Gender-Bending Lesson

After studying the 1960s, including themes of the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement, I gave follow-up lessons on legacies of those and other issues in American culture today. This is one.

“Feminists and homosexual activists use the words ‘genders’ and ‘sexes’ almost interchangeably. They’ve been pushing an idea that there are more than two genders since at least the 1990s,” I told them. “They’ve been trying to pass a United Nations resolution that instead of two genders, there are five.”

“What would those be?” asked a girl with an incredulous look.

“They claim that male and female are out on the edges of a spectrum,” I explained as I wrote on the board. “That inside the female on the extreme right are lesbians. That inside the male on the extreme left are homosexual men, and than in the middle are ‘transgender’ people who go either way.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “A lesbian is still female. She’s not another gender.”

“That’s crazy,” said a boy.

“To them,” I explained, “it’s another battle in the Sexual Revolution.”

“Well I hope they lose,” another girl said.

“Remember last month when a speaker came in to discuss bullying at an assembly in the gym?” I asked.

There were nods all around. “Last year it was a football player,” said a boy.

“Yes,” I said. “What did you think of those lectures?”

“They were good,” he said.

“What do the rest of you think?”

Most indicated the lectures had been interesting.Joel Baum Fox News

“Well, in Oakland, California, students get different kinds of bullying lessons,” I said, wheeling the LCD projector into position and plugging in my laptop. “Watch this.”

It was a “bullying” lesson on “gender diversity” in which the lecturer told fourth grade students they could be a girl or a boy or both. Joel Baum told students: “They can feel like girls. They can feel like boys. They can feel like both, and they can feel like, as I said, kinda like neither.”

Baum is educational director for Gender Spectrum, an activist group pushing the idea that the two sexes - male and female - are too rigid. Students can move around on the “gender spectrum” depending on how they feel. They can change whenever they want.

“They’re way too young to be listening to that stuff in the fourth grade,” said another girl.

“They shouldn’t teach that stuff,” said a boy. “It’s crazy. Those kids are going to believe it now. They believe anything the teacher tells them.”

“Would you think it was all right to teach this,” I asked the the girl, “if the students were older?”

“Yes,” she said.

“At what age then?”

“I don’t know - high school maybe.”

“It’s mandatory for all students in Oakland to take it from kindergarten to twelfth grade,” I said. “Mandatory means they have no choice.”

“That’s brainwashing,” said a the boy. “Those schools shouldn’t be doing that. It hasn't got much to do with bullying.”

“What if it were taught only in high school and students could choose to take the 'gender spectrum' course or not to take it?”

“That would be okay,” he said.

“The California Teachers’ Association, the CTA, is paying for this. That’s the teachers’ union,” I explained.

“Why?” he asked.

“Teachers’ unions all over the country are very left-wing,” I said. “They think this stuff is wonderful, and teachers’ unions are the most powerful groups in the Democrat Party.”

“You’re not left-wing,” said a girl.

“I’m unusual,” I said. “There are very few conservatives in this profession.”

“And you’re retiring.”

“Yup.” “This kind of gender-bending stuff is happening all over the country,” I explained. “The Maine legislature, for example, is about to vote on a bill that would prevent males who claim to be females from suing when they’re not allowed to use the ladies’ room in middle school or in a restaurant. In two cases, a boy’s parents and a man have sued a school and a restaurant and the Maine Human Rights Commission has agreed with them. Now the Orono Middle School is being forced to allow a boy to use the girls’ bathroom. A Denny’s Restaurant was forced to allow a man dressed as a woman to use the ladies’ room there.”

“In both cases here, the newspaper article refers to the boy and the man with the personal pronouns of ‘she’ and ‘her’ as if they were indeed females,’” I explained. “I don’t do that.”

“If you were in the Maine Legislature, how would you vote?” I asked. “How many of you would vote ‘yes,’ which would allow schools and restaurants to prevent males from using female bathrooms or locker rooms?”

Five or six hands went up.

“Who would vote ‘no’?”

Two hands.

“Who isn’t sure?”

Another five or six hands went up.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll see what the legislature does.”


The Vagina Monologues

“The Vagina Monologues” just won’t die. When I first read of the play more than a decade ago, it sounded bizarre. When I saw the playwright, Eve Ensler, interviewed on TV, she was another kooky, man-hating feminist and her play was becoming a rallying point for NOW (National Organization for Women) types and “Women’s Studies” majors across the country. When I spoke disdainfully of it last year in front of a young, female colleague, she asked, “Have you ever read it?”

