No doubt many readers will be amused by the eventual outcome of YM’s experience in attempting to discuss a basic political principle with his mother:
My father arrived home from a business trip last night. Upon hearing what happened, he ungrounded me, and suggested to my mother that punishing a child for thought crime would only drive him further into misogyny. Then he took me aside and said “While you may be right about Santa Claus being not being real, you have to accept that a 6-year old will throw a tantrum at you when you tell him that.”
The funny thing is, I never actually told her women shouldn’t vote, only that it was an interesting idea, yet she still reacted like a child. Given my mother’s irrational response, I am now firmly on your side. I had seen this sort of behavior before, but mostly from younger, feminist women. I never thought in a million years that my evangelical, allegedly traditionalist mother would act the same way. You are right about learning a valuable lesson on women.
Ironic, and yet hardly surprising. YM is not only fortunate in having a strong male father in his life, but he is aware of it. Notice too that he didn’t react with outrage to his unfair and absurd grounding, but simply waited calmly for his father to rectify the situation. This is the way things are supposed to be.
As I have pointed out many times before, those who are capable of intellectually defending their position will do so calmly. Those who can’t always try to shut down the conversation one way or another. While the pro-suffrage side did have some effective hypothetical arguments in the early part of the 20th century, the subsequent 90 years of negative consequences have sufficed to destroy them utterly.
It’s interesting to note how female solipsism can trump a mother’s instinct to defend her son, which nevertheless is capable of detaching a woman from Team Woman at times.