1. Introduction
Quick note: This is written mainly for Lesbians, from a Lesbian Radical Feminist viewpoint. This piece should also be read after the two last posts:
These posts clarify my personal experience with the question of motherhood and sum up my thoughts on hetero sex, which will not be a part of this piece here.
Since this is a very long post, here is the table of contents:
1. Introduction
2. Liberal Analysis Isn’t Enough
3. Not a Biological Question
3. 1. Humanity Will Not Go Extinct Without Lesbian Mothers
3. 2. The Potential Of Motherhood Is Female, Motherhood Is Feminine
3. 3. Under Patriarchy, Motherhood Is a Right
3. 4. Female Bodies Are Not Designed For Procreation
3. 5. Instinctual Dislike Of Procreation
4. Stick and Carrot – Privilege and Discrimination
4. 1. Discrimination Against Mothers
4. 2. Motherhood Gives Privilege
5. Motherhood Undermines Female Solidarity
5. 1. Mothers Choose Their Sons Over Women
5. 2. Mothers Choose Their Men Over Women
5. 3. Lesbian Families Promote Hetero Families
6. ″Feminist Motherhood″ Has Failed
6. 1. Feminists Failed To Raise ″Better Sons″
6. 2. Lesbians Fail To Raise ″Better Sons″
6. 3. Lesbian Mothers Are Inevitably Legally Tied To Men Also Thanks To ″Feminist Mothers″
7. Motherhood Is Doing Patriarchy
I hope the numbered headings and sub-headings help not only to clarify the arguments, but also will be helpful in the discussion I’m hoping for.
2. Liberal Analysis Isn’t Enough
Mothering is a hot topic for liberal feminism. But as usual, the defenders of the choice paradigm have nothing to offer in terms of analysis and remain on the very surface of things. Liberal feminist analysis is ahistorical, sexist, racist and classist.
Except in the context of what is barely more than liberal poverty porn (http://jezebel.com/homeless-mother-arrested-for-leaving-kids-in-car-during-1553880432), liberal feminists discuss motherhood like any other middle-class ″project″: Breastfeeding versus formula, cloth-diapering versus Pampers, pram versus baby sling, family bed versus Ferber method, home births versus hospitals, orgasmic birth versus epidural, doulas/midwives versus elective c-sections, stay-at-home-moms versus working mothers – the intensity of these discussions is caught in the buzzword ″mommy wars″. There will be defenders of every position and those who try to fuse both positions. One group of feminists views breastfeeding as the ultimate feminist act, others will say the same thing about formula, and those seeking compromise will declare that both are equally fine and feminist and mothers should be able to make the choice for one or the other.
But to analyse motherhood along the lines of choice is not radical.
It is just the same old liberal story of how to make individual women’s lives better instead of figuring out what would be best for all of us. And motherhood is not the best for all of us.
3. Not a Biological Question
3. 1. Humanity Will Not Go Extinct Without Lesbian Mothers
Whenever a woman questions the need to procreate on a fundamental level, she will be told that refusal to breed will cause humans to die out, mostly said with a tone of voice between reproachful outrage and badly hidden panic. This even happens in Lesbian and feminist communities.
I don’t know if this is the old anti-abortion rhetorics of ″How would you like it if your parents aborted you?!?” on a societal level, the sheer panic of having mean old dykes wrenching away their favourite life project or good old capitalist fear of having taken away something they feel entitled to.
However, at this point, there are over 7 billion people living on this planet and the population is growing. Humanity is not at the brink of dying out. Humanity is at the brink of exploding. So, when Lesbians don’t procreate, humanity is not going to end. Patriarchy and rapists keep up the birth rate, why would Lesbians want to show solidarity to their patriarchal construct by participating?
It is illusionary to assume that all these people would stop having children just because some Radical Lesbian Feminist says it would be better for women and the planet as a whole if humanity would stop overpopulating and Lesbians wouldn’t buy into the breeding ideology of patriarchy.
3. 2. The Potential Of Motherhood Is Female, Motherhood Is Feminine
The ultimate argument of liberal feminist pro-breeders is biological. To have children is seen as a biological imperative, and those who seem to lack this need are on the one hand deserving of liberal tolerance (choice!), yet on the other are still the exceptional, the dysfunctional, the ″With this mindset it is better you don’t have kids anyway″. That the need to have children is perceived as the ubiquitous norm is the rationale behind liberal feminists’ crusade to enable gay and trans people to have children at any cost – and may it be by throwing poor ″surrogate mothers″ under the bus or taking away fundings from women’s health research in favour of uterus implant research.
In the rhetorics of empowerment, liberal feminists also often paint pregnancy, childbirth and lactation as manifestations of female superpower, as something a non-mommy will never be able to best or even understand. At the same time, they are the first to call out what they mistakenly consider biological essentialism in Radical Feminist analysis of the trans cult.
It’s true, biology matters; no surgical procedure and no amount of hormones will ever make a man female. A man can’t ever conceive or give birth.
This gives the transcultists the opportunity to take intersex people and infertile hostage for their own women-hating agenda: ″They can’t conceive and give birth either! Are you saying they aren’t women?!?”
And when Radical Feminists then say that they of course are women due to their biology, the accusation of essentialism is coming next.
But those who call Radical Feminists essentialists forget one thing: We are not framing female bodies as a tool of action (conceive/give birth). Having female organs does not include the need for any action to be set.
Having hands and legs and a head does not include the need to be a soldier: Most people are born with two hands to carry a rifle with, two legs to march with and a head to put a helmet onto. Yet, having hands, legs and a head does not force us to be soldiers.
And likewise, having an uterus, ovaries, a vulva, a vagina and a monthly cycle (or lacking any of those as many women-born-women do for various reasons) does not come with any natural inborn necessity to become pregnant, give birth and raise children.
If it was compulsory, there would be no way to avoid procreation. If the presence of sex organs meant the individual need to procreate, procreation would happen like breathing or the beating of our hearts. The only things a human has to do are: Breathe, eat, shit/urinate, sleep. These are the only needs dictated by the very design of our bodies. This is the reason why the basic regulations (breathing, heartbeat, hormonal release to regulate feelings of hunger and fullness, tiredness, sense for heat/coldness etc) are beyond our conscious control.
But our procreation is within our mind’s control. Our ovulation is relatively hidden. Some women can track it by close observation of themselves, some can’t. In one way or the other, nothing in our biological existence forces us to mate and procreate. Human women are not in heat. While some women report an increased sex drive around ovulation, it does not force them to seek out males and maybe isn’t even true (in patriarchy, this would be a desired answer to give when asked). The simple decision not to have sex with men is fully within our abilities.
