Selling cultural/social decay
It is fairly universally accepted that boys brought up by single mothers
are far more likely to slip into dysfunction
than those brought up by both their biological parents.
This is a point raised by many of those concerned about
social dysfunction in our society.
So why are so many mothers trying to raise their children
without benefit of the child’s biological father?
A convenient, and no doubt partly true, answer is to blame it all on
irresponsibility of the male (all too often a minor) who fathered the child.
But, wonder of wonders, in some cesspools of the social sciences,
there are some harpies who are
actively encouraging girls and adult women
to raise their children without benefit of their father,
assigning the highest priority to
“what is good for the woman”
rather than
what is good for the child or for society at large.
Clearly,
Women in 20s, 30s Are Driving Trend, Report Shows
By Rob Stein and Donna St. George
Washington Post, 2009-05-14
[1]
Katrina Stanfield, 25,
is raising her 3-year-old daughter in Middletown, Md.,
without a husband because
she and her boyfriend decided that marriage would not work for them.
[2]
Heidy Gonzalez, 21,
is living with her two children and their father in Mount Rainier [Maryland],
but tying the knot is not a priority for them now.
[3]
Emily Smatchetti, 38,
is a single mother of a toddler in Miami because
she had not found the right man and worried that time was running out.
So she found a sperm donor.
[4]
The mothers are part of a far-reaching social trend
unfolding across the United States:
The number of children being born out of wedlock
has risen sharply in recent years,
driven primarily by women in their 20s and 30s
opting to have children without getting married.
Nearly four out of every 10 births are now to unmarried women.
[5]
“It’s been a huge increase -- a dramatic increase,”
said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics,
which documented the shift in detail yesterday for the first time,
based on an analysis of birth certificates nationwide.
“It’s quite striking.”
[6]
Although the report did not examine the reasons for the increase,
Ventura and other experts cite a confluence of factors,
including
a lessening of the social stigma associated with unmarried motherhood,
an increase in couples delaying or forgoing marriage, and
growing numbers of financially independent women and older and single women
deciding to have children on their own after delaying childbearing.
[7]
“I think this is the tipping point,”
said Rosanna Hertz,
a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wellesley College.
“This is becoming increasingly the norm.
The old adage that
‘first comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes baby in the baby carriage’
just no longer holds true.”
[Wellesley College, in its “Faculty Expert Resources List”,
lists her as an expert on the following topics:
Divese families, Gender stereotypes, Families, Motherhood and fatherhood,
Nontraditional families, Single mothers, Social inequality, Women and work.
She is, naturally, a Jewish woman.
The web page just linked to includes the following paragraph:
“The presence of many Jewish women among current sociologists
is likely to be noted, if at all,
not because these women study Jewish themes
but because of their Jewish-sounding names (e.g.,
Muriel Cantor, Nancy Chodorow, Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Roberta S. Cohen, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Eva Etzioni, Zelda Gamson, Nona Glazer, Rosanna Hertz, Beth Hess, Ruth Jacobs, Charlotte Schwartz, and Lenore Weitzman).
In fact, locating Jews for research purposes
by identifying Jewish-sounding names
is an accepted practice among sociologists.”]
[8]
The trend has unfolded
despite decades of political and social hand-wringing over the issue,
such as
Vice President Dan Quayle [41]’s attack on
the unmarried television mother Murphy Brown,
President Bill Clinton [42]’s revamp of welfare and
President George W. Bush [43]’s focus on “family values.”
President Obama [44] has said that one of his priorities is reducing abortions,
in part by helping women who become pregnant and want to keep their children.
[9]
Some experts said
the trend represents a positive change for many women,
allowing them to avoid becoming social outcasts,
being forced to give up their babies for adoption or having abortions, and
letting them raise children in nontraditional families.
[10]
“Women can have children on their own, and
it’s not going to destroy your employment, and
it’s not going to mean that you’ll be made a pariah by the community,”
Hertz said.
“It’s much more socially acceptable.”
[11]
But others said the trend is disturbing because
children who grow up without stable, two-parent families
tend not to fare as well in many ways.
