Make 2007 “Year of the Father”
Friday, December 29th, 2006Today should be a day of celebration for anti-father feminists and policymakers. The New York Times published an article, “Middle School Girls Gone Wild” (reprinted below), proving once again that girls and women in this country are out of control. This trend of MissBehaving is occurring at younger and younger ages, and, in my opinion, the lack of paternal influence — either from absence or spineless silence — is the main culprit.
In this NYT article, we learn about girls in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades dancing like sluts — in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks, and glittery eyes. They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps — while their parents watch and cheer. Unbelievable!
Rosanna Hertz, women’s studies professor at Wellesley College (alma mater of Hillary Clinton), wrote Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family. Welcome, Professor Hertz, to the “new American family.” Ain’t it great?
Your world stinks, Dr. Hertz. You are espousing garbage that helps destroy my society. Alas, too many men — fathers, TV producers, lawmakers, mayors, governors, judges, district attorneys, chiefs of police, and presidents — remain silent while you and your misguided colleagues, under the guise of “progressive” academia, dismiss and undermine men.
When the New York Times, ordinarily pro-female, calls attention to MissBehaving, the problem is huge. To any father who is both actively present in his daughter’s life and cheering while she denigrates herself, I say, Hang your head in shame, for you have allowed women to dominate your thoughts and your life. You, sir, are part of the problem. You, sir, need a new pair of balls.
Let’s make 2007 the “Year of the Father.” I am calling on all men in all Western cultures to stand up, to become men once again, to reclaim your role in society. By this proclamation, I am not promoting the male domination of women; I am exhorting you to fight against the oppressive tide of misandry.
A society should measure itself by the way its children behave. Our society’s females, from Britney Spears to the 12-year-old girls imitating Britney Spears, are MissBehaving. Why? They never hear the word “no” — not from their fathers, not from their boyfriends, not from their husbands, and not from their district attorneys. In the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
NoNonsense Bottom Line
If you believe that our overwhelmingly unbalanced, man-is-irrelevant society is either unfixable or fixable only by women, you are wrong. That attitude got us to where we are now, a bad place. It’s time for a change. A big change. And, 2007 is the year to make that change. It may be our last chance. So, what can you do?
Every time you see men treated badly on a TV sitcom, complain to the show’s producers with calls and e-mails. Every time you see a brewery negatively portray men in its TV commercials, call and write to the brewery in protest. Every time you see a newspaper or magazine article define domestic violence as men mistreating women, write to the editor to protest. Every time your state legislature proposes another bill to limit men’s and fathers’ rights, bombard the bill’s author(s) with calls, faxes, and e-mails. Every time a woman insists that you pay for her meals and vacations, refuse to do it.
Whatever you do, do NOT sit there doing nothing except complaining to yourselves and your friends. Inaction always leads to total defeat, an emasculating and expensive end. What will you do?
About the Author
Marc H. Rudov is an internationally recognized author of 30+ articles and the books Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze, or Jumper CablesTM (ISBN 9780974501727), and The Man,s No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet EarthTM (ISBN 0974501719).
Rudov’s books, articles, blog, and podcasts are available at http://www.TheNoNonsenseMan.com/.
Copyright 2006 by Marc H. Rudov. All rights reserved.
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December 29, 2006
Editorial Observer
Middle School Girls Gone Wild
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
It’s hard to write this without sounding like a prig. But it’s just as hard to erase the images that planted the idea for this essay, so here goes. The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.
They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. …Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. It was something different. Something younger. Something that didn’t make the girls look so … one-dimensional.
It would be easy to chalk it up to adolescent rebellion, an ancient and necessary phenomenon, except these girls were barely adolescents and they had nothing to rebel against. This was an official function at a public school, a milieu that in another time or universe might have seen children singing folk ballads, say, or reciting the Gettysburg Address.
It is news to no one, not even me, that eroticism in popular culture is a 24-hour, all-you-can-eat buffet, and that many children in their early teens are filling up. The latest debate centers on whether simulated intercourse is an appropriate dance style for the high school gym.
What surprised me, though, was how completely parents of even younger girls seem to have gotten in step with society’s march toward eroticized adolescence — either willingly or through abject surrender. And if parents give up, what can a school do? A teacher at the middle school later told me she had stopped chaperoning dances because she was put off by the boy-girl pelvic thrusting and had no way to stop it — the children wouldn’t listen to her and she had no authority to send anyone home. She guessed that if the school had tried to ban the sexy talent-show routines, parents would have been the first to complain, having shelled out for costumes and private dance lessons for their Little Miss Sunshines.
I’m sure that many parents see these routines as healthy fun, an exercise in self-esteem harmlessly heightened by glitter makeup and teeny skirts. Our girls are bratz, not slutz, they would argue, comfortable in the existence of a distinction.
But my parental brain rebels. Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.
There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem. It’s as if there were now Three Ages of Woman: first Mary-Kate, then Britney, then Courtney. Boys don’t seem to have such constricted horizons. They wouldn’t stand for it — much less waggle their butts and roll around for applause on the floor of a school auditorium.