Being called an “incel” by this girl and her friends made Jamie angry. So angry that he borrowed a friend’s kitchen knife, followed her, and stabbed her to death in a parking lot. 

Before I get into the profound problems with this show and its reception, I should note that Adolescence features world-class acting and takes on eternal themes: love and loss, family and fatherhood, anger and helplessness. It is made up of sharp vignettes in which single cut scenes make already raw interactions even more visceral. At one point in the first of the four episodes, Jamie’s dad—a tough, honorable man—cries in resigned horror at the footage showing his beloved son committing this heinous crime. The scene is any parent’s worst nightmare, and its acting is superb. 

If the show’s creators had told Jamie’s story simply as a riveting (though horrifying) tale that embodies real aspects of the human experience, Adolescence would have been uniformly profound. 

Instead, by its second episode, the show becomes a master class in how to cheapen otherwise excellent art through over-determination and ideological politicization. 

There is potential value in the prescient treatment of the online right and the plausible effects of the misogynistic “manosphere” on an average-looking pubescent boy. Unfortunately, Adolescence traffics mostly in a progressive fantasy. In this ideological make-believe, traditional masculinity and the traditional family are the breeding ground for, rather than a bulwark against, toxic masculinity. 

Male Violence and Female Fear

In episode two, a 40-something Black police detective, fairly senior in his profession, is somehow entirely unaware, in the year 2025 (a quarter century after Columbine), that premeditated murders by white teenage boys are typically mixed up with issues around popularity. Why is this seasoned cop so unbelievably naive? Because he’s tall, handsome, and muscular, and was popular as a teen. That is, he has proximate access to the spoils of toxic masculinity even if, as a faithful husband and caring father, he spurns those spoils. Accordingly, he needs his teenage son—not nearly as good-looking as his father, and thus implicitly vulnerable to the manosphere himself—to explain to him that emojis have meanings. Again, this is a successful police detective in 2025, who we are supposed to believe has been inured, by the blinders of his traditional masculinity, to any knowledge whatsoever about the online right, the misogyny it peddles to teenage boys, and the fact that teens often communicate in ways that are opaque to adults. 

Then, in episode three, a discussion between Jamie and the attractive, white, 30-something female psychologist interrogating him reveals that the boy’s dad has never hit him and rarely gets angry, but he once tore down a shelf when he was enraged and, another time, was disappointed by his son’s subpar performance in a soccer game. We also learn—brace yourself—that Jamie’s grandfather likes to go to pubs and that Jamie would like to touch girls in sexual ways. In the course of this conversation, Jamie blows up at the psychologist twice, physically intimidates her, and then taunts her for being afraid. 

From all this we are supposed to gather, with the good doctor, that Jamie’s violence toward women, from screaming to murder, has something—something societal, something systemic—to do with his dad’s penchant for sports, his grandfather’s taste for beer, and his own heterosexual impulses. What about the thousands of boys with beer-guzzling grandfathers, sports-fan fathers, and straight male libidos who do not murder female classmates in response to online slights? We’re not supposed to entertain that question. In the Rousseauian imagination of Adolescence, evil resides not in the eternal, individual human soul, but in the socially constructed, misogynist ether.

Finally, in episode four, Jamie’s dad explodes in anger at the neighborhood youths who vandalized his plumbing truck, shaking one of them by the collar and threatening him before throwing a can of paint at the ground in the parking lot of a hardware store. Later, he confesses to his wife that he tried to be better than his dad, who beat him with a belt; but, as the day’s events show, he ultimately failed because he still has a temper. In a last, heart-wrenching scene, the bereaved father tucks Jamie’s teddy bear into bed while offering a tortured apology to his son. 

The message is clear. Men who approximate what has traditionally passed for the virtuous iteration of masculinity—faithful marriage, well-fed family, blue-collar work—are, if they ever lose their tempers in ways that upper-middle-class women who become psychologists find jarring, self-evidently responsible for the creation of 13-year-old woman-killers. In progressive fantasyland, evil is not an endemic part of each individual’s human nature, but an omnipresent, amorphous outgrowth of patriarchy as manifested by Western men. 

Beware of cops, of plumbers, and of anyone who doesn’t look upon them, as upon all traditionally masculine men, with preemptive contempt.

Progressive Fantasy Is Not Reality

Michael Hogan writes in The Guardian that Adolescence “isn’t just all-too-plausible fiction” but “unavoidable fact.” 

Except it isn’t. 

The UK has indeed been facing an epidemic of stabbings. These crimes are typically perpetrated both by and against males between 15 and 24 from unstable families and/or living in poverty. So, in reality, contra the progressive imagination, the number of 13-year-old boys from two-parent homes plotting and planning to stab girls (let alone actually doing so) is vanishingly small. There’s no reason to think that will change.

Does this mean that 13-year-old boys from functional homes are unaffected by the growing “manosphere” online? That such boys would not benefit from more direct and meaningful engagement with their fathers and other male role models? That social media use is good for teenagers’ emotional and social development? 

Of course not. 

Indeed, if Adolescence would stay in its lane—”all-too-plausible fiction”—rather than perpetuate the blatant lie that Jamie is some kind of male prototype, the show might have engendered reflection and conversation along exactly these lines. But honest engagement with questions of manhood and masculinity does not interest today’s progressives. 

Writing in The Atlantic in February, Jill Filopovic offers an eloquent articulation of how the female-dominated left now views the old-school masculinity vilified by Adolescence. According to a traditional understanding of manhood, Filopovic allows, “real men are expected to provide for themselves and their families, protect those they love, and demonstrate the kind of moral fortitude that justifies their familial and social authority. There are all kinds of problems with this traditional model, and feminists like me are among the first to point them out. The masculinity of MAGA, though, is far worse: It rejects commitment and virtue, but still demands power and respect.”

Adolescence is powered by the progressive fantasy that there is some as yet untried third option. That we can reject men’s protection of others as sexist, denigrate high moral standards as relative, view marital and professional commitment as merely an individual lifestyle choice, and insist that men evince virtues no differently than women—and somehow produce a society that women like Filopovic would like to live in.

What mainstream feminists like Filopovic and progressives more broadly fail to realize is that the broad denigration of the “traditional model” for virtuous, protective, competent masculinity is precisely what leads, predictably and invariably, to the infantile, embittered, and entitled “masculinity of MAGA.” 

This is why near-universal respect for the traditional model was so dominant for so long. Until quite recently, almost no one in any position of influence was airheaded enough to believe that the cultural, political, and sexual manners and mores of most men would prove essentially indistinguishable from those of most elite, college-educated women if we just “smashed the patriarchy.” Until quite recently, most people understood that the indiscriminate, purposeless aggression and misogyny that Filopovic calls “MAGA masculinity” is not a more extreme iteration of yesteryear’s protective, authoritative patriarchy, but what inevitably emerges when you smash it. 

We should dignify, respect, and support males like Jamie’s dad—culturally, politically, and economically—for the hard and necessary work they do. Not just because the cultural elevation of traditional, Judeo-Christian-coded manhood militates against the misogyny of today’s manosphere (though this is empirically true), but also because traditional manhood is really just what unisex virtue tends to look like when manifested by males in modernity.

And if we fail—as we appear to be failing—to reinvigorate respect for traditional manhood at scale, will 13-year-olds begin knifing their female classmates en masse? Probably not. Contra Adolescence and its progressive fans, evil is the opposite of systemic. 

Just like each individual’s human experience, which is what great stories are supposed to convey.

The fictional Jamie is a complex, tragic character ensconced in a compelling, vivid ecology. That could have made for such an insightful, evocative tale. 

If only Adolescence had just told it.

The post A Juvenile Fantasy appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Even by 1960s standards, this was a lot of childhood freedom and responsibility. More than most of her friends got, and more than either of her younger siblings would get at the same age. 

I reached age 10 in 1997, also the oldest of three siblings. That was the point when I was finally permitted to ride my bike by myself around my neighborhood. I understood boundaries that stretched a little over half a mile in each of three directions, at the tip of one of which my paternal grandparents lived. Not until the summer of 1999, at nearly 12, would I be babysitting my siblings on my own. 

I thought then that my parents were overprotective. By the standards of the 1990s, they were. Other kids were riding their bikes around the neighborhood unaccompanied at eight, not 10, and watching siblings solo at ten, not 12. 

But by today’s standards, apparently, my parents were practically free range. 

According to a 2023 poll, only 50 percent of parents of nine to 11-year-olds today will allow their child to find an item in a grocery store when a parent is in another aisle. Just 33 percent will let their child walk or bike to a nearby friend’s house, and a mere 29 percent will permit their child to play unsupervised with a friend at a park. 

Apropos these new norms, a mother in Georgia was recently arrested for letting her 10-year-old son walk a mile from his home unaccompanied and without a tracker on his cell phone. Essentially, that is, for doing what even my parents allowed. Except that I had not only no tracker but also no cell phone. 

What explains this rapid shift in our perceptions of the appropriateness of 10-year-olds out and about unaccompanied? How did something so commonplace turn into a thing that inspires a call to the police? Of course, there are a multitude of explanations. I want to highlight one that I think is implicated in them all: The politicization and attendant secularization of nearly all aspects of American life, parenting chief among them. 

We are now possessed by a social-media-spawned cultural and political discourse in which the guardrails of decency and reason have fallen off on all sides. This impacts for the worse how we think (or don’t) about many things—among them childhood, adulthood, and the proper path from one to the other. 

Today, we no longer have any common understanding of what freedoms and responsibilities children ought to have and when. Moreover, we no longer have any common understanding of how and when people should achieve the increasingly indeterminate markers of personal, familial, and societal adulthood. The absence of accepted milestones on the way to becoming a well-functioning adult is in part a result of our collective failure to agree not only on what those markers ought to be, but on what respectable adulthood looks like. 

 Childhood Unbound

In 2008, when childhood freedom advocate Lenore Skenazy let her then nine-year-old son ride the New York City subway unaccompanied, she was not merely a parent near one end of an established, if unspoken, freedom and responsibility continuum (as both my maternal grandparents and my own parents were). Instead, Skenazy was a cultural lightning rod, dubbed “the worst mom ever” by many—and a heroic advocate for an old-fashioned childhood by others. This makes sense, since few 10-year-olds today are permitted even to play unsupervised at a park. 

As Jean Twenge argues in iGen, these lesser expectations of kids, in terms of both freedom and responsibility, have made the average 18-year-old of today about as capable as the average 14-year-old of 30 years ago. This, of course, perpetuates a vicious cycle: Kids are less mature because we fail to offer them opportunities to build competence, which leads us to deem them insufficiently competent for the next opportunities. 

The defining down of age-appropriate levels of competence and maturity begins early, due to a pervasive new norm of “gentle parenting. ” This was invented and is most holistically practiced by progressives, but conservatives are by no means impervious. The worldview from which this ethos springs dictates making excuses for immature or selfish behavior that previous generations expected kids to outgrow. 

