‘My Hypothetical Daughter’

Posted on | September 29, 2014 | 133 Comments

Emily Heist Moss (@EmilyHeistMoss) is the type of young feminist who inspires readers to ask, “Stacy, how do you find these idiots?”

The short answer is that feminists are herd animals, who aggregate around certain online watering holes, so that wherever you find one zany Gender Studies type, there are sure to be many more. Thus while I was reading an article by Chelsea Bock, I noticed in the sidebar an article by Emily Heist Moss with this eye-grabbing headline:

To The Men Who Try To Have Condom-Free Sex

If crazy were silver, Emily Heist Moss would be the Comstock Lode, and the feminist blog Role/Reboot would be a Nevada mountain, but we’ll have to take these metaphors one at a time, beginning with Ms. Moss’s complaints about the hook-up lifestyle:

You know that thing when you’re about to have sex with someone and you’re feeling all warm and fuzzy and fun things are happening and you anticipate more fun things are coming and you’re in this groove and then, instead of the telltale ripping of a condom wrapper, or the brief pause when he sits back on his heels to assess and discuss the protection situation, he tries to slip it in like you won’t even notice?
And you, upon realizing what the moron down between your legs is doing — or rather, neglecting to do — you hear in your brain that screeeeeeeech like tires slamming to a halt because instead of warm and fuzzy you feel confused and indignant. You feel overlooked, irrelevant to this bodily conversation you were excited to get going just seconds before. You feel, suddenly, like just a hole, and not a person with opinions on the subject of contraception, with aspirations for a baby- and disease-free future, with a 50% stake in what’s about to go down.
Do you know that feeling?
If you have been so lucky as to avoid it, pat yourself on the back, cross your fingers, and continue whatever rain dance you’ve been performing that keeps condoms falling from the sky and conscientious partners in your bed. Because the rest of us? Man, we are sitting out here in the cold and it sucks. . . .
When I polled the Internet about their experiences, I got bombarded with stories of the bareback-pressurers, “Don’t you trust me, baby?” whisperers, and the worst offenders, slip-it-off-mid-coitus-no-condom-ninjas. The issue is so widespread that it seems obvious it’s not a question of a few bad apples, but rather a persistent misunderstanding of the rules of engagement. . . .

You can read the whole thing. I’ve quoted Ms. Moss at such length to avoid any accusation that she is being quoted out of context. This is how it is with feminists: If you try to briefly summarize their bizarre beliefs, you will be accused of distorting their meaning; on the other hand, if you quote them at length — unfair! You’re infringing their copyright on lunatic gibberish. But I digress . . .

What Ms. Moss seems to be saying is that when she picks up a random stranger for an exercise in meaningless hedonism, she is shocked — shocked, I tell you! — that these semi-anonymous creeps do not always heed her “rules of engagement.” But what do “rules” mean between two amoral fornicators? On what authority does Ms. Moss, an avowed atheist, base the rules for her loveless couplings?

Well, consent, you see. Starting in the 1960s, a coalition of bohemian perverts, porn merchants and civil libertarians fought a grand crusade to vanquish any vestige of morality from our laws governing sexual behavior, replacing it with the “consenting adults” standard. It was no longer sufficient, said these judicial and legislative modernizers, to say that something was wrong and therefore should also be illegal. According to the new regime, concepts like “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “evil,” “vice” and “virtue” had no useful meaning.

You could do absolutely anything, sex-wise, so long as the participants were “consenting adults.” Now all arguments about sex boil down to disputes about two things: Who is an “adult” and what does “consent” mean? I’m pretty sure that if the forces of Progress and Equality continue in the direction they’ve been going recently — because the logic of their argument is consistent — those who refuse to consent will be accused of a hate crime, the legal age of consent will be abolished, and deviants will then organize to demand the “right” to have sex with unborn fetuses. (“Pre-natal sexuality”? Who are we to judge?)

Anyone who thinks we have reached rock bottom on our long slide down the slippery slope simply hasn’t been paying attention. A commission in Germany recently recommended the legalization of incest, a “reform” too late to benefit the multigenerational incestuous clan in Australia where uncle/brothers were habitually sodomizing their sister/nieces before the police finally raided the place. Meanwhile, in England, gangs of Pakistani pimps were raping and prostituting working-class girls as young as 11 while local Labour Party officials looked the other way.

Amid this increasingly frenetic worldwide carnival of sordid sexual atrocities that the advocates of Progress and Equality have let loose upon humanity, you see, Emily Heist Moss is complaining that some of her “friends with benefits” are trying to sneak a bit of unprotected friction into their casual couplings. This is a Major Issue, OK? And if you disagree about the relative importance of her problems, you’re just a hater.