I’m not preaching ‘abstinence as contraception’. In patriarchy, i. e. rape, brainwashing into heterosexuality, prostitution/pornography, withholding of biological knowledge, forced marriage etc, ‘abstinence as contraception’ is a cruel, cynical joke. I just want to say that in the absence of force and coercion, the choice to not have sex with men CAN be made because there is no biological need to have sex with men.
This is a hallmark of Radical Feminism. We actually do think there is an alternative to heterosexuality, an insight unpopular all over the place.
The whole philosophy behind the sexual orientation theory is based on the desperate attempt to make the expression of our sexuality a biological thing: ″I can’t put women first! I’m just biologically drawn to men!” or ″Stop hating me for being gay! It’s just the way nature made me!” And it happens the very same way with motherhood. Left or right, liberal or conservative, dictatorial or democratic, religious or secular, every single ideology endorsing motherhood ultimately ends up with pseudo-biological arguments – and may it be the most trivial and stupid reference to the ″clock ticking″. There is no damn clock beyond the one patriarchy hung over our heads, declaring it was a part of our bodies.
So, this is the crucial difference between biological essentialism and Radical Feminism:
To essentialists female bodies come with an inherent order to do things. They think gender is biological.
To Radical Feminists, female bodies just are. To be of female sex doesn’t require you to do anything.
So, becoming and being a mother is not a biological necessity. Becoming a mother is an action set following force or choice. It is behaviour, not state of being, shaped by cultural context and personal circumstance rather than biology. It is doing patriarchy.
3. 3. Under Patriarchy, Motherhood Is a Right
Women under patriarchy have exactly three rights: The right to be feminine, the right to be fucked, and the right to bear children.
Women who are not allowed to have children (see further down) are defined as un-women by the patriarchy, but that doesn’t free them from the obligation to be feminine and fuckable. Even women in Nazi concentration camps were kept fuckable enough to be raped in camp brothels.
Patriarchy doesn’t care for mothers’ needs, because being feminine, fucked and a mother is everything and the best a woman in patriarchy ever can be. Patriarchal societies sometimes candy-coat this into rhetorics of ″the sanctity of motherhood″, ″the highest calling″, ″the hardest job″, ″the hand that rocks the cradle″. Patriarchy knows that women are more docile when they are flattered.
And so it is only logical that there is one thing each and every patriarchal ideology agrees on: women have to be mothers.
Left and right, liberal and conservative, democratic and fascist, secular and religious, literally every political ideology proclaims how the family is under siege and backs up its claims with their respective narratives of threat: For religious people, families are too small and not god-fearing enough for society to survive. For seculars, families (and the societies made up by them) are either bound to implode through their archaic religious values or humanity will lose the evolution lottery by breeding itself into extinction. For fascists, the ″proper families″ will collapse due to being outbred by the ″wrong people″. For democrats, the family unit is under siege because the state isn’t doing enough for the future voters and tax-and-pension-payers. For conservatives, the family is threatened by welfare and too much individualism. For liberals, the family is crumbling under way too much nanny state interference and too little individualism.
There is not and never was a shortage of hetero families and therefore mothers. But of course all over the world the lie of the “decline of the family″ is passed on, and has been all throughout (written) history.
This lie is one of the core myths of patriarchy: There is always one more child that has to be fathered, birthed and raised, who in turn has always one more child, and one more, and one more. Hunger, disease, war, there is nothing that will stop patriarchy producing more children. In fact patriarchy actively and in particular encourages people to have children in times of hardship: For practical reasons – e. g. hope for children surviving into adulthood to take care of old parents – but also for ideological reasons. Without children, no believers. No consumers. No workers. No soldiers.
Religious thinkers (= ideologists who promote male dominance by making use of the authority of supernatural forces) stress how it is a right of women to have hetero sex and children. I have heard this in university discussions with protestants, Jewish people, Muslims and practicioners of hinduistic traditions. Ibn Warraq in his book ‘Why I Am Not A Muslim’ quotes Richard Burton’s claim that wives in the Islamic tradition are better off than their christian counterparts because of their god-given right to have sex with their husbands. In an absurd scene, I have been told the exact same thing by a young Muslim woman at university, who considered this right a sign of Islam being a forerunner of modern ″sexual liberation″.
Just to make clear one more time: This is nothing specifically Islamic, but something typical for patriarchy. As I said, I have been present at an uni discussion with all kinds of believers who roughly had the same position.
We also find the same position in medicine: From ancient Greece to modern times, the medical establishment (= men who made up wild nonsense in order to gain control over women’s bodies even beyond legal and religious oppression) have declared that unfucked women will fall sick.
Psychoanalysis (= a historically lucky fraud invented by a junkie con artist in order to keep women and children in line and provide men unfettered access to them) and its offshoots take the same line.
Evolutionary Psychology (= a pseudo-science latching onto biology as a form of modern backlash against liberation movements like feminism and anti-racism) declares fucking/birthing the only meaningful motor of human behaviour.
Sadomasochism (= a male perversion and a Trojan horse to re-establish the worst parts of patriarchy inside feminist and Lesbian communities) fetishises impregnation and pregnancy, birth and lactation.
This should be proof enough that hetero sex and procreation are the most powerful tools of patriarchal oppression. If there was no oppression in them, sadomasochists couldn’t make a fetish out of them in the first place.
3. 4. Female Bodies Are Not Designed For Procreation
″The vulva and vagina are actually perfectly designed and sometimes I just think about birth and am completely amazed at what the female body can do. Birth is awesome. You can grow an actual person inside your uterus and expel it out of your vagina where it goes on living as it’s own unique being. That’s pretty incredible.”
http://doulaness.tumblr.com/post/82557221816
Statements like this are rampant in feminist spaces. In order to praise the choice to be a mother, the life-endangering business of pregnancy and childbirth is romanticised, up to the claim of not only pain-free, but orgasmic childbirth.
But this couldn’t be further from truth. As evidenced by all women dying, by all women left permanently damaged (starting with simple incontinence and ending with outright disability), female bodies obviously are not at all ″designed″ for pregnancy and childbirth. We can more or less tolerate it, if we are lucky. But even the most uneventful pregnancy and easy birth will wreck havoc on the integrity of our bodies. My native dialect, charming and tactful as always, has a special expression to describe the washed-out appearance of a woman growing the parasitic entity of a fetus in her: She looks like puked-up barley.
And then there are all the complications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childbirth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childbirth-related_posttraumatic_stress_disorder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complications_of_pregnancy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episiotomy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestational_trophoblastic_disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_physiological_changes_in_pregnancy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molar_pregnancy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetric_fistula
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetric_forceps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstructed_labour
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpartum_pelvic_floor_dysfunction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelvic_girdle_pain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perineal_tear_classification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placental_abruption
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpartum_depression
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preeclampsia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphysiotomy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_pregnancy#Medical
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventouse
(The list is nowhere complete.)