It is now considered enlightened, for example, to treat the three-year-old who screams repeatedly in a restaurant “because she’s tired” (and thus can’t be expected to behave) like the one-year-old of not so long ago (i.e., just don’t take her to restaurants when she’s tired). It is similarly trendy to treat the five-year-old who “has so much energy” (that he doesn’t sit still when told to do so and is often rather free with his hands) like the three-year-old of generations past (i.e., avoid situations that require much sitting, and offer consistent and calm reminders about keeping our hands to ourselves). 

Having been permitted to act like an erstwhile one-year-old at three, and an erstwhile three-year-old at five, children are not deemed ready to act like even a comparatively sheltered erstwhile 10-year-old until they are teenagers. 

Yet, as the continuum for children’s freedom and responsibility has moved to demand less of them, it has also widened regarding what they (and the state) can demand on their alleged behalf. Mainstream educators cry “book banning” when parents attempt to excise pornographic material that would merit an “R” rating in a film from elementary school libraries. Activists insist that children have a “right” to the pronouns (and sometimes medications) of their choice without parental notification. 

As Abigail Shrier illustrates in Bad Therapy, medical doctors often ask children invasive questions—and mental health professionals even commence treating children—without parental consent. Indeed, the therapeutic establishment turns many of these minors into patients for life based on diagnoses of questionable, subjective ailments and identities—ones often opposed and rejected by their parents. Meanwhile, as family doctor Leonard Sax explains, parents in thrall to progressive theories of consent and bodily autonomy now allow their elementary school-aged children to refuse compliance with the doctor’s request to see a sore throat, such that he is unable to examine or treat them. 

Centrists and conservatives do push back on these expansions of childhood sovereignty. But our successes beyond our own children are limited, and our positions can seem to confound without a shared sense of what a well-functioning human adult is—a throughline that wide religious observance once provided. 

Conservatives are against genital mutilation under the guise of gender-affirming care even if the child’s parents are for it, which might require action from the state. Simultaneously, we want decent parents to have far more control over their children’s educational and political formation, and the state via the public schools to have far less. Finally, we know that compliance is prima facie the correct disposition to expect of children, given their youth and inexperience. 

But threading the needle between these positions requires a very clear distinction between what sorts of parenting imperatives it’s important to get right, and what sorts of parenting decisions it’s okay to leave at right for me. Progressives, when it comes to a vision of well-functioning adulthood, have no concept of “right;” for them, all “lifestyles” (including those that involve rights but not responsibilities) are created equal. Meanwhile, conservatives also won’t articulate a concept of “right” due to our own disagreements, contradictions, and shortcomings. Hence, “right for me” in all its ideological and identitarian illogic reigns supreme. 

As a result, we now live in a country where many 10-year-olds have access to R-rated reading and digital material, and to unnecessary, life-altering medications—but not to parental permission to ride a bike around the block. 

Adulthood Undefined

Part of why we are no longer clear about what kinds of freedoms and responsibilities are appropriate for children is because we are no longer clear about what kinds of freedoms and responsibilities are attendant to adulthood. For example: Are traditionally aged university students children, or are they adults? 

Until the 1960s, colleges related to students in loco parentis, assuming the position that though the students in their charge could and often did go to war, get married, and purchase alcohol, those students were, for their purposes, children. In the 1960s, colleges abandoned that posture, essentially conceding students’ freedom to engage in sexual activity without sneaking around. Ostensibly, this was an acknowledgment of students’ adulthood. But by the 1990s, there were Take Back the Night rallies everywhere, with many female students insisting on exactly the protections that had been abandoned several decades before—only, impossibly, without giving up any of their own sexual or logistical freedom. 

Now, 60 years removed from the sexual revolution, we try to maintain maximal autonomy but in a risk-free way. We offer students free condoms and workshops on consent. And trigger warnings on novels that depict racism or sexual violence. And safe spaces when conservative speakers come to campus. Today, the young people most privileged and poised for success are offered endless autonomy—but with no attendant intellectual, logistical, or other reality principle or responsibility. This makes sense, as we have prepared them throughout childhood not for actual life, but for a fraudulent simulator thereof. 

If that ended after college and led into the adult responsibility attendant to adult freedom (as it mostly did for people my age ), that might be largely harmless. But as Andrew Sullivan presciently pointed out nearly a decade ago, “we all live on campus now.” No wonder the kids—including and especially those who did not even attend college—are no longer growing up. 

No wonder they are not moving out, pairing up, and starting families of their own. When these things are all questions of mere lifestyle choice and identity, and when all lifestyles and identities are deemed equal, there is no universal mandate and no societal impetus to adopt the responsibility of adulthood. Just like there is no universal mandate and no societal impetus to make one’s children do so. 

After all, if adulthood as it was once understood is now merely an option, rather than a vocational necessity, why not let the five-year-old act like a three-year-old, and keep the 10-year-old as parentally protected as would befit an eight-year-old? It’s easier, and it’s way less scary. 

Talk about a vicious cycle. 

It is only if one is invested in the 10-year-old’s independent maturation—in his eventual ability to be a provider, protector, partner, and parent himself—that one will accept the hardship, the work, and the risk of judiciously preparing him to walk that mile. Literally and figuratively. 

Meanwhile, we increasingly live, parent, and relate to others (including children) within politically inflected cultural siloes. We relate ever less, and ever less well, to people who live, parent, and conceive of adulthood differently than we do. Parents who do not allow their 10-year-olds to fetch an item one aisle over in the grocery store tend to find one another. So do those within the growing cadre of people who deem providing, protecting, partnering, and parenting as unimportant markers of adulthood. Friends reinforce shared parenting priors and shared worldviews. 

As parents congregate in their like-minded silos, and kids have ever-less freedom, it is possible to be a rational adult without malice or rancor and call the police because a 10-year-old is out alone. This might really reflect the same sense of duty with which I might call the police if I saw a three-year-old out alone.

The fact that significant numbers of people now hold such a perspective is dangerous and divisive. It threatens both societal fracture and civilizational devolution. One ray of hope: Per Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly, those of us who reject an ideal of fragile childhood and undefined adulthood do tend to have more kids. 

My husband and I have our oldest turning 10 this year. Thanks to our Catholic parish and school, and to having had our first children in our 20s (uncommon among people of our educational and geographical background), we are fortunate to exist in a mild counterculture where it’s about 1998 in a whole host of respects—including the fostering of limited but growing freedom and responsibility for fourth graders. 

This is a counterculture that I hope will grow as my children do, as more thoughtful parents endeavor to raise capable adults. Preferably without undue fear of arrest. 

And admittedly, at least in my case, with one of those watches that keeps your kid off the Internet but renders him able to call you in an emergency and you able to track his whereabouts. 

I know, I know. But, as in all things, let’s be grown up enough not to let the perfect be the enemy of what we pray is the good enough.

The post When Parenting is Politicized appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Shalit argues that women’s lives and romantic prospects would be greatly improved if we eschewed the sexual libertinism suffusing popular culture and society, and re-embraced traditional mores predicated on sexual modesty instead. 

After the publication of A Return to Modesty, Shali briefly became a conservative darling and anti-establishment enfant terrible. It’s easy to see why. 

Twenty-five years after its publication, A Return to Modesty feels fresher than ever. 

First, Shalit’s once-novel polemic about the negative externalities of the sexual revolution for women has only been reified and reiterated by the past quarter century. Second, her insights about the multifaceted push toward androgyny are quite relevant to today’s debate over gender ideology. Third and finally, her extolling of modesty’s virtues offers us a way to resist those aspects of gender ideology that otherwise defy easy characterization.

The Case for Modesty

The term “sexual modesty,” on its face, conjures for most of us the regressive, didactic notion that women are responsible in a daily and banal way for the sexual morality of men. For example, self-described champions of modesty may appear to be arguing (and indeed, sometimes do argue) that eschewing short skirts and tank tops is the measure of women’s virtue. 

Shalit’s understanding of modesty, though, is much richer and more nuanced than this. It is not a superficial “damping down of allure” but a source of women’s self-protection and empowerment.

At bottom, Shalit is arguing that most women’s reticence about casual sex (in comparison to most men’s enthusiasm for it) is: (1) Natural rather than socially constructed, but subject to social deconstruction at the hands of a society hostile to women’s romantic hopes; (2) Predicated on a protective kind of preemptive embarrassment that makes many women rightly reluctant to be physically and emotionally vulnerable to men in the absence of love and/or commitment; (3) Under assault from a cultural mainstream that tries to make sex “no big deal” and encourages women to dress in a revealing way to accord with this premise; and (4) Actually far sexier and more satisfying for both women and men than either clinical “consent” or mere prudery. 

Per Shalit:

Today girls are generally brought up to assume that they have no special vulnerability, because that would be sexist. … Being as promiscuous as any man is taken to be a badge of one’s liberation … [but] it is precisely denying a woman’s special vulnerability and stripping her of her natural way of compensating for it that is the height of true misogyny.

If we teach women that they are the same as men when it comes to sex, they will feel inadequate when they are unable to treat sex as “no big deal.” But in fact, that female reticence to treat sex casually—otherwise known as modesty—is a protective armor meant to help women safeguard both their bodies and hearts for the “one” lifetime sexual partner most women still claim to want. 

If we encourage women to follow their natural impulses and treat sex as something significant, both they and the men will be better off. Romantically, spiritually—and also sexually. 

“Today modesty is commonly associated with sexual repression,” observes Shalit, “with pretending you don’t want sex though you really do. But this is a misunderstanding, a cultural myth spun by a society which vastly underrates sexual sublimation.” 

Shalit’s defense of modesty rests on the claim that so-called “women’s empowerment” predicated on the sexual revolution has sold women a bill of goods: “I propose that the woes besetting the modern young woman … are all expressions of a society that has lost its respect for female modesty.” 

If we recover a foundational understanding that “a woman’s experience of love and sex is fundamentally different from a man’s,” Shalit contends, we could save young women an enormous amount of heartache. We could also keep them from the pathologies that show up in too many of their lives around adolescence, from eating disorders to self-cutting. These self-harming behaviors, Shalit argues, are ways for girls to regain control of their bodies and their sexuality in a sexually permissive, amoral culture that seems to lay casual claim to both. 

These contentions are audacious and polemical now. But they were far more so in 1999—when it still seemed to some thinking women that “girl power” might not be actively disempowering. This was also before the religious right got its Bush-era moment to push purity culture content into the mainstream. 

Shalit explained to a jaded readership how and why the modern feminist consensus around sex (separating sex from love and marriage) is so unkind to women. She made crystal clear—in a way that cut through all the sacred cows—how the modern feminism that claimed to empower women and improve female well-being had done the opposite. 

Indeed, Shalit’s central argument would be rehabilitated—simplified, streamlined, and secularized—nearly 25 years later in Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. These two books, published nearly a quarter century apart, address the same fundamental flaw at the heart of a fraudulent feminist project that remains sadly and frustratingly hegemonic. 

