At Slate, Katie Roiphe responds to the pair of New York Times articles which reported on single motherhood in the town of Lorain, Ohio where 63 percent of mothers under the age of 30 are single. Roiphe responds to what is, at best, a minor ray of sunlight emanating from the liberal Times on an issue that has historically been understood to carry many negative consequences. Roiphe starts:
Conservatives will no doubt be elaborately hysterical over the breakdown of morals among the women of Lorain, but they will be missing the major point, which is that however one feels about it, the facts of American family life no longer match its prevailing fantasies. For those who have associated single motherhood with the poor and uneducated, and increasingly, with the urban very-educated (see the New York Times piece, the same day, on Casey Greenfield) they now have to confront the changing demographics of the vast American middle. No matter how one sees this development, and as a single mother myself I have my own views, one has to recognize that marriage is very rapidly becoming only one way to raise children. (And other countries are obviously way ahead of the United States in incorporating a rational recognition of the vicissitudes of love, and the varieties of family life, into cultural attitudes toward unmarried parents.)
Roiphe makes the fatalistic mistake of first accepting the trajectory of family disintegration which then causes her to excuse it. She’s throwing up her hands at the problem and ignoring the very real and observable problem lying before us. That demographics are changing does not mean that demographics have to change or that the change should go without derision. Those single moms who marginally replace two-parent families will place their offspring further behind the 8-ball.
The Times reporters’ analysis of the economics and sociology of Lorain is punctuated by a pat “meanwhile, children happen” that is perhaps not quite as respectful as it could be of the fact that these independent-minded, apparently hard-working women are making decisions and forging families, after thinking clearly about their situation.
This is not a car purchase. The problem is that these mothers are employing short-term economic thinking, but they are not thinking long-term or big picture. They care about economic capital but not the increasingly important social capital that lays the foundation for raising children into well-adjusted adults.
Others describe the economic realities of not needing a man to support children, feeling the men around are too childish, or criminal, or jobless to help much, and not feeling a stigma about having a child outside of marriage. (By the time one finishes these strangely inflected articles, they seem to be arguing that these women should feel a stigma about having children out of wedlock.)
Of course there should be a stigma against having children out of wedlock. Should we pat single mothers on the back? Should we pretend that we don’t all think that they’ve just created a mess for themselves and the child they so selfishly brought into the world? There are at least two better options than doing this: not having children at all or only having children after insuring a stable father figure will be present. This should be the buoy towards which we should be collectively swimming.
Of course, one of the reasons children born outside of marriage suffer is the culturally ubiquitous idea that there is something wrong or abnormal about their situation. Once it becomes clear that there is, at least, nothing abnormal about their situation, i.e. when this 53 percent of babies born to women under 30 come of age in the majority, the psychological landscape, at least, will be vastly transformed.
Most of the children brought up by single mothers grow up around other kids who are raised by single mothers. They are insulated from judgment – the type doled out in the olden days when “bastard” and “illegitimate” were used to shape social norms. But reaching this critical mass of psychological confidence does not address the root causes of all of the problems that these types of households face. Roiphe making this argument is like me saying that because anal sex had become the norm among homosexuals that it should be wholly and unqualifiedly embraced.
Even people who are certain that the children of single mothers are always and forever doomed to a compromised existence, are going to have to await more information about a world in which these kids are not considered illegitimate or unconventional or outsiders, where the sheer number of them redefines and refreshes our ideas of family.
But we’ve already run this experiment in this country. It’s called the black community. As has been hammered on over the past few weeks since the release of Charles Murray’s book, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the first to draw cackles in the midst of the sexual/cultural/civil rights revolution for publicly pointing out the drawbacks to a dearth of fathers and the attendant “tangle of pathology”. One wonders how much proof Roiphe needs in order to accept the truth that two parents are the family ideal. One also wonders if Roiphe has watched or read any of the first-hand testimony by gang members in the black community who openly admit that they turn to gangs because they serve the father function that young black males so desperately need and seek. Does Roiphe deny such testimony?