Here are two articles telling the truth about the utter design faultiness of pregnancy and childbirth:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meredith-bland/10-surprises-from-the-first-days-after-delivery_b_5544704.html
http://groupthink.jezebel.com/how-my-vagina-got-her-groove-back-tmi-1540110557
Note how many commenters fully agree on the descriptions and tell about their own experiences of being physically ripped apart. And now tell me again how our bodies are designed for childbirth and how natural it is to sacrifice our health.
The same goes for breastfeeding. Despite the lies of women-hating organisations like La Leche League and people who want to outright force women – like UAE’s lawmakers, model Gisele Bündchen and the countless internet commenters in their favour – to breastfeed, the ″natural″ way to feed babies is comparatively unreliable and can lead to severe health problems in the mother:
http://jezebel.com/5968243/fuck-you-breastfeeding
″Because that’s what it’s like: burning, stabbing, sharp, deep, wide, thick, soul-sucking pain that will cause your asshole to constrict so far up into your body that you fear you might choke on it. (…) I used to punch the arm of the couch, kick my feet, and scream, “Cocksucker motherfucker!” just to get through a feeding. And then, roughly two hours later, I would be presented with my child, by my husband or another family member, telling me it was time to do it all again. “Already!?” I would cry, before sobbing so hard from revisiting the pain that I couldn’t even make noise, but just silently quake. When one of my breasts developed a painful case of mastitis, I was told that the only way to cure it was to “keep her on the breast as much as possible.” That was the last thing I wanted to hear. Both of my tits were gross. They were so bloody and scabby that they looked like someone had stubbed cigarettes out on them, like it was some kind of gang initiation ritual, symbolizing my induction into Da Mutha Hood. Of course, the worst came when I discovered, to my horror, that my left nipple became semi-detached from my areola. It was hanging on by a slim cord of flesh. My hands trembled as I moved my whole nipple up and down, like the head of a Pez dispenser. Panic-stricken, I asked my midwives what I should do. I was convinced I might need to be hospitalized. Again, I was told to “keep her on the breast as much as possible.” Eventually, it healed, but I’m scarred—in more ways than one.”
The commenters, they called her lazy. Selfish. An asshole. Dumb. A Bitch. A Monster. Crazy. Insane. Shitty. Other women reported how nurses and ″lactation advisors″ physically reached into women’s clothing and pulled their breasts out. One commenter openly said that she looks down on women who do not breastfeed.
And there were endlessly many comments of breastfeeding mothers who reported pain, bleeding, thrush, pus oozing out of their nipples, detached nipples, crying and shrieking in fear. Many of them gratulated themselves for not ″giving up″. Many of those mothers also see no contradiction when they on the one hand report their own troubles and on the other claim how great breastfeeding is: Self-gaslighting at its finest.
(Regarding breastfeeding laws:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/30/united-arab-emirates-breastfeeding-law_n_4689740.html
http://thestir.cafemom.com/baby/107460/gisele_bundchen_says_there_outta)
3. 5. Instinctual Dislike Of Procreation
Another hint that procreation is nowhere as ″natural″ as promoted is the fact that girl children are not born with an inclination for pregancy and childbirth. Quite in the contrary. They have to be subjected to severe brainwashing in order to force them on the track of motherhood.
They are given dolls and younger children to babysit, they are asked over and over again in a suggestive manner if they want to have children themselves when they are adults. All information on sex they receive is focused on procreation.
I’m not advocating to withhold this information from them at all. But it is important to point out that before a little girl hears about Lesbianism for the first time, she will have years of procreation propaganda under her belt already. Everything children learn about sexuality is subsumed in the question ″Where do babies come from?”
Even deeply feminist women fall into this trap when they are celebrating menarche as a world-changing thing, as the one happening that distinguishes girls from women (this I will write about another time).
But still girls keep up a deep sense of unease about procreation. Look at this girl here who is made to watch her own birth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0MyWpILzYA
Look at her face, her body language.
I have heard from both US citizens and Europeans that their schools actually made use of the natural revulsion against pregancy and childbirth in order to hammer home the message of safe sex; there are schools who actually show the students birth videos in order to frighten them into using birth control.
Most girls and women at some point give in. A big majority of them either has children or at least despairs trying to have children.
But some keep on resisting. Some of them do this in a conscious manner (e. g. childfree activists), some within the framework of some weltanschauung (e. g. nuns, environmentalists, voluntary extinction activists etc.). Some women find themselves restisting because they sense motherhood is at odds with Lesbian life and feminism. These are the women who are targeted with policial means: Their convictions are attacked, their values ridiculed, their worldview mocked.
Some women don’t need any form of intellectual framework for their refusal to have children. Their reaction is basic, emotional and fundamental. For them, the patriarchal backlash comes in the form of medicalisation: They are diagnosed up and down the manuals, hardly a psychological condition or a physical illness that is not suspected in them. Neurosis or hormonal imbalance, narcissism or ‘on the autistic spectrum’, women who retain their visceral dislike of pregnancy and childbirth are simply declared sick.
The medical establishment even created a specific ″disease″ to get every last child-refusing woman under the sick label:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokophobia
Tokophobia, a phobia of childbirth. A phobia by definition is a fear that is unreasonable, blown out of proportion and has little to nothing to do with real endangerment. To declare that a deep instinctual fear and hate for pregnancy and childbirth is a phobia rather than a perfectly justified concern in the face of billions of women crippled and dead in childbirth is gaslighting, nothing else.
In the nineteenth century medical authorities declared that runaway slaves suffer from a medical condition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
Some things never seem to change.
4. Stick and Carrot – Privilege and Discrimination
4. 1. Discrimination Against Mothers
Mothers often experience discrimination by state and society. This leads many feminists to the reverse conclusion that motherhood can therefore be a potentially radical act of opposition and resistance against the patriarchy.
But it is not motherhood per se leading to discrimination. It is the wrong kind of motherhood.
Mothers who are discriminated against are discriminated against because they are poor, disabled, immigrants, too old or too young, or simply because they are women and their motherhood is a convenient point to attack. Misogyny takes many forms, and motherhood is just one thing to latch onto.
A disabled, brown-skinned immigrant poor Lesbian experiences intersectional oppression for being disabled, brown-skinned, immigrant, poor, Lesbian and a woman. If she also is a mother, the hate against her may be expressed as hate against her motherhood, but there are other factors at play.
Maybe it is racism: ″Brown-skinned people breed us light-skinned people into extinction!”
Maybe it is ableism: ″I’m not saying eugenics are good, but…″
Maybe it is nationalism: ″She and her anchor baby are not one of us and never will be!”
Maybe it is classism: ″If she can’t feed it, she shouldn’t have it (and we will make sure she will not be able to feed it since she doesn’t deserve it)!”
Maybe it is Lesbophobia: ″She’ll be making her children gay/she wants to abuse her children!”