Modesty and Gender Ideology

If Return to Modesty is enduring in its foundational claims, it is prophetic in its subtle anticipation of a far newer problem: Gender ideology. 

Twenty-five years ago—before Caitlyn Jenner, before “preferred pronouns,” and long before Lia Thomas—Shalit contended that there was a delicate symbiosis between conservatives’ shrugging “boys will be boys” and feminists’ insistence on clinical regulation of sex. Together, she recognized, these perspectives perpetuate an ideal of androgyny, which cuts against a sophisticated understanding of male/female sexual difference. A cultural respect for modesty, by contrast, is a way to avoid intrusive, legalistic regulation. 

When Shalit’s 1990s feminists drafted dating codes to prevent sexual assault while simultaneously proclaiming their freedom from sexual mores, they represented a living paradox: “On so many … modern college campuses, where there was such a concentration of unhappy women, everything was as nonsexist as could be. … We were as far from patriarchal rules as we could get. So, if we were supposed to be living in a nonsexist paradise, then why were so many of us this miserable?” 

Then as now, feminists believe that women and men should relate identically to romance, sex, and love. To the extent that the sexes remain distinct, it indicates to feminists that women need better protection against victimization at the hands of men, and further liberation from “the patriarchy’s” regressive and oppressive expectations of women and their sexuality. 

Meanwhile, when Shalit’s 1990s conservatives snigger at feminist insistence on dating codes and the like to prevent sexual assault, they are in effect rejecting the idea that women are different from men in any way save the obvious, physically self-evident ones. This is one short step away, Shalit sagely implies, from conceding that womanhood is “just breasts and lipstick.” That is, a set of appendages and styles that can be adopted (or not) at will. 

For the libertarian-leaning, “College Republican” intelligentsia of Shalit’s college years (which uncannily resembled today’s less than erudite “bar stool conservative,” Trumpian right in its indifference to sexual morality, and morality generally), women “freed” by the sexual revolution should be expected to take care of themselves. Just like the men to whom they ostensibly want to be genuinely equal. These conservatives of Shalit’s era (which included, in this respect, its “pro-sex feminists”) argued for their part that men and women are, in essence, physically different but intellectually the same. 

When this is the best that many conservatives can do—as it was in 1999 and ultimately remains today—it is easy to see the essential prescience of Shalit’s insight. 

Clearly, the ubiquity of what she terms the “androgynous project” left us with few cultural guardrails, even on the right, against the recent infiltration of transgender identification and its demands. 

Modesty and Freedom

With recasts of Title IX and discussions about “biological women,” we are now trying to justify the prohibition of male intrusion into female spaces. 

Many, myself included, find the notion of men undressing in women’s locker rooms and of women being forced to undress in front of “fully intact” men (as the collegiate swimmers sharing a locker room with trans-woman Lia Thomas regularly had to do) unconscionable. We, the sensible majority, tend to cast our objection as a matter of common-sense physical safety: a basic and time-tested response to the obvious physical differences between men and women. 

Allowing some men, regardless of how they “identify,” into women’s private spaces, endangers all women. Both by opening the literal door to potential predators and by militating against women’s own intuition of danger. This perspective makes it easy for us to advocate for women’s physical protections, without conceding anything in the way of women’s need for any protections beyond the strictly physical. 

Maybe too easy. And maybe not entirely honest. 

After all, even if Thomas posed no threat of sexual assault, and even if he were the only man admitted to the women’s locker room such that no such threat was ever posed, many of us would remain adamant that collegiate women should not be expected to undress in front of him. Indeed, it could be persuasively argued that Thomas did pose no physical threat, given the team environment and the group dynamic attending the locker room. 

But this changes not at all our conviction that forcing young women to undress in Thomas’ presence as a condition of maintaining their standing as collegiate athletes is unjust. And, no, we would not feel similarly if the situation were reversed: men who need for some reason to undress in front of a woman (identifying as male or otherwise) do not evoke on their own behalf any particular empathy, outrage, or pity. 

How can we explain this double standard, once we admit that it’s not purely about risk mitigation? 

Modesty. 

Shalit understands sexual modesty as a mature female adaptation containing spiritual and psychological elements rooted in but not encapsulated by the physical. To be fully equal, women require something beyond deference to just the vulnerability of our physical bodies. We require mores that respect how our bodily vulnerability is reflected in a kind and degree of embarrassment at exposure that is as debilitating psychologically as the exposure itself could be physically.

Thus, the concept of modesty offers us an understanding of sexual difference that goes beyond strictly physical safety, but without addressing ourselves to the faux-progressive emotional “safety” at which conservatives (rightly) chafe.

Modesty gives us a language and a conceptual framework in which to make this admission without fear of excess. Why does the admission have to be forced? What is the excess we fear? I’ll speak for myself and hazard a guess that many of my fellow right-leaning women feel similarly. 

After the vice-presidential debate, there was widespread feminist ire at the fact that JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, had interrupted the female debate moderators. “There was no way that Vance wasn’t going to interrupt and talk over two female moderators,” wrote feminist journalist Jessica Valenti on X. 

Yes, Vance had spoken over the female moderators. After those female moderators had broken the agreed-upon debate rules by (incorrectly) fact-checking him but not his opponent, and then trying to “shush” him when he pointed out their rule violation. 

To call “sexism” after an incident like this one—in which women voluntarily enter the public arena, behave dishonorably, and are called out for it by a man just as another man would be—is to demand special treatment for women. 

This is disempowering, infantilizing, and undermining. For those of us who believe that women are actually adults, not little girls, this “feminist” assumption of “special treatment when it suits us” is enraging. 

It also calls to mind the excesses of “Me Too,” in which women who embraced the freedom to consent to sex one moment regretted their consent the next—and then traded on feminine credulity to accuse their male partners of something between “verbal coercion” and forcible assault. 

Modesty offers us a way to separate circumstances like Thomas’ locker room (in which a woman must be accorded a distinct level of physical deference in order to be made equal) from circumstances like Vance’s debate (in which a woman needs to be held to the same standards of professionalism as a man). 

In between, of course, there remains a private sphere in which men can behave like boors and still be protected by law—but would not be protected from social censure if we embraced Shalit’s tenets. 

Everyone should care about the violation of women’s private spaces, and about men’s socially sanctioned reduction of women to sexual commodities. Our collective inability to articulate this imperative in a broadly persuasive way betrays a culture that is, per Shalit, trying to “cure womanhood itself.” And too often, nearly succeeding. 

After all, even among today’s centrists and conservatives (myself included), the word and the concept of “modesty” is far from top of mind. 

All the more reason why it, like engagement with Shalit’s book, is long overdue for a comeback.

The post Liberation from Libertinism appeared first on Law & Liberty.

He asks her only one: “What ever happened to Gary Cooper?” 

Contrasting what he perceives as the self-indulgent emotionalism of therapy with the stoicism epitomized by Cooper’s roles in Westerns and war films, Tony persists, “Now that was an American.” 

As the six-season series begins, Tony, barely 40, is reaching the heights of his career as boss of a Family, well aware that he has arrived personally even as both the mafia and the country face decline. At any given time, several “friends of ours” are failing to adhere to “omerta” (the mafia code of silence) and are instead feeding information to the FBI in exchange for immunity and other spoils. Relatedly, both within and outside Tony’s underworld, reliable men have become hard to find. 

What Ever Happened to Gary Cooper?

Tony’s late father, Johnny, was an absentee tough guy who gave Tony’s dog away to his mistress’ son. His uncle, Junior, is an insecure petulant who tries to kill his nephew out of jealousy. His fledgling heir apparent, Christopher, is a self-aggrandizing drug addict. Old guard mafiosos released from prison attempt to undermine Tony’s reign, hoping to perpetuate an insular and belligerent way of doing business that is no longer workable. Finally, the youngest mafiosos at the turn of the millennium are by turns ungovernable, lazy, insouciant, and stupid. Tony’s own son, Anthony Junior (AJ) is all of the above, having inherited all of his father’s egotism without developing any of his strength. 

From this bleak vantage point, Tony’s idealization of Gary Cooper’s all-American movie roles, to which he pays continued homage throughout the series, is best understood as an expression of confusion, dismay, and self-loathing in the face of a nascent crisis of masculinity. Twenty-five years later, this same subject dominates both educated discourse and lived reality.

With boys falling behind in school and young men floundering in life, concern about America’s men, and our dismal prospects as a nation if we do not fix what ails them, has rightly reached a fever pitch. 

On the left, educators and others fret over so-called “toxic masculinity,” liberally defined as a near-ubiquitous and endemic socialization into misogyny, homophobia, and lesser treatment of women, that rely on violence or the threat of violence for both domination and self-justification. They worry, that is, over the continued cultural influence of real-life men more or less like the fictional Tony and his mafia compatriots. 

Meanwhile, in the center and on the right, traditional parents and others express concern over a devolution of childhood independence, academic standards, and behavioral expectations that is often decried as males’ “feminization,” but is more accurately understood as a universal infantilization that disproportionately impacts boys and men. 

A quarter century ago, when these problems of American masculinity were evident but not yet as ubiquitous or prominent in public discourse, The Sopranos offered some prescient—and, as yet, wholly unheeded—insights into how we began to foster so much malaise and malevolence among our young men. 

The New Toxic Masculinity

Who and what is to blame for American males’ decline, according to the show?

First, there are twenty-first-century American men, like Tony, who want to have their cannoli and eat it, too. For many baby boomers of various backgrounds, the capacity to retain the distinctive fumes of an ethnic identity that no longer delimits or demands anything of them while also accessing the full spoils of American wealth and decadence is too tempting to resist. 

So, they don’t resist it. 

At one point in season four, Tony takes his teenage son, AJ, for a ride around blighted parts of Newark. He stops in front of St. Elzear’s, the Catholic church in whose literal and figurative shadow he spent his early childhood. The father waxes nostalgic about how, back when the neighborhood was “a hundred percent Italian” his grandfather, a stonemason, came over from Avelino and helped to build this beautiful building. Italians from all over the area, Tony tells AJ, still travel here on Sundays to worship. “Then how come we never do?” AJ asks.

Tony offers no reply. Perhaps in part because any true response would involve explaining to his son that his visits to Newark’s roughest neighborhoods involve housing fraud, making him complicit in the crime-ridden reality that he blames on predominantly Black residents.

Tony exemplifies the combination of misplaced pride and bombastic self-deception that leads away from any coherent, prosocial iteration of traditionally old-world manhood, and also from any new-world, American version of the same. 

In a statement simultaneously exculpatory and damning, Melfi declares that Tony is, “in spite of everything, a very conventional man.” Still, for him, the proximate problem of floundering manhood is a self-consciously ethnic one. His identity is rooted in an urban Italian-Americanism that was beginning to break up and suburbanize even during his own 1960s childhood. Options have now proliferated for Italian Americans but in Tony’s mind, the question of how he makes a living is still primarily an issue of Italian-American identity. Is he a valiant soldier in a pre-modern social order sanctified by its origination in the “poverty of the mezzojiorno, where all higher authority was corrupt,” or a common criminal reaping the material spoils of continued affiliation with la cosa nostra? Tony’s specific problems are indeed unique to him: most people (including most Italian-descended people) are not and never were involved in organized crime.