“No,” I admitted and she offered to lend it to me. I promised to check it out, but not to read it all if it didn’t grab me. It was interesting the way train wrecks are interesting and so short that I read it all. It was even more bizarre than the newspaper descriptions because most of its content couldn’t be published in a newspaper. Women chanted several dozen slang terms for that part of their anatomy - way more than I’d ever heard. Then they described what their vagina looked like, smelled like, what it would say if it could speak, and what it would wear if it could get dressed up. It reminded me of puerile conversations sixth grade boys would have about their anatomy when out of the earshot of adults. But these were grown women.

My wife didn’t want to read the book last year, but I persuaded her to watch an HBO film of the play I rented from Netflix starring its author, Eve Ensler. Her impression was the same as mine - bizarre. Then a local theater company decided to produce it at the Magic Lantern in nearby Bridgton, Maine - a community whose newspaper carries this column. I thought it would be interesting to watch local women willing to shout the C-word to an audience and see if the audience would join in the chant. Again, it would be interesting the way a train wreck is. I bought tickets, but then gave them away when the date conflicted with a trip to Ireland.

Last weekend, a theater company in North Conway, New Hampshire produced it - another community whose newspaper carries this column. My wife said, “Nah. I’ll stay home. You go.” It was a very small venue at M&D Productions, but nice enough and quite reasonable at $15. They even served wine which I could take into the theater with me - very civilized. Most of the actresses were my age - late middle age - and so was the audience - mostly women and about 80% late middle aged. The script was modified with local writers adding monologues, but the flavor was the same. Women offering feminist laments about bad treatment of them and their vaginas by the world at large - especially by men, of course.

Being familiar with the script, I was more interested in watching the audience. Most laughed in that way some junior high school girls will when they’re shocked at outrageous sexual comments made by junior high boys. They don’t consider the remarks funny, but laugh because they don’t know how else to react. It seemed that some of the men laughed because they thought they were supposed to and it would have been impolite not to. I smiled at one performance by a local woman mimicking a triple orgasm. She bettered Meg Ryan’s performance in “When Harry Met Sally.”

The play’s nadir was a monologue by an actress playing a 13-year-old girl describing her seduction by a 24-year-old woman.

“Vagina Monologues” explored many aspects of vaginas except what I would consider their most important one - procreation. Vaginas are, after all, vehicles for pregnancy and birth. Ensler said in a revised version of TVM: “I had been performing this piece for over two years when it suddenly occurred to me that there were no pieces about birth. It was a bizarre omission.”

Um, yeah.

Radical feminists’ disconnect from the maternal is the essence of what’s bizarre about them. Ensler went on: “Although when I told a journalist [about] this [bizarre omission] recently, he asked me, ‘What’s the connection [between vaginas and birth]?’”

Uh-duh. It’s hard to imagine any journalist asking that question. I know there are dumb ones out there, but still. Ensler then described how she was present at a birth and what she saw. I’ve been present at four and it wasn’t a bad piece of writing.

TVM’s forward was written by feminist guru Gloria Steinem, who seems to deny that women have a maternal instinct at all. In his television special “Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women, and the Sex Difference,” ABC’s John Stossel asked Steinem: “Aren't women, in general, better nurturers?” Icily, she answered: “No. Next question.” In TVM’s forward, she referred to the women’s movement as an alternative to the “patriarchal/political/religious control over women’s bodies as a means of reproduction.” Is Steinem referring to abortion here? I learned elsewhere that she’s had at least one herself and described it as “a pivotal and constructive experience.”

Constructive experience? Abortion?

Given that vaginas are the vehicle for 40 million-plus abortions in the United States alone, and given that abortion is the single most important issue on the radical feminist agenda, it’s very interesting that it's completely ignored in what has become the iconic feminist play. Maybe that’s because the worst and most horrible violence perpetrated on a vagina is by a woman’s own choice.

Palin's "Prop"

A local feminist Democrat accused Governor Sarah Palin of using her handicapped infant son as “a prop on late night television.” It caused a fuss and she resigned last week from Representative Carol Shea-Porter’s (D-NH) campaign as a result. It’s not clear whether she was asked to resign or she did it on her own initiative. No matter. The remark crystallizes why Palin drives feminists crazy.

Radical feminists say they’re “pro-choice.” It looks to them like Sarah Palin made a choice when she got pregnant in her forties after being inaugurated the first woman governor of Alaska, but we can’t be sure of that. To make a choice, she would have had to consider an abortion and we don’t know if it ever entered her mind. Only she knows that. Maybe she discussed it with her husband before anybody else knew she was pregnant and made a choice then. We just don’t know.

