Feminism Disempowers Mothers

Last week Jennifer Moses wrote a poignant op-ed about the anguish she was feeling as she watched her dress like a thirteen year old tramp. I had my say in this post.

This week Kathryn Jean Lopez weighs in on the same topic, and her article is worth a read. Link here.

Lopez interviewed pediatrician Dr. Meg Meeker. According to Dr. Meeker, mothers who experimented with sex should understand that things are quite different for their daughters.

According to Dr. Meeker, sexually transmitted infections are far more prevalent today than they were when she and Jennifer Moses were growing up.

In Dr. Meeker’s words: “In 1979, when I graduated from college, there were two sexually transmitted infections snaking their way through the sexually ‘open’ teens and adults who chose to explore their sexuality through freer sexual expression. Herpes 2 broke upon the scene in a fierce way, increasing 500 percent from 1980 to 1990. By the time 2000 rolled around, there were over 30 STIs in the then–15 million Americans each year who contracted a new STD. Now, in 2011, the CDC reports that 20 million Americans each year contract a new STI, and almost 50 percent are young people (teens and college students). This is completely unacceptable.”

This aspect of the story will probably be denounced as hysterical and alarmist, but it is also a reality for young girls today.

Those media outlets that do not denounce the story will probably just ignore it. After all, it undermines the party line that insists that adolescents should be more sexually active.

Keep in mind, our enlightened class believes, as an article of dogma, that sexual restraint is sexual repression and that sexual repression will make you neurotic. It also holds that free and open sexual expression makes you mentally healthy, regardless of age or gender.

As I was reading Lopez I had three additional thoughts.

First, the women who grew up being told that they should never allow themselves to be treated as sexual objects are allowing its teenage daughters to dress up as though they are aspiring sexual objects.

Second, for all the talk about how feminism was going to empower women, feminist mothers are incapable of exercising authority over their own children. They have been disempowered by their ideology.

Third, Lopez asks where the fathers are. Why are they so conspicuously absent from the discussions that Jennifer Moses has with other mothers?

As we all know, feminism has relegated fathers to insignificance. In its effort to undermine paternal authority-- and thus to gain more power over the minds of women-- feminism has persuaded two generations of women that men must be ignored.

The illogic is flagrant. The feminist view says that men want to turn women into sexual objects. It‘s an article of feminist faith. Thus, male influence needs to be eliminated if women are to escape being sexual objects.

And yet, the most elementary survey of paternal opinion would have immediately given the lie to this dogma.

How many fathers do you know who would ever, if they were given a say, allow their daughters to slut it up at age thirteen?