated by another hierarchy of men. Feminism is a tool of the patriarchy, which is simply the name I give to those (inevitably) male-dominated institutions--such as the political class--that are attempting the destruction of all mediating social institutions, such as the family, insofar as those institutions are not under the control of, among other, the political class.
Imagine the anger and despair of the millions of men and women who've missed out on having families of their own.
Who benefits from this?
Feminism is a tool of the patriarchy, which is simply the name I give to those (inevitably) male-dominated institutions--such as the political class--that are attempting the destruction of all mediating social institutions
It still makes no sense to call it that. If you consider all organizations of people to be patriarchies because they're all dominated by men, the word doesn't identify the one you're talking about. You might as well call it "humanity" and say, "Feminism is a tool of humanity in its war against humanity." After all, feminism is being pushed by humans even more than exclusively by men, right? It's nonsensical.
I realize we don't seem to have a very good simple name for the elites who are working to destroy civilization. Not many people seem to like "Cathedral," and calling them liberals is misleading in some ways, though they are. There's the Jewish angle, but they're not all Jews either, and bringing that up scares people. Maybe we should go back to calling it Freemasonry. But "patriarchy" is an especially bad name for it.
"There's the Jewish angle, but they're not all Jews either"
That's not even close to being necessary for it to be true.
Feminism is not new. It dates AT LEAST to 1792 and Mary Wollstonecroft (mother of Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley) and "Vindication of the Rights of Women." Other seminal feminist works include William Blake (yes that most Christian of Poets best known for his massive epic Christian poem "Jerusalem") a champion of "free love" who held that marriage was a prison.
What you are looking at is a deep, deep strain of Christianity. Now, as a painful agnostic (a not fun position believe me, I would DESPERATELY like to believe that I would see those I love again) I will caveat that of all religions, Christianity is the BEST and also every people NEED A RELIGION. Since you cannot have a policeman on every corner and in every dwelling place; and people need to believe something.
BUT ... the whole Mary-worship, very feminine aspect of Christianity lends itself so easily to ... oh hell let's just quote Blake in "Visions" ...
Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound
In spells of law to one she loathes? and must she drag the chain
Of life in weary lust?
Feminism works so well in the West because it speaks to something DEEP inside Western culture: the better treatment, position, and value of women compared to other peoples. Even Patriarchal Ukraine and Russia is over-run with Femen and look-at-me Pussy Riot. While Japan and the ME and China and Korea and Africa remain untouched by feminism.
Bernard Lewis in "The Muslim Discovery of Europe" notes that Muslims and Westerners have vastly different views of women: the Sultan's ambassadors were horrified at the Emperor (Hapsburg) courteously allowing ladies to cross in front of him and DOFFING HIS HAT! in a muddy road in Vienna (a Muslim man of any station would have run them down). While hardened crusaders, often illiterate killers, were horrified at the brutality meted out by Muslims to washerwomen.
As Tacitus points out, from the beginning Germanic peoples (Celts also) depended on women of their own free will more or less choosing a husband and sticking by him, in partnership, more or less equal. In a thinly populated and very harsh environment lacking regular food and requiring extensive preservation for long winters and early spring (the starving time) and constant physical threats.
Western men tend to venerate and worship their women because for over three thousand years or so Western women (until the 1960s or so) had of their own free will chosen them. And Christianity with its emphasis on Mary venerates women in a way that other religions do not.
I will add I do hold conspiracies exist, they tend to be short-focused, limited to few people (otherwise they are discovered and quashed easily) and limited in time. I don't believe in multi-generational conspiracies involving millions of people all coordinated by secret meetings doing things that obviously hurt them. For example -- feminism has meant essentially the end of the Jews outside Israel. As delayed fertility equals no fertility among Jewish women and as Steve Sailer points out, Jewish men finding Asian women more tolerant of their nerdy IQ than Jewish women who tend to demand uber-Assholishness.
Are Amy Chua's and her husband's daughters Jews or Chinese? The latter I would argue from their own self-identification.
Indeed I'd say that Heartiste is correct that as male IQ rises, women demand more and more aholishness in their men. More dominant asshole.