All of this speaks to Roiphe’s particular brand of elitism. She complains that the liberal New York Times is exhibiting its own “subtle” and “condescending” morality – a difference without a distinction from that pushed forth by the likes of a Rick Santorum. Roiphe, an upper-middle class academic and writer, is a single mother. This is part of what Murray criticized in his book. The elites observe the freedoms and privileges they have and assume that the non-elite poor have the social capital to handle the same inputs. But the elites, the wealthy, and the upper classes have many other tools to cope with risk. They have higher IQ which helps them better assess risk. In short, they handle risk, freedom, and temptation differently than do the types of people at the lower end who are more likely to develop a myriad of addictions and pathologies: tattoos, risky sexual behavior, drug use, smoking, alcoholism, gambling. What works for the middle and upper classes works less well for the lower. This truth holds across most behaviors.
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And yet here’s Chuck, selling out, working for the man-haters, father-haters, and castrators of the self-entitled, self-appointed, self-determining “Good Men Project.”
So when does Chuck start telling us we live in a rape culture, that women earning less than men is all men’s fault, and that paternity shouldn’t be something men should be concerned with?
I give him 6 months. The poison takes a while to seep into all aspects even a weak man’s soul.
[Chuck: I've defended your faggot ass in the past; now that I try to venture out and get in somewhere to further my writing (a place which I started writing for after they culled Schwyzer) and you turn and bite the hand that didn't bitch slap you?]
nah, chuck along with GWW and typhonblue writing for GMP is about anti-feminist takeover. marcotte and schwylock got pissy and upped sticks, time for men’s rights to move in and change the discourse LOL
The main problem is that in Roiphe’s demogaphic (which doesn’t actually have a lot of single mothers), when single motherhood happens, there is enough money lying around to blunt the negative impact in most cases. This is why studies are routinely trotted out that say that the main issue is economics not family structure (i.e., showing that the most adverse impacts are among poorer single mother children, rather than richer single mother children). But this really sidesteps the issue more or less completely, because there are far more moderate/poor single mothers than there are rich ones — not just because there are fewer rich in general, but also because the UMCs tend to get and stay married. But people like Roiphe, who is that relatively rare UMC single mother by choice, don’t want frank discussion of the pathologies that come from places like Lorain because they personally don’t relate to them (i.e., the money blunts the pathologies) and also they feel attacked by them, and so they go off and write articles like this one.
It’s pretty much a classic case of what Murray was talking about in his book, really.
I was having lunch somewhere recently and there was a father and his daughter at the next table. He must have been her soccer coach and I overheard him saying, “You played well today, but I really didn’t like the way you cried when we lost.” That’s just the kind of thing a father would say to his daughter. Fathers do teach kids important life lessons. I also picked up lunch at another small restaurant and there was a baby girl there. She was the daughter of the cook and her mother was working that day, so she was hanging out with her father. (her grandmother was there too). It was his first child and he was talking to me about her and you could see how much he adored her. He said she can be fussy with her mother, but she is always happy with him because she knows no one will hurt her when he is around. The relationship between a father and a child is a fundamental one. If your father has died, or you never knew him, you get by, but it is a huge loss.
Katie Roiphe probably isn’t the easiest mother in the world to deal with. Her kids are going to wish they had a father to help them out with that.
The problem with looking at the black community, and looking at mothers of bastards in general, is that a lot of the same factors that cause their dysfunction are the same thing that caused them to have a child out of wedlock. When the mothers of bastards are poor and stupid, it’s hard to separate the effect of bastardy from the effect of being poor and stupid. The reality is that Roiphe’s kids will probably be screwed up in all kinds of ways, but not in quite the same way as your stereotypical bastard.
Anyway, it’s not like there was ever any chance that Roiphe would come to any conclusion other than “I made the right decision.” That’s just how modern narcissistic woman operates.
