PETRONELLA WYATT: I'm single, childless and alone. Feminism has failed me and my generation
She has had a most privileged life so if she feels she has missed out it is a lesson on what an important part of life relationships are. She once had a pregnancy to which Boris Johnson was the father. Had she had saner values then and not aborted it, that baby would now be a undoubtedly talented adult who would be the joy of her life.
I cannot talk. In my youth (late '60s) I too was betrayed by the values of my life in an academic environment and arranged an abortion attributed to me by a very bright and blonde girl. That may have been the daughter I have always wanted and never had. I have had better luck than Petronella with relationships, however and I do have a high-achieving son
Every Monday I meet with a group of female friends in a London restaurant. We sit at a table near the window and discuss our lives.
We have many things in common. We are all in our mid-50s and highly educated career women. But there is a vacuum in our lives. We are all single and childless.
I increasingly feel, as do many of my intimates, that feminism has failed our generation. I grew up with its beliefs. No, strike that. I was force-fed them.
By the age of 13, Christmas presents from my Women's Lib aunt were books by Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvoir, considered the mother of modern feminism. (My aunt was one of those militants who had famously disrupted the 1970 Miss World contest).
My peers and I watched Mary Poppins, idolising the determinedly single nanny (never noticing the occasional sadness behind her eyes), and sympathising with suffragette Mrs Banks, while wondering why she didn't leave her dullard of a husband.
Our heroine was Margaret Thatcher, who, though she would have denied it, was a feminist de facto. In one of those encounters that make life instructive, I met Lady Thatcher at my late father's house (my father was the politician Woodrow Wyatt) when I was 15. She was our first woman prime minister and, after our introduction, she began to address me on the subject of life.
The gist of her address would have been greeted with hosannas by every feminist of the age: in summation, a woman's career superseded by far her relations with the opposite sex. (Her own union might well have been to a cipher as opposed to a husband. Indeed, when the Thatchers dined with us, Denis withdrew to the drawing room with the women).
At my private school, St Paul's, we children of Thatcher were similarly educated out of marriage and femininity.
One of my unmarried school friends recalls: 'My teachers made me feel as if marriage was shameful. My English mistress once teased me for looking at a bridal magazine, but then she was an arch feminist who demonised men.'
We both recall being told that 'Paulinas do not cook, they think'. This is all very well when you are young and aspire to greatness, but not all girls grow up to be executives or high court judges, something that feminism perilously forgot to tell us.
Historically, the feminist argument had its points. In the old days, when members of my sex were bound first to their fathers and then to their husbands, they led unenviable lives. If a woman had a good education, however, she could make a comfortable living and remain independent of male approbation. When the desire for marriage and children overwhelmed her, she would almost certainly lose her job.
The world has now changed in a way the early feminists would find incomprehensible. I sometimes think, and so do my friends, that the West has outgrown the feminist philosophy, and that it has become pernicious.
Where, for instance, does it leave women like us, when we have reached our mid-50s, and find ourselves alone?
One of the chief causes of unhappiness is the feeling that one is unloved, whereas companionship and the feeling of being loved promotes happiness more than anything else.
One in ten British women in their 50s has never married and lives alone, which is neither pleasant nor healthy.
My friend Sally, a lovely 55-year-old with eyes the colour of Eau de Nil, once said to me: 'I constantly feel unwanted as a woman because feminism taught us that the traditional female was a stereotype invented by men to keep us down. Accordingly, I was anti-men to the point of driving them away. Now, I'm paying for this.'
According to a recent study by an American medical institute, loneliness is the leading cause of depression among middle-aged females. I should know, as I recently fell prey to the unforgiving maw of mental illness.
Many of my single friends suffer from depression, springing from a solitary existence that would be eschewed by a race of alley cats.
Moreover, there are the economic factors involved. It is a truism that two incomes are better than one, and many of the unattached women I know work in low to middle-paid professions.
A university professor chum bemoans 'as a single woman, it has been increasingly difficult to pay the bills with no assistance from a partner. For every J K Rowling, there are millions of women who get by on a pittance.