The tragedy of the West is that the rise of the Welfare State means women don't NEED a beta male guy who will stick by her, and will trade her youth and sexiness for a lifetime of devotion. Instead the hypergamy always there, and shown by Wollstonecroft and Blake, has reared its head and women are told what they want to hear. Instead of the truth.
Enough wealth (for now) exists so that women can get by without beta males. And trade off fertility in the hope that IVF advances can thwart nature.
Ok, so it's not "the Cathedral", its "the Synagogue."
BUT ... the whole Mary-worship, very feminine aspect of Christianity lends itself so easily to ... oh hell let's just quote Blake in "Visions" ...
That's just the ROMAN "catholic" church. The rest of Christianity not only doesn't practice that sort of Roman paganism, but finds it just as offensive as all of their praying to dead men and dead women who the Romans have presumed (with no basis for it in the Bible) to elevate to demi-god status by calling them "saints".
"But its not REAL feminism, its Patriarchy in disguise! REAL feminism would work if it were only tried! No, really, it would!!!"
Leftists never run out of excuses for their failures, do they? *shrug*
It is astounding what we are ignorant of these days. What basic, fundamental truths have been hidden from us by our Baby Boomer parents. Of course it's not entirely their fault either as their parents, in their later years, got fat, happy, and lazy and many sent them off to the first public schools to be indoctrinated and subjected to the then unheard of "peer pressure."
The "Greatest" Generation had no idea what they were sending their children into when they sent the Baby Boomers into mass education facilities, then onto Marxist-infused universities. In turn, the Baby Boomers, though walking around with much more basic knowledge about male and female relationships, refused to "burden" their own children with such "antiquated" notions of the male and the female. Heck, the Baby Boomers spent their entire lives trying to reinvent the wheel... of everything fundamental, including male-female relationships and timelines. Bye bye civilization.
Of course, when it came time to make money, they didn't waste time questioning that. They worked their cans off. Money, money, money, money.
Both my parents were medical professionals (a doctor and a nurse) and I had wait until age 26 to learn that women are most fertile, generally, around 18 years old (17-20), and it's generally downhill after that. By 30 their fertility really starts slipping. Did I learn that from my Baby Boomers parents? Nope, I had learn that from a random, older Canadian lady while eating a fish curry in Siem Reap, Cambodia. WTF? How is that NOT common freakin' knowledge to any boy or man walking this earth. Sure would have helped us understand why our 18 year old female peers would run towards a 25 year old at the drop of a hat. That makes sense. Don't freakin' tell us it's because they themselves are "more mature." They're not, they're just full of hormones that drive them to seek out the more mature male who will bed them, impregnate them, and give them resources. They do this virtually without thinking about it.
When one generation does not pass down knowledge and wisdom, especially of the most basic moral and realistic kind (like when a girl needs to get pregnant and start a family), civilization falls apart. Many Baby Boomers still don't know what to believe about anything outside of putting money away into a bank account. They can wax eloquent about all kinds of shit; politics, philosophy, history, spirituality, whatever, but when the rubber meets the road? Default position: just uh, go to work and pay your taxes. And this goes for even the libertarian types and many of the Christian Baby Boomers. And they fail to see how utterly they failed their children, themselves, and their society in the most basic ways, like teaching their girls how their bodies work. Idiots.
You know, if men really wanted to go about oppressing women, you'd think they wouldn't do so by pushing a system that gives women more rights than men, criminalizes and vilifies maleness and masculinity, gives women more economic and educational opportunities than men, gives women the power to turn men into criminals on a whim with one phone call, gives women rights without responsibilities, and passes the consequences of women's mistakes onto society in general as far as it possibly can, while shielding women from those consequences as much as possible. All of which we now have today, thanks to feminism, that horrible tool of male-on-female patriarchal oppression!
But hey, maybe it's just me.
Did I learn that from my Baby Boomers parents? Nope, I had learn that from a random, older Canadian lady while eating a fish curry in Siem Reap, Cambodia. WTF? How is that NOT common freakin' knowledge to any boy or man walking this earth.
