We Have Miseducated Boys and Girls Alike

Last month, The Atlantic magazine ran a powerful article by Peggy Orenstein about young men in America. Titled "The Miseducation of the American Boy," the article is poignant and deeply troubling. And yet I was struck by the fact that Orenstein misses some obvious causes and connections.

She mentions, for example, that the interviews she conducted over two years revealed young men who are broadly supportive of the dreams, aspirations and general equality of young women. They are tolerant of and form friendships with gay classmates. According to the contemporary narrative, these trends should portend progress and better emotional and mental health, right?

Instead, it is boys' opinion of themselves, of masculinity and manhood, that are stunted and crippled. They all knew the term "toxic masculinity." In Orenstein's words: "They could also easily reel off the excesses of masculinity. ... They'd seen the headlines about mass shootings, domestic violence, sexual harassment, campus rape, presidential Twitter tantrums, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings."

That brief statement got my attention. Mass murder is a consequence of "excessive" masculinity, as is rape. President Donald Trump is an exemplar of what is wrong with masculinity. Apparently, so is Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

These are not statements of fact; they are opinions -- and strongly negative ones at that. Orenstein does not ask why the young men she interviewed are so aware of those (in their impressionable minds, widely held) views, or why they have internalized them so strongly.

She provides other, similarly distressing data. When asked in a PerryUndem survey what traits our society associates with masculinity, only 2% of male respondents chose "honesty and morality." Why is that? No answer is offered. When Orenstein asked her own interview subjects "what they liked about being a boy, most of them drew a blank." She quotes one interviewee who admitted: "I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys."

This is heartbreaking. We should be asking why America's boys feel the way they do, and why so much of what they hear about themselves as males is so negative. Orenstein is sincerely affected by the young men who trusted her with their deepest fears and anxieties. But she seems utterly oblivious to causes that should be obvious, given what the boys have told her.

Most notably, Orenstein completely overlooks the impact that the sexual revolution has had on the skewed perspective young people -- boys and girls -- have on their own identities and society's expectations of them. Orenstein asks the boys she interviews what constitutes "the ideal guy." When a surprising number of them mention "sexual prowess," she characterizes this as a viewpoint hearkening back to 1955.

Au contraire. That is a distinctly more modern phenomenon. Orenstein cites a recent survey in which young men report "more social pressure to be ever-ready for sex and to get with as many women as possible." She also reports that a contemporary "culture of adolescence," complete with a worship of "sexual conquest," has replaced perspectives of men as protectors and caregivers from earlier in the 20th century.

If you think the culture of sexual conquest is driven by the boys, you are seriously out of date. As a woman (and a mother), I was horrified by what the boys told Orenstein about the young women in their social lives. As young teens, these girls are "hooking up" with multiple boys and then comparing, mocking and humiliating them to friends and classmates, and on social media. I was frankly shocked by Orenstein's obliviousness to this. She decries what she views as the boys' misogyny. But not a word about the self-destructive promiscuity and deliberate cruelty of the girls.

Orenstein never asks the most obvious question: Why wouldn't a culture that worships promiscuous sex send the message to young men that their entire value revolves around sex? And consider the stated -- and hidden -- messages that young men get every day: Women should be able to sleep with as many men as possible. (Your girlfriend won't be faithful to you.) Divorce should be easy. (If your own father left and you're hurt by that, who cares? Men won't stay in a marriage. You shouldn't expect to stay in a marriage.) Dads are "deadbeats" or buffoons. (Mothers are more important than fathers.) Abortion is a constitutional right, and men should have no say. (Your children shouldn't mean anything to you. They can be destroyed whether you want that or not. You don't matter.)

It isn't that every negative, oppressive trend affecting American boys is an aftereffect of the sexual revolution. Some problems Orenstein mentions -- difficulty expressing emotions; fear of failure; "jock culture," with its bullying and vicious coaches -- have been around much longer.

But the sexual revolution -- which we were told would resolve the "battle of the sexes" -- has not only left those problems unaddressed but also created others, most notably, absent fathers.