But, for The Sopranos writ large, the question of how to negotiate between self-actualization and assimilation in a newly integrated world with common expectations and standards for the culturally, linguistically, and culinarily distinct descendants of once-separate groups draws its narrative power from its multiracial, multiethnic universality. It is an issue of American identity. Specifically, American male identity. 

After all, it is no coincidence that the most reliable “soldier” in the Soprano family under the age of about 55, is 30-something Furio Giunta, who is not Italian American at all, but Italian, having been brought over from Italy. 

Unlike Tony and his fellow New Jersey natives, Furio is not plagued by questions about who he is or why he makes a living through violence and criminality. Because unlike Tony, Furio actually is a “soldier.” 

Unburdened by liberty, a true member of a pre-modern social order in which his fate was sealed before birth, Furio is psychologically free. Whereas Tony cannot help feeling at least passing empathy for the strippers whom the proper execution of his business interests requires treating like so much refuse (after all, he has a daughter their age, and caste doesn’t work in the new world quite like it does in the old one), Furio can deftly smash one woman’s cheek in with a baseball bat in a given moment, and then treat other women with a gentleness and courtesy literally foreign to his American compatriots the next. He sees no conflict therein because, for him, there isn’t one.

Thus, The Sopranos makes poignantly and abundantly clear that Tony’s problem is not really whether his once-other world will merge with the wider American story, but that it has already done so—and by his own hand. Neither the mafia nor the nation is profiting as a result because the men within the mafia are much the same as the men outside it: whiny, excuse-mongering, and underachieving. 

Beginning with Tony. 

Depressive inclinations notwithstanding, Tony is “larger than life,” a generational leader with an outsized capacity to influence reality at will. He comes to power so young, while building a seemingly conventional upper-middle-class life, because he is uncommonly smart and exerts tremendous initiative. Tony is also far more comfortable and capable, and more interested and interesting, outside the parochial confines of his own world than anyone else he knows—and far more so than his wife or his oldest friends. We see this time and again through his interactions with his daughter’s Ivy League classmates and business associates of various backgrounds.

Yet, with all these gifts and talents at his disposal, Tony chooses to spend his energy reminding himself that he’s a “soldier,” allegedly without agency in his choices. He lands in Melfi’s office because there is a cognitive dissonance between his interior reality—in which he knows full well he’s no Southern Italian peasant fighting corrupt authority, but a “crook from New Jersey” who took the easy way out—and the fatalistic lie he has to curate for himself in order to cope. 

In America, Tony, like all of us, ultimately bears the burden of his own self-determination. He wishes he didn’t know this, because then life would be as simple for him as it appears to be for Furio. 

Or, better yet, for the all-American Gary Cooper, whose all-American mother presumably never tried to have him killed. 

The New Devouring Motherhood

Who are the second group of people to blame for American men’s malaise, according to The Sopranos? Psychotherapy’s oldest scapegoats, and ultimately the weightiest influencers of both men and nations: mothers. 

Throughout the series, two different women—Livia, Tony’s mother, and Carmela, his wife—are studied and found deeply wanting as mothers of men. 

Livia is a narcissistic, borderline personality who colludes in a plot to have her son killed because she is angry that he placed her in the area’s most luxurious retirement home. The show’s original villain, and the alleged source of her son’s depression and panic attacks, she epitomizes the ancient “devouring mother” archetype in which children exist only as an extension of the mother, who deeply resents their developing affection or loyalty for anything or anyone else. 

Livia belittles Tony incessantly because she takes his embrace of any idea, habit, or joy that stretches beyond the limits of her fatalistic insularity as a personal affront. Her only pleasure is in being revered, and she is hostile to anyone or anything that challenges her conviction about life, which is that “it’s all a big nothing.” All, that is, except her own solipsistic anxieties and fears, and her insistence that everyone and everything else revolve around them. 

To have grown up in 1990s America with great-grandparents who came from the old world—as I, like Tony’s children, did—is to know many lightweight versions of Livia Soprano (and with the benefit of generational distance to see their endemic limitations). 

No, my Italian American grandmother never tried to kill my father. On the contrary, she adored him—and me. But, when babysitting me, she frequently closed her eyes, made the sign of the cross, and intoned a fervent request: “Please, holy Mary, mother of God, take me now.” This typically occurred in response to my preschool misbehavior, which she apparently took personally. At four, I understood that this had something to do with her being old—which was, in my ethnic-descended family, synonymous with “old world.” No one my mother’s age, I knew, would ever express a desire to die because a young child was being disobedient. 

After all, modern American mothers are too reasonable for the kind of operatic psychodrama that can, years later, bring a physically strong and mentally tough man like Tony literally to his knees. They are better acquainted with children’s psychology, focused on the future rather than the past, and more concerned about their sons’ holistic well-being than about their own emotional needs. 

Or, at least, so it would seem at first glance.

Carmela, Tony’s wife and AJ’s mother, is in many ways Livia’s opposite. Whereas Livia expects her son to live for her, catering to her comforts and whims while demanding nothing from her, Carmela appears to live for her son, catering to his comforts and whims while demanding nothing from him. 

When AJ gets expelled from high school for breaking into a teacher’s office and stealing a test, Tony panics over his son’s downward trajectory and initiates meetings with military academies. But Carmela doesn’t want to send AJ away. She refers to the 16-year-old as “still a child” in an expression of maternal concern that seems markedly different from Livia’s. She ostensibly wants to preserve rather than destroy her son. 

Carmela routinely accepts the teenage AJ’s surliness and arrogance toward her and others. She intervenes for him when he gets into further academic and behavioral trouble at school (even to the point of alleging, in a predominantly Italian community no less, the cringe-worthy excuse of anti-Italian discrimination) rather than letting him suffer the consequences of his own actions. And, far from requiring that he adhere to basic standards of politeness, decency, and industry as a condition of residing in her home, she issues only the needy, pathetic request that he “involve [her] in [his] life a little.” 

At bottom, Carmela’s iteration of devouring motherhood is just as self-centered, and just as destructive, as Livia’s. Instead of killing her son outright, she does so on the installment plan by ensuring that he is unfit to live a life worthy of the name. 

Carmela centers AJ’s erstwhile place in her heart and home as “a child” over the place to which he should aspire in the wider world as a man—in this way if no other like his father, who fights for life with every fiber of his being because (morally insupportable methods for doing so aside) he takes responsibility for others. 

To be living and raising sons a quarter century after The Sopranos premiered, as I am, is to recognize that Carmela’s version of maternal vampirism—catering to one’s own emotions by putting faux-egalitarian, emotive closeness with one’s children ahead of the authoritative shepherding of their broader development—now dominates our culture’s orientation to child-rearing. Today, it is common to accept the false notion, codified as “gentle parenting,” that it is wise for parents to respond first and foremost to children’s feelings rather than to their behaviors. 

As a result, we now cultivate rampant immaturity and fragility among our young men, whose lack of biological markers for adulthood and comparative physical invulnerability make them less resilient than young women in the face of infantilization. Today, ever more American men resemble AJ, and ever fewer resemble Tony.

Is there a third and better option? Can we help young males find a path beholden to neither toxic masculinity nor aimless extended adolescence? 

The Sopranos offers no grounds for optimism. In the end, Tony is dead, and AJ is something far less than fully alive. But it does offer a hint about what we might try.

When Tony mourns the obsolescence of Gary Cooper, he is lamenting the lack of moral clarity and self-control that he, despite all his cynicism, rightly idealizes as “American.” And when he glories in the majesty of St. Elzear’s, he is really grieving the patient upward mobility exemplified by his grandfather, who valorized honest work for modest rewards. 

For Tony, Gary Cooper remains a symbol of American idealism and specifically “WASP,” nonethnic American folklore, just like St. Elzear’s remains a symbol of the uniquely immigrant work ethic. Thus, he can claim sufficient distance from each to profess disingenuous bewilderment about where these admirable touchstones have gone. 

Because what really happened to Gary Cooper is that Tony failed to emulate him, and Carmela failed to raise him. Not because Cooper was white and Protestant, while they are arguably neither. And not because the virtues Cooper represents are old-fashioned. 

It’s because the paths of least resistance—in this case, so-called toxic masculinity and the devouring motherhood that overcorrects for it—are always easier than those of delayed gratification and self-determination. 

Today, as AJ becomes more of an American male prototype than not, maybe it’s long past time that we stop asking “What happened to Gary Cooper?” and instead reinvent him in our racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse image—with Tony’s perception of his values intact. 

The Sopranos earned its place as arguably the iconic all-American story in part because it presciently showed that the responsibility attendant to freedom really does belong to us all, no matter where we came from. 

We continue to believe otherwise at American men’s—and, therefore, at the whole nation’s—deepening peril. 

The post Masculinity, Motherhood, and American Moxie appeared first on Law & Liberty.

The longstanding progressive contention is that, per mainstream feminist Jill Filipovic, “women are having fewer babies because they have more choices.” But this notion is given the lie by studies showing that women today are having not just fewer babies than women used to, but fewer babies than they want.

Educated women are uniformly expected to take professional formation more seriously than they take family formation. Moreover, modern motherhood is popularly understood to be—and often is—extremely difficult and profoundly lonely. Consequently, regret about having not prioritized motherhood when facing waning fertility in one’s late 30s and early 40s is commonly felt, but rarely expressed.

Meanwhile, the economic and cultural peril wrought by below-replacement fertility is a horrifying specter with which few of us are prepared to grapple, and for which even fewer of us can propose any feasible solution.

So, a pressing question emerges: How can the West both retain the fruits of modernity (as defined by advanced medicine, equality for women, and the like) and also make motherhood appealing (that is, convince more women with a range of options to give birth more times, despite what Filopovic accurately identifies as today’s broader range of female choices)?

Here’s one answer: Honest feminists, who are willing to put women’s and families’ well-being ahead of mainstream feminist zeitgeist, should endorse and seek to incentivize religious participation.

Religious affiliation is correlated with fertility: In 2015, American women identifying as Christian gave birth to an average of 2.2 children while those identifying as unaffiliated gave birth to an average of 1.7. Among Jewish women, those claiming Judaism as a religion as well as an ethnicity have an average of 1.7 children, whereas those who identify as Jewish but claim no religion have an average of 1. Greater religiosity as defined by observance also correlates with more children: Orthodox Jewish women have an average of 3.3, while those that identify as conservative and reform have an average of 1.8 and 1.4, respectively. Religious practice is correlated with fertility as well: In 2016, women who practiced no religion gave birth to an average of just under 2.5 children, while women who attended religious services at least once per week gave birth to closer to 3.5. Meanwhile, the propensity of more educated women to have fewer children can be offset by religious practice. In Britain and France in 2021, highly educated women who claimed no religious faith had given birth to an average of 1.85 children, while highly educated women who practice Catholicism had given birth to an average of 2.45.