During the pregnancy, she found out her baby had Down Syndrome. She’s bound to have known families with such children and thought about how difficult it would be to raise her child. Maybe she considered abortion then. Maybe not. Maybe someone else asked her if she thought about abortion. Maybe not. It could be her friends and family believed she would never consider it because she had borne four children already and knew what was inside her was her child. Maybe they knew she believed abortion was murder so they never brought it up. Maybe she and her husband had a private conversation in which they weighed the prospect of living with a Down Syndrome child against the prospect of living with the guilt they would feel for killing it. Maybe they made a choice then. Or, maybe it never came up because each knew what the other would say.

Whatever went on in Sarah Palin’s mind during her pregnancy, she clearly carried a handicapped baby to term and delivered it when she could have had an abortion. She rejected that most prized “constitutional right” feminists believe they “won” for women everywhere in America and has a highly successful political career without it. When Palin’s family is on stage with the older girl holding her handicapped, infant brother, it drives the local feminist mentioned above and all the rest in the “sisterhood” of feminism nuts. She calls the infant boy, whose name is Trig, a “prop” because, although he’s the smallest, he stands out most in her eyes.

Perhaps it would be petty of me to speculate about another thing that annoys feminists about Palin: In addition to all the above, and after bearing five children, she’s attractive. Back in 1987 when Rush Limbaugh wrote that “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society,” I believe he was kidding - mostly. As with all humor though, what makes it funny is that there’s a grain of truth in it. Feminists have long railed against societal standards of female beauty and they’ve made some good points along the way, but many of us have sensed that, as Shakespeare put it, they “protesteth too much.” Do many feminists resent attractive women and the advantage it gives them? I think so. Is there a disproportionately large number of angry, man-hating, homely women in the “sisterhood”? I think it’s pretty obvious that there is. I believe it’s safe to say that jealousy is also a factor in their hatred of Governor Palin.

The feminists favored candidate, Barack Obama, has the most pro-abortion record in the US Senate - indeed the most pro-abortion record of any candidate for president in history - by far. Speaking on sex education and his two daughters during the campaign last April, he said: “I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby.” To Obama, babies are “punishment.” While in the Illinois State Senate, he voted against the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act.” He would rather leave babies born alive after unsuccessful abortions to die on a shelf in another room, alone and unattended, because to recognize them as human beings would threaten the legality of abortion itself. Explaining his vote, Obama said, “I mean, it - it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute.” If it’s not a child, Barack, then what the hell is it?

Ignore that crying baby in the other room. We must protect abortion. No wonder feminists love Obama and hate Palin. To them, her baby is a prop, a symbol that she rejects their culture of death.

A Parent? Apparently Not

“I care about the children,” or “I only want what’s best for the children.” It seems that I hear those platitudes most often from people who, by choice, don’t have any children of their own. I also hear it sometimes from others who are parents but have only one child, as if they found out what a huge sacrifice it is to raise one child and they quickly closed the door on the possibility of having any more. There are quite a few such people in education and in other human services fields, more so than in the private sector it seems. I have taken no surveys, nor have I read any; it just seems that way in my experience.

Some childless people really do care about children, but they do it quietly and don’t feel the need to profess it. They simply perform kindnesses in a subdued way without seeking recognition. Others feel the need to trumpet their concern and when they do, it rings hollow somehow.

Often, teachers who have chosen not to become parents are the first to criticize parents whose children are sometimes unruly or challenging in school. They believe firmly that all children would work hard, submit to authority and behave well if only their parents had raised them properly. They cling to this belief even after teaching two or more children from the same family who are quite different from one another - one a model student and the other a certified pain in the butt. Obviously, each had the same parent(s) and presumably were raised about the same way, but they turned out quite differently. Certainly, many unruly students are very likely that way from lack of correction at home, but we humans are complicated organisms and there are many other causes than parenting.

Childless teachers tend to forget what it’s like to be a kid. When capable students slack off, they tend to overlook laziness as a likely cause, thinking that there must be some reason other than sloth for lack of performance. Parents can draw from vast experience in getting children to do chores - experience that childless teachers would obviously be lacking. Parents know that nine out of ten times, indolence and procrastination are the reasons kids don’t do what they’re supposed to, and cracking the whip is the most effective way to motivate them in such circumstances. They tend not to teach that in the education departments of our state colleges and universities where most teachers take the courses they need to become certified, however. Instead, they look for some syndrome or code to account for it, and extra personnel are hired to fix the problem.