The venue in which Ms. Moss made this complaint deserves critical scrutiny. Here’s how Role/Reboot began a few years ago:

In 2009, Role Reboot co-founder Fran Rodgers was asked to teach a course on Women’s Movements Past and Future at Tufts University. Fran wanted to make sure that her course was relevant to a younger generation, and enlisted Morra Aarons-Mele as her partner in developing the course. . . .
As they prepared the college course, however, Fran and Morra realized that with every new reading they were moved to act, and began to feel a sense of awakening and responsibility to help create change among men and women. . . .
Fran asked her daughter Nicole to help. . . .
Nicole wanted to bring a feminist sensibility to modern debates without relying too heavily on second-wave authors and discussions. Eventually, the three women determined that what they wanted was an online space for thought leadership about how gender roles are changing . . .

This is from Role/Reboot’s mission statement:

We’re a group defined mostly by what we are not. We’re not the Cleavers or Ozzie and Harriet (nor do we want to be). We don’t aspire to the status quo. We’re forward thinking, creative, and counter-cultural. We’re concerned about deeply embedded “traditional” roles and expectations that often dictate how we structure our lives. We’re creating our own rules. We’re naturally a big-tent movement for anyone trying to live a life free from unhelpful “shoulds.”
While others rally for “New Normal,” we will continue to champion the ideal of “No Normal.”

They aspire to a world in which there are no norms. Who is Role/Reboot co-founder Fran Rodgers? A bit of investigation discovers that Mrs. Rodgers’ life has followed a familiar “gender equality” script: Get an elite education and marry an enterpreneurial Alpha Male so that the heteronormative patriarchy can then fund its own deconstruction (cf., Mike Huffington and Arianna, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, etc.). Role/Reboot is all about postmodern narratives that challenge the discourse of the sex/gender binary, as Judith Butler might say. The site might as well be called “Slouching Toward Androgyny.”

One of the obvious problems with this subversion of gender norms — or, rather, a problem that should be obvious to anyone who hasn’t been drinking the radical egalitarian Kool-Aid — is that masculinity and femininity work, and androgyny fails, when it comes to the crucial social task of reproducing the species. Which is to say that, in general, when viewing cultures in terms of population demographics and over the course of time, traditional sex roles are associated with higher fertility, whereas androgyny is typical of societies that have become decadent and entered demographic decline. This can be demonstrated both historically and in comparing contemporary population groups.

Ceteris paribus, populations typified by what feminists call “male supremacy” (what anthropologists call “normal human behavior”) exhibit reproductive vigor while androgyny (or what feminists call “gender equality”) is typical of population groups with below-replacement fertility levels. Feminists simply have not recognized how their advocacy of the Contraceptive Culture must ultimately doom their movement to failure and, insofar as our nation embraces feminism, so also is our nation doomed. This has been explained by numerous authors. You can read Mark Steyn’s America Alone or Jonathan Last’s What to Expect When No One’s Expecting for timely discussion of these issues. Yet it’s really just common sense, and you don’t need a Ph.D. to understand why the birth rate in Yemen is higher than the birth rate in Denmark, why Orthodox Jews have large families and secular Jews do not, or why Oklahoma Baptists have more babies than Massachusetts liberals. Culture influences demographics and vice-versa, but while decadent intellectuals may dominate elite culture, demographics is a matter of simple math, and no amount of complex academic theory can change a basic fact of nature: The future belongs to the fertile.

What anyone could discern from facts, logic, tradition, common sense and elementary arithmetic, however, eludes the minds of those who have been indoctrinated into the beliefs of the intelligentsia. Thus we return to another Emily Heist Moss column:

On Choosing My Own Last Name
At 18, I added my mother’s last name to my signature. . . .
When I first changed my name, people thought it was a joke, that “Heist” was some sort of badass moniker, like “Danger,” that I gave myself to look cool on the Internet. . . .
My mother’s last name is Heist and she, like many in her cohort of second-wavers, kept it when she got married, even in the face of wedding day second-guessing from my traditionally-minded grandmother. . . .
When I was in college, probably with the assistance of a heavy load of consciousness-raising gender studies classes, I realized that my signature felt incomplete. Particularly because my parents were divorced, I wanted the name I put on things I was proud of to reflect both sides of my history. . . .
But what if you get married?! Oh how the naysayers love the What Ifs. What if you marry a hyphenated dude?! You can’t hyphenate forever! You wouldn’t do that to your kids! That’s just cruel! 
Is it? Maybe, if you think burdening children with complicated answers to simple questions is cruel. But is it any crueler than explaining to my hypothetical daughter that Daddy’s last name was more important than Mommy’s because he’s a man? Is it crueler than telling her that someday, unlike her brother’s, her identity will probably be considered dismissable, negotiable, non-essential? Is it really any crazier than what we do now? Disappearing one parent’s past into the other parent’s because… chromosomes? Because…tradition? Because…convenience? . . .
But what will I call my children?! Who knows . . . I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Uh, you mean if you get to it, don’t you, Ms. Moss?

