Home Truths - An old wifes tale.... | |
Just ask old women if they felt opressed and what their thoughts on feminism is: Quote:
Home Truths
By MELANIE PHILLIPS
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the young rebelled against the establishment order of their elders. The world was to be saved by a revolt against capitalism and patriarchy. One by one, the old elites ran up the white flag and, over time, the warriors of the counterculture became the new establishment. Now, 30 years on, it is ironically the conservatives who are trying to save the world from the damage being inflicted by the ruling order.
A memoir chronicles a social revolution -- and its discontents.
What makes this all the more piquant is that some of these conservatives were themselves once progressives. As she recounts in her splendid memoir, "An Old Wife's Tale" (HarperCollins, 234 pages, $24), Midge Decter made the journey from Roosevelt Democrat through neoconservative to all-out Republican. Born into a family that believed President Roosevelt walked on water, Ms. Decter became a writer and journalist who went to war with the left over communism, affirmative action and family values.
As she started to say the unsayable, she discovered that so-called liberals are tolerant of all views except those that differ from their own. With an ineffable combination of intellectual arrogance, moral blindness and social snobbery, these people found the country's upsurge of conservatism under President Reagan totally inexplicable (an outrage that was to be replicated some two decades later with the election of George W. Bush).
Such a closing of the liberal mind meant that Ms. Decter's reward for telling home truths was to be marginalized and excluded from fashionable literary society. Her early crime was to grasp that the women's liberation movement was a noxious ideology of victimhood that preached hatred of men.
As a sharp-eyed resident of the American postwar suburbs, Ms. Decter knew that the image of women trapped in suburban hell by patriarchal men -- the Betty Friedan dystopia that launched the women's liberation movement -- was a myth. She realized that women's real problem was not male oppression but a clash of two incompatible female ambitions: work and motherhood. Because women failed to square this circle, they blamed men instead.
The absence of self-awareness was startling: the radical feminist Gloria Steinem in a crotch-high suede skirt and knee-length suede boots telling men that women were no longer prepared to be their playthings. It would have been comical were it not for the group libel. Men were making wearisome daily journeys to city jobs they hated to provide their wives and children with material comforts, only to return to the suburbs to find these wives in "consciousness-raising" sessions propagating the doctrine that men were insensitive careerists, thugs and rapists.
As Ms. Decter observes, the deadly mix of the women's movement and the sexual revolution poisoned relations between the sexes, with women explosively complaining and men silently seething. The fallout has been immense and continuing harm.
Men have been harmed by the loss of their role as providers and protectors, creating escalating male rates of mental and physical illness, antisocial behavior and unhappiness. Meanwhile, women who have been taught that only a paid job can provide self-fulfillment often discover to their confusion and shame that once they become mothers they don't want to go back to work. Many mothers who do work find in dismay that they manage to fall short on both motherhood and the job.
Indeed, mothers are indicted by Ms. Decter for using "enlightened" attitudes to camouflage their indifference to their children's need for love and limits. The result is thousands of lost and needy children who are precociously sexualized and whose insecurity expresses itself in self-harming behavior, from drug-taking to navel-piercing to anorexia.
Meanwhile, young women are trapped by a paradox. They become promiscuous while declaring themselves the victims of male sexual predators. Then they find to their amazement they are left on the shelf as their biological clock ticks away and resentful men, vilified and bullied and deprived of a role in any courtship ritual, turn their backs on commitment.
Ms. Decter advances the intriguing theory that such women, while aping male sexual adventurism, are in fact desperate to find an escape route from this free-for-all. Realizing that they stand to lose out heavily from it, they are nevertheless terrified of being pilloried as Victorian prudes. So, she says, the feminists of the women's movement turned anti-man as a device to avoid sex without appearing reactionary. Their daughters have invented further ruses to get them off the sexual hook, such as date rape and the fear of AIDS.
Maybe, though, such women simply want to have their cake and eat it: to enjoy sexual freedom while disclaiming responsibility for their own conduct. For it's not clear that they do understand the harm their "emancipation" is undoubtedly doing to them. Like Wendy Shalit and others, Ms. Decter is right to note that women have torn up their trump card. They have forgotten that they need to induce men to stay with them. Sexual commitment, after all, is based on a bargain: Men stick around in return for sexual fidelity and home comforts. Why on earth should they commit themselves to women who veer dizzyingly between offering oral sex and screaming date rape?