(I have heard the last with my own ears. I was told by an acquaintance it was okay for me to be a Lesbian, ″as long as you don’t abuse girls″. Seriously.)
Or maybe it is pure and simple garden-variety misogyny: Because women are hated, everything what women do is hated. Women can be presidents or astronauts, heroes and geniuses, sport champions and beauty queens, but they still will be hated. Women can in every aspect completely submit to the patriarchal ideas of their respective societies, and still will be hated. And so mothers are hated. But it is not motherhood per se that the haters target, it is the mother’s femaleness. Mothers in the workforce are not discriminated against because they are mothers; they are discriminated against because they are female and their motherhood is a convenient tool to do this.
On the other hand, there are certain forms of ″discrimination″ that shouldn’t even be framed as such, because they are merely disappointments of feeling entitled:
The lack of child care and child support enforcement, forbidding women to breastfeed in public, employers unwilling to adapt workplace circumstances for mothers, too little political representation of families, hospitals too insensitive to mothers’ ideas of ideal childbirth, poverty in old age for stay-at-home-mothers, oppressive beauty ideals, conservative mothers bemoaning the lack of mother’s salary and family tax splitting, progressive mothers bemoaning the lack of re-entry programs for mothers returning to work, the list is endless. And, as indicated by the last two examples, whatever society does for mothers, other mothers will complain that it is wrong, ineffective, harmful and oppressive. Speaking from an European perspective here, conservative women view the mere existence of child-care institutions for babies as patriarchal oppression and devaluation of mothers. Leftist and liberal women on the other hand feel the same way about money from the state to stay at home for years. Both sides claim that the majority of women would choose (choice is a very important point of rhetorics in this whole discussion) their lifestyle if society just did enough to support these choices.
This shows one thing: All the discussions about motherhood have nothing to do with motherhood as such. It is merely a discussion among women who attempt to make their personal situation more comfortable, using their privilege in the hierarchy of women. They prefer to talk about how big exactly the carrots they are entitled to should be and ignore the stick that beats those women who say no to patriarchy.
4. 2. Motherhood Gives Privilege
From a cynical perspective, patriarchy doesn’t need to lift a finger for women. There still will be babies, no matter how little is done to literally keep women and girls alive.
But as a matter of fact, patriarchy does things for mothers because it is effective to keep women committed.
The default model of womanhood in patriarchy is the virgin-then-mother. Being a mother in patriarchy is the highest position of privilege a woman can have. Napoleon once was asked which woman he admired most. He said it was the one with the most sons. This holds true for each and every patriarchal society, past or recent.
Every patriarchal society has its own way of rewarding motherhood via praise and privilege over non-mothers. By this societies establish a hierarchy of women, with married mothers at the top and childless Lesbians (in particular Butches) at the bottom.
And mothers are aware of their privilege, using it to silence or lecture non-mothers in feminist spaces. Mothers also use their privilege to derail feminism in their own selfish interests. Mothers are so very much aware of their privilege that it is not uncommon to hear them starting arguments with phrases like ″Well, as mother, I have to say…” or ″I’m a mom, and so…” They know, their motherhood gives their argument weight, both inside and outside feminist spaces.
Just imagine a Butch Lesbian standing up in a discussion forum and starting her argument with ″Well, as a Butch, I say…”. It will get her nowhere.
5. Motherhood Undermines Female Solidarity
5. 1. Mothers Choose Their Sons Over Women
It is almost trivial to state this, but motherhood is the biggest force in undermining female relationships. It is a trope that children always will come first – take one look over to Facebook, Pinterest or Mumsnet. Children, and small children in particular, are women’s top priority. This is even acknowledged in extreme right-wing circles where motherhood is the only thing that is for women at all:
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/lindsey-graham-det-bowers-south-carolina-senate-2014-elections-106007.html#ixzz30E0cQl23
The darkest side of this is mothers covering up for and remaining at the side of their sons when they turn out to be criminals. Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother had the gall to ask the public after her cannibal serial killer son was killed in prison: “Now is everybody happy? Now that he’s bludgeoned to death, is that good enough for everyone?”
Even his step-mother stood by him: ″Lionel Dahmer is now retired from his career as an analytical chemist and resides with his wife in Medina County, Ohio. Dr. Dahmer is an advocate for creationism, and his wife was a member of the board of the Medina County Ohio Horseman’s Council. Both have refused to change their surname and have professed their love of Jeffrey in spite of his crimes.”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer#Imprisonment_and_death)
5. 2. Mothers Choose Their Men Over Women
The same is true for hetero women living in partnerships with men. Not only are the worst criminals showered with marriage proposals and get married frequently, sometimes more than once, women frequently choose their male partners over other women, even their own daughters.
This woman even goes on TV to defend her despicable husband who not only left behind him a trail of brutally raped victims all over England, but also made a pass at the woman’s teenaged daughter:
BBC Real Crime: The M25 Rapist (Part 1 – 4)
This girl was lucky. She got away. Others didn’t. Like the five year old girl in Germany who for years was raped by her stepfather while her mother taped everything:
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/urteile-in-hildesheim-erzieherin-filmt-missbrauch-ihrer-tochter-a-979781.html#ref=veeseoartikel
The mother is a child care worker, by the way.
Women will even side with boys against other women without having any connection whatsoever to them. This is an article on pseudo-feminist site Jezebel about mothers posting anonymously how they regret to have had children: http://jezebel.com/happy-mothers-day-from-the-moms-on-whisper-who-hate-the-1574199180
Most comments are firmly on the side of outrage: Sad, heartbreaking, narcisstic, poor children, child abuse, mental illness, hateful, being a shitty person, ″You know having them was actually a choice, right?” and ″This person is an awful, awful human being″. Their heartbreak goes up to demanding trigger warnings, as if the headline ″Happy Mother’s Day From The Moms on Whisper Who Hate Their Kids″ was in any way ambiguous.
There are also plenty of female commenters getting all wrought up at the thought that women indeed could not like boys for being boys, often while writing about their own oh-so precious sons: ″I have tears in my eyes after reading that, and thinking about my own wonderful son and how much love he gives and receives every day.” One mother even points out that forcing herself to be comfortable with the thought of maybe having a boy after all while carrying a girl made her a better parent to the girl now. Other mothers of girls hurry to confirm that they of course would have liked to have a boy as well.
Many of the commenters who feel sad for the unwanted sons speak from the position of having been unwanted daughters. They compare their own experience of being unwanted female children in patriarchy with boys without realising that they are supporting patriarchy’s next generation of oppressors over their own female sisters. Whether they are aware of it or not, by siding with the boy and not the mother, they choose patriarchy, the very patriarchy they were rejected by.
This indeed is a choice – a choice for privilege.