[12]
“I look at this and say,
maybe this trend is what young adults want or stumble into,
but it’s not in the best interest of children,”
said Sarah Brown, chief executive of
the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
[13]
About 1.7 million babies were born to unmarried women in 2007,
a 26 percent rise from 1.4 million in 2002 and
more than double the number in 1980, according to the new report.
Unmarried women accounted for 39.7 percent of all U.S. births in 2007 --
up from 34 percent in 2002 and
more than double the percentage in 1980.
[14]
“If you see 10 babies in the room,
four them were born to women who were not married,”
Ventura said.
[15]
Although experts have been concerned about
a recent uptick in births to older teenagers after years of decline,
that is not the driving force in the overall trend
but more likely a reflection of it,
Ventura said.
Instead, much of the rise is due to
significant increases in births among unmarried women in their 20s and 30s.
Between 2002 and 2006,
the rate at which unmarried women in that age group were having babies
increased between 13 percent and 34 percent, the report found.
[16]
The rates increased for all races,
but they remained highest and rose fastest for Hispanics and blacks.
There were
106 births to every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women in 2006,
72 per 1,000 blacks,
32 per 1,000 whites and
26 per 1,000 Asians,
the report showed.
[17]
The percentage of babies born to unmarried women in the United States
is starting to look more like that in many European countries,
the data shows.
For example, the proportion of babies born to unmarried women is about
66 percent in Iceland,
55 percent in Sweden,
50 percent in France and
44 percent in the United Kingdom.
[18]
In many of those countries,
couples are living together instead of getting married,
which is also the case in the United States.
Previous research indicates that
about 40 percent of births to unmarried women
occur in households where couples are cohabitating.
[19]
Gonzalez, the mother who lives with her children’s father in Mount Rainier,
said marriage has not loomed as a necessity for them.
“Time goes by and we think about other stuff -- and we think about rent,”
[Gee, do they ever think about the cost over, say, twenty years
of raising a child?]
she said.
This holds true, she said, for most of her friends.
“Most of the people I know just live with their baby’s father or boyfriend
and don’t get married,” she said.
[20]
Other couples today feel less compelled to marry
just because they are having a child.
[21]
“It seems to be more wrong to be in a marriage
with someone who you don’t love and consider to be your best friend
than not to be in a marriage at all,”
said Barbara Katz Rothman
[interview;
her Wikipedia profile categorizes her, among other things, as
a “Jewish woman writer” and
an “African Americans’ rights activist”],
a professor of sociology at the City University of New York.
“It’s not that people care less about marriage.
In some ways, it’s because they care more.”
[Yeah, yeah, but this is about having children, not just being in relationships.]
[22]
Stanfield and her boyfriend tried living together after she got pregnant,
but he moved out
when it became clear to both of them that they were not compatible,
she said.
[23]
“He’s a good dad and a good person, but he’s just not right for me,”
Stanfield said.
[24]
In New Carrollton, Natrice McKenzie, 25, a teller supervisor at a bank,
said she did not set out to become a single mother but has no regrets.
[25]
“Getting married was something I had in mind,
but that basically was not what happened,”
said McKenzie, pregnant with her third child.
She said it can be difficult, and she knows she is far from unique.
“Nowadays it’s becoming more like, single moms are everywhere,”
she said.
[26]
Alana Hill, 33, sees family history as an important influence.
A single mother in Silver Spring who works as a dancer and a dance teacher,
Hill was raised by a single mother
and was part of a large extended family
in which most of the mothers were not married.
Except for grandparents,
“I didn’t have a role model of a husband and a wife who were married for years,”
she said.
Even when she was very young,
her foremost wish, she said, was motherhood, not marriage.
“I knew I wanted a child,” she said.
[27]
Smatchetti, who works as a U.S. attorney in Miami,
said she is glad that she had the option of using a sperm donor
after a long-term relationship ended.
[28]
“I didn’t want to pick the wrong person just to have kid,
so I just decided to go ahead and do it and work on the relationship later,”
she said.
“It’s hard, but in a good way.”
[Note how the reporters end the story.]
Program for Teen Mothers Includes Psychotherapy
By Ian Shapira
Washington Post, 2009-08-12, page B-1
[1.1]
In the living room of a converted brick ranch house in Manassas,
three teenage girls sat around a large sofa,
sifting through the intimate complications of their lives.