As Ms. Decter understood from the start, far from being about the emancipation of women, modern feminism is about the emancipation from women. It is a revolt against motherhood and womanhood itself. What has now become clear is that women are the losers in this process -- and so is everyone else. It is only former liberal idealists like Ms. Decter who can understand the depth of the liberal betrayal on issues like this, and the harm that is its legacy.
Comment from the same side:
I told one of the pathologists at our lab that Gloria Steinem, the founder of MS Magazine was a Playboy Bunny. He is a young guy that doesn't remember the sixties and seventies. He told me this couldn't be true because there is too much of a disconnect between Steinam and being a sex object. I told him Steinam used sex with powerful, wealthy men to get what she wanted. He was aghast. He was ready to go back to work when I told him about the article in MS back in the early seventies that was telling the bullyboys of feminism that their best male friends were homosexual.
That's the trouble with being seventy. We've seen too much to tell the younger generation.
2 Posted on 08/28/2001 18:21:03 PDT by doxteve
| Error Quote:
Midge Decter tells 'an old wife's tale'
Posted: September 01, 2001
1:00 am Eastern
By Cynthia Grenier
© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com
Author, activist, editor, wife, mother, grandmother – Midge Decter in her latest book, "An Old Wife's Tale," (Regan Books/HarperCollins, $24.00) is taking a look at her seven decades in love and war. What stands out in this relatively brief (234 pages) book is not just how much her personal history meshes with the political and cultural trends of a half century of American life, but what a singular success she has made of her personal existence.
Think on the women's movement, the hectic '60s, the Vietnam drang und sturm, the recession, Watergate, the Cold War, the drug war, the fall of communism, AIDS. Think of all the young lives and families in this time span – who doesn't know at least one family marked – often disastrously, if not tragically – by these events?
Consider then, with some astonishment, that Ms. Decter is mother to four successful and stable children, and grandmother to 10 who appear to be coming along admirably well. Her marriage to Norman Podhoretz, long-time editor of Commentary, lasting well over 40 years, is for all practical purposes a model mating.
At this point I should say we saw quite a bit of the Podhoretz family during the '80s and early '90s, finding them congenial and compatible folk to work and socialize with. Very much to her credit, Ms. Decter, in examining her career – and quite a career it has been – does not go in for name-dropping, the sin of so many memoirs of this order.
She is more interested in ideas and social trends than in collecting any reflected glory from association with boldface personalities. She does make mention of having met Ronald Reagan when he was president three or four times. "And each time I met him, he always gave the impression of being cordially attentive. Naturally, he never recognized me – on every occasion I was introduced anew – and I doubt he recognized many of the rest of us either."
What should make Ms. Decter's book of particular interest to young working women and working mothers are her own experiences in this realm. As a young single mother herself (she and her first husband divorced shortly after the birth of their second daughter), she went to work as a secretary. She underwent all the angst of hiring illegal aliens (soon to become legal through her help) to look out for her daughters. With two more children added to her family after her second marriage, she alternated between working – moving up the ladder from editorial assistant to executive editor – and staying at home with the children. She favors the staying at home with the children mode until they're at least in high school, believing a woman can nearly always get back to work once the crucial childhood years are past.
What truly irks her most today is the damage wrought by the so-called women's liberation movement and the likes of Betty Friedan, NOW and Gloria Steinem over the last 20 years. She has sat on more than one panel with Ms. Steinem arguing those issues, and is struck by the hypocrisy, conscious or not, of Ms. Steinem standing there on a platform in "a crotch-high skirt and knee-length boots telling men that women were no longer willing to be men's playthings."
Ms. Decter sees the damage being done to men and young boys as a result of the women's movement as being the most nefarious heritage. She comments on boys today, such as the ones who partake in random killings seen on the evening news. "I do know something about those boys, and others like them, and it isn't that they watch television and don't have enough contact with adults (some, in fact, may have all too much). It's that the society in which they live, and in which we all live, will neither allow them on the one hand to grow up, nor on the other hand to be real children at only the beginning of their journey to some genuine kind of adulthood." She goes on to observe on how American kids are infantilized in lots of ways, "preeminent among them their almost never having to pay any genuine price for bad behavior, either at school, at home, or in the world at large."
This "Old Wife" has a wise and often witty tale to tell. She deserves a listening. We can all profit from it.
| Midge Decter tells 'an old wife's tale'
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