Modern society and government programs actively punish women who choose to lead traditional lives

‘Barbie changed everything because Barbie can be anything.’ Many have heard the marketing phrase. Even if that was true, which it isn’t, is being able to ‘be anything’ really the answer, or does the tyranny of choice leave us with too little time when we finally figure out what is meaningful in life? By substituting the ‘be anything’ Kool-Aid with words like family or career (that imply choice and sacrifice), social media-induced ‘be everything’ anxiety pushed on young women and the heartbreak of unmet expectations would be lessened.

The pain is real. Only 6 per cent of women who worked full-time considered childlessness to be their ideal, according to a report by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. Yet, about 25 per cent of Australian women will remain childless by the end of their reproductive lives, according to a report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. That’s one in five women who wanted kids and didn’t have them.

In the distant past, career-focused women were valued lower than family-focused women. Now the opposite is true to the point that tax laws consider family women as a non-entity. A family woman’s tax-free threshold is not considered unless her family owns a business or has a family estate trust to distribute income to her. Further, I’m told the work test means that mums have to get back to work after 6 months if they want their $15,000 maternity leave payment for their next pregnancy. A mum that couldn’t work because they were sick, couldn’t find work, had post-natal depression, or wanted to spend time with their newborn only gets $500. A far cry from feminism’s ideals of equality.

Does that mean family-focused women need to become 60s-style vacuum cleaner ad caricatures, or should we create a new version of pre-industrial revolution femininity, where family-focused women are side-hustle founders and equitably taxed mums? That’s a markedly different image to the prevailing narrative where the pinnacle of female achievement is the boardroom. I’ve been in boardrooms, they aren’t that exciting.

Meanwhile, career-focused men have had their teeth removed and their claws pulled out. Nominally feminist, they are powerless to take the cause of family-focused women for fear of being labelled as a misogynist.

The solution? According to one American psychiatrist, a disarming technique is to agree. The only way to stop someone thinking you are something is to admit, without reservation, that part of their judgment is true. Paradoxically, by finding a grain of truth in the accusation, the assailant immediately stops believing it. Defence is futile. David D Burns’ EAR method steps in:

Empathy: ‘You’re completely right, you must think I am a misogynist because I think women should stay at home with their young ones.’

Assertiveness: ‘I feel like career doesn’t give most people the same life fulfilment as parenthood. I feel like mums miss out by missing their kids’ infant years. I feel like their kids miss out by being in childcare. I feel like society misses out when these kids grow up having missed this time with their mum (and dad). I feel like it takes about 15 years to get to where you want to be career-wise, and by this time, women are running out of time to have kids. I feel like feminism’s recognition of career success and neglect of family success implicitly promotes career and demeans family.’

Respect: ‘I think all women should be totally free to choose and every woman is different, and there is no right path for everyone.’

Contrast this with every man’s natural defensive posture: ‘How could you say I’m a misogynist, I’m not a misogynist. I’m a feminist and don’t have any thoughts beyond completely agreeing with the narrative. I’ll stop talking now.’

Even the language is feminist. We don’t have words like masculinist and misterogynist. While they might even things up, I’m not sure more verbal warfare is what we need.

Imagine that instead of ‘isms’ we had four sub-groups: Family-focused women, career-focused women, family-focused men, and career-focused men, all with an equal say. Family-focused women would need to speak up to the career-focused women and start burning their business suits. Career-focused women would need to admit that being able to be anything hasn’t really been the answer they were searching for. Family-focused men would need to embrace the label of being a misogynist for wanting a wife that stays at home with the kids. Career-focused men would need to stop talking over career-focused women who don’t want to compete with their booming voices. Rather than one group with outright emotional control, it’s a two way street, and each group has checks and balances on each other.

The game has changed. Instead of women taking on masculine traits to compete in the workplace, or men taking on feminine traits to become sensitive new age guys, women now identify as men and men as women.

That might mean that men who don’t identify as women still feel more effeminate than men of previous generations. This stacks up, young men of this generation produce measurably less testosterone than the previous generation at the same age. It would be interesting to know if similar hormonal phenomena were happening with women. If so, it would be interesting to compare hyper PC Australia and Canada with family-focused countries like Spain and Italy.