Some women sense that they are literally carrying the seed of patriarchy; one commenter quotes a woman who very lucidly puts in words why she doesn’t want a son: ″She called him “the stranger with a penis inside me”.” This is nothing but the bare truth. She was not introduced to the sprog and it did have a penis, after all.
This woman (who – according to the commenter – also lost her uterus in the aftermath of the pregnancy), and others who dislike their sons may not have the courage to have an abortion or give the boy away. But at least they are not fooling themselves into patriarchal bliss like so many other women do to justify their choice for privilege.
5. 3. Lesbian Families Promote Hetero Families
Regarding Lesbian mothers in particular, I find it impossible to think about motherhood as seperate from the idea of heterosexual family. The parent-child relationship biologically and historically is the heart of heterosexual family. The idea of for example a childless hetero couple as a family is relatively new and not widely accepted.
One thing all patriarchal political movements have in common: They don’t question the institution of heterosexual family at its very core. This is even true for groups which envision a future of commune-like structures without nuclear families: No matter how communal the child-raising is organised, there still is a mother who has given birth. Real life experiments of communal child-raising also have either moved towards stronger nuclear family structures again (e. g. the Kibbutz system) or failed miserably (e. g. the European post-1968 communes).
The cultural model of the hetero family is so dominant that it is inflicted even on non-family groups, e. g. in Austrian youth groups where troubled children and teenagers of both sexes are put into shared flats by the authorities so that they can ″experience a healthy family situation″. Needless to say, this leads to severe sexual abuse of little girls at the hands of troubled older teenage boys (http://steiermark.orf.at/news/stories/2604589). This is an excellent example where the dominance of the ideal of heterosexual family with older and younger siblings, brothers and sisters, puts girls at a huge risk. They have nowhere else to go, completely at the mercy of their ″brothers″.
Lesbian families promote the dominance of the hetero family by their participation into this ideal.
Also, many women actively invite male figures as ″role models″ into their families. Motherhood removing all male presence is rare, if it exists at all. Even if a single mother raises her daughters alone, she still often upholds patriarchal tradition.
After WWII, many children here in Europe grew up in households made up of mothers and grandmothers, and there are sociologists who link this to the rise of feminism. But the absence of a man does not mean the absence of the ideal of a man or the absence of male values. To stick with the example of the post-war families, there were plenty of mothers who build up the dead/missing soldier father as some kind of puppet god (″What would your father say!” or ″How can you do this to your dead father!”). The idea that children need father figures was so strong that psychologists actively encouraged women to do this (I will write about that someplace else in more detail.).
There are plenty other forms of patriarchal ideology carried on by mothers which also make use of male puppets, e. g. religion, male-identified political ideologies or simple everyday heterosexual brainwashing within the norms of mainstream culture. Hetero mothers mostly have either the biological father, boyfriends or long-term partners stick around; if they don’t happen to have any, they often at least teach the children that they should have one.
Too many Lesbian mothers also actively invite men into their families, like the sperm donor (as a co-parent, often a gay man), male relatives (sometimes there is even an overlap, sperm donors who are relatives to the non-biological mother are not entirely unheard of) or some random male person they consider necessary to be around to provide their children with a ‘male role model’. Lesbian mothers also very often try to over-assimilate into mainstream culture and community life, as if to serve as living evidence for how homosexuals are really just like everybody else.
6. ″Feminist Motherhood″ Has Failed
Mothers often like to envision themselves in a position of power. It is the mothers who do the majority of childcare, so very often it is the mother who ultimately has to power to e. g. feed a child or not. In reality, she of course doesn’t have nearly as much power over her children as it seems to the children themselves. Controlled by the patriarchal family she is often a part of, and a broader patriarchal society, her actual power is limited. A mother continuously refusing to feed her child will most likely get in trouble with the father of the child/child protection service, tragic individual cases nonwithstanding.
Mothers also have very little general control over the development of their children. I have plenty of friends who are young mothers, and each and every of them likes to bemoan how their seemingly unique and smart children fall for societally shaped and advertised consumerist promises: If I had an Euro for every time a mother telling me how she lost the battle against the invasion of pink glitter princess stuff in their tiny baby daughter’s lives, I’d be a full-time writer by now. Mothers realise that they can’t keep their children from using swear words as soon as they are in contact with other children (mostly in kindergarden). Mothers realise that they have no real power over what their children eat: I know a mother who attempted to raise her oldest son without any sugar and battled the whole family (including the grandparents who felt deprived of their spoiling rights) to enforce this diet. By the age of four, the boy stole money from her purse and went to the gas station to buy sweets. Parents of older children know very well the begging and outright terror children can put up in the fight for clothing, mobile phones, computers etc. (I’m painfully aware that in particular class-oppressed children and teenagers often put up this kind of terror to avoid social exclusion and bullying, so I’m not even blaming them. )
In short, mothers experience their relative powerlessness daily, but still many of them fool themselves into believing they somehow have enough influence and power to raise their children towards feminism.
By this they swallowed an old piece of anti-feminist propaganda.
When women were rallying for the right to vote, one argument against female suffrage was that women already were shaping the world as mothers: ″The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world″ was trotted out back then and still is trotted out by right-wingers like this loony Texan pastor who runs a christian movie review site I came across recently. From the good pastor’s review of Mona Lisa Smile (2003) with Julia Roberts (http://www.capalert.com/capreports/monalisasmile.htm): ″Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles) was the real surprise. As the one who was initially most likely to embrace Watson’s new age teachings and as the one who was Yale law school bound, Brandwyn was the one who saw the benefits of the greatest and most important job on the planet. She elected to become the housewife and mother Wellesley tradition cherished.There is no greater job than the one you mothers have. Our future depends on you. God indeed instructs children to honor their father’s commands, but He instructs them to heed your teachings. [Prov. 6:20] Yes, God made the husband the head of the wife [Eph. 5:23], but the wife is the neck who can turn the head any which way she chooses. Mothers and potential mothers, please do not let this Mona Lisa Smile (and soap opera) kind of tripe in entertainment make you think you are any less than you are. Mothers shape the world. One child at a time.”
Another example: “No career approaches in importance that of wife, homemaker, mother – cooking meals, washing dishes, making beds for one’s precious husband and children.” (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/14/why-i-rejected-life-as-mormon-mother-religious-scepticism)
Mothers should confine themselves to motherhood instead of voting or having a career, because mothering gives them the best opportunity to change and shape the world anyway.
Somewhere along the way, feminists started to believe this twaddle.
Of course voting and careers are out of the question today, but ″feminist motherhood″ is definitely a thing and thanks to the brave actions of liberal feminists, there are plenty of women out there who demand to have their economically and intellectually idiotic decision to be a stay-at-home ″mom″ lauded as a ″feminist choice″.
6. 1. Feminists Failed To Raise ″Better Sons″
At this point in history, there are two, maybe three generations who were raised by mothers with a certain feminist consciousness. A good portion of these mothers would even be actively feminist in one way or the other.
