Message to All Kids: Don’t Be a Weirdo Like Those Loser Freaks on Tumblr

Posted on | August 14, 2016 | 2 Comments

 

Would it be cruel to call attention to “Jakob” the teenage girl who thinks she wants to be a boy? Probably, but “Jakob” is the author of a Tumblr post with more than 100,000 notes entitled, “Message to all parents,” which keeps getting expanded to include all kinds of “messages” that cumulatively amount to the message, “PARENTS ARE TOTALLY STUPID AND DON’T KNOW ANYTHING! WE ARE SPECIAL SNOWFLAKES!”

Just a few pearls of wisdom from “Jakob”:

– Grades are NOT everything. You can get plenty of well paying jobs now without having to go to college.
– Really strict parenting leads to sneaky kids. Trust me.
– Let them be who they want. They can’t change who they are, whether it is sexual orientation, gender identity or anything else. They need someone to support them.
– ^ Never say “you’re too young to know”
– ¼ teenagers deal with a mental illness of some sort (in the U.S). Please make sure they’re okay.
– You can’t MAKE them chose an educational field. . . .
– Self harm is more common than you think amongst teenagers. It’s also not always cutting (or on wrists). Be aware.
– Sex ed. doesn’t teach them anything.
– Tattoos and piercing aren’t “unprofessional” anymore . . .
– School is much harder now than it ever has been before.
– Not everyone on the internet is a predator
– It’s normal to have internet friends now

Hey, “Jakob,” I’ll bet your “Internet friends” are all really encouraging about your “gender identity,” aren’t they? And on the other hand, I’ll bet the actual real-life human beings around you — your parents, the kids at school, etc. — probably think you’re a creepy weirdo, right? Do you ever wonder why there is this disparity between the disapproval you get in real life and the way nearly everybody on Tumblr is “supportive”?

Let me explain: There are 286 million Internet users in the United States, and if only 0.1% of these users have some kind of “gender identity” issue, that’s 286,000 weirdos hanging out online. Because the Internet enables all these weirdos to gravitate to each other, they form a “hive mind” — a cult mentality — where everybody’s “supportive” of weirdness.

This is why, for example, it’s easy for young people to believe that tattoos and facial piercings “aren’t ‘unprofessional’ anymore.” Believe whatever you want to believe, but if you show up in the Human Resources office looking like the cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, you might belatedly realize you have been led astray by your “Internet friends.”

And no, school is not much harder now than it’s ever been before. Quite the opposite, in fact. Public education has been dumbed down to the point where high school is really just daycare for teenagers, and I rather doubt you’re being required to learn Latin declensions or recite Shakespearean soliloquies from memory. This kind of boo-hoo-hoo woe-is-me millennial teenager self-pity trip is annoying, “Jakob,” and I think I speak for every adult in America when I say we’re all sick and damned tired of it.

Oh, but look at how the “supportive” Tumblr weirdo community of millennial snowflakes chimes in to extend the “Message to all parents”:

Don’t take their phones/computers away from them, as that is severing a link to what could be the only people that understand and care about them . . .
-Don’t say, “You don’t know who you’re talking to,” about their internet friends
-Don’t yell at them ever, especially if they have a fear of loud noises
Don’t react to everything with anger, dissent is not the same as disrespect and being a parent doesn’t mean only your opinion matters . . .

Message for all Tumblr weirdos: Don’t tell me how to raise my kids.

If you’re such g–damned parenting experts, you can have some kids of your own and raise them however the hell you want, but don’t complain when they turn out to be pathetic whiny helpless losers just like you.

It’s very easy for kids to think their parents are unreasonable tyrants, but if you grow up and have kids of your own, you’ll discover that being a good parent requires constant vigilance and a fanatical determination to protect your kids from bad influences, e.g., weirdos on Tumblr.

When I was a teenager, back before Al Gore invented the Internet, teenage losers mainly smoked dope and listened to Pink Floyd albums. This was far more entertaining than a bunch of Tumblr weirdos blabbering about their “gender identity.” It never occurred to us — stoned out of our minds as we usually were — to lecture our parents about how they should raise us. Our main challenge back then was figuring out how to get money to buy more dope and trying not to get caught smoking it.

What teenage dopeheads lacked, circa 1976, was a worldwide interactive communication system whereby all of us could get together to “discourse” about whatever, and form cliques based on mutual interests. What we had was FM rock radio and so-called “underground” newspapers, as the weekly alternative tabloids were then called, but 96 Rock and Creative Loafing (the Atlanta manifestation of these phenomena) weren’t the kind of interactive DIY platforms that a Tumblr blog provides to young weirdos nowadays. Were all of us teenage dopeheads entirely normal back in the day? Of course not. Issues of sexual orientation and “gender identity” are not recent inventions. What has changed is that abnormal kids now can (and do) spend hours a day obsessing over their weirdness in online communities that reinforce their fixations and fetishes.

