I just read Sara Shoener’s recent opinion piece in The New York Times in which she indicts the two-parent home. It is alarmist, one-sided, aimless, radical, misandric, short-sighted, self-serving …
And totalitarian.
To indict our “culture” as simply too philistine for its inclination to preserve fathers, in the face of the endless social maladies resulting from fatherless homes, is a blind advocacy of continued, exponential social chaos. Shoener does this with a transparent scientism, offering hastily arranged statistics that barely clothe her radicalism and misandry.
She starts with positing that all girls are inevitable victims. Her demonization of young girls for whom “marriage is equated with success” is rooted in her distant state of aloofness and academic arrogance. Next, she marries this condescension with the hysterical domestic violence narrative that is dependent upon an obscenely broad definition. In New York State, domestic violence includes “implied” domestic violence; this is a vague allegation that a family equivalent of a “civil liberty” is violated. A poor mood is today domestic violence; as is responsible management of money; a lascivious glance; indeed, anything open to interpretation can be domestic violence under the “implied” revision. For Shoener, at the far left of the sexual politics war, the very idea of marriage and family is now hopelessly domestic violence.
But this goes to the heart of her attack: allegations—mere allegations—of domestic violence is the silver bullet for custody. And this is the radical feminist obsession: custody of de-fathered children.
Her article curiously views domestic violence through the prism of the male-initiated brand. It frames all its subject women as victims of their boyfriends and husbands. Not once does she consider female-initiated domestic violence, ignoring one-half of the phenomenon. Scientism.
We learn that men should never fight to have involvement with their children if mommy does not wish so; indeed, fathers and men are too stupid to realize that they should—in the bizarre Shoenersphere—just magically turn off their instinct to father and redirect this innate instinct to the maintenance of monetary child support.
Also, the “state institutions” that she lambastes as too philistine are products of our valid egalitarian and procreative social paradigm. To ask the state to depart from this reveals the severity of her hateful positions. No, Sara, it does not take a more draconian village; at the end of the day, it takes a mother and a father.
These institutions “reinforce” the family and the participation of the father because they recognize that fathers and children have natural rights to each other. The same rights that women have to the control of the insemination and gestation of their wombs are the same rights that fathers have to a relationship with the product of these wombs. The state should not be a tool to eliminate fathers wholesale, as this article shamelessly advocates.
This piece is a continuation of the radical feminist message that wantonly redefines family at any cost without any regard for the father. Shulamith Firestone died a miserable old cat lady; she, too, had radical ideas about family. In Shoener’s defence, she makes a stylish nod toward the two-parent home at the bottom of her attack. But this is a symbolic effort to seem fair-minded.
At the end of the day, Shoener wants women to have all the power over the family and to render everything and everyone else powerless over the socialization of children. The holy right to terminate the fertilization of the womb has metastasized into a totalitarian right to the full control of the product of the womb after gestation as it lives.
Finally, Shoener’s piece is devoid of the sentiments of a real mother who thinks of her children first; rather, it reeks of the hubris of a young radical and childless advocate who thinks only of her career and her hateful ideology.
The world she advocates is chilling and hateful.
