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It’s Our Own Fault

It is a truth not so universally acknowledged that pretending men who think they are women are actually women is a farce. Male bodies are not at all the same on both a micro- and macro-level. Their genes are different. Their hormones and chemicals are different. Their bone and muscle structure are different, their organs are different, and their psychology is very, very different. These are all truths that should not have to be repeated.

I generally call surgically altered males who think they are women “extreme cosplayers.” Because that is what they are.

In a sane world, this would be pretty harmless. Who cares how Joe/sephine wants to live his life? I don’t, really, so long as I’m not forced to hear about it or modify MY behavior to conform to his version of reality. It doesn’t harm me when he wears 5” killer heels, or that his closet has better dresses than mine. I simply don’t care.

But this is not a sane world. Joe/sephine wants to use women’s traditionally private spaces, infringing on at the very least our modesty and at worst our safety. Joe wants to be able to shower naked alongside us, whether he has been surgically altered or not. Joe wants to have access to women’s shelters, where women who have been terribly abused by men may be counting on a safe, private space. Joe wants to be housed in women’s prisons, even if Joe has a history of raping actual women. Joe thinks we are being stupid or hysterical because we do not WANT to share our spaces with Joe.

In addition, Joe thinks he is a better woman than women. Because of his unique male physiology, it’s easier for him to diet and exercise his way to a shapely form. Joe wants to be a beauty queen. Joe wants also to compete in women’s athletics – regardless of the fact that Joe’s male physiology gives him an unfair advantage, resulting in hard-working female athletes losing competitions and scholarships to Joe. Joe thinks he even ought to be able to breastfeed babies, whether his fake breasts produce milk or not. (Spoiler alert – they do not. MEN DO NOT LACTATE, at least not in quantities that could nourish a baby – and even with hormonal treatments, the quality of the milk would be in question.)

Joe is wrong, of course.

But it’s our own damn fault Joe can even field arguments that he has a right to our spaces, our clothes, our unique role in the human species, and our social niches. For decades, the women’s rights movement has insisted that women be treated just like men – not treated equally under the law, but treated LIKE men.

It didn’t start out that way. In the 70s, women still embraced femininity while expressing a desire to be treated equally. This led to all kinds of great positive advances (and a few negative ones): women had better access to traditionally male careers, giving us more choice. Women made up the wage gap – yes, entirely, since the tradition that women only make 80% of what men make does not take into account critical variables like experience, time in job, and relative danger/comfort levels. Women’s health made huge leaps forward, and women’s athletics gave women opportunities we had never had before. By the 1980s, things were pretty hunky-dory for us chicks.

But never underestimate the human ability to spoil a good thing.

There’s an old fairy tale I’m quite fond of called “The Golden Fish.” In it, a fisherman catches a pretty golden fish, and as he is marveling at it, the fish speaks. “Fisherman! I’m actually a prince of the seas, and if you release me, I can give you whatever your heart desires.” Well, the fisherman was pretty poor, so he asked that the fish turn his run-down shack into a prosperous cottage farm. “Go home, fisherman, and you will find it so.”

And indeed he did. His old shanty had been replaced with a pretty thatched cottage with a separate kitchen and even a loft, and a barn and pens held farm animals that could make his life much better. His wife was inside, stunned at the transformation. Eagerly the fisherman told her what had happened, expecting that the wife would be delighted at his cleverness, but she was not. “What! You could have asked for much more! Tell the fish that you want instead to be a wealthy merchant with a fine house and a horse-drawn coach!”

So the fisherman goes back and calls to the fish. “Go back, fisherman, and you will find it so,” said the fish.

Was the wife satisfied? Heck, no. She asked for more – first to be a noblewoman. Then to be the queen, then empress, then the Pope himself. Each time the fisherman went back and the fish granted his wish, though the sea was stormier each time. At last the wife asked to be God.

When the fisherman asked for this, the golden fish laughed. “Go back, fisherman, and you will find your old shanty.”

And the fisherman went back, and there was his wife, in her rags, sitting in the tar-paper shanty they had started with. She had finally asked for too much.

And so the women’s movement did. Women began to insist we were not just equal under the law, but JUST THE SAME as men. We deluded ourselves that we were just as strong, as fast, as fit, and as durable as men. The kickass heroine became popular – the idea of the Captain Marvel, the woman who could beat up the men around her because women were in fact more powerful.

Now, science shows that this is not true. But men, by and large, want to give women what women want. Evolutionarily, this is sensible; happy women are more likely to have sex with men, and thus procreate. Men like happy women.

So men decided to share our delusion. And thus it has been for 20 years or more. How unsurprising is it, then, that so many men have decided that since women are the same as men, men can be the same as women?

We can only blame ourselves for what has happened.

