The Pseudo Anti-Feminist, Liberal White Man

The insipid Mr. Chua

I wrote in one of the posts in which I analyze the "Tiger Mom" phenomenon:

I think liberal (conservative-liberal) men are punishing white women for their feminism, or at least their support of feminism. Deep down, I don't think any male likes or supports feminism. It is essentially a movement against men.

So, these super-hypocritical liberalized white men, who ideologically support feminism, cannot do so in their private and family (and love) lives.

They goad on white (liberalized) women to follow this ideology but then they pull the rug out from under their feet. "We like what you say, but not in our castle" is their evil message.

Jed Rubenfeld manages to confirm my points about two minutes into this video where he is being interviewed, along with his wife Amy Chua and their daughter, on Chua's book Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mom, and Chua's views (and practices) on child rearing. Here's what he replies to the interviewer's question: "What do you think Jed, from your vantage point?":

I do think Chinese mothers are superior…I don’t mean it ethnically or racially…I never thought of it as Chinese or Western when we were raising our kids. I thought it was more like old fashioned parenting vs. like post 1960s parenting…That’s what I thought when we were raising our kids…Things changed sometime around the 1960s…There was a way that kids used to be raised, not just in China, in America, pretty much in Europe, pretty much all over… There was a traditional style of parenting then there was a more lax style of parenting which I think is fairly recent, really…So I always thought that we were doing this kind of traditional type, or old fashioned, traditional [emphasis] type of parenting and people get nervous about that.

No, Chinese mothers use rash and irresponsible bullying techniques as traditional methods to warding off potential bad behavior from their children. He's right, it is a Chinese thing, Chua said as much in the interview linked above. But for all her pushing, her daughters are no stars. The concert-pianist potential is now absent from the daughter who played in Carnegie Hall (once, as a teenager, which could be some special program to get young musicians to perform in that famous concert hall), and the other daughter has gone off the radar.

Information on Rubenfeld's background is surprisingly sparse. Here's one article which describes his defense of abortion:

In 1989...he wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review, which is still talked about in legal circles. It was what legal scholars call a brilliant argument about...the right to privacy.

In his article, Rubenfeld used the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade to argue that privacy is inextricable from personhood, and that the Constitution should guard a woman’s right to choose an abortion because not allowing her to do so amounts to a kind of governmental control over a woman’s identity. “Women should be allowed to abort their pregnancies so that they may avoid being forced into an identity," he writes.

A 1997 article discloses, from what I can glean through all the jargon, that he thinks affirmative action is not such a bad thing.

He branched into fiction writing, soft porn specifically. A little embarrassing for a law professor at Yale, no? I wonder how he explains that to his students.

[H]e is a successful, popular author. He reportedly received an advance of $800,000 for his 2006 book, The Interpretation of Murder, a thriller about Sigmund Freud. (It was a massive bestseller in England, though it fared poorly in the States. Filled with kinky sex—“her entire body glistened in the unbearable August heat”—the book was described by a reviewer for The New York Times as “both smutty and pretentious.”)

An abortion-supporting law professor, soft on affirmative action, who writes soft porn in his spare time (encouraged by his proud-to-be Asian wife, "She was the one who said I should write a novel, and she was even the one who suggested using what I knew about Freud in it") is no example of a conservative and a traditional American. He may pick and chose to live the kind of lifestyle that will not tear apart his family in his elitist enclave (and he's picked Chinese traditionalism!), but he will have to eventually climb into the trenches with the masses, including his daughters, to whom he has thrown scraps of indigestible liberalism. I don't recommend he join them, though, since they will not see him as their ally, but as their enemy.

Such is the hypocrisy of liberals.