Feminists Need to Stop Desperately Seeking Male Validation

I don’t need my son to play with dolls in order to feel like my maternal attributes are valuable

Want to understand everything wrong with “gender-neutrality” in parenting today? Look no further than Elissa Strauss’s commentary on gender norms at CNN.

“Today, there’s not a single traditionally masculine thing a girl can do that would raise eyebrows.” The author cites short hair, sports teams, STEM and playing superheroes as the defining markers of masculine behavior. What she fails to note are that women who take on traditionally masculine roles into adulthood do wind up being judged, and rather harshly I might add, by their own biology.

The majority of women who choose to prioritize career over motherhood wrestle with fear and regret their entire lives. Those who try to have it all, all at once, keep demanding more from an economic system that isn’t designed to accommodate their intrinsic feminine needs. Nearly 2/3rds of mothers in the workforce want the job market to bend to their flex time demands so they can have more time at home with their children. Federally-funded family leave is in such high demand that even Republicans are working on ways to subsidize the inevitable.

The stark reality isn’t that these women are on trial in the court of public opinion for their choice to work, but rather that they are already living according to the verdict handed down by a previous generation’s judge, jury and executioner: That femininity is guilty. Guilty of being powerless. And therefore, it must be back-burnered or even banned if women are to survive, let alone thrive in the presumed patriarchy.

The author readily classifies beauty, love and motherhood as feminine traits. Yet she can’t seem to wrap her head around how these things are demonized by feminists, despite observing:

Girls have been told that they can do anything, be anything, and they largely can, without judgment. However — and here’s the catch — that’s true only if they are physically strong and career-oriented and eschew most of the traditional trappings of femininity. In short, they will gain respect if they act like boys.

She even cites a sociology professor who comments:

“It’s about mobility. Girls who act like boys are moving up the social ladder. Boys who are acting like anything but masculine are moving down and risk losing their status…”

Her solution: Make femininity acceptable for boys. Make it culturally cool for boys to embrace dolls, glitter and My Little Pony. That, she asserts, will balance things out in what she claims will be a truly “gender neutral” landscape. But what she’s advocating for isn’t gender neutral. It’s gender-bending.

Asserting that if boys play with dolls femininity will somehow be deigned acceptable by feminists is even more ironic: For the daughters of second-wave feminists who chose the male career path over female motherhood, their sons must play with dolls in order to make motherhood acceptable. That’s right: Little boys must be allowed to imitate their mothers’ natural feminine instincts so those instincts can be found acceptable to the wider culture. “Broadening boyhood will also help give legitimacy to women’s work and interests,” she writes. In other words: I need my son’s love of dolls to be accepted in order to validate my role as a mother.

Today’s mainstream feminists are stuck in the patriarchy loop created by their liberationist foremothers. Introducing the Marxist notion of patriarchy into the feminist movement created a mythical power structure from which no woman could ever escape. Feminists sacrificed the feminine on culture’s altar and accused men of lighting the match. Now a new generation of women who dare to find fulfillment in motherhood struggle to make their joy culturally acceptable according to the way of their elders. This means raising their daughters within a masculine framework while forcing their sons to imitate, and therefore validate traditional female roles.

The solution, of course, is to resurrect the female; to liberate the sister, the wife and most importantly the matriarch from the closet and parade her, loud and proud. Boys will never be free to be boys until women are once again free to be girls — and damned proud of it.