Since teachers, social workers, and other human services professionals are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats and support similar policies on issues dear to that party, they tend to be strongly pro-choice. That so many remain childless should, therefore, be no surprise. Radical feminists are heavily represented in those occupations and their rhetoric has proclaimed for decades that the biggest obstacle to leading a fulfilling life as a woman is pregnancy. They tend to consider motherhood in a nuclear family as little better than servitude, so it is ironic whey they’re so often the first to profess how much they care about the kids other people raise.

Their concern is frequently voiced when an expensive program or policy is being proposed in a staff meeting or school board meeting or a budget meeting. Parents must operate within family budgets and they must be ready to say no to something their children want. Parents are also accustomed to going without for the sake of their children. Nearly every day, they have to sacrifice energy, time or money they could have spent indulging themselves to spend it instead on what the children need. Some things, however, just aren’t affordable and parents have to remind themselves and their children that it is possible to go without much and still lead a full and productive life. Parents also know that when kids have to work hard and save up for something they really want, they appreciate it a lot more when they finally get it. When liberals clamor for increased spending money on programs “for the children” however, it’s often other people’s money they want to spend.

Nearly everyone can recall feeling a profound skepticism when told by their parents something like: “Wait until you have children of your own; then you’ll understand,” or “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” or “When you’re a parent, you’ll know why I’m doing this and you’ll feel differently.” Everyone who becomes a parent overcomes that skepticism and learns how true those statements were. Do those who choose not to become parents ever learn this? Apparently not.

This column was first published in May, 2005

Heterosexual White Guy

I don’t feel guilty being a heterosexual white guy, but evidently there are many people who think I should. Three years ago, a friend working in the mental health field showed me an essay entitled: “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” distributed to everyone, every year, at the agency where she worked. Written by Peggy MacIntosh, Associate Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, it was full of the usual leftist, victim-group buzzwords, like: empowered, outraged, systemic, consciousness, heterosexism, etc. MacIntosh said that while spending years bringing materials from Women’s Studies into the regular curriculum at Wellesley, she “often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged . . .”

My reaction is: thank God that back in 1988 there were still some men expressing that unwillingness among the Birkenstock-wearing, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, bicycle-riding, sensitive he/shes MacIntosh be likely to encounter around the Wellesley College campus. But that was nearly two decades ago and I fear there are fewer men left who are willing to to tell MacIntosh she’s crazy in those trendy, blue-state, Boston suburbs. Twenty years of mandatory sensitivity training in universities and work places have done a lot of damage to men down there. Testosterone is ebbing dangerously in the region that gave us Michael Dukakis back in 1988, and then John Kerry in 2004. At least those two had an excuse, catering to their coo-coo constituency in Massachusetts. But what about Al Gore in 2000? He wasn’t sure how to be a man either and he came from Tennessee. Then again, he did go to Harvard for four years. That time in Cambridge must have damaged him so much that, during his presidential campaign, he had to hire feminist Naomi Wolfe at $30,000 a month to tell him what a man should be like. And it didn’t work, did it Al. All that money wasted.

Speaking of Naomi Wolfe, I saw her on Book TV last week giving Harvey Mansfield a hard time about his recent book “Manliness.” I was gratified that Mansfield wrote such a book in spite of having taught at Harvard, where he was the only faculty member to vote against establishing a Women’s Studies Department there. I watched the whole interview waiting for him to bring up Wolfe’s work with Gore, but he never did. It’s good to know there’s at least one person left to represent the male sex down there in Cambridge now that Larry Summers has been run out of town.

But back to MacIntosh’s essay. I asked my friend if there were any objections at her agency when it was passed out. She said there weren’t and that disappointed me. “No one spoke up?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “And nobody laughed either the way you did.” That surprised me and made me wonder what kind of men she worked with.

A couple of years passed and I had nearly forgotten the essay when a student-teacher in my classroom said, “Tom, check this out,” as he handed me another copy of MacIntosh’s diatribe. There it was with its list of twenty-six white “privileges,” such as #12: “I can swear or dress in second hand clothes or not answer letters without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.” Not answering letters? Is this the kind of thing they’re outraged about at the Wellesley College Women’s Studies Department? How much does it cost to send a kid to that school? Isn’t that where Hillary Clinton went?

After we read sections like that aloud and chuckled about them, I asked the intern if anyone spoke up about the essay to the instructor. “No,” he said. “We have to pass the course if we want to become teachers.”

Trying to hide my disappointment, I asked, “Well, do you mind if I write about it?”

