Latest news with #RobinAbcarian
Gulf Today
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Gulf Today
Oh please, the right is reviving a tired trope about women
Robin Abcarian, Tribune News Service Here we go again. A bunch of successful, conservative professional women are telling young women they don't need careers to have fulfilling lives. All they need to do is avoid college (or better yet, just use it to find a husband), get married, have babies, stay home and live happily ever after. Perhaps you've noticed the proliferation of "tradwife" (i.e. traditional wife) influencers on various forms of social media, or the coverage of conferences like the woefully misnamed Young Women's Leadership Summit that recently took place in Dallas. A project of Charlie Kirk's conservative student organisation, Turning Point USA, the summit promised to focus on "foundational aspects of womanhood" such as "faith, femininity and well-being." The conference drew 3,000 women who, according to reports, were mostly college students or young professionals. They sported pins that read "My favourite season is the fall of feminism" and "Dump your socialist boyfriend," and they were told by Kirk, "We should bring back the celebration of the Mrs. degree." "The left wants women to feel angry and like victims, and like your rights are being taken away," a 31-year-old influencer named Arynne Wexler told a reporter for New York magazine. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in fact her rights are being taken away. Perhaps she has forgotten that the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion in 2022? Anyway, there is absolutely nothing new here. A certain subset ofwomen — straight, white, conservative, religious — has always fought against gender equality for their own reasons, but mostly I'd say because it threatens their own privileged status and proximity to male power. Nearly half a century before Wexler bemoaned "the left," Phyllis Schlafly, lawyer, author and anti-feminist crusader, said basically the same thing: "The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness." Hmmm. I'm pretty sure it was the oppressive patriarchy that prevented women from owning property, having their own credit cards and bank accounts, from earning equal pay, accessing legal birth control and abortion, serving on juries and holding public office. Until second wave feminism came along in the 1960s and 1970s, I'm pretty sure, too, that oppressive patriarchy allowed employers to fire women once they married or got pregnant, and that domestic violence, marital rape and sexual harassment were not treated as crimes. Oh, and it was feminists who pushed for Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which addressed gender inequality in education, including, crucially, in sports. Attacking feminism because you've never experienced a time when women were not, for the most part, legally equal to men springs from the same ignorant well as believing measles vaccines are unnecessary because you've never experienced the (largely vaccine-eliminated) disease for yourself. Indeed, reciting the accomplishments of feminism reminds me of that classic scene in the 1979 black comedy "Monty Python's Life of Brian." You may recall it: What have the Romans ever given us? (Just sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health.) A consistent thread in the argument against gender equality is that feminism makes women feel bad for staying home with their kids and not pursuing careers. In Dallas last month, young conference-goers told the New York Times "that it was feminism and career ambition making them unhappy, not the broader stress of puzzle-piecing together the responsibilities of modern life." In 1994, former First Lady Barbara Bush said she had experienced a period of depression and partly attributed it to "the women's movement," which, as she told NPR, "sort of made women who stayed home feel inadequate." I get that. But in response, I would paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt: No one can make you feel inadequate without your consent. If you are lucky enough to be able to stay home with your children and do not feel compelled to carve out a career, more power to you. Alex Clark, a popular podcaster and influencer who headlined the Young Women's Leadership Conference, offered the crowd her Make America Healthy Again formula: "Less Prozac and more protein. Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity." But having lots of babies is stressful — having one baby is stressful — and can certainly lead to its own kind of burnout. One of the most popular tradwives in the country, Hannah Neeleman, is a Mormon mother of eight young children. She is married to a rancher who is the son of the founder of Jet Blue, has more than 9 million social media followers and, as a former professional ballerina, posts under the handle Ballerina Farm. Last summer, in a profile published by the Times of London, she was dubbed the "queen of tradwives." We learned that she does all the food shopping, makes all the meals and has no help with childcare. I would submit that she is a career woman as well, since she runs popular social media accounts that generate millions of dollars a year in income. In a stunning admission, her husband told the London Times reporter that his wife "sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can't get out of bed for a week."
