The title is not something I just made up for attention. It is straight from the child abusing mouth of Zach Rosenberg, to and about his four year old son, now gracing the pages of the post-Matlack version of the Good Men Project. The unfortunate youngster had informed his father that he had tried to kiss a girl at school, and that the girl didn’t like it.
Rosenberg told him that the attempted kiss was rape.
As most of you who follow my writing know, I am a pacifist. I can think of very, very few situations in life, almost none, where I think violence is an answer.
Zach Rosenberg almost tested that today.
What kind of father tells his four year old son that trying to kiss a girl is rape? Take that back, what kind of human being does it? I have literally hundreds of adjectives that come to mind, none of which I will bother sharing here. Besides, I hope that I cannot compete with what you are now thinking yourself.
The real question here is not what kind of human being Zach Rosenberg is. We don’t even need to ask because he tells us himself in the article, when he discloses that he is more comfortable talking to his son about rape than he is sex.
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There was a twenty minute pause before I starting typing this part of my commentary. That is a rarity for me. I typically form what I want to say in my head it flows out pretty evenly. I have spent more time mentally stuttering on this one than writing. I am simply at a loss on what to say.
I will start with the obvious. Zach Rosenberg is a child abuser. Let me say that again in a headline tag so it will Google all the better.
Zach Rosenberg is a child abuser.
And the abuse he is delivering is sexual, because the sexual shaming of children is sexual abuse. He is so ideologically driven that he is uncomfortable talking with his son about healthy sexuality, but has no problem calling him a rapist as he sits at the dinner table. He has taken the innocence of childhood and criminalized it in the mind of his own child. He has taken his son’s normal sense of curiosity and desire to express affection and twisted it into a sex crime.
His son, courtesy of a really fucked-up father, has now internalized the word rape into his personal identity.
That is the thing about childhood, especially at that age. Children see their parents in the light of gods. They are the providers and protectors. They are the teachers and the all-important mirrors of their children’s identity. This is why what parents say to children about who and what they are is so goddam important. They internalize it. They become it.
To a four year old, parents are often infallible. If Dad says you raped someone, you did. Even if you don’t know what the word really means.
In Zach Rosenberg’s narcissistic need to create a Mini-Me of gender ideology, or perhaps just a cheap and base desire to appeal to female readers whose approval he craves, he has sacrificed his four year old boy. Rosenberg has taken what at worst is a common opportunity to teach a boundaries lesson to a child, and turned it into something vile.
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OK, I have just spent a few more moments stuttering again, struggling for what else to say. I find that I have nothing. I never want to think about this motherfucking child abusing asshole again for as long as I live.
I will instead close with a note to Lisa Hickey. You know this shit is wrong. Shame on you.
Oh, and one more thing. Some day Zach Rosenberg’s son will get old enough to read this. Hopefully by then he will have figured out that it was his father, not him, that is so fucked up.
Note: This article is also available in Spanish.
