Very illuminating definitions and discourse in both the article and the podcast transcript (as well as the posting by Clever Pseudonym just below where I am typing), which I happen to completely agree with, as an educated and liberal progressive white female personage not having a "person of color"broad ill-fitting cultural label even remotely constraining me from being who I actually am.: an educated and liberal progressive white female personage liking (a lot!) where this all seems to be going!
Being who we actually are is a good jumping off place as opposed to assigning broad, non accurate labels to any human categorization based on lumping all without white caucasian skin to be aggregately the people of color designation for all purposes by the up to now "dominant" culture? I believe that begs, based on reality and actual figures, a revisiting of the word "dominant," and what worldview supports and maintains whites as the dominant culture? Coming to a majority of age in the late 1960s, early 1970s, I cannot believe we are still dealing with this paradigm in 2023, and continuing?
Should have made clear this was my first visit to Glenn's writing and work, thus my thorough enjoyment of reading the most sane discourse I have read regarding race issues in a very very very very very very very very long time!
Glenn and John are right inside my head. As a Bangladeshi immigrant that's exactly what I'm thinking. And I'm even a pretty liberal person on criminal justice and welfare issues. But that comes from concerns about "fellow Americans," not because I think of Bangladeshis as belonging to the same coalition of "oppressed people" as Black people in Chicago or Philly.
I think the damaging aspect of this for Democrats, which is implicit in what Glenn and John said but is worth saying expressly, is that emphasizing racial identity is probably going to backfire when it comes to other minority groups. The whole narrative since 2016 has made me a lot more conservative. I can't help but focus more on my Bangladeshi identity, which makes me focus a lot more on what typical Bangladeshis think about meritocracy, law and order, family structure, etc.
Thank you, especially for pointing out the truly dangerous rhetoric of the Elect in encouraging "white identity." There was once a time (not that long ago), when eastern and southern European immigrants and their children were considered non-white. They were seen as non-white by the Anglo-Protestant majority but also by Black Americans. The whole notion of terms like "Asian," "white," or "Latino" representing some coherent group of people with some common traits or characteristics is just silly. To the extent such terms actually create a pseudo-identity they tend to obliterate the real cultural distinctions that make cultures interesting and vital in the first place.
Hiding your head in the sand and ignoring the hard truths will only lead to disaster! America is racist to the core, and white nationalists are breeding hatred daily!
Thank-you both! Really appreciate it. A few points from me; I am one of 10 kids and grew up poor. 5 of us joined the military to get to college on GI Bill. I have had to be be better through whole career because 1964 Affirmative Action put me behind all women and all non-whites for opportunity. I always had to do better in school and work to overcome this racism and sexism. If you discriminate on basis of race then you are a racist. If you discriminate on basis if sex then you are a sexist. If you want all people to have an equal outcome then you are a communist. If you are a racist sexist Communist then own it and introduce yourself as such. Like “hi I am Jane/John and I am a racist sexist Communist, nice to meet you”.
Young blacks are killing themselves at a crazy high rate indeed. I am in Philly and see it daily. Dems have optimized the destruction of blacks and the proof is in the murder and shootings data. On one hand the shooter is doomed and in the other the person shot is doomed. Chicago, Philly, Baltimore, St Louis, etc. Dem controlled for half a century and optimized to doom blacks.
Doubt it; after they spent the first $10k they would want another $10k or threaten violence. In addition, once other people see one group getting paid to not be violent, they would demand $10k to or they would become violent. Better answer is to jail those that injure others and keep them jailed until you would be willing to have them as your next door neighbor instead of foisting them on poor inner city population.
Guys, I think your discussions are wonderful. I was an academic for a couple decades and my most notable publications were on the subject of bureaucratic representation. I have had a long fascination with the issue of how we raise children, primarily boys, of black families -- i.e. do you instill this is what a "man" is and then (so to speak) this is the black variant on that character, or vice versa? I have many black friends from my military experience over 50 years ago, and I recently asked one of my running buddies whose son just graduated from college, and is an outstanding young man, he told he and his wife embedded personal character (truthfulness, honor, respect and so forth) in Andy...and then told him, "but never forget you're black." It reminds me of a college dean at U of Hawaii told me after I told him "take me off your list, I don't want to come here," he said, "There is no gap in human experience that basic human respect will not bridge." So, please keep up the good work.
One day, and I believe soon we will end up with a bunch of white leftists who speak in terms of persons of color lecturing blacks, hispanics and asians on what it means to be a person of color in the USA. It will be farcical and ludicrous and likely the end point for that ideology. The horror is that amount of damage that will happened between now and then.
Whoever introduced "people of color" must have intended to create a minefield. It takes the insipidness of "Latinx" and magnifies it across all minority groups. Worse, it seeks to have it both ways by using the term to describe nonwhites in one breath and as a euphemism for black in the next. And this overlooks how close this phrase tap dances very close to the old "colored people."
How this benefits society is a mystery, which may well be the point. The idea of everyone within a particular group marching to the same beat on all things is patently offensive. No one would ever say that all white people think alike on all things, but for some reason, that is never extended to minorities. Maybe at some point we can stop with the fixation on melanin, but that's just one olive-skinned guy's opinion, a man who probably falls within the realm of the "swarthy horde" or is at worst, horde-adjacent.