This, too, Orenstein virtually ignores. But much evidence suggests that things like crime, mass shootings and sexual assault are not so much a function of toxic masculinity as they are absent masculinity. With no role models to demonstrate strong, healthy male behavior -- including respect for women, sexual self-restraint, honor and chivalry -- boys are left to fend for themselves, filled with untamed energy; the self-loathing and anger that comes from abandonment; societal messages of worthlessness; and the cultural push toward promiscuous sex (but with rampant accusations -- even presumptions -- that men are rapists). It is easy to understand why young men feel hopeless, frustrated and depressed.

Who is responsible for the miseducation of American boys? Our society. But changing that means admitting that the libertine behaviors we promised (or were promised) would bring fulfillment have wrought little but chaos and destruction.

Do we, as a society, have the courage to admit this, for the sake of our boys and our girls?

A certifiably crazy (twice institutionalized) radical Marxist dyke who wanted to have sex with young girls has successfully brainwashed the masses.

Kate Millett founder of NOW wanted to make men cower and assume second class status.

—

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3200158/posts
Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives
Frontpagemag.com ^ | 9-2-2014 | Mallory Millett (sister of the founder of NOW)

“When women go wrong men go right after them.” – Mae West

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Winston Churchill wrote this over a century ago.

During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment. I asked my favorite nun, “Why?” She answered, “That means you’ll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!”

What a giggle we girls had over that. “How ridiculously unsophisticated these nuns are,” we thought. Then I went to the university and four years later walked out a communist and an atheist, just as my sister Katie had six years before me.

Sometime later, I was a young divorcee with a small child. At the urging of my sister, I relocated to NYC after spending years married to an American executive stationed in Southeast Asia. The marriage over, I was making a new life for my daughter and me. Katie said, “Come to New York. We’re making revolution! Some of us are starting the National Organization of Women and you can be part of it.”

I hadn’t seen her for years. Although she had tormented me when we were youngsters, those memories were faint after my Asian traumas and the break-up of my marriage. I foolishly mistook her for sanctuary in a storm. With so much time and distance between us, I had forgotten her emotional instability.

And so began my period as an unwitting witness to history. I stayed with Kate and her lovable Japanese husband, Fumio, in a dilapidated loft on The Bowery as she finished her first book, a PhD thesis for Columbia University, “Sexual Politics.”

It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group,” a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China. We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:

“Why are we here today?” she asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”

Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears. Was I on planet earth? Who were these people?

“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.

They proceeded with a long discussion on how to advance these goals by establishing The National Organization of Women. It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of Western society. The upshot was that the only way to do this was “to invade every American institution. Every one must be permeated with ‘The Revolution’”: The media, the educational system, universities, high schools, K-12, school boards, etc.; then, the judiciary, the legislatures, the executive branches and even the library system.

It fell on my ears as a ludicrous scheme, as if they were a band of highly imaginative children planning a Brinks robbery; a lark trumped up on a snowy night amongst a group of spoiled brats over booze and hashish.

To me, this sounded silly. I was enduring culture shock after having been cut-off from my homeland, living in Third-World countries for years with not one trip back to the United States. I was one of those people who, upon returning to American soil, fell out of the plane blubbering with ecstasy at being home in the USA. I knelt on the ground covering it with kisses. I had learned just exactly how delicious was the land of my birth and didn’t care what anyone thought because they just hadn’t seen what I had or been where I had been. I had seen factory workers and sex-slaves chained to walls.

How could they know? Asia is beyond our ken and, as they say, utterly inscrutable, and a kind of hell I never intended to revisit. I lived there, not junketed, not visited like sweet little tourists — I’d conducted households and tried to raise a child. I had outgrown the communism of my university days and was clumsily groping my way back to God.

How could twelve American women who were the most respectable types imaginable — clean and privileged graduates of esteemed institutions: Columbia, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar; the uncle of one was Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt — plot such a thing? Most had advanced degrees and appeared cogent, bright, reasonable and good. How did these people rationally believe they could succeed with such vicious grandiosity? And why?