All three had moved into the home,
now the E. Carrington Family Enrichment Center,
because they were either pregnant or had recently become a mother
and also had a diagnosed mental health disorder.
[from paragraph 2.2:
“ranging from
anxiety, depression, conduct disorder, post-traumatic syndrome
to attention deficit disorder.”]
[1.2]
Yet the scrutiny they faced from house parent Peggy Jennings,
a former Lorton prison official,
could have applied to any teenager in a troubled relationship.
[1.3]
“What is [your boyfriend] doing?”
Jennings asked a 16-year-old teen mother [called “J’s Mom” below]
who was holding a bottle of baby formula in the mouth of her 3-month-old boy.
“Where does your relationship stand?”
[1.4]
“He wants to take my relationship to a higher level,”
the young mother responded.
[1.5]
“How old is he?” asked another girl, 18,
who at the time was due any day.
[1.6]
“He’s almost 18.
He wants me to live with him,”
the young mother said, her voice rising in confidence.
[1.7]
“If you start playing house,
that’s what you’ll be doing,”
Jennings said, her voice softening.
“I had a baby at 22.
Even then, it was frightening.
I played house.
You lose sight of yourself.
Somewhere inside you, you must say,
‘I want to be better.’ ”
[1.8]
The young mother, her baby enfolded in her arms, nodded.
She was sensing a new maturity.
...
[4.1]
But it is their group talks on relationships that elicit the most chatter.
As Jennings wrapped up a session,
she told them that
the fathers of their children
might not be the most suitable life partners.
[4.2]
“You’re 16. You’re going to have a couple more relationships,”
Jennings said.
[4.3]
“It’s funny you mention that,” J’s Mom said.
“There’s a couple people who want to be with me.”
[4.4]
Jennings looked at her with a sternness that bordered on reproach.
“Right now, you got school.
Then you got to get a job.
God is making you stronger,”
she said, before adding words that seemed to them
as enigmatic as their fates:
“Tears, then joy. Tears, then joy.”
The persistent, alarming link between illegitimacy and poverty
by Duncan Currie
National Review, 2009-08-24
Sometimes, a crisis lasts so long, or proves so impervious to remedy,
that it becomes normal.
We are now 44 years removed from Daniel Patrick . . .
[This is not about
the selling of the alarming (to most rational people) rise in the illegitimacy rate,
but rather about the consequences of that rise.
But because some people,
especially in the “social sciences” in the academic sector,
do not seem alarmed at all by the rise,
but rather view it as a “victory for women”,
I am including this link here.
Unfortunately to actually read the article
you will need access to an online database;
at universities that should not be a problem.]
By Petula Dvorak
Washington Post, 2009-09-04
[Here are some excerpts, with comments.]
[T]heir marriage is the envy of many of their fellow mommy friends.
Right after Lisa had their first boy,
Stefanie gave birth to their second.
What woman wouldn’t kill
for her husband to endure kankles, nausea and stretch marks
just as she was battling the baby blues?
[This is an argument for permitting gay marriage?]
Their effect [I presume the effect of “the kids”, not of the “kankles, etc.”]
on the children of their heterosexual friends and neighbors?
Many report that
their own children -- including one of my own --
were jealous that
Lisa and Stefanie’s kids “got to make two Mommy’s Day cards.”
...
[And that’s as much as Dvorak says on that topic.
But, even if it is true, look at what it omits:
If the children of the lesbian moms
are delighted that they “got to make two Mommy’s Day cards”
how will they feel
when Father’s Day rolls around, other kids have a dad to make a card for,
but they have none?
And, pursuing Ms. Dvorak’s analogy,
how will the other children make the children without father’s feel?
What Dvorak can’t even bring herself to mention in this column
is the academic research and intuitive understanding
that shows that children, especially male children,
do better when they have a male role model in their immediate family.
It is absolutely typical of the way the Post biases its stories
that it omits this important item of knowledge.
If I might be permitted a personal note,
my mother divorced my father when I was one,
and raiseed me, with the help of her parents,
from then until she married a fine man when I was eleven,
who, fortunately for me, was a wonderful step-father.