Here is an excerpt from her article:
“Quentin Bell once wrote about growing up with his single-ish mother, the painter Vanessa Bell: “We had to balance the comforts of being so well loved against the pain of being so fearfully adored.” And that seems like a fair assessment of what goes on in my house. (The grown son of one of the single mothers I know refers to this same thing as “the unparalleled intimacy.”) But if I am being honest I like the fearful adoration, the too-muchness of it, the intensity, the fierceness. I don’t actually believe “healthy” is better.”
My grandfather’s mother was like this. He joined the marines to get away from her.
Like most armchair liberals, Roiphe thinks that there’s no problem; the chaos and more or less mass destruction of an entire generation of males is irrelevant to her.
Lorain, Ohio, is similar in demographics (and a steel town too) to the place I grew up but more ethnic. One thing that stands out as being meaningful regarding it is it’s proximity to Cleveland, it is a suburb – I did not grow up in a suburb of any city. Housing prices are amazingly cheap where I am from, and while they are similarly cheap in Lorain currently, Lorain has experienced a huge foreclosure problem, while where I am from has not.
I would find this consistant with the single mother phenomena. Both represent a lack of values, family values and the contract (mortgage).
I have never been to Lorain, but I would have to guess that it is a dump with a small gang problem and unkept homes and yards. A liberal Distopia with plenty examples of that which is representative of liberal Distopias.
To praise Lorain is to praise doom. Single mothers earning shitty wages relying on the l government financially to support their bastard children.
“these independent-minded, apparently hard-working women are making decisions and forging families, after thinking clearly about their situation.”
One of the things I’ve noticed about liberal women’s writing is that is it is often loaded with flurries of compliments for described victim groups. For instance, from just the one sentence above , we glean that (in Roiphe’s warped world view) single mothers:
1. are independent-minded
2. are hard-working
3. are decision makers
4. forge families (clever – the use of “forge” rather than softer verbs like “foster” or “create” intentionally conjures up images up manly, earthy, ironworker toughness here)
5. think clearly
Apparently, if we take Roiphe’s blustery statement to its logical conclusion, the best thing young women can do with themselves is join the ranks of single motherhood.
Back in the real world though, not a single thing on that list has actually applied to any of the single moms I’ve ever met – not even #2. They may expend a lot of energy in their personal lives, but that doesn’t make them more productive in the workplace (If anything, it makes them less productive).
There is a lot of circular reasoning built into leftism. If single motherhood produces lower standards of behavior, then in leftist reasoning the problem isn’t with single motherhood but rather a “proof” that your standards are incorrect. Privileging white patriarchal stands of behavior over any other system of behavior is oppressive, essentialist, sexist, patrio-fascistic, etc, etc. The same logic applies if you swap out “single motherhood” for any other golden calf in the leftist pantheon. Any evidence that leftist ideas are false are proof that the evidence is false.
“other countries” = other western countries thoroughly infested cultural marxism. The whole world isn’t and shouldn’t follow the west off of a cliff, but even if it did it wouldn’t say anything about whether its desirable or not. Millions of people like X, therefore … what? Millions of McDonald’s customers can’t be wrong, therefore eat at McDonald’s. This democratic argument is dumber still when you consider that these changes are pushed from the top down by the media, academia, and the government (Moldbug would say: but I repeat myself).
Ollie, makes a good point and the idea that single moms are these things (e.g., independent-minded, decision makers) could be tested. I think we all know what the results would be. However, I wonder if AE or Inductivist could come of with some metric in the GSS or another data set.
I’ve responded to whorefinder’s crybaby “where’s-my-binkie” routine up above.
Hahaha whorefinder is such a flaming faggot
Is Roiphe a single mother per se, or a divorced mother? While I’m on the topic, is she counting divorced mothers as single mothers when she speaks of single parenthood?