“Not until I graduate, okay?” he said. “I really need this course. We get these kinds of things a lot and I have to keep my mouth shut or I won’t make it through. After I get my certificate, I won’t care. Write about it then.”

“Okay,” I said. “What will you do if you should get a testosterone surge before June? How will you handle it?”

“I’ll get a muzzle,” he said. “I’m in enough trouble now.”

That’s how it is on campus nowadays for a heterosexual white guy who is unwilling to grant that he’s overprivileged. If he spoke up, he’d be a racist, misogynist, heterosexist oppressor.

Number 22 on MacIntosh’s list of white privileges said: “I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.”

Excuse me? Affirmative action puts women, blacks, hispanics, Eskimos, and just about everyone else ahead of heterosexual white guys in hiring, awarding contracts and admission to colleges and universities, awarding scholarships, etc. HWGs are last on the list and we’re supposed to be overprivileged?

No. I don’t feel guilty being a HWG. And I don’t feel guilty about not feeling guilty either.

Lining Up Last

At St. William’s School, we always lined up before doing anything. It was girls on the left and boys on the right whether we were going out to recess, to the lunchroom, back to the classroom, or wherever. The girls’ line always went first and sometimes I resented that. If I was shivering in the cold wind, I had to wait for the girls to file in first. Seldom did they seem to appreciate our sacrifice. They accepted their privilege as a matter of course.

Girls were more organized than we were. If I forgot to write down a homework assignment or lost it entirely, I could always call up Mary Bauer or Geraldine Hoyle. One of them would be home and able to tell me what it was we were supposed to do. Both were kind and helpful and I didn’t mind if they always went first, but some of other girls were annoying and it was easy to resent them. But it didn’t matter what I thought. They were girls and they always went first.

When I graduated from eighth grade, I went to a Catholic all-male high school and my sisters went to a Catholic all-female high school nearby. After graduation, young men my age were last in line again as Affirmative Action programs were getting started. Women and minorities were given preference over Caucasian males in hiring and promotion. Then we had to get in line for the draft during the Vietnam War. Women were exempt from that. They didn’t have to line up at all.

In those days there were demonstrations in which women demanded equal pay for equal work. I had no objection. In the kinds of jobs I was working at the time, women were getting the same low wages I was getting. I didn’t see any wage discrimination, but that’s not to say it wasn’t happening somewhere else.

When my first three children were girls, I was glad women were guaranteed at least as many opportunities as men were. With Affirmative Action and other developments, they were likely to get even more opportunities than men. They were born in the 1970s when girls were thought to be disadvantaged in schools so special programs were set up to assist them. Evidently they’ve been successful, inasmuch as girls’ performance is measured against boys’ performance at least. Girls are way ahead.

Most feminists pushing these special programs believed there were no differences between males and females beyond the obvious physical ones. We’re all the same, they insisted. They really believed this and still do. The only reason men achieved more than women was because the evil patriarchy conspired to keep women down. They insisted that if you raised girls the same as boys, they would turn out the same.

The most tragic result of this fallacious teaching is what happened to an unfortunate boy born an identical twin in 1965. When he and his brother were circumcised, his was botched. A woman using an electrical cauterizing device accidentally burned off his penis. His parents were persuaded by Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University that the boy could be raised as a girl just as easily as his twin brother would be raised as a boy. So the rest of his genitalia were removed in a sex change operation. He was raised as a girl and given hormone treatments during adolescence. In spite of socialization, hormones, the nurturing as a girl, he never adjusted. He didn’t want to play with dolls; he was prone to fighting; he peed standing up. Finally, he was told what really happened to him and he set out to reverse it. He had surgery again to reconstruct a penis and even married. Two years ago, at age 38, he killed himself. Dr. John Money is still writing and lecturing, however, about how there are no differences between males and females beyond the obvious physical ones.

At a recent in-service workshop in MSAD 72 called “With Boys in Mind,” two veteran elementary teachers offered data convincing most present that boys are in trouble. Nationally, boys make up 2/3 of students in special education and are more likely to be classified as hyperactive. Boys earn 70% of D’s and F’s and fewer than half of the A’s. Boys represent 90% of discipline referrals. When it comes to grades and homework, girls outperform boys in elementary, middle, high school, and even graduate school. Men make up less than 40% of college graduates these days. Boys are many times more likely to commit suicide than girls and women.

There were brain research findings indicating that girls mature earlier than boys. One woman at the workshop wondered aloud if men ever caught up. I told her we would eventually, but we die too soon. The average life span for women is several years longer than for men. Finally, men are allowed to go first - to the morgue.