Posted on 11/01/2001 10:44:36 AM PST by jalisco555
Misconceptions Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood
by Naomi Wolf
Doubleday, 326 pp., $24.95
NOW THAT A REAL WAR has been engaged and an ideological truce declared on the home front, it is generally agreed that our criticism should be reserved for certain groups only--particularly those that advocate violence, promulgate stereotypes, and espouse hatred. This makes it an especially opportune time to check in on contemporary feminism, where a parable of sorts can be found in the twists and turns taken lately by one of its more popular practitioners.
Six years ago, Naomi Wolf--author of such works of "Third Wave" feminism as "The Beauty Myth," "Promiscuities," and, now, "Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood"--momentarily rocked the sisterhood with an essay in the New Republic provocatively entitled "Our Bodies, Our Souls: Re-Thinking Pro-Choice Rhetoric." A collection of propositions guaranteed to outrage orthodox believers in "choice," the essay proved an instant media hit. Pro-choice feminists, Wolf declared, had "relinquished the moral frame around the issue of abortion." They had "dehumanized" the contents of a pregnant woman's womb and failed to acknowledge that "the death of a fetus is a real death."
Click on the source link for the full article.
Bumiller's book is particularly interesting because she has a chapter that discusses both sex selective abortions and infanticide in India and includes quotes by Indian women saying that they are the same thing. Clearly disturbed by the disonnance between her own pro-choice views and the obvious truth of the comparision, she closes the chapter by saying that no one could ever compare the two practices -- despite the fact that she just spent an entire chapter doing just that.
If you really want to understand the abortion issue, look at infanticide in history. It is also the future of the slippery slope that abortion must slide down -- even if only Michael Tooley and Peter Singer have the guts to say so in public.
Well hello darling!!!! This is the world as we know it and Thank God for it. You damn well better wake up to your duty or your children will suffer and the trend will begin in earnest...ad infintum...beyond your grandchildren to be certain.
Oddly, most of us men...those of us who are responsible know from grade school that this will most likely be our lot in life and we accept it and deal with it....happily in my case.
Torn between selfish self aggrandizement and mommyhood....hard to reconcile. And what about poor mothers who HAVE to work. Their angst is over separation from their children.
Her attitutdes on abortion show she knows better but she refuses to capitulate to her heart in favor of retaining her so called independence of spirit and comradre with her kindred sisters. Understanding birth, motherhood, and when life first stirs is simply not compatible with being pro-choice.
In the end ...just another whiner...cultivated by the likes of Sanger, De Beauvior, Freidan and Co......a wonderful recipe for perpetual unhappiness.
In a partly sarcastic way I blame it all on women's sufferage, the washing machine, and the PILL. Too much idle time...too much time to ponder is this all there is? when in reality it's holy plenty if you have the proper doses of love to go with the duty.
Now as far as dogfood ugly feminists and lesbian feminists....that's another story...another diatribe.
I thank God for my conservative wife even though a wee bit of this poison can infect even the most resolute like her from time to time.
Pardon the wind.....wonderful post Jalisco
Usted ven de Guadalajara?
patent
Warm Regards.
No, soy Norteamericano pero vivia en Guadalajara y mi esposa es una tapatia.
This is NOTHING new. The 20th century " feminists " ( not to be confused with Suffrigists !!!!!! ) are the direct descendants of those FRINGE sentiments, that have been around for centuries. It is all a part of the " FREE LOVE " movement that the literatti , and aristocratic / " arty " salons proposed for centuries. Mary Woolenstonecraft , Mary Shelly , Hetty Green, the Victorian " NEW WOMEN ", the SUFFIGETTES, the Fabians, the Bloomsbury bunch, Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge , etc., are the great, great, grandmothers , great grandmothers, and grandmothers of the 1950's feminists.
The vote, equal pay for equal work, and equal education aren't the " evil " of feminism. Those things , for the " masses " , were far less hamful than the free love, eugenistis' view of birth control and abortion, and woman as men's superiors .
Betty Fredan opened the door, but the hippies and all that that generation , as well as their grownup aggrandizzers forced , what was until then a FRINGE set of ideas, upon the entire culture . That was the death knell to what was left of " civilized " society. Once specious norms were accepted as " NORMAL " , good manners , marriage, personal respnsibility, proper use of English, and yes, even gender roles, went to hell in a handbasket.
Sex without marriage, abortion, profanaity used as " normal " speech , irresponibility, dope use, and the debasement of all that is civilized society are the legacies that you are railing about; wheher you realize it or not. These things are all part and parcel of the whole. If you read Marx , Engles, and the rest of that damned pantheon, you'll see the seeds that bloomed and spread like Kudzo ( sp ? ) .
Yep, DUDE, that has been done to death. LOL
PSSSSSSSSSSS Calvinist friend...God knows ..*grin* Yes He does. .
Salude.....verdad....Yo hablo Portugese mejor...perdon mi Castillano.
You will notice the decadent wealth amongst some of the illuminati avant garde you mentioned....too much time on their hands...hence gilded lilies with absurd notions.....not suprising Marxism is so easily embraced is it?...
Regards
Muy feminina, muy linda y muy, muy inteligente.
Of course " FRAKENSTEIN'S MONSTER " is full of sexual angst and secular humanism.Laudamum , maybe, absinthe (? ), I doubt. Most likely Laudanum spiked wine. Absinthe wasn't drunk all that much , nor as widely, then.
I'll grant you that upper middle class and wealthy women were in the forefront of much of it all ; however , Hetty Green, Emma Goldman, some of the Suffergettes, and even a few of the Bloomsbury bunch were either poor or low middle class.
Not " Illuminati " ( they've been long gone, since they were driven out of Germany ! ) , but rather LITERATTI ... women writers and the wealthy women who held " salons " and championed male writers and artists.
Mabel Dodge was " into " all sorts of things. Just another wealthy woman, who wanted to be a " somebody " by being on the FRINGE. LOL Spritualism, though , attracked many " normal " people after the Civil War and especially after WW1. The brerieved have yearned to reach out to " the otherside " , after huge loses in wartime. That's another whole different topic, though. LOL
. . . THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET of the mommy wars, perhaps the last genuine secret left to excavate from that cultural pit, is that most women do not talk and think about motherhood and babies, born or unborn, the way Wolf and other contemporary feminists do. Whether they consider themselves pro-life or pro-choice is beside the point. Most women do not revel in the bloody details of "reproductive choice"; most do not think of themselves as potential child abusers and killers; and most do not experience pregnancy and childbirth and motherhood as personal catastrophes.
But our pro-choice activists, our orthodox feminists, do--from the troops who woman the battlefronts of NOW and NARAL and Emily's List, to the aging ghouls who flaunt their own children's pacifiers as they march for the destruction of other people's babies. What it would take to truly satisfy these souls is something that--fortunately enough--we may never know.
This much, however, is plain: Three decades after Roe v. Wade was handed down, there is no mistaking the connection between what the high priestesses of abortion believe about disposability of the human fetus, and the turmoil that motherhood itself unleashes in them.
The incessant sacralization of their favorite rite has done more than harden our feminists toward what it is they kill. It has also deformed their view of the babies and children that fetuses become.
The Apostle Paul anticipated the advent of "ladies" like these when he prophesied in 2 Tim. 3: In the last days . . .men [and women] will be lovers of self, boastful, arrogant, . . .unloving, . . .without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous. . .
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