But during those growing-up years from one to eleven,
I lacked a resident Dad, a fact which I much regretted.
Men are regarded by all those male-bashing women (of whom there have been plenty)
as “insensitive” and “clueless” when they overlook
what feminists claim to be the women’s point of view.
So what does that make Dvorak
when she can’t even see, or at least state,
that boys want a man in the family, someone to look up to?]
(which does not seem to be on the web, at least as of 2013-10-04)
by their film critic Kirsten Page-Kirby
of the newly released movie Baggage Claim staring Paula Patton.
That review contains a number of quotations of Paula Patton,
evidently speaking in her own voice in an interview, perhaps with Ms. Page-Kirby.
In any case, the review ends with the following [but the emphasis is added]:
Patton seems to be rejecting what used to be the way women used to be brought up,
to fit in and to place other people’s happiness above their own.
I agree with that rejection in one specific area:
I think it led to an unfair failure by some men, certainly including myself,
to consider women’s sexual happiness as being equally important to that of men.
(This problem was not entirely due to the selfishness of men.
There was a strong reluctance in those days to talk explicitly about the situation, rejecting talk about
1) the importance of sexually satisfying women,
2) the methods and techniques for achieving that goal and
3) the specific structure of women instrumental to that goal.
Cluelessness of men in this area was not necessarily of their own choice,
but due to the desire of women to keep such matters literally concealed.
What little knowledge men of my generation gained about the female anatomy
came from the pages of Playboy and Penthouse,
neither of which was noticeably concerned about
the issue of female sexual happiness.)
I don’t consider placing greater emphasis on women’s sexual happiness
as being at all detrimental to anything important in our society.
However in other areas, that change in female attitudes
has led to great social and economic harm in areas of importance.
Sure, women can place their own happiness as issue number one.
Sure, women can say “I don’t need a man to complete me”
or “Men are just a dessert”.
Indeed, many women in, for example, Arlington, Virginia
seem to take exactly that attitude.
But where does that lead in terms of preserving and continuing their line?
It leads to racial extinction of the line of those making those claims.
(In larger terms, consider the fertility rate of non-Hispanic white women in America.)
On the importance of men, certainly artificial insemination
avoids the need to have direct sexual intercourse with a man to make a woman pregnant.
But how about raising the child?
Single motherhood may be fine for those women who are wealthy,
for example, to name some perhaps not totally irrelevant examples to
the views expressed in the Washington Post,
Katharine Graham, Lally Weymouth, and Katharine Weymouth,
who can afford to hire people to help in raising their children.
But I will be bold enough to assert that our society simply cannot afford
to make a large percentage of women that wealthy
while simultaneously being competitive with societies
whose women do not make such extravagant demands on the society,
and who are willing to place to larger social good ahead of
their own immediate happiness.
Finally, one may, and indeed should, consider the question of “Just what makes a woman happy?”
Feminists, and I certainly have experience with them, place issues such as “personal growth” and power, both economic and inter-personal,
as practically sine qua non’s (or perhaps I should say sine quibus non)
for their own happiness.
But the many of the women of the 1950s claimed they found happiness and contentment precisely in performing the classical women’s roles of the 1950s,
through seeing their families develop well, seeing their children,
and perhaps their husbands, grow and develop.
(The abandonment of that position was certainly pushed along by
cultural and media elites,
e.g., those controlling and writing the New York Times and Washington Post.)
One can argue which approach is “fairer” or “more just” for women.
But one thing that one cannot argue with is that
Putting women’s happiness first leads to
eventual extinction of the line of those women.
By Jonathan Mooney, Mr. Mooney is the author of “Normal Sucks.”
New York Times Opinion, 2019-10-09
are far more likely to slip into dysfunction
than those brought up by both their biological parents.
This is a point raised by many of those concerned about
social dysfunction in our society.
So why are so many mothers trying to raise their children
without benefit of the child’s biological father?
A convenient, and no doubt partly true, answer is to blame it all on
irresponsibility of the male (all too often a minor) who fathered the child.
But, wonder of wonders, in some cesspools of the social sciences,
there are some harpies who are
actively encouraging girls and adult women
to raise their children without benefit of their father,
assigning the highest priority to
“what is good for the woman”
rather than
what is good for the child or for society at large.
