On child hate and feminism
NS November 3rd, 2009
Before I became a mother I had opinions about a lot of things on which I’ve since done an about-face. For example:
- I thought I’d always wear shoes with at least a little bit of a heel and would never, EVER wear flat slip-ons just because they’re more comfortable and convenient
- I thought people who wore trousers anywhere above their hipbones were tragically uncool
- I thought parents were selfish for taking their pushchairs on the bus or train at rush hour and should be relegated to only using public transport at times when the Busy, Important People weren’t around
- I thought babies and children could easily be ‘controlled’ and that any kid who threw a tantrum, screamed or cried incessantly was a brat who needed to be immediately removed from the vicinity of my ears and my precious public space, of which I was utterly convinced I had dibs on over a snot-faced two-year-old
Some of these naive thoughts were a result of merely being young and inexperienced, but others didn’t even register as being perhaps a tad selfish until I became a parent and gained a new perspective.
I now know that wearing heels while pushing a 35 lb. toddler in a pushchair up a steep hill, in the rain, with the week’s shopping hanging off the handles and a crying baby attached to your front in a sling calls not only for flat shoes, but sturdy, comfortable, weather-resistant, puke-wipable, hard-wearing, sensible stompers.
I now know that moms wear ‘mom jeans’ because the hip-slung look isn’t really compatible with post-baby bellies.
I now know that parents (and kids) have just as many places to be and just as much right to use public transport, dine at a restaurant, have coffee on a Sunday morning, go to the cinema, shop at the mall or have lunch at the pub as those rushing to and from work and those without children.
But if I’d never become a parent, would I have wised up about how unrealistic my expectations of children in public were? Would I have softened my hardened stance as I aged and interacted with my friends’ children? Most likely, yes. Because as much as our society loves to divide us into Us vs. Them (parents vs. non-parents), with neither side being able to fathom what it’s like for those on the opposite side of the fence, it’s much more complex than that.
First of all, there are different attitudes towards children from those who don’t have them. There are the ones who want them but can’t have them for whatever reason (illness, infertility, etc..); those who don’t ever want children of their own but who like children, have children in their lives or are at least kindly tolerant of them; those who will probably have children of their own someday but are perhaps naive about the realities of parenting so may be a bit simplistic or harsh in their views; those who are openly hostile towards children because of their own fears, insecurities and a wealth of negative messages about kids and being a parent that they have internalised over the years; and those who are openly hostile towards children because they truly think they are sub-human monsters not worthy of existence and who would be happy to return to the Victorian motto of “seen and not heard,” with “seen” being a concession to letting the little beasts out of their cages at all.
Of all my friends and acquaintances who are not parents, the vast majority fall into the first three categories. They may not have first-hand experience of parenting but they generally like children, may even have spent a lot of time around them and caring for them, and have absolutely no issues with their presence itself. They may, as I said, be a bit naive to some of the realities of day-to-day life with small children, but that’s okay. I wouldn’t expect them to know all about it, or even want to. As long as they’re cool with me living my life and my children living theirs and us all mixing it up together and coexisting in public spaces, we’re golden. Any misconceptions or misunderstandings about parenting (or not parenting) between us can be cleared up 99% of the time with a quick conversation or by gently sharing a different viewpoint. Even if we can’t totally understand where the other person is coming from, we can certainly sympathise.
But the “seen and not heard” people, the ones (like many of the commenters on this article) who talk about children needing to be smacked, drugged or threatened into submission; the ones who talk about kids needing muzzles and leashes becasue they are like dogs; the ones who think that if there are not crayons and clowns in the restaurant, kids should not be allowed in; the ones who would slap a crying child in Wal-Mart or shout “Shut the hell up, you little brat!” to a 3-year-old crying in the grocery store checkout line (as I witnessed one day last summer)…these people are not just lacking perspective, they are bloody psychotic. Anyone who would advocate such violence and punitive measures against children just to make them behave the way THEY want them to is not only controlling, hateful, self-absorbed and deluded, but frightening to a degree that it makes me nervous to know they’re out there among us. Thankfully, people who are truly this hateful towards children aren’t great in number.
But the people I really want to talk about are the ones in the penultimate category — the ones who are offended by and sometimes hostile towards children as a result of their own fears, insecurities, defensiveness or having internalised all of the negative messages conveyed to us on a regular basis about children and parenting. Again, even those who fall into this category will be varied and have different reasons for their disdain.
