Today in the Prozac Nation we have a holiday of sorts, Fathers' Day. Once upon a time, being a husband and a father was actually an honorable thing. American men managed to degenerate to such a level that today fatherhood is an object of ridicule or contempt. The best-known head-of-household in the United States until recently was Bruce Jenner; and that fact alone illustrates what a hypocritical joke things like Fathers' Day have actually become. The fact that Fathers' Day falls in the middle of so-called 'Gay Pride Month' makes it even more of a pointless farce.
We might be inclined to laugh at Jenner, but actually his life is a metaphor for the decline and fall of the American male. Jenner grew up in an upstate New York town where his own father had a job as a successful arborist. Young Bruce worked to become a star athlete and was a promising football player until sidelined with a knee injury. Like men were once taught to do---adapt, improvise, and overcome---Jenner switched to Track & Field and eventually qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team. He went on to win 12 of 13 competitions and set 10 world records. At the time of the Cold War and the national malaise of the mid-1970s, Jenner was a national hero in a country that badly needed one.
As America drifted into cynical postmodernism and heroes became just another marketing commodity, Jenner drifted into relative obscurity and through a series of broken marriages and hybrid families until Hollywood decided that it could profit off his decline and gave him a role in a reality-TV series. From national hero to a failed father in a home dominated by out-of-control females, Jenner finally suffered a nervous breakdown and renounced his masculinity altogether. Today, Jenner is a rising star again---this time in a political movement known for its masochistic males and its hypocrisy about standing for traditional family values.
Back when Psychology was still a legitimate science, Jenner would have been a case-study---and likely cured. Men who have a high need for achievement and significance but who find themselves in a family or social dynamic that treats them like has-beens and losers (wrongly) often see themselves as complete failures. When, in that same dynamic, women are idolized and preferred, that overwhelming sense of failure is sometimes transferred to gender identity. In other words, the man in this situation cannot stand the stress of feeling like a failure as a man, and feels a compulsion to be a success as the opposite sex. That situation parallels both contemporary familial and social norms, and it's small wonder that such a situation is producing Gender Identity Disorder on the scale that it is. The 'Red Pills' who make up the so-called 'Manosphere' are a variant of the same thing: feminized men who feel inferior but who try to cloak their Inferiority Complexes by affecting cartoonish 'Alpha Male' identities.
Though it may sound counter-intuitive, transgenderism---in most cases---is not a sexual disorder. It's real causes are typically rooted in obsessive-compulsive disorders which is why (when it was allowed to be treated), it had an exceptionally high cure-rate. Psychologists should be the ones sounding the loudest alarm against America's deconstruction of masculinity, but like most sciences today, Psychology is also for sale and 'reality' is simply whatever psychologists are paid to make it---which is making our social problems a lot worse instead. Recently, an abstract from the once-prestigious Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association caused some controversy online by fanning false guilt in White Americans.
"Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure."
The ignoramus who wrote this thesis---and published it in a scholarly academic publication---has been in a university-level position and published articles in peer-review journals for over 20 years. Here's an reflective question for fathers---especially Conservative dads: how do you feel that you let people like this educate your children? Did you intervene? Did you organize, or stand up for your rights at school board and PTA meetings? Did you close your wallet to fake universities and colleges or did you close your eyes and ears instead and say: "Go along to get along! Academia isn't the real world! Just do what you have to do to get that sheepskin!" Think about that this Fathers' Day.
It should also be remarked that---whatever else it might be---the statements in the abstract are in no way grounded in Psychoanalytic Theory. Neither Freud nor any of his followers taught anything this revolting to reason. The APA bears a lot of responsibility too (while not necessarily literal fathers, they have a fatherly duty to society in the sense that they are all medical professionals) for allowing simpletons like this to have a platform and hold positions of influence. Did any of you protest what this man has been promoting, or did you look the other way as he brought in free publicity and fat foundation-grant checks? "Well, after all we have to stay competitive with other schools," "A little dissent doesn't hurt," "We have to be open-minded and tolerant of diverse viewpoints." Yeah---tolerant to the point now where mental patients are running the therapy sessions and nobody cares as long as they pay the bills and you're protected from malpractice suits.
In 2020's America, Fathers' Day has ceased to have any meaning; and for most Americans today there's no actual concept of fatherhood to which they can really relate. This day needs to change: it needs to become a time of reflection on what men need to start doing to turn themselves around.
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