To reverse the Golden Fish course we are on, it is essential that we undelude ourselves – that we confess that men and women are, in fact, very different. That women have bodies that are physically weaker, but gifted almost magically with the ability to bear and nourish babies – our very future is literally in the hands of women. We need to confess that we cannot do exactly the same things boys can do.

And we need to say that this is okay.

Of course we should be treated equally in the law, in society, and in culture. We are just as important as men, and men are just as important as us. But a demand for equal treatment is not the same as being exactly the same. Equality and equity are very different things.

By insisting otherwise, by insisting that women are just like men, we have severely damaged women’s status – and our culture as a whole. The equilibrium that once guaranteed women a special protected status in society while also guaranteeing us equal treatment under the law has been upset. We are losing everything because we have insisted on the error of the fisherman’s wife.

We can’t have it all. We are different from men. We are only human beings.

And that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than enough.

Posted 18 August 2021 † Jamie K. Wilson § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Cross-post – Heroines & Female Heroes

What’s the difference between a heroine and a female hero? And why aren’t female and male heroes interchangeable? (Or, why don’t female reboots of male characters work?)

http://www.conservativefiction.com/blog/2019/04/01/heroines-and-female-heroes/

Posted 01 April 2019 † Jamie K. Wilson § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Trading Paternalism for Maternalism

So okay, what’s the patriarchy? It’s the man keeping the woman down, right? Or is there a more specific definition than that, something beyond the vague “men work to keep themselves in charge”.

Maybe it’s about men holding predominance of power in all situations involving a woman – male presidents, male priests, male bosses, male police, right down to male fathers and male husbands who boss women around and sometimes even force her to do what she doesn’t want to do. Okay, I can see that. Women have achieved parity under the law, but there are lots of social norms that are still shifting to conform to reality. They are, however, shifting, the sphinx moving its slow thighs. Ultimately the center cannot hold. We really are headed to a new normal.

But here’s the thing: the patriarchy isn’t just going away, leaving a void behind. It’s being traded in for the matriarchy. Not in the traditional roles of boss, politician, father – but rather in the social roles of friendship and sisterhood, maiden aunt and just-like-a-mother-to-me. Except instead of bossing people around (there’s another word for that, but I’ll get to it in a moment) women are getting nurtured to death.

Here’s a case in point. A while back, a friend of mine had an affair while her fiancee was deployed to Afghanistan. She posted to a Facebook group, asking if she’d been wrong to do it and whether she should tell him. The men (wisely) stayed silent.

EVERY female friend she had said no, keep it secret, it’s understandable, you were lonely, we love you (name). They affirmed her decision. NONE of them gave her anything but love and understanding and forgiveness.

Except it was not their forgiveness that needed giving. It was her fiancee’s – and her own.

I said every female friend – it was every female friend but me. No, I said. You were wrong, so very wrong. It was a mistake, and you need to own up to that, and yes, you need to tell him and never do it again – or break up with him. Because you can’t be engaged to him and mess around like that. It’s not fair.

What was going on here is an example of the echo chamber that is the matriarchy, a not-so-secret sisterhood that believes that if it involves a man, the woman is always right. It impacts divorce, child rearing, how well a marriage succeeds, whether the woman has an affair, etc. And the evil of it is, the woman is given a moral out. If she wants to do something bad, so long as the group agrees, it’s okay to do so.

She chooses to do precisely the thing women were FORCED to do when patriarchy was genuinely the law of the land and women were excused from law-breaking if they participated with their husbands: she eschews her own moral judgment. Making moral decisions is HARD. But if everyone else thinks it’s a good idea to choose path Y, then it must be a good idea.

No. No, it’s a very bad idea. Men, at least, for all their flaws and foibles, make choices, for good or ill. A man doesn’t sit in a bar and have all his friends weigh in on whether he should go up and honk Suzy Q. Waitress’s humongous bazongas. No, either he gets drunk enough that he goes up and does it and gets clobbered by Suzy’s boyfriend behind the bar, or he sneaks peeks for the next several hours and leaves her a good tip. A man doesn’t follow the choice of the crowd; his particular crowd would tell him to do it partly because they would enjoy watching the beat-down. (Because men are perverse and weird that way.)

But women follow the crowd. And the crowd does not boss. It pressures. You’re okay, it says. You are totally normal. You can do these things. And I will love you if you do them, whether you really want to do them or not. The not-so-subtle subtext, of course is “if you don’t do what we all just recommended, we will be disappointed, and then we may not like you any more.” And just from an evolutionary point of view, that cannot be stood by a woman. In prehistoric times, the woman who did not join the group got eaten by the hyena. Today we women go to the safest public bathroom in packs; groups are important to us.

The crowd, my friends, is the shaping matriarchy: a civilization in which your sins are all forgiven if everyone says so, in which personal responsibility can be replaced with the hugs of your friends – and no one understands where the consequences are coming from or why all the bad things happen to you.