Home, home of the strange!
Where the weird Tumblrinas are gay!
Where seldom are heard
Heteronormative words,
And the discourse continues all day!

Kids complain that their parents don’t understand this, just like our parents didn’t understand why my buddies and me were down in the basement playing Pink Floyd albums and staring at blacklight posters. Except, of course, our parents did understand enough to know that our behavior was abnormal, so they correctly suspected we were on drugs.

Few things in life are more predictable than this: Bad things will happen when teenagers get together without adult supervision. Parents are entirely correct to reject the assertion that it is now “normal” for kids to have “Internet friends,” for reasons that should be obvious, but which I apparently must explain for the benefit of the stupid:

Why don’t you and your “Internet friend” have any real-life friends?

How many kids are at your high school? Isn’t there even one kid at your school who shares your interests? Isn’t it usually the case that it is the misfit/outcast/weirdo kids who seek out “Internet friends”? Isn’t it also the case that the influence of these “Internet friends” generally tends to reinforce whatever personal problems led to the kid being a misfit/outcast/weirdo in the first place?

Parents are personally invested in their children’s well-being and future happiness, and one of the ways to safeguard our children is to monitor their friendships. “Stop hanging around that hoodlum,” my parents would say, and my hoodlum buddy’s parents said the same to him about me. With the benefit of four decades of hindsight, our parents were correct: We were both up to no good, which was the basis of our friendship.

The “Internet friends” phenomenon not only serves to enable the kind of unsupervised adolescent mischief that so often leads kids into serious trouble, but it also inhibits their development of the social skills and attitudes necessary to real-life happiness. As someone who has been blogging for more than eight years, trust me when I say that staring into a laptop screen all day has produced a noticeable degradation of my own social skills. I am a natural extrovert, but the effects of what might be called Online Isolation Syndrome are apparent to me, and I strongly suspect that spending too much time on the Internet is a significant factor in the psychological disturbances of today’s young weirdos, most of whom are introverts, and thus predisposed to such problems.

Well, I could lecture on this subject all week, but if I could say one thing to teen Tumblrinas, it would be this: STEP AWAY FROM THE ABYSS!

You may not yet be doomed to become a weirdo loser. It may still be possible, if you are strong-minded enough to assess your situation objectively, to re-evaluate your options and change course before disaster overtakes you, as it surely will if you keep going the way you are.

Consider this strange possibility: Maybe your parents are right.

Now that I’m a gray-bearded grandfather, I see the basic wisdom of my own parents’ intolerance of my juvenile rebellion. Sure, at the time, I thought my parents were stupid because they didn’t understand what I was going through. Life for a teenager in the 1970s wasn’t what life was like when they were teenagers in Depression-era rural Alabama. Yet having escaped the pervasive hardship of their youth, my parents knew a thing or two about the kind of habits and attitudes necessary to success in life, and when I started going off that path as a teenager, they did everything in their power to steer me back toward the way of success.

Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of “normal” as an achievement, as I have said more than once. Do any of these young weirdos on Tumblr have the strength of mind to think clearly about this?

Is it really “hate” — transphobia or whatever — for parents to become alarmed by their kids’ “gender-non-conforming” (GNC) behavior? Are parents wrong in believing that when their child starts acting out in certain ways (“Jakob” has a pierced lip, shows a preference for black clothing and dark music and blogs a lot about depression and suicide) this weirdness may reflect the influence of “Internet friends”?

 

What occurs to me, ignorant old fogey that I am, is that the Internet has enabled young people to obtain a precocious knowledge of concepts they are not psychologically prepared to deal with in a rational way. Thanks to Al Gore and Judith Butler — the  socially construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — we have kids in the throes of adolescent turmoil trying to make sense of themselves in a world of seemingly infinite possibility. No longer is the troubled teenager just a “discipline problem” or a moody misfit. Instead, the young weirdo can log onto the Internet and discover all kinds of categories and labels that seem to explain their problems, and also connect with other young weirdos who share their peculiar obsessions. The one option that the Tumblr feminist community seems to agree must be excluded from consideration is that any of these disturbed kids could ever consciously choose to be normal. As I wrote in discussing the “queer theory” pioneer Eve Sedgwick:

Adjusting society to enable misfits to feel “accepted” — letting little Johnny wear a hairbow and a lacy skirt to school and teaching the other kids that this is perfectly normal — is one of the logical consequences of feminist theory that seeks to “problematize the very notion of sex as a biological given.” Rather than trying to teach little Johnny how to fit in with the other boys, Sedgwick’s “queer theory” rejects as invalid the categorization of children as boys and girls, and condemns as “homophobia” any expectation (by parents, especially) that children should grow up to be normal.