All this herding of people is a kind of narcissistic self-flagellation. It's a luxury and demeans both those in the group (black people have to stay on code or they're a "coon") and out of the group ("model minority" is an insult, "white" is an insult now, etc). Typically the 'prosperity gospel' ends such things - when everyone is doing well, there is less scuffling for resources. But in the present climate, what should really end it is need. Huge problems of global technological and intellectual competition with China, enormous resource and energy concerns, food supplies, etc. - Big Crunch coming for America, if not the world. In my opinion, there won't be time to worry about someone's fragility or if you're elevating black or LGBTQIAA++ voices enough when you shop online - we'll urgently need to work together to live. This is why you see less of this bs in sports locker rooms or military teams - the goals are present, clear, and urgent.
Hopefully we are approaching the end of this pendulum swing away from stoicism. I am not for peak stoicism either, but we passed equilibrium a long time ago. I am not sure we can valorize victimhood any more than we do now. The trip out to this extreme has been interesting, and at times entertaining, but I am very much looking forward to the journey back.
This was great. I actually quoted you in my Substack. I have a section called "Food for Thought" where I usually post about challenging social/political subjects, even though I mostly educate about mental health and relationships. https://www.vpetrova.com/p/3-natural-ways-to-treat-anxiety-and?sd=pf
Glenn, religion IS an issue when you're dealing with the politics, the Supreme Court, public office. It's an ideology and while you may be born into a family committed to that ideology, you can choose to reject it as many have, whereas you can't reject your skin colour or your sex (well some do, but they're still limited as to what they can do by their birth biology). Do I think there are 'too many Catholics' on the Supreme Court? Hell yeah, when that misogynist, sexist ideology is held by several Justices who are now about to decide whether women are allowed body autonomy or not! Can there be 'too many Jews'? Maybe, if they're making decisions based on their ideology to the detriment of others (I don't know if that happened or not - I'm not sure when there were 'a lot of Jews' supposedly on the SC). I look closely at religious ideology as a woman, since so many of them are famously misogynist, especially fundamentalist Protestantism and Islam.
Ideology *is* important and I can understand why Americans were afraid that JFK might answer to the Pope before the country. Catholicism was much different back then and yes, that was a real concern. Some might be concerned that a Jewish candidate might be too strongly aligned with support for Israel and blind to their human rights abuses against the Palestinians. That's a valid concern too. Getting off religion for a moment, I looked askance at Jesse Jackson, a lifetime civil rights activist, when he ran for President in the 1980s. While I didn't object to Jackson per se, I wondered: Would he be preoccupied with black rights as President, to the detriment of other problems and injustices in America? It wasn't his blackness (I didn't worry about Obama), it was his *ideology*.
I wrote a few months back about how I liked Ketanji Brown Jackson as a SC nominee because she seemed more liberal than anyone Trump has appointed, and I think there are 'too many conservatives' on the SC right now. I also stated that I didn't want an all-'progressive' SC because I didn't think liberals would do a good job with too much power either. I like a nice mixture of ideologies, I think that's what works best.
If it's misogynistic to think that a woman doesn't have a right to end the life that she carries when pregnant, is it misandrist to think that a man doesn't have a right to terminate his legal obligations to any child he helps conceive but has no desire to parent?
Let me first say that I actually find abortion very depressing, especially when women terminate a pregnancy only because it is unwanted. I think that both women and men should be responsible when they are having sex.
To respond to your question, I agree with Nicole that a man should not assume that the woman he is having sex with is using contraception, unless they both trust each other and are honest with each other. In the same way a woman should not assume that a man who is having sex with her actually likes and respects her, unless he has proven that he does.
Of course a man shouldn’t make those assumptions about his partner, but given the degree to which people are inundated with messaging about hormonal contraception being a normal & necessary part of women’s healthcare, is it really that surprising that so many men would think that women would be using it?
That a significant number of [especially young] women will think that a man who is interested in having sex with a woman necessarily likes and respects her is also the result of people consuming propaganda (i.e. “entertainment”) that constantly repeats this lie. What makes it worse is that it can become even more difficult for a woman to disabuse herself of this notion once she has started to have sex with him and actually begins to emotionally bond with him in a way that he may never be able to reciprocate if the relationship didn’t have love as its foundation.
While reasonable people may be able to agree that everyone *should* rationally assess the people they are tempted to fornicate with and not be too quick to assume that their sexual target is an honest, decent person, that sort of advice still comes up very short when it comes to making the sort of positive life choices that enable people to avoid serious regret and even tragedy.
So long as people take it as a given that the purpose of sex need be nothing more than the fulfillment of desire and that the welfare of children shouldn’t be a consideration when it comes to how adults order their sexual lives, the sorts of attitudes that enable people to justify the shirking of responsibility for their partners and offspring will proliferate, with women and children being the ones to disproportionately bear the costs.
Despite the messaging you mention men should not assume that every sexually active woman is using hormonal contraception. Any man who believes that it is a necessary part
of women's healthcare is actually very naive: this form of contraception is not harmless for women and in reality only about 23% of American women aged 15-49 are using it: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db327.htm
Hormonal contraception does not protect people from HIV/AIDS and STDs, so if a man does not use a condom with a casual sexual partner, he is putting his own health at risk.
To be honest, I don't really see this propaganda telling women that if a man has sex with a woman, he necessarily likes and respects her. I guess that some women believe it because the truth would be too painful to them. However, a relationship which didn't have love as its foundation may turn into a loving relationship. Of course it is extremely unlikely if the man sees the woman only as a sex object which can be easily discarded...
I totally agree with you that as long as many people don't care about the welfare of children and detach sex from emotions and responsibility, toxic attitudes will persist and proliferate. In order to avoid regret and even tragedy, people should consistently use some form of contraception, unless they are in a stable and loving relationship.
