Monday, May 9, 2016

Liberated from Motherhood

You remember Susan Patton. Once upon a time she wrote a letter to the Daily Princetonian—student newspaper at the school where one of her sons was attending and where her other son had graduated. In it she suggested that young coeds spend their dating time looking for a husband, not a hookup.

She explained, cogently, that women of college age were in the strongest position and had the best selection of prospective mates. The older a woman gets the more the dating pool dries up. Why wouldn't young women use their time on campus to find the best husbands?

Obviously, the long knives came out. The feminist furies were unleashed. They denounced Patton as a reactionary misogynist. They believed that Patton wanted to undo all of their good work and relegate female Princetonians to wifedom and motherhood. The horror of it all.

For feminists what mattered was career. If you did not hear it clearly enough, the word is CAREER. Everything else must take second place to CAREER. Women must establish themselves in their careers, the policy insists, and postpone marriage and family… to say nothing of motherhood.

If men can do it, women must be able to do it too.

This is why feminists are so concerned about avoiding pregnancy and childbirth. It’s not about reproductive health. They want to create conditions which will allow women to walk away from the consequences of copulation as easily as men can. You see, anatomy and biology make it that women’s bodies gestate human children. A man can walk away and shirk his responsibility. A woman cannot… or, at least, she cannot do so quite as easily.

We can’t have that.

By the logic of feminism, motherhood is a curse. Note how well the feminists have changed the meaning of the word “curse” in this context. It’s a curse because motherhood, in and of itself, is a detriment to women’s career advancement.

We can’t have that.

Somehow or other, it does not cross the feminist mind that many mothers want to spend more time with their children and are willing to sacrifice some measure of career advancement in order to be good mothers.

We can’t have that, either.

In the feminist mind women exercise their freedom to choose when they have abortions. They are not allowed to exercise their freedom to choose by marrying young or by taking time off from work to care for their children.

Now, Patton has written a screed about modern motherhood. With the help of technology, labor saving devices, social services and undocumented immigrant labor today’s modern woman need not feel tied down by motherhood. She will be liberated from the whole process.

I did not say it yesterday when I posted about Sheryl Sandberg’s newly found concern for single mothers, but I suspected that what really happened to Sandberg when her husband died is that she discovered what it was to be a mother.

Be that as it may, Patton’s column was a bit too snarky to write about on Mother’s Day, but, since that day has come and gone, I offer her comments for your consideration.

Patton points out that if a woman has worked long enough and hard enough on her career, she might have allowed her biological clock to wind down. Thus, she might only be able to have babies through the use of donor eggs. Nowadays, we are regaled with stories about women who get pregnant when they are 50.

Alternatively, she might choose to freeze her eggs.

These processes might make a liberated career woman more competitive with other younger women for the men she desires, because they will allow the man to have offspring.

If the prospect of finding a man is too daunting, a modern liberated woman can solve the problem by repairing to her local sperm band, the better to purchase the magical elixir that will turn egg into embryo.

And then there is the problem of gestation. Because, don’t you know it, men do not gestate infants, so if only women do, that can only mean that God is sexist. A modern woman can solve the problem by hiring a gestational carrier, a woman who will, for a fee, carry her child for her. Since she does not want the inconvenience of pregnancy and certainly does not want to give birth, gestational carriers are just the thing.

Patton does not mention how much this is all costing, but trust me, you are already well into five figures.

Since the liberated woman wants to have as little as possible to do with caring for an infant, she will naturally hire a baby nurse. In that way she will avoid the indignity of performing so many tasks that do not enhance her career advancement. She will not have to get up for middle-of-the-night feedings. She will not have to change diapers. After all, men don’t have to do it, why should she?

A woman who does not want to breast feed her baby can hire a wet nurse. In the old days, it used to be de rigueur for many women of a certain class. Happily, for today’s liberated women, the custom coming back.

As for bringing up your children, you will naturally want to delegate the task to a full time nanny. If you have followed Patton’s plan scrupulously, you will not have a husband lurking in the wings ready to pounce on your nubile young nanny. You will not have to feel that your nanny’s care for your children is going to make her more attractive to your husband and make you look like a negligent mother.

As soon as you child is old enough, you will further save yourself from the time and effort required to bring him or her up… by sending him or her off to boarding school. Why not? You don't really want to deal with a teenager, do you? Boarding schools are great places to make contacts with the right kinds of people and to prepare oneself for success in the world.