There is a logical non sequitur in “queer theory,” namely the certainty that anyone who becomes aware that “gender is performative,” as they say, must reject normal behavioral patterns as a form of oppression. This unsubstantiated belief assumes that there is no such thing as authentic masculinity or femininity, that “gender” is somehow an emulation of original male/female models that never actually existed in real life. Yet the “monkey see, monkey do” process of imitating behavioral models is not always unconscious. Consider, for example, how Elvis Presley assembled his famous style by cobbling together a set of idiosyncratic influences: His flashy wardrobe was an imitation of Beale Street’s pimps and gamblers, his singing style reflecting gospel, country, blues and pop influences, and his mannerisms as an actor learned by watching young Marlon Brando. He became one of the most iconic personalities of the 20th century, and yet it can be argued that there was almost nothing about Elvis Presley that was truly original. He nevertheless influenced an entire generation (“Before Elvis, there was nothing,” John Lennon once said) and it could be argued that this former truck driver from Memphis, with his unique combination of secondhand styles, has profoundly shaped Western culture ever since he burst into public view in the late 1950s.

Why has it apparently become so difficult in the 21st century for young people to find ways to express their individuality without escaping the “gender binary” and the “heterosexual matrix”? Why are so many teenagers being sucked into the vortex of the transgender cult?

Radical feminists who are by no means advocates of heteronormative patriarchy have been raising the alarm about this phenomenon, and I wish there could be some common forum where the feminist critics of transgenderism might have an opportunity to hear thoughtful conservative views on this subject. What I perceive, and I think many conservatives share this perspective, is that young people are experiencing a Crisis of Meaning. Existential despair is a common reaction to the loss of religious faith and the collapse of social values most clearly exemplified in the breakdown of the traditional family. Feminist critics have noted the quasi-religious fanaticism of the transgender cult, where skeptics are condemned as heretics and only True Believers are allowed to speak. Indeed, there is something of a tent-revival mentality manifested by the enthusiastic evangelists of transgenderism, who expect all their followers to applaud and sing hallelujah for the promise of secular salvation via hormones and surgery.

Yes, the world HAS gone crazy. https://t.co/fk1Twu59Ys via @Tumblrisms pic.twitter.com/5XiL0FbZjE

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) July 4, 2016

Increase in UK's taxpayer-funded sex-change "treatment" for children under age 11. https://t.co/XXCIps2ms8 pic.twitter.com/XTG2QmGzn4

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) July 4, 2016

Parents who see their kids sliding toward this abyss may not realize what is happening until the teenager has already become emotionally invested in the idea of “transition.” In some cases, an almost instantaneous conversion occurs. A seemingly well-adjusted kid becomes curious, starts browsing through online forums and, in a matter of weeks, abruptly self-diagnoses as being “trapped in the wrong body.” If you have talked to parents of these kids, as I have, it is hard to resist the conclusion that there is something quite literally satanic going on here.

Let any intelligent adult think back over the developments of the past 15 or 20 years, and then imagine where our society might be in 2030 or 2040, if nothing is done to alter the current cultural trajectory. There is such a thing as momentum in processes of social change, and I do not wish to engage in any specific prophecies as to what that future might bring, but if you are not concerned about this, why not? It would be very easy for me to concern myself only with my own children, who seem to be doing just fine, but day after day I see more examples of young people being dragged into strange manifestations of this postmodern sexual madness — “Herpes is awesome!” — and realize our society is moving in a clear direction with accelerating speed. We are traveling rapidly down a road proverbially paved with good intentions, and trying to fireproof our children is the best any parent can hope to do.

 

RELATED:

• Aug. 10: Feminists Plan to Sue U.S. Education Department Over Title IX ‘Gender’ Policy
• July 25: A Simple Question: Is This True?
• May 26: NY Times Transgender Columnist Was Accused by Wife of Rape and Abuse
• May 21: ‘Feminist Motherhood’ and the ‘Transgender Kindergartner’
• April 16: The Queering of Feminism and the Silencing of Heterosexual Masculinity
• March 13: A Theory of Sex (and Feminism)

 

“Ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5) was the false promise of Satan’s original lie. https://t.co/t77KB9H1NI pic.twitter.com/xkCzVSBGDR

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) July 4, 2016

Comments