Do career-focused women and testosterone-depleted men find each other attractive? I’m not aware of any data on this, but anecdotally it doesn’t look good. If so, could ‘isms’ be contributing to spiralling fertility rates?

Arguably, fertility rate has more to do with financial concerns. Rightly or wrongly young people want to be responsible and able to provide for their family before taking the leap. They do pretty well, getting lenient tax treatment on a high surplus income while focusing on their career, but is this a mistake? Most couples figure out their finances together, and the necessity is the mother of invention. The tax system could be set up in such a way that instead of incentivising the highest possible surplus income, it incentivised the highest possible contribution to society. Income tax affects money in and GST affects money out. Parents earn less (combined) and spend more.

Tax brackets and tax laws are remnants of the industrial revolution that attempt to keep people in factories making widgets paying their taxes and paying off their home loans. Rather than taking the short-term view of ‘more kids means more mums not working, means less tax revenue’, the tax office could learn delayed gratification. Long term, more kids means more trade means more work means more tax revenue, it just takes 20 years before the tax office sees a return on investment. They get better, more productive adults thrown into the bargain for free.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/barbie-ism-feminisms-unhelpful-verbal-warfare/

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Hilariously failed gender re-education caught in the wild

Alexandra Marshall

I was sitting in a cafe last week when I overheard the pair sitting beside me. It was one of those pigeon-hole coffee houses where patrons are elbow-to-elbow rendering eavesdropping a requirement.

As best I could gather, the woman – in her mid-thirties – was a biology lecturer at one of the many nearby universities. The young Asian man was a foreign student with near-perfect English and a calm demeanour. She was restless and became more so as the conversation dragged on until she reminded me of a toddler squirming around with a distinct air of immaturity.

The conversation appeared to be one of those ‘re-education’ chats common among Western universities when a student does something crazy – like refuse to bow and scrape at the feet of progressive propaganda.

In this case, the biology lecturer was interrogating this poor young man about the difference between biological sex and the post-modernist re-imagining of gender.

‘Sex and gender are the same thing,’ the young man shrugged. His crime was evident. How dare he see the world so clearly!

‘What it means to be a ‘man’ has changed. What it means to be a ‘woman’ has changed,’ she replied, as if that was some sort of answer to his statement. ‘That’s why you can change sexes.’

‘Means to be makes no sense. What does it ‘mean’ to be a woman?’ he replied, searching for a clarification.

That had her stumped. ‘Uh… It – through history – like – it changes.’

My faith in the youth of this world was immediately restored. This young man was not buying the half-arsed ramblings and nonsensical rebuttals that amounted to ‘because I say so’.

‘Why separate sex and gender?’ he pushed, no doubt sensing the woman’s fidgeting panic. ‘It is stupid. It makes no sense.’

The starkness of his ungilded words threw her off. ‘It – it was the same thing with racism. Like – we didn’t want to separate them.’

This time the man’s eyebrows furrowed. He took a sip of his coffee, bewildered by her pivot to ‘racism’. ‘What…?’ he eventually replied. ‘That – that’s not an argument.’

‘It needs to be forced. We have to force the separation of gender and sex.’

‘Why?’ he asked, still not following.

‘Because it is more inclusive!’ her voice rose in annoyance. ‘It – you know – it says what it means to be a woman because they identify as that.’

Keep in mind, at this point I’m transcribing word for word, pretending to drink my coffee. I couldn’t help it – they were fascinating. I’d found a wild case study on the demise of social justice propaganda.

The man took another sip of coffee. I don’t blame him. ‘None of that makes any sense…’

‘Sex is used for men,’ she declared. ‘Sex – sex is for like… If I’m a transwoman and I went to a hospital and they want to know my sex – that’s when I would say I was born male. That’s where it ends.’

He narrowed his eyes, not sure if the woman was aware of what she’d admitted to. ‘So, you’re a transwoman but you’re still a man when reality gets involved?’

‘No! No. Transwomen are real women. But a man.’

The male student’s face fell into a distinctive ‘I’ve wasted ten years of my life studying to get into this university’ look. Remember, he’s the kid – she’s the biology lecturer.

It was at this point that I required a quick coffee top-up, but when I came back, the woman had resumed her attempts to re-educate the student.