I dismissed it as academic-lounge air-castle-building. I continued with my new life in New York while my sister became famous publishing her books, featured on the cover of “Time Magazine.” “Time” called her “the Karl Marx of the Women’s Movement.” This was because her book laid out a course in Marxism 101 for women. Her thesis: The family is a den of slavery with the man as the Bourgeoisie and the woman and children as the Proletariat. The only hope for women’s “liberation” (communism’s favorite word for leading minions into inextricable slavery; “liberation,” and much like “collective” – please run from it, run for your life) was this new “Women’s Movement.” Her books captivated the academic classes and soon “Women’s Studies” courses were installed in colleges in a steady wave across the nation with Kate Millett books as required reading.

Imagine this: a girl of seventeen or eighteen at the kitchen table with Mom studying the syllabus for her first year of college and there’s a class called “Women’s Studies.” “Hmmm, this could be interesting,” says Mom. “Maybe you could get something out of this.”

Seems innocuous to her. How could she suspect this is a class in which her innocent daughter will be taught that her father is a villain? Her mother is a fool who allowed a man to enslave her into barbaric practices like monogamy and family life and motherhood, which is a waste of her talents. She mustn’t follow in her mother’s footsteps. That would be submitting to life as a mindless drone for some domineering man, the oppressor, who has mesmerized her with tricks like romantic love. Never be lured into this chicanery, she will be taught. Although men are no damned good, she should use them for her own orgasmic gratification; sleep with as many men as possible in order to keep herself unattached and free. There’s hardly a seventeen-year-old girl without a grudge from high school against a Jimmy or Jason who broke her heart. Boys are learning, too, and they can be careless during high school, that torment of courting dances for both sexes.

By the time Women’s Studies professors finish with your daughter, she will be a shell of the innocent girl you knew, who’s soon convinced that although she should be flopping down with every boy she fancies, she should not, by any means, get pregnant. And so, as a practitioner of promiscuity, she becomes a wizard of prevention techniques, especially abortion.

The goal of Women’s Liberation is to wear each female down to losing all empathy for boys, men or babies. The tenderest aspects of her soul are roughened into a rock pile of cynicism, where she will think nothing of murdering her baby in the warm protective nest of her little-girl womb. She will be taught that she, in order to free herself, must become an outlaw. This is only reasonable because all Western law, since Magna Carta and even before, is a concoction of the evil white man whose true purpose is to press her into slavery.

Be an outlaw! Rebel! Be defiant! (Think Madonna, Lady Gaga, Lois Lerner, Elizabeth Warren.) “All women are prostitutes,” she will be told. You’re either really smart and use sex by being promiscuous for your own pleasures and development as a full free human being “just like men” or you can be a professional prostitute, a viable business for women, which is “empowering” or you can be duped like your mother and prostitute yourself to one man exclusively whereby you fall under the heavy thumb of “the oppressor.” All wives are just “one-man whores.”

She is to be heartless in this. No sentimental stuff about courting. No empathy for either boy or baby. She has a life to live and no one is to get in her way. And if the boy or man doesn’t “get it” then no sex for him; “making love” becomes “having sex.” “I’m not ‘having sex’ with any jerk who doesn’t believe I can kill his son or daughter at my whim. He has no say in it because it’s my body!” (Strange logic as who has ever heard of a body with two heads, two hearts, four arms, four feet?)

There’s no end to the absurdities your young girl will be convinced to swallow. “I plan to leap from guy to guy as much as I please and no one can stop me because I’m liberated!” In other words, these people will turn your daughter into a slut with my sister’s books as instruction manuals. (“Slut is a good word. Be proud of it!”) She’ll be telling you, “I’m probably never getting married and if I do it will be after I’ve established my career,” which nowadays often means never. “I’ll keep my own name and I don’t really want kids. They’re such a bother and only get in the way.” They’ll tell her, “Don’t let any guy degrade you by allowing him to open doors for you. To be called ‘a lady’ is an insult. Chivalry is a means of ownership.”

Thus, the females, who are fundamentally the arbiters of society go on to harden their young men with such pillow-talk in the same way they’ve been hardened because, “Wow, man, I’ve gotta get laid and she won’t do it if I don’t agree to let her kill the kid if she gets knocked-up!” Oppressed? Woman has always had power. Consider the eternal paradigm: only after Eve convinced Adam to eat the fruit did mankind fall. I.e., man does anything to make woman happy, even if it’s in defiance of God. There’s power for ya! Without a decent womankind, mankind is lost. As Mae West said, “When women go wrong men go right after them!”

