{"id":72375,"date":"2021-09-21T17:14:45","date_gmt":"2021-09-21T22:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=72375"},"modified":"2021-09-21T17:14:45","modified_gmt":"2021-09-21T22:14:45","slug":"72375","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=72375","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Saving Your Child From The Village<\/a><\/p>\n

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A reader comments on the \u201cGender Identity And Your Kids\u201d\u00a0<\/a>thread:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a certain kind of conservative who looks at this trend [the corruption of fandom by gender ideology obsessives \u2014 RD] and says, \u201cGood riddance. Unplug it all. Now your lazy nerd kids can spend all day at the gym lifting weights, or learn to play a musical instrument, and won\u2019t be wasting time on the fandom of some media-marketed TV show or book series.\u201d<\/p>\n

I totally understand this impulse as a utopian ideal, but I also think there\u2019s a horrible lack of appreciation for how difficult it is to raise kids in a world where they are uncomfortable with participating (or forbidden to participate) in popular franchise fan culture. My children are homeschooled and constantly desperate for more peer interaction. When they meet other kids at the park, or the roller skating rink, or on vacation, they are bombarded with aspects of pop culture from which they are being excluded \u2014 and they know it. Last month my brother passed along a collection of books and comics that my nephew was reading, and within a few weeks my 9-year-old came to us to confess that one of the books had \u201cthe f-word\u201d in it. It ended up featuring a protagonist who was a pre-op transgender boy. At at this point I\u2019m not even sure if her uncle gave it to her out of ignorance, or if he knew but did it anyway as a way to subvert our overly protective parenting style. I don\u2019t have the heart to start a confrontation over it, given the cultural and ideological stress I have with my siblings already. Do you have any idea how wretched I feel that I can no longer trust my own brother as a screen for children\u2019s literature content?<\/p>\n

Right now my girls are super-enthusiastic about a book series\u2026 and I know they are just a few books away from the one that introduces a lesbian character. We started watching a TV show\u2026 and I already know which season has the gay wedding. Every new property (whether it\u2019s original or the rebooting of a Gen X classic) is simply obligated to pay out a wokeness tax now. I\u2019ll let my children watch this stuff with my supervision sometimes, when we can talk about it along the way. But I can\u2019t let them enjoy unsupervised spaces with peers, certainly not in virtual spaces, since those peers are not going to exercise similar discretion. I essentially have to ban my kids from having friends unless those friends are very carefully vetted and supervised, and now I feel trapped in a helicopter-parenting Defcon-alert holding pattern.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to exaggerate how besieged the current culture makes me feel as a parent of two daughters leaving elementary school age. I have unceasing dread of a giant industry devoted to prying my children away from my world, my culture, and my values, and to convince them that I\u2019m the sociological equivalent of the stock villains being defeated weekly in their prepackaged media products. I want to give my children the freedom to explore and discover friends without oppressive surveillance, but all of the friends they meet want to create secretive phone-driven modes of contact with them for private conversations. Am I doomed to become a CIA operative, using spyware to catch my preteen daughter having illicit chats about testosterone and top surgery? Will I be the stereotypical killjoy parent, demanding that my girls stop seeing any friends I regard as \u201ca bad influence\u201d? I\u2019m staring into an abyss that has swallowed so much of my world and the things in it that I once loved already, and has designs on my girls as well.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve given up on having any kind of fandom myself, except of a few retro franchises that I can pretend are \u201cclosed\u201d. But even that no longer feels safe. What\u2019s LGBT representation going to look like in the new Tolkien-verse show on Amazon? After feeding that fandom for years, do I suddenly have to start telling my own children to avoid interacting with anyone who acts too enthusiastic about Middle Earth? Is there any safe ground left? Will they come for Narnia next?<\/p>\n

This devouring of a formerly apolitical childhood and adolescent culture of organic fan enthusiasm to transform it into a catechism for woke cant is an act of unspeakable cruelty to families.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well said. This is what totalitarianism means: the infiltration of politics (cultural and otherwise) into every aspect of life. In Huxley\u2019s\u00a0Brave New World<\/em>, the Savage was the only sane person there because as an exile, he had been raised ignorant of the corrupt totalitarian culture and its values. I heard the other day about a family \u2014 a conservative Christian family \u2014 that has been devastated by gender ideology wreaking havoc in the lives of their children. It sneaked up on them. Catastrophe. I mean, honest-to-God destruction of young people\u2019s bodies and souls, and of family relationships.<\/p>\n

It used to be that it takes a village to save a child. Now, you have to work hard to save your child from the village.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saving Your Child From The Village A reader comments on the \u201cGender Identity And Your Kids\u201d\u00a0thread: There\u2019s a certain kind of conservative who looks at this trend [the corruption of fandom by gender ideology obsessives \u2014 RD] and says, \u201cGood riddance. Unplug it all. Now your lazy nerd kids can spend all day at the … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,59,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-education-schools","category-enemies-foreign-domestic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72375"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72376,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72375\/revisions\/72376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}