A long time ago, in a familial worldview far, far away, whenever a child persisted in whining to Mother about meaningless things she would send the brat outside to pick weeds or run laps around the house to burn off some pent-up energy otherwise going to waste. What medievalism! Today’s mothers are far more ‘proactive’ and ‘involved in their children’s lives’, which, translated from Sociologese, means that they willingly take upon themselves the immature mantle of obsessing over minutiae. And boy, do they want the rest of the world to know how selfless they are! Doubtless the authoress of this recent screed dripping with pan-cultural munificence treated herself to a great quantity of chocolate-flavored something over a work of investigative journalism well done:
MOANA, ELSA, AND HALLOWEEN
My five-year-old, who I had successfully shielded from Disney princesses until recently, finally figured out that “Let it go” (which she had been singing with her friends for a over a year), was from the movie “Frozen.” My daughter promptly demanded to see “Frozen” along with “Moana,” inspired by a Moana-themed birthday party favor (sunglasses). We saw both films within the month and, in early August, she declared that she wanted to be “Elsa” from “Frozen” this Halloween, and “Moana” the following Halloween.
I had some reservations regarding both costume choices…about cultural appropriation and the power/privilege carried by Whiteness, and about Whiteness and standards of beauty…and so our conversations began:
“Elsa is an imaginary or made-up character. Moana is based on real history and a real group of people…if we are going to dress up a real person, we have to make sure we are doing it in a way that is respectful. Otherwise, it is like we are making fun of someone else’s culture.”
Hearing me push back against her Moana choice, my daughter re-asserted her desire to dress up as Moana (for Halloween 2018!). I closed this initial “Moana” conversation by telling her: “We would have to do some research and figure out if there is a way to dress up as Moana that is respectful of her culture.”
And so on and so forth. Let’s just say my grandmother would have berated this woman for forsaking her husband and her household duties to engage in such foolish prattle, and she would have been absolutely right. It was posted on a blog entitled ‘Raising Race Conscious Children’ by a scribe who ‘identifies as White’. We can take a little comfort in knowing that that bold declaration is sufficient to earn her the maniacal enmity of Antifa forever and anon.
Welcome to the creepy, kooky, mysterious, spooky, and altogether ooky world of mommy blogs, men.
The preponderance of ready-made blog construction templates online, along with an enormous potential audience of tech-savvy young mothers and the egalitarian web ethos of ‘a microphone to all who can draw breath’ has wrought a veritable boom in blogs extolling the experience of parenthood. Millennial mothers don’t watch daytime tee vee anymore, with Oprah comfortably retired and Drs. Phil and Oz only watched by Grandma. And on the face of it, the mommy blog seems not such a terrible substitute. Parenting tips, whimsical anecdotes akin to ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things’, recipes, concerns over everything from health to education. And many of these blogs are written from a Christian perspective to boot. Nothing groundbreaking, but surely harmless comforts, right?
Except….the sagacity of Marshall McCluhan’s aphorism ‘the medium is the message’ is proven more fully with each passing year. And the internet is most assuredly not an issue of Good Housekeeping or Reader’s Digest.
We’ve all run across the ‘Facebook warrior’ – the tough-talking pipsqueak who probably weighs sixty pounds soaking wet in real life, but who courageously puts on a belligerent front when insulting those who live hundreds of miles away from him. Women also are prone to online personas – except they tend to let their inner feminist out rather than to hide behind an alpha-wolf facade. The total depravity inherent to both men and women manifests itself differently. Fallen woman, as befitting mother Eve, is more prone to displaying her rebellion against God in a self-justifying fashion, with the aim of turning her shortcomings into virtues and ultimately coming off a hero – nay, even a martyr. Given free rein on an unshackled (unless you’re a racistsexisthomophobe) web, such a woman will naturally attempt to paint herself as the picture of enlightenment, perhaps with a craven desire to be venerated as a second Ceres. If she happens to be a mother, increase these inclinations a hundredfold, as she has a passel of young, impressionable disciples at hand to indoctrinate! And should she start dispensing her hard-earned wisdom via blog posting, you can be certain you will be presented with heaping helpings of navel-gazing and strange self-utopian whimsies, with a distinctive undercurrent of campaigning to be Mother of the Year, if not the Century. And this is why matriarchal societies always fail.
