Summary: Educators bring feminist indoctrination to high schools. Admire their skillful use of techniques developed by Mao and company! The WaPo frankly and unselfconsciously tells the tale. “Struggle sessions”, public pressure to confession & repent, and ideological conversions. This fourth wave feminism, the quest for dominance. It will not end well for America.
“I’m sorry for being a man.”
— David Cunliffe, leader of New Zealand’s Labour Party, speaking at a Women’s Refuge symposium on 14 July 2014.
Here is a typical news story in New America. It is unusual only because this event occurred in high school – not college. Boys are guilty of unauthorized thoughts and non-politically correct speech to friends. Then comes the government crackdown and a Maoist-like struggle session – culminating in confession and self-criticism by the guilty. Followed by new programs for indoctrination using authoritarian pressure plus intensive social pressure to conform. It is America’s new education, since teaching about reading and math is so boring. School officials find political activism more fulfilling!
Another in the WaPo’s “Inspired Life” series.
“Teen boys rated their female classmates
based on looks.
The girls fought back.“
A “news” story by Samantha Schmidt
in the Washington Post.
An annotated look at our authoritarian future.
“‘There’s a list of the girls’ names,’ her friend Nicky Schmidt, a fellow senior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland, said. ‘And we’re ranked.’ …They felt violated, objectified by classmates they considered their friends. They felt uncomfortable getting up to go to the bathroom, worried that the boys might be scanning them ….”
What a strange opening to the story! Children making lists of people they like and dislike is normal behavior. Boys making a list circulated among themselves is not actionable by the government, even in schools, by any normal American standards. There is a massive body of research by psychologists showing how men and women value others by their appearance – an innate behavior by our intensely visual species. It is natural for young people to be uncomfortable about this, whether women or men.
“{A} group of girls reported the list to an administrator …. The next day, the girls learned that after an investigation, school officials decided to discipline one male student with in-school detention for one day, which would not show up on his record. Bethesda-Chevy Chase’s principal, Donna Redmond Jones, said an investigation revealed the list was made during school hours, and that ‘there was definitely discipline applied,’ in line with the district’s code of conduct but that she could not give any more information because of privacy concerns.”
The WaPo does not explain how this violated the school’s Code of Conduct. The principal could have discussed this incident with the girls, explaining that living with such pressures is part of life. Nerds are mocked. Mentally slow people are mocked. Clumsy people are mocked. Cheerleaders and jocks are lionized. It is high school. After graduation the pressures change, but never go away.
“Unsatisfied with the disciplinary action, Schmidt texted about 15 girls she knew, and told them to tell all of their friends to show up at the school’s main office the next day during lunch, ‘to tell them we feel unsafe in this environment and we are tired of this toxicity,’ Schmidt wrote in her text.”
Schmidt understands modern America. Get a mob and confront friendly authorities to get action. Claims of feelings are trump! Feeling “unsafe”, no matter how irrational, gets action. Children’s calls for force to change behavior of the politically incorrect are treated like the Declaration of Independence.
“About 40 senior girls showed up, packing into an assistant principal’s office as Schmidt read a statement she had written. ‘We want to know what the school is doing to ensure our safety and security,’ Schmidt said. ‘We should be able to learn in an environment without the constant presence of objectification and misogyny.'”
What is the threat to their “safety and security”? Irrational demands by the politically privileged are treated respectfully, no matter how irrational. (Another example: “LGBTQ groups say student vets ‘jeopardize’ well-being of students.”) Demands to change behavior of others are considered legitimate, with few daring to challenge them.
“The girls and administrators agreed that they should have a large meeting with the male students in the program, including the boys who created and circulated the list. That Friday, on International Women’s Day, almost all of the students in the IB program – about 80 students – met in a large conference room for what was supposed to be a 45-minute meeting during fifth period.”
Was this structured as a discussion, with both sides able to express their concerns? Probably not. Did anyone ask the boys if they had complaints about the girls’ behavior?
“Instead, the meeting lasted two and a half hours. Several girls delivered personal and impassioned speeches describing not only their presence on the list but also their previous experiences with sexual abuse, harassment and objectification, both inside the school and outside of it.
“‘I feel it when walking home from school, I get catcalled by a man in a truck who repeatedly asks me to get in his car, and follows me home when I don’t,’ said Rose Frank, one of the senior girls on the list, reading from a letter she had prepared. ‘I feel it when my mother tells me that my third ear piercing will ‘send the wrong message’ in a workplace setting, and that in the future it’s best to let my hair down for job interviews.'”
These are complex matters. Some rooted in thousands of years of culture. Some rooted in biology. A discussion would have been educational. But that was not the intent.