The first big anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s, the aggressive hijacking of feminism of the 1990s and the almost lost fight for women’s liberation in the 2000s were conceived and carried out by men and their female collaborators who were raised by second wave feminists.
If that is not evidence that ″feminist motherhood″ was one big fail, I don’t know what is.
6. 2. Lesbians Fail To Raise ″Better Sons″
The same is true for Lesbian mothers. One glaring example for the complete failure of Lesbians to raise better sons is Tobi Hill-Meyer, trans activist:
http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/tobi-hill-meyer-admits-he-authored-controversial-anti-lesbian-memes/
http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/censored-from-butch-voices/
Or this precious angel here, rallying against homosexual marriage:
His mothers must be so proud.
Another example, showing the plain, low-profile, casual everyday sexism of patriarchy:
″My best guy friend said he wouldn’t date a girl because she “is a feminazi and won’t put out” but it’s ok he’d never come near me because “I look like a raging lesbian”. He was raised by a lesbian couple and has no male relatives, how he’s such a sexist fuckwad Is beyond me.”
And isn’t this the main argument of rainbow family activists?
″We can be trusted with access to adoption and fertility treatments, because we raise our children EXACTLY like everybody else and with the EXACT same outcome as evidenced by countless studies proving our children are perfectly average and norm-adhering in every regard″?
So how do Lesbian mothers envision their role, then? Raising perfectly patriarchy-adjusted children who at the same time are the generation of anti-patriarchal Lesbian liberation? We cannot have it both ways.
6. 3. Lesbian Mothers Are Inevitably Legally Tied To Men Also Thanks To ″Feminist Mothers″
There is another threat to Lesbian mothers they mainly owe to hetero mothers: The tendency of the law in the US and many European countries to strengthen the position of fathers. Despite the lies of MRAs, hetero mothers have a vital interest to keep the fathers legally bound to the children. Liberal feminists fight not only for the financial engagement of fathers, but also for their social involvement.
And the lawmaker, patriarchal as ever, is happy to oblige. In several EU states men get even visitation rights with their children when they battered the mother. Australia, ditto:
In many states, mothers can be charged for kidnapping – even when the child is only a fetus, even when the woman has to fear for her life!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2681033/American-mother-lived-Britain-16-years-allegedly-fleeing-abusive-husband-extradited-US-charged-kidnapping-three-children.html
So even if a woman has her mind set on raising the children alone, it is legally impossible. In the name of ″equality″ and due to the lobby work of ″father’s rights activistis″ lawmakers force patriarchy into each and every single house.
This is particularly true in states where Lesbians are not allowed to use sperm banks, although under the guise of ″children’s rights″ even this possibility will likely be de-anonymised soon.
So, even if there was a community of separatist Lesbians raising girls in an entirely female world (from medical care to schooling), at most places, there’d still could be a man appearing at the gates with law enforcement, sueing his way into access to the girls.
From a Lesbian point of view, this is an act of treason hetero mothers committed against us. Instead of being on women’s side, they choose their own privilege once again by siding with a male-centered system.
7. Motherhood Is Doing Patriarchy
Motherhood is at the heart of patriarchy. Patriarchy, the rule of the fathers, is impossible without mothers who make them fathers in the first place.
Mothers have sex with men or at the very least obtain sperm from men to become pregnant.
Mothers give birth to the next generation of men.
Mothers choose men and boys over women and girls.
Mothers raise the next generation of men, pouring endless energy and devotion into the task.
Mothers raise their daughters to become mothers as well and teach them to pick men over other women.
Mothers, on the other hand, have failed gloriously to raise ″new men″: Patriarchy is alive and kicking, and men contribute to it and benefit from it as ever.
Mothers do exactly what patriarchy wants them to do.
Lesbians shouldn’t be a part of all this. We don’t need more colonisation and assimilation. We need to say no.
IceMountainFire 
This is incredible! You did a brilliant job. Until the chapter, “Motherhood: the Ultimate Feminine Role” in our book, Dykes-Loving-Dykes, I haven’t seen hardly anything daring to question/criticize motherhood from feminists of any kind. It’s the most forbidden topic to even think about.
I hope every Lesbians and every woman and every girl reads this.
I especially love ” Patriarchal societies sometimes candy-coat this into rhetorics of ″the sanctity of motherhood″, ″the highest calling″, ″the hardest job″, ″the hand that rocks the cradle″. Patriarchy knows that women are more docile when they are flattered.
And so it is only logical that there is one thing each and every patriarchal ideology agrees on: women have to be mothers.”
And “My native dialect, charming and tactful as always, has a special expression to describe the washed-out appearance of a woman growing the parasitic entity of a fetus in her: She looks like puked-up barley.”
Thank you so much for this. It’s especially timely since we’ve been slammed in one of our facebook groups for daring to forbid promotion of pregnancy.
No, thank you!!! For your ongoing support and for giving me the courage to spell out what I really think.
I can’t wait to read your own chapter on motherhood!
XOXOXXOXOXOXOXXOXOXOXO
XOXOXOXXOXOOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO!!!
I have had some of these thoughts, but rarely express them, even to my closest, most radically-feminist friends. Thank you, so so much, for writing this.
You are not alone. I understand why you are mostly silent about this topic. The the social pressure is enormous, also in the face of “LGBQTIA”-activism single-mindedly focused on the “heterosexualisation” of our lives. It is right here in our community, and it is a disgrace women like you are silenced and shamed for a perfectly reasonable position.
“Lesbians shouldn’t be a part of all this. We don’t need more colonisation and assimilation. We need to say no.”
Richtig so! Ich möchte kein Kind, aber es ist auch demütigend wenn man das Gefühl hat, dass die Gesellschaft denkt, dass man sowieso nicht wertvoll genug ist, um sich zu vermehren oder ich mich behandelt fühle, als wäre ich sowieso unfruchtbar. Ich hatte immer dieses Gefühl. Als hätte ich keinen Wert und eben auch kein Recht, ein Kind zu haben. Eben vielleicht auch, weil ich für keinen Mann begehrenswert bin. Unter diesen Umständen ist es auch nicht befriedigend zu den Widerständlerinnen zu gehören. Wie kommt man auf Dauer damit klar, keinen Status und keine Privilegien zu haben? 😦 Weder als Frau, noch als Mann, noch als Mutter? Ich verzweifle völlig daran…
We are not talking about men here. Lesbians aren’t Lesbians because they are not attractive to men, but because they choose women. If you think men have anything to do with being a Lesbian, you are not right here. Also, if you feel the need to have ‘status and privileges’, you may be not right here either (let me guess, middle-class?). And please reply in English, should you want to make another point. I happen to understand you, but I want this blog as accessible as possible.
