Men are 100% involed in impregnating women.
Thanks to Kamala Harris and Amanda Zurawski men have been invited to the debate to promote family freedom and abortion rights.
Welcome back, subscribers to the Substack of Empathy Surplus Network USA. The embodied human brain is cognitively biased through experience and language toward conservatism in some areas of our lives and progressivism toward others. This cognitive bias is called biconceptualism. Empathy Surplus is a nonpartisan, membership, science-based communication education 501c3 collective to strengthen our progressive biases toward empathy and mutual responsibility to expand our freedoms. We want to know what’s most important to our members. We use interactive Zoom forums to apply and share what we learn from the books of cognitive scientist, linguist, and progressive activist George Lakoff to our individual goals.
Our mission is to make empathy central to constant public discourse in our mutual centers of influence. Join us at https://proempathy.us/join.
This post is in preparation for the 09/30/2024 Empathy Surplus Network USA Zoom Forum. We will recess afterward and convene again after the election. Now’s the time to join us and prepare for our 2025 Zoom forums. We will discuss The Little Blue Book and use our Pro-Empathy Freedom Framing Toolkit.
Progressive men have finally been invited to the abortion rights conversation for family freedom.
Men are 100 percent involved in impregnating women. Therefore, why has it taken so long in my lifetime for progressive women to seek the help of progressive men in protecting their reproductive freedom? As a member of the Caring Y Chromosome Club, I am probably not alone in being told to STFU by wives, sisters, mothers, girlfriends, and female acquaintances when attempting to advocate for their reproductive freedom. That’s a “women’s issue, so butt out,” they have snapped in the past. But that’s changing, thanks to Kamala Harris.
Margaret Attwood 1982
Women’s appropriate righteous indignation is understandable when the white male cruelty wing of too many religions has abused women for centuries. Margaret Attwood lectured in 1982 at the University of Waterloo on The Male Character. I’m paraphrasing her at that lecture, saying men are afraid of being laughed at by women, and women are afraid of being murdered by men.
Media reports
Therefore, I am overjoyed to see Kamala Harris invite us men into the moral debate about better protecting and empowering women. CNN, NPR, Time Magazine, and Politico are all reporting on the invitation to caring wing men to join the abortion rights bandwagon and protect the women they love from cruelty wing men and women.
Abortion rights is a man’s issue too!
Texas resident Josh Zurawski’s wife Amanda almost died when doctors sent them home without providing the necessary abortion care she needed because she wasn’t “sick enough.” The couple appeared at the Democratic National Convention. Mr. Zurawask told Politico, “We’re trying to create a space for men to jump into this fight.”
Two decades of reframing finally paid off.
Our mentor, cognitive scientist, linguist, and progressive activist, George Lakoff, has encouraged men to enter this debate for two decades. His work has always focused on contrasting the two primary nations as family metaphors at odds with each other—the gendered, conservative, strict father family metaphor versus the non-gendered, progressive nurturing family metaphor. “Framing pregnancies and abortions as women’s issues,” writes Lakoff,1 “hide the fact (that boys and men have a high stake in keeping the girls and women they love healthy and alive).”
Conservatism is the root of much of the cruelty in the world.
All of the misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, and climate denial of conservatism - the list is long - is all due to conservatism’s moral hierarchy that remains unconscious in too many progressive brains. David Fenton, the owner of progressivism’s first public relations firm, recently wrote, “Progressives often suffer from what Dr. George Lakoff calls the Enlightenment Fallacy. This Enlightenment reason-based view is common among those who study the humanities, sciences, and law. This is the belief that great ideas are intrinsically convincing because of their obvious brilliance – and because ideas based on science and reason appeal to the rational mind. There is no need to “sell” these ideas,” say progressives, according to Lakoff and Fenton, “because selling is viewed as dirty, manipulative, and sullying to the ideas themselves.”
Remember, men…..
We’ve been invited. So, if you’re a man who cares for humanity, especially the women in your life, it’s time to get in the debate on behalf of family freedom and abortion rights. Women shouldn’t be alone in this fight for their lives. We all have a duty to care for each other’s freedom. We must commit to exercising that duty. That takes empathy. It’s time to build an empathy surplus in your centers of influence.
Lakoff and Wehling, The Little Blue Book, Ch 20, Family Freedom, p. 124, Simon and Shuster, NY 2012.