I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it. – Thomas Jefferson.
One of the first ways a child knows his mother recognizes that he’s growing up is that she stops reminding him of commonsense things. Obviously, there are some mothers who never stop, but this gets pretty irritating because it tends to mean the mother doesn’t really trust her child to remember it himself; in other words, it’s a sign she views him as immature and therefore irresponsible. A mother who regularly called to remind her adult son or daughter to take typical adult precautions such as locking doors, brushing teeth or dressing warmly in wintertime would certainly be perceived as annoying and interfering; such reminders are at best patronizing and at worst examples of a pathological need to infantilize the one to whom they are delivered. Any normal woman would resent such behavior if her mother did it…so why do we accept it from busybody strangers?
In my column of April 4th, I offered a few safety tips for my amateur sisters who date strangers (including men they meet online). But I’m not in authority over any of my readers; my suggestions are intended in the spirit of sharing my considerable experience in dealing with strange men in sexually-charged situations with women who may not have been in that position. You don’t have to take them, don’t even have to read them and in fact can say “up yours, Maggie” if it pleases you to do so. I’m certainly not going to put the suggestions on my front page so you’re forced to look at them every time you sign on, and I couldn’t take measures to “protect” you from your own decisions even if I wanted to.
Others, however, have a lower opinion of the adult competency of those who use the internet. After an entitlement junkie recently sued Match.com for failing to warn her that meeting strange men for potentially sexual purposes might be, like, dangerous, the popular dating site announced that it will now screen users via the national sex offender registry. Because obviously, anyone who isn’t on the registry must be perfectly safe, and anyone who is on it deserves never to have sexual contact ever again with anyone for the rest of his life, even if he’s there for screwing his 16-year-old girlfriend when he was 19, or she’s there for prostitution or taking nude pictures of herself as a teenager. Match.com is a business and if it decides to nag its users with commonsense warnings or discriminate against certain groups as a ward against future lawsuits, that’s certainly its right. But as this AP release, from last Thursday (April 21st) explains, Big Nanny wants to force websites to do those things:
… Amid accounts of sex offenders using matchmaking sites to find victims, lawmakers in several states are trying to pass legislation to help make online daters more aware of the potential pitfalls of the process. Bills are pending this year in Connecticut and Texas to provide users with more information to protect themselves. Connecticut’s bill, mirroring a law in New York, requires Internet dating services to provide a safety awareness notice during registration that offers advice such as never including your last name, email address, place of work, phone numbers or identifying information in an Internet profile. Similar laws are already on the books in Florida and New Jersey…”I’ve heard a lot of stories, not only people who had their physical safety endangered, but also financial safety,” said Connecticut…[bill sponsor] Mae Flexer…”I’ve heard from a number of people who unfortunately met someone online, they gave them too much information and were damaged financially as well.”
The Texas legislation requires online dating services to clearly disclose to customers whether they conduct criminal background checks on each member before allowing them to contact other members on the site. The same bill requires the sites to remind customers that background checks are not a perfect safety solution and they can be circumvented by criminals. New York lawmakers are considering a similar bill that would supplement last year’s law. It would also require the companies to clearly notify users whether they conduct criminal background screenings…
Donna Rice Hughes, CEO and president of Enough is Enough, a Virginia-based nonprofit that focuses on improving Internet safety for children and families, said it makes sense for corporate matchmaking websites to proactively take steps to make their services safer…”The last thing they need for business is for somebody to get harmed by something through their site… They should be running their database against the sex offender registries. That’s a no-brainer.” [But] Alex Vasquez, founder of the L.A.-based blog theurbandater.com, said not everyone in the online dating community likes the idea of background checks. “It’s definitely going to be a hot-button item because there’s definitely that privacy issue,” he said. Vasquez recommends both women and men use common sense when meeting their online dates face-to-face…
One would think that since Mrs. Hughes made her own highly questionable choices involving men without the assistance of the internet, she would understand that it’s dating strangers which carries the risk, not the method by which people find each other. Meeting strangers via online personals ads is no different from meeting them via print personals, except that the online personal is likely to contain a great deal more information (not to mention a picture and the ability to “chat” electronically without exchanging phone numbers). If anything, using computer ads vs. print ones actually decreases the danger; it certainly has for escorts. The real change isn’t the medium, it’s the percentage of people using such ads for dating. But even then, does anyone really believe meeting a man online is remotely as dangerous as meeting him in a singles bar?
Mr. Vasquez has it right; if people would simply use common sense, they wouldn’t need corporate and political nannies telling them whom they’re allowed to meet and talk to and insulting their intelligence with “advice” which should be obvious to any rational adult. Alas, common sense has gone out of style; taking personal responsibility for one’s choices and the consequences thereof make it much more difficult to sue somebody if one screws up or unforeseen circumstances occur, and people who accept personal responsibility tend to reject the efforts of “authorities” to control their lives, beliefs and finances…and we certainly can’t have that.
This was what the whole revolution in the 1960’s was all about:
Abandoning responsibility.
The big trend, whether you’re a black rights advocate, a neo-feminist, an MRM advocate bitter about the inability to find a Hausfrau, is to blame someone else.
