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Notes -
Celebs, boundaries and emotional abuse
So two stories have popped up around the same topic recently: how much men have the right to complain about or police their women's public behavior.
First off: recent mother Keke Palmer finally got to go out and enjoy herself, and her outing involved being serenaded by R&B star and notorious hound Usher Raymond. Her "baby daddy" decided to come out and complain that: "A man of the family doesn’t want the wife & mother to his kids to showcase booty cheeks to please others".
Well, that didn't go well. The feminist-aligned internet tore into him and he appeared to have been promptly dumped and, insult to injury, merch clowning him is now being sold
At the same time, "toxic masculinity" has a white representative to balance it out: Jonah Hill is now being attacked for being a misogynistic narcissist. Soon after the birth of his child, his ex decided to post texts showing his demand that she stops sexy photo shoots or overly close relationships with men or hanging out with women from her "wild past"
Hill is also facing a backlash from the DM women for "emotionally abusing" his ex via his boundaries and non-negotiables and his exploiting of "therapyspeak" to sanctify controlling behavior.
In both stories both men are excoriated for hypocrisy because these women behaved this way when they met, and expecting them to change (including after childbirth) is inconsistency.
So, what culture war implications to take from this?
Keke Palmer's boyfriend had a very standard male reaction, regardless of charges of hypocrisy. Making it public that way was unwise, especially since he was the comparative minnow in the status competition. Times have changed. Maybe men like that should reconcile themselves to playing the role of the honorable wife who conveniently never sees any of these shenanigans, for everyone's sake. Of course, that would suggest some more restraint on Palmer's part...
The situation is reversed with Hill. He has the status. Which I suspect is a significant part of the motive to release it now and draw in Deuxmoi-reading women to help win a battle that she couldn't have won in the relationship. As many people asked: why did she put up with his absurd demands (asking her to not post risque surfing photos when he met her through them) for any time whatsoever? Well, because he was Jonah Hill, presumably.
No pretense to even wrestle with why men don't want the mother of their kids publicly on display. Just near-total lack of care.
Obviously the concept creep on abuse continues.
Is the celebrity (and wannabe celebrity) class just going to litigate every relationship online now for fans and political affinity group points...forever? The Hill thing happened a while ago and now it's supposed to be a thing? I suspect part of the push to call some of this "abuse" is precisely that there's a realization that no one should care about messy personal business. I assume the word game is retarding us coming to the conclusion one should in a panopticon: to stop caring. I wonder how long it'll hold.
Nothing new here, it seems to me. I might be wrong, but from my reading of history it seems to me that for all of history, rich people of both sexes have often left the boring aspects of raising kids to their servants. Of course it is probably better for the kids to be raised closely by their biological relatives, but historically this is something that has probably been more common among the poor who had no choice but to do it than among the rich of both sexes who could just get others to do the childrearing for them while they went off to do things that they found more interesting, including pursuing new sexual relationships. It is nice to think that there is some deep psychological force that compels all parents to devote themselves to their children beyond the bare minimum, but I think that objectively speaking this is not true. Most people do feel emotionally compelled to provide to some extent for their children, but historically speaking this has never been something that one could rely on beyond a certain bare minimum, and it still is not.
Men should understand that their madonna/whore complexes, their simplistic notions of saintly mothers, and their "women are wonderful" psychological delusions are just that, delusions. Women, just like men, are complex monkeys with their own desires. When a man becomes a father or a woman becomes a mother, they do not stop being complex monkeys with their own desires. Humans are biologically programmed to devote some degree of attention to their children, but it only goes so far.
I don't know why you are so focused on the child rearing aspect of this, but this statement seems bizarrely anachronistic in the year of our lord twenty twenty three. The song I am woman (Hear me roar) came out fifty years ago. The men who don't understand that women are complex monkeys are never going to understand it at this point. Not that I think this Darius guy or Jonah Hill can't understand that women have their own desires - they do, but like everyone else on the planet they value their own desires higher, and attempted to negotiate with their partner over the specifics, only to discover that their partner can summon a fricking army to her side of the table with an emotionally loaded tweet.
Also Madonna/whore complexes and the women are wonderful effect are propagated and enforced at least as much by other women as they are men, if not more so.
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