Los Angeles Times
03-07-2025
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
Letters to the Editor: Vaccines save millions of lives. Don't let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. diminish them
To the editor: For Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be our secretary of Health and Human Services is not only having the fox guard the chicken coop — the fox is invited right into the chicken coop. His unfitness for the job and danger to the health of our citizens was beautifully laid out by columnist Robin Abcarian in her article on the critical role of vaccines and the dangers we face because he belittles their validity and importance ('RFK Jr. is dismantling trust in vaccines, the crown jewel of American public health,' June 29). During my pediatric residency decades ago, some of the 'old-timers' occasionally brought in patients who had diseases that we rarely saw anymore because of vaccines, including measles. One night, a toddler came into the emergency room and we admitted her immediately to the intensive care unit because we could see she had a grave infection. She died the next day. The infection she had, Haemophilus influenzae type B, is now part of the vaccination schedule. That vaccine alone is estimated to have saved 2.85 million lives from 1989 to 2024. There is little that prevents infant mortality like vaccines. Even though the insurance industry has followed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations for vaccines, paying for the ones recommended by the CDC Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, I recommend and hope they will pivot to following the recommendations of professional medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics. Our children and others receiving vaccines deserve this protection. Linda Randolph, Los Angeles .. To the editor: Operation Warp Speed was a great success that enabled testing and widespread distribution of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of the first pandemic year, 2020. According to one study, in just the first seven months of 2021, the vaccines saved approximately 279,000 U.S. lives. Now, as Abcarian discusses, we have a Health secretary who tells Americans to eat healthy while he feasts on junk science that erroneously claims that COVID vaccines, along with other vaccines, are harmful. We should all be concerned about our nation's transition from Operation Warp Speed to what I call 'Operation Warped Mind' — a foolish opposition to vaccines — and the risks that this poses to our health. And we should all question why the president nominated an unqualified person to be the Health secretary and why all Republican senators except Mitch McConnell voted to confirm him. It's notable that McConnell, a survivor of childhood polio, explained his position by saying, 'I will not condone the relitigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.' David Michels, Encino
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Letters to the Editor: Republican lawmakers could learn a thing or two from Costco and Ben & Jerry's
To the editor: Columnist Robin Abcarian's description of how Harvard, Costco, Ben & Jerry's and other businesses are refusing to kowtow to President Trump's efforts to bully and intimidate them should inspire resistance to the current administration's crusade to dismantle our democratic institutions ('Bravo to all those engaged in the struggle against Trump's anti-democratic bullying,' May 25). If only spineless Republican lawmakers could summon similar fortitude to remain true to their historic philosophical roots. Bill Crosby, Laguna Woods .. To the editor: I love to give consumables as gifts, and after reading this article I can now add Penzeys Spices as gifts for my home chef friends. Ginette Watson, San Clemente This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
28-05-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Letters to the Editor: Republican lawmakers could learn a thing or two from Costco and Ben & Jerry's
To the editor: Columnist Robin Abcarian's description of how Harvard, Costco, Ben & Jerry's and other businesses are refusing to kowtow to President Trump's efforts to bully and intimidate them should inspire resistance to the current administration's crusade to dismantle our democratic institutions ('Bravo to all those engaged in the struggle against Trump's anti-democratic bullying,' May 25). If only spineless Republican lawmakers could summon similar fortitude to remain true to their historic philosophical roots. Bill Crosby, Laguna Woods .. To the editor: I love to give consumables as gifts, and after reading this article I can now add Penzeys Spices as gifts for my home chef friends. Ginette Watson, San Clemente
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Letters to the Editor: White House's proposed incentives to get women to have more babies are half-baked
To the editor: I was fascinated by columnist Robin Abcarian's recent story about the White House entertaining ideas on how to get American women to have more babies ('The government's pronatalism warps family values,' April 27). Among these ideas is offering a $5,000 bonus after a baby is born. I'm looking forward to hearing more about the criteria that will determine who is eligible for this bonus. Must one be married? Young? Fit? White? Employed? Wealthy? Christian? Able-bodied? What if someone has had a brush with the law? Or is battling a serious disease? I'm sure, given this administration's track record, this idea is as well thought out as all the others we've seen over the past 100 days. Valerie Burchfield Rhodes, Laguna Niguel .. To the editor: Do I have this straight? Our president wants to give $5,000 to any woman in the U.S. who has a baby and awards to mothers of six children or more. Our government also wants to defund Head Start, a program that provides daycare for families with limited means. So the family should accept the $5,000 and mom won't work? I don't know how far $5,000 goes these days, but I suspect the financial calculations don't actually work out that well. Erica Hahn, Monrovia This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
