I do hate a straw feminist argument and a particularly absurd one is that “feminists hate babies”, because if another group of women are writing more about their love for their children than feminist mothers (seen my blogroll?) then I’d like to know who. And so I enjoyed this take down over at Shapely Prose and I was all yes, yes, yes…
Feminists of the world, how can you not love the “opium-den quality to maternity leave”? Maternity leave, as we all know, was benevolently granted to women by men because they understand that motherhood is like an addiction, and hey, we all deserve a little time off from work when we’re high on opiates, am I right? Wait, what’s that — maternity leave is only available to you because of feminist activism that “analogized childcare to the work of men” (you know, real work!), and in fact we have far less paid parental leave than many of our international peers? Oh, you feminists and your politics! Why don’t you put those boring history books down and pick up a baby, for god’s sake? Quit being so dishonest and tell it like it is: motherhood is just like drug addiction, which is a financially supported and widely approved lifestyle.
… until I clicked over to the article that Sweet Machine is referring to in her post and I was surprised to find myself, straw feminists aside, agreeing with a lot more of that article than I expected. In My Newborn is Like a Narcotic: Why won’t feminists admit the pleasure of infants? Katie Roiphe describes her experience of new motherhood, and frankly, lying in bed next to my own four month old baby while reading it, I thought her analogy with narcotics awfully accurate.
- The shocking realignment of priorities? Check.
- The reduction to a simpler, earthier, more animal existence? Check.
- The exhaustion of this new kind of emotional vulnerability? Check.
- The exhileration of falling in love so entirely? Check.
- The immersion into the surreal? Check.
All this made it very difficult for me to read some of the snark in the comments directed towards Roiphe over at Shapely Prose. (Although it must be said that the comments aren’t all one way).
And word of advice to fellow mothers – be careful describing anything about your experience which sounds like ‘mummy brain’ because boy is the world more than happy to see you as a sleep-deprived idiot who should shut up already.
Also, some of the follow up at Double X is interesting too.
Thank you for posting this. I found the snark a little hard to swallow too but couldn’t really articulate my thoughts on the matter.
It’s been bothering me too and I was just discussing it on Twitter with someone. Nowhere in Roiphe’s article does she say that all childless feminists hate babies but so many of the commenters got all defensive and took it that way. The resulting “mothers are sappy idiots who all want us to be just as boring and insipid as they are” rants really missed the point, I think. Criticise Roiphe’s points all you want, I had a few myself, but this auto-defensiveness and then counter-attack (including sweeping generalisations and insults towards mothers and children) is not necessary.
I know I’ve had to bite my tongue a number of times when feminist bloggers without children have pretty much implied their superiority by deciding not to have kids and lumped all of us “Mommies/Mummies” into one big, homogenous group.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only reader of the Shapely Prose discussion who thought it largely tended to miss Roiphe’s point.
I put it down to me probably not understanding the conventions of what seems to be a regular feature. It seemed they might be parodying hysterical takedowns of apostate feminists – or something similarly convoluted.
But perhaps not.
And this is following a similar path, at this stage: http://open.salon.com/blog/heather_michon/2009/08/27/why_do_feminists_hate_babies
Also Katie Roiphe’s mother on a related theme: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/january97/roiphe_1-22.html
Hmm. I see your point about about the ad feminem comments in the SP discussion, which I think have as much to do with Roiphe’s past writing as with this specific piece. OTOH, I didn’t like Roiphe’s piece much, either. I didn’t see myself in her vision of motherhood, and while I agree that she didn’t explicity say “all feminists devalue motherhood”, she also didn’t say “not all mothers feel the way I do”. I loved having a newborn but did not wish to draw the curtains and retreat from the world. I did not suddenly feel that everything else in my life was secondary. I just…didn’t.
That’s my main discomfort with Roiphe. She seems to assume that her experiences are All Women’s, and that she can explain my life to me without all that nasty feminist stuff getting in the way. And she thinks she’s doing me a favor. She’s one of the chorus of voices telling me I’m not a Real Girl, and clearly not a Real Mommy. Feh.
Hey, new reader here, found you on the tag surfer.
I agree in some part with Jay. I also felt uncomfortable with reading Roiphe’s piece, as I had difficulty bonding with my daughter. Sure, I did everything for her and didn’t become completely post-natal-ly depressed, but I didn’t EVER have that complete, utter, love and adoration feeling for months. I think this is an important point that many mommies gloss over because they can’t imagine NOT feeling the way that Roiphe does. It’s quite a difficult issue to deal with, and I would have liked a critique of Roiphe’s article to have at least some mention of it.
[...] Feminists hate babies [...]
I agree with what Jay said, too. I certainly did have the Great Adore for my beautiful son, but it didn’t alter the fact that I was really struggling a lot of the time and couldn’t articulate it, because mothers are supposed to be so damn happy and satisfied and, you know, natural at being mothers that they couldn’t possibly want to complain. I think Roiphe is being hopelessly naive to think that the myth of motherhood being hard work is stronger than the myth that mothers are natural and don’t require any support or help because they just love their babies so everything will be fine, fine, fine and even dandy as well. That’s what irritated me about Roiphe’s article.
But yes, I do also get very irritated at the husband when he complains about how hard it was having a baby, and does not remember the fabulousness of it, even though I remember us very explicitly saying that we should pass on the fabulousness to the public as well as the tiredness and work and so on.
I definitely didn’t experience any of my babies the way Roiphe describes. I also agree that any suggestion that the idea that babies are hard work has overridden the paradigm that they are joyous and natural and your inevitable fulfillment is naive at best.
Oddly, I am pretty much the baby hating stereotype – I don’t like them very much, didn’t really think of mine as people until they were bigger and felt that most of my attachment to them was driven by instinct, not higher emotion. Still, my experience of some feminists dismissing child raising as somehow demeaning and inferior to real work has really got up my nose. The idea that a woman is some sort of idiot for experiencing her baby the way Roiphe has described is unreasonable and dismissive.
If only people just acknowledged that everyone experiences pregnancy and early childhood slightly differently. Sure there’s probably a predictable continuum, but mothers of more than one or two will vouch that each child was a unique challenge (mine does, at least!), and no one should be vaunted over another as the Universal All-Mother. That way lies essentialism, absolutism, and disregard of valid life experience.
[...] Feminists hate babies [...]
Great post, really help me alot. Thanks.
Cheers