Some may simply be assholes, the kind of people so filled with hate and anger that they enjoy taking it out on those smaller than them or more vulnerable. Let’s face it, kids are pretty easy targets because they’re relatively defenseless against adults with their adult world and their adult rules and their adult size. They’re at our mercy on the bottom rung and they know it, which must be a pretty horrible way to navigate the world. I think we all remember how frustrating and unfair it felt, even as teenagers, to be restricted, disallowed and banned from doing the things we wanted to do because of some arbitrary rule or simply becuase someone bigger and more powerful than us said “Because I said so.” If it’s that frustrating as a 15-year-old, imagine how much more frustrating it must be for a two or three-year-old who doesn’t have the verbal capacity to communicate her concerns in a legitimate way or even keep a handle on her emotions as she reacts to situations she doesn’t understand.
Flaunting one’s control over children as a means of establishing and exerting power for the sole purpose of letting them know their ‘place’ is a type of power-tripping narcissism that I just can’t understand, though it is obvious from the remarks of some child-haters that this is exactly what they expect parents (and any adult a child comes into contact with, for that matter) to do, so as to preserve their “right” to quiet cafes, pavements free of mobility devices for babies and eateries reserved for the exclusive use of those who understand that etiquette requires them to not slurp their soup, shout with joy when dessert comes, or take a walk around the restaurant to check out what others are doing when they become bored.
Many may be (like I was in my early 20s before I had kids), terrified of what children represent and how they might affect our lives, even before we have them or if we never have them at all. Women particularly are prone to fretting about how having children (or even being perceived as wanting to have or being capable of having them) will result in a loss of power and standing in the professional or academic world, a loss of personal freedom and a loss of our selves. Because to a certain extent, it’s true. We do lose a lot of power when we become mothers. We gain it in other areas, sure, but becoming a mother automatically throws a kink in the patriarchal plan, the hierarchal system we were operating under, where men come first, then women who are able to act and live ‘like men’ and then, languishing somewhere at the bottom of the food chain with unpaid interns and temporary staff, the mothers.
The mothers and their shortened hours and maternity leaves and special requests and general pain-in-the-ass-ness…they’re really only kept on at some places because it’s against the law to fire them when they get pregnant. Even employers who truly value their workers and consider themselves progressive find sweat forming on their upper lips when they see someone of childbearing age and possessing a uterus walk through the doors for an interview. It doesn’t matter if she has children or doesn’t, she is a liability. And childless women know this just as well as those who have reproduced.
I remember looking at this couple with their crying child in an art museum one time, when I was maybe 24, and wondering what the hell they were thinking by bringing him there and how they should’ve gone somewhere more family-friendly for his sake. Automatically, my brain registered the connection I had just made between having children and either being scorned for taking them to places not necessarily geared up specifically for kids, or having to stay home altogether. To me, the choice was pretty clear: have fun and have a life, or have a kid. It didn’t dawn on me that having to choose between those two things is unfair, purposely exclusionary and inherently sexist since women are affected by having and caring for children (in a social sense) much more than men.
My perception of the sacrifices and personal losses of parenthood was confirmed by other things I witnessed and observed. I saw how the only woman at work who had a child was demoted after taking her second maternity leave because she had to leave at 5 on the dot to pick her kids up from daycare. I saw how everyone rolled their eyes as she picked up her bags and logged off of her computer, even though she’d been at her desk since 7.30 compared to our 9am, and had worked through the lunch break that we’d all spent at the pizzeria next door.
I believed that any woman who stayed at home to take care of her children was wasting her education, subjugating herself to her husband and would inevitably become completely boring and obsessed with her children. I had absolutely no idea about anything to do with the physical, emotional, social and financial repurcussions of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, maternity leave, the costs and difficulties of finding quality childcare, or the bonding and primary caregiver role that is so vital to a new baby’s development.
I had no idea how hard it could be to take a child on a simple errand without incident, when it wasn’t nap time, meal time, or rush hour. I had no idea how much pressure parents are under to keep their children well-behaved, well-mannered, quiet, compliant and taking up as little space as possible, and what kind of mental strain that puts both the parents and the children under. I had no idea that one day I would be thinking back to the glares I have shot at chattering children or the way I would sometimes mutter under my breath “Jesus, these women and their pushchairs, they think they own the street,” as two women with prams came my way, and I would be ashamed of how I behaved, would like to find those cheerful but noisy children and those women just struggling to make it through the day with their newborn babies and unwieldy prams and apologise for my asshattery.
It’s clear to me now that I was the one acting petulant and selfish, not those women or those children just going about their lives. But why did I have so much antipathy towards them? Why did I feel a self-righteous sense of anger at the fact that I couldn’t understand or control what they were doing or experiencing?
