A Letter to Washington Post Columnist Alyssa Rosenberg About Her Father's Day Article
Feminist Misdirection for America's Fathers
Father’s Day, 2023
Dear Ms. Rosenberg,
I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter about your recent article in The Washington Post, This Father’s Day, stop treating dads as dopes, deadbeats or icebergs, and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
Trust me, you really need to read this.
As a brief introduction, I’m a proud lifelong reader of the Post who nevertheless has long noticed the paper’s gender bias, most notably its imbalanced coverage of domestic violence.1
But my pride in the Post finally turned to quiet outrage in 2018 after the paper published two undeniably gender-biased articles: Why can't we hate men? and Amber Heard’s shameful op-ed.
Since then, I’ve been sending letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate this bias.
I was elated on my first reading of your article, thinking, “Thank God! Finally, a Washington Post columnist has seen the light!”
But after a more thorough reading, including exploring all your article’s links, I can only conclude that your article is just another, more surreptitious, example of this gender bias so prevalent at the Post.
It is also an example of what one might call a “feminist she-wolf in sheep’s clothing” – on its face seeming to acknowledge the anti-male bias so prevalent in America today, but instead simply furthering selfish, one-sided feminist objectives under the deceitful guise of “helping fathers”.
Much of the content of these links, examined with a truly “gender equitable” mind, reveals content that might be found in a feminist manifesto or the NOW website:
By including “Responsible” in its name, the source of your Dad Jokes link, the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, cleverly helps advance the feminist-inspired myth that many, or even most, fathers are irresponsible fathers. Wouldn’t “National Fatherhood Clearinghouse” be less prejudiced?
Can you imagine the outrage of American women if a “National Responsible Motherhood Clearinghouse” was created to combat abortion?The link to the Congressional Dads Caucus only parrots feminist talking points, completely ignoring fathers’ rights: “Fighting for family-friendly policies in Congress, including paid leave, affordable child care, and the enhanced Child Tax Credit”.
Why don’t these groveling, chivalrous, quisling congressmen address issues that affect real fathers, like anti-father bias in family courts, or parental alienation syndrome, where women (usually) poison the minds of children against their fathers, or paternity fraud, where men are incorrectly, often deliberately, misidentified as the biological father of a child?You characterize the international MenCare media and training campaign as “involved fatherhood as part of the fight for gender equity”, yet this organization’s website includes the following father-unfriendly, feminist-oriented mission statement:
“Our mission is to promote men’s involvement as equitable, nonviolent [assumes that most men are violent] fathers and caregivers in order to achieve family well-being, gender equality, and better health for mothers, fathers, and children. We aim for men to be allies in supporting women’s social and economic equality, in part by taking on more responsibility for childcare and domestic work. We believe that true equality will only be reached when men are taking on 50 percent of the world’s child care and domestic work.”
If feminists were genuinely concerned about “true equality”, this statement should have included the following:
“We also believe that true equality will only be reached when women become 50 percent of coal miners; occupy 50 percent of the jobs in the world’s death professions, where men suffer 94% of workplace deaths; are 50 percent of the homeless population, where men are currently 80%; are 50 percent of suicides, where men currently are 80%; are 50 percent of homicides, where men are currently 76%, and that women should have lifespans equal to men, who currently die six years sooner.”The MenCare organization is sponsored by Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice, a “less-than-father-friendly” organization whose website home page includes an all-caps banner “PROMOTING NURTURING, EQUITABLE, NONVIOLENT MASCULINITY SINCE 2011”:
Wouldn’t Equimundo be more honest with a home page that shouts, “PROMOTING A FEMINIST AGENDA BY DISPARAGING MEN”?
Finally, your last paragraph,
“This Father’s Day, the best present for parents like him would be policies and practices that signal an end to treating dads as dopes, incompetents or emotional icebergs who flee for the fairway — and a commitment to nurturing all our caregivers.”,
seems to be a wonderful, welcome Father’s Day message for fathers everywhere, but the document that the link downloads, How TV Does and Doesn’t Get Men’s Caregiving, contains a 193-word leading paragraph in its introduction that reveals the document’s real intent (truncated for brevity):
“Women are still doing more care work than men, but change is slowly happening. Today, nearly as many women are in the labor force as men, yet women still handle most household chores and the majority of childcare and eldercare responsibilities. Globally, women are tasked with three to ten times more caregiving than men, with this ratio varying from country to country. Survey research suggests that men are increasingly aware of caregiving imbalances and are carrying out more of these tasks than they did in the past….”
Do you know what’s missing in this long description?
Any mention of the real needs and concerns of fathers, outside of the one-sided depiction of “gender equality” espoused by its feminist worldview.
Ms. Rosenberg, you’re just a bit older than my own three children, young enough to have lived your entire life under feminist indoctrination, so I can understand how, with little thought and even less research, you have simply regurgitated a feminist perspective, not recognizing that all of these “father-friendly” programs are tainted with feminist prejudices.
Your article – and thousands of others like it that mindlessly echo a feminist worldview – reminds me of the answer Ernest Hemingway gave when once asked what quality was most needed to be a great writer: “a built-in, shockproof, crap detector”.
By that measure, you and many other writers at the Post are not great writers.
This Father’s Day is past, too late for you to have understood your article’s fundamental hypocrisy. But for Father’s Day next year, you can give American men a genuine gift by turning your crap detector back on and writing another article that truly supports fathers.
My observation was recently confirmed by a February 2023 report that described a 10-Year Suppression of the Truth on Domestic Violence by the Washington Post. The report concludes, “The Coalition to End Domestic Violence calls on the Washington Post, in a timely manner, to run an editorial acknowledging its biased coverage of the domestic abuse issue, and to publish articles that focus on the plight of male victims of domestic violence.”
Boom! Nailed it. I skimmed through the referenced WaPo article and indeed I saw a lot of policy proposals which would help men become nurturers like women. Standard feminist boilerplate. If only men were more like women we might be able to tolerate them. Feminists will never acknowledge the unique contributions dads make to the parenting process, because of course gender is just a social construct ...