I’m totally with you re: the assumptions men should NOT be making about women being on hormonal contraception, and yes, given the risk of STDs, males who engage in casual sex without using a condom are being doubly foolish. But both the wrong assumptions that they make about women & their willingness to risk their own health by not taking precautions to protect themselves are features of the same tendency common to a great many [especially young] men: a willingness to engage in risky behaviors & rely on faulty reasoning to justify doing very stupid things.
A corollary negative tendency in women is to imagine their sexual/romantic partners as being better or more decent than they actually are. Hence the willingness to believe that their partner really cares about them and isn’t just using them. And yes, there have been gobs of movies & TV shows (and this is to say nothing of all the trash available online) that depict happy resolutions to not-especially-wise sexual entanglements that when regularly consumed by not-especially-thoughtful viewers, can condition people to expect that a dreamscape romance will emerge from their sad realities. And while I’m not going to deny that it’s possible for a sexual relationship not founded on love to turn into a loving relationship, those scenarios are actually pretty rare.
The bottom line is our culture is very weak when it comes to trying to instill in people of either sex a proper understanding of the other that includes what men owe to women as well as what’s reasonable for women to expect of men. Changes in social organization due to the technological & economic revolutions of the past couple centuries are a part of it, but much of that weakness stems from the fact that with technology enabling us to now sever procreation from sex, we’ve been able to treat as dispensable wisdom gleaned over the ages about relations between the sexes (wisdom that was needed to maintain any approximation of social equilibrium), and in the process, we’ve collectively sabotaged family life with children being the first casualty.
I wonder if there's a way to handle it legally in which, perhaps, they sign something saying the man isn't obligated to raise a baby if conceived. But I'm not sure how well that would hold up in court.
If he wasn't wearing a condom, and most aren't, and unless you buy cheap condoms there's a low percentage of them breaking, then no, he is at least on the hook for 18 years of child support payments. It's as much the man's responsibility as the woman's to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and the most common male post-conception whine was, "But I thought she was OOOOOONNNNN something!"
Given men's historical, well-documented reluctance to take responsibility for their contribution to a new human, my sympathies fall more on the mother's side than the father's.
You want to have sex? Wrap your willy and don't complain about how you don't feel as much with it. My response has always been: "You won't feel anything at all if you don't." There's not a man alive who will turn down protected sex for no sex. Not a single one.
If people can have the forethought to agree to the terms of a sexual relationship and/or encounter before they take the risk of conceiving a new human being, then there can be no question that adults are fully capable of exercising their will over their sexual passions, thus obviating the "need" for abortion, with the exception being the cases where the woman’s will is disregarded by the man. This possible legal solution that you propose seems to be a distorted form of marriage in that it would serve solely to satisfy the desires of the adults as compared to, say, serving a greater good of establishing a structure wherein both spouses would commit to the good of the other as well as that of any children conceived.
In any event, your suggestion that men should be able to sign away their paternal obligations is what men’s rights activists have been pushing for for decades. And of course the legalization of abortion-on-demand is what they have been able to use to justify their position. That post-conception whine that we hear from so many foolish men is similarly a consequence of the shift in thinking about pregnancy from being a normal consequence of sexual activity the response to which is the shared responsibility for the child to the expectation, afforded to us by technology that manipulates female physiology (i.e. ovulation-suppressing drugs), that the prevention of pregnancy is ultimately within the woman's power and therefore the responsibility for it belongs to her alone.
While it’s absolutely true that a not-insignificant minority of men have always failed to take responsibility for their offspring, strict sexual norms did function to keep those numbers relatively low. Given the dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births as well as single parenting across societies that have embraced an ethic of sexual “liberation”, it doesn’t seem to be the case that the move to divorce sex from marriage & procreation has done anything to reduce (at least at a population-wide level) the burden that women (and children) suffer as a consequence of male sexual impropriety.
I have been slowly coming around to the idea that perhaps marriage isn't such a bad idea after all, even though I myself have never been all that keen on it (and never married myself). Steven Pinker has made that argument and he's not screaming anti-sex right-wing conservative. But I do think parents bear a lot of responsibility in that they *don't* raise boys with the same strong hand with which they raise girls. Boys are given far more freedom than girls growing up and the 'boys will be boys' attitude (like re the teenage Brett Kavanagh) prevails. I want to see boys raised with the same restrictions with which parents raise girls, and punished when they can't control that troublesome little penis of theirs.
The signing away of parental obligations is something they'd both need to sign, not just the man, although as I said I don't know it would ever hold up in court. In the end, there needs to be more attention paid to what happens if a human being is conceived and what will happen to it. Neither party may be prepared to raise it and adoption isn't the answer either; women are now mom-shamed if they say they're going to do this and non-white women, who are the most affected by the end of Roe, will give up their babies to institutions since most parents don't want to adopt non-white babies, and there aren't enough black couples for all the black babies.
Since women are the ones who have *always* borne the brunt of child-rearing, conceived via a one-night stand, a relationship or by rape, and that ain't gonna change soon, they're the ones who decide what happens with the pregnancy, and the man just has to go along with it. I've often said to the ones who are anti-abortion: If you don't want your baby aborted, be very, very careful where you plant your seed, and make sure always to use a condom.
Now there's talk of a male birth control pill and feminists say, "How do you know he's on something?" to which I reply, "How does he know *you* are? If *you* don't want to be a parent, *you* handle the birth control for your body." That works BOTH ways.