Clearly,
Feminism = female selfishness, egotism, and narcissism
2009
2009-05-14-WP-Stein-St.-George-unwed-mothers
Number of Unwed Mothers Has Risen Sharply in U.S.Women in 20s, 30s Are Driving Trend, Report Shows
By Rob Stein and Donna St. George
Washington Post, 2009-05-14
[1]
Katrina Stanfield, 25,
is raising her 3-year-old daughter in Middletown, Md.,
without a husband because
she and her boyfriend decided that marriage would not work for them.
[2]
Heidy Gonzalez, 21,
is living with her two children and their father in Mount Rainier [Maryland],
but tying the knot is not a priority for them now.
[3]
Emily Smatchetti, 38,
is a single mother of a toddler in Miami because
she had not found the right man and worried that time was running out.
So she found a sperm donor.
[4]
The mothers are part of a far-reaching social trend
unfolding across the United States:
The number of children being born out of wedlock
has risen sharply in recent years,
driven primarily by women in their 20s and 30s
opting to have children without getting married.
Nearly four out of every 10 births are now to unmarried women.
[5]
“It’s been a huge increase -- a dramatic increase,”
said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics,
which documented the shift in detail yesterday for the first time,
based on an analysis of birth certificates nationwide.
“It’s quite striking.”
[6]
Although the report did not examine the reasons for the increase,
Ventura and other experts cite a confluence of factors,
including
a lessening of the social stigma associated with unmarried motherhood,
an increase in couples delaying or forgoing marriage, and
growing numbers of financially independent women and older and single women
deciding to have children on their own after delaying childbearing.
[7]
“I think this is the tipping point,”
said Rosanna Hertz,
a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wellesley College.
“This is becoming increasingly the norm.
The old adage that
‘first comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes baby in the baby carriage’
just no longer holds true.”
[Wellesley College, in its “Faculty Expert Resources List”,
lists her as an expert on the following topics:
Divese families, Gender stereotypes, Families, Motherhood and fatherhood,
Nontraditional families, Single mothers, Social inequality, Women and work.
She is, naturally, a Jewish woman.
The web page just linked to includes the following paragraph:
“The presence of many Jewish women among current sociologists
is likely to be noted, if at all,
not because these women study Jewish themes
but because of their Jewish-sounding names (e.g.,
Muriel Cantor, Nancy Chodorow, Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Roberta S. Cohen, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Eva Etzioni, Zelda Gamson, Nona Glazer, Rosanna Hertz, Beth Hess, Ruth Jacobs, Charlotte Schwartz, and Lenore Weitzman).
In fact, locating Jews for research purposes
by identifying Jewish-sounding names
is an accepted practice among sociologists.”]
[8]
The trend has unfolded
despite decades of political and social hand-wringing over the issue,
such as
Vice President Dan Quayle [41]’s attack on
the unmarried television mother Murphy Brown,
President Bill Clinton [42]’s revamp of welfare and
President George W. Bush [43]’s focus on “family values.”
President Obama [44] has said that one of his priorities is reducing abortions,
in part by helping women who become pregnant and want to keep their children.
[9]
Some experts said
the trend represents a positive change for many women,
allowing them to avoid becoming social outcasts,
being forced to give up their babies for adoption or having abortions, and
letting them raise children in nontraditional families.
[10]
“Women can have children on their own, and
it’s not going to destroy your employment, and
it’s not going to mean that you’ll be made a pariah by the community,”
Hertz said.
“It’s much more socially acceptable.”
[11]
But others said the trend is disturbing because
children who grow up without stable, two-parent families
tend not to fare as well in many ways.
[12]
“I look at this and say,
maybe this trend is what young adults want or stumble into,
but it’s not in the best interest of children,”
said Sarah Brown, chief executive of
the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
[13]
About 1.7 million babies were born to unmarried women in 2007,
a 26 percent rise from 1.4 million in 2002 and
more than double the number in 1980, according to the new report.
Unmarried women accounted for 39.7 percent of all U.S. births in 2007 --
up from 34 percent in 2002 and
more than double the percentage in 1980.
[14]
“If you see 10 babies in the room,
four them were born to women who were not married,”
Ventura said.