And there are alliances. Feminists are allied with gay people and blacks; black activists (poor me victimologists) tolerate feminists, to a point, but not gays; hispanics are out on their own, but are courted for their votes, though they largely hate blacks, feminists and gays; and Asian-Americans wonder why the hell other people don’t just pull their socks up and stop whining like little babies. No matter, they’ll just get rich while everyone else argues how best to fleece those with money and redistribute it so the local activists have the most power.
Ultimately, we need to be responsible for ourselves. You do something stupid – then, next time, don’t be stupid.
Stop whining like a little baby.
And for neofeminists: Either women are full-on grownups with equal (*equal*) rights with men – or they’re incompetent children who need special protection.
You may be able to get away with rank hypocrisy for a while, but ultimately, these things work themselves out of a system. The result is almost always bad.
This whole country is turning into a big cover your ass society (CYA as I commonly hear). I believe this has completely permeated the government and is now being spread into the general populace so we can avoid being sued. I mean, we have to do risk assessments for bloody everything in the Army. I even have to make shit up to mitigate risk on combat missions, as in the risk of getting shot at and blown up, it’s quite ridiculous much of the time.
Hughes decided she wanted to be remembered for something other than Gary Hart. I guess she succeeded.
And I would totally agree, except that supporting laws which prevent others from making the sort of mistake she was freely allowed to make is exactly the same as adults who drank at 18 supporting raising the drinking age to 21 because they know what THEY were like at that age.
Well, that wasn’t exactly what I meant, but…
hhhmmmnnn……
Maybe that is exactly what I meant.
http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/house-rules/
Thanks, ma’am.
Oh, Gorbachev, that wasn’t really intended to be a message to you! I was just working out how to post it as a link in the right column and replied to your post temporarily (notice I deleted it) because it was the first one. I’m sorry if you felt like I was singling you out, because I wasn’t; I just wanted to look at the html for it! 🙂
In modern society, everyone but certain groups it’s convenient to demonize is a victim. There’s no such thing as personal responsibility anymore apparently. It’s much easier to blame an outside entity for one’s own shortcomings than to assess one’s personal history of poor decisions and work to make the changes necesssary to achieve better results in life. So sad.
This is the natural consequence of mothers abandoning their duties and responsibilities to their families. Women have been raised to believe that the only place they can find identity is at work. The only valuable contribution they can make to society is to generate cash and then spend it on shit they probably don’t need in the first place.
Unfortunately, there’s that whole problem of needing to create more humans to keep the whole ball rolling. So we have children.
Children + work = disaster.
These kids have been raised in institutions or by hired help from birth. They have their entire days structured and formed and make virtually no personal decisions of their own. They have grown up seeing their parents avoid the responsibility of actually raising their own children.
Where exactly are they supposed to acquire a sense of personal responsibility?
There is nothing wrong with women working. There is something very wrong with mothers of young children working at a job that requires the child to spend long hours in the care of someone else.
It’s very fitting that an overly instrusive government is called a nanny state. That’s the central problem. Parents hire nannies to do the job they have a profound responsibility to do. They sidestep responsibility for their own children, and pay someone else to pick up the slack.
Well, you get what you raise. Welcome to “Please Nanny Tell Me What To Do”. The daycare generation comes of age. So far, it’s just been delightful.
Being a single parent for my kids entire life (my 22 y/o was five and my 18 y/o was 18 months when their father passed) it is especially tough NOT to be with the kids. Making up for two incomes led to 12 hour days and home in time (maybe) to tuck them in and do it again the next day. Hookerdom has allowed me the ability to work only within the hours they are in school and earn more than the 12 hour days, and I could take off when they were sick and schedule my own hours around school activities.
Quality of parenting counts as much as time spent with them. I’ve always preached personal responsibility (as in if you fuck up, you know you fucked up, your ass is going to sit in jail bud… don’t call me till it’s time to pick you up). (Fucking up meaning something like breaking and entering, burglary, you know.. doing stupid shit). Heck I remember trying to tell the cops to arrest my son when he decided it would be fun to break into a house and party there with his friends. Cops called me to pick him up I said no, take his ass to jail… in cuffs.. whole nine yards! Cops wouldn’t do it… thanks for not backing me up… sheesh
Holy hell, Brandy. Being a widow is a far fucking cry from having kids and deciding that the work of being a mother sucks, so it’s off to the daycare with you while Mommy goes back to her office.
I’d say you taught your kids about personal responsibility in spades! I wish we lived in a world where widows were paid to raise children who have ALREADY lost a parent. I’d say you stepped up to the plate, and them some.
Amen, Sister! 🙂
We did receive SSI (Social Security Survivor Benefits) each month till the boys were 18. However since their father was only 35 when he passed and he worked as a carpenter (ie mostly cash based) most of his adult life, the benefits weren’t much. (Benefits are based on percentage that the person put into social security from the deduction in the paychecks… or something like that). Basically we received enough to cover most of their childcare expenses. It was better than nothing but not near enough to cover rent, groceries, car payments, utilities, etc.
How could I forget this story? How many rape victims have you seen reveal their identities via a PRNewswire.com press release proclaiming herself the “Erin Brockovich” of online dating?
http://once-fallen.blogspot.com/2011/04/mismatch-dot-com-how-carole-markin.html