The real answer, if I’m honest? Fear. Fear of the unknown, of being in that position someday and feeling scrutinized and picked apart and passed over and talked about. Insecure because I wasn’t sure if parethood was something I wanted and if it wasn’t, why was I ever-so-slightly disappointed when a pregnancy test the month before came out negative? And if it was something I wanted, why wasn’t I being struck down with the “biological urge” or “maternal instinct” I’d been told I should be feeling by now? More importantly, if I did decide to become a parent, how much of my ideals and my freedome and how many pieces of my true self would I have to wave goodbye to, as I’d come to believe was inevitable?
For self-proclaimed feminists in particular, this can be a real minefield of conflicting issues. On one hand we’ve been fed this message all our lives that we can do and be anything and that women are worth more than the domestic drudgery and single-minded devotion to childrearing often associated with marriage and motherhood in times past. In order to reinforce this message, has it become necessary for some women to convince themselves that they are better than mere housewives, more than “just” mothers and that children and parents are the problem, not a society that demeans and undervalues both? Because admitting that motherhood went from overrated to undervalued in 40 years flat isn’t something many of us want to acknowledge. Not many of us want to admit that even though the mainstream women’s movement certainly isn’t to blame for the way mothers and children are treated, it hasn’t done much to help them either.
And there on the other hand are the messages we are constantly bomarded with that say we are the ‘natural’ caregivers, that we have these biological bombs in our wombs that will make us go baby-making-crazy eventually, that we will be bereft and barren and bitter if we don’t become mothers. Even if we actively reject this message, know that it is sexist drivel, some of it inevitably sinks in and makes us doubt our decisions, our bodies and our roles in society. Even if one knows intellectually that a decision to not have children is a perfectly legitimate one, is it any wonder that so many non-parent women feel they have to be on the defensive from those who think them selfish or weird; that perhaps they employ the ol’ “attack before you are attacked” method of self-defense to ward off potential hurts?
Feminists (or feminst-minded women) in particular, I believe, are more prone to feel conflicted about children and motherhood and therefore are perhaps so emphatically resistant to the pigeon-holing as to risk entering into enemy territory, the very ideology that feminism deplores, where oppression and hatred reign supreme. Because — and let me be clear here — hatred of children, or expecting them to behave in a specific, prescripted, pre-approved way, or denigrating mothers by calling them “braindead housewives” or “breeders” is nothing short of oppression.
You won’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) gain any street cred or merit badges amongst the feminist in-crowd if you proudly declare yourself free from the yoke of mothering, or make jokes about muzzling children, or shoot dirty looks to families in cafes where you’re trying to do Important Things like read Salon’s Broadsheet, where even people who bother to read feminist sites say things like:
Fuck her and fuck her brat. I am goddamn sick and tired of screaming, misbehaving children making my time in public places a misery. Kudos to Southwest for having the intestinal fortitude to do the obvious thing: Boot their asses off the damned plane. If I’d been there, I would have given the flight crew a standing ovation.
Because you know what? Participating in child-bashing is participating in the oppression of a vulnerable group. By only “allowing” them into your space (be it political, social or public) through forcing them to adhere to a set of arbitrary standards is no better than the way whites told people of colour in the 50s and 60s that sure, they could be one of them… but only if they agreed to adopt white dress, speech, habits, customs and so on. So long as they were Trying To Fit In, the reigning race would reluctantly allow them to enter their space, but it had to be by their rules.
Even today, as soon as a comb gets tucked into an afro, or a pair of trousers on a black ass are found sagging, or the urban vernacular of a group of dark-skinned folks gets too complicated and labeled ‘threatening’, some white people get ucomfortable and that’s when things can get Ugly. It’s also like the people who claim to be okay with gay couples but then balk and gag when they see two men holding hands or kissing and say: “I respect your right to exist and all but you don’t need to shove it in my face! Keep that crap at home!”
Saying you support a group of people while at the same time defending your right not to have to interact with those people if they don’t fall in line with your expectations is just a superficial veneer of “acceptance” that means jack shit when it comes to real inclusion.
So no, you’re not really a progressive or a feminist or a liberal, all-encompassing sort if you also openly declare your disdain for children. Threatening to enact violence against them or their parents is not funny, it’s not cool and it’s not right. In fact, it’s really fucking hurtful. Not just on a personal level but on the whole, to women.
Instead of ripping on each other for our respective reproductive choices, let’s remember what’s really holding us back and work together to make it so having children or not having children are equally legitimate choices that don’t limit or ostracize us in any way.
Image credit: kayepants, via a Creative Commons license
