The online reaction to Harrison Butker’s graduation speech at Benedictine College shows us many broken things about our brokenIt was totally predictable that folks on social media and in the news media would freak out that a man said things that cut against current feminist teaching. Matters of marriage, homosexuality, and gender roles have been extremely contentious for decades, if not longer.
This is a creepy mindset, that everyone should be accountable to everyone for whatever they say to anyone. Humans need private spheres. We need little platoons. We need local pubs, religious institutions, book clubs, and semipublic venues in which we can speak to a particular audience whose premises and values we share without needing to defend ourselves to other audiences who reject our values.
Bassett writes, “The first thing I see every day, via the online **discourse** that I have to monitor for my job, are men who know nothing about me or my life yelling that my very existence is a scourge on society.” “‘Disorder’ is an interesting word. It really says the quiet part out loud, which is that the conservative movement isn’t genuinely concerned with the birth rate, in general, or women’s happiness and fulfillment; it’s about controlling the kinds of families that should exist and the role of women within them. It’s about keeping women out of competition with men in the workforce and economically dependent on them.