It is common knowledge to people in their 30s and older. How that doesn't filter down to the younger folks I'm not quite sure.
It's not that nobody tells women about fertility, it's that they lie to women about fertility. "Don't worry, there's plenty of time. Women are having children into their 40s these days. Have fun. See the world. Then start your family after your career is established."
And indeed, everyone knows someone who had a baby at age 41 or 42. The part they leave off is that most women can't have a first baby at that age, even with IVF. Where I work everyone delayed starting a family until after 35. A few lucky ones were able to do that. Most of them started IVF (my office mate spent $50k on fertility treatments), and some of them were successful. But I would say about half the couples are either childless or raising adopted children after much money and anguish.
Of the people who did manage to have children about half are dealing with some kind of mental problem. A few of the kids are autistic. One boy who, at age 3 or so, decided he was a girl and goes into hysterics if you contradict him. It's not a phase, either - apparently the brain goes through some kind of sexual identity fixing at that age and his didn't do it right.
" It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease."
And, again, we're on the whole "POOR FEMALE" trip.
"Boys" have "less to lose"? Oh really? Where a "girl" can abort or give a kid up for adoption without any male's consent but the male involved is put on a possible 26 year hook (college + masters degree) at the whim of a judge?
Go to hell, bitch. In a world with actual female accountability, maybe. Not this planet.
At Corishev: Patriarchy is rule by men. It's not rule by "humanity". The term is straightforward. "If you consider all organizations of people to be patriarchies because they're all dominated by men, the word doesn't identify the one you're talking about." All public status and power hierarchies are dominated by males. There's nothing puzzling about what the word means. "You might as well call it "humanity" and say, "Feminism is a tool of humanity in its war against humanity." No, I might as well call rule by men patriarchy, because that's what the word means. "After all, feminism is being pushed by humans even more than exclusively by men, right? It's nonsensical." No, it's not. Rule by men is rule by men. Whatever do you mean by "feminism is being pushed by humans even more exclusively..." What is that even supposed to mean? How can something being pushed by a collective be pushed "more exclusively" than its being pushed by a part of that collectivity? What are you talking about? Your comment was almost outright word salad.
Patriarchy is rule by men. We are ruled by men. Women always and everywhere accomodate themselves to those men they perceive as running things. Women never run things. All of feminism, all of it, is a tool of the men who run things.
Retrenched, try to read the English that's posted here. The issue is not all men vs all women, but some men using some women against most men. The patriarchy isn't all men. That's feminist folderol. The patriarchy is those men who use affirmative action, outsourcing, multiculturalism, mass immigration, "feminism" and everything PC to control and subordinate other men. Why on earth would you be puzzled by the fact that the regime of feminine "empowerment" is not directed at the rich and powerful, but at ordinary working white men? Why is that so confusing for you?
Patriarchy is rule by fathers, not men. It's there in the word. Rule by men would be andrarchy or something.
The patriarchy is those men who use affirmative action, outsourcing, multiculturalism, mass immigration, "feminism" and everything PC to control and subordinate other men.
Every single ruling system on the planet has been overwhelmingly run by men and the few women involved have been mostly figureheads. And yet there have been ruling systems (of men) that oppose that laundry list of liberal fantasies. What are those called? If they are all patriarchies by virtue of being run by men, then clearly some patriarchies oppose liberal ideology and some don't. You're painting all patriarchies with the same brush. It's some kind of category error you're committing.
PatrickH, I agree that one sentence was confusing, so I'll clarify: Most of the powerful people pushing feminism may be men. But all of the powerful people pushing feminism are human beings. So if your only criterion for choosing a name for them is "who is in charge," it makes more sense to call them "humanity" than "patriarchy," since one is 100% accurate and the other is less than that.
As for the rest, I'll let others decide which of us is the master of word salad. I still see no reason to call the elites behind feminism "the patriarchy" except to obfuscate the issue.
Patriarchy is rule by fathers, not men.