It doesn’t take much to break the matriarchy, though. In my friend’s case, my lone voice of dissent made her think. She understood that I, at least, would join her in facing down the hyena. She broke up with that marine, and then, while traveling abroad on 9/11, she realized that she wanted to be with him. They got married. (And later divorced, but that’s another story entirely.)

One person. One woman, willing to be ostracized if necessary, can break the siren spell of the echo chamber. Be that woman, every day, in small things and large. Don’t follow the waning patriarchy, and don’t follow the rising matriarchy either. Instead, woman up: trust and follow your innate sense of right and wrong. It’s nearly always more correct than the crowd.

Posted 01 May 2018 † Jamie K. Wilson § The Matriarchy ‡ Comments (0) °

8 Years Old or 35 Years Old – HELL Yes, It Matters

On Megyn Kelly’s whine-a-thon with a club of Trump accusers, alleged victim Jessica Leeds dared say that it doesn’t matter whether you’re eight or thirty -five – you remember where you were, what you were doing, and what happened.

Bull. Shit.

I WAS molested as a child and, later, raped as an adult. I was four. I was eight. I was thirteen. I was twenty-three. I was thirty. I’ve even been hit on by handsy friends, though alas I am certain I don’t remember all THOSE incidents. (Perhaps I’m just too jaded. Or perhaps I have my priorities straight.)

It matters a lot whether you’re eight or thirty-five. Trust me.

I know what rape is. It isn’t just thinking, gee, that was creepy. It is more than ick, he wants my phone number. A grope when you’re an adult, baby girls and boys, is not rape or even assault. A grope is unwanted touching, and men who do it should never be excused, but it’s not rape.

Sure, it’s creepy and repulsive. It’s creepy when a grown man is drawn to women who are Barely Legal. It’s creepy when a man massages your shoulders intimately in front of your husband during a televised event. It’s creepy when a man makes sexual jokes to you when you have not initiated that kind of contact. It’s creepy when he watches you funny, or when he talks to your boobs instead of your face.

But guess what? It’s not rape. It’s not assault. Hell, it’s probably not even harassment. It’s mostly just annoying and deserving of physical retaliation – a slap used to be a perfectly acceptable response.

The pansy reactions and whining I am seeing from this group of sweet little cupcakes – man, I just have no words for how pathetic this is. Such girlish weaponry from women who are supposedly strong and independent – really?

If you are followed throughout your life with crippling self-doubt when a man kisses your cheeks and lips – I’m not talking stuff his tongue down your throat a la Franken, but closed-lip pecking – I daresay the problem is not him, but you. Like most people, I have dealt with self-doubt and defeated it – and I was forcibly, penetratively raped at the age of eight. What is wrong with you, chickadee? How about a teensy bit of therapy?

If you put yourself forward to become a beauty pageant contestant and a man lines you and the other ladies up to look you over like a piece of meat – well, hell, darling, what did you think the swimsuit portion of the contest was all about? Do you think they judge you by your eyes and fetching smile? Nope, they are looking at how your anatomy fits together, how subjectively and objectively attractive you are. This is what you are here for. And I’m not just talking men, but also women. You and I both know that we ladies even look at women and think, damn, I wish I had her legs. What is that but judging another woman as if she’s a piece of meat? Objectively speaking, we all are – you know, meat.

And it’s pretty standard for men to come backstage in group dressing areas whether you’re talking beauty pageant or modeling event. Judges, managers, agents, talent scouts. In privacy, it’s more like a team locker room than a bathroom (by the way, since this bothers you so much, how do you feel about gender-neutral bathrooms?) Oh, at the time you’re naked – under a robe? Sweetie, we are all naked under our clothes. A robe is far more covering than the bikini you wore in front of a live and television audience.

Moving on. You want Congress to “address it,” no specification of what that addressing would entail.

Um. Didn’t women want their male “protectors” to address insults to their honor way back when? Husband, father, brother, sometimes son or cousin or uncle, if a male insulted your honor, he was supposed to duel with the miscreant, right? So are you just setting the government up in that position for you – oh, defend my honor, sirrah! I have been woefully insulted by yon nobleman!

Woman, please.

I don’t want to be protected by the questionable ethics of the government. Congress didn’t do a whole lot to protect Monica Lewinsky or address the honor of the myriad women abused by Clinton. No one ever complained about the waitress sandwich incident committed by the cuddly duo Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd, and we have yet to find out how deeply involved Congress is in tapping their sexual harassment slush fund.

And you want THEM to protect YOU? From what? Themselves?