This event reads like the classic form of a “struggle session” used in during Communist China’s cultural revolution.These were meetings used to shape public opinion and attack class enemies. A crowd, supported by authority figures, pressures the target to admit crimes – culminating in the target’s conversion to correct though and re-acceptance to the community. These were psychologically powerful and traumatic events. No defense was allowed. Making the target fearful is victory, and the lesson for other class enemies (their time will come). Struggle sessions were often held at the school or workplace of the guilty. For a horrifically vivid description, see Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
“Sitting toward the center of the room during the meeting was the male student credited with creating the list, an 18-year-old senior in the IB program. After listening to all of the girls’ speeches, many of which were directed specifically to him, he stood up and spoke to the group, admitting to making the list and apologizing for the hurt it caused. ‘It was quite intense, being so directly confronted in front of so many people for so long,’ the student recalled in an interview with The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of the repercussions he could face. …He said he never distributed the list to anyone else in the grade, and he didn’t know how it began circulating earlier this month. But he took responsibility for what he said was a haphazard, ‘stupid decision.’
“‘When you have a culture where it’s just normal to talk about that, I guess making a list about it doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing to do, because you’re just used to discussing it,’ he said in an interview. ‘I recognize that I’m in a position in this world generally where I have privilege. I’m a white guy at a very rich high school. It’s easy for me to lose sight of the consequences of my actions and kind of feel like I’m above something.’ While he regrets making the list, he said he was grateful that the girls spoke up. ‘It’s just a different time and things really do need to change,’ he said. ‘This memory is not going to leave me anytime soon.'”
Following conversion, next comes extending indoctrination to the next generation of children.
“Since that confrontational meeting, a co-ed group of senior students – including the boy who created the list – has been gathering on an almost weekly basis at lunch time to discuss how to prevent this sort of incident from happening again. Jones, the school principal, said she has been proud to see the students take the lead on the meetings since the list emerged. ‘It takes bravery, it takes being vulnerable, it takes a sense of forgiveness,’ she said.
“The Bethesda-Chevy Chase students are planning a day next month in which pairs of students – one senior girl and one senior guy – will go to the younger students’ classes to talk about toxic masculinity, said Gabriella Capizzi, one of the senior girls taking the lead on the campaign. Some students are also organizing a pop-up museum focused on the theme of cultural toxicity. While the event was planned before the list circulated, it has now taken on a new meaning, said Gloria Karekezi, a 17-year-old senior who is working on an exhibit and who has been a part of the ongoing efforts to speak up about the list. With the two months of high school they have left, the seniors hope to set a precedent for the younger grades, Capizzi said.”
This is a profound educational experience for these girls. They get a taste of power. Victim-hood brings power. Feminist power comes through expressions of fear, no matter how imaginary, and working with the government to attack men.
“‘I wasn’t surprised by the list,’ Capizzi said. ‘The kids like the kid who made the list aren’t the outliers. It’s the people who speak up about it that are. And that culture needs to change.'”
This is a powerful educational experience for the boys in the audience. Government authorities are their enemies. Defense is not allowed. They have no rights. Their parents are MIA. They stand alone. At some point they will learn that safety only comes when they stand together.
This shows what many of our schools – first colleges, now grade schools – have become: indoctrination centers to change America’s culture. Needless to say, parents are not consulted. As for traditional education – reading, writing, math – those are secondary to our Leftist masters’ larger goals.
———————————
See the bigger picture
Fruits of our society’s war on boys and men surround us, but we no longer see them (frogs jump from a slowly heating pot, but people don’t). For a detailed analysis of how the Left is steering our society off a cliff, see The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It
“In the middle of an invigorating dinner conversation involving a former governor, a minister, an owner of a PR firm, two authors, and a UC Berkeley professor (three men and three women, two strong feminists), one of the hosts, author Sam Keen, asks, ‘If you were born today, which would you rather be – a boy or a girl?’ Every man answered, ‘A girl.’ As did two of the three women.
“At another dinner party, Melissa, the daughter of close friends, told my wife, Liz, and I that she was pregnant. …Later that evening, I asked Andy, ‘If you had to choose, which would you prefer – a boy or girl?’ After a second’s hesitation, he said in a serious tone, “A girl.” …
“{Dads-to-be are almost twice as likely to prefer a daughter to a son. As for moms-to-be, they are 24% more likely to prefer their firstborn child to be a daughter.”
There will be a reaction to this revolution. This will not end well for America.
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about society and gender issues, about feminism, and especially these …
- The Economist proclaims that men are “The Weaker Sex”.
- Women are moving on top of men in America.
- Victims no more: the revolution puts women on top of men.
- The feminist revolutionaries have won. Insurgents have arisen to challenge the new order. As always, they’re outlaws.
- As the Left’s social revolution wins victories, a revolt begins.
- MeToo discovers that there is always a counterrevolution.
- Society changes as men learn the Dark Triad.
Another book about the gender wars
The War Against Boys:
How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men
By Christina Hoff Sommers.