And then of course, he or she will be well prepared for college… hopefully one that is out of town, a safe distance from home.

Patton concludes:

Your child is now 18 and ready to matriculate at a fine university, far away from home. Undergraduate years are so packed with classes, studying, extracurricular activities, and socializing, you’ll hardly ever even hear from your child, except when the tuition bill is due for payment or they need money for books, or that Spring Break trip. Congratulations on a job well done.

By now, you are well into six figures… if you are lucky.

11 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. Stuart: This is why feminists are so concerned about avoiding pregnancy and childbirth. It’s not about reproductive health. They want to create conditions which will allow women to walk away from the consequences of copulation as easily as men can. You see, anatomy and biology make it that women’s bodies gestate human children. A man can walk away and shirk his responsibility. A woman cannot… or, at least, she cannot do so quite as easily.

    This is nonsense. If women only had sex for as many times as they wanted to have children, we'd be back to the good old days of 10 children families.

    And men can't walk away from responsibility, at least not in the civilized world. If a mother of two doesn't want to use birth control, and tells her husband she doesn't want to have sex any more to avoid pregnancy, that's still grounds for divorce.

    And if the man gets a divorce and remarries a sensible modern woman who believes in family planning, he'll be responsible for child support (and possibly alimony) for his mistake in marrying a foolish woman.

    So much for walking away.

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  3. Ares Olympus @May 9, 2016 at 7:31 AM:

    "This is nonsense."

    What is nonsense? My sense is that Stuart is speaking to the emotional and mental state of women, and that feminists try to divorce this reality, advocating casual copulation as an opportunity to have fun with no true connection or commitment. Such a plan for having fun is not about reproductive health, it is purely about preventing reproduction so as to have more fun. After all, who doesn't want to have fun? The question is: Does having endless fun lead to a better life? This idea that preventing reproduction is akin to reproductive health is very strange. Is pregnancy unhealthy? What feminists euphemistically call "reproductive health" strikes me as purely a desire -- on the part of feminist advocacy -- for sexual recreation without reproductive consequences. That may seem fun, but most women are not able to carry on serial casual sexual relationships without significant consequences in other realms of their humanity.

    Therefore, the encouragement feminists provide about conquering sexual mores developed over millennia, and liberating women from said social structures, does not exempt one from evolutionary, biological and neurological realities. Liberals love to lecture us about the inheritance of our evolutionary past and the randomness of our evolutionary future, but they seem to exempt women from the past while encouraging random copulation outside of true connection and commitment. It's so odd that it must be either (a) monstrously intentional, or (b) a willful suspension of disbelief so as to live the fantasy of how one wishes life were, rather than how it is, and ignore the consequences.

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  4. Ares Olympus @May 9, 2016 at 7:31 AM:

    "And men can't walk away from responsibility, at least not in the civilized world."

    This is not true. The most "civilized" Western world is degenerate in this regard. Nowhere on the globe is it easier for men to walk away from their most important responsibility in having children: parenting. Child support is not parenting. It funds a subsistence lifestyle for the vast majority of women. There's no true connection, which is what children desperately need. And it definitionally halves the possibility of investment and attention a child might get. Look at any prison. About 99% didn't have a father around... whether he made child support payments or not. These children are devastated by their father's choice to walk away. So what you've highlighted is your belief that the child's most necessary need is material. I would expect nothing less.

    Men walking around without something to believe in, stand for, and contribute to is a recipe for social disaster. Combine this with the loss of clear social expectations for the same, and you're screwed. And we're living it... we see it every day on the news, in our families, in our relationships, on our streets.

    What is most disgusting is that the 1% liberals have clear, firm expectations of their own children, but feel everyone else should be able to do whatever they want socially. That's not love or hatred, that's indifference. It requires no action, no effort. All they say is "I don't care what other people do, it's none of my business." And the talk show audience applauds vigorously. It's easy to be popular when all you say is yes. True, loving parents often say no.

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  5. Ares Olympus @May 9, 2016 at 7:31 AM:

    "... a sensible modern woman who believes in family planning..."

    My sense is that Stuart's point is that it's not about the kind of family planning you imply. It's about sexual recreation without consequences turned into a licentious worldview that is promoted by some rather unhappy people. Unhappiness can be exported as an idea for how one should lead their life. It validates the unhappy person and promotes the typical Lefty worldview that we should all be equally miserable. No justice, no peace.

    What is remarkable is that we have so many studies that validate the wisdom of traditional morals, and their promotion is a hell of a lot less expensive than government programs. They advocate a very simple set of lifestyle choices that maximize happiness by minimizing unforced errors in how one ought lead their life. And these choices aren't always the most pleasurable and expedient in the moment. We miss out on the "fun" in hopes of a better life down the road. It's called self-control, and it is the key to sustained success in any human endeavor. Yet we continue to make virtue more and more obscure, complex and confusing through our indifference, through which we prattle on that people should be allowed to live their lives however they see fit, and the canard that there are "victimless crimes" within a social system.

    Now that's nonsense.

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  6. IAC: What is most disgusting is that the 1% liberals have clear, firm expectations of their own children, but feel everyone else should be able to do whatever they want socially. That's not love or hatred, that's indifference. It requires no action, no effort. All they say is "I don't care what other people do, it's none of my business." And the talk show audience applauds vigorously. It's easy to be popular when all you say is yes. True, loving parents often say no.

    Really? I thought its the conservatives who object to the bleeding-heart liberals who care too much about the difficulties of others, at least under the narrative of oppression which needs to be fixed by spending other people's money, while conservatives are wise enough to be responsible stewarts of their own household duties before worrying about what else they can do, and then using their own time, energy and money to make a difference close to home.

    We agree "self-control" is better, but apparently people who believe in self-control only practice abstinence, unless they want more children. Or the alternative is traditional morals" is that wives submit to their husbands, and if the husband wants 10 childen, its her duty to provide him.

    It is a nice idea that judging other people as doing wrong things will help make the world a better place, but I have little evidence it works, and the Left and Right simply have complimentary ways of judging each other badly, and each clinging to their own narratives of what's wrong with the other side.

    That's what I was trying to call out, reductive assertions that reject freedoms of people you don't like from doing what you don't want them to do.

    Myself I'm 100% FOR selfish peole NOT having children, than selfish people having children they don't want, and creating a new generation of neglected or abused children in the world.

    Incidentally on Stuart's anti-self-esteem bandwagon, I see the Atlantic has a new article, encouraging self-compassion over self-esteem.
    http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/05/why-self-compassion-works-better-than-self-esteem/481473/

    It seems like a good attempt, but it may be the focus on self-X in general is problematic, and that self-pity might dangerously overlap self-compassion as well, along with self-indulgence and self-deception.

    It say self-compassion requires "mindfulness" which is the opposite of reactivity I think, it means slowing down enough to put things in perspective, like the Serenity prayer offers.

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  7. "Your child is now 18 and ready to matriculate at a fine university, far away from home. Undergraduate years are so packed with classes, studying, extracurricular activities, and socializing, you’ll hardly ever even hear from your child, except when the tuition bill is due for payment or they need money for books, or that Spring Break trip. Congratulations on a job well done." I sense a load of 16 Tons of Number Nine Snark here (I surely do hope so). The child has grown up without parents being present in his/her life. This child has and will have "issues" and problems.

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  8. Sam L, you are correct.

    Susan Patton is mocking the feminists' collective dreams to subcontract out motherhood duties so they can achieve self-actualization in their career.

    The problem is that stay-at-home mothers are feeling sorry for themselves, so Susan wanted to offer them a pep-talk for mothers day to show how foolish those ambitious women are, and in contrast how lucky the young mothers are who went to college, stayed pure until marriage, got their MRS degrees, married after graduation and now have college-educated men who will pay for their vanity degree student loans.

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  9. "The feminist furies were unleashed. They denounced Patton as a reactionary misogynist. They believed that Patton wanted to undo all of their good work and relegate female Princetonians to wifedom and motherhood. The horror of it all."

    Feminists should be called famine-ists. Their way is reproductive famine.

    Femmies have this idear that love, marriage, and family are about living FOR OTHERS.
    In contrast, career is about living for oneself and individuality.
    They got it backward. It is love, marriage, and family that is really about living for what really belongs to you.

    Professions may pay well and come with social status, but they are about serving OTHERS, the strangers. Doctors serve patients, lawyers serve clients, chefs serve diners, bus drivers serve passengers, auto makers serve drivers, and etc. And most of these relations are impersonal and forgotten. I mean who cares about the dentist or doctor you saw 3 yrs ago, or even 6 months ago. What dentist cares about all the people he treated? What chef cares about all the people he served dishes to?