Attempting a great awakening and an attendant increase in fertility would require three changes of intellectual and practical orientation on the part of those who want to change feminism from within.

First, we need to get a lot more comfortable with a “shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll still land among the stars” concept of sexual morality, rather than expecting every decision of our own to be validated by every institution in which we participate.

Many religious institutions set the bar for sexual morality high enough that most believers have always failed to reach it. That is not a reason to eschew religion. After all, most of us also fail to love our neighbor quite as ourselves; but no one, as far as I know, deems social justice pointless for this reason. Why should sexual morality be any different?

At age 30 in 1993, in an interview with America Magazine, Andrew Sullivan, a practicing Catholic and a gay man who was a revolutionary voice for marriage equality in the 1990s and 2000s, offered this reflection on sexual sin: “I know that there are many things within homosexual life that can be wrong—just as in heterosexual life they can be wrong. There are many things in my sexual and emotional life that I do not believe are spiritually pure, in any way.”

Sullivan’s capacious understanding is one that those presently taking mainstream feminism to task for its total elimination of sexual mores that protect women’s unique vulnerability would do well to adopt: We can acknowledge our own impurity without either self-hatred or insistence on its reclassification as purity. That is, the religious standard of sexual morality need not change in order for those who do not meet said standard to find a home in a religious community.

I met my husband and many of my college friends and acquaintances in the Catholic student center of our hyper-progressive, non-sectarian, Ivy League university. Universally bucking the trend among similarly educated peers, almost all of our cohort got married before age thirty; many, like my husband and me, were in our mid-twenties. Now in our mid-thirties, all of us have at least two children, and many of us have three or more.

Most of us (like most church-attending people throughout history) would not have passed muster at a purity ball.

Still, most of us could distinguish between virtue and vice as our religion defined them (regardless of which side we were on at a given moment). Moreover, most of us spent a lot more time on the virtuous side of the divide (and, well, time with a lot fewer people and a lot more future spouses on the less virtuous side) than our secular peers.

So, in the end: We married in churches and had children whom we baptized and took to mass—becoming civically indistinguishable from saints, and paragons of the countercultural fertility that many critics of mainstream feminism want to incentivize.

Second, we need to reject the orthodoxy of “personal choice” by acknowledging the shallow nihilism of many who embrace the tenets of mainstream feminism unto an eternal “child-free” existence and the civic responsibility of many who answer the call to birth and to raise the next generation are not morally neutral “choices.”

When a mainstream feminist like Jill Filopovic contends, not unjustifiably, that women are having fewer children (and fewer women are having children) in part because we have more choices, we need to get comfortable responding: Sure, but (due acknowledgment of the slim minority of childless people that forego parenthood in pursuit of a different and equally worthy mission aside) some choices are better—more socially useful, and more civically worthy—than others. There is societal value for all in the rearing of the next generation, even though its work is disproportionately undertaken by some. There is only individual value for some (and dubious value at that) in the freedom of the “child free” to pursue unimpeded hedonism.

In her 2013 book, Adam and Eve After the Pill, Mary Eberstadt insightfully argues that we have stripped sex of its moral valences only to project those judgments onto food. Once, mainstream Westerners prized virginity and had never heard of veganism. Today, most of us look at vegans with a certain admiration and at regular fast-food eaters with some derision; but our disposition toward virgins is neutral to contemptuous and the mainstream embrace of sexual practices like polyamory is becoming a new cultural frontier. So, we remain capable of making judgments, but we are selective about where we focus our judgmental attention.

I am confident, for example, that Filopovic would probably not celebrate that fewer people consume whole, unprocessed foods today because we have more choices. We all know that bananas are better for us—and for everyone—than Cheetos.

Well, married parenthood of multiple kids is like bananas: Once, it was the only option; now, it is the ideal option, regardless of whether it seems like the tastiest one.

Third and finally, we need to recognize the profound limitations of intellectual argumentation and individual persuasion to simultaneously impact familial, social, and civic phenomena like people’s willingness to embrace a(nother) child.

In “The Case for One More Child,” published in Plough in 2021, Ross Douthat makes an argument for greater fertility among married couples that, in its fundamental reliance on the Christian concept of a vocational call to holiness, underlines the futility of any secular argument for the same.

After explaining that it would be good to make larger families more affordable, and thus to instigate a virtuous cycle of child-friendly policies that lead to larger families that in turn lead to even more child-friendly policies, Douthat gets down to the fundamentals: “If I didn’t have kids there’s a 5 percent chance that I’d be doing something more radical in pursuit of sainthood; there’s a 95 percent chance that I’d just be a more persistent sinner, a more selfish person, because no squalling infant or tearful nine-year-old is there to force me to live for her and not myself.”

In other words: For the normal and normative and not particularly saintly among us, the stewardship and offering of well-loved and well-enough-raised children is best understood as a disposition of generosity toward God and His world.

Having acknowledged this, Douthat ends his argument for more kids on a rather pessimistic note: “The large family as a spiritual discipline, children as a life hack that might crack the door of heaven—if that’s the worldview required to make our society capable of reproducing itself again, then we’re waiting not for child tax credits, better work-life balance, or more lenient car-seat laws, but for a radical conversion of our hardened modern hearts.”

Well, yes and no.

I posit that the willingness to embrace a(nother) child might actually be less about the worldview one imbibes than about the particular corner of the world in which one lives. This is why infusing religious practice into more people’s lives, regardless of what beliefs they ultimately hold, might be the most important prong in a return to prioritizing family formation and growth.

I was 27, 29, and 33 when I had each of my three children. I am 36 now, and my fourth child will arrive in a few weeks. I am the first to acknowledge that modern motherhood, with its assumption of total self-sufficiency and its lack of practical communal support, is not easy. Not even for people like me, who are blessed with physical health, nearby and relatively young parents, and financial security—much less for women lacking any or all of these assets.

Still, I have never experienced the existential loneliness in motherhood that so many women my age have experienced. Partly, that’s because every time I had a baby, I had at least one friend, and usually far more than one, due in the same year—along with many friends, themselves mothers of two and three and four children, offering me hand-me-downs, gifts, and advice. Relatedly, I understood even in the throes of sleep deprivation that the work and sacrifice of motherhood is not so much a personal choice as it is a civic service.

For these communal and spiritual realities that have made my experience of motherhood so much easier, I have the routine, communal practice of Catholicism—even more than its tenets, teachings, or beliefs—to thank.

The sexual revolution begot cultural sterilization because it first begot the cultural atomization of secularization. A feminist embrace of religious practice would represent a valiant attempt to make (earlier) marriage and (increased) fertility cool again. After all, if feminism is about helping women fulfill their ambitions, and one prevailing ambition among women today is to mother more children, then the feminist embrace of institutional religion should be a no-brainer to anyone who puts women’s actual well-being ahead of mainstream feminist ideology.

Not to mention that the resultant bump in fertility might help Western society to survive, and perhaps even to thrive, in the globally complex world that is already here.

The post Why Modern Motherhood Needs Religion appeared first on Law & Liberty.

In 1993, Roiphe’s controversial contention was both reflective and constitutive of “pro-sex feminism.” This orientation had undergirded the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s but had been, since the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s, uniformly marginalized in favor of what Roiphe termed “a new bedroom politics” of “just say no,” “no means no,” and sexual “trauma and disease.” This new politics often demonized men while patronizing women. For Roiphe, a feminist emphasis on sexual danger reflects an alarmingly infantilizing and neo-Victorian return to an obsession with womanhood as “delicate,” with “pure intentions and wide eyes.” 

In perhaps the most forceful passage of her uniformly powerful polemic, Roiphe chides feminists for their insistence that verbal coercion into sex constitutes rape because “lurking beneath this definition of rape is that men are not just physically but intellectually and emotionally more powerful than women.” Roiphe continues her rebuke:

We should not nurture this woman on her back, her will so mutable, so easily shaped; we should not support her in her passivity. We are not this woman on her back. We do not have the mind of an eleven-year-old in the body of a twenty-year-old. All competent female college students are compromised by the association of gullibility, low self-esteem, and the inability to assert ourselves with our position in relation to men. … Allowing verbal coercion to constitute rape is a sign of tolerance toward the ultrafeminine stance of passivity. … Whether or not we feel pressured, regardless of our level of self-esteem, the responsibility for our actions is still our own.

Three decades after The Morning After, the book remains relevant, controversial, and confounding. 

This is in part because Roiphe’s seminal defense of women’s sexual agency, of which the above passage is the provocative crux, renders seemingly inextricable what are really two distinct arguments. The first, about women’s sexual indistinguishability from men, has proven too influential for our own good; the second, about women’s intellectual parity with men, has been utterly ignored, much to our detriment. 

Roiphe’s foundational contention is that women’s physical vulnerability in relation to men (which, like everyone in 1993, she did acknowledge as a biological reality) requires no unique legal protections, nor should it inspire any gendered social mores. In Roiphe’s view, women’s unequal sexual danger is an acceptable price for our equal sexual freedom: “Sex might be dangerous, but then so [is] driving a car.” 

The presumption that women’s admittedly unique physical vulnerability requires no particular legal or social deference has mostly prevailed across American culture in the decades since The Morning After. Indeed, at women’s great expense, it is this assumption that undergirds today’s feminist consensus around trans issues in ways that Roiphe could not have foreseen and likely did not intend. 

Across the country, female students and their parents are fighting to maintain our daughters’ privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms, as well as their safety and victories on athletic fields. Boys and men who identify as trans girls and women spike balls with dangerous force, steal athletic championships and records, and invade intimate spaces where women should be entitled to the same privacy and safety that men enjoy in their bathrooms and locker rooms (not to mention their prisons and shelters). As political and cultural commentator Bridget Phetasy recently argued in Unherd, “A generation of women is being taught to disregard the fear that they might feel in a threatening situation.” They are “being called bigots” if they insist that the nonconsensual admission of biological men to the spaces where women undress puts women in real danger. 

It does not do to exclaim in equality’s name that girls and women who identify as trans boys and men can enter male spaces just as their male counterparts can enter female ones; the politically inconvenient but empirically indisputable truth is that boys and men are in virtually no physical danger from girls and women, trans or otherwise. And it does not do to counter that most men, including most men who identify as women, are not sexual predators. No, most men (including those who identify as women) do not pose a threat to women. But those individuals who do pose any threat to others—women or men—are overwhelmingly male. Moreover, as 2017’s “#MeToo” movement and any broad acquaintance with history makes clear, the threats that a substantial minority of men can and do pose to women differ in kind and degree from those that virtually any woman is likely to pose to others. As a result, the blanket admission of men into women’s spaces means that women are correct to be anxious about the potential danger that newly lurks in the very places where it is ethical, prudent, and customary to ensure that we are protected from male lurkers. 