Her course of action was to start a debate about gender being an outward expression of appearance – the clothes, the makeup, the wigs etc. It’s the ‘womanhood is a performance’ argument we see propagated to validate the social media trend of men ‘experiencing womanhood’ through vacuous TikTok posts bankrolled by fashion labels.

‘If you want to wear a dress, wear a dress…’ he said, picking at the tangled net of her logic with a fishing knife. ‘It doesn’t make you a girl. It makes you a dude – in a dress – who wants to look feminine.’

‘That’s – no!’ Her argument shifted again. ‘Gender is influenced by more than just biology.’

His head tilted, like a bird of prey spying an injured bug on the lawn. ‘So… You wouldn’t separate sport based on gender?’

‘No… Sport segregation is based on sex.’

‘But you just said transwomen should be allowed to play women’s sport because they are real women. That’s a gender argument for sex division. You’ve confused the two.’

The student was correct. His biology lecturer was using two mutually exclusive arguments surrounding the definition of gender to suit different points. When viewed holistically, her comments became incoherent. If this was a debate on Twitter, she would have rage-quit by now, blocked the man, and put up some kind of ‘I’ve been bullied by toxic masculinity’ post. Trapped in a cafe with real people, all she could do was bang her spoon around the insides of her coffee cup in frustration.

He dug her deeper into that hole. ‘We don’t separate sports teams by race. There is no Asian football team. But we do separate by gender. That implies there is a real, biological difference.’

‘You’re really focused on the words,’ she complained. ‘Why does it matter so much?’

‘Because reality matters.’

The banging of her spoon grew louder. She changed the topic.

‘Gender has something to do with what you look like,’ she re-attempted her point. I believe this is what transpeople call ‘passing’. The likes of Blaire White have explained this far better.

‘I’m a big guy. If you saw me in a dark alley, would you feel safer if I was wearing a dress?’

‘No…’ she replied quickly.

‘But according to you, I’m a woman when I’m wearing a dress.’

‘No… Uh, not exactly. Like, being a woman is – like – women wear bras. Bras are part of the female identity. It’s part of their gender expression as women.’

‘Are you wearing a bra?’

‘Um – not right now – actually – I don’t wear them very often.’

‘So, you’re not a woman?’

If there was a reply to that, I didn’t catch it.

‘What if someone was a menacing woman?’ he tried again. ‘A woman who looked blokey. Is their gender male?’

She was taken aback. ‘No – like – if you were a man in a dress – but – still looked manly – uh…’

That was a critical error on her part.

‘But you just said a few seconds ago that gender is all about how you feel, not your biology or looks…’

‘No – but…’

‘So, women are always women, even if they feel blokey, but men are only transwomen if they look the part of a woman – unless they are feeling female, because self-id is always valid.’

She was stumped. ‘What?’

Finally, the poor boy lost it. ‘EXACTLY! IT MAKES NO SENSE. YOU MAKE NO SENSE!’

It was at this point the assumed biology lecturer was interrupted by the Harry Potter ringtone on her phone and I decided to leave before I did something embarrassing – like shake the guy’s hand and congratulate him on permanently traumatising his university ‘elder’.

Whether he passes his biology course is another matter.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/hilariously-failed-gender-re-education-caught-in-the-wild/

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Appeals Court Says DC ‘Selectively’ Enforced Statute to Arrest Pro-Life Activists but Not BLM Protesters

A federal appeals court ruled 3-0 Tuesday that Washington, D.C., “selectively” used a defacement statute to arrest pro-life activists for chalking a message on the sidewalk while permitting Black Lives Matter protesters to mark property without consequences.

During the summer of 2020, at the same time thousands of BLM protesters were taking to the streets of Washington, D.C., and covering public spaces with paint and chalk, two pro-life activists were arrested for chalking the words “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” on a public sidewalk.

The Frederick Douglass Foundation and Students for Life of America, who organized the pro-life protest and filed the lawsuit over the arrests, “plausibly alleged” that the statute’s enforcement was viewpoint discrimination, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found.

“The First Amendment prohibits discrimination on the basis of viewpoint irrespective of the government’s motive,” Circuit Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, wrote in the opinion for the court. “We hold the Foundation has plausibly alleged the District discriminated on the basis of viewpoint in the selective enforcement of its defacement ordinance.”

