Can Queer Feminist Emma Lindsay Possibly Avoid a Crazy Cat Lady Future?

Posted on | August 1, 2017 | 1 Comment

“I’m a queer white woman, and I think I hold considerable privilege over many straight white men in the USA, primarily because of the benefit of my education. . . . People who are not educated well enough, and who lack the verbals signals of being well educated, are un-hirable right now.”
— Emma Lindsay, Nov. 13, 2016

Emma Lindsay is a 32-year-old queer feminist who lives in San Francisco, where everybody is gay except for desperate heterosexual men. How desperate are they? Desperate enough to date Emma Lindsay.

Last year, Emma Lindsay’s blogging about sex — sex! sex! sex! — was the subject of an article I wrote called “Whatever Happened to Normal?”

When did every woman on the planet suddenly decide that she needs to relate her every sexual experience — and every thought she’s ever had about sex — for the entire Internet to read? Who would want to date someone like that, knowing that your every interaction is likely to be conveyed in detail (and critically analyzed) for the enjoyment of everybody with a Wifi hookup?

Like all queer feminists, Emma Lindsay is crazy. She dated men until she was in her mid-20s, then switched to dating women before she apparently noticed that her relationships with women were going the same place that her relationships with men had gone — nowhere.

One of her therapists, “who specialized in LGBTQ issues” asked her if she “was really bisexual, or just attached to the identity of bisexual.” She tried identifying as straight for a while, but that made her “miserable,” and later on she decided to “briefly identify as a lesbian, and assumed that my prior attractions to men had been due to the heteronormative brainwashing of society.” Hey, did I mention that Emma Lindsay is a queer feminist? And that “queer feminist” is a synonym for crazy?

Why Straight White Women Perpetuate the Patriarchy

That’s the headline on an article Emma Lindsay wrote last fall, denouncing “a highly insidious, type of patriarchy as women are denied access to success on their own and are reliant on their husbands.” Oh, what a terrible thing it is for wives to rely on their husbands, because patriarchy denies women “access to success on their own.”

Readers would be mistaken to think I dislike Emma Lindsay, because in fact I am deeply sympathetic to her. She is a victim of feminism, part of a generation of young women doomed to a future of barren loneliness by their belief in a false ideology, the Cult of Social Justice.

Emma Lindsay is not stupid — she’s an MIT graduate, for crying out loud — nor is she incapable of thinking outside the feminist box. Read through her columns at Medium.com and you find her occasionally making factual observations that do not fit within the oppression/victimhood narrative of feminism’s Patriarchal Thesis, i.e., “the assumption that normal human life is a system of injustice in which all women (collectively) are victimized by all men (collectively).” Ms. Lindsay is observant enough to see beyond the anti-male scapegoating rhetoric of feminism, and rejects the totalitarian ethos of Cultural Marxism, as in her December 2016 column “The Polarizing Rhetoric of the Left is Scary.”

It is unfortunate, however, that Ms. Lindsay did not develop her doubts about feminist ideology 10 or 15 years earlier, before she had squandered her adolescence and young adulthood in a series of failed relationships, first with men, then with women. Only now, in her early 30s, has she heard the proverbial ticking of her biological clock and begun a serious effort to avoid the Darwinian Dead End toward which feminism leads.

Alas, Ms. Lindsay’s quest for motherhood faces a serious obstacle, namely that men don’t seem too eager to cooperate with her project:

Lately, I’ve been seriously considering becoming a single mother by choice. Something that’s really pushing me in that direction is just how clueless a lot of the dudes are I go on dates with. I had a like, 3 year stint of dating basically only women in San Francisco, and not a lot of SF lesbians are super sold on the idea of kids (probably because SF is so expensive and because babies are not a byproduct of lesbian sex.)
So, I was like, ah-ha! I know how to solve this, I can date men! Straight men want kids, right?
And indeed they do. Apparently, more men want kids than women do nowadays. Something like 80% of men say they want kids vs 70% of women. So like, those are good odds for me, right? . . .