Roiphe’s screed against special legal or cultural protections for women’s bodies proved so persuasive that we have invited a reality in which women are the only people without any basic protections at all. For Roiphe, of course, nonconsensual invasion remained distinct from consensual encounters. But once the idea of women as not just the equals of men but sexually indistinguishable from men took root, it proved to have a trajectory to which few of us would ever have consented. 

The second, related but distinct, strand of Roiphe’s argument was clearly, with 30 years’ hindsight, prophetic. It is that if to any extent women are more apt than men to be agreeable, easily influenced, or intellectually dominated (whether due to biological predisposition or, as Roiphe would no doubt contend, to cultural norms), there should be no intellectual or psychological accommodation made within educational institutions (in class or outside of it) for these deficiencies. Nor should we misappropriate the language of progressivism to pretend that such weaknesses are really strengths. When Roiphe’s friend complains that class discussion is too “phallogocentric” to make space for female voices and Roiphe counters that she always talks in class, the friend responds, “That’s because you have a masculine style of thinking.” 

So much for feminism’s alleged presumption of academic equality between men and women. Roiphe assumes women’s intellectual parity with men, as do I; feminists in good standing, apparently, do not. 

But any feminism that denigrates reason itself as the sole province of dominating men while elevating utopian musings as the rightful province of other-regarding women is patently against women’s equality. The human capacity for reason is what separates us from the lower animals; women are every bit as human as men. Feminists who redefine sentiment as morally superior to reason in an attempt to exempt their ideas from the thrust and parry of intellectual debate, instead imposing their cultural preferences by fiat, are asking not for equality but for special—infantilizing and subhuman—treatment. Two-year-olds have “voices.” So do dogs. But most of us don’t believe that morality requires equating toddler tantrums or canine yaps to substantive argument. 

Sadly, we are left today with an iteration of “feminism” that insists on protection from ideas that might offend and simultaneously elevates the feelings of the ostensibly marginalized over any facts that might refute those feelings. This approach, against which Roiphe argued so presciently thirty years ago, now defines not just feminist discourse but progressive political discourse as a whole. The patronizing presumption of women’s and other historically marginalized groups’ incapacity to hold their own in an unmediated competition of ideas reflects the very prejudices that proponents of this intellectual protectionism allegedly deplore: sexism, racism, heteronormativity, and so on.

“Trigger warnings” slapped on the front of Greek myths and concessions to omit any descriptions of rape in criminal law classes infantilize women and stoke the very anxiety they are meant to ease. “Feminist” and “antiracist” classrooms that decenter knowledge and argument in favor of impressions and experiences cultivate the impression of women and racial minorities as less authoritative and capable than white men. “Some feminisms,” per Roiphe, “are better than others.” Indeed, we have been elevating the wrong feminisms in academia for nearly half a century. As a result, we are now elevating the wrong progressive politics more broadly, as well.

Take the kangaroo courts on college campuses that “try” collegiate men for often unfounded accusations of sexual assault. These circuses are a national disgrace. In addition to ruining the college and career prospects of many demonstrably innocent (and disproportionately minority) young men, they manage to simultaneously encompass both our disdain for women’s physical safety and our sycophantic devotion to their psychological comfort. 

It was, after all, the 1960s and 1970s feminists’ total lack of regard for women’s unique physical vulnerability that created the “date rape” crisis in the first place. By throwing their lot in with the sexual revolution’s “free love” ethos, eliminating colleges’ “in loco parentis” authority, and embracing co-ed dorms and unisex bathrooms, second-wave feminists put women in constant danger. The single-sex dorms and proprietary rules of yore may indeed have made some young women feel infantilized and overprotected. But their purpose was to offer female students access to the intellectual formation of a college education without subjecting them to the predictable indignities and dangers of unpoliced interaction with young males. 

Heedless of women’s physical vulnerability and invested in the fantasy of a disembodied version of equality, feminists threw collegiate women overboard. An increase in female students’ sexual victimization foreseeably ensued. Then, instead of recognizing and correcting their mistake by pulling young women out of the water, feminists began trying to rid the sea of all sharks. This is, of course, an impossible, impractical, and nonsensical project. It leaves women in chronic danger while victimizing innocent young men, as the Title IX net ensnares many harmless fish while still failing to capture most sharks. 

As Camille Paglia has argued in various forums for nearly 40 years, there will always be rapists, and no amount of feminist education will change that. These criminals deserve lengthy prison sentences, not mere collegiate expulsions. If a young woman has been sexually assaulted or sexually threatened, she should call the police. Campus bureaucrats may help her seek legal redress, but should not be operating as unlicensed cops, judges, and juries in deference to a supposed concern for women’s well-being that, in addition to violating men’s due process rights, actually leaves open the possibility of more women being harmed by sexual predators. 

Conversely, however, if a young woman has been merely offended by some sexual innuendo, or regrets sex that she was persuaded to engage in, she should grow up. The world is dangerous and cannot be made free from unsavory ideas. Moreover, there is a difference between coercion and persuasion. Coercion is not to be tolerated. But, evolutionarily as well as socially, sex and romance often do involve persuasion—typically male pursuit and female capitulation. Women, no less than men, are responsible for their own uncoerced decisions, whether those decisions were the result of persuasion or not. 

Thirty years after The Morning After, it is long past time to offer women the unique physical protections we require and to withhold from us the infantilizing intellectual protections we don’t. But because society and academia today mostly do the exact opposite, women are being made into a new kind of second-class citizen. 

Yes, unlike in the nineteenth century, women today have the right to compete and live as free individuals. But our increased physical victimization is the inevitable result of legal and cultural norms that treat us as biologically indistinguishable from men. 

And yes, unlike in the nineteenth century, women today have untrammeled access to higher education and to political discourse. But the offer of intellectual protection to women (as to any historically marginalized group) represents, as Roiphe intoned, our “personal, social, and psychological possibilities collapsed.”

The post Thirty Years After <i>The Morning After</i> appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Well, sort of.

She knelt down to her son’s level and said, “That little boy might not like having sand kicked at him. Are you bored with the sandbox, and that’s why you’re kicking sand?” The kid did not respond. “Are you feeling tired?” Again, no response. I was tired just watching her. 

“Maybe it’s time to try the slide?” The little boy pointed to the jungle gym, where there was indeed a slide. The mother took her child by the hand and led him away from the sandbox, saying “sorry” to me and receiving my “no worries!” in reply on her way. My son, after swiping at his sandy face, continued playing happily. I continued to sit on my shaded bench, on the other side of the small playground. 

I felt sorry for this nice woman. I saw how closely she was hovering near her son while he played, and I noticed that she had offered him not one but four different snacks ten minutes before. It all added up. 

I had placed her, even before the sand-kicking incident and subsequent feelings-centered redirection, as a likely victim of the latest fad in child-rearing: gentle parenting. 

Feelings First

In a New York Times essay that begins with a playground anecdote similar to my own, Caitlin Moscatello defines gentle parenting as “an approach that steers away from punishment and focuses instead on helping children to become more self-aware.” Old reliable parental phrases from “stop it” to “because I said so” are verboten. 

According to the Cleveland Clinic, instead of saying “Stop acting childish and put on your shoes,” parents trying to get a kid out the door in the morning could say, “When you don’t get ready on time, it hurts my feelings and makes me anxious. Why are you having a hard time?” Ostensibly, this approach shows “empathy and respect for how your child is feeling” and “center[s] how their actions directly impact how you feel.” 

According to psychologist Becky Kennedy, who is quoted in Moscatello’s piece, today’s generation of parents understands that “feelings” are “the core of who you are” and therefore “feels like, I have one life. I want to feel good.” 

Pardon my inability to find any gentle way to say this: so-called gentle parenting as defined above is antithetical to the very essence of parenting; it is also an affront to the barest notion of common sense. 

Loving parents need to communicate two basic facts to children. First, you are the center of my world. Second, you are not the center of the world. 

Gentle parenting communicates the first in a wholly dysfunctional way, and fails to communicate the second, because it is premised on the false notion that the correctness or incorrectness of all speech, behavior, and thought is dependent upon personal feelings—those of the child and those of the parent. 

Actual parenting, by contrast, requires authoritative clarity about appropriate behavior to which parents (by virtue of their age and experience) have access, and children (by virtue of their youth and inexperience) do not. Moreover, it requires a concept of right and wrong that supersedes mere emotion.

Parenting in an Anomic Age

Many millennial parents come honestly by gentle parenting’s twisted perspective. For understandable reasons, they simply don’t understand what it actually takes to make our children feel like the emotional—not just logistical—centers of our worlds. 

The college-educated people currently raising young kids in thrall to gentle parenting (and, make no mistake, formational years in a university are a necessary but insufficient condition to buy any of this nonsense) were mostly raised by baby-boomers—largely without the kind of extended family and community infrastructure that those boomers had themselves enjoyed as children. Many boomers that achieved financial security (and would therefore be likely to send their millennial children to college) had fewer children than their WWII generation parents; enjoyed the spoils of a hot economy that led to mc-mansions in the ex-urbs; and took their kids to church less and to travel soccer tournaments more. As a result, there were fewer older siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, priests, and choir ladies around to share parental duties in the 1990s than in the 1960s. The upbringing of many millennials (and particularly of the white, upper-middle-class ones who would prove disproportionately vulnerable to the siren call of gentle parenting) was fairly anomic, compared with that of our boomer parents. 

Because our parents were increasingly “parenting alone,” they loomed larger and less diluted in our lives than our grandparents had in theirs. Thus, when they parented “traditionally”—defined by the Cleveland Clinic as “yelling or screaming” due to “focus[ing] on your child’s action and the frustration it’s causing you”—they fostered in their children an overidentification with parental emotion. Parents’ feelings had such a powerful impact on millennials because these emotions were not offset, as in earlier eras, by the feelings of multiple other authority figures. 

Thus, many millennials’ emotional self-awareness was subsumed by self-doubt and repression, contributing to exactly the baseline “anxiety” that has made so many of us (and even more of our helicopter-parented Gen Z juniors) candidates for anti-anxiety medications. Gentle parenting nobly seeks to avoid sowing this kind of emotional distance between parents and children by rightly cautioning today’s parents—who have, in this anomic age, such outsized influence—to avoid burdening their kids with untutored, reactive emotions of anger and frustration. 

Unfortunately, rather than countering that reactive indulgence of “traditional parenting” as the Cleveland Clinic defines it (and as many millennials no doubt experienced it) with an equally authoritative but responsibly stoic alternative, gentle parenting merely extends to children as well as parents the fundamentally misguided reliance on emotion as a substitute for authority. 

In this way, millennial parents attempt to build emotional closeness with their children under the false pretense that the parent-child relationship is essentially one between equals. They focus on, in the words of one Connecticut mom quoted in Moscatello’s piece, “the relationship we are going to have with this child 20 years from now.” 

But 20 years from now, our children won’t be children. While a loving and close relationship with our adult children is something we pray for, what we want for ourselves 20 years from now is frankly irrelevant to the parental vocation. The stewarding of our children’s intellectual and spiritual formation—not the enjoyment of their untutored, emotive existence—is the proper center of a vocationally parental world.