I’ve known women who fell for this creed in their youth who now, in their fifties and sixties, cry themselves to sleep decades of countless nights grieving for the children they’ll never have and the ones they coldly murdered because they were protecting the empty loveless futures they now live with no way of going back. “Where are my children? Where are my grandchildren?” they cry to me.

“Your sister’s books destroyed my sister’s life!” I’ve heard numerous times. “She was happily married with four kids and after she read those books, walked out on a bewildered man and didn’t look back.” The man fell into despairing rack and ruin. The children were stunted, set off their tracks, deeply harmed; the family profoundly dislocated and there was “no putting Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

Throughout the same time these women were “invading” our institutions, the character of the American woman transformed drastically from models portrayed for us by Rosalind Russell, Bette Davis, Deborah Kerr, Eve Arden, Donna Reed, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunn, Greer Garson. These were outstanding women needing no empowerment lessons and whose own personalities, as well as the characters they interpreted, were strong, resilient and clearly carved. Their voices were so different you could pick them out by that alone. We all knew Rita Hayworth’s voice. We all knew Katherine Hepburn’s voice.

I dare you to identify the voices of the cookie-cutter post-women’s-liberation types from Hollywood today. How did these “liberated” women fall into such an indistinguishable pile of mush? They all look exactly the same with few individuating characteristics and their voices sound identical, these Julies and Jessicas! My friend, Father George Rutler, calls them “the chirping fledglings of the new Dark Ages.” The character of the American woman has been distorted by this pernicious movement. From where did this foul mouthed, tattooed, outlaw creature, who murders her baby without blinking an eye and goes partying without conscience or remorse come? And, in such a short little phase in history?

Never before have we heard of so many women murdering their children: Casey Anthony killing her little Caylee and partying-hearty for weeks; Susan Smith driving her beautiful little boys into a lake, leaving them strapped in the water to die torturous deaths; that woman who drowned her five children in the bathtub? “Hey, if I can kill my baby at six months of gestation why not six months post-birth, just call it late late-term abortion.”

I insist that woman always has been the arbiter of society and when those women at Lila Karp’s table in Greenwich Village set their minds to destroying the American Family by talking young women into being outlaws, perpetrators of infanticide, and haters of Western law, men and marriage, they accomplished just what they intended. Their desire — and I witnessed it at subsequent meetings till I got pretty sick of their unbridled hate — was to tear American society apart along with the family and the “Patriarchal Slave-Master,” the American husband.

We’re all so busy congratulating each other because Ronald Reagan “won the Cold War without firing a shot” entirely missing the bare truth which is that Mao, with his Little Red Book and the Soviets, won the Cold War without firing a shot by taking over our women, our young and the minds of everyone tutored by Noam Chomsky and the textbooks of Howard Zinn. Post-graduate Junior is Peter Pan trapped in the Never Neverland of Mom’s (she’s divorced now) basement. Christina Hoff Sommers says, “Moms and dads, be afraid for your sons. There’s a ‘war on men’ that started a long time ago in gender studies classes and in women’s advocacy groups eager to believe that men are toxic… Many ‘educated women’ in the U.S. have drunk from the gender feminist Kool Aid. Girls at Yale, Haverford and Swarthmore see themselves as oppressed. This is madness.”

If you see something traitorous in this, a betrayal of my sister, I have come to identify with such people as Svetlana Stalin or Juanita Castro; coming out to speak plainly about a particularly harmful member of my family. Loyalty can be highly destructive. What about Muslims who refuse to speak out right now? I was one of the silent but at last I’m “spilling the beans.” The girls have been up to something for years and it’s really not good. It’s evil. We should be sick to our souls over it. I know I am. And so, mass destruction, the inevitable outcome of all socialist/communist experiments, leaves behind its signature trail of wreckage.

So much grace, femininity and beauty lost.

So many ruined lives.

Mallory Millett resides in New York City with her husband of over twenty years. CFO for several corporations, she is a long-standing member of The David Horowitz Freedom Center and sits on the Board of Regents for the Center for Security Policy.

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