From the publisher …
“An updated and revised edition of the controversial classic …argues that boys are the ones languishing socially and academically, resulting in staggering social and economic costs.
“Girls and women were once second-class citizens in the nation’s schools. Americans responded with concerted efforts to give girls and women the attention and assistance that was long overdue. Now, after two major waves of feminism and decades of policy reform, women have made massive strides in education. Today they outperform men in nearly every measure of social, academic, and vocational well-being.
“Christina Hoff Sommers contends that it’s time to take a hard look at present-day realities and recognize that boys need help. …that the problem of male underachievement is persistent and worsening. …Sommers tackles: how the war against boys is harming our economic future, and how boy-averse trends such as the decline of recess and zero-tolerance disciplinary policies have turned our schools into hostile environments for boys. As our schools become more feelings-centered, risk-averse, competition-free, and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic needs of boys. She offers realistic, achievable solutions to these problems that include boy-friendly pedagogy, character and vocational education, and the choice of single-sex classrooms.
“The War Against Boys is an incisive, rigorous, and heartfelt argument in favor of recognizing and confronting a new reality: boys are languishing in education and the price of continued neglect is economically and socially prohibitive.”
“This is a powerful educational experience for the boys in the audience. Government authorities are their enemies. Defense is not allowed. They have no rights. Their parents are MIA. They stand alone. At some point they will learn that safety only comes when they stand together.”
I asked my wife when we were going to address toxic femininity. The answer was that men had to suffer as long as women had to. The dark and slippery path to hell is in full effect. We know were it leads. We know what is at the bottom. Everyone loses, but some will survive. This is not a pretty, nor a civilized gift for future generations. We should do better.
You fucked up by asking her.
‘Mother may I’ will get you despised. Women don’t want to be asked anything—they want to be led by men of strength, will and status. In the absence of such, they will reluctantly take the reigns themselves, and woe betide the beta males.
You’re right, we can do better. We can stop asking questions. We can stop apologizing. We can retake control. I’ve done it in my own life in part by finding strength in a group of like-minded men. It remains to be seen if this model can scale.
dragnet,
That pretty much nails it. John’s wife wants revenge thru power. The reply is to give a demonstration of power.
John should prepare for the possibility of getting divorce papers in the mail one day.
John: “I asked my wife when we were going to address toxic femininity. The answer was that men had to suffer as long as women had to.”
She implied you and her sons have to suffer.
Men and boys have to suffer for things they were never part of. We have to suffer for things that were done before we were born.
And why you did not present her the paper of the divorce already?
Men gave us civilisation. Women will give us tyranny.
The Mao reference is amusing but inaccurate. A digest of his collected political wisdom was published as the Little Red Book to teach 400,000,000 peasants how to read and simultaneously, overthrow the elite that had oppressed them for 3,000 years without resorting to violence.
You could call it ‘indoctrination’ but it was much more for those people: it was liberation. They haven’t forgotten, either. Ten million of them visit Mao’s birthplace each year to say ‘thank you,’ more than all the people on earth who visit heroes’ sites.
Godfrey,
You have to read the text, not just the title. The reference to Mao refers to the tactics used during the cultural revolution.
Read! Who knows what you might learn!
And the millions that died under Mao because they didn’t get in line. Sure, the peasants overthrew the elite only to be replaced by Mao and his elite. The dude was evil. 4th wave feminism is evil.
Gute,
I didn’t want to respond directly to Godfree’s comment, but you go to the heart of it: evil people are often popular. Serial killers get lots of fan mail – including admiring letters from women offering themselves. Stalin remains popular in Russia. Germany had to institute draconian measures to limit expressions of admiration for Hitler.
Evil has a root in our souls. Some express it by doing evil things. Others in admiration of evil people and their evil deeds. Probably its a ying-yang thing, light and darkness.
I don’t know why most people whether don’t get this or tend to forget it (about Stalin, Hitler and Mao etc.) — It is the other way around! Sir Acton’s: “Power corrupts…” has a second part, rarely mentioned: “Great men are almost always bad men.”
As about the “evil (persons) worship” — Paraphilia may be part of it and there are all sorts of (often conflicting) theories about this. But not much to do with the Sir Acton’s point I tried to make…
The roots of evil was already present by the time of 1st wave feminism: The Suffragette Bombers: Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists
.
Here is a review of the book by a partisan source: “Heroines? No, the suffragettes were terrorists plain and simple” by Belinda Brown at The Conservative Woman.
Those women actually delayed women’s suffragette through their acts of terrorism and attempts to kill innocent civilians.
Info,
Thank you for the links to the book and a review! I added details to your cite for other readers.
The terrorist acts of first wave feminists are important hidden history. I knew about it, but until I read your comment I did not make the mental connection with the evils of fourth wave feminism. Thanks for providing that insight.