We are not tasked with “building a relationship” with our children. We are tasked, instead, with building our children’s relationships with the wider world—in all its sanctity and all its horror.

It’s Not Just the Two of Us

At bottom, gentle parenting discards the very concepts of truth and authority, in deference to the capricious tyranny of both parents’ and children’s feelings. The approach requires that parents model the kind of facility with emotional language that we want children to have. That’s why it is considered a good example of gentle parenting to say: “When you don’t get ready on time, it hurts my feelings and makes me anxious. Why are you having a hard time?”

There are two problems with a statement like this one, in a situation where a parent is trying to get out the door: First, the problem with not getting ready on time is that it is inconsiderate, inefficient, and disrespectful of others’ time; whether I “feel anxious” about it is wholly immaterial. Second, “why you are having a hard time being on time” is a conversation we by definition do not have time for in this circumstance. By beginning such a conversation in this moment, I am being inconsiderate and disrespectful toward whomever we are not on time for. 

In other words: what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong, no matter how either the child or the parent feels about it. This is why any civilization that carves an ordered society out of the harsh barbarism of nature is built on rules, laws, and mores that incentivize and reward what is right while stigmatizing and penalizing what is wrong. 

If I assault another woman on the street unprovoked, I am unlikely to be treated to a soliloquy on the anxiety of the police officer that responds to the scene. Nor am I likely to be asked why I am having a hard time. More likely, I will face some sort of criminal penalty—and rightly so. Then, likely, after getting over their shock and disappointment at my misbehavior, my husband and closest friends might inquire about the emotional frame of mind that led me to behave so badly. 

Putting aside the different consequences of attending to a toddler and an adult, why should the sandbox be any different?

Our emotions are an expression of intimacy with those close to us, who care how we feel—not an arbiter of right and wrong in the wider world that we as parents are supposed to be preparing our children to both enter and serve. 

My husband and I do want our sons to grow into empathetic men who can express their feelings and respect those of others. Modernity is not kind to men that lack facility with emotional language, nor is undue stoicism a recipe for fulfillment.

That’s why we try—very imperfectly and with great room for improvement—to project as a de facto setting the kind of calm demeanor that makes space for children who are developing the capacity to identify and articulate their feelings to be heard.

But, even more importantly, we want our sons to grow into honest men who can put their own feelings and those of others aside in deference to the truth when necessary. That’s why we are unapologetically directive and (with rare exceptions) invite emotional reflection after, not before, exacting compliance. Had the sand been kicked by the other foot that day on the playground—which it easily could have been, as my two-year-old is no angel—I would have handled things differently. 

I would have addressed my kid by name and said, in a tone stern enough for this youngest of three brothers to know well that I mean business: “No! You do not kick sand. What do you say to that little boy?” Once the requisite apology was extracted, I would have explained, “Kicking sand in someone’s face can hurt his eyes. You don’t want to hurt him.” If my kid kicked sand again after that, I would have removed him from the sandbox—not as a diversion to something else fun like a slide, but as punishment for unallowable behavior. 

I know that’s what I would have done because it’s what I have done countless times in relation to each of my children. Now, I’m increasingly able to sit across the playground from my two-year-old, who is getting better at playground etiquette. 

Meanwhile, I rarely so much as glance at my eight- or six-year-old playing with others. It’s been that way for several years. Fortunately, they’ve mostly imbibed the disciplinary orientation toward misbehavior that is so anathema to gentle parenting—and so indispensable to functional living. 

To me, this indicates that my sons have a prayer (by no means a guarantee, but at least a chance) of one day being fit for productive adult lives in a world that is sorely in need of people able to separate what they feel from what is true. 

So just maybe, 20 years from now, my sons might be men worth having relationships with. Not just as sons, but as spouses, brothers, friends, and colleagues.

Perhaps even as parents—God-willing, the kind with their heads on straight enough to eschew any inane fads that impede this all-important work. 

The post The Case Against Gentle Parenting appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Polls show that the plurality of Americans do not want elementary, middle, or high school-age students studying transgender and nonbinary gender identities in school. While opinions differ by party, only 22% of Democrats and 6% of Republicans say that middle and high school students discussing these topics in school are a good thing (with even lower numbers for elementary school students). Meanwhile, over 80% of Americans (including 53% of Democrats) oppose medical interventions that alter the sex characteristics of minors. 

On the far left, some erroneously claim that those in favor of limiting discussion of sexual topics in schools and banning so-called “gender-affirming care” are oppressing gay and trans youth. Meanwhile, some on the far right have equally erroneously insisted that all those attempting to introduce gender ideology into schools in the name of protecting and validating gay and/or transgender children are “groomers,” enabling pedophiles to sexualize children. 

In preparation to do better by the truth and by one another in these battles, it would behoove us all to acknowledge that this culture war of gender ideology is not really about sex or sexuality. Whether or not the far left is effectively incentivizing the sexualization of children, the argument over sex and gender is a mere by-product of the far left’s far broader agenda: institutionalizing the perpetual infantilization of adults. 

The Thrill of Sexual Transgression

Ever since the newness of the sexual revolution wore off sometime in the 1980s, it has been the transgression of sex rather than sex itself that has seemed, well, sexy to some extreme progressives. To be a revolutionary, after all, you have to be not just for something, but also against something.

The sexual revolutionaries were against sexual repression, so, until very recently, they focused their attention and support on sexually explicit material that flouted norms of religious morality. Sex itself was still sexy because it was still, to some degree or another, verboten. The sexual revolution continued, as those pushing the boundaries of what is considered appropriate met with resistance from the then-ascendent (though compartmentalized) religious right, as well as from the mainstream. Popular culture was pulled toward ever more risqué norms. Today, revealing clothing and sexually explicit lyrics are accepted by almost everyone—including many mainstream and right-leaning people.

We now live in a culture where pornography is ever more ubiquitous, ever more easily accessible, and ever more explicit. Like pornography itself, mainstream music and entertainment often attempt titillation by shock, even with diminishing returns. While somewhat risqué at the time, Britney Spears’ 1998 “…Baby One More Time” no longer raises eyebrows, from any side of the aisle. It seems, frankly, quaint. When it comes to heterosexual sex, it now takes Cardi B’s 2020 “WAP” to raise even a hint of disapproval from the so-called conservatives. Put more pointedly: He of “grab ’em by the pussy” is the champion of many self-identified traditionalists. Enough said.

Now that heterosexual (and, increasingly, homosexual) adult sexuality—no matter how explicit—is culturally banal, the only way for sexual revolutionaries to continue their assault on what might remain of sexual repression is to go back the other way: to reject altogether the reality of biological sex, without the cultural significance of which nothing would be risqué. More importantly, for today’s far left, rejecting biological sex is merely the most politically salient byproduct of rejecting altogether the adulthood from which a mature sexual identity has heretofore been inextricable. 

Before the early twentieth century, little boys and little girls all wore long white nightgowns until somewhere between ages 5 and 7. Early childhood was an androgynous time. This is not to say that boys and girls were not acknowledged to be different, but that differences between the sexes were understood to emerge and intensify as children grew older.

Prepubescent childhood lends itself to a great deal of androgyny and some amount of gender fluidity; little boys often pretend to be pregnant or to breastfeed when their mothers have babies. Adolescence has traditionally been the time when that fluidity falls away, along with other aspects of a softer, more forgiving, early childhood. Adolescents and teens are expected to manage their schedules, friendships, school work, and future plans more or less on their own, without the handholding that they received at age 5 or even (to a lesser degree) at age 10. Half of them have to deal with menstruation; the other half have to register for the draft.

For today’s sexual revolutionaries, though, greater androgyny should accompany greater maturity, rather than the other way around. This is not prima facie pedophilia or grooming; and it does not necessarily have anything to do with sexual orientation, which is merely a variance of human sexuality, not a rejection of human biology. Moreover, there are many more common examples of potential pedophile-enabling embedded in such “traditional” elements of American life as little girls’ cheerleading routines and beauty pageant outfits. 

But reducing sex to a gender identification rather than a biological reality is dangerous, as a byproduct of the illiberal segment of the left’s broader project: pursuing oversimplified conceptions of “equity” and “inclusion.” These are meant to advance the dignity and worth of each individual but instead result in reality-indifferent, utopian thinking that is fundamentally at odds with mature adulthood. 

The Stubborn Reality of Biology

Obviously, traditional gender identity as it is typically understood can be unnecessarily restrictive for all kinds of people, including many who are cisgender, meaning that they identify with the sex associated with them at birth. Most individuals, after all, do not live out all of the stereotypes or traditional roles of their gender. I am a woman, for example, and a mother and primary caregiver to three, but “nurturing” is not on the list of adjectives that anyone—including and especially my children—would use to describe me. Someone might use that word, though, to describe my (male, traditionally masculine, primary breadwinning) husband.

Few Americans with mainstream sensibilities, even when I was born in 1987, ultimately objected to the widening array of opportunities available to both women and men. And almost no one in 2023 insists that all women “are like this,” that all men “behave like that,” or that there is no such thing as a masculine woman or a feminine man. To do so would be to deny psychological, societal, and moral reality.

But nearly all of us know, deep down, that biological sex cannot be gainsaid. To insist that athletes who have experienced male puberty can compete fairly against athletes who have not is to squint so hard that one’s eyes are squeezed shut against all contrary evidence. To perform elective surgeries that can result in permanent sterilization on children who are not yet fully in possession of their mental or legal faculties is to perpetuate medical malfeasance. And to teach elementary school students that biological sex is essentially a spiritual or semantical reality rather than a physical one is not to groom them, but to lie to them.

The Sting of Truth

I am a Democrat surrounded mostly by other Democrats, and I hear a lot of quiet comments to these effects. This is not surprising. It’s very hard, after all, to keep a lie going when nearly everyone sees the truth with their own eyes. 

Hence, I am optimistic that we will not be talking about elective mastectomies on 14-year-olds a decade from now. (Except insofar as we find prurient interest in all of the forthcoming medical malpractice lawsuits and their settlements, as more countries inevitably follow Sweden and England in disallowing various medications and surgeries that endanger trans-identifying youth). Nor will we be teaching gender ideology to seven-year-olds. The illiberal segment of the left on this issue will, I am fairly certain, do what the illiberal segment of the left always does: experience sufficient pressure and dissension from fellow progressives that maintain a foothold in reality to retreat predominantly to their increasingly irrelevant safe spaces in academia. 

But the insistence on telling children feel-good lies instead of hard truths is a legacy that today’s sexual revolutionaries and those who abet them are likely to leave in their wake. Sex actually should not matter that much at age four; even our forbears, dressing their youngest children in unisex garments, knew that very little girls and very little boys are more alike than not. The same is true of other realities and attributes that divide individuals along lines that are sometimes obfuscated in early childhood but become important as adulthood looms: intelligence, strength, work ethic, a regard for others, and the like. Some people are smarter than others, funnier than others, or more interested in science or literature than others. As every parent learns, people’s attributes and interests are not nearly as malleable as we might want or expect.