You misunderstood what I wrote. Not being wanted doesn’t make me a lesbian. What you state isn’t what I wrote. Everyone needs some kind of status. Or call it appreciation. I’m interested in how this can be achieved if one doesn’t fit into the standard role which usually gives us some kind of worth. I meant that I probably think I’m not entitled to have a child because I’m not wanted by any man. As long as there’s no alternative to feel worthy most women will try to please society’s expectations and try to get validation from men if they are in the position to decide between women and men. What do you mean by “middle-class?” If I would like to become middle class? I don’t think middle class exists anymore. It’s not a caste system where I live. These categories don’t apply to me. I’d like to be respected for example. To me that’s a privilege some people have. I’ve hoped it comes with aging but now I think it will only become worse with getting old. I’d like to be able to contribute something to society which is valued by anyone. This would give me status. Like for you writing this blog you receive status in a certain group of people who value it. I’m addressing the problem of how to live with any dignity when you don’t get this because with my values and beliefs I’m an isolated outsider. Most women are or will be mothers so how to cope with that in real life? Any suggestions? And now also many younger lesbians want to get married and have children and aren’t feminist. So be alone, frightened, and hated on until we die? What is the solution? The worse the criticsm (like in this blog article) the worse the isolation and fear? At least for me. Not for you? Reading these things makes me fear women. I also read another blog which goes in this direction. I just don’t know how to live my womanhood. Womanhood is already occupied by all these het women images which do not fit me. I want to be appreciated for my femaleness like those women are but there seems no way to achieve it. Are you bound to be a bad loser and a neuter if you decide not to conform and reject femininity? I sense your animosity against me. It’s because I don’t conform. Maybe it’s interesting for you to know that reading your blog will people label me as ‘paranoid’. Maybe the impact of your blog interests you. Exactly what you mention regarding diagnosis of “phobia”. I like your posts. They suit me. However, I’m in a vulnerable position. I’ve learned I can’t rely on women and trust them and it’s too dangerous to depend on them. They might get me into psychiatry if they feel like it or hurt me in other ways. I’m certified “mentally ill” and depend on this label to get some state social support. At the same time some blogs and vlogs are all I’ve got and I cling to them. I have no alternative. I fear a woman might want to harm me when she learns my true ideas. Vicious circle. Do you hide your attitudes from the people you meet in real life? How do you live in everyday life having these thoughts you do and it does give a sense of horror to you, too, doesn’t it? How do you succeed?
Half of what you write I don’t even understand, like your obsession with societal acceptance. They will not accept us. No matter how deep we bow, they won’t. But I’m not quite sure why we would want that anyway. Perfectly feminine, ″high-status″, hetero mothers are battered, raped and murdered everyday. No matter how assimilated and obedient a woman is, they still will hate us. That’s the point of patriarchy. So why even try?
Regarding class, of course classes exist. Right here in Europe (where I assume you are). I know class is a dirty word and anyone suggesting that we are not all equal will be met with rabid hate, but it is a simple fact. I don’t even get riled up when someone suggests they don’t. I just assume that they either lived a privileged life or swallowed the propaganda of ″pulling yourself up the bootstraps″. Kind of when poor people vote for CDU/CSU or FDP (assuming you are German, which I’m not.)
Of course I don’t hide my attitudes. I’m not horrified, however. The horrors of patriarchy are there no matter what. I can choose to ignore it and conform, but patriarchy doesn’t go away. All we can do is carve out a bit of space for us alone.
Regarding femaleness, were you born female? Do you have XX-chromosomes? Are you a adult human female now? There you go, you are a woman, inalienable a woman. I fail to see what else is behind it. Sex doesn’t go away just because of someone’s perception. I occasionally get “misgendered” (to use a word trannies and their cult followers use) and I have been called ‘it’ before. Why would I care?
And I don’t like that you trace the trouble to other women. It’s not other women who are the problem. It is men and nobody else. Women may be collaborators, but ultimately men are the source and the puppetmasters.
Thank you so much for this essay and the previous which led to this!
Since early childhood – always foisted with unwanted, ugly and useless prams and stupid dolls as toys (the vulgar, urinating kind of dolls that were “lessons in how to diaper and nurse” were the worst) I knew that the very last thing in the world that I would ever be would be a mother.
“I would rather have poured gasoline over myself and set myself ablaze than to have children,” was my truthful response some months ago to a younger woman asking me the forever-boring-because-always-predictable question of, “Do you have children?”
The frantic, falling-all-over-themselves-in-shock response from the other women listening ( all mothers) was, “You hate women!”
“No, I do not hate women. But you do,” was my reply. “Because if you believe that all that a woman is is a baby-making machine, then you truly hate women. You very much hate women. You want us all in motherhood prison cages together with yourselves,” was my response.
No. I do not hate women. I decidedly do not hate women. I have never hated women; which is why I answered the way I did: with the truth; that to be a woman does not mean being a mother.
Thank you again for this essay.
Hating women? The mind boggles. That doesn’t even make sense.
Anyway, I’m glad you didn’t let yourself being bullied into silence and thank you for your comment!
Bronte71, that was a wonderful, brilliant comment. It’s when if we say no to men who insist they are Lesbians, we are called “woman-hating.” Cruel mind-fuck and game-playing and illogical. In this case, it’s because mothers are the epitome of being female. If you refuse men and motherhood, which is the supreme role of women in patriarchy, then you must hate women because you aren’t entirely a woman if you haven’t been fucked by men. Linked to this though, is the rage mothers feel at single women and even more so at Lesbians. One feminist in our groups even complained that single women don’t help her with kids, which is het women’s feminism brought into our communities as if we are men who owe women for their kids. We don’t ask other women to help us with choices we make, so why on earth should women who chose to not have the privilege of motherhood be expected to take care of the results of a woman choosing men over women? Yes, it does not make sense, but the Lesbian-hating and the hating of women saying no to men and reproduction rarely does.
You mentioned single women expecting lesbians to help with kids. Wow, have I got a story about that one. I worked at a call center briefly after I finished school (which I don’t recommend). There was another woman there, who I think was 19 or 20 and in here third trimester. And what a surprise, the man who got her pregnant left and cut off all contact. However, the good news for this young woman is that she is/was friends with a self-hating lesbian who was in love with her. So, she managed to get this self-hating lesbian to help her pay for medical stuff, take her to the appointments and agree to help raise the kid. She (the pregnant woman) was always going on about how great “her lesbian” was and the whole thing was just supper creepy because she was always talking about her lesbian friend the way you’d talk about a cool new object you bought. I think that the pregnant woman knew that her lesbian friend was in love with her and used that to her advantage. I know that there is no way that the pregnant woman would have ever returned her lesbian friends feelings and a friend of mine who still works at the call center told me that after she gave birth, she was back to dating douchy men.
