Actress Emma Watson, who earned her rights to shape public opinion and policy through her arduous educational endeavors playing a smarty pants witch, named Herione Granger, in the Harry Potter movie series and by walking out of lecture halls if anyone referenced the fact, has been quite the little activist since those days. She can hardly wait to get a microphone so she can tell the rest of us how to save the human race from the barbarism of the past.
This barbarism is clearly represented by things like recognizing gender, having moral restraint, or believing that like every other mammal—not to mention reptilian, avian, amphibian, ichthyes, insecta, arachnid, echinodermata, and cnidaria creature—oops, I mentioned them—we humans are male and female with distinctive and easily observed behavior patterns. Oh the inhumanity!!! We make those who want to be earthworm-clownfish-hybrid humans feel bad when they can’t and when we refuse to pretend they can.[1]
For a while now, Miss Emma has been publicly attacking the woman, to whom she owes so much, over J.K. Rowling’s refusal to betray real women by pandering to mentally-ill men who want to put on woman-face and displace them wherever they can. And in response to this flurry of attention by leftist “journalists” Watson has renewed her designs on saving the world. Let the people rejoice. Is there a sarcasm font? I need a sarcasm font so no one misses it.
On the On Purpose podcast, the host, Jay Shetty queried of the 35 year old actress, “I know you talked about how getting asked the question, ‘When are you getting married?’ or ‘Why aren’t you married yet?’ … that’s something every woman’s hearing. What’s your reaction when you hear that?”
Her “wise” reply, in spite of the fact that her safest childbearing years are nearing a close? “I think it’s such a violence, and it’s such a cruelty on people — especially young people, and especially women — to make them feel like they have no worth or like they haven’t succeeded yet in life because they haven’t forced to its culmination something that I just don’t think can or should ever be forced.”
Hmmmm… use the weasel word “force” and this almost sounds noble. Who thinks people should be forced to do things? Other than her I mean. Her entire political platform is a platform for total government and forcing people into all sorts of things that the left craves for society. So let’s get past the manipulative use of “force” designed to make the most basic principles of living look barbaric.
We could focus on her declaration of tolerance for greater levels of force rallied against men, with special rules for women. We could consider the statistics of those who wait for marriage sexually and who tend to marry younger in this condition… cough cough lowest divorce rate. But why bother when emotional appeals are so much more satisfying. We could query who these people are who want to tell the unmarried that they are worthless. But again, vague declarations of the grand oppressive “them” and mean “society” and self-proclaimed “you made me feel this way!” are far easier than bothering with facts.
I’ve certainly not met any of these people. But I have met a lot of people with far more sense than Dear Emma here that know what is waiting for her and others like her when they burn away their youth on vanity and selfishness. They tend to awaken to loneliness when it is too late to do anything meaningful about it, when they are too far gone into their narcissistic patterns of life to sustain meaningful connection. And they, I can only imagine, wish to spare her this eventuality.
Let’s get more basic yet.
Every biological agent in creation has a handful of behaviors that determine its biological legitimacy.
1. Breathing/Eating/drinking.
2. Staying alive in a hostile environment.
3. Procreating in a stable enough condition (Number or safety) to perpetuate itself in the gene pool in such a way as to assure that its progeny can successfully accomplish all 3 as well.
For people, #3 is done best in exclusive, lifelong unions… marriage and family.
Now this biological imperative goes well beyond the individual and his or her chosen mate.
Societies themselves depend on enough members in that society following such dictates to preserve the stability of the whole community. As goes the family, so goes society. This sociological imperative also works wonders on one’s own soul. There is nothing in this world like marriage and family for driving a person out of self-absorbed infancy of mind into responsible, self-denying adulthood. People are anti-fragile. They become their best under challenge, demand, pressure, and responsibility. And nothing accomplishes that better than committing for life to marriage and family.
I am not saying that people should marry anyone as soon as possible to check off some biological or sociological box… that would intrinsically validate #3, by failing to vet the character and trustworthiness of the one with whom one wishes to establish a family.
But I am saying that only a fool imagines that these biological and sociological imperatives are “violence” or even “unnecessary.” Your lasting happiness is on the line, the stability of your own community is on the line… and many people care enough about you (and Emma Watson) to encourage you to go down the right path and to abandon your self-absorbed, self-indulgent, childish existence.
~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD
[1] Worms are “dual-sexed” and Clownfish “sex-switching” animals. But let’s be honest, using terms like male and female for such creatures are metaphors for describing the reproductive realities of such beings, and they make for poor sociological understanding of them. Amoebas even split and that’s the way the Good Lord made them all. These creatures don’t experience identity or gender; they shift reproductive function, changing the type of gametes they produce in response to environmental cues. Describing this as becoming “male” or “female” projects human categories onto a biochemical adaptation, rather than recognizing it as functional reproductive plasticity that has nothing to do with human beings or most of the rest of the creaturely population.