in which p is a kid-hating bitch!
You all know what I love? An exhortion by a non-feminist for feminists to be nicer young ladies,* and just remember how much we love babies.
It’s really telling to me that this person specifically chose a feminist blog on which to lecture people about the appropriate feelings to have towards children. Because remember, this person has absolutely no idea about the political leanings of the people who have had the temerity to look askance at her toddler. (Who does sound really fucking amazing! I am not debating the awesomeness of her kid or anyone else’s!) What she does know is that there are WOMEN being NON-MATERNAL on the internet, and these ladies need to be lectured and shamed into their rightful place, which is of course cheerfully with child or dutifully self-flagellating for failure to duly reproduce.
And you can do that ANYWHERE on the internet! Hating on feminists, while a bullshit answer to this particular social issue, is also welcome everywhere on the internet except feminist blogs. Outside of a desire to feel superior to the selfish low-life commentariat, I don’t really know why someone would choose to post that particular reactionary idea to Feministe. I don’t question her credentials to be there at all, I have a lot of respect for the regular bloggers who made that decision, I just really question the choice to put this post in this forum and some of the ideas behind it.
Look, if someone is actually mean to your kid, sure, knock yourself out, dislike them; say something. But online hostility towards children - children entirely too young to read a blog - is not actually hurting the children, so I’m inclined to conclude that the posturing is parental defensiveness of the parents’ feelings. Just like a lot of childfree defensiveness (as opposed to simple honesty about disliking children) is in reaction to those apocryphal parents we’ve all come up against who bring their kids to happy hour and then decide it’s their job to morally police the language and conversation of everyone around them.+
And I get that parents, especially mothers, get shit on a lot and that’s wrong. Which is why I am so glad FEMINISTS ARE ON THE FUCKING CASE. Day care? Parental leave? Breastfeeding accommodations? Thank a feminist(womanst/pro-feminist/etc)! Or support a feminist org, since they’re basically the only folks who give a shit about your problem.
I mean, what, were things awesome for kids pre-feminism, and we ruined everything? Because I’d feel just terrible about that. Between all the factory-working and the being married off as to older and potentially abusive men as teenagers and the pathetic pre-modern-era education and the totally legal physical and sexual abuse and the being the tenth kid to a mom who didn’t even want one? No. You’re right. I bet people were more polite in restaurants, which is the more important thing.
As long as women are expected to reproduce and give up our lives to be mommies whether we want to or not - and had damned well better like it, or tranq ourselves up on enough Valium to be able to pretend we do - the expression of anything less than cooing adulation of children is an overtly political act. Answering that particular political expression with a self-satisfied tone argument is a deliberate reinforcement of traditional gender roles. And when someone’s follow-up to “im (sic) not a feminist” is to lecture women on how to be nice and ladylike, I really feel justified in some suspicion about their motives.
I’m glad a lot of people in comments brought up the ableism of the post - if you have PTSD, a sudden scream isn’t so much an occasion to send a smile and some “warm energy,” so much as it is a potential trigger. And if you’re deaf/Deaf/hard of hearing, or have a difficult time concentrating on a conversation, an undue level of noise isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s something that socially isolates you from your companions. If you’re like me, it’s a reminder that you’ll probably never be a mom, no matter how much you want to, because your mental illness might never lift. Expecting disabled folks/PWD to suck it up even more than we already are just to be out, and to do so with a smile on our face, is privileged bullshit. That’s not to say kids and moms should stay home. Just that if the general atmosphere of a room is quiet and well-controlled, at least some of the people there have chosen it for a reason; if it’s family-friendly, parents are less likely to face judgment and kids are far more likely to have a good time.
There’s a lot of straw-arguments going on in comments, as well. LaLubu’s discussion of a child-hostile hospital is of course an important story, but it’s simply not the same issue as the one the post was talking about. Children are to be expected in a hospital, as both patients and family members; hospitals may be privately owned but they should be open to all members of the public; such a burden falls disproportionately on single and working-class mothers and it’s unacceptable. But recreational areas, where children won’t be welcome or particularly happy, such as bars, are not the same.
I’m so annoyed at people who buy into the divide-and-conquer strategy about kids. The issue, very clearly, isn’t about “cultural hostility towards children.” It’s about the cultural policing of reproductive decisions, the under-valuing of child care labor, and the class disparities of child care opportunities. Considering that these are among the core social concerns of even the most mainstream - and thus totally non-intersectional and uncool, we hate those old hags - feminist organizations, and that the denial of progress in these areas is an explicit goal of anti-feminists, it’s tough to find good-faith justifications for this type of feminist-shaming.
In short: “ladies, I exhort you to do your duty, be nice and coo over babies” is not actually revolutionary social commentary. Quite the opposite.
*When someone says they’re not a feminist and follows it up by saying they’re a womanist or a pro-feminist or some other explicitly woman-positive identity, I respect that. When someone says, by way of introducing themselves to a largely unknown audience, that they’re not a feminist and then commence to the childfree-shaming, I really don’t think they’re arguing in good faith.
+Seriously, parents of the world? Dirty language and happy hour go together like Jack and Coke. Learn to deal, or teach your kids those words early enough that they won’t be shocked when you bring them to J&R’s on a Thursday. And we, the drunken twenty-somethings of the world, will endeavor not to be douchey when your kid behaves as badly as we do.