I think feminism has told itself so many self-empowerment stories that it's gotten an idea about itself that isn't exactly true.
At the core of the feminist ideology is the idea that power comes from being nothing short of selfish. My body, my mental health, my time, my luxury, my convenience, my stress, my empowerment.
If you sit back and listen to a feminist, you start to see that all the concern a feminist has is centered around the self. One of the biggest issues a feminist will fight tooth and nail for is the most selfish act imaginable, abortion, which is taking the life of an innocent child in order to maintain an easier lifestyle and better access to first world luxuries.
No one represents this kind of mentality better than Chelsea Handler. The only time she seems to pop up lately is when she's trying to maintain her relevance by inciting controversy about her lifestyle decisions, claiming men are upset and threatened by her because of her proud and happy lifestyle of selfish behavior.
According to the Daily Wire, she was on Kelly Ripa's podcast, “Let’s Talk Off Camera.” In it, she laid out the same tired ideas she's been selling for some time. She says her life is great and men are somehow threatened by this:
“I just have this sense of freedom in my life that I don’t feel enough women celebrate,” Handler told Ripa.
She continued, “So when I started celebrating it and getting the feedback from so many women who feel the same way, and then the feedback from all these idiot men saying I’m not really happy and shame on me because I’m spreading terrible messaging to women, that just obviously gave me even more of a motivation to do it.”
Ripa asked the comedian why she thought critics brought up objections to her lifestyle, prompting Chandler to reply, “I’m a threat.”
“I’m a threat to a lot of straight men who don’t have enough self-confidence,” she added. “You shouldn’t find it threatening, you should find it empowering that I’m spreading this message to other women; if you want to have a baby, for sure get one, but if you don’t want to have a baby that’s valid, too.”
As an aside, we're seeing another feminist delusion here. For one, men absolutely did speak out, but the loudest voices who contradicted Handler were actually women. Feminism often forces all blame to go to men for any inconvenience or pushback, ironically ignoring the voices of women, but I digress.
I'm going to respond to Handler's claim that she and her lifestyle threatens me as a straight man.
She's right. I do see her lifestyle as threatening. Not to me personally, but I do see it as threatening to men in general... and women, and society.
I'm not necessarily referring to Handler's decision to be childless here. Many people go their entire lives without children for various reasons. Sometimes they can't have them, or it just was never in the cards for them. Some of them dedicated their time to other things they found to be important.
What I do find threatening is Handler's celebration of selfishness, which this is ultimately about.
Perhaps some of you might remember back in 2023 when Handler created a video with the intention of mocking people who found her promotion to women of going childless and living for the self off-putting. I described the video at the time, which you can read below if you don't want to watch her video:
Chelsea Handler, who I’m told is a comedian, decided to put out a short skit about her childless life of wonder and ease. The 47-year-old leftist paired up with The Daily Show to show off how she wakes up lazily in the morning, gets high and masturbates (she even flashes her vibrator for good measure), then sleeps for several more hours. This is before she puts on good-looking and expensive clothes before her video dives into silliness such as flying to Paris for a croissant, teleporting back home, then having sex with random men.
Just another day. pic.twitter.com/Bf4cdBqunG
— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) February 10, 2023
Handler loves to celebrate the fact that everything she does is self-centered, and she dresses this as "empowerment." She revels in the fact that everything she does is done because it scratches her own itches. She considers anything that claims ownership of her time as a bad thing. Everything is done in service to and for her. Her only responsibility is to her own pleasure.
Take a step back and imagine if everyone thought like that. We wouldn't have a society. We wouldn't have a civilization. Even if you were to just take a large fraction of the population and gave them that level of selfishness, very real problems would pop up in society.
And they have. This level of selfish behavior is a threat, not just to men, but to everyone. Handler doesn't just not care about this, she makes it worse by making her selfishness a virtue.
Handler is able to sell this because her lifestyle is very easy. In fact, with her level of wealth, I can assume it's very addictive, but with it comes a level of ignorance.
I was childless up to the age of 39. Life was very easy. My wife and I had dual incomes, and going and doing anything was very easy to do. There was a thrill to that level of self-centered life. After I had my son, things did become more difficult. I can count on one hand the amount of times I've been able to wake up when I wanted to in the last year. I go to bed early so I can have energy throughout the day with him. He brings home bugs from day care a lot, so the entire family is sick more often. Our costs have gone way up. Learning how to deal with and teach a tiny person who runs on pure emotion and boundless energy is taxing beyond belief.
It's hard, but there's a far deeper reward than just watching your little creation grow. There's a real sense of purpose here, like you're a part of something far bigger than yourself. The things that used to be my favorite moments of the day now seem mundane compared to laying on the couch just before bed and watching my son's favorite show with him, cuddled up together. Going to the store to buy something just because I felt like it is boring, compared to taking him to the store and simply naming the things he sees and hearing him try to repeat what I said.
There is an extravagant beauty in this that Handler, and people who think like her, will never experience because they only saw the surface-level difficulty and decided for an easier path, but anything worth doing is often difficult. In order to get to the deeper parts of life, you have to work for it.
And that's Handler's ultimate threat. She's shallow. She sells shallowness as virtue. She is selling the lie that her lifestyle is all the fulfillment you need, like seeing the cover of a really good book and never cracking it open and plunging into it.
So yes, Handler is right. She is threatening, she doesn't get how threatening she actually is.