Here’s the deal: I’m a real feminist. I know how bad it can get for women, and I’ll fight to the end to ensure women aren’t abused by men. But when a man’s just being an asshole, well, he’s just being an asshole. If he’s a friend, I quietly correct him and give him what advice I can. If he’s being an asshole to me, or I see him being an asshole to a female friend, I tell him to knock it off. I take care of it myself. I don’t need a protector from anything that’s not violent. And I sure don’t need to go running to Big Daddy Government to ask him to make the naughty boy stop it.

I am disgusted by all of you female adult children. As Whoopi Goldberg said – inaccurately in her case – this isn’t really RAPE rape. This is a far lesser sin, and in most cases should be taken care of on the spot by real women. Please, ladies: if you are really feminists, if you are really fierce and strong, act it. Take hold of your own power, and smack the creepy asshole silly on the spot.

Posted 01 January 2018 † Jamie K. Wilson § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Common Sense for Women 101 and Harvey Weinstein’s Hotel Room

This should be self-evident, but apparently it is not:

If you do not want to be sexually harassed or even raped, do NOT go to a hotel room to discuss a job or a gig (unless you are a prostitute). 

Corollary: if you do not want to be sexually harassed again, do NOT go to a hotel room AGAIN with the same scumbag.

This is common sense not held by Ashley Judd, the self-avowed nasty woman of feminism. By her own account, she visited Harvey Weinstein‘s room multiple times, with the same result – an attempt at the casting couch – each time. Mr. Weinstein, a self-avowed feminist, seems to be the grabby sort, when he’s not trying to cadge a nekkid massage from one of his employees.

Let me lay down some points here: if you willingly go to a man’s hotel room, he’s going to make assumptions. If you do not kick his ass the first time he grabs yours, he’s going to assume you are playing hard to get. If you take money in exchange for not prosecuting him for grabbing your ass, you are a whore. And if you take his money in exchange for silence, then go out and preach about feminism and women’s strength, you are a hypocrite.

Now some more points, since the other half of this does not seem to be well-understood either. Unless traveling, it is inappropriate to conduct business in a hotel room rather than in your office or at a lunch. It is never okay for a man to insist his female employees massage his ogrish naked body. It is never okay to assume a woman is willing to have sex or mess around just because she comes to your hotel room. And it is never okay to pay a woman off so she doesn’t publicly embarass you, then run around claiming to be a feminist.

Sheesh. You would think these truths to be self-evident.

The faux feminists of liberalism are now running around pretending to be utterly aghast at this behavior. Give me a break. Bill Clinton engaged in much the same things in the Oval Office. What did y’all do when it was no longer deniable? You said you’d be happy to give him a blow job just because he kept abortion legal.

So you would debase yourself, cynically abusing your sexuality in exchange for certain laws? That, too, is prostitution; power is an item of value.

What feminism has devolved into is beyond pathetic. Women fought first for abolition, then legal protections for abused women, then suffrage, with great dignity and aplomb. Today, they clamor for not equal, but extra rights. They don’t understand how to keep the rights they should have simply to maintain dignity. Instead of treating sex as the very special and emotional  and powerful thing it is, they treat it like any other bodily function.

Weinstein is a scumbag. But he was operating in the same way many powerful men do: he took the lack of “no” as a “yes.” Women need to claim their personal power. Instead of being angry at men when they assume, we should be angry at ourselves for not taking enough responsibility to say, clearly and loudly, NO. And our actions should match our words.

Let’s put on the big-girl panties and act like adults, not helpless and vulnerable children. If every woman in the sisterhood had said no, Weinstein would not have been able to assume yes. Every woman who did not say no enabled his crass and humiliating behavior. EVERY woman.

Posted 07 October 2017 † Jamie K. Wilson § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (1) °

The Tragedy of No Manners

In the South when I grew up, kids learned young to mind their manners; not so much today. Young liberal feminists are rude and self-centered, interested in making a spectacle of themselves rather than displaying elegance and refinement, and young men don’t volunteer their seats for elderly people and pregnant women, meet other people’s eyes when being introduced, or even keep their language clean and polite until conversational ground rules have been established. (Then again, a lot of young women could stand learning the same things.)

These are not trivial things. No, bad manners never murdered anyone, but the clear social rules of etiquette are there to prevent accidental misunderstandings and teach self-control, both issues that, unaddressed, often lead to violence. (I strongly suspect that a new social norm based on better manners would lead to decreased crime.)

But we don’t have that today. Instead, we have young people who are so bad at understanding other people they believe they are surrounded by microaggressions and encoded language. Their misconceptions are reinforced by equally triggerable people around them, and their claiming of the victim mantle is lauded rather than mocked. Instead of an egalitarian etiquette providing balanced protection for both people in a social interaction, certain groups learn they must be retrained to think differently, to defer to certain other people based on color or sexual orientation, and under no circumstances (for guys) make any social move with a young woman until and unless she sets up the ground rules under which they must mutually operate.

