The central focus of this shocking, despairing documentary shot with the emergency services in Blackpool is that the gravest danger facing young girls, right here in Britain, right now in 2012, is not from a stranger or a violent partner, but from themselves.She continues:
More young women than ever are deliberately crippling themselves with binge drinking, putting themselves in real peril by fighting and carrying knives, and using their fists and foul language as offensive weapons.
And I have to ask, echoing that police officer and speaking as a mother of daughters myself, where are the mothers of these loutish, brutalised girls?
These extremely young women seem so determined to self-destruct that it makes me wonder if they ever had a loving role model — namely, their own mother.
...Is it because they have been brought up to believe themselves to be so utterly valueless that they numb themselves with huge quantities of strong drink, spending £100 a night if they have it, drinking ten or 12 glasses of ‘Jager Bomb’ until they vomit or pass out and have to be rescued?
...Most shocking is the violence perpetrated by some of these girls. They don’t just hurt themselves, they injure others.
...The Channel 4 documentary showed men with blood running down their faces, stabbed by women who the police said habitually carried knives, ‘like mobile phones’, said one officer, ‘in their handbags’.
Esther Rantzen throws out a number of ideas in trying to explain the rise of this ladette culture. I thought her instincts best when she asks,
Is it liberation to behave like a violent, brutal, drunk man? The police in the programme who deal with girl binge drinkers said they seem to set out to be even worse than men. If men have ten or 12 shots lined up, women will try to keep up with them.
That's a key question. What does it mean to be a liberated woman? Liberalism assumes that our sex is a straitjacket, that it is something that we didn't choose and therefore constrains our autonomy. Liberalism further assumes that men are the privileged group in society, the ones with the gold standard autonomous lifestyle.
Put those two beliefs together and what you get is the idea that women are liberated when they can prove that their sex doesn't matter and that they can match it with a male lifestyle. If masculinity is coarsely associated with drinking and violence, then that then becomes a measure of liberation.
Against this, Esther Rantzen correctly asserts something decidedly non-liberal, namely that there are feminine qualities which are both innate and admirable and which provide "boundaries" (i.e. a direction) for women's behaviour:
If a girl becomes a banshee, something has gone terribly wrong.
Watching my daughter with her new baby son confirms my belief that women are instinctive nurturers, that we naturally respond to tenderness.
The young women in this documentary seem to have lost that instinct and, with it, all their boundaries, exposing their skin to a grabbing, drunken stranger, vomiting without shame. With proud grins, they boast how much they drink, and proclaim they never get a hangover, or claim that being stabbed by a girlfriend was just a ‘drunken mistake’.
What kind of mothers will they become in their turn? Is there any hope for their children? There may be: if they are given different role models, they may be able to change their behaviour and their thinking. The revealing ITV series Ladettes To Ladies showed girls like these, drinking and then throwing up, using every swear word, fighting and having mindless sex, believing that way they proved themselves ‘as good as men’.
I was going to watch this, but decided not to. It reminds me though of what happened at the weekend...
ReplyDeleteI was at the pub at the weekend and you know what I found?
A girl talking about how she was masturbating to porn on the internet, a 47-year-old man slobbering over a girl's boobs and pulling them out of her top for all to see...
You couldn't make it up. Truth is stranger than fiction. But what causes this kind of behaviour?
What kind of mothers will they become in their turn? Is there any hope for their children? There may be: if they are given different role models, they may be able to change their behaviour and their thinking.
ReplyDeleteIs there any objective evidence to show that 'role models' can influence the attitudes and behaviour of anyone for the better?
Who casts someone in the role of a 'role model' anyway? Is it the media searching for fantasy figures with magical powers?
And how truly ignorant to loosen the "autonomous" constraints of men even further by turning the women into sex toys and nothing more.
ReplyDeleteWho casts someone in the role of a 'role model' anyway? Is it the media searching for fantasy figures with magical powers?
ReplyDeleteNo, a role model is a person that lives in reality and does their best at the role they're given, in this case the role is the mother who should have taughht their daughters that bein nurturing, and loving was far more valuable than being the worst masculine behaviors. Men may be more prone to violence, but real men know when to use violence to protect themselves, these women seem to ignore the other male trait of self-control.
This is the feminists goal, to blur any difference between the sexes and to destroy the family. Once the "roles" are blurred they will advocate for lbgt rights, as they are currently, because everyone would basically be defining who they are; the only problem with this goal is that human nature will God willing kick in and push back, especially when more people start understanding that men and women are much more different than just genitals.
This is like the only place I'm able to come to that understands what I know to be true, confermation bias? It's like I know feminism is wrong and that men and women are different, and then I read marks posts explaining it.It'd suck to find out later that this blog will close, I mean you make posts almost every single day since like 07
How widespread is this kind of behavior beyond Britain?
