Life is tough for a feminist scold who's cursed with the horror of having sons.
Here's a typical dinner chez Washington Post contributor Jody Allard:
“Oh boy,” my son said, rolling his eyes. “Not rape culture again.”
We were sitting around the dinner table talking about the news. As soon as I mentioned the Stanford sexual assault case, my sons looked at each other. They knew what was coming. They’ve been listening to me talk about consent, misogyny and rape culture since they were tweens. They listened to me then, but they are 16 and 18 now and they roll their eyes and argue when I talk to them about sexism and misogyny.
“There’s no such thing as rape culture,” my other son said. “You say everything is about rape culture or sexism.”
What's a feminist mom to do when she hears something like that? Why, shame those sons in public!
I never imagined I would raise boys who would become men like these. Men who deny rape culture, or who turn a blind eye to sexism. Men who tell me I’m being too sensitive or that I don’t understand what teenage boys are like….
They don’t call each other out when they make sexist jokes or objectify women. It’s too uncomfortable to separate themselves from the pack so they continue to at least dip their toes into toxic masculinity.
"Toxic masculinity"! Otherwise known as "masculinity."
It gets worse:
When I first talked to my sons about enthusiastic consent, they laughed at me.
So let's shame those boys some more:
My sons are part of the problem.
And also hector them some more:
No matter how often my sons remind me that they are good men, they don’t understand that being “good” is an action. You don’t earn the honor by simply shaking your head when you hear about Turner and other rapists being given lenient sentences. You earn it by acting to end rape culture, and by doing it even when it’s awkward and uncomfortable as hell.
Jody Allard says she's "a survivor of rape and sexual abuse" by a "stranger," and there's no reason not to believe her. But you know the old saying about catching flies with honey versus catching flies with vinegar. Maybe instead of yammering on and on about "rape culture" and trying to humiliate her sons on the pages of the Washington Post for being male, Allard ought to teach them how to protect women from the stranger-rape that she experienced.
Now, I don't know a thing about Stanford swmimmer Brock Turner's rape conviction, or whether he deserved to spend three months or three thousand years in prison. The episode seemed to involve quite a bit of alcohol consumed by both parties. And that feminists hate Turner because his father, instead of doing a son-shaming Jody Allard on him, actually acted like a father and begged the judge to show him some mercy.
As Suzanne Venker, writing in the Daily Caller, has pointed out, Allard has a history of dragging her teen sons into the public spotlight. In February she wrote a Washington Post piece about a suicidal son of hers. Actually, the piece was all about Jody Allard and how tough she had it:
My son’s depression doesn’t belong to me. I didn’t create it and I am not responsible for it.
I'm assuming that son wasn't one of the two cursed with "toxic masculinity" she dragged through the mud on the WaPo pages the other day. Those two eye-rollers sound astoundingly healthy to me.