In short, we have a diseased and broken society: unjust, unfair, and unkind to anyone not in the deferred-to groups. There are people who think it’s okay to hit other people with bats – just because they don’t like their ideas. That’s about as bad as it gets

The reasons are multiple, including too much practice with self-pitying social media and not enough practice with real people. But the main issue is that these people are not learning that basic innocuous-seeming skill: etiquette. Like the old adage “fake it til you make it,” learning etiquette as a child is practice for sympathy, empathy, and human kindness. It keeps social interactions peaceful until those involved can converse, then begin to understand one another.

Look around. How much etiquette do you see in your everyday life? How much respect are people giving to strangers in casual situations, where social etiquette is most important?

I blame one thing above all: poor mothering habits. It has always been the mother who corrects bad social habits – sit up, be quiet now, address him as “sir”, always open doors for ladies, give up your seat to those who need it more than you do, don’t run in public areas, put your phone down, smile and speak clearly. Schools do a little of this, but a single teacher of a large or even small class can’t possibly instill all this along with properly educating students.

It takes the one-on-one interaction with a mom who does not want to be embarrassed by her children to do this.

Why aren’t moms doing this?

For one thing, they aren’t treated with respect anymore as individuals. Instead, the creeping miasma of Marxism is turning women into cogs, not moms. Women today are invariably expected to work, preferably outside the home where they can visibly contribute to the industrial machine. Marxism and its descendants treat women like units of labor, RUR units, not individuals to be valued for their hard unpaid labor as well as paid labor. If you’re a housewife and stay-at-home mom, you don’t get respect – you are, instead, dismissed as stupid, lazy, or unambitious. But women who do work outside the home very often don’t have the time or energy to care for children in the way they once did – and the first thing to go is etiquette teaching and practice.

Because of this, another thing is happening – this generation of new moms is being encouraged to focus on themselves above everything. Since we females are “minorities” (though of course we are not) the world owes us the freedom to pursue true equality – which this brave new world of feminism tells us is to eschew our natural femininity to become more like men. We don’t have to be moms anymore, and we don’t have to worry about kids knowing social rules. Shortchanging the kids? They’ll be fine. They learn all that stuff at school, right?

Posted 21 September 2017 † Jamie K. Wilson § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Abortion Poetry: More Look-At-Meism

Several years ago, I had a personal tragedy. I lost a baby. She was a child I desperately wanted, a baby I could already picture even though she was no bigger than a tadpole. I blamed myself: I had been too active or too lazy or ate the wrong thing or somehow had failed. In my soul, I knew I deserved the month or so of pain I endured, first with her eviction from my body and then with the recuperation and the heavy blood loss. It has taken me years to forgive myself, and even now when I look at her two little sisters sometimes I can see her too.

I knew that child. I knew she was a girl, knew she was blonde, knew she’d be smart like her daddy and feisty like her mama. The only thing I didn’t know at that point was her name; her daddy and I had not yet discovered it.

She was just as real as any post-birth clump of cells (these clumps are also known as “newborns”). When the doctor came to give me the bad news, I referred to my baby as a “she.” The poor man made the mistake of telling me, “But we don’t know what sex the baby was.”

I remember looking at him calmly. “That’s okay. She can be whatever sex I wanted her to be now.”

That’s why Leyla Josephine’s poem about her abortion tore my heart out. Not because it was sensitive and soul-searching, a repudiation of an industry that slaughters babies, but rather because it was the opposite – and yet I could see my own post-miscarriage self in it. Josephine tells us she would have raised her daughter to believe in abortion as part of women’s freedom.

Josephine, just like me, assigned a sex to her baby. She wanted that child to be a daughter, so a daughter she was. And she wanted her daughter to be a pro-abortion feminist, so she was.

Problem is, these assignations are just fancies. They are ways we humans can deal with the great tragedies of our lives. We make up stories that help us live through dreadful things, like losing a child, even when we have chosen to lose that child ourselves. Or, let’s face it, to murder that child. When you are at the point of assigning a child a sex and have decided how you would have raised it – the child is real, no matter what you choose to do to make your life more convenient. Worse, the child is real to you personally, in a way that does not allow you to deny that you are committing murder when you abort it.

We all like to think our children will do just as we teach them. Sadly, the reality is that they usually don’t. That is why we don’t hold the parents of a child legally accountable when that child goes terribly wrong and becomes a mass-murderer or a politician. Ms. Josephine, in her poem, fancies that her daughter (also a fancy) would have been all for Josephine’s aborting of her – because Josephine would have died for the daughter’s right to choose, too.

I would have made sure I was a good mother to look up to. But I would have supported her right to choose. To choose a life for herself, a path for herself. I would have died for that right, just like she died for mine. I’m sorry, but you came at the wrong time.

What Josephine does not seem to understand is that when a woman aborts a daughter, only one woman gets the right to choose. The other one dies.