I ask this because I constantly see divorced mothers referring to themselves as “single moms.” They’re not. There is a difference and the Orwellian language control used to make divorced women into “single moms” speaks volumes about the agenda of the elites* to turn America into the Third World.
* Notice I didn’t say “the left.” The classic left was concerned with labor issues and equality, not debasing the language.
stop gay bashing~!!!!
naw just kidding …
dont know if he’s a peterpuffer or not, but 90 % of his comments are inflammatory drama. (AKA gay)
Days of Broken Arrows,
From what I could tell by reading a few of her articles, she had her daughter in a marriage and then divorced. It sounds like her daughter sees her father. Katie had a son years later and was not married. I’m not sure of the situation or who his father is.
Katie apparently wrote a book about date rape, where she defended men to some extent.
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@mike: But the black community *is* a good comparison. Within living memory, illegitimacy rates were far, far lower than what they were now. Moynihan was shocked that they were ~25% in the 60s, when they had already been rising for some time. I accept that blacks are in aggregate more impulsive and less intelligent than other races. This helps explain why e.g. black illegitimacy and criminality have always been higher than whites. But I can’t accept it as the sole explanation for the total collapse of the nuclear family as a black institution in the span of what–three generations? two? There’s something else going on–blacks might be more susceptible to “it”, but it’s not something that arose spontaneously out of certain black racial characteristics.
‘Anyway, it’s not like there was ever any chance that Roiphe would come to any conclusion other than ‘I made the right decision.’”
What is she going to do, repent? How retrograde.
The economy can only support so many single mommies. There is an equilibrium point where once passed society cannot return without some sort of massive correction. The process is similar to the way yeast can only produce so much alcohol before it dies from its own by-product. We are getting close to that point now and we will probably go through a death spiral as liberals turn on each other to compete for the last remaining scraps. The first single mommies probably thought they are pretty clever availing themselves on the fat of the land. But as more and more get in on the scam, the low hanging fruit disappears and eventually only the lucky ones will survive.
We aren’t going to delegitimate “single motherhood” (a form of “radical autonomy”) until we expose the FACT that it doesn’t actually exist. “Single motherhood” does not exist. Yes, we have females who “raise” children without “fathers,” but THERE ARE NO females who raise their children ALONE. And this is the false perception that legitimated “single motherhood.” The idea that females CAN OR DO raise their children with their own “single” effort is a BIG LIE. One of the biggest and most destructive lies. The kind of lie that produces “no fatherhood.”
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Oh! You’re trying to further your writing by selling out to the fags! My mistake, all is forgiven!
The site is a left wing man- hating fag-run p.o.s. your careerism is no excuse to start supporting their agenda of blaming men and trying to make us all into granola-eating,women-worshiping betas. Merely because one fag is no longer working for them does not suddenly absolve you of your actions.
Honestly, the fact that you think your writing career is an excuse to become a turncoat is so pathetically weak it makes one vomit. You have now admitted that you will say anything for a bit of fame. I’m sure you’d gladly hug Al Sharpton for a few moments of the spotlight.
Fuckoff, fame whore.
whorefinder,
you seem to have separation anxiety. but that’s not my problem. i don’t give half a shit what you think or don’t think on the topic. so you can continue to wail and scream and cry for your blankie, but i’m not listening. if a whorefinder bitches and sobs on the internet does anyone care? nah.
Geez, I wrote a piece for The Good Men Project about the Duke Rape Hoax.
According to WF I’ll soon be eating granola and slipping a knife into the back of my fellow men.
I didn’t know a single post to any blog could possibly cause such issues. Oh noes, whatever shall I do?
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Unreal….women refuse to take any responsibility for their sexual history. “We’re proud to be unwed mothers!” Why? Because some dude pumped and dumped you? And you’re pissed at men because? Oh..because you were too stupid to find a man who would have committed to you instead of pumping and dumping you. Now, no one wants you and your self-entitled fuck trophy.
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