The idea that sex really is only appropriate and justified within the confines of a loving, committed relationship (which most functional societies understand as marriage) should, imo, be inculcated in children of both sexes. While the sex education of children is complicated by differences in male & female psychology, I agree totally agree with you that the “boys will be boys” response is just a way to justify holding males to lower moral standards, and it in fact inverts the traditional notion that males have a duty to protect. That said, it’s still very important to instill in young females that they have the prerogative to refuse any and all sexual activity; I’ve always been taken aback when encountering women who say they feel like they “have to” have sex with whoever they’re in a relationship with as if they have no choice in the matter. If males are easily conditioned to think it’s no big deal to have sex with females they haven’t committed to, far too many females have been conditioned to think that what’s expected of them is that they put out.
The problem with approaching the problem of unwanted parenthood by providing the sort of legal out that you mentioned is that it treats the child as a problem that self-interested parents can choose to preemptively abandon, as compared to treating the child as a subject with certain rights (i.e. to its parents) that should be protected by law where possible. While there are and will probably always be parents who aren’t able or willing to take responsibility for their offspring, reordering the legal system to prioritize the personal desires of parents over the needs of children seems to be a great way to codify into law the idea that the strong should prevail over the weak.
While adoption isn’t the best option in every case of unplanned pregnancy (and, in fact, the vast majority of women who consider abortion before they decide to keep their babies elect to raise them on their own), I think you may be overstating the lack of interest in inter-racial adoptions. In any event, telling poor women (of any color) that abortion is their best option is a yet another way to avoid having to actually confront the needs of low-income people and the women among them who may find themselves raising children without a co-parent.
Since women are the ones who will always bear the brunt of reproducing the species (provided we don’t slide into a everyone-gets-conceived-in-a-lab-&-gestated-in-an-artifical-womb dystopia), it’s incumbent on society to provide proper social supports to ensure better outcomes for mothers and children. And where traditional social supports break down or are absent (i.e. marriage, the father of the child or even extended family), civil society and/or the state should attempt to fill that void. Without question, people need to make responsible use of their bodies and take care in how they manage their relationships. But so long as there are fertile men and women who engage in sexual activity without the intention of having a child, there will be some unwanted pregnancies. Contraception can [in some cases dramatically] lower the chances of pregnancy, but there’s not one kind that is 100% effective.
I don't know that we're ever going back to 'sex only within the confines of a loving relationship'. That's the standard of most religions and men have always ignored it. Men have *always* reserved the right to tomcat around and when women gained the ability with the introduction of the Pill, and then abortion rights, suddenly women started acting an awful lot like men and for the last sixty years men have had to deal with what women always did: What's she doing with others? Do I know or not know? Can I do anything about it? No? Well, shit!
Hence the hostility (mostly by male politicians) to birth control and sex education, and now abortion rights. Keeping her knocked up will keep her 'where she belongs', and having a baby she doesn't want is the 'proper punishment' for a slutty little ho who shouldn't have been having sex in the first place. Men, of course, don't need to pay the price for being slutty little hos, and in some cultures it's a badge of honour to have multiple baby mamas.
The fact is, most men hostile to women's sexual rights don't give a damn about the baby, and in fact dehumanize it - it's not a potential human being, it's a punishment for a woman for having sex. As I've pointed out, men famously aren't always very good about supporting their sperm donations. Y'all ready, perhaps, for the return of 'shotgun weddings'? Are they, or were they, ever a good idea? I don't know.
I don't have a problem with a sexually freer society for all. I don't think we *have* to keep it to a 'committed, loving relationship' as long as all parties know what the deal is with the other and agree to it. I'm not sure either sex really has it it them, overall, to be faithful to one person throughout their entire lives, as we change and grow and sometimes grow apart. I don't think America was such a great place in the sexually repressed '50s lionized by conservative male politicians who want to return us there. That was when women had little say over their own sexual lives even within marriage. What joy, what bliss it must have been to be a Don Draper back then!
But can I get back to a return to promoting marriage and committed relationships for raising children? Yes, I can. Marriage, as Steven Pinker points out, has another side benefit too - it civilizes young men during their most dangerous, volatile stage - age 18-35. No wonder they tried to avoid it so much! I think, actually, that may be the main reason why I would support it. To bring young man back into line.
But since sexual control has *always* meant 'for women only', as exemplified by every male-created religion ever, I don't believe in mandating any sexual culture that men themselves can't adhere to. And since men haven't seen the need to control their dicks for thousands of years, women don't need to control their vaginas. If an unwanted pregnancy happens, the woman decides what's to be done about it. If a man doesn't want his sperm contribution aborted, he can use a condom, or better yet, for 100% efficacy, he can keep his dick in his pants.
"Keep his dick in his pants!" ROTLFMAO! I kill me, sometimes I really kill me!!!
For sure. I've known plenty. And evidence strongly suggests most of them support birth control too, because Mel Gibson's family aside, most Catholic families have only a small number of kids.
Very illuminating definitions and discourse in both the article and the podcast transcript (as well as the posting by Clever Pseudonym just below where I am typing), which I happen to completely agree with, as an educated and liberal progressive white female personage not having a "person of color"broad ill-fitting cultural label even remotely constraining me from being who I actually am.: an educated and liberal progressive white female personage liking (a lot!) where this all seems to be going!
