The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Parenting in the #MeToo Era

Posted on | September 23, 2018 | Comments Off on Parenting in the #MeToo Era

 

Megan Fox at PJMedia is a mother, with a young son, and she’s angry:

Mothers of sons everywhere should be terrified by the constant destruction of men by duplicitous, lying women and an overzealous and political Senate confirmation process. All a scheming broad has to do these days is claim that your son touched her inappropriately more than two decades ago and she can derail his career. . . .
The press has underestimated the mothers of America who are watching this process of destroying a good man with horror and anger. What can we do as mothers to make sure this doesn’t happen to our sons? It begins with training them from a young age to protect themselves from unscrupulous girls. A long time ago the worst you had to worry about was a girl trapping your son by getting pregnant. Now it’s much worse. . . . .

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

A few years ago — in 2013, during the second Anthony Weiner scandal — I found myself reading the Riot Act to my then-14-year-old son.

“Don’t ever do anything like that! ‘Dick pics’ from a member of Congress? All this ‘sexting’ stuff? This is crazy! The Internet never forgets, boy! Don’t ever write anything in an email or a text message you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times!”

The advent of the Social Media Age has caught adults unprepared for the consequences. Online lynch-mobs are constantly patrolling the Internet in search of their next victim, and many kids have not been adequately warned of the dangers of digital destruction. How many stories have we seen of young people going to prison on the basis of evidence found on their cellphones? It does not seem to occur to these young fools that the ubiquitous devices can be used, for example, to provide investigators with minute-by-minute data on their location, and that the electronic log of their calls and messages is also available as evidence.

A few years ago, we heard a lot about “cyberbullying,” with some kids being driven to suicide by tormentors on Facebook or other sites. And have we forgotten Steubenville? “The jocular attitude of the assailants was documented on Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and cell phone recordings of the acts,” to quote Wikipedia, and two 16-year-old boys were convicted of sex offenses as a result of that August 2012 incident.

Megan Fox offers some suggestions for parents to protect their sons from false accusations, and I would augment her list with two points:

  1. Pair up — Get yourself a steady girlfriend, one who’s not too crazy, and avoid the random casual hookups that seem to be the most common context of destructive charges of sexual misconduct.
  2. Don’t use text or email for personal conversation — Many young women seem to have the idea that their boyfriends have nothing better to do than to constantly monitor their phones and reply instantly to any message. It’s as if they’ve forgotten that phones can be used to, y’know, actually talk to people. Young guys foolishly cooperate with this routine of constant texting back and forth, and girls become accustomed to using their phones as a sort of remote-control device for manipulating their boyfriends.

So, the young man should limit his romantic activities to one girl, and put her on notice that he’s a busy man — he’s got places to go and people to see — who can’t be bothered to reply to every damned message on his phone. “You need to talk to me? Call me. Time is money, honey. If you got some kind of emotional issues, call a therapist, but that ain’t my job, woman. Now stop interrupting me with these silly messages.”

It is from the habit of using texting in a purely personal way that people get into the whole “sexting” business, wherein fools unwittingly create incriminating evidence against themselves. Anthony Weiner is the textbook example of where that kind of behavior can lead. The situation that has developed into the #MeToo witch-hunt arguably started with WeinerGate in 2011, which is when women first seemed to get the idea that social media can be used as a weapon of vengeance.

My son? The one I warned when he was 14? He’s been with the same girl since he was 15, and he doesn’t even have a Facebook account.

Get smart, kids. The life you save may be your own.



 

Category: Family

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