Posted 23 September 2014 † Jamie K. Wilson § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

The Boysenberry Effect

One thing that mystifies conservatives is the utter rage with which pundits and ordinary followers alike attack conservative women and minorities. We were not prepared, none of us, for the daily Two-Minute Hate that greeted Sarah Palin when she became our vice presidential candidate.

Apparently, she was supposed to be a pretty, empty-headed Republican Stepford wife. Instead, she was charming and snarky, beautifully feminine but stronger and more fit than most men, a successful businesswoman and politician who also had raised four children and was starting on a fifth with special needs. She did not fit the box within which liberals prefer women to be confined.

Oh, you hadn’t noticed the box? Strange thing I’ve noticed about liberals: they categorize people within rigid boxes. There’s the Republican Rich Guy box, which includes all wealthy and some nonwealthy Republicans. There’s the Crazy Libertarian box, with the guy smoking pot but also wearing a tinfoil hat. There’s the Gun Nut box, the Welfare Mother box, the Generous Liberal Philanthropist box, etc. There are hundreds of boxes, and for liberals to be comfortable you must be made to fit in one.

For example, an ultraliberal friend of mine expressed delight but also utter astonishment when my current husband proposed to me. You see, this friend had a particular viewpoint of him that did not allow for change or deviation. "I’ll have to construct another box to put him in!" he told me. He had put Clark in a rigid "selfish gamer dude" box that did not allow for him actually committing to marriage. Funny – after the box was broken, we didn’t see much of that friend anymore.

Liberals often don’t handle it well when people don’t fit their cardboard stereotypes. Women are supposed to be perpetual Mary Tyler Moores or Murphy Browns, Aunt Bees or struggling welfare moms. Women who "have it all" are not really part of the liberal paradigm, no matter how they might deny it. (Show me a strong wife, mom, and professional woman, and I’ll show you a woman conservatives, not liberals, admire.)

You see, deep down inside they don’t believe the things they say about women. They really don’t believe women are capable of having it all; often they don’t seem to believe women are capable of taking care of themselves. How else to explain the "Life of Julia" woman, spiritually married to Big Daddy Uncle Sam? Or the insistence of Democrats that a refusal to pay for birth control equates to a denial of birth control?

SOME women can handle it, of course – but most women? They shouldn’t bother their pretty heads about it – let Uncle Sam make those mean old men share what they have. After all, they didn’t build that. As for the women who CAN have it all or who give up part of what it means to be a woman in order to Advance The Cause: they should be our honored leaders.

We have two major boxes for women, according to liberals: we have the Strong Independent Woman box, where smart women capable of having it all reside. And we have the Poor Little Thing box for Julias, the women who just can’t quite do it, bless their hearts. But there’s one requirement for both boxes: they must believe in redistribution as the answer. The SIW must acknowledge the benefits of socialism as the key to her position, and she must proselytize "paying it forward" to other women – but in the form of other people’s money, not, you know, starting up a charity or something. The PLT woman must gratefully accept the handouts the SIW and her allies provide – by confiscating money and opportunities from others.

The patriarchy – men – must be made to pay. Not just with money, either.

Apparently, these days women aren’t supposed to make it on our own, as Mary Tyler Moore did. Instead, we require others to step aside so we can take their positions. Men, the reasoning goes, have had control of everything for too long. Hence, it is time for women to take their turns.

Well, that’s just silly. It works just fine in a classroom, where children are participating in a learning process that necessitates each having an opportunity to practice what they are learning. It also works fine in play, where children sharing facilities should all have a roughly equal chance to use them. But we’re talking about real life. In real life, if you share and step aside, you do not enhance excellence. Instead, you hinder advancement – progress, if you will. You are not moving things forward, but rather stagnating society.

Analogy warning.

Let’s say you are making a berry pie. You have several types of berry to choose from: strawberry, blueberry, blackberry, boysenberry. Of course you’re going to choose, not the berry you haven’t used as much, but the berry that looks best to you when you’re shopping for pie ingredients.

Now let’s say the store has decided boysenberry has been ignored for too long. They tell you either you must use an equal mix of berries or you must use boysenberries exclusively. Your pie’s probably not going to be as good, is it?

That’s what happens when you decide ONLY WOMEN should be considered, or women should have preferential treatment, or you must have a roughly equal ratio of men to women in your organization. Your talent pool shrinks. Now sometimes your boysenberries will be in season and excellent – but other times? Not so much.

In addition, when it goes on for a long time, boysenberry farmers find out they don’t have to put out the best berries they grow to sell them. They can, instead, put out Incredibly Average Berries. Or they can dump their worst berries on the market, or skimp on fertilizer to save money, or whatever. It doesn’t matter – they will sell those berries.