I think it’s interesting that most of the people that are upset about this list have a profile on Facebook. One of the origins of Facebook was FaceMash, a website built by Mark Zuckeberg to rate girls.
Not saying it’s right or wrong, just interesting.
Eric,
I didn’t know about that history of Zuckerberg! Thanks for posting the video!
Dikotter has a three part series on the Cultural Revolution. It is shocking and fascinating.
Follow-up to Daniel’s comment:
Frank Dikötter is a Dutch historian who specialises in modern China, a Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. See his website. Here is a list of his books.
One sometimes has the impression of having woken from a deep decade long slumber, to find that it looks like the same world, but has changed in incomprehensible ways.
Its not just incomprehensible to the ‘unawoke’ men. Find Camille Paglia’s interviews on youtube for a feminist to whom this stuff is iequally ncomprehensible.
Reading recently an account of a 60 year old man who is embarking on transition to becoming a woman. He says he was a woman trapped in a male body. I read it with a similar bemusement. What is it like, to feel one is a woman or a man, in some sense that is independent of one’s physical being? Do so called ‘cisgender’ men feel like men? Or women similarly? Isn’t it not a matter of feeling like, but simply being?
I don’t actually find the idea of ‘feeling like’ the gender that one is a coherent concept. Do I feel white, or brown, or blue eyed? Do I feel 6ft tall? Could I possibly be a 25 year old trapped in a 60 year old body? This is mad.
I can only think that something in the environment is having strong hormonal effects. Someone said that one day we would find that all our most profound feelings and thoughts about abstract matters were determined by the interplay of our hormones. This stuff is so conceptually crazy that I can only think its a mass hysteria driven by some environmental cause.
Like, as a for instance, if a people were to start mentally deteriorating due to ingesting some substance universally used in food preparation. But we are not even looking because our confusion is so great we don’t see there is a problem.
Yeah but gender isn’t a purely physical trait like one’s biological sex, height, or eye color is. Since there’s a major psychological-social-cultural component to gender, it seems weird to pretend that a person’s feelings about their gender isn’t a coherent part of their identity.
Piggie,
“it seems weird to pretend that a person’s feelings about their gender isn’t a coherent part of their identity.”
Nothing in this post implies such a thing.
Try reading the comment I was responding to.
Piggie,
My apologies! My screen shows comments only in time sequence, and I forgot that about Henrik’s comment.
Piggie,
It is certainly true that a person’s feelings about their gender are a coherent part of their identity. Or part of their identity, don’t know about coherent.
In the same way, my feelings about all aspects of my physical being are a part of my identity. I have feelings about being tall or short, broad or thin, muscular or slight, bald or hirsute, young or old. Even feelings about non-physical things can be part of my identity – sexual orientation, arguably nationality or ethnicity.
We have feelings about who we are, and yes, they are part of our identity. But it does not at all follow from this that we are ‘really’ who we would like to be, or that it makes any sense to say we are in the wrong body and really of some different being.
Can I, for instance, really be black? Or French? Or really 30 years old, when I am chronologically 70? What is the difference exactly?
And when we come to the marks of femininity or masculinity that the ‘in the wrong body’ argument usually tends to wishing to achieve, they are very traditional traits and behaviours of exactly the sort that the progressive movement has proclaimed to be nurture and not nature. If that is correct, they are not at all marks of having a brain of a certain gender, because there is no such thing.
Or maybe we are going to argue that nurture produces a gendered brain? This isn’t what the direct reports say. Jan Morris, for instance, at age 3 or so, under his mother’s piano, and he reports and recalls feeling that he was a girl. Or are we saying that the first couple of years of nurture are enough to make the brain one particular gender? Morris was brought up very conventionally as a boy. We are going to end up with the circular argument that he must have been brought up as a girl, because his brain got that way…
Discussions about the topic are mired in logical non-sequiturs and contradictions.
I still think these are so great that we have to find some other explanation for the increasing prevalence of what seems to me a sort of mass hysteria. Like, that they were drinking too much wine out of lead bottles, and it produced the symptoms of lead poisoning. Not knowing which, they thought they were having profound policy and value debates. But they were actually just brain damaged.
How long until the little darlings in high school (and grade school?) start dressing in Red Guard uniforms and carry around heavy buckled belts to beat the transgressors? Don’t send these links to any western woman and girls, they’d really dig the idea of a new Red Guard.
“Red Guard Movement – 50th Anniversary” by the Hong Kong Art Galley Assn.
Upcoming event: 121 artworks by Han-Wu Shen, a Chinese 21st Century Realist artist (born 1950) – at the Art Renewal Center.
Bandito,
While many on the Left fantasize about that – a growth spurt for the Black Bloc – my guess (guess) is that marching youth wearing snazzy black suits is more likely, given western culture.
But we drifting to Weimerica, where an extreme outcome is the only likely outcome. We can only guess at which flavor.