Just like biological sex, these facts are not particularly important in kindergarten (nor should they be). But these and a host of other incontrovertible realities will come to matter greatly to the people in a given kindergarten classroom a decade or two later when some of them will want to be engineers, doctors, or athletes. Therefore, helping each child to figure out what her gifts are—and to develop a work ethic that allows her to cultivate those gifts to best serve herself and the world—should be the motivating project of elementary and secondary education.

But instead, the illiberal segment of the left is myopically focused on perpetuating fundamental misunderstandings of equity and inclusion. They are creating a world in which all the limitations of mature reality can be put off as long as possible, and perhaps forever. And they are creating this (anti)utopia not in deference to the needs of children, but in obeisance to the whims of childish adults for whom an identity as an ostensibly inclusive transgressor supersedes all other considerations. We have long heard about “extended adolescence,” meaning that people are not taking up adult burdens and societal responsibilities until a decade later than they once did (that is, 35 is the new 25). But the gender identity craze is best understood as an attempt not merely to delay the formational work of adolescence—figuring out who one is and what one has to offer the world—but to eliminate it. For today’s far left, the wider world should conform to the impulses of individuals, rather than grounding adolescents by inculcating the ability to contextualize themselves—physically, socially, and emotionally. 

If we raise children in such a way that they are constitutionally and ideologically unable to acknowledge what they are not, we will wind up with adults stuck in arrested development, who cannot embrace all that they are. That will be tragic in ways that far supersede today’s debates about how gender is discussed in our schools. 

A nation of perpetual children will be, inevitably, a nation that is ever more androgynous. But in such a society, “gender ideology” will be among the least of our worries. After all, perpetual girlhood and boyhood are no more useful than perpetual androgyny, in the end. 

Yes, it is important to keep discussions of gender as separate from biological sex away from young children’s classrooms. Whether the recent proliferation of red state laws accomplishes this effectively and/or respectfully is a question on which reasonable people can disagree. Regardless, it is even more important to meet the future with the resolve to raise mature women and men who are ready to encounter all manner of realities in the world that awaits them beyond their school days. 

And no law can do that. 

Only the truth (about sex and gender, as about anything else)—and most people’s willingness to acknowledge it even when doing so is hard—can create and sustain the grown-up culture of both respect and reason that nearly all of us want to hand down to our free society’s future adults.

The post Gender Ideology’s Infantilizing Effects appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Sandberg’s book, which grew out of her Ted talk entitled “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders” and launched hundreds of women’s groups, is best understood as a forceful response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s famous 2012 lament in The Atlantic that women in the twenty-first century still could not “have it all.” 

In her book, Sandberg accepts this fact and doubles down: Of course, no one can have it all; still, women should run fully half of the world’s businesses and men fully half of its homes, because a world in which more women lead is presumptively a better world for all women. 

Yet despite Lean In’s phenomenal popularity and some of its useful tips on matters like negotiating salaries, just eight percent of Fortune 500 companies today are female-led. We are not much closer to Sandberg’s vision than we were a decade ago. 

Moreover, other indicators of women’s well-being continue to decrease rather than improve, and there has been widespread rebellion among both men and women in recent years against exactly the kind of grinding, nonstop, corporate culture that Sandberg lionizes throughout Lean In. Indeed, one hidden blessing of the recent pandemic was a recognition of how unnecessary this culture can be to workplace productivity. 

The failure of Lean In feminism comes as no surprise to those on the right. Conservatives generally believe that, given the choice, most women would spend more time with their families and less on their careers. Conservatives would say that Lean In feminism failed in part because of its false premises: that the modal woman is indistinguishable from the modal man when it comes to preferences about family, and that a just society would therefore produce just as many career-driven women as career-driven men. 

Meanwhile, for those on the left, Lean In feminism’s failure is harder to swallow. To progressives and mainstream feminists, persistently lower rates of female leadership are proof that women remain systemically excluded from opportunities for advancement in the workplace, saddled with domestic expectations, and professionally undervalued compared to their male counterparts. From this perspective, Lean In feminism failed because it was predicated on individual women changing their own behaviors, rather than on those in power changing the professional and domestic ecosystems that motivate those behaviors. 

The conservative and progressive perspectives are not mutually exclusive. Both critiques of Lean In feminism point to truths that we must embrace in a spirit of non-ideological rationality. 

Conservatives are correct that there are, on average, pronounced differences between men and women — especially when it comes to orientation toward family and career. Two-thirds of Americans agree that women tend to want to take more time off than men do after the arrival of a new child. Moreover, if they had the financial freedom to do so, most mothers of at least one child under age 18 would choose to work part-time if at all.  

This remains true even as more equality between men and women in the home is our present reality. Today’s men spend more time with their sons than they have at any time since industrialization moved work off of the farm and into a non-domestic workplace. They spend more time with their daughters than ever before. Moreover, there are many men that embrace the primary caregiver role. Often, when men take a step back professionally upon becoming fathers, it is because their children’s mother makes more money than they do and the financial well-being of the family is contingent upon her continued “leaning in.” Sometimes, it is because this arrangement suits the preferences of both parents for other reasons, including the prioritization of the career with the more stable trajectory, even if both continue to work essentially full-time. 

Regardless, healthy involvement of fathers is all to the good, and a sign of societal maturation that permits greater individuation for both women and men when it comes to balancing parenthood and career. 

That said, no amount of female freedom—to access education, to avoid social stigma for choices that put career ahead of family, and so on—will produce total parity between the sexes when it comes to the primary caregiving role and which parent modifies career choices to meet familial needs.

Just look at the Nordic countries, which boast the greatest equality of opportunity between the sexes and the most distance from traditional expectations for male and female roles. Despite these progressive values, the professional differences between Nordic women and men have become more, not less, pronounced. 

That’s because women, where they are financially and socially freest to make unencumbered choices about career and family, overwhelmingly prioritize family. 

My own experience is an example of this norm. My husband and I met as undergraduates. We are both professionally ambitious. He went to law school; I earned a doctorate. 

We now have three children, and my husband is as hands-on a father as you’ll find. He changes diapers, gives baths, coaches t-ball, participates in every scouting and church event, does bedtime—all of it. And yet, despite working full-time myself until our youngest was 18 months old, I have always been the primary caregiver and the CEO of the household—because that is what I want. 

I have been the one to maximize flexibility (rather than ambition, fulfillment, or income) in my career trajectory. This is because my husband makes more money, yes. But that, too, was a deliberate choice that we made from the start: for him to pursue the partnership track at a large law firm, doing work he loves, and for me to do just some fraction of what I wanted professionally so that I could prioritize availability to be home with babies, supervise and transport school age kids, orchestrate after school activities, run the household, and so on. 

Like the Nordic women, I have been fortunate enough to have options; and, like most of them, I choose to be a primary caregiver. The majority of women, given those kinds of privileges and options, always will. 

Many professions today are structured in ways that are unfriendly to family goals. That reality plausibly does affect women’s preferences and choices (more on this below), but nevertheless, it is simply a reality that more mothers want to run households and more fathers want to run companies, and this is antithetical to “lean in” feminism’s insistence that all average differences between males and females are socially constructed rather than innate. 

By contrast, a feminism that stands for maximizing rather than scoring women’s choices would be strong enough to embrace average differences between the sexes while simultaneously dismantling the barriers that still do plague women attempting to ascend to the highest reaches of many professions.  

Progressives and mainstream feminists are correct that the upper echelons of myriad professions remain systemically inhospitable to women. Even in the wake of the Me Too movement, for example, sexualization and sexual harassment often go unpoliced. There remains a gulf between human resources policies and workplace culture that can ultimately be overcome only by the greater integration of women into the inner social circle of male-dominated workplaces. 

Feminists rightly noted, for example, that former Vice President Mike Pence would be hard-pressed to have any close working relationships with women of the kind that would facilitate their professional rise if he is never permitted to be alone with a woman. Though few American men share Pence’s reluctance to have unsupervised time with female colleagues, many participate in the kind of coercive, after-hours workplace sociality that’s making a post-pandemic comeback. This does not always lend itself to unambiguously platonic mixed-sex spaces that are nonetheless conducive to human bonding. This is especially the case in professions like business and law, as well as policing and some areas of medicine, where the upper echelons remain overwhelmingly male. 

Moreover, even in professions where women are as likely to be in positions of supreme power as men—such as academia, where I worked for over a decade—motherhood is often incompatible with continued advancement. In part, as noted above, this is because women choose to pursue more flexible and less ambitious career paths in order to be more available for their children. In some professions, that’s inevitable. Some careers simply are not and can not become flexible (think surgeons, Wall Street traders, or trial lawyers). But in fields like academia that are flexible by nature, this doesn’t have to be the case. If we had greater respect for many women’s desires to tend their families while maintaining their careers, more women might find it possible to advance professionally while raising children. As it stands, we currently impose cultural penalties for motherhood where they are unnecessary.  

For example, mothers that want to breastfeed are required by law to be offered spaces in which to pump breast milk while at work. For those that do not have their own offices (one negative externality of the open concept office design trend), this space may be neither convenient nor clean (think: trekking across campus to a restroom with a sitting area). Moreover, mothers that want to pick older children up from school, or spend time with them in the late afternoon, often aren’t allowed the kind of flexibility in work hours or career path that could facilitate this arrangement with no loss of productivity. 

Unfortunately, there is a perception of vast cultural difference between women like Sandberg, who want women and men to be culturally and professionally indistinguishable, and women like me, who have no interest in influencing women’s free choices in pursuit of any particular outcome. This perception is codified when women of the former type dominate in a given profession, as they do in academia. This leads to a “lean in” culture that is often more rigid—not just professionally, but also culturally—than is required to do the work itself. 

This is part of why, today, “lean in” feminism is getting pushback, not just from conservatives, but also from progressives that question more broadly the hustle culture of work that, thanks to digital technology, now never ends. “Quiet quitting” is all the rage among the young. Sandberg’s personal anecdotes highlight an undauntable work ethic that may be entirely relatable to 35-year-old me, but it’s far less relatable to someone a decade my junior. 

The pandemic proved that many jobs held by college-educated women of the Sandberg demographic really could be done from home—if not entirely, then often at least in part. Moreover, it gave a lot of us the chance to think about how we really want to spend our time. 

Fewer women than Sandberg guessed want to spend it climbing a fundamentally rigid and all-consuming corporate ladder. 

And that’s okay; we don’t need 50% of CEOs to be women. 

We do, however, need a feminism that works for us all, by comprehending the kind of genuine choice that truly encourages women to lean in—whether to an explosive career or to some other version of a self-determined, examined life. Ideological monism about eschewing or embracing traditional women’s roles should comprise no part of the freedom-oriented feminism that could prove functional and transformative in the twenty-first century. 

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