“The District all but abandoned enforcement of the defacement ordinance during the Black Lives Matter protests, creating a de facto categorical exemption for individuals who marked ‘Black Lives Matter’ messages on public and private property,” the ruling states.

Pro-life activists had a permit to assemble and verbal permission from a police officer to point their message, according to the ruling.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/08/15/appeals-court-dc-treat-pro-lifers-blm-protesters-same/

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Why Australians should be worried about the thought police

ROBERT GOTTLIEBSEN

Prepare yourself for the danger of an Australian 1984-style ‘thought police’ masquerading as ‘truth police’. Sadly, we need a truth disclosing force because we have entered an era where public servants, politicians and those in the private sector are embracing the habit of making misleading or untrue statements.

In recent times, misleading information has emerged via the Uluru statement summary which we discover is very different from the actual statement; renewable energy cost concealment, PwC, and so on. Accordingly, the proposed outlawing of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ on social media looks reasonable.

But we already have a form of so-called ‘fact checking’ operating on Facebook and other parts of social media, and its performance is sending out alert signals that apply to the proposed legislation.

I emphasise that I have not conducted detailed research into the outcomes of the current ‘fact checking’ exercise, but an incident hit my desk where I was familiar with the actual facts and the so-called ‘fact checking’ looked dangerously like an exercise in political correctness.

If fact checking becomes opinion vetting then we will experience a very serious curb on public opinion via social media as ‘fact checking’ becomes a form of ‘thought police’ designed to stifle views that the government does not like or that are ‘politically incorrect’.

For example, on social media, both the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ campaigns will be very active and presenting two entirely different set of facts.

A fully operational ‘thought police’ on social media might block opinions based on the full Uluru statement or even blocking the full statement itself, given it has been so damaging to the government supported ‘yes’ case.

My long-term readers will remember the coverage of the case brought against WorkSafe Victoria by Independent Contractors of Australia, which had asked WorkSafe to investigate 27 individuals and entities – including Victoria’s premier, former ministers, the chief health officer and the health department – for alleged breaches of the Occupational Health and Safety that allegedly led to the deaths of 801 people.

The case came before the Supreme Court and the hearings lasted almost the entire 2022.

In December, the Victorian court rejected the cases against the defendants, partly on the basis that early in the hearings, a particular document was lodged later than the court claimed it should have been. The decision was handed down just after the state election returned the Andrews government.

The declaration on timing was legally very controversial because it meant that issues raised by the case were not addressed, and had the opinion been reached early in the case, expensive legal bills would have been avoided.

The judge declared that if Independent Contractors of Australia “is not granted an extension of time, the individuals … will be freed from the not insignificant stress of potentially being subjected to prosecution for serious criminal offences which may carry lengthy terms of imprisonment”.

He added that the 20 individuals “may suffer considerable prejudice” if Independent Contractors of Australia are granted an extension of time.

Australia has WorkSafe laws that carry lengthy jail terms if the courts find there has been a breach of the act.

Although stress was not the reason why the case failed, the fact that a judge declared that in a WorkSafe case the stress of the people being sued was an issue, opens a whole new set of legal issues that may be used to block cases that carry large penalties and stress for those on trial.

On Facebook, a long debate was posted that canvassed the multitude of issues being debated. It was about opinions on the issues raised by judgement. The so-called fact-checkers shifted the opinion entry to the fact-checking section of Facebook, and then superimposed an introduction before the link.

Given this was a discussion about legal opinions, for it to be declared the subject of a fact check on political issues sets a dangerous precedent. Then to make matters worse, the so called ‘factual’ introduction contained statements that were factually incorrect, but were politically correct.

And what is of further concern is that AAP Factcheck that undertook the manoeuvre is a reputable organisation. Australian Associated Press aims to be an independent, nonpartisan Australian not-for-profit organisation.

Again it is unfair to reach conclusions on one example, but non-profit organisations need income to pay salaries and while this may simply be a mistake of judgement, it is a warning that when a fact checking organisation becomes involved in opinions, a 1984-style ‘thought police’ can emerge.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/why-we-should-be-worried-about-the-thought-police/news-story/fd49a44f358178299120389852f553ef

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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