Being who we actually are is a good jumping off place as opposed to assigning broad, non accurate labels to any human categorization based on lumping all without white caucasian skin to be aggregately the people of color designation for all purposes by the up to now "dominant" culture? I believe that begs, based on reality and actual figures, a revisiting of the word "dominant," and what worldview supports and maintains whites as the dominant culture? Coming to a majority of age in the late 1960s, early 1970s, I cannot believe we are still dealing with this paradigm in 2023, and continuing?
Should have made clear this was my first visit to Glenn's writing and work, thus my thorough enjoyment of reading the most sane discourse I have read regarding race issues in a very very very very very very very very long time!
Dear Sir - Keep up the good work
Glenn and John are right inside my head. As a Bangladeshi immigrant that's exactly what I'm thinking. And I'm even a pretty liberal person on criminal justice and welfare issues. But that comes from concerns about "fellow Americans," not because I think of Bangladeshis as belonging to the same coalition of "oppressed people" as Black people in Chicago or Philly.
I think the damaging aspect of this for Democrats, which is implicit in what Glenn and John said but is worth saying expressly, is that emphasizing racial identity is probably going to backfire when it comes to other minority groups. The whole narrative since 2016 has made me a lot more conservative. I can't help but focus more on my Bangladeshi identity, which makes me focus a lot more on what typical Bangladeshis think about meritocracy, law and order, family structure, etc.
The entire nation of Spain , including its king and queen, is Hispanic and thus BIPOC.
Thank you, especially for pointing out the truly dangerous rhetoric of the Elect in encouraging "white identity." There was once a time (not that long ago), when eastern and southern European immigrants and their children were considered non-white. They were seen as non-white by the Anglo-Protestant majority but also by Black Americans. The whole notion of terms like "Asian," "white," or "Latino" representing some coherent group of people with some common traits or characteristics is just silly. To the extent such terms actually create a pseudo-identity they tend to obliterate the real cultural distinctions that make cultures interesting and vital in the first place.
Hiding your head in the sand and ignoring the hard truths will only lead to disaster! America is racist to the core, and white nationalists are breeding hatred daily!
more racist tripe from a democrat party propagandist.
I did not get that impression at all.
Thank-you both! Really appreciate it. A few points from me; I am one of 10 kids and grew up poor. 5 of us joined the military to get to college on GI Bill. I have had to be be better through whole career because 1964 Affirmative Action put me behind all women and all non-whites for opportunity. I always had to do better in school and work to overcome this racism and sexism. If you discriminate on basis of race then you are a racist. If you discriminate on basis if sex then you are a sexist. If you want all people to have an equal outcome then you are a communist. If you are a racist sexist Communist then own it and introduce yourself as such. Like “hi I am Jane/John and I am a racist sexist Communist, nice to meet you”.
They were benefited by wealth and not by the Affirmative Action program of 1964 because thst program does not cover white males.
Young blacks are killing themselves at a crazy high rate indeed. I am in Philly and see it daily. Dems have optimized the destruction of blacks and the proof is in the murder and shootings data. On one hand the shooter is doomed and in the other the person shot is doomed. Chicago, Philly, Baltimore, St Louis, etc. Dem controlled for half a century and optimized to doom blacks.
Doubt it; after they spent the first $10k they would want another $10k or threaten violence. In addition, once other people see one group getting paid to not be violent, they would demand $10k to or they would become violent. Better answer is to jail those that injure others and keep them jailed until you would be willing to have them as your next door neighbor instead of foisting them on poor inner city population.
Guys, I think your discussions are wonderful. I was an academic for a couple decades and my most notable publications were on the subject of bureaucratic representation. I have had a long fascination with the issue of how we raise children, primarily boys, of black families -- i.e. do you instill this is what a "man" is and then (so to speak) this is the black variant on that character, or vice versa? I have many black friends from my military experience over 50 years ago, and I recently asked one of my running buddies whose son just graduated from college, and is an outstanding young man, he told he and his wife embedded personal character (truthfulness, honor, respect and so forth) in Andy...and then told him, "but never forget you're black." It reminds me of a college dean at U of Hawaii told me after I told him "take me off your list, I don't want to come here," he said, "There is no gap in human experience that basic human respect will not bridge." So, please keep up the good work.
One day, and I believe soon we will end up with a bunch of white leftists who speak in terms of persons of color lecturing blacks, hispanics and asians on what it means to be a person of color in the USA. It will be farcical and ludicrous and likely the end point for that ideology. The horror is that amount of damage that will happened between now and then.
Whoever introduced "people of color" must have intended to create a minefield. It takes the insipidness of "Latinx" and magnifies it across all minority groups. Worse, it seeks to have it both ways by using the term to describe nonwhites in one breath and as a euphemism for black in the next. And this overlooks how close this phrase tap dances very close to the old "colored people."
How this benefits society is a mystery, which may well be the point. The idea of everyone within a particular group marching to the same beat on all things is patently offensive. No one would ever say that all white people think alike on all things, but for some reason, that is never extended to minorities. Maybe at some point we can stop with the fixation on melanin, but that's just one olive-skinned guy's opinion, a man who probably falls within the realm of the "swarthy horde" or is at worst, horde-adjacent.
Interestingly, Douglas Murray in his THE MADNESS OF CROWDS reminds the reader that LGBT is not a unified field either.