'Feminism kept drumming into my head that financial independence was the ideal, but in practice it doesn't happen unless you are managing a hedge fund or are able to write best-selling novels.'
Equally depressingly, many single women feel they have failed at life. Far from empowering us, feminism has made us insecure. 'My career has stalled, I've never married and I feel worthless as a person,' observes my pretty 53-year-old friend Rachel.
General self-confidence comes more than anything else from being accustomed to receiving love, particularly from the opposite sex. The woman with a husband and children accepts their affection as a law of nature, but it is of great importance to her mental health and success.
Yet of all the institutions that have come down to us from the past, none is so derailed by feminism as the family. Many women with feminist ideals feel parenthood is a far heavier burden than their grandmothers did, due to long working hours and the vilification of the housewife. Is it any wonder that the birth rate has declined?
Says another of my Monday group: 'I was conditioned to have no encumbrances, particularly children. Or at least to wait until I was established in my career, but now I'm too old and that boat has sailed.'
Recently, after my depression became debilitating, I had a 20-year-old student living in my home. After a week of acquaintanceship, it dawned on me that the notion of not marrying and giving birth before the age of 30 was anathema to her, and she rejected it completely.
In short, she wanted to conduct her life like a woman.
'Yes, I believe in women's rights,' she ruminated, 'but I don't believe in the militant feminism my mother grew up with. It went too far.' Out of the mouths of babes.
The feminism I was spoon-fed in my youth made the error of telling members of my sex to behave and think like men. This error was a grave one, and women like me are paying for it, like gamblers in a casino that has been fixed.
It's time for a cultural reset. It may be too late for me and my friends, but feminism should not be allowed to ruin the lives of future generations as well.
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A Signal That Oakland Is Slipping Further Into a Doom Loop
This is such an Oakland story. The city of Oakland, California, known for its extreme leftism, is replacing some traffic lights in the city with a four-way stop sign, according to CBS News
The city isn’t taking this step to improve the flow of traffic or anything like that.
Instead, city officials decided to remove the traffic signal because copper theft has become rampant, and thieves keep tampering with the electrical boxes that control the lights.
Amusingly, the city put up a stop sign to replace the traffic light at the E. 12th St. and 16th Ave. intersection. Locals say that even though it looks strange it’s a huge improvement because usually the traffic light is broken and is causing accidents.
However, as with many cases of dysfunctional blue city governance, the deeper problem is that the city won’t address the most fundamental issues: repeat criminality and general lawlessness.
According to the locals CBS interviewed in the story, most of the people tampering with the traffic signals are coming from a nearby homeless encampment.
Tam Le, owner of an auto repair shop at the corner of the intersection, said of the city’s “solution” in an interview with CBS: “It’s just telling us that the city is giving up on us.”
Pretty much, yes.
City officials said that the stop signs are temporary and that the traffic lights will come back. But they put no timeline on when that will happen so good luck.
Maybe, just maybe, the issue isn’t with the traffic signal or even with the thieves.
“If you really want to fix the stop sign, I think you really have to clean up this homeless encampment,” Le said, delivering the kind of commonsense solution to the problem that has apparently escaped the people who run the city.
And therein lies the problem.
For those who haven’t traveled to a West Coast city recently, homeless encampments have taken over urban landscapes. Oakland is particularly bad. It’s become so bad that the city requested help from the state to start clearing the encampments out.
Plenty of other cities have found solutions a lot quicker, but places like Portland and Oakland are slow on the uptake. This is mostly due to the ideology of government officials and the activist organizations who pressure them. They really think that the problem with homelessness is just a “housing” issue and that pushing people off the streets and into shelters is oppressive.
Cities like Oakland have only begun to act when it’s become obvious that large, perpetual homeless encampments and open-air drug markets create a climate of criminality and disorder.
And even when the city does eventually do something there is typically no follow-up enforcement to ensure that the problem doesn’t simply manifest itself again once the coast is clear.
Le, whose auto business has been affected by the homeless encampment, said in the CBS story that the city has moved some of it in the past, but it keeps coming back and getting bigger.
