Jody Allard’s latest piece slamming her teenage sons has rightly gone viral. Vox Day describes it as a case for paternal custody, and Ed Driscoll at Instapundit darkly joked about naming her mother of the year.
Allard is the most shameless of the shameless, a professional divorcée who plies her trade by repeatedly humiliating her sons in print. In February of last year Allard wrote in the Washington Post about one of her sons being committed to a psychiatric ward after expressing the desire to kill himself. Starting with the title, it was all about her: I have to learn to care for my suicidal teen with limits but without fear
I am a good enough mother. I know that because my son’s psychiatrist told me so last week, as she explained bell curves and Skinner’s theories, and said that suicidal thoughts are normal. Forty percent of teenagers have them, she said, and it’s only verbalizing these thoughts that pushes my son out of the realm of normal and into the abyss of mental illness.
…I have been searching for what I did wrong since it happened, and I’ve examined my son’s life with a fine-toothed comb, finding a thousand examples of my mistakes. I married the wrong men…
Allard followed up six months later with another humiliating piece, this time accusing her sons of perpetuating rape culture. My teen boys are blind to rape culture.
My sons are part of the problem.
I’m a survivor of rape and sexual abuse. My sons know this like they know I was once a reporter and I love curries and coffee…
…they aren’t allies in the fight against rape culture because they refuse to acknowledge their own culpability when they call a girl a slut or a whore, laugh at a sexist joke or remain silent when their friends talk about their own questionable sexual behavior.
And in this broken system, anyone who isn’t with us is against us. Particularly, and especially, men. Even my own sons — even yours. It’s not enough to teach our sons about consent; we have to encourage them to have the courage to speak out against rape culture, too.
The deep irony is that she is accusing her sons of lacking empathy, something Allard displays a truly pathological lack of. What kind of mother would publicly humiliate her suicidal son repeatedly, all under the guise of offering parenting advice?
This brings us to Allard’s latest article about her sons, I’m Done Pretending Men Are Safe (Even My Sons) (emphasis mine):
I wrote an essay in The Washington Post last year, during the height of the Brock Turner case, about my sons and rape culture. I didn’t think it would be controversial when I wrote it; I was sure most parents grappled with raising sons in the midst of rape culture. The struggle I wrote about was universal, I thought, but I was wrong. My essay went semi-viral, and for the first time my sons encountered my words about them on their friends’ phones, their teachers’ computers, and even overheard them discussed by strangers on a crowded metro bus. It was one thing to agree to be written about in relative obscurity, and quite another thing to have my words intrude on their daily lives.
One of my sons was hurt by my words… He is angry at me now, although he won’t admit that either, and his anger led him to conservative websites and YouTube channels; places where he can surround himself with righteous indignation against feminists, and tell himself it’s ungrateful women like me who are the problem.
This woman is incredible. She knows what she is doing to him, but she simply won’t stop. No depth is too low. More astounding is that her editors haven’t come to their senses and pulled the plug on her.
And as always, it is all about her. Tossing her sons under the bus yet again is merely a segue into how hard it is for her to date as a single mother:
As a single mother, I sometimes wonder whether the real problem is that my sons have no role models for the type of men I hope they become. But when I look around at the men I know, I’m not sure a male partner would fill that hole. Where are these men who are enlightened but not arrogant? Who are feminists without self-congratulation? If my sons need role models, they may have to become their own.
I joined Bumble recently, after a six-plus year break from dating. I’m not overly interested in dating in the first place, but I’m starved for adult conversation so dating feels like a necessary evil. Bumble, as I explained to my married friends, is like the feminist Tinder. Women have to initiate contact with men, so at least there’s no inbox full of dick picks every day. But, feminist or not, the men are no different from the men anywhere else and I quickly felt deflated. If the feminist men — the men who proudly declare their progressive politics and their fight for quality — aren’t safe, then what man is? No man, I fear.
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