Barbara Kay: Misandrist mother sure to damage her vulnerable sons

Article here. Excerpt:

'Gru succeeds in transcending his mother’s terrible parenting, because any other outcome in a kids’ film is unthinkable. In real life, such a scenario can end quite otherwise. Mothers who hack away at their children’s self-esteem are by no means rare, but there aren’t many like freelance Seattle writer Jody Allard, who actually boasts in respectable publications about her methods for producing Despicable Me’s.

Allard, a thrice-divorced single mother of seven children, and a rape survivor, has written several such incendiary articles. One, for the Washington Post in September, 2016, was a shaming indictment of her two “strong and compassionate” sons, then 16 and 18, for their failure to take up her zealous brand of activism against rape culture. The problem, as Allard framed it, was that even though her sons “are good boys and who know all about consent, (they) do not speak out about consent.” Her sons, that is, “understand” her experience, but decline to take up political activism against the larger problem she claims her experience represents. It is not enough for Allard that her sons are personally “good.” For Allard, goodness must be “an action.” In her eyes, her sons’ “passivity perpetuates the same broken system.”'