Same thing happens when you "level the playing field." No matter who you’re leveling it for, that group discovers they don’t have to work as hard to be hired. Businesses are harmed in the long run, because it makes them less efficient, and efficiency is profit. And since they’re less profitable, they pass more costs on to consumers, who are ultimately the ones who pay.

Now back to those boxes. When a woman breaks out of the box, like Sarah Palin did, she’s essentially spitting in the face of the system. She has told them hey, I don’t have to do it your way. I can do it MY way and do even better. Palin built a profitable family business and raised five children, had a very successful political career, and looked gorgeous while doing it. Conservative women from Nikki Haley to closeted-conservative novelists are doing the same thing.

How? They are breaking all the progressive rules: they are working hard, getting married and having children while married, eschewing most or all government support, becoming entrepreneurs. They don’t have abortions. They don’t sleep around. They don’t complain about patriarchy. They don’t ask for a handout.

They are not dependent on the feminist system.

In short, they’re just like successful women BEFORE feminism. It is true, unfortunately, that women for a very long time were held in second place by the government – restricted to varying degrees from voting, owning property, and inheritances. Despite these barriers, there are thousands of stories about widows and single women making their own lives and their own fortunes.

  • Louisa May Alcott supported her family by writing and selling books that became beloved classics.
  • Clara Barton pioneered nursing and hygienic medicine, then founded the Red Cross.
  • Elizabeth Blackwell became the first female doctor in America, then founded her own college to train women doctors.
  • Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science.
  • Harriet Tubman, born a SLAVE, led over three hundred blacks to freedom, was a spy and high-level military adviser in the Civil War, and spent her life helping freed slaves improve their own lives.

Not one of these women could ever vote legally in a federal election. All these women had to deal with a prejudiced society, a government that treated them as lesser, a workplace that wasn’t fair. And every single one of them changed our world, shaped our country.

Now today, I’m seeing a lot of female politicians and journalists and entertainers – but I’m not seeing a whole lot of female excellence in the vein of these historical ladies. I propose this is due to the Boysenberry Effect: women who are propped up and cared for by a sugar-daddy government and a coddling women’s rights movement never have to push that envelope. Women who COULD excel learn not only that they don’t have to, but also that if they do excel on their own, they are pulled down by the other crabs in the bucket. Sarah Palin – she was an escaping crab. Hence, she had to be destroyed. Other women watched and learned, whether they were the pullers or the pullees: independent success must be destroyed.

This is killing female excellence. We are all poorer for it.

Posted 22 August 2014 † Jamie K. Wilson § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (1) °

Flash! Academics Discover Single-Parent Families Are Not Healthy for Children or Other Living Things

Conservatives of all stripes have been saying this for decades, but at last it seems that sociologists throughout academia can no longer ignore the evidence: children from single-parent homes, whether through divorced, deceased, or never-married parents, have worse overall outcomes than children from dual-parent homes – even dual-parent homes in which the parents do not get along. From an article in the Wall Street Journal by Robert Maranto and Michael Crouch:

Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can’t change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn’t some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?

Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

Why do they use the smoking/cancer analogy? From the same article:

Abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues of all kinds, such as developmental behavior problems or concentration issues, are less common for children of married couples than for cohabiting or single parents, according to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control study of children’s health. The causal pathways are about as clear as those from smoking to cancer.

The implication is stunning. Over a decade ago, the CDC cited single parenting – not the quality of the parent, but the fact of having only one parent present OR parents who cohabit rather than marry – as a clear and direct cause of serious behavioral and psychological problems in children, problems that are likely to affect the child for the rest of his life. Yet politicians, community spokespeople, and activists of all stripes have ignored this causative correlation to instead ask for handouts to treat the symptoms rather than looking at ways to eliminate the cause – symptoms like juvenile delinquency, poor academic outcomes, disruptive behavior in school that affects other children, and even early sexuality that leads to disease and pregnancy. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to look inward at ways to slow or stop the problem of single parenting, ways to encourage marriage and involved parents?

But then, that sensible suggestion assumes that the welfare of children is indeed the objective. Evidence suggests that secondary effects of the requested panaceas include more government jobs, large paychecks for activists, and increasingly safe jobs for teachers. Besides, politicians don’t like to tell anyone they are doing a Bad Thing for being irresponsible with their child’s welfare. It’s easier and safer to tell them that no, society failed them, Big Brother should care for them financially, and that women with children don’t need husbands.

That is complete bunk. I’ve been a single mom, and I’ve been a married mom. As a single mother, I struggled to finish college. I lost multiple excellent job opportunities that I know of because I had children – I don’t blame the employer, but rather praise them for understanding that my self-inflicted lifestyle would have made it impossible to do the job they needed done. I lost multiple jobs because I had to retrieve my children – one of whom is autistic – when they misbehaved in daycare or school. When I was home with my children, I was tired – but had no option but to wrangle multiple children by myself. When I cohabited, even with the father of my children, I saw little relief; for whatever reason, my partner was not interested in taking on much of the serious work around the house, including sharing bills, cleaning, and caring for children. While this is my story, I suspect it is not an uncommon one.

