February 12, 2015 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization
Yesterday it took me something over 1,200 words to describe just the most obvious ways in which Glosswitch’s first paragraph was factually wrong, intellectually dishonest and anti-dad. The first paragraph! That’s large load of error, ignorance and illogic packed into a small space.
But GW’s piece, once again here, actually gets worse. As I mentioned in passing yesterday, some of what she writes just plain makes no sense. As I recall, I referred to chimpanzees with typewriters. Well, here they are. GW is explaining how, what radical feminists demanded back in the 70s was all so self-evidently meritorious that no one should have questioned them. They should have simply read the list of demands and gotten to work enacting them into law and public policy. But alas, the power structure was peopled with — who else? — Troglodyte men, so some of the radicals’ wish list failed to come about. Who can believe it?
Clearly [radical feminists] didn’t realise that when it comes to sorting out inequality, you don’t just make an obvious list of all the things that might help to achieve it. You can’t just say “free 24-hour nurseries, please.”
Yes, of course — nurseries that are open 24 hours, seven days per week, all paid for by an already bankrupt Exchequer, and all because radical feminists had taken the trouble to write down their list of demands. What could be more obvious?
But that’s merely the semi-nutty ramblings of someone who is privileged enough that the idea she might not get her way — immediately! — simply doesn’t occur to her. GW moves on to the outright incomprehensible.
It is obligatory to faff around for ages, decades in fact, chipping away here and there, trying to find ways to sell the idea that having children isn’t just some evil conspiracy hatched by women who are out to ruin the economy.
Picture me slack-jawed and muttering “Huh?” I mean honestly, someone somewhere sometime said that women having children is an “evil conspiracy hatched by women who are out to ruin the economy?” Who’s ever said any such thing? Needless to say, GW doesn’t mention anyone, but wait. Now that I think about it, I recall plenty of people who did and probably still do.
As I mentioned in my last piece, feminist Simone de Beauvoir so dogmatically opposed women taking the maternal role she suggested passing a law prohibiting them from staying at home and caring for their kids. What was The Feminine Mystique if not an attack on a culture that encouraged mothers to do exactly that? The 1970s were littered with feminists inveighing against home and family as snares in which evil men caught unsuspecting women, the better to oppress them with their hard-earned incomes. Maybe the best way for us to stop “faffing” around would be for extremist feminists to get their stories straight.
Oh, and as for fatherhood, tread very, very carefully. You don’t want to risk making anyone feel unmanned.
Again I say, “Huh?” I literally have no idea of what those sentences even mean. Apart from GW’s plain ignorance of the definition of the word ‘unmanned,’ the words just don’t make sense. From here they look like nothing more than a gratuitous swipe at men, which would explain her proceeding to do so again and again.
When Sheila Rowbotham observed,“the creation of a new woman of necessity demands the creation of a new man”, I wonder if she could have predicted the degree to which the creation of “new men” would topple over into anti-feminist backlash. All too often “what about the dads?” has become the battle cry of the modern-day men’s rights movement.
Yikes! I’m having difficulty keeping up with GW’s logical(?) switchbacks. Let’s see. She began her piece complaining about what she called the “unfair” “distribution of labor” between mothers and fathers, by which she meant fathers failing to do as much of the “housework and childcare” as she wishes. That was paragraph one. By paragraph three, she’s admitted the existence of the “new man” for whom Rowbotham pined, the one who, according to multiple nationwide databases, does almost as much of the “housework and childcare” as do women, all the while doing substantially more of the paid work.
But radical feminists are nothing if not determined to complain and GW proves herself more than equal to the task. You see, these new men are anti-feminist too. Just so we can all keep up, those “old men” who didn’t pull their share of the household duties were anti-feminist and so are the “new men,” who do. Got that? I don’t mean to jump to conclusions, but it’s beginning to look like, for the GW style of feminist, nothing fathers do is satisfactory. But that couldn’t be true. Could it?
Next GW does what I’ve noticed other extremists doing from time to time. She writes a sentence and includes links that suggest support for her ideas from another source. They’re the Internet equivalent of footnotes or citations in a legal article. Fair enough, but GW plainly hopes no one will click on her links. That’s because the ones she provides not only don’t support her claims, in one case (out of two), they actually contradict them.
In many cases these are men who had no interest in shared parenting until divorce or separation removed them from their role as head of the household, but there are also more subtle pro-dad voices whose parenting recommendations still smack of traditionalism and control, despite all their claims to the contrary.
Now, without clicking it, to what do you suppose her first link takes us? Don’t even try; you’ll never guess. It takes the reader to the website for Fathers4Justice, one of the U.K.’s foremost pro-shared-parenting organizations. According to Glosswitch, dads who are members of F4J are mostly those who had no interest in being parents until Mom walked out on them. Her evidence? None. And I can assure her that the men who make up most of that organization are the most passionate about active fathering, before, during and after divorce. GW just made that one up.
Her second link is almost as bad. It’s to an article in the Telegraph that’s about an Australian psychologist who’s written some books about parenting, particularly of teen-age boys. His books are popular and his advice is pretty much common sense brought up to date with some new brain science. He does emphasize the importance of fathers to children’s well-being, but surely that can’t be what’s got GW’s knickers in a knot. After all, she was the one complaining about fathers not doing enough. But now she doesn’t want them too involved with their kids. As I said, it’s getting tough to keep up.
But it’s always interesting when someone expresses ideas that are so utterly lacking in factual or logical support that she stoops to citing sources as support that in fact do the opposite. That level of intellectual dishonesty would make a person of any integrity pause and refigure what she’s saying. But this is Glosswitch, so…
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