[15]
Although experts have been concerned about
a recent uptick in births to older teenagers after years of decline,
that is not the driving force in the overall trend
but more likely a reflection of it,
Ventura said.
Instead, much of the rise is due to
significant increases in births among unmarried women in their 20s and 30s.
Between 2002 and 2006,
the rate at which unmarried women in that age group were having babies
increased between 13 percent and 34 percent, the report found.
[16]
The rates increased for all races,
but they remained highest and rose fastest for Hispanics and blacks.
There were
106 births to every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women in 2006,
72 per 1,000 blacks,
32 per 1,000 whites and
26 per 1,000 Asians,
the report showed.
[17]
The percentage of babies born to unmarried women in the United States
is starting to look more like that in many European countries,
the data shows.
For example, the proportion of babies born to unmarried women is about
66 percent in Iceland,
55 percent in Sweden,
50 percent in France and
44 percent in the United Kingdom.
[18]
In many of those countries,
couples are living together instead of getting married,
which is also the case in the United States.
Previous research indicates that
about 40 percent of births to unmarried women
occur in households where couples are cohabitating.
[19]
Gonzalez, the mother who lives with her children’s father in Mount Rainier,
said marriage has not loomed as a necessity for them.
“Time goes by and we think about other stuff -- and we think about rent,”
[Gee, do they ever think about the cost over, say, twenty years
of raising a child?]
she said.
This holds true, she said, for most of her friends.
“Most of the people I know just live with their baby’s father or boyfriend
and don’t get married,” she said.
[20]
Other couples today feel less compelled to marry
just because they are having a child.
[21]
“It seems to be more wrong to be in a marriage
with someone who you don’t love and consider to be your best friend
than not to be in a marriage at all,”
said Barbara Katz Rothman
[interview;
her Wikipedia profile categorizes her, among other things, as
a “Jewish woman writer” and
an “African Americans’ rights activist”],
a professor of sociology at the City University of New York.
“It’s not that people care less about marriage.
In some ways, it’s because they care more.”
[Yeah, yeah, but this is about having children, not just being in relationships.]
[22]
Stanfield and her boyfriend tried living together after she got pregnant,
but he moved out
when it became clear to both of them that they were not compatible,
she said.
[23]
“He’s a good dad and a good person, but he’s just not right for me,”
Stanfield said.
[24]
In New Carrollton, Natrice McKenzie, 25, a teller supervisor at a bank,
said she did not set out to become a single mother but has no regrets.
[25]
“Getting married was something I had in mind,
but that basically was not what happened,”
said McKenzie, pregnant with her third child.
She said it can be difficult, and she knows she is far from unique.
“Nowadays it’s becoming more like, single moms are everywhere,”
she said.
[26]
Alana Hill, 33, sees family history as an important influence.
A single mother in Silver Spring who works as a dancer and a dance teacher,
Hill was raised by a single mother
and was part of a large extended family
in which most of the mothers were not married.
Except for grandparents,
“I didn’t have a role model of a husband and a wife who were married for years,”
she said.
Even when she was very young,
her foremost wish, she said, was motherhood, not marriage.
“I knew I wanted a child,” she said.
[27]
Smatchetti, who works as a U.S. attorney in Miami,
said she is glad that she had the option of using a sperm donor
after a long-term relationship ended.
[28]
“I didn’t want to pick the wrong person just to have kid,
so I just decided to go ahead and do it and work on the relationship later,”
she said.
“It’s hard, but in a good way.”
[Note how the reporters end the story.]
2009-08-12-WP-Shapira-Carrington
Caring for Body, Mind and BabyProgram for Teen Mothers Includes Psychotherapy
By Ian Shapira
Washington Post, 2009-08-12, page B-1
[1.1]
In the living room of a converted brick ranch house in Manassas,
three teenage girls sat around a large sofa,
sifting through the intimate complications of their lives.
All three had moved into the home,
now the E. Carrington Family Enrichment Center,
because they were either pregnant or had recently become a mother
and also had a diagnosed mental health disorder.
[from paragraph 2.2:
“ranging from
anxiety, depression, conduct disorder, post-traumatic syndrome
to attention deficit disorder.”]
