From the silver screen to the pulpit, I grew up hearing how the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality, personified by John Wayne, wasn't healthy for men.
But while little boys were being scolded for their toxicity, it seems a different poison was being peddled to little girls.
I don't have a way to download the video to post it here (and it might be the property of Fox News), so the full 6-minute clip can be found through that link.
But let me highlight a few quotes.
This is Melissa Persling, a journalist who writes for a variety of outlets, but has been especially open about her life over on Business Insider. Last month, she went viral for this piece:
Melissa was married to her middle-school sweetheart from Idaho when she was in her 20s. She remembers sitting on the counter talking to him about the future when she was 20 years old. She didn't want kids. He did.
Because he loved her, he tried to make a marriage work, but a decade later, they divorced.
Melissa then dated a 58-year-old rich guy and wrote about it. Now, nearly a decade after her divorce, she realizes she wants kids, and realizes she might not be able to have them.
I wrote a lot of that article truly scared. I really did think, like, 'Wow, you missed your opportunity. You are going to be alone, you're not going to have a family' - Like, I was really scared when I wrote that. That's exactly like I felt.
And when I got comments, after that article was published, like I said, there was hundreds of guys emailing me, texting me, LinkedIn messaging me, commenting on the post - saying, 'You're selfish, you missed out, you know you could have had all that [but] you picked your career,' calling me horrible things. I mean, it was awful. I sat in bed reading these comments and I thought, 'Oh my [gosh], they're right.'
Melissa said she heard "you've been selfish" over and over again. She didn't appreciate the hate, but she realized there was truth in what they were saying.
She had been living a "selfish, me-focused life."
For me, it's definitely started to feel hollow and meaningless. And, you know, it's taken me until this point in my life to realize that that's not a life that gonna bring you happiness.
Ask any parent if they would trade their kids for a bigger house or a bigger career. Perhaps one in ten thousand would make the trade.
It is such a me-focused culture right now. It really is, and I just think a lot of us are missing out, you know?
The "traditional" crowd - conservative politicians, church leaders, stay-at-home moms, said this for decades. No one listened.
I don't want to wake up [at] 60 by myself and go, 'Well, I had a lot of fun.'
Legacy isn't everything, but it's nearly everything as far as this life is concerned. You don't need to be married or have kids to find that fulfillment, but most of the women "freed" from motherhood aren't opening orphanages in Calcutta.
I feel UNBELIEVABLY betrayed by feminism. I don't wanna put it on the movement, because I believe you make your own choices, and everything I've done coming up to this point in my life has been my choice and that's on me. But when I was a little girl, it was like - and to be fair, I think this partly comes from a divorced family and seeing my mom kinda handle a lot.
(That's a whole different can of worms, and the root of much of this problem, but let's move on.)
But also, it was constantly said this idea that women can be everything. We don't really need men. Women can have the great career and have the kids that they like and change the tires and do this. I grew up thinking - men are great - but I grew up thinking all the same things. I do feel, in many ways, betrayed by that line of thinking.
I'm not making fun of Melissa. I have 4 daughters, and I know statistically that at least one will get sucked in by the poison apple our culture is offering these days.
But when will the modern women wake up to the lie?
A lot of the older women in my life, I kind of want to go back to some of those teachers and coaches and say, 'What the [heck] did you mean by that,' because women can't do it all. We can't. It's such a lie.
Agreed! As a guy, I was well-versed in all unique "toxicity" of men by the time I was 10. It started young when my kindergarten teacher wanted to put me on Ritalin because I wouldn't sit still like a good little girl. Fortunately, I had a dad who laughed at that idea.
By the time I was in my teens, I was being taught how men (especially white men) were the source of all the world's problems. I had the "role models" of Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin to show me how stupid and laughable men are, especially fathers.
I made it through because I had faithful parents who taught me otherwise, and because I had a template for masculinity in the Bible.
Many men didn't.
Unfortunately, our culture is so in "SLAY, KWEEN!" mode - this rot of endless empowerment without wisdom - that it's considered taboo to suggest that maybe women have been sold a lie too.
Melissa says she thanks God that she realized that marriage and children are important before she turned 40, because she believes she has enough time.
But a geriatric pregnancy - what a term! - that is considered to have greater difficulty and risk due to old age is any pregnancy over the age of 35. From the Cleveland Clinic:
"ADVANCED Maternal Age"
Life is short, and for women, the window to have kids is even shorter.
My wife gave birth to our first child at 23. She recently gave birth to our fourth child at 32. There was a world of difference in the difficulty of the last pregnancy compared to the first. We ended up in the ER afterwards because it was that much harder on her body.
I pray for the tens of millions of women like Melissa - my fellow millennials who aren't the up-and-coming generation anymore, but are just now starting to realize what life is actually about ...
About 20 years too late.
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