Exactly. Patriarchy is about the family structure with the father at the head and the wife and children as a hierarchy subject to him. That may be reflected in society or politics, but it doesn't mean every government made up mostly of men is a patriarchy. Heck, by Patrick's definition, even a matriarchal African village could also be a patriarchy if it has one Big Man at the top who calls the shots and takes the hottest girls as wives.
It is common knowledge to people in their 30s and older. How that doesn't filter down to the younger folks I'm not quite sure.
Well, sure, that's the point of Paglia's column - letting knowledge "filter down" to younger folks is an unreliable, barbaric way of educating the next generation. "Filter down" is what happens with forbidden knowledge, and quite apparently the truth about sexuality is forbidden knowledge according to the lefty progs running schools.
PatrickH, there are a lot of words to choose for the would-be new nobility, but Patriarchy is a terrible choice. Please stop using it, you will only be giving ammunition to the feminists.
The problem with letting it filter down to younger women is that women are horrible at cautioning other women of their mistakes, they are more likely to encourage a repeat of the mistakes. That is, if they arent outright seeking to sabotage the younger (threatening) competition.
"Filter down" is what happens with forbidden knowledge, and quite apparently the truth about sexuality is forbidden knowledge according to the lefty progs running schools.
Well, okay, but these girls have mothers. You'd think what young women would be hearing from their moms is "No, you can't really have it all. Don't make the same mistake I made by waiting so long to find a husband."
On the other hand, maybe it really did work out for the women who found a husband and had kids in their 30s. The people who got burned have no daughters to talk warn.
You'd think what young women would be hearing from their moms is "No, you can't really have it all. Don't make the same mistake I made by waiting so long to find a husband."
It's interesting to think about how many lives would be different if many more young women heard this from their mothers (and their mothers were people whose opinions they respected).
Marissa,
Amen. And not just their personal lives, but the state of society, of this world. It would be much, much different. Happier, more realistic, down-to-earth people. And more of them. Of every color and stripe, but particularly more whites.
The problem is that the hamster starts running frantically (as it always is) and in the vast, vast majority of both baby boomer and Gen X'er females, the hard truth of their life choices and resulting consequences are rationalized away and avoided in a million different ways. The ones who got away with it, who managed to have kids after age 30, don't even think they did anything wrong. The others chalk it up to any number of other reasons outside of the obvious biological and sociological ones. "It wasn't my path." "I just got unlucky." "God has a different plan for me." "I chose my career" "I never found a good man." "It's just life." "I'm a modern woman."
Natural female solipsism combined with a world chock full of the victimhood mentality of feminism means that any woman who managed to pop out at least one kid (even if they went through emotional hell, treatments, and eventually IFV to do it), will not, not, not, not dare look back upon their life and say they chose poorly, or that they were taught some very unrealistic things by their own mothers, schools, or modern society.
I know, I have sisters who wouldn't dare admit that their degrees, careers, jobs, and life "experiences" were not worth the pain. They'll still be doing the same when they're on their deathbeds and their society has fallen apart, when their own sons and daughters are living an extremely different and more difficult life all because they and a few million other women only had 2.3 children. But hey, they've got a piece of paper on the wall that says they achieved!! And a resumé full of nice-sounding words! Whoopee!!!
Women generally don't DARE look within in a serious, serious manner unless they feel serious, serious pain and are forced to do so. This could also be said of men, but there is something different about it with women. I think men generally tend to look for the more practical, tangible, real-world solution or explanation, while women internalize more and do mental and emotional gymnastics looking for an "out" rather than facing the outer reality. If they think in any way, shape, or form that they've been 'successful', they'll run with it and never look back. They're not going to turn to another person, much less another woman, and say "I did it wrong, totally wrong. I just got damn lucky." Few will ever say that. I've never heard any woman say it outside of a church or Christian testimony.
So no, they'll never tell their daughters to do differently. Nor their sons. That would mean internally as well as openly fessing up. And they'll speak pretty little lies to their sisters and friends who weren't so lucky to get married and have kids past 30. All so they'll all feel warm and fuzzy and good about themselves. Sentimental feel-goodness is generally the goal.
Post a Comment
NO ANONYMOUS COMMENTS.