Now, I’m going to interrupt Ms. Lindsay here, and skip over the part where she quotes Laurie Penny (eye roll), to note the chronology of Ms. Lindsay’s romantic life. She dated a series of boyfriends until she was in her mid-20s, at which point she decided she was actually bisexual, spent three years dating lesbians and, as she has said, convinced herself she was a victim of “the heteronormative brainwashing of society.” However, Ms. Lindsay’s lesbian relationships turned out the same way as her earlier relationships with men — i.e., failure — and, after a two-year romantic hiatus, she decided to subject herself once more to the insidious forces of patriarchy. What is her likelihood of heterosexual success, at age 32, if she always failed with men when she was younger? Or to look at it from a different angle, why would a man be interested in a woman who has not only been rejected by all her previous boyfriends, but has also been deemed an unsuitable partner by lesbians?

As I’ve explained, “the dating market is full of bad guys because all of the good guys already have girlfriends and good guys don’t cheat”:

Past a certain age — maybe as early as 25 — the singles scene is nothing but culls and rejects. The keepers are already taken, and if you’re still in the dating scene when you’re 30, you’re rummaging through piles of damaged goods and leftovers in the discount bin.

This is Emma Lindsay’s problem, but she doesn’t recognize it because (a) this would require her to admit that she is the cause of her own problems, and (b) she can’t get past the feminist ideology which tells her that all males are her moral and intellectual inferiors. Despite the fact that no man she ever dated considered her worth keeping, she imagines that having been used and discarded by a series of boyfriends when she was in her youthful prime doesn’t reflect negatively on her, but only on them.

Ms. Lindsay considers herself a prize, and can’t understand why men don’t share her high estimate of her value. There’s nothing wrong with her, she insists. The problem is that men are so “clueless”:

I’ll go on dates with guys, who are like “Yeah, I’d like my wife to take my last name, cook for me, and iron my underpants, but I’d never date someone who just wanted to be a stay at home wife. Financially that just doesn’t make sense.”
Or, I’d get messages from guys 20 years older than me who didn’t want to date women their own age because they looked “busted.”
Or, I’ll talk to male friends who think their romantic relationships are “the most important” factor in their personal happiness, but work 70 hour weeks and devote zero energy to learning the skills of making relationships work.
And… the end result of this is that a lot of men who want kids won’t be able to have kids. . . .

(Not with you, anyway. But please continue, ma’am.)

I’m getting a bit bored dating 35 year olds who want kids “one day.” Truthfully, more than anything else, it’s the complete lack of effort that’s really off-putting.
As far as I can tell, I have 2 options. Option 1 is “trapping” some guy into having kids with me because he lacks the self awareness to plan for it himself. This would also involve taking his last name, doing most of the housework while contributing 50% to the earnings, and faking my orgasms so he doesn’t have to feel emasculated by his lack of sexual prowess.
Option 2 is having kids by myself.
It would involve some sacrifices, like probably not living in San Francisco. However, every time I go on a date with some man-child, I become more and more convinced that those sacrifices are probably the less bad option. . . .

You can read the rest of that, but notice how Emma Lindsay disparages her so-called “male friends.” Do friends badmouth their friends this way? Notice also her sweeping assertion that every man she has dated is a “man-child” deficient both in “self-awareness” and “sexual prowess.” Her condemnation of males is categorical — men are universally inferior to her, Ms. Lindsay would have us believe — and does her diatribe about male inferiority seem strangely familiar? Isn’t her sour-grapes rationalization almost a perfect mirror-reverse of the anti-female rhetoric of Santa Barbara mass murderer Elliot Rodger?

 

“You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime because I don’t know
what you don’t see in me, I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman. I will punish all of you for it. . . . You think I’m unworthy of you. That’s a crime I can never get over.
If I can’t have you girls, I will destroy you.”

Oh, he was “the perfect guy . . . the supreme gentleman” and considered himself a victim of “injustice” because girls preferred “obnoxious men.”

It is probably unfair to compare Emma Lindsay to a deranged killer, but she is engaged in a very similar narcissistic rationalization. Nothing is ever her fault. Men are entirely to blame:

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been absorbing abusive behaviors normalized by the patriarchy. I’ve had boyfriends who force sex on me when I did’t want it, I’ve had boyfriends who tried to stop me seeing my friends, I’ve had boyfriends who disregard my academic/professional aspirations demanding attention when I need to work (one time, an ex called me at 3am before a final demanding emotional support from me.) Essentially, what I want for myself is always seen as less important than what these men want from me.