[1.2]
Yet the scrutiny they faced from house parent Peggy Jennings,
a former Lorton prison official,
could have applied to any teenager in a troubled relationship.
[1.3]
“What is [your boyfriend] doing?”
Jennings asked a 16-year-old teen mother [called “J’s Mom” below]
who was holding a bottle of baby formula in the mouth of her 3-month-old boy.
“Where does your relationship stand?”
[1.4]
“He wants to take my relationship to a higher level,”
the young mother responded.
[1.5]
“How old is he?” asked another girl, 18,
who at the time was due any day.
[1.6]
“He’s almost 18.
He wants me to live with him,”
the young mother said, her voice rising in confidence.
[1.7]
“If you start playing house,
that’s what you’ll be doing,”
Jennings said, her voice softening.
“I had a baby at 22.
Even then, it was frightening.
I played house.
You lose sight of yourself.
Somewhere inside you, you must say,
‘I want to be better.’ ”
[1.8]
The young mother, her baby enfolded in her arms, nodded.
She was sensing a new maturity.
...
[4.1]
But it is their group talks on relationships that elicit the most chatter.
As Jennings wrapped up a session,
she told them that
the fathers of their children
might not be the most suitable life partners.
[4.2]
“You’re 16. You’re going to have a couple more relationships,”
Jennings said.
[4.3]
“It’s funny you mention that,” J’s Mom said.
“There’s a couple people who want to be with me.”
[4.4]
Jennings looked at her with a sternness that bordered on reproach.
“Right now, you got school.
Then you got to get a job.
God is making you stronger,”
she said, before adding words that seemed to them
as enigmatic as their fates:
“Tears, then joy. Tears, then joy.”
2009-08-24-NR-Currie-Five-Decades-of-Crisis
Five Decades of CrisisThe persistent, alarming link between illegitimacy and poverty
by Duncan Currie
National Review, 2009-08-24
Sometimes, a crisis lasts so long, or proves so impervious to remedy,
that it becomes normal.
We are now 44 years removed from Daniel Patrick . . .
[This is not about
the selling of the alarming (to most rational people) rise in the illegitimacy rate,
but rather about the consequences of that rise.
But because some people,
especially in the “social sciences” in the academic sector,
do not seem alarmed at all by the rise,
but rather view it as a “victory for women”,
I am including this link here.
Unfortunately to actually read the article
you will need access to an online database;
at universities that should not be a problem.]
2009-09-04-Dvorak
Reality Makes Gay Marriage Debate ObsoleteBy Petula Dvorak
Washington Post, 2009-09-04
[Here are some excerpts, with comments.]
[T]heir marriage is the envy of many of their fellow mommy friends.
Right after Lisa had their first boy,
Stefanie gave birth to their second.
What woman wouldn’t kill
for her husband to endure kankles, nausea and stretch marks
just as she was battling the baby blues?
[This is an argument for permitting gay marriage?]
Their effect [I presume the effect of “the kids”, not of the “kankles, etc.”]
on the children of their heterosexual friends and neighbors?
Many report that
their own children -- including one of my own --
were jealous that
Lisa and Stefanie’s kids “got to make two Mommy’s Day cards.”
...
[And that’s as much as Dvorak says on that topic.
But, even if it is true, look at what it omits:
If the children of the lesbian moms
are delighted that they “got to make two Mommy’s Day cards”
how will they feel
when Father’s Day rolls around, other kids have a dad to make a card for,
but they have none?
And, pursuing Ms. Dvorak’s analogy,
how will the other children make the children without father’s feel?
What Dvorak can’t even bring herself to mention in this column
is the academic research and intuitive understanding
that shows that children, especially male children,
do better when they have a male role model in their immediate family.
It is absolutely typical of the way the Post biases its stories
that it omits this important item of knowledge.
If I might be permitted a personal note,
my mother divorced my father when I was one,
and raiseed me, with the help of her parents,
from then until she married a fine man when I was eleven,
who, fortunately for me, was a wonderful step-father.
But during those growing-up years from one to eleven,
I lacked a resident Dad, a fact which I much regretted.
Men are regarded by all those male-bashing women (of whom there have been plenty)
as “insensitive” and “clueless” when they overlook
what feminists claim to be the women’s point of view.