Fallen man, by contrast, tends to rebel by forsaking the role of headship ordained to him of God, as befitting father Adam. Assuming these female scriveners are married, then, their husbands do greatly err in allowing them to write such hideous missals without once checking their work and inquiring of them just what in the name of all that is decent they think they are doing. The guilt is to be shared equitably among both parties.
With 4.4 million (!!!) mommy blogs out there (and that’s the 2014 figure!), we can at least discount the majority of secular humanist moonbat blogs and concentrate on Christian ones, right? We could, if not for the fact that the vast majority of these blogs obviously use the Christian moniker as a mere clickbait ploy that in no way reflects the poster’s Amazonian tendencies. One ‘Tami Zacharias’ has a blog entry entitled ‘Why I’m a Christian First, a Feminist Second, and Both at the Same Time’. ‘Agnes Raises’, a self-described ‘liberal Christian mom’, addresses some very heady stuff indeed, as one can plainly see from her post ‘Here is What I Learned About Sex, Mostly From the VCR’. If you get to be fairly well-known like Luma Simms, you can jettison any pretended care for your own family at all and focus on posts lamenting the effects of infidelity on Chabad Lubavitch communities and the like (as this post demonstrates, that’s not much of an exaggeration, either). And don’t even get me started on when emasculated dads post a guest entry on their wives’ blogs. A black dad, posting on his black wife’s blog (kudos for that bit of kinism, at least), encourages fathers to ‘date’ their daughters and engage them in Marcus Pittman-level conversation. (‘After the movie, we went for lunch at a restaurant of her choosing. I asked her if she noticed how the women stuck together and encouraged one another, highlighting the importance of friendships. This opened the door for me to ask questions about her friends. I think it is very important to check up on the emotional well-being of our children. especially when it comes to their relationships outside the home.’) And of course, if they get to be a big enough deal, they can drop the whole Christian schtick entirely in pursuit of their inner Lilith, as documented in the recent case of Glennon Doyle Melton, a white Christian mommy blogger who abandoned her husband and children in order to ‘marry’ a black female tennis player. Her apostasy earned her a plethora of backhanded compliments from left-leaning media outlets for considerably less than the regulation fifteen minutes. Celebrities rule!!!!
Even more insidious is when these bloggers manage to rustle up sponsorships. A story in the New York Post about a disgruntled ex-Erma Bombeck wannabe showcases some of the hideous ramifications of this vassalage: being prohibited from using any and every copyrighted term (and there are many of them out there), an enforced cheery demeanor, staged family photos, a focus on puffball topics that resonate with a brain-dead demographic, etc. And the most tragic consequence of all: being married to her computer instead of her husband, prompting an acrimonious divorce and traumatized children. All of which, incidentally, must also be documented in emotionally dishonest rhetoric and dished up ready to consume to your discerning fanbase, m’dear. Don’t want to lose your premium Google ranking, after all! When Tennessee Ernie Ford sang about owing his soul to the company store, he had no idea.
How far removed are these prattling women from the virtuous one of Solomon’s proverbs, who ‘looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness’ and whose ‘children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her’. To forsake the husband of thy youth and thy children in their formative years, where godly example or lack thereof will determine their character, all in the cause of typing, is vanity indeed. Which is all the more shame because, when done decently and in good order, a blog about motherhood has the potential to do great good indeed. The ideal would be a Christian mother just out of her active child-rearing years, reflecting back on the good times and bad she has gone through, the mistakes she has learned from, the lighter moments that made things bearable, and the overall lessons she derived from her experiences, all with the aim of mentoring young, impressionable mothers who are feeling intimidated over what awaits them. After all: what diligent mother has ample time and energy at day’s end to regularly maintain a chronicle of feelz for public consumption for years on end? Thankfully, there are a very small smattering of blogs that do undertake their mission in a serious manner, not the least of which is eschewing the tiresome trend towards interpreting Scripture through a feminist lens. A friend of mine was kind enough to direct me to the blog Mom Delights, written by a mother of fifteen, as an excellent example of a mommy blog that’s worth following regularly. Please, Christian ladies, use discernment always. ‘I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully.’ (1 Tim. 5:14)
As for the other 4,399,999 mommy blogs out there, they will serve as a fascinating archive when criminologists ten or twenty years from now are tracing the origins of their era’s spate of serial killers. Till that time, they’re better off ignored.
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