All this herding of people is a kind of narcissistic self-flagellation. It's a luxury and demeans both those in the group (black people have to stay on code or they're a "coon") and out of the group ("model minority" is an insult, "white" is an insult now, etc). Typically the 'prosperity gospel' ends such things - when everyone is doing well, there is less scuffling for resources. But in the present climate, what should really end it is need. Huge problems of global technological and intellectual competition with China, enormous resource and energy concerns, food supplies, etc. - Big Crunch coming for America, if not the world. In my opinion, there won't be time to worry about someone's fragility or if you're elevating black or LGBTQIAA++ voices enough when you shop online - we'll urgently need to work together to live. This is why you see less of this bs in sports locker rooms or military teams - the goals are present, clear, and urgent.
Hopefully we are approaching the end of this pendulum swing away from stoicism. I am not for peak stoicism either, but we passed equilibrium a long time ago. I am not sure we can valorize victimhood any more than we do now. The trip out to this extreme has been interesting, and at times entertaining, but I am very much looking forward to the journey back.
If you think you can buy a ticket for the journey then you are mistaken: need to drive some yourself.
Wait, are you saying my work in the comments section of The Glenn Show is not enough?!
Damn! I need to re-evaluate
Fair enough! Fair enough! We each have to contribute how we best can.
This was great. I actually quoted you in my Substack. I have a section called "Food for Thought" where I usually post about challenging social/political subjects, even though I mostly educate about mental health and relationships. https://www.vpetrova.com/p/3-natural-ways-to-treat-anxiety-and?sd=pf
Glenn, religion IS an issue when you're dealing with the politics, the Supreme Court, public office. It's an ideology and while you may be born into a family committed to that ideology, you can choose to reject it as many have, whereas you can't reject your skin colour or your sex (well some do, but they're still limited as to what they can do by their birth biology). Do I think there are 'too many Catholics' on the Supreme Court? Hell yeah, when that misogynist, sexist ideology is held by several Justices who are now about to decide whether women are allowed body autonomy or not! Can there be 'too many Jews'? Maybe, if they're making decisions based on their ideology to the detriment of others (I don't know if that happened or not - I'm not sure when there were 'a lot of Jews' supposedly on the SC). I look closely at religious ideology as a woman, since so many of them are famously misogynist, especially fundamentalist Protestantism and Islam.
Ideology *is* important and I can understand why Americans were afraid that JFK might answer to the Pope before the country. Catholicism was much different back then and yes, that was a real concern. Some might be concerned that a Jewish candidate might be too strongly aligned with support for Israel and blind to their human rights abuses against the Palestinians. That's a valid concern too. Getting off religion for a moment, I looked askance at Jesse Jackson, a lifetime civil rights activist, when he ran for President in the 1980s. While I didn't object to Jackson per se, I wondered: Would he be preoccupied with black rights as President, to the detriment of other problems and injustices in America? It wasn't his blackness (I didn't worry about Obama), it was his *ideology*.
I wrote a few months back about how I liked Ketanji Brown Jackson as a SC nominee because she seemed more liberal than anyone Trump has appointed, and I think there are 'too many conservatives' on the SC right now. I also stated that I didn't want an all-'progressive' SC because I didn't think liberals would do a good job with too much power either. I like a nice mixture of ideologies, I think that's what works best.
If it's misogynistic to think that a woman doesn't have a right to end the life that she carries when pregnant, is it misandrist to think that a man doesn't have a right to terminate his legal obligations to any child he helps conceive but has no desire to parent?
Let me first say that I actually find abortion very depressing, especially when women terminate a pregnancy only because it is unwanted. I think that both women and men should be responsible when they are having sex.
To respond to your question, I agree with Nicole that a man should not assume that the woman he is having sex with is using contraception, unless they both trust each other and are honest with each other. In the same way a woman should not assume that a man who is having sex with her actually likes and respects her, unless he has proven that he does.
Of course a man shouldn’t make those assumptions about his partner, but given the degree to which people are inundated with messaging about hormonal contraception being a normal & necessary part of women’s healthcare, is it really that surprising that so many men would think that women would be using it?
That a significant number of [especially young] women will think that a man who is interested in having sex with a woman necessarily likes and respects her is also the result of people consuming propaganda (i.e. “entertainment”) that constantly repeats this lie. What makes it worse is that it can become even more difficult for a woman to disabuse herself of this notion once she has started to have sex with him and actually begins to emotionally bond with him in a way that he may never be able to reciprocate if the relationship didn’t have love as its foundation.
While reasonable people may be able to agree that everyone *should* rationally assess the people they are tempted to fornicate with and not be too quick to assume that their sexual target is an honest, decent person, that sort of advice still comes up very short when it comes to making the sort of positive life choices that enable people to avoid serious regret and even tragedy.
So long as people take it as a given that the purpose of sex need be nothing more than the fulfillment of desire and that the welfare of children shouldn’t be a consideration when it comes to how adults order their sexual lives, the sorts of attitudes that enable people to justify the shirking of responsibility for their partners and offspring will proliferate, with women and children being the ones to disproportionately bear the costs.
Despite the messaging you mention men should not assume that every sexually active woman is using hormonal contraception. Any man who believes that it is a necessary part
of women's healthcare is actually very naive: this form of contraception is not harmless for women and in reality only about 23% of American women aged 15-49 are using it: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db327.htm
Hormonal contraception does not protect people from HIV/AIDS and STDs, so if a man does not use a condom with a casual sexual partner, he is putting his own health at risk.
To be honest, I don't really see this propaganda telling women that if a man has sex with a woman, he necessarily likes and respects her. I guess that some women believe it because the truth would be too painful to them. However, a relationship which didn't have love as its foundation may turn into a loving relationship. Of course it is extremely unlikely if the man sees the woman only as a sex object which can be easily discarded...