So what does that make Dvorak
when she can’t even see, or at least state,
that boys want a man in the family, someone to look up to?]
2013
2013-09-27-Kirby-Paula-Patton-self-absorbtion
The 2013-09-27 edition of the Washington Express has a review(which does not seem to be on the web, at least as of 2013-10-04)
by their film critic Kirsten Page-Kirby
of the newly released movie Baggage Claim staring Paula Patton.
That review contains a number of quotations of Paula Patton,
evidently speaking in her own voice in an interview, perhaps with Ms. Page-Kirby.
In any case, the review ends with the following [but the emphasis is added]:
The film is less about finding happiness in a relationship,
Patton says,
than about Montana [the character in the movie Ms. Patton plays]’s efforts
to find happiness alone.
“She is losing sight of her own happiness,”
Patton says.
“She just wants to fit in; her decisions aren’t based on making herself happy.
I think it’s something we see all the time with young women.
Through this journey, she finds herself and finds confidence in saying,
‘I don’t need a man to complete me.’
Men should be a dessert, frankly.”
Patton seems to be rejecting what used to be the way women used to be brought up,
to fit in and to place other people’s happiness above their own.
I agree with that rejection in one specific area:
I think it led to an unfair failure by some men, certainly including myself,
to consider women’s sexual happiness as being equally important to that of men.
(This problem was not entirely due to the selfishness of men.
There was a strong reluctance in those days to talk explicitly about the situation, rejecting talk about
1) the importance of sexually satisfying women,
2) the methods and techniques for achieving that goal and
3) the specific structure of women instrumental to that goal.
Cluelessness of men in this area was not necessarily of their own choice,
but due to the desire of women to keep such matters literally concealed.
What little knowledge men of my generation gained about the female anatomy
came from the pages of Playboy and Penthouse,
neither of which was noticeably concerned about
the issue of female sexual happiness.)
I don’t consider placing greater emphasis on women’s sexual happiness
as being at all detrimental to anything important in our society.
However in other areas, that change in female attitudes
has led to great social and economic harm in areas of importance.
Sure, women can place their own happiness as issue number one.
Sure, women can say “I don’t need a man to complete me”
or “Men are just a dessert”.
Indeed, many women in, for example, Arlington, Virginia
seem to take exactly that attitude.
But where does that lead in terms of preserving and continuing their line?
It leads to racial extinction of the line of those making those claims.
(In larger terms, consider the fertility rate of non-Hispanic white women in America.)
On the importance of men, certainly artificial insemination
avoids the need to have direct sexual intercourse with a man to make a woman pregnant.
But how about raising the child?
Single motherhood may be fine for those women who are wealthy,
for example, to name some perhaps not totally irrelevant examples to
the views expressed in the Washington Post,
Katharine Graham, Lally Weymouth, and Katharine Weymouth,
who can afford to hire people to help in raising their children.
But I will be bold enough to assert that our society simply cannot afford
to make a large percentage of women that wealthy
while simultaneously being competitive with societies
whose women do not make such extravagant demands on the society,
and who are willing to place to larger social good ahead of
their own immediate happiness.
Finally, one may, and indeed should, consider the question of “Just what makes a woman happy?”
Feminists, and I certainly have experience with them, place issues such as “personal growth” and power, both economic and inter-personal,
as practically sine qua non’s (or perhaps I should say sine quibus non)
for their own happiness.
But the many of the women of the 1950s claimed they found happiness and contentment precisely in performing the classical women’s roles of the 1950s,
through seeing their families develop well, seeing their children,
and perhaps their husbands, grow and develop.
(The abandonment of that position was certainly pushed along by
cultural and media elites,
e.g., those controlling and writing the New York Times and Washington Post.)
One can argue which approach is “fairer” or “more just” for women.
But one thing that one cannot argue with is that
Putting women’s happiness first leads to
eventual extinction of the line of those women.
2019
2019-10-09-NYT-Normal-Sucks
At Risk in the Culture of ‘Normal’By Jonathan Mooney, Mr. Mooney is the author of “Normal Sucks.”
New York Times Opinion, 2019-10-09
posted by KHarbaugh at 09:00
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