There has been alot of talk on conservative websites like Hot Air about a family in Toronto (I use "family" because that is the traditionally used term for genetically related groups that cohabitate) that has decided to make ambiguity and mystery the key factor in the life of their child Storm. Despite his having been given by God, evolutionary biology and providence a penis or vagina, the family has decided that potty training and socializing will take a back seat while they use their child to loudly pronounce their ideology to the world.
What strikes me here is the psychology of people that view childhood as a grand field for experimentation. No matter how liberal I am in many arenas, supporting interracial and same sex marriage and even same sex adoption (this isn't quite contradictory with the argument I am making here, as advocates of same sex marriage and adoption consistently argue their rights on the basis that their raising and parenting children actually will fit within tradition), I don't quite understand where they are coming from. This is an issue for me that is feisty and emotional, but I have become enough of an adult by now that I can recognize that emotion and ask questions.
The original touters of this brand of feminist ideology sprouted in the bloom of 1960s liberalism. The generation that bought into a wholesale rejection of any tradition was one that, by all accounts, never grew up and faced the harsh, brutal world. The Baby Boomers came of age in an America that was the most prosperous place on earth. 1950s America enjoyed a record boom that produced suburbia, drive in films and juvenile delinquency (the latter of which, paradoxically, is at its highest in good economic times).
In other words, the Gloria Steinems of the world had never actually faced broken families, lack of tradition and identity and a chaotic upbringing, so they could dispense with the vanguard of their upbringing without knowing what the reality of their proposed alternative would be like. The imageless alternative is always utopian.
I really lived some of the chaos that this family are advocated. While not as extreme, my mother had a heavy dosage of women around and generally avoided romantic liasons because of the chaotic turmoil of her marriage to my father. Little was ever said about my father and I have only recently been able to attain peace in that realm. I empathize with lower income whites, blacks and Hispanics who have had to live in the shadow of no father. Meanwhile, I have noticed feminists like Pamela Paul, who advocate that my method of upbringing, the fatherless method that has birthed juvenile delinquency for millenia, is actually superior.
Unsurprisingly, her argument is totally academic, which I take as evidence, based on the presumption that narrative storytelling is always better to hook readers in with than polls, studies and statistics, that she doesn't have first hand experience on this matter. I've only just been able to find out, at nearly 25 years old, that my father is even still alive. I had to find this out by taking action on my own, as asking family about this basic information usually resulted in getting yelled at. Imagine that for a second because chances are most readers can't fathom that. If Paul wants to know what it's like to have no father in the real world, I recommend she call me or e-mail me. I'll tell her all about it.
My mother raised us all vegetarian. This resulted in me always being the outcast at friend's birthday parties, where pepperoni pizza arrived and I had to tell my friends, who had invited me, that I couldn't eat it. More than once, this was taken as an insult by other children and their parents, who had after all invited me to their house and offered me food. So I know the sort of feeling of being a freak and an outsider that Storm has to look forward thanks to his/her enlightened parents.
So I ask of people who think that this family, by loudly proclaiming their child genderless and devoid of a social structure, how did you grow up? Did your parents socialize you with older people of your gender? If you grew up with a childhood that was traditional, what makes your arguments stronger than the traditionalist argument of someone like me, who did grow up in an unorthodox environment?
This attitude reminds me very much of a line by Howard Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, in The Aviator. Attending the household of his lover Kate Hepburn, one of the Hepburns declares loudly, "We don't care about money." Hughes fires back, "That's because you've always had it."
When you've always had something in your life, like money, a father or a firm sense of what it is to be a man or woman, it's easy to dismiss its vitality. For those of us who had a rougher upbringing, we value what you so easily dismiss.
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My mother raised us all vegetarian. This resulted in me always being the outcast at friend's birthday parties, where pepperoni pizza arrived and I had to tell my friends, who had invited me, that I couldn't eat it. More than once, this was taken as an insult by other children and their parents, who had after all invited me to their house and offered me food. So I know the sort of feeling of being a freak and an outsider that Storm has to look forward thanks to his/her enlightened parents.
So I ask of people who think that this family, by loudly proclaiming their child genderless and devoid of a social structure, how did you grow up? Did your parents socialize you with older people of your gender? If you grew up with a childhood that was traditional, what makes your arguments stronger than the traditionalist argument of someone like me, who did grow up in an unorthodox environment?
This attitude reminds me very much of a line by Howard Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, in The Aviator. Attending the household of his lover Kate Hepburn, one of the Hepburns declares loudly, "We don't care about money." Hughes fires back, "That's because you've always had it."
When you've always had something in your life, like money, a father or a firm sense of what it is to be a man or woman, it's easy to dismiss its vitality. For those of us who had a rougher upbringing, we value what you so easily dismiss.
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