Viewing Baby Boys as Future Predators Was a Bad Idea
A short while ago, many parents feared that their infant sons would later be violent misogynists. Their tactics didn’t help.
Everyone in this world of terminally online sickos is aware that a “vibe shift” has happened, somewhere around 2023-2024. Almost anything that would be popular to say today would have been weird/cringe ten years ago, and the reverse applies.
The vibe shift in question is a reaction to “peak woke” in 2017-2020, where the media narrative (even if it didn’t align with how most people really felt) was to default to a paradigm that revolved around oppressed people (who can do no wrong) versus oppressors (who are always wrong). This structure failed when confronted by a scenario where one person was both powerful and powerless, such as the fraught arguments about women (some of whom were white) who felt uncomfortable being harassed and screamed at on the street or public transit by “unhoused” male vagrants, who somehow came out the victims in the scenario. The women who were told it was perfectly normal to feel “unsafe” in the presence of a Republican coworker were instead instructed to “just avoid eye contact” when faced with a man screaming threats at them on the subway.
The problem with an oppressor-oppressed framework is that people are stripped of their humanity and moral obligations, and every interaction becomes a contest of who has the least power, regardless of what has actually occurred. And a lot of people—even liberals—hated it! Like all pendulum-swings, the vibe shift away from peak woke probably went too far, because there are times when I think people could stand to maybe be a tiny bit more woke. Not 2019 woke, but like…something in between “bodies and spaces” and the mainstreaming of the R-slur.
Not to belabor the Jameela Jamil essay defending her choice to be childfree, but this article you’re reading now is yet another piece inspired by it—or at least inspired by the subsequent discussion around it. One thing that stood out to me about JJ’s article was how many pre-vibe-shift comments were made (arguably, openly disliking kids at all is a pre-vibe-shift thing too.) Granted, she was writing humor, so I didn’t take it very seriously, nor did it offend me as a parent, but one pre-vibe-shift statement came up in my comments and my subscriber chat: I thought it was weird that her first concern about potentially having a baby boy would be that he might be a sexual predator someday. And yet, as a friend of mine reminded me after I published my article, this was a somewhat popular thing to say just ten years ago in certain circles. I used to hear it all the time. Maybe not as literally as “If I have a son, he might be a sex criminal” (although sometimes people did say this) but this sentiment presented in many less jarring ways. The narrative was: men suck, and even if the “man” in question is your unborn son, your goal should be to steer him away from the otherwise default track of becoming a violent misogynist. Because people—even your children—are oppressors and victims before they are individuals.
I don’t think problems among today’s boys stem entirely from this line of thinking—but it didn’t help. And it certainly didn’t create “less misogynist” men.