I totally agree with you that as long as many people don't care about the welfare of children and detach sex from emotions and responsibility, toxic attitudes will persist and proliferate. In order to avoid regret and even tragedy, people should consistently use some form of contraception, unless they are in a stable and loving relationship.
I’m totally with you re: the assumptions men should NOT be making about women being on hormonal contraception, and yes, given the risk of STDs, males who engage in casual sex without using a condom are being doubly foolish. But both the wrong assumptions that they make about women & their willingness to risk their own health by not taking precautions to protect themselves are features of the same tendency common to a great many [especially young] men: a willingness to engage in risky behaviors & rely on faulty reasoning to justify doing very stupid things.
A corollary negative tendency in women is to imagine their sexual/romantic partners as being better or more decent than they actually are. Hence the willingness to believe that their partner really cares about them and isn’t just using them. And yes, there have been gobs of movies & TV shows (and this is to say nothing of all the trash available online) that depict happy resolutions to not-especially-wise sexual entanglements that when regularly consumed by not-especially-thoughtful viewers, can condition people to expect that a dreamscape romance will emerge from their sad realities. And while I’m not going to deny that it’s possible for a sexual relationship not founded on love to turn into a loving relationship, those scenarios are actually pretty rare.
The bottom line is our culture is very weak when it comes to trying to instill in people of either sex a proper understanding of the other that includes what men owe to women as well as what’s reasonable for women to expect of men. Changes in social organization due to the technological & economic revolutions of the past couple centuries are a part of it, but much of that weakness stems from the fact that with technology enabling us to now sever procreation from sex, we’ve been able to treat as dispensable wisdom gleaned over the ages about relations between the sexes (wisdom that was needed to maintain any approximation of social equilibrium), and in the process, we’ve collectively sabotaged family life with children being the first casualty.
This article does a decent job of exploring that thesis: https://unherd.com/2021/11/the-sexual-revolution-killed-feminism/
I wonder if there's a way to handle it legally in which, perhaps, they sign something saying the man isn't obligated to raise a baby if conceived. But I'm not sure how well that would hold up in court.
If he wasn't wearing a condom, and most aren't, and unless you buy cheap condoms there's a low percentage of them breaking, then no, he is at least on the hook for 18 years of child support payments. It's as much the man's responsibility as the woman's to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and the most common male post-conception whine was, "But I thought she was OOOOOONNNNN something!"
Given men's historical, well-documented reluctance to take responsibility for their contribution to a new human, my sympathies fall more on the mother's side than the father's.
You want to have sex? Wrap your willy and don't complain about how you don't feel as much with it. My response has always been: "You won't feel anything at all if you don't." There's not a man alive who will turn down protected sex for no sex. Not a single one.
If people can have the forethought to agree to the terms of a sexual relationship and/or encounter before they take the risk of conceiving a new human being, then there can be no question that adults are fully capable of exercising their will over their sexual passions, thus obviating the "need" for abortion, with the exception being the cases where the woman’s will is disregarded by the man. This possible legal solution that you propose seems to be a distorted form of marriage in that it would serve solely to satisfy the desires of the adults as compared to, say, serving a greater good of establishing a structure wherein both spouses would commit to the good of the other as well as that of any children conceived.
In any event, your suggestion that men should be able to sign away their paternal obligations is what men’s rights activists have been pushing for for decades. And of course the legalization of abortion-on-demand is what they have been able to use to justify their position. That post-conception whine that we hear from so many foolish men is similarly a consequence of the shift in thinking about pregnancy from being a normal consequence of sexual activity the response to which is the shared responsibility for the child to the expectation, afforded to us by technology that manipulates female physiology (i.e. ovulation-suppressing drugs), that the prevention of pregnancy is ultimately within the woman's power and therefore the responsibility for it belongs to her alone.
While it’s absolutely true that a not-insignificant minority of men have always failed to take responsibility for their offspring, strict sexual norms did function to keep those numbers relatively low. Given the dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births as well as single parenting across societies that have embraced an ethic of sexual “liberation”, it doesn’t seem to be the case that the move to divorce sex from marriage & procreation has done anything to reduce (at least at a population-wide level) the burden that women (and children) suffer as a consequence of male sexual impropriety.
I have been slowly coming around to the idea that perhaps marriage isn't such a bad idea after all, even though I myself have never been all that keen on it (and never married myself). Steven Pinker has made that argument and he's not screaming anti-sex right-wing conservative. But I do think parents bear a lot of responsibility in that they *don't* raise boys with the same strong hand with which they raise girls. Boys are given far more freedom than girls growing up and the 'boys will be boys' attitude (like re the teenage Brett Kavanagh) prevails. I want to see boys raised with the same restrictions with which parents raise girls, and punished when they can't control that troublesome little penis of theirs.
The signing away of parental obligations is something they'd both need to sign, not just the man, although as I said I don't know it would ever hold up in court. In the end, there needs to be more attention paid to what happens if a human being is conceived and what will happen to it. Neither party may be prepared to raise it and adoption isn't the answer either; women are now mom-shamed if they say they're going to do this and non-white women, who are the most affected by the end of Roe, will give up their babies to institutions since most parents don't want to adopt non-white babies, and there aren't enough black couples for all the black babies.
Since women are the ones who have *always* borne the brunt of child-rearing, conceived via a one-night stand, a relationship or by rape, and that ain't gonna change soon, they're the ones who decide what happens with the pregnancy, and the man just has to go along with it. I've often said to the ones who are anti-abortion: If you don't want your baby aborted, be very, very careful where you plant your seed, and make sure always to use a condom.