Contrast this with my life today. My husband embraced the role of father, even to my three boys who are not his biological children. He is a full partner in parenting as well as in my professional career, and we share responsibilities.  Just his presence and example turned my troublemakers around, transforming them from hard-to-control children with behavioral issues into the strong, moral young men they are becoming today. Our girls, who have never known a life without two parents, have no behavior problems at all.

I have to wonder what would change if only one percent of today’s single mothers were to marry. In today’s atmosphere, this is unlikely to happen. Maranto and Crouch give three reasons: first, that politics is less about what you’re for than what you’re against. Since conservatives have (naturally) embraced promotion of marriage as a solution for many societal problems, it’s unlikely that liberals want to be seen embracing the same common-sense answer, preferring instead to continue pursuing the same failed policies. Second, that because single parenting is disproportionately a problem within minority communities, politicians and academics fear being attacked as racist. And third, that promoting marriage is hard, requiring influential members of entertainment, political, and educational industries to work together in seeking ways to turn around the current tide.

Despite the seeming futility, promoting marriage is a goal worthy of pursuing. Every child deserves a mother and a father. Welfare is nothing more than a Band-Aid, trying to cover up a problem rooted deeply in the societal structure we’ve developed over two generations. Each year, it costs us more and does less. It is time to seek out a real solution, no matter how much it hurts or how long it takes. This is, after all, a problem that has developed over decades. There is no quick fix.

Posted 22 April 2014 † Jamie K. Wilson § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

The Rule of Least Harm

A few days ago, I had a very good conversation with friends and strangers on Facebook. We had been debating – politely – whether or not abortion is wrong. I used a rationale I called the Rule of Least Harm: when faced with an uncertain situation, weigh the potential bad outcomes, and choose the one that does the least harm. In the case of a pregnancy, the two potential bad outcomes are harm or, rarely, death to a woman, and the death of a human being. It is clear that a woman’s desire to avoid nine months of discomfort (at whatever level) and the baby’s outright death are in no way equal. When the woman’s life is on the line, the equation changes, but overwhelmingly this is not the case.

This line of reasoning, I just recently learned, is commonly used in ethical vegetarianism as well – in most cases, the argument goes, your desire to eat an animal or wear its skin are outweighed by the animal’s need for its flesh and skin. (I wondered, after reading this, why so many ethical vegetarians are pro-choice; it’s as if they don’t really understand their own arguments. But whatever.)

Pro-choice people have gotten around this obvious argument by treating the baby (or potential human being, if you insist that it’s a fetus) as if it’s not a real human being but only a parasite. I will ignore the ethical-vegetarian counterargument that killing a parasite put there by your through your own choices is even worse than killing a pig for its bacon. Instead, I’ll go to a different point: by arguing that the “parasite” should simply be eliminated, pro-choice advocates are able to pretend that, once a woman has an abortion, it’s as if the baby – I’m sorry, developing human being – had never been.

But “as if” is simply a lie. It WAS there, and you chose to evict it, possibly in a most grotesque manner far less humane than the most primitive of animal slaughter techniques. Women have a real gift for identifying truth. It’s the source of so-called women’s intuition, a real-life built-in bullshit detector. And we know that, even if it is not now, a baby that rested in our wombs at any given point WAS.

I never understood the abortion issue until I had a miscarriage in July 2006. She* was a baby I wanted terribly – the daughter I wanted to cherish with my husband – and when I found I was pregnant I was ecstatic. When I was three months along, my husband was sent to a training program for new Navy technology; he’d be gone a month. Only a few days later, I started spotting and cramping. Within hours, I had lost the baby. It took me weeks to recover physically; I had lost a lot of blood.

I will never recover emotionally. I loved that baby as much as if I’d held her in my arms. Today, when I watch my two daughters born after I lost her, I can “see” the echo of the little girl who could never be playing with them, brushing their hair, singing and playing games. Women who have abortions know, just as I did, that the baby was real – even when they bury the truth, hide it from themselves. They will always regret the baby they never had, and some will regret it mightily.

And so I wrote Biscuit Boy, the tale of a little boy who would never be but who would always be, the child his mother aborted but who would live within her always – just as every baby, born and unborn, does with every mother. No matter how she denies it.

* I am certain someone will point out that at three months, you don’t know what the sex of your baby is. I have five children, and I knew the sex of every single one before the doctor did, and usually knew within a day that I was pregnant. Besides, as I told the gynecologist who foolishly pointed out there was no way to know if it had been a girl, “She can be anything I want now.”

Posted 02 April 2014 † Jamie K. Wilson § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °