put that baby spell on me
So, a friend is going through the "OMG do I really want to have kids?" thing, and it's making me think about the issues in a state of profound political annoyance. Because the truth is, there is enormous cultural pressure from a large number of sources which is exerted on women to make them think that child-bearing is not only desirable, but inevitable. It's just what women do, because (1) hey wow, human race, continuation, yadda yadda, and (2) besides, it's absolutely the ONLY experience which will ever complete you as a female person, and further besides, (3) it's selfish not to. I wholly and utterly support any friend of mine who feels the need to have children, it's a great thing and I rather enjoy the resulting small thundering herds. I am equally and entirely outraged that any friend of mine, of my generation, born and raised under Western culture, should feel that she has no actual choice in procreating. I also absolutely reject all of the above reasons for doing it.
So, my own personal and philosophical proclivities deal quite neatly with (1). The human race needs fewer babies, not more, we live on a horribly overpopulated planet which is on the brink of ecological disaster, and apart from the need to cut the population, I'm not entirely convinced there's going to be a world worth living in for any offspring of mine. And I really don't buy the traditional response to same, which is "oh, but you're an intelligent educated woman, the world needs more of that kind of person, it's your duty to procreate" - it's a horribly self-congratulatory argument, don't you think? The world at large, particularly the madly-procreating bits of it, needs more education, not more self-righteous Westerners. I do my bit for that every year when I make another cohort of students read Sheri Tepper.
On (2) I'm particularly aware of the whole thing because my dad's just died, and it was one of his hobby-horses. He was an animal scientist and horribly prone to biological essentialism: as far as he was concerned, my body and hormones and what have you would never allow me to be happy without bearing children, and I don't think I convinced him otherwise before he died. We used to get into quite enthusiastic feminist debates about it, in which I'd be all outraged that he was mentally classifying me with his bloody cattle. Because, really, Papa, you don't have a uterus, you know? and here I am telling you that I'm actually perfectly happy without all the childbearing schtick, and am not feeling a lack, and why the hell should your sense of my identity be more correct than mine? Also, men are equally genetically programmed to hunt and fight and all the rest, and they quite happily sublimate it into capitalism, sports and political arguments, so why shouldn't the parallel work for women? Such maternal urges as I have (and I do have them) are apparently contented with a weird combination of teaching, student advising, cats, cooking huge meals for friends, and abstractedly patting on the head any offspring-of-friends who happen to rocket through my ambit.
See, I'm perfectly prepared to accept that motherhood is an amazing experience, a life-changing one, a particular aspect of being human that you can't access any other way. I know a large number of very happy, fulfilled mothers (starting with my own), and I love watching them celebrate that experience. There's a part of me that's a bit wistfully sad that I'll never have that, but I also don't believe it's the only way to be happy, or fulfilled, or to have a meaningful life. So in answer to (3) I have to ask: how many famous women activists, writers, scientists would not have achieved what they did if they were also raising a family? Is their choice somehow selfish or incomplete? Should we by this logic be faintly despising Jane Austen?
But, you know, it hit me yesterday: really the bitch about this whole cultural expectation of parenthood is its gender-exclusivity. "Of course you'll have kids" is ultimately a thing that the male half of creation does to the female, or conditions the female to do to other females: it's another way of controlling and defining female sexuality. There's a far lesser tendency to look pityingly at men who've chosen not to become fathers. And that's a purely Victorian survival, a result of the nineteenth century's ridiculous need to idealise Womanhood as either Virginal or Maternal: a complete refusal, in other words, to think of women in any terms other than those defined by their sexuality. Somewhere deep in the antediluvian slime of that belief system, women who have sex but not children are not Mothers, but Whores. It sucks. We should be more enlightened than that.
But the sad truth is that we're not, that those attitudes are embedded firmly in our technically post-feminist culture; a woman choosing to have kids, or not, is bombarded on all sides, from family, friends, the media, literature, with a horrible and heavy weight of expectation which says she ought to. This means that if she's like me and doesn't have the maternal urge to any imperative extent, she's faced with the choice of having children and vaguely resenting it, or not having children and being vaguely resented. This is why, I've realised, I have a minor and sneaking sympathy with even the particularly ugly and frothing extremism of some of the online childfree movements: they're extreme because they have to be, because you need some pretty serious momentum to break free of all the weight of expectation. If your society is a bit insane in this area, there's a reasonable chance you'll become a nut in sheer self-defense.
A lot of my own personal ability to basically pull a sign at societal expectation and defiantly be happy in the teeth of it is purely circumstantial: I'm not in a relationship, I don't have a broody would-be-father looking expectantly at me, and my biological clock is apparently digital. Even if all of the above weren't true, my slightly despairing sense of our horribly crowded world would probably still weigh in quite significantly. I'm lucky to be reasonably clear-cut. I truly and deeply sympathise with anyone who isn't, and is trying to negotiate a space for themselves while being tugged in all directions.
So, my own personal and philosophical proclivities deal quite neatly with (1). The human race needs fewer babies, not more, we live on a horribly overpopulated planet which is on the brink of ecological disaster, and apart from the need to cut the population, I'm not entirely convinced there's going to be a world worth living in for any offspring of mine. And I really don't buy the traditional response to same, which is "oh, but you're an intelligent educated woman, the world needs more of that kind of person, it's your duty to procreate" - it's a horribly self-congratulatory argument, don't you think? The world at large, particularly the madly-procreating bits of it, needs more education, not more self-righteous Westerners. I do my bit for that every year when I make another cohort of students read Sheri Tepper.
On (2) I'm particularly aware of the whole thing because my dad's just died, and it was one of his hobby-horses. He was an animal scientist and horribly prone to biological essentialism: as far as he was concerned, my body and hormones and what have you would never allow me to be happy without bearing children, and I don't think I convinced him otherwise before he died. We used to get into quite enthusiastic feminist debates about it, in which I'd be all outraged that he was mentally classifying me with his bloody cattle. Because, really, Papa, you don't have a uterus, you know? and here I am telling you that I'm actually perfectly happy without all the childbearing schtick, and am not feeling a lack, and why the hell should your sense of my identity be more correct than mine? Also, men are equally genetically programmed to hunt and fight and all the rest, and they quite happily sublimate it into capitalism, sports and political arguments, so why shouldn't the parallel work for women? Such maternal urges as I have (and I do have them) are apparently contented with a weird combination of teaching, student advising, cats, cooking huge meals for friends, and abstractedly patting on the head any offspring-of-friends who happen to rocket through my ambit.
See, I'm perfectly prepared to accept that motherhood is an amazing experience, a life-changing one, a particular aspect of being human that you can't access any other way. I know a large number of very happy, fulfilled mothers (starting with my own), and I love watching them celebrate that experience. There's a part of me that's a bit wistfully sad that I'll never have that, but I also don't believe it's the only way to be happy, or fulfilled, or to have a meaningful life. So in answer to (3) I have to ask: how many famous women activists, writers, scientists would not have achieved what they did if they were also raising a family? Is their choice somehow selfish or incomplete? Should we by this logic be faintly despising Jane Austen?
But, you know, it hit me yesterday: really the bitch about this whole cultural expectation of parenthood is its gender-exclusivity. "Of course you'll have kids" is ultimately a thing that the male half of creation does to the female, or conditions the female to do to other females: it's another way of controlling and defining female sexuality. There's a far lesser tendency to look pityingly at men who've chosen not to become fathers. And that's a purely Victorian survival, a result of the nineteenth century's ridiculous need to idealise Womanhood as either Virginal or Maternal: a complete refusal, in other words, to think of women in any terms other than those defined by their sexuality. Somewhere deep in the antediluvian slime of that belief system, women who have sex but not children are not Mothers, but Whores. It sucks. We should be more enlightened than that.
But the sad truth is that we're not, that those attitudes are embedded firmly in our technically post-feminist culture; a woman choosing to have kids, or not, is bombarded on all sides, from family, friends, the media, literature, with a horrible and heavy weight of expectation which says she ought to. This means that if she's like me and doesn't have the maternal urge to any imperative extent, she's faced with the choice of having children and vaguely resenting it, or not having children and being vaguely resented. This is why, I've realised, I have a minor and sneaking sympathy with even the particularly ugly and frothing extremism of some of the online childfree movements: they're extreme because they have to be, because you need some pretty serious momentum to break free of all the weight of expectation. If your society is a bit insane in this area, there's a reasonable chance you'll become a nut in sheer self-defense.
A lot of my own personal ability to basically pull a sign at societal expectation and defiantly be happy in the teeth of it is purely circumstantial: I'm not in a relationship, I don't have a broody would-be-father looking expectantly at me, and my biological clock is apparently digital. Even if all of the above weren't true, my slightly despairing sense of our horribly crowded world would probably still weigh in quite significantly. I'm lucky to be reasonably clear-cut. I truly and deeply sympathise with anyone who isn't, and is trying to negotiate a space for themselves while being tugged in all directions.