Life hits us all hard, but especially young women
Last weekend I caught up with a female friend, Anna*, from the US, whom I hadn’t seen in many years. We had a nice, long chat. I asked her how her daughter Nicola is. “She’s well,” she told me. “She’s now living with her girlfriend in another part of town.”
This was a surprise. I last saw Nicola ten years ago when she was twelve years old. She was a sweet, shy, pretty girl who looked much like her mother did at that age. It is difficult for me to envisage that she is now a woman, let alone a lesbian.
I did a little probing. Anna told me that Nicola had previously dated a boy for around three years, but it was rocky and ended acrimoniously. Before that she had been terribly affected by lockdowns (or ‘crimes against humanity’ as I prefer to call them); she spiralled into depression and became increasingly anxious.
She was unsure of the course her life should take. She applied for and then lost interest in university courses; she flirted with several different careers, jettisoning many in their early stages.
Then she met a woman she took a shine to. They moved in together. Nicola left her parents’ house and began her new life.
“Has she changed her physical appearance?” I asked. “Yes,” Anna replied. “She’s cut her hair short. She’s started going to the gym to bulk up. She’s joined the town’s LGBT community.”
And one other thing: “She’s changed her name. She now wants to be called ‘Morgan’.”
It was a lot for me to take in. I didn’t say much in rebuttal at the time but now I’ve had time to reflect. First, the name change. This strikes me as, at the very least, ungrateful. It’s the child distancing themselves from the parent. Granted, Zowie Bowie, now calling himself Duncan Jones, had a good case for changing his name, but this seems to me less pleasing – and likely driven by ideology. It’s somewhat authoritarian; the child would be full of righteous anger if their new name wasn’t used.
As for changing her appearance: it saddens me. Nicola was all set to be a beautiful, feminine woman desired by the opposite sex. Now she is deliberately suppressing and subverting her nature.
She has been funnelled into the ‘LGBT community’ – not actually a proper community but nevertheless a collection of friends and acquaintances that will largely consist of lesbians. I have nothing against lesbians. But it will mean that most of Nicola’s everyday activities will be enacted through a narrow filter; it will be difficult for her to escape the lifestyle.
Here’s what part of me wanted to yell when Anna told me all this: by the age of 40, is there not the chance that Nicola will be a bitter, childless lesbian trapped forever by the lifestyle choices she made when she was immature and insecure? She could be deeply unhappy about where she ends up. Anna believes her daughter is probably bisexual (remember the three-year boyfriend). At the risk of sounding like an Alan Partridge/Woodrow Wyatt hybrid: if someone is bisexual then surely they should go with the heterosexual option?
There are sensible reasons for that. It is better for the individual, for the community, for wider society. The nuclear family is the bedrock of Western civilisation. Having children is the most enriching thing that can happen to a woman in her life. Of course I have to do my disclaimers – some women genuinely do not want children; many homosexuals are genuinely happy; many ‘nuclear’ families can be chaotic and dismal – but masses of data points to the rich value of marrying a person of the opposite sex and having children with them, and bringing them up together.
I know that Nicola will have been subject to many years of messaging that ‘alternative’ sexual lifestyles are fine, even preferable. Her school will have pushed this incessantly. Neo-Marxists have long wanted to destroy the West, and now they are doing so, in part through sexual identity propaganda. Yes, there are myriad reasons for the global collapse in fertility rates, but it’s likely that one of them is that youth who would not previously have entertained same-sex partnerships now do so.
Nicola’s journey is not an unusual one nowadays. A female work colleague told me about her two daughters: one is 24 years old and now living with her Swedish girlfriend in the family house; the younger one is 18 and tried to kill herself last month because she is so depressed and anxious. Her mother saved her life with the use of a defibrillator. She says both her daughters have ADHD and are on the autistic spectrum.
In my new job I recently visited a house, which included a teenage girl, and I noticed she had self-harm marks on her body.
When I speak to friends my age, I’m surprised when they tell me that their daughter isn’t autistic and/or ‘identifying’ as a lesbian! Mention of troubled sons pops up less often, but isn’t unknown. Another colleague told me how her husband’s son from a previous marriage rarely leaves the house but did so on his recent 18th birthday when his father took him to get the nose ring he wanted.
Why is Generation Alpha so messed up? Perhaps because our political and media Establishment tell them the climate will kill them. That a coronavirus imperilled them. That boys can be girls and girls can be boys. That they should feel guilty for feeling uncomfortable having more people who aren’t the same race as them in their communities. The internet and smartphones. Lots of reasons.
Also that they should completely give in to darker desires, and they should channel their same-sex friendships in a carnal way, and they should switch to a life path that may not be in their long-term interest. Nicola is just one girl, but she is representative of many under enormous pressure in the early 21st century.
*All names have been changed, and some details altered, but everything important here is true.
Russell David is the author of the Mad World Substack.
If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee or sharing this piece with your friends – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!
Or perhaps Nicola is just weak and/or mentally ill and if it wasn’t ‘this’ (butch lesbianism) she got involved in it would be ‘that’ (insert fad name here). I say this quite callously as I don’t know any of the people involved, but simply as an observer of the seemingly growing need and incidence of no one wanting to be simply normal or at least at ease with themselves and their circumstances. Life is not a blame game, but it is rapidly becoming one.