There is tremendous irony in her hypotheticals, you see. Is hooking up with random dudes likely to lead to marriage for Ms. Moss? If she can’t even convince them to put latex on their weenies, how does she expect to persuade one to put a ring on her finger? Given how adamant she is about contraception, what do you think the odds are against her ever having that “hypothetical daughter”?

My guess is that both her imagined marriage and imagined children will remain hypotheticals. All those “consciousness-raising gender studies classes” tend to foster anti-male attitudes that are incompatible with marriage. A casual hook-up is one thing, but how many guys want to marry such a ranting fanatic? Even if there were some masochistic male willing to marry her, however, does anyone think Ms. Moss’s feminist consciousness is compatible with motherhood? Abortion is the most cherished sacrament of feminism; it’s impossible to imagine that monomaniacal advocates of baby-killing actually harbor any shred of natural maternal instinct. Yet such is the logic of feminism that we are expected to take seriously what Ms. Moss says about hypothetical marriage and hypothetical child-rearing, and anyone who expresses skepticism as to her authority in these matters . . .

Well, you’re just a hater.

Defining disagreement as hate, so that anyone who does not share their worldview is morally inferior, feminists create the kind of echo-chamber feedback loop we see in totalitarian states or inside paranoid apocalyptic doomsday cults. The possibility that the dictator’s ideology is wrong, or that the cult leader is not divinely inspired — these alternatives must be rejected by the True Believer, and only the voices of True Believers can be heard inside the echo chamber. People who become part of these types of movements typically don’t recognize the nature of the systemic bias built into the information structure that shelters movement members from facts or logic that contradicts the movement’s ideology. Over and over again, intelligent and well-meaning people who join such movements become disillusioned when they encounter the Thought Police who enforce rhetorical conformity. Eventually, therefore, as the honest followers become disgusted and walk away, the movement is more and more composed of followers who are too stupid to understand what’s wrong with their belief system, and who do not recognize that the movement’s leaders are selfish, dishonest or just plain crazy.

Currently reading a biography of Valerie Solanas, the psychotic sexual nihilist whose ideas all other feminists have plagiarized. #feminism

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) September 28, 2014

Judith Butler's 'Gender Trouble' is to postmodern #feminism what 'Mein Kampf' was to the Third Reich.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) September 28, 2014

The postmodern feminist views 'gender' as the Golgotha of womanhood; her vagina is the cross upon which she is martyred by patriarchy.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) September 28, 2014

Feminism is like Jonestown or North Korea, but the totalitarian cult vibe inside the movement is never apparent to True Believers like Emily Heist Moss. They continue parroting the belief system, continue upholding the truth of their ideology, and reject all negative feedback as “hate.” Nothing else can explain why Ms. Moss is willing to humiliate herself by publishing lunacy like this:

What Sex Counts As ‘Real’ Sex?
. . . Penis-in-vagina sex is not on the menu for same-sex couples for obvious reasons. By putting a premium on this one particular sex act as the only one that “counts,” we are implicitly suggesting that the other ones count less. Think about your LGBTQ friends; is your sex more important, more special, more “real,” than their sex?
If it is true for same-sex couples that sex can still occur without a penis penetrating a vagina (and it can, obviously, just ask them), what’s so different about straight couples? Just because you have the specific parts capable of penis-in-vagina doesn’t mean that you must use them in that specific way. If doing the things your gay friends would call “having sex” with your partner gets you going, why wouldn’t you call that “having sex” too?

Do you see what I mean? Ms. Moss insists that the way we talk about sex and think about sex must be changed, lest our “LGBTQ friends” get the impression that we believe there is something “important” or “special” about “a penis penetrating a vagina.”

When you put this weird “LGBTQ” sympathy in the context of her increasing antipathy toward males — those selfish jerks who refuse to wear condoms when their (unimportant) penises are penetrating Ms. Moss’s (non-special) vagina — perhaps you see why I say the odds are that her “hypothetical daughter” will remain strictly hypothetical.

Yes, it’s Patriotic Androgyny for the Equality Warrior!

 

 

 

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