Lady, you're a bitch
I wasn't especially shocked to discover that "Research conducted over six years shows [...] it is these single-track careerists who are increasingly likely to be vilified, refused jobs and denied promotion because many employers believe them to lack what the study calls 'an essential humanity'." Every person I've ever spoken to on the subject has ended a frustrating conversation by concluding that there's just something wrong with me for not wanting children[1]. Compared to the crushingly overwhelming cultural pressure to view myself in terms of my reproductive ability, and to consider motherhood an inevitable consummation of my personhood, the occasional personal comments are paper bullets.
Nor does the fact that I'm viewed with sidelong distrust at work a big revelation to me ("she will go off on long maternity leave, we just don't know when, but we'll pay her less in advance of that time anyway - she's getting on a bit, can't be much longer, tick tock"). It doesn't even really make me angry anymore - it's not like they'd treat me more fairly if I did have kids, anyway, so the basic assumption here is un-testable.
It didn't surprise me either to note that the writer of this bigoted screed (she goes on to offer "three cheers for the employers who [...] don't want to people their workforces with the cold, the calculating, the sad and the mad" - way to go on encouraging discrimination, dude) never mentions this so-called research again or provides any link to it. Nor that she, purely by dint of being a mother herself, considers herself to be not only invested with automatic authority on all topics motherly, but also qualified to comment on the mental health and state of "essential humanity" of other women.
This is, after all, the Daily Mail - anyone who doesn't agree with any of their writers is a ravening psychopath, and the source of all earthly evil, including suicide bombing and climate change (or worse, immigration).
The usual responses duly followed from the feminist blogosphere: the discursive, the sarcastic, the straight-up angry. No surprises there.
In fact, the only big surprise to me in this whole business is how unsurprising it all is. How absolutely normal it is for us to read this hateful bile in one of Britain's best selling papers. How jaded we all are to the fact that millions of people will agree with the writer. How perfectly normal it is for us to consider this rank essentialism, if not accurate, then at least understandable, or harmless. How we all fall into complacent assumptions about gender roles based on what we "see with our own eyes" in "our own children". The completely isolated, brought up in lab conditions, never allowed interaction with the outside world, sheltered from all media and cultural influences little angels who just happen to prefer playing with whatever toys are sold in Toy R Us under the rubric that fits their biological sex. Ah-huh.
So yeah. It's not the fact that this woefully inadequate excuse for a representative of the human race (not to mention an ostentatiously appalling writer) thinks that I'm a selfish, drunken madwoman with nothing but hollow despair behind my eyes that gets to me here. It's the fact that this is just one small - and, compared to some places I've been on the 'net, mild - example of the depths to which essentialist thinking has percolated into our daily lives. After all, it's a small step from the sort of evo-psych pseudoscience I hate so much - all the "women are from Uranus because teh babbies" shit - to saying "fire any woman the minute she gets pregnant, because their brain goes soft blah blah blah teh babbies" or "women secretly want to be raped because strong alpha male blah blah blah teh babbies".
And that's why all that shit is wrong, dammit. That's why every time I hear the words "hard wired" I want to break something. That's why anyone who mentions the words "hunter gatherers" or "savannah" or "ancestors" in a conversation about culture immediately loses the argument (it's my own personal Godwin's Law).
Because this junk science is used to justify the status quo rather than challenge it, which is not how science should work. And because in some weird way, it's less repugnant when some stupid ass bitch dickhead in the Daily Fail spouts naked hate speech against people who make a different fucking lifestyle choice to her, than when some so-called "scientists" get government money to validate the same primeval prejudice with the authoritative stamp of "Science(tm)".
Fuck, I wasn't even angry when I started writing this. Now I need like a fucking cold shower or something. Gah.
++++++++++
[1] I know my friends - especially the mothers - are sitting there right now thinking "no I haven't!". I can practically see your faces. Trust me - you have. Like I've probably judged all of your mothering skills at some point without meaning to or even being aware that I'm doing it. Let's move on.