August 27, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — From microaggressions to transgender prefixes to “redefining masculinity,” we cover a lot of left-wing propositions that are just plain crazy. But while this madness is all too familiar on college campuses these days, seeing it promoted by the Big Three media networks is another matter…at least, seeing it promoted as overtly as NBC News did this month.
On August 16, NBC published an op-ed by Women’s Media Center columnist Marcie Bianco that uses the latest high-profile celebrity breakup, Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth, as a springboard to make the…odd…argument that “as the status quo, heterosexuality is just not working.”
Not working for whom? For what?
As a snapshot of 2019 America, these stories present a startling picture: Men continue to coerce, harass, rape and kill girls and women — and go to extreme lengths to avoid responsibility for their actions. On the other side of the issue, girls and women are challenging heterosexuality, and even absconding from it altogether.
Note how, just as the Left did with the “rape culture” meme, grotesquely violent men are framed as one “side of the issue,” as if the most depraved crimes are somehow reflective of or intrinsic to one of the two sexes rather than universally despised examples of evil committed by individuals. (The “extreme lengths” line links to Jeffrey Epstein, because billionaires with their very own pedophile islands are apparently a representative sample of American males.)
Men need heterosexuality to maintain their societal dominance over women. Women, on the other hand, are increasingly realizing not only that they don’t need heterosexuality, but that it also is often the bedrock of their global oppression.
Patriarchy is at its most potent when oppression doesn’t feel like oppression, or when it is packaged in terms of biology, religion or basic social needs like security comfort, acceptance and success. Heterosexuality offers women all these things as selling points to their consensual subjection.
Historically, women have been conditioned to believe that heterosexuality is natural or innate, just as they have been conditioned to believe that their main purpose is to make babies — and if they fail to do so, they are condemned as not “real,” or as bad, women.
There are a couple of pretty remarkable things to unpack here. First, considering that U.S. women enjoy full legal, social, and yes, economic equality, yet less than 5% of Americans are estimated to be homosexual or bisexual, it seems pretty clear that both sexes “need heterosexuality” not to control one another, but for love, companionship, stability, intimacy, and childrearing…that is, assuming it’s a conscious choice at all.
That’s the second oddity about this passage. For years, all we heard from LGBT activists is that nobody chooses to be gay, that the heart wants what the heart wants, that it’s dangerous to even discuss “junk science” like reparative therapy. Yet when there’s a patriarchy to be smashed, straightness can be dropped with a simple cost-benefit analysis?
The facts that the vast majority of people are attracted to the opposite sex and that only heterosexuality naturally produces children don’t suggest that heterosexuality is “natural or innate”? Every biological reality, cultural trend, and behavioral indicator can be written off as “conditioning”?
Cyrus thoughtfully explains how her sexuality is both distinct from and influences her definition of what a relationship looks like. “Being someone who takes such pride in individuality and freedom, and being a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community,” she writes in a personal memo in Vanity Fair in February, “I’ve been inspired by redefining again what a relationship in this generation looks like. Sexuality and gender identity are completely separate from partnership.”
In what might be the first time in human history Miley Cyrus and any variation of “thoughtful” have ever unironically appeared in a sentence together, Bianco takes Cyrus’s view that “sexuality and gender identity are completely separate from partnership” as a “far cry from the type of freedom espoused by those on the right, for whom freedom, as I wrote in an earlier article on how misogyny is the driver of mass shootings in America, is conflated with domination.”
Depending on how familiar you are with these types of screeds, it may not surprise you to learn that said earlier article doesn’t even try to make a cogent case for this libel. The author does, however, double down on malice by marveling that Brett Kavanaugh considered himself “the ‘victim’ of character assassination” just because he was, in fact, the victim of character assassination.
Where men seem to never to have to take responsibility for their actions, women always must take responsibility for not only their own actions but the actions of men. Absconding from responsibility is the quintessential strategy of the patriarchy; it’s how men stay in control and never lose their power.
This narrative may be useful for keeping feminist activists in a perpetual victim mentality, but it has no basis in reality. Can Bianco name a single pro-lifer who thinks men shouldn’t be responsible, a single opponent of contraception mandates who makes an exception for male birth control? If anything, true misogynists love abortion because it helps them avoid any children that might obligate them to the women they use for sex.
While men stew in their mess, women are rising. They are taking back control of their lives and their bodies and they are questioning the foundation of the patriarchy — heterosexuality — that has kept them blindly subordinate for centuries.
And Miley Cyrus is a role model for this brave new world, apparently.
The Left is often at its most brazen in the academic world, where its dreams of tearing down the foundations of society are laid bare, whereas in the real world, leftists are more likely to put at least some effort into a reasonable-sounding façade (“Equality!” “Women’s health!”). But NBC’s choice to highlight this radicalism as worthy of its audience’s consideration suggests one of two possibilities: either our mainstream media institutions are growing even more rabidly out of touch, or they have reason to believe that their audiences are more open to more extreme ideologies.
Neither possibility speaks well of the future for a serious media establishment or intelligent discourse on issues where America desperately needs both.