ReplyDelete...... a role model is a person that lives in reality and does their best at the role they're given, in this case the role is the mother who should have taughht their daughters that bein nurturing, and loving was far more valuable than being the worst masculine behaviors.
ReplyDeleteI didn't have a mother's influence, if any, on her daughter(s) in mind. We are led to believe that 'role models' in, for example, the celebrity worlds of entertainment, sport, fashion, etc., can and do permanently modify the behaviour of individuals. I tend to doubt that theory, and ask for empirical evidence to support it.
BWA HA HA HA HA! Everything is proceeding according to plan!
ReplyDeleteAnd yet if one of these loutish, sluttish, brawling women were beaten or raped, there would be a great howl that the woman's behavior did not cause this to happen, so stop "blaming the victim"...
ReplyDeleteMark@
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the rise of this brutal ladette lifestyle shows that feminine nurturing is not the innate behavior of a woman, but is rather one of the innate potentialities for behavior with which a woman is born. Culture in large degree decides which of these innate potentialities is ultimately expressed. I think that we conservatives have been too quick to see plastic human nature as a liberal lie, simply because they use it to justify autonomy and permissiveness. But if conservatives believe that everything is innate, it's hard to explain why we get so worked up over culture. It's not easy to do given modern metaphysics, but I think conservatives should talk less about human (or female) nature, and more about human (or female) destiny. We don't have to insist that every woman becomes a mother, but that those who have uniquely realize the telos of their sexual nature. Women who cannot attain this ideal destiny should be pitied, women who will not should be shamed. The same goes for us men. We're all born with innate potentialities to be lads or dads. Those who cannot be the later should be pitied, those who cannot should be shamed.
...feminine nurturing is not the innate behavior of a woman, but is rather one of the innate potentialities for behavior with which a woman is born.
ReplyDeleteif conservatives believe that everything is innate, it's hard to explain why we get so worked up over culture.
should talk less about human (or female) nature, and more about human (or female) destiny.
Those are all important observations. But it remains true, doesn't it, that nurturing remains an innate potentiality of a woman rather than a socially constructed one as liberals would say.
In my working life, I observe some of my female colleagues behaving radically differently to me or to other male staff. They will do things like remember students' birthdays, or bake cupcakes for their students, or cry when their students leave at the end of Year 12, or write poems about their students - thoughtful little gestures that would never occur to me and which are often too emotional for me to want to copy.
It's a nurturing, feminine way of relating that has real value, just as my own more masculine, bantering, goal and resilience oriented teaching style also has value.
These things aren't just made up by culture but nor do they just exist as inevitable outcomes of being female or male. As you put it, they are innate potentialities.
And, yes, I think the emphasis should be on something like an "ideal destiny" or "telos", e.g. what masculine or feminine potentiality represents the best fulfilment of what we can be as men or women.
Esther Rantzen stole another woman's husband, the late Desmond Wilcox. His daughter by his first wife, Patsy, said that Esther Rantzen wrecked her parents' marriage and left her mother heartbroken until her death in 1999.Miss Rantzen is not modest in her dress either, so she is in no position to speak out against moral wickedness, when she has contributed to the moral collapse of society and lived in an adulterous marriage.
ReplyDeleteMark@
ReplyDeleteYes, I think you are correct. A conservative who argues for the plasticity of human nature is not obliged to argue for the uniformity of human nature, whether between the sexes, races, or even individuals. I think that we should certainly say that people are, to a significant degree, cultural constructions, but this in no way commits us to say that the ideal pattern culture aims at when constructing a person is itself a cultural construction. There's no logical inconsistency in saying that, for instance, all feminine women are cultural constructions but the ideal of felinity is not. Femininity is, we might say, the telos of the human female, but she cannot reach that telos and fulfill her destiny without the aid of the culture.imulta 114
Think of a panel on a car. The metal can stay in its normal shape. But if you hit it hard enough, it assumes another characteristic shape: a ding. So it has multiple possibilities. However hard you hit it, though, it won't shape itself into a grandfather clock. Multiple possibilities doesn't mean infinite possibilities, all equally available.
ReplyDeleteThere is a menu of possibilities, and within each broad choice there is infinite minor variation.
Conservatives should get worked up over culture not only because they know something about the telos (say the ideal state of the panel, fitting the picture of the car, or the ideal state of the happy wife in a good marriage) but also because they read history and know something about the "dings" - that is, the typical alternative shapes people assume.
Another way to look at it is that our culture, today, is sufficiently strong (and toxic) that it can pervert human nature. The destruction of the family, and the behavior of women, would hardly have been possible in other times and places due to the lack of technological and political factors present today (e.g., readily available and effective birth control, and the intrusive nanny state).
