The moment I do well on my resolve to stay off my phone over the weekend, something happens that’s worth seeing.

Influencer Paige Connell made a video on Friday about my article published here last week titled, “What happens when the man-hating feminists have sons.” The article explores the plight of young boys whose mothers see them as misogynists in the making, teaching them to loathe their own sex and its attendant nature. A video of Connell’s was mentioned in the piece, so it’s entirely understandable that she responded, and just as natural that I clear up some of her mischaracterizations of my argument.

My original article opens:

Motherhood influencer Paige Connell recently posted a video explaining what she does to keep her son from ‘grow[ing] up to be an a**hole.’ Teaching her daughters common courtesy is less of a concern as ‘girls are generally people pleasers,’ she says, but she is especially concerned that her son develop these traits.

One way she teaches common courtesy to her son is by having him go to every one of her daughters’ gymnastics lessons. This wouldn’t be a problem, yet when someone at gymnastics complimented her son for showing up for his sisters, she was sure to tell her son that it’s ‘the least he could do.’

‘This is not something we should be applauding him for, because nobody ever says things like that to me when my daughters are at his baseball game,’ Connell said.

“She caught me red-handed,” Connell said in response to my piece. “I am trying to raise a son who is kind, considerate, treats women with respect, keeps his hands to himself, treats everybody with respect and kindness.”

Of course, my issue is not at all with Connell raising her son to respect his sisters, to show up for them and their interests, and to do so without a thought or a grudge. My issue is how she, by her own admission, withholds praise for her son because he is a boy, and more fundamentally, that she does so because she is upset that her daughters allegedly receive unequal praise for the same courtesy. In other words, she withholds praise because she is upset by how insufficient feminist society is, and she is also upset by the privileges her son enjoys in a misogynistic society. She admits to treating her son differently in order to right some perceived wrong that he is party to by virtue of his membership in the male sex.

Of course, her sons and daughters live their lives “under a microscope,” Connell says, because that is the task of mothers and fathers – to watch behavior closely and steer it towards good.

Her point is well taken, but that is not what is at issue here. She admits that her frustration with societal misogyny has made her less likely to do what parents do every day to encourage good behavior – praise and praise and praise some more.

I praise my own son for saying, “Thank you,” for keeping his food on his plate, and for using the toilet. Surely, these are all the most basic of common courtesies. Should I then withhold praise because “it’s the least he could do”? I don’t think Connell would think I should, yet she brags about correcting a stranger for praising her son’s kind and considerate behavior.

My original article actually focused on a newly released survey, and Connell’s viral video simply provided the news hook to introduce this survey. The survey exemplified our current gender wars, finding that two-thirds of young Democratic women aged 18 to 29 blame men for their challenges. As a mother, that statistic immediately made me think of my two sons and how it would affect my parenting should I see them as responsible for my personal challenges.

“There’s a disproportionate amount of man-hatred on the left and young boys will be caught up in a whirlwind of self-hatred if they are raised by mothers who succumb to it,” my piece reads.

The boys raised in such a context of self-loathing face one of two options – to lean into it or to do anything in their power to run from it. In other words, young boys raised by mothers who find them toxic by their very natures will either become as craven and destructive as they can out of revenge, or adopt whatever skinsuit they need to seem more palatable to their mothers. Whether that’s by becoming a soft-spoken male feminist, a homosexual, or switching to female entirely, it’s easy to imagine that just as girls are unfairly targeted by the transgender lobby because of their self-loathing of their own bodies, boys will be targeted for their self-loathing of their own masculinity.

Of course, my point about feminist mothers encouraging LGBT identities in their children wasn’t about Connell at all. I have no evidence that she does so, and my piece was not about her, with the exception of a few lines at the top, which used her video as an example of feminist mothers treating boys differently.

Connell’s insistence that my piece was “about her” in its entirety may have been an honest mistake. But I stand by the article’s main point – that our gender wars have reached a fever pitch that will result in young men and boys choosing to either become the misogynists feminists say they are or neuter every male instinct towards strength and leadership in order to satisfy the vitriol of a feminist culture.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Pixabay