Now there's talk of a male birth control pill and feminists say, "How do you know he's on something?" to which I reply, "How does he know *you* are? If *you* don't want to be a parent, *you* handle the birth control for your body." That works BOTH ways.
The idea that sex really is only appropriate and justified within the confines of a loving, committed relationship (which most functional societies understand as marriage) should, imo, be inculcated in children of both sexes. While the sex education of children is complicated by differences in male & female psychology, I agree totally agree with you that the “boys will be boys” response is just a way to justify holding males to lower moral standards, and it in fact inverts the traditional notion that males have a duty to protect. That said, it’s still very important to instill in young females that they have the prerogative to refuse any and all sexual activity; I’ve always been taken aback when encountering women who say they feel like they “have to” have sex with whoever they’re in a relationship with as if they have no choice in the matter. If males are easily conditioned to think it’s no big deal to have sex with females they haven’t committed to, far too many females have been conditioned to think that what’s expected of them is that they put out.
The problem with approaching the problem of unwanted parenthood by providing the sort of legal out that you mentioned is that it treats the child as a problem that self-interested parents can choose to preemptively abandon, as compared to treating the child as a subject with certain rights (i.e. to its parents) that should be protected by law where possible. While there are and will probably always be parents who aren’t able or willing to take responsibility for their offspring, reordering the legal system to prioritize the personal desires of parents over the needs of children seems to be a great way to codify into law the idea that the strong should prevail over the weak.
While adoption isn’t the best option in every case of unplanned pregnancy (and, in fact, the vast majority of women who consider abortion before they decide to keep their babies elect to raise them on their own), I think you may be overstating the lack of interest in inter-racial adoptions. In any event, telling poor women (of any color) that abortion is their best option is a yet another way to avoid having to actually confront the needs of low-income people and the women among them who may find themselves raising children without a co-parent.
Since women are the ones who will always bear the brunt of reproducing the species (provided we don’t slide into a everyone-gets-conceived-in-a-lab-&-gestated-in-an-artifical-womb dystopia), it’s incumbent on society to provide proper social supports to ensure better outcomes for mothers and children. And where traditional social supports break down or are absent (i.e. marriage, the father of the child or even extended family), civil society and/or the state should attempt to fill that void. Without question, people need to make responsible use of their bodies and take care in how they manage their relationships. But so long as there are fertile men and women who engage in sexual activity without the intention of having a child, there will be some unwanted pregnancies. Contraception can [in some cases dramatically] lower the chances of pregnancy, but there’s not one kind that is 100% effective.
I don't know that we're ever going back to 'sex only within the confines of a loving relationship'. That's the standard of most religions and men have always ignored it. Men have *always* reserved the right to tomcat around and when women gained the ability with the introduction of the Pill, and then abortion rights, suddenly women started acting an awful lot like men and for the last sixty years men have had to deal with what women always did: What's she doing with others? Do I know or not know? Can I do anything about it? No? Well, shit!
Hence the hostility (mostly by male politicians) to birth control and sex education, and now abortion rights. Keeping her knocked up will keep her 'where she belongs', and having a baby she doesn't want is the 'proper punishment' for a slutty little ho who shouldn't have been having sex in the first place. Men, of course, don't need to pay the price for being slutty little hos, and in some cultures it's a badge of honour to have multiple baby mamas.
The fact is, most men hostile to women's sexual rights don't give a damn about the baby, and in fact dehumanize it - it's not a potential human being, it's a punishment for a woman for having sex. As I've pointed out, men famously aren't always very good about supporting their sperm donations. Y'all ready, perhaps, for the return of 'shotgun weddings'? Are they, or were they, ever a good idea? I don't know.
I don't have a problem with a sexually freer society for all. I don't think we *have* to keep it to a 'committed, loving relationship' as long as all parties know what the deal is with the other and agree to it. I'm not sure either sex really has it it them, overall, to be faithful to one person throughout their entire lives, as we change and grow and sometimes grow apart. I don't think America was such a great place in the sexually repressed '50s lionized by conservative male politicians who want to return us there. That was when women had little say over their own sexual lives even within marriage. What joy, what bliss it must have been to be a Don Draper back then!
But can I get back to a return to promoting marriage and committed relationships for raising children? Yes, I can. Marriage, as Steven Pinker points out, has another side benefit too - it civilizes young men during their most dangerous, volatile stage - age 18-35. No wonder they tried to avoid it so much! I think, actually, that may be the main reason why I would support it. To bring young man back into line.
But since sexual control has *always* meant 'for women only', as exemplified by every male-created religion ever, I don't believe in mandating any sexual culture that men themselves can't adhere to. And since men haven't seen the need to control their dicks for thousands of years, women don't need to control their vaginas. If an unwanted pregnancy happens, the woman decides what's to be done about it. If a man doesn't want his sperm contribution aborted, he can use a condom, or better yet, for 100% efficacy, he can keep his dick in his pants.
"Keep his dick in his pants!" ROTLFMAO! I kill me, sometimes I really kill me!!!
There are many Catholics who do support women's right to abortion. There are also Catholic feminists.
For sure. I've known plenty. And evidence strongly suggests most of them support birth control too, because Mel Gibson's family aside, most Catholic families have only a small number of kids.
Though Catholics are allowed to use natural birth control which can be very effective. There are Catholic couples who use it.
This is a great point!