ReplyDeleteWell said Anonymous, 25 October 2012
ReplyDeleteAnother way to look at it is that our culture, today, is sufficiently strong (and toxic) that it can pervert human nature. The destruction of the family, and the behavior of women, would hardly have been possible in other times and places due to the lack of technological and political factors present today (e.g., readily available and effective birth control, and the intrusive nanny state).
And the reason why we live in this supposed utopian era of plenty is because masculine men invented, designed and built the occident to the point that their masculinity became optional/superfluous. This above article is a prime example of the results. The very blood, sweat and fortitudinous stoicism that lead men to protect their families and boldly contribute to the evolution of society, has, in modern society, become our very downfall. Women (feminism) have turned our stoic nature, that in the past was a strength, against us to become a weakness.
We now must not complain, as it is weakness. Yet ironically, men's lack of voice is in reality, a collective gargantuan lack of assertiveness, or in more base terms lack of balls.
Women are only playing this game because they feel safe to do so, everything is easy and they FEEL that because they are 'strong and independent' women, they don't need us anymore.
As per 'game', feminism is akin to the biggest 'shit test' that there ever was and it's time for us to show our indifference to these women's pathetic attempts at solipsistically caricaturing masculinity.
Yes it is sad, but that's the modern reality we live in, what is naturally elementary becomes esoteric, hence why the Manosphere terms understanding such truth as 'taking the red pill'.
Um, this would be, if I'm not mistaken, the same Esther Rantzen who, even while maintaining her public persona as children's-rights sob-sister, contrived (along with most of her broadcasting colleagues) to cover up the molesting appetite of her fellow broadcasting apparatchik Jimmy Savile?
ReplyDeleteAnd this is the same Esther Rantzen whom Mr Richardson expects us to take seriously as a moral avatar? Merely because she now, with her employer's reputation unsalvagable, utters the same elementary truths about juvenile sluthood which the rest of us have known for decades?
Mr Richardson, surely it is incumbent upon a website owner to do some basic research, even if such research does put a crimp upon ritual invocations of "autonomy" as the root of all evil. Here's a start. Two links, one from an openly leftist newspaper, the other from a notionally right-wing one:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2012/oct/15/esther-rantzen-jimmy-savile-video
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2220075/Esther-Rantzen-steps-ChildLine-charity-bash---worrying-lifes-work-ruined-wake-Jimmy-Savile-scandal.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
Very true A. Redding.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the fact that a leftist such as Esther Rantzen is even articulating this phenomenon means that a direct facilitator of the MRM. such as her, though she may not directly realise the consequences of being a children's-rights sob-sister, might ever so tentatively at least, comprehend the drunkard, hedonistic and mindless consequences of modern society that she has in part instigated. The consequences might fully become apparent to her one day. 1 + 1 makes 2 after all. Maybe she cannot ultimately resign herself to the full reality, but others will and her podium will be taken by another. This shit can only last for so long.
tl;dr: I'd contend that Mr Richardson is using Esther Rantzen as an example, not an advocate.
ReplyDeleteI meant to say MSM (Main Stream Media) in my second post. LOL, I have spent too much time within the MRM (Men's Rights Movement) within the past.
ReplyDeleteCheers.
Perhaps, Monad, you are right about Rantzen's potential for intellectual and moral growth; it is unlikely that even she could get much worse, short of actually murdering someone in cold blood. But in my experience the belief in poachers turning gamekeepers is largely a myth posited by over-confident gamekeepers.
ReplyDeleteFar more often, a champion of Totalitarian Lunacy X will simply switch to Totalitarian Lunacy Y, with no intervening interval of moral decency or even adulthood. While Arthur Koestler might have grown out of communism, it could easily be argued that he was more dangerous to Christendom when championing euthanasia and denouncing capital punishment than he had ever been as a commissar.
Until reading Mrs White's comment I was unaware of Rantzen's whorishness on the marital front, but I cannot say I am surprised at it. Any more than I am surprised at those so-called "anti-communists" who deplored Stalin and Castro only because of those dictators' "homophobia".
A. Redding,
ReplyDeleteThe post wasn't about the moral virtue of Esther Rantzen, but about the rise of ladette culture in England and what might explain it.
Perhaps I should have stated it more clearly but Esther Rantzen throws out quite a few ideas in her Daily Mail article, most of which I thought wrong. But in casting about for answers she did go beyond liberal p.c. and I thought this a useful starting point for a discussion.
Mark, as a long standing reader (yet infrequent responder) of your blog, in all honesty, do you find any exception to what have espoused? I would be very interested in your opinion regarding the same.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks,
Monad
Monad,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you'd like me to respond to, but I did agree with your comment that the West is living on the social capital built up by past generations (and also the part about feminism being a kind of test).
English?
