Turning Boys against Feminism

Thrice divorced single mother of seven Jody Allard shows us how not to raise teenage boys. In the Washington Post, no less.

Were you to ask yourself what topics a teenage boy would not want to discuss with his mother, sex would certainly be on the list. And teenage boys do not want to have to talk about their mother's view of rape while digging into the mashed potatoes. The worst, if such can be quantified, would be to talk about rape with a mother who has already shared with them her own experience of having been raped. 

Time to crawl under the carpet.

Can you get more appalling? Can you set a worse example? Several months back I posted about a study showing that successful people know what not to discuss in polite company. Successful people value harmonious interactions; they know how to get along with people. They know better than to discuss intimate matters or politics or ideology at the dinner table.

But, Jody Allard is a fanatic. She is a feminist zealot. She is on a crusade against rape culture. And she is afraid that her teenage boys, age 16 and 18 will turn out to be rapists. Or that they will condone rape. Or that they will laugh at sexist jokes. Or that they will slut shame young women of loose morals.

So she harasses them. She harangues them. She ruins the harmony of a family dinner by lecturing and browbeating them about her current obsession: toxic masculinity and rape culture. What kind of mother considers her own children to be poisonous?

But, isn't her insistence on harassing her children over dinner a toxic form of child abuse? Won't these boys grow up with a decidedly negative view of women? 

It is likely that they will see women as irredeemably hostile toward men, as ideological fanatics who have no sense of other people. And they will learn that it is impossible to have a serious and intelligent conversation with a female being. With any luck they will also learn to keep a considerable distance from feminists. If they learn anything they will learn not to marry a feminist.

To their credit these boys do not tune their mother out completely. With time I suspect that they will. With time they might even react to her unremitting hostility by retaliating… if not against them, against women that they meet.

For now, they attempt to engage the argument. It’s the price of dinner with their witch of a mother:

“Oh boy,” my son said, rolling his eyes. “Not rape culture again.”

We were sitting around the dinner table talking about the news. As soon as I mentioned the Stanford sexual assault case, my sons looked at each other. They knew what was coming. They’ve been listening to me talk about consent, misogyny and rape culture since they were tweens. They listened to me then, but they are 16 and 18 now and they roll their eyes and argue when I talk to them about sexism and misogyny.

“There’s no such thing as rape culture,” my other son said. “You say everything is about rape culture or sexism.”

I never imagined I would raise boys who would become men like these. Men who deny rape culture, or who turn a blind eye to sexism. Men who tell me I’m being too sensitive or that I don’t understand what teenage boys are like. “You don’t speak out about this stuff, mom,” they tell me with a sigh. “It’s just not what teenagers do.”

Allard is guilt tripping her sons. She is trying to make them feel guilty for slut shaming young women. She is not smart enough herself to know that most slut shaming is done by women against other women. Slut shaming occurs when girls and women discover that another woman has given away her favors too cheaply. They look seriously askance at such behaviors.

She says that she wants them to be honorable young men, but her warped mind sees honor only in leftist political activism. 

Allard is not smart enough to know-- point I have often had occasion to mention-- that the rape capital of the Western world is Sweden and that Sweden is not only a Feminist Paradise, run by feminists, but that Swedish boys in Swedish schools are forced to pee sitting down. Peeing standing up might be more manly, but it is also more sexist.

Of course, Allard’s boys defend themselves against their mother’s harassment. She describes their reaction:

When it comes to speaking out against rape culture and questioning their own ideas and behavior, they become angry and defensive. Not all men, they remind me, and my guts wrench as my own sons mimic the vitriol of a thousand online trolls.

Fascinating to see that Allard-- because of some bad experiences with men, not only a man who raped her but a husband who cheated on her with a frizzy-haired pock-marked vixen-- has decided that all men are bad. That all men suffer from toxic masculinity. That all men are potential rapists. Especially white men. Even her sons. Allard does not know or does not care that most of the rapes in this world are not committed by white men. In Sweden, none of the rapes are committed by white men.

In truth, Allard does not much care about the rapes in Sweden or Germany or in other parts of Europe where refugees have run wild. She is mounting a crusade because a Stanford student named Brock Turner was convicted of rape and did not get a long enough sentence.

So, Allard stereotypes all white men. But, if someone were to stereotype members of a minority group, she would be at the barricades shouting insults and invective, accusing him of being the worst kind of bigot. You see, to the mind of a fanatic, there are no good white men. There are no men who want to protect women. Men are all bad.

The way it looks now, if she has any say in it, her boys will be just as bad as the rest. Why does she think that they will be happy to read about her harangues in the newspaper? And, what does she think this story will do to their cred in high school? To save face, her boys will have to denounce and repudiate their mother and her zany ideas.

In truth, Allard might succeed in beating her boys into submission and making them into metrosexuals. It is just as likely that she will show such a negative view of women that they will have difficulty developing relationships with women. Certainly, they will never know what it is like to sit down for dinner with a woman and to have a good conversation.

She is certainly making feminists look bad... to a generation of teenage boys.