Reading this article had me feeling a little sick. What must it be like to live with a mother that could express this kind of disgust for her own children?
I have two sons. They are strong and compassionate—the kind of boys other parents are glad to meet when their daughters bring them home for dinner. They are good boys, in the ways good boys are, but they are not safe boys. I’m starting to believe there’s no such thing.
This word "safe" keeps cropping up. You might think that she means "non-violent" as in "emotionally stable" and "won't physically harm others". But, no, further on, she gives us exactly what it is that she has such a problem with in her own progeny:
My sons won’t rape unconscious women behind a dumpster, and neither will most of the progressive men I know. But what all of these men share in common, even my sons, is a relentless questioning and disbelief of the female experience. I do not want to prove my pain, or provide enough evidence to convince anyone that my trauma is merited. I’m through wasting my time on people who are more interested in ideas than feelings, and I’m through pretending these people, these men, are safe.
And here it is, "the female experience". Unsafe actually means unwilling (or unable) to buy into the narrative of oppression that defines Ms. Allard's life. She thinks that people should be interested in feelings, not ideas. If she feels oppressed, she should not have to prove, or even explain, why this is so. The fact that she feels this way is all of the justification she requires to demand that others change their behavior. It is a surprisingly clear, tacit admission that she has no objective and rational basis for an argument.
I joined Bumble recently, after a six-plus year break from dating. I’m not overly interested in dating in the first place, but I’m starved for adult conversation so dating feels like a necessary evil. Bumble, as I explained to my married friends, is like the feminist Tinder. Women have to initiate contact with men, so at least there’s no inbox full of dick picks every day. But, feminist or not, the men are no different from the men anywhere else and I quickly felt deflated. If the feminist men — the men who proudly declare their progressive politics and their fight for quality — aren’t safe, then what man is? No man, I fear.
That's because male feminism is a joke, a charade, a con. It's a bunch of men following what they think is a superior strategy for getting access to women. These men will flatter her ego and lament the unfairness of rape culture, but "the male experience" tells them that it is all bullshit. The pain that this woman talks about? That's life, honey. People are going to disappoint you. They are going to insult you. They will try to use you. There is nothing intrinsically masculine or sexist about any of that. I've had all of that and worse done to me by people of both sexes.
But to understand Allard's "female experience", you really have to go deeper. I had a feeling about this one, and it didn't take long to discover the truth.
She married and divorced more than once, and has had seven children. One of her daughters was molested by one of these men, and the last husband she had she claims was a narcissist. One of her sons is suicidal. No doubt she blames the men in her life for the problems that she has experienced as a wife and a mother. But didn't she choose these men? Ultimately, wasn't she the one who failed to recognize that one of the men she brought into her children's lives was a pedophile?
And then there is this. That is from 2013, long before Jody Allard's more recent notoriety as a feminist journalist. Given all of the above, my reading of Ms. Allard is that she likely has a personality disorder. Since she also claims that she was abused and raped as a child, you might say that should excuse her from responsibility for these bad decisions, but what if that person never tries to change? If someone is ruined beyond all help, why should we affirm their words and respect their advice?
Modern feminism is nothing more than a demand that the world change so that mental illness of people like this is normalized. Jody Allard is a pitiful, broken person who has passed on her own miserable experiences to her children. Rather than place the blame for her abuse as a child squarely on the shoulders of her parents, she blames "rape culture". It is a way of coping with her childhood trauma, and the conflicting feelings of hatred and anger she must feel towards her parents. Interestingly, this attitude serves to get Ms. Allard off the hook for raising dysfunctional children who also hate her.
This little exercise is instructive in showing us where the kind of rage and helplessness that fuels modern feminism comes from. Are there feminists out there who had stable, loving families growing up? Possibly. People can be persuaded into all kinds of silly ideas, but usually, in the absence of trauma, a dominant, healthy personality will generally reassert itself. More likely, when you encounter a feminist, you will find an unstable, hypocritical person like Jody Allard, whose life is so painful for her to examine that she has to lash out at others, even going so far as to demonize her own children to make herself look better in comparison.
Feminism. Not even once.