ReplyDeleteEsther Rantzen is a Jew:
(http://www.thejc.com/arts/arts-interviews/esther-rantzen-older-and-wiser)
"One of Britain's most famous TV presenters has spent much of her career trying to right wrongs. Now, at 68, with a revived interest in her Jewishness, she is targeting age discrimination"
Always with the righting of wrongs, always with the anti-discrimination.
Wonderful people, absolutely fabulous people.
It's interesting how much you write posts citing Jews Mr Richardson, yet you are blithely ignorant of the fact they are Jews.
Just an interesting observation.
Very true Interested Observer,
ReplyDeleteIn what has clearly become a new taboo (for fear of being labelled an anti-Semite), no one is allowed to mention Jewish involvement in revolutionary movements. But the facts remain that they have represented revolutionary movements in numbers disproportionate to the ratio of Jews in the world. From the French Revolution, to Bolshevism to feminism - essentially every social ill that has befallen Christendom - Jews have had a disproportionate representation.
But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. This has been the pattern since they rejected Christ (Who is Truth/Order/Reason), in favour of the revolutionary Barabbas (whose main crime was sedition), and they will continue choosing revolution in their perennial quest to find a pseudo messiah who will establish heaven on earth.
The only way this can stop is if they reject the rejection and accept Christ as Messiah.
Interested Observer,
ReplyDeleteSorry, but I think obsessing over the Jews is a dead-end kind of fringe politics. My job is to help supersede it with something better and more positive.
And if Esther Rantzen writes something politically interesting I'm going to quote it regardless of her religion.
"obsessing"?
ReplyDeleteHmmmm, interesting.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWhile it might be the case that Jews have faced systemic discrimination since time immemorial and as a result, due to the restrictions they have been subjected to and subsequently turned to their advantage, their cultural cohesion, interbreeding and in their collective rise to the high echelons of society, they have however been a major catalyst for liberal thought as it only gains them more power (they use their previous victimisation to their advantage). Though I don't reckon it's such a finely orchestrated conspiracy that many might think is the case.
ReplyDeleteIronically, it resonates with those who wanna be equal with no obligations or expectations and be accepted for the uncultivated persons that they are. Chalk and cheese really, but it suits those in power as a means to an end, no matter their ethnic origins.
Mark,
Thanks for your reply, I was wanting to get where you sit regarding, from my view, a couple of the major tenets the Manosphere is built upon. Your confirmation of same is appreciated.
Interestingly, Captain Capitalism (Aaron Clarey) is ethnically Jewish, by his own admission. As an integral part of the Manosphere, he is certainly not one of 'them', but certainly one of us.
ReplyDeletehttp://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/AaronClarey
Question without notice:
ReplyDeleteWhat's worse:
a) a paedophile or
b) an anti-semite?
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ReplyDeleteSo you people are attempting to twist Mark's adherence to traditionalism for your own ends.
ReplyDeleteHow about responding to my last two comments aimed at opposing your views, or do you consider my contentions to be so weak that they are not worth arguing against? If so, please humour me and explain why I'm not worth responding to, because, as such, it would be elementary for you to do so. By not doing so might inadvertently leave others to surmise that you reside at a level more elementary than my ignorant self.
Interested Obsterver,
ReplyDeleteThe irony is that the Jews are the antithesis of the "no obligations or expectations" and "uncultivated persons" we see ubiquitous amongst us.
They have built their culture, prosperity and financial empire through hard work and diligence. The fact that they have power and influence because if it, compounded by their previous treatment throughout history is testament to many of their views. I'm just saying it's not a conspiratory, but actions and consequences thereof (others and theirs), that has led to where they are.
Plenty of people of Jewish origin are not liberal, being such is a choice, not a destiny.
If Monad's comments above seem out of context it's because I've deleted some anti-semitic comments, which Monad was responding to.
ReplyDeleteWTF is this with the "Jew" thing?
ReplyDeleteI want anybody here to give me proof and not speculation "the Jews" are behind anything.
I criticize from a unique position of being Jewish through blood lines and have Jewish relatives, but having a Lutheran pastor as a father. I am also (not to brag) one of the heavier hitters in the Manosphere, fighting for libertarian and conservative values, am for free markets and am against nepostism. Additionally, this isn't a "NAJALT" citing my own personal experience applying it to all. In all my inteactions with Jews, be it family, friends or complete strangers, NONE of them are conspiring against society.
Now, again, I'm not really Jewish because that's a religion. But I'm getting mighty sick and tired of the genuine bigotry going on here against a people that have done nothing to harm you just because people are too darn lazy to spend the time to figure out how the real world works and find it easier to come up with conspiracy theories that conveniently blame all their problems on one sole group of people.
If that's what you want to do, why don't you become liberal and blame "Bush" for everything? much simpler than blaming an entire group of people.
Cpt. Capitalism
Captain Capitalism: "I want anybody here to give me proof and not speculation "the Jews" are behind anything."
ReplyDeleteHere ya go.