    Career only has meaning at work, and it's about working with and for strangers. If a doctor were to die, all his patients over the yrs won't know about it. And even if they did, they'd say, 'oh, that's sad', and just go on with their lives.

    If someone dies, the ONLY PEOPLE who really care are the family members.
    Also, family loves you just for what you are.
    People go see doctors, lawyers, dentists, auto mechanics, accountants, and etc for specific services. Outside those services, there is no bond, no concern. But parents love children and children love parents and siblings love siblings simply because it's All in the Family.

    Career means nothing once you come home to an empty apartment. All the people you worked with and worked for don't care about you. They don't own you, you don't own them. If you were to quit or be fired, they'll forget you in no time. There is no special bond. If a worker is replaced by a new worker, things just go on as usual.

    But if one has family, one has love and warmth in the house AFTER work and during the night when parents know the kids are asleep. This is why divorce or loss of family member is so tragic. Because of deep emotional bonds, it's not just a case replacing one worker with another.

    So, it is family that really belongs to a woman. Career may be nice with money and status(if the job is 'cool', but then, most are not), but it's all about serving strangers who don't care about you and for whom you don't care about for a fee.

    Surely, even a social worker hired by the government to 'care' for the people don't have real bond with people standing in line for benefits. If she wants something that truly belongs to her in a deep emotional way, there is only the family.

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  10. Also, in professions, people do things for others on the basis of MONEY. It's all about money. Dentists, doctors, accountants, government workers, bus drivers, and etc. all do it because they get paid. They may seem to helping out fellow man, but they wouldn't offer services unless there's money in it.

    But in the family, parents take care of kids simply out of love and caring. And children later do things for parents out of love. It's not about the Money.
    In a world where so much is about money, status, and hierarchy, isn't it nice to have a family where the bonds are about love without conditions?

    Also, it is only through the children that adults can pass down their identity and culture.
    If you're Jewish, you have to power to pass down Jewish identity and culture to your kids. You have no such power over other kids. It is only through your own kids that you have the power and means to pass down identity, heritage, and culture.

    This goes for Mormons, Catholics, Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Vietnamese, Hungarians, etc. Unless one has children, there is no guarantee of passing down identity and culture for future posterity.

    But our decadent world has deracinated people into atomized consumers without identity, tradition, culture, and heritage. For so many, the only culture that matters if junky pop culture with narcissistic celebrity freaks and the only ideology that matters is PC that comes with pat slogans about 'racism' and 'homophobia' and whatever. Indeed, with pop culture and PC, even true individualism has been lost because pop culture is like a drug that reduces people into amnesiac pleasure-junkies and PC demands conformism to dogma.

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  11. priss rules said... Career only has meaning at work, and it's about working with and for strangers. ... Unless one has children, there is no guarantee of passing down identity and culture for future posterity.

    I think you're being too judgmental here. Not all women are going to have children. Not all woman aspire to have children. Not all women are even going to find a man who is worthy to marry, if she doesn't happen to have the traits and temperaments that men are looking for (and same in reverse for men).

    And plenty of such women will be lucky to be aunts (or uncles as the jokes may be) and have a chance to show their love that way, or a god mother, or a mentor to girls or young women who grew up in disavantaged families.

    A large number of women of my direct ancestry, and aunts including ones who never had kids, were teachers, and if you want to take about posterity, the posterity of a teacher can be vast, touching hundreds or thousands of children over a lifetime. It is really depressing to know a teacher can only change a young person for a short while, and may never know what good was done?

    There's no need to diminish any of that under real or imagined modern degeneracies.

    When I hear "Liberated from Motherhood", I'm sure it doesn't means "all women should aspire to avoid motherhood", rather it means "Society shouldn't tell women they should be barefoot and pregnant" and that "Men shouldn't earn more for identical work, identical experience because they're 'breadwinners'."

    That old culture of sexual division of labor, public and private spheres, might be essential at times, and is perfectly good for some, but we can be glad woman now have more choices than that. Choices mean women can decide what's best for them, and decide which compromises they want to make for what's most important for them.

    I'm sure its easier in ways when we don't have choices, and many choices will be poor, and women who choose poorly, like waiting until they're 35 to "find a man" will suffer because of it, so hopefully such decisions were made with "eyes wide open."

    And sarcastic voices like Patton's can help draw lines in the sand and say "I told you so" for anyone who fails to follow her wisdom.

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