Emma Lindsay is The Most Important Person in the World™ and she is enraged that men don’t agree with her assessment. She wants you to know she’s plenty popular — she’s had lots of boyfriends, you see, but all of them were “abusive” in one way or another. Blame the patriarchy!

Her proposed “Option 2” — pay for donor sperm, “becoming a single mother by choice” — is a childish threat: “If you don’t play by my rules, I’m going to take my uterus and go home.” To which the world’s male population will generally react with a shrug of indifference.

“Damaged goods,” they’ll say, and if Emma Lindsay were an isolated exception, a lone kook howling at the moon, perhaps I’d shrug, too. Yet the fact is that Ms. Lindsay is part of a tide of human wreckage washing up on the shores of our sin-sick society, the flotsam and jetsam created by the disintegration of America’s formerly Christian culture.

Emma Lindsay is an avowed atheist, so it is ironic that she was quoted in a sermon last year by Matthew Broyles at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. Taking as his text a passage of Philippians 3, Pastor Broyles spoke about the idea of “privilege,” and of the Apostle Paul’s rejection of his own privilege for the sake of Christ:

Before Paul met Christ on the road to Damascus, he was extremely privileged. He was already a leader in the Jewish community and was well on his way to becoming one of the highest ranking Jews. He had it all: fame, fortune, power and influence. He could have coasted through the rest of his life without a worry in the world but he couldn’t because someone named Jesus wanted to know him.
Paul lays out his resume not to brag, make others feel guilty or speak poorly of his Jewish heritage. He lays out his resume to speak against the Judaizers, those Jewish Christian converts who were requiring Gentiles to become Jews before becoming Christians. They were using their religious status to create barriers for non-Christians.

Pastor Broyles quotes from Ms. Lindsay’s 2016 column, “Trump Supporters Aren’t Stupid,” in which she argued that working-class white people saw in Trump a hope for dignity, to avoid the shame of poverty:

She says, “We must find ways for the working class to maintain its dignity, we must find a way for them to have jobs that are satisfying to them, we must find a way for them to contribute to culture. We must find a way for them to feel heard. Which, by the way, are the exact same goals we need to have for oppressed races. We all need the same thing, and until we find a way to give it to more people, we will fight each other for it.”
She’s right. We all need the same thing. We need our dignity. But the only thing that will help us to overcome our need for privilege and the need to keep others under oppression while maintaining our dignity is admitting first that our dignity comes not from who we are but whose we are.
We must let go of our economic, racial and religious privilege, emptying ourselves, taking the very nature of servants, trusting Christ’s faithfulness and putting our faith in Christ, reminding ourselves that we are all equal in the eyes of God and no matter the earthly privilege we may have, all people can experience the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus, who is Lord of all.

Here’s the whole sermon on video:

 

How strange is it that a queer feminist in San Francisco should have inspired a Baptist preacher’s sermon in Texas? Do you think that’s just a coincidence? Or do you suppose, as I do, that God moves in mysterious ways, and that this apparent coincidence has some purpose? Isn’t it possible that, through the instrument of Pastor Broyles’s sermon, God might have intended to send a message to Emma Lindsay?

What did she say about her prospects of becoming a mother? “It would involve some sacrifices, like probably not living in San Francisco.”

Don’t you think Ms. Lindsay’s prospects would improve if she left behind those San Francisco “man-child” guys she’s been dating and moved to someplace like — oh, I don’t know — Dallas, Texas?

What if Ms. Lindsay moved to Dallas, and went to Wilshire Baptist Church some Sunday morning to learn about what Jesus taught?

“I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”
— John 10:10 (KJV)

I doubt Emma Lindsay will move to Dallas or become a Christian. She’ll probably stay in San Francisco and become a crazy cat lady. But the choice is hers, and isn’t feminism about “choice”? Excuse me for preaching a sermon here, when two words would suffice: “choose life.”

It’s going to take a miracle to save Emma Lindsay from the Darwinian Dead End, and if in 20 years, she’s the Baptist mother of a teenage boy — he’ll be playing football and going deer hunting with his Dad, because that’s what boys do in Texas — don’t say that miracles never happen.

 

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