That 70’s snow: Propaganda for children Exhibit A

EegahInc, I’ll see your Mission: Magic, and raise you a Free to Be… You and Me.

Everyone is aware the tumult of the 60’s. Fewer really know much about what Paul Johnson dubbed the collectivist 70’s. Fewer still even realize that all this junk landed on generation of children growing up at the time. I was one of those kids and I remember it well. I do not remember Mission: Magic, but I remember 1974’s feminist propaganda piece aimed at children Free to Be… You and Me. It was a record album and later a TV program full of songs, skits and features reminding us that is ok for boys to cry and play with dolls; and it is just nifty for girls to wear hard-hats and operate jack-hammers. (If anyone sees a female construction worker that looks like Marlo Thomas, let me know.) This part features Michael Jackson. You can watch if you want and let the irony sink in when he sings about how comfortable he is with the way he looks. Oh yeah, I happen to be a stay-at-home dad, so this is all going to seem like being hoisted on my own petard, but meh.

But on to the meat of the matter, let’s look at this part:

Now I know I’m not the first to ask, but what is it with progressives and puppets?:

But I digress. In that first example with puppets of newborns wondering if they are a boy or a girl, does anything strike you as odd? It shouts at me: That the boy/girl question is decisively settled when they get around to actually checking out the plumbing. It says male and female are actual objective things. In other words, progressives have not yet gone nominalist on us. Watch this:

and ask what happened between 1974 and now. I’m going to suggest that what happened was the only thing that can happen once you start down the dark path. Forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it…sorry. Lemme explain it with another example. You are probably aware of the popular idea that whatever consenting adults choose to do is fine and nobody else’s business. One of my favorite bloggers Mark Shea pointed out that it would not be long before certain Brights start asking, “Just what is this ‘consent’ stuff anyway? And what’s so great about it?” To see this described in action, see Lydia McGrew’s writings under “Choice devours itself“.

That is, the puppets say the relatively harmless and uncontroversial: “Of course there are biological differences that make us a certain gender, but that does not lock us into a gender role.” Somewhere between 1974 and today some Brights asked, “What is this biology stuff anyway? And what’s so great about it?” Enter the nominalists. Cut off some body parts, take boatloads of hormone cocktails, change your name from Tracy to Thomas, and voila! A dog’s tail is a leg simply because someone called it that.

But perhaps you think I’m being unfair (if not, good. It would be unfortunate if I had to leave a garrison…er…sorry again). I mean circus-show exceptions are hardly anything to go by (however, those news guys reporting the story with a straight face ought to creep us out just a little). Perhaps it isn’t fair, but allow me to spin an anecdote about Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. That’s the apostolic letter from John Paul II that said what the Church has always said: women should be barefoot and pregnant.

… 

Just kidding. It said that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” Direct and straightforward isn’t it? Yes, and even many progressives realize the game is up. But that didn’t stop one guy I encountered in the comment section of an Amazon.com review (can’t locate it, sorry). He said he fully accepted OS. But guess what? The Church hasn’t defined what maleness is. Get that? Nothing is ever settled because one determined to keep up the argument can always throw language itself into doubt. So I say this shows that word games are a feature, not a bug that only crops up in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cases.

The most revealing part of Free to Be You and Me is the tale of Atalanta. Take five minutes and watch it all or at least until your stomach for platitude gives out:

What we have is a perfect example of the dominate brand of feminism at this time: equity feminism–feminism that emphasizes the similarities with men. But it is gender feminism, which emphasizes the differences, that has won out in the academic-media complex. Why did it? I’ll speculate. With equity feminism, at least they start with the concrete fact of the plumbing as a given and that gender roles generally allow exceptions. Also things like salary comparisons, job performance, promotion, and achievement are things that can be objectively measured. As I’ve argued elsewhere, progressives prefer the abstract. Gender feminism feeds right in to that so that the meta-narrative can never run afoul of those little niggles called facts.

Speaking of niggles, let’s talk Tolkien. Y’all think you are geeks because you like Tolkien. I got you beat because I actually prefer his non-fiction writing and letters to his cumbersome stories. I’ll slog through Lord of the Rings in order to research questions like “does the story explicitly say that any use of the One Ring is inherently evil?”, but when I actually want to enjoy Tolkien, I reach for The Letters. Take for example, his marriage advice to his son:

Women really have not much part in all this, though they may use the language of romantic love, since it is so entwined in all our idioms. The sexual impulse makes women (naturally when unspoiled more unselfish) very sympathetic and understanding, or specially desirous of being so (or seeming so), and very ready to enter into all the interests, as far as they can, from ties to religion, of the young man they are attracted to. No intent necessarily to deceive: sheer instinct, the servient, helpmeet instinct, generously warmed by desire and young blood. Under this impulse they can in fact often achieve very remarkable insight and understanding, even of things otherwise out of their natural range: for it is their gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than physical) by the male.

Now a question for all of us enlightened, don’t you feel a little naughty reading that? Isn’t that more fun than, as Dyson put it, “another f—ing elf!”? Continuing further, it looks like Tolkien has more in common the gender feminists. If by “in common” you mean leaving out the lesbianism and agenda of smashing the patriarchal hegemony:

But they [women] are instinctively, when uncorrupt, monogamous. Men are not…..No good pretending. Men just ain’t, not by their animal nature. Monogamy (although it has long been fundamental to our inherited ideas) is for us men a piece of ‘revealed’ ethic, according to faith and not to the flesh. Each of us could healthily beget, in our 30 odd years of full manhood, a few hundred children, and enjoy the process.

And then Tolkien says something that gives a clue as to why few can watch Free to Be without succumbing to guffaws:

However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ’self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him — as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties as it provides easements. No man, however truly be loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that — even those brought up ‘in the Church’. Those outside seem seldom to have heard it.

Not only have those outside not heard it, but when they do, they recoil. Witness the reaction to Pope Benedict’s words on his visit to Africa:

It is my belief believe that the most effective presence on the front in the battle against HIV/AIDS is in fact the Catholic Church and her institutions. … The problem of HIV/AIDS cannot be overcome with mere slogans. If the soul is lacking, if Africans do not help one another, the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem. The solution can only come through a twofold commitment: firstly, the humanisation of sexuality, in other words a spiritual and human renewal bringing a new way of behaving towards one another; and secondly, true friendship, above all with the suffering, a readiness – even through personal sacrifice – to stand by those who suffer.

Free to Be… You and Me was for many children of that era their first introduction to therapeutic culture. Today it is inescapable and infects every aspect of life like kudzu–choking out all competitors. But even though I owned the album back then, (my wife has the CD) somehow I still managed to end up a reactionary, so there is always hope against brazen propaganda efforts and what Chesterton called the “degrading slavery” of the age.