He then said if it continues to grow, he will shutter his business like many other people have in the area.
So, the city will keep the encampment and lose the dutiful business owner. Sounds like a recipe for success, right?
It’s this sort of governance that contributed to the so-called doom loop that places like Oakland and downtown San Francisco are stuck in. It should be no surprise that the In-N-Out fast-food restaurant that closed in Oakland—the first In-N-Out to close, ever—was close to where the problematic intersection is.
In almost all these cases of urban decay we see a similar pattern. Lax enforcement of laws—or predictably terrible laws, a retreat from proactive policing, and mind-boggling recidivism.
A man apprehended by Oakland police for robbing an ATM in Oakland in January had 25 arrests since 2014.
According to Crime Voice, a California crime journalism media outlet, the 39-year-old repeat offender had “previous arrests for kidnappings, robberies, motor vehicle thefts, possession of a controlled substance, and for shootings.”
Is it any wonder crime is out of control?
In July of last year, the Oakland chapter of the NAACP called on the authorities in the city to start taking its crime problem seriously.
“Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities,” the NAACP wrote in a letter. “There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime.”
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price responded insultingly, “We are disappointed that a great African-American pastor and a great African-American organization would take a false narrative on such an important matter. We would expect more from Bishop Bob Jackson and the Oakland Chapter of the NAACP.”
What cities like Oakland have done is create a situation where the burden of disorder has been placed on innocent, helpless citizens who have little recourse other than to leave—if that’s even possible.
Even when these cities have begrudgingly rediscovered the value of the police post-George Floyd riot crime boom, they haven’t exactly recovered.
Restoring order and creating a healthy, thriving city environment is difficult once anarchy becomes the norm. For some places like Oakland the road back is a long one. Maybe a combination of failure and outraged citizens will get city leaders to wake up to reality.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/20/a-signal-that-oakland-is-slipping-further-into-the-doom-loop/
********************************************The miserable death of multiculturalism
We see the experiment of multiculturalism completely falling apart in the UK and many European countries. The US is awash with illegal migrants and the notion of one big happy family pursuing the great American dream is completely dead, having been on life support for many years. The idea of one big (and growing) diverse family in Canada is also now an open joke.
Most Asian countries are explicitly racist in their governance – Malaysia, Japan, China and India being stand-out examples. The very idea of multiculturalism makes no sense to them.
I could go on, but while everything might be relative, Malcolm’s boast about Australia being the most successful multicultural country was still misleading even when he started saying it. There are vastly more examples of warring tribes living here, constantly at each other under the surface, than the fairytale dreamt up by the gazillionaire from Point Piper.
Let’s face it, multiculturalism was always a device to ramp up migration while securing the votes of particular ethnic groups. In Australia, it goes back to the days of Petro Georgiou, who became the Liberal member for Kooyong at some stage. He persuaded both Andrew Peacock and John Howard to jump on board.
Arguably, that rogue, Al Grassby, Labor member for Riverina and immigration minister in the Whitlam government, set the ball rolling. It has to be said that Gough himself was no fan of the idea.
He never denied saying, ‘I’m not having these f–king Vietnamese Balts coming into the country with their religious and political prejudices against us.’ In that sense, Whitlam was more a traditionalist – you know the thing, we’re all Australians with a common set of values.
But multiculturalism always required bipartisan support and, of course, government funding. All sorts of ethnic-based groups popped up, supported by the taxpayer. We even had the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs and then the Office of Multicultural Affairs.
Compared with today, however, the policy of multiculturalism last century looks fairly tame. This was prior to the widespread uptake of post-modernism and cultural race theory. Nowadays, it’s all about oppressor versus the oppressed, white supremacy and the pernicious impact of colonialism.
New migrants are not expected to leave their ancient grievances behind; they are encouraged to prosecute their cases here, often with taxpayer funding, and to enlist their children and grandchildren in their causes. Gone are the days when the leaders of the day might draw lines in the sand – the edge of Australians’ tolerance.
Now migrants can suit themselves. They pick up the benefits of living in a high-income country – copious government payments, close to free education and health and the like – while clustering with members of their tribe and demanding more.
It’s worthwhile at this point recounting a personal story to illustrate how much has changed. One of my mother’s best friends was born in Germany. She met her Australian businessman husband – he had actually been born in Austria – in Europe in the early 1960s and she happily moved to Melbourne to be with him.
They had four children and lived a regular suburban life, interrupted by the usual stresses and strains. They always spoke English at home and became fully integrated into the communities in which they were involved. Her adult children were subsequently very annoyed that they could not speak German.
I’m sure Speccie readers can recount numerous examples of migrant families in the past doing their darndest to fit in while working hard and doing their best for their children. Of course, they retained some of their traditions, but the accepted rule was that we were all Aussies first. Learning English was generally seen as a high priority. It now seems like a different world.
It is estimated, for instance, that over one million people living in Australia do not speak English. The proportion of the population who speak no or little English has been rising rapidly.
If you want a driver’s licence, you can take the test in the language of your choice. Migrants can demand translators for a range of government-provided services. It’s not one rule for all, but a splintering of rules for different ethnic groups.
Australia has one of the highest proportions of the population born overseas – around 30 per cent. It has been growing strongly this century as the floodgates have been opened to temporary migrants, in particular. If we add to those born overseas those with at least one parent born overseas, we are over 50 per cent.
Of course, there is nothing right or wrong about these figures, although the rate of change makes a difference. It’s how migrants are absorbed into the population and how they then seek to fit in. We have seen a marked concentration in the destinations of recent migrants, to Melbourne and Sydney and to parts of these cities as well. This makes a difference.
It is no surprise that recently arrived migrants stick together; they did in the past but quickly became part of the wider community. The evidence now points to persistent clustering, in part because of the much larger flow of migrants leading to critical masses of ethnic groups.
This in turn potentially leads to voting blocs that can influence the substance of government policy, including foreign affairs. We see this in the disproportionate number of people of the Muslim faith in several seats in western Sydney and the weak response of the Labor parliamentarians to rising anti-Semitic behaviour that has been clearly on display. This development is the antithesis of constructive multiculturalism.
When the Department of Home Affairs can describe the migration program as recognising ‘the strong contribution all migrants make to social cohesion… by focusing on strengthening family and community bonds in Australia’, we know we are trouble.
Leaving aside the possibility of sloppy drafting, does anyone in their right mind believe that all migrants contribute to social cohesion? Only in the dreams of Canberra’s bureaucrats. It would be better to acknowledge that multiculturalism has died here and to get on with a more cohesive model in which the same standards are expected of us all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/05/the-miserable-death-of-multiculturalism/
*********************************************Australia: Teen had been previously convicted of 84 offences but had not spent a day in custody until he killed someone
The grieving husband of a mum-of-two stabbed to death during a home invasion has recalled the haunting moment his life changed forever.
Emma Lovell, 41, and her husband Lee spent Boxing Day 2022 baking treats and playing games with their young daughters Scarlett and Kassie before the North Lakes couple enjoyed a few cocktails and went to bed early.
Several hours later, she was fatally stabbed in the heart after two teens, then both 17, broke into her home north of Brisbane at about 11.30pm.
Her partner of 22 years was also stabbed in front of their horrified daughters.
The teen, now 19, who killed Ms Lovell had been previously convicted of 84 offences but had not spent a day in custody until that night.
Mr Lovell has opened up about being attacked in his own home - and how he didn't realise his wife was gravely injured until his daughter saw she was bleeding.
'By the time I looked back at Emma, she was, like, just, like, passed out on the floor,' he told A Current Affair on Monday night.
'And when Kassie came back, she was like, 'Mum's bleeding', I'm like, 'what do you mean?'
'She's bleeding and looked at her left side and I know it was just, like, soaked with blood, you know, and then that, like, panic sets in.'
As he was rushed to hospital, other paramedics performed open heart surgery on his wife on their front lawn.
'To be at the hospital and be told that she hadn't survived was a major shock,' he recalled.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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