Anyway, that is just something that comes to mind when you mentioned single women expecting help from their lesbian friends with the kids. Fortunately, I am not friends with too many parents/single women, but I have had the experience of people thinking I was free to babysit because since I wasn’t a mom, I must not have anything better to do. I’m a grad student and a teaching assistance (it’s how I earn rent and food money) so I am very busy.
I also wanted to say to icemountainfire that your article was very interesting and I liked your snarky comments about things like the medical establishment.
Thank you, Bev Jo (and Icemountainfire) but it wasn’t any kind of brilliant. Just honest, is all.
It’s been some years now that I’ve stopped telling lies for society’s benefit because it is just too tiring. Besides, that same society has never had any problems with insulting me, my personal dignity together with any independent life “choices” that I have made in the small wiggle room given. Society has no problems whatsoever in bombarding defenseless girls and, later, women, with rudely invasive questions and cheap guilt-tripping. I’ve heard it all. Today, it just bores me.
However, I was stunned with the, “You hate women!” response- so vehemently voiced, because it is simply not true. Afterwards, I realized it was just another variation of the usual insult – albeit disguised- given to all child-free and/or Lesbian women. Or, “You are not a Real Woman. I am. How dare you attempt to degrade my status as mother in society.”
So it always comes down to this in patriarchy: status declaring, status defending and Othering of women who think for themselves and live according to their true personality and needs.
Bev Jo, you wrote: “Linked to this though, is the rage mothers feel at single women and even more so at Lesbians. One feminist in our groups even complained that single women don’t help with her kids, which is het women’s feminism brought into our communities as if we are men who owe women for their kids. We don’t ask other women to help with the choices we make, so why on earth should women who choose not to have the privilege of motherhood be expected to take care of the results of a woman choosing men over women?”
Oh, yes, indeed. Although I’m not certain it’s due to “as if we were men who owe women for their kids.” Instead, I see it, once again, as conflating motherhood with moral superiority: a woman’s so-called “highest calling” which confers some magical, “profound insights into life and wisdom” that child-free women can never attain. Therefore, because we are “lesser than” in status, and not “real women,” we owe “servitude” to the Sacred Mother; single women and Lesbians as servants of the servants of men. The lowest of the low.
In my experience at least, they tend to believe that our (relative) freedom and independence just dropped into our laps without us having to work very very hard and for many years for it.
I see written today – in various books and essays authored by men- that it would take only a 20% reduction in the male population (in the 15-29 year old age Testosterone Head group) to create a peaceful society. Men can write this freely without being called man-haters as rad fems always are when we state the same thiing. However, it is never stated that it would take only the same 20-to 30% of the female population refusing to be mothers to achieve that same peaceful society. Not a feminist utopia, of course, but I’m a realist. I don’t demand perfection.
A 20-30% change in those demographics would alter the entire character and “ecology” of society.
That is all that would be needed to make a more livable,much less violent, saner society. Apparently, one such existed for a very short time in England after World War I – until the Freudian backlash- what men describe as a “large number of spinsters due to the shortage of men.”
From what little I’ve read, those “spinsters” were very happy.
So, yes, Icemountainfire, motherhood is indeed the basis of patriarchy.
That comment about you hating women because you don’t want to have children is nuts, but I’ve heard it before. My parents don’t really care one way or the other if my brother and I have or adopt children (and my mom said not to expect her to be a babysitter). So, I don’t really have family pressure when it comes to that, but the way complete strangers have reacted to me saying I don’t want children is really telling. I have heard that I hate children and that I hate women too. I also had a group of libfems tell me that I should reproduce because men were jealous of women’s ability to reproduce. I am aware that there are jealous fucked up men with womb envy (look at the majority of the trans cult brigade) but having a child out of spite is ridiculous and is to me the true child-hating choice. Besides, if we’re going with the libfem logic that every choice is empowering and exists in a vacuum, then why isn’t my decision to not reproduce empowering and valid? Especially since unlike with consuming porn and convincing women that being a sex-object is empowering like they do, I am not hurting anyone by deciding not to reproduce. But whatever. Since I get such vile reactions for just saying “I don’t want children” I have decided to add the phrase “because pregnancy is like the movie Alien.” My aunt agrees with me on that one and even my mom said the comparison isn’t entirely inaccurate.
I am familiar with dudes admitting how awful they are and it being okay, but say the same thing as a radical feminist and not only do dudes flip out, but libfems accuse you of “reverse sexism”, which is about as real as “reverse racism”. And those men saying society would be more peaceful with less males are right. Women’s movements really kicked off when there were less men and more spinsters.
Your first paragraph is just great. I admire you for looking right through the propaganda and clearly seeing society at fault rather than doubting yourself or giving in to the propaganda. This form of strength and clearness of mind is rare, and indeed brilliant.
Thank you for mentioning the Freudian backlash! The damage done by Freud and everyone in his footsteps is extensive and largely unreflected even in feminist environments (e. g. the admiration for writers like Simone de Beauvoir or Shulamit Firestone who relay heavily on the principles of “psychoanalysis”).
Yes, I agree spinsters were/are generally happy. It is one of the most persuasive lies of patriarchy that women need men to be happy. There are too many hetero women complaining to me all the time for me to believe that. They complain about the littlest things and about the biggests; they are not happy on an everyday level and not with the great outline of their life. So what do men do to make them happy, exactly? They give them status in patriarchy. That’s about it.
Would you say that creating seperatist spaces is a feasible strategy for women?
Being Lesbian Separatists is what has made sense to me more than anything. It’s about the choices we make in terms of who we love and are committed to and doesn’t mean owning land or being rich. It’s the best way to live.
Bev Jo, I entirely agree with you: with one critical caveat. The following:
“The younger generation has not had to go through what we went through,” Ms. Greene said. She and other Alapine women described leading double lives when they were younger, playing the role of straight women in jobs and even marriages. “I came out in the middle 60’s and we didn’t even know the word lesbian then,” Ms. Greene said.
This is one paragraph- amongst others- that leaps out at me from a New York Times article from 2009 titled “My Sister’s Keeper” on the subject of Lesbian Separatist Communities in the United States. It was from the Fashion and Style section: not so funny or strange that. I used to know lots of “hidden’ lesbians and rad fems who worked in international fashion during the 1980’s and 90’s. I was one of them. We were not Handmaidens of the patriarchy because our deep love for women was born and grew up with us. It could never be taken away. However.
The reason the quoted paragraph leeped out at me was because, until the very late 1970’s (I was nineteen years old) I had never heard the word “lesbian”, either. Call me an aberration if you like – I wasn’t- but in those nineteen years of strict, punishing Catholic upbringing (not that I EVER believed in the pornographic fairytales of any male gods) and because I had already been raped for years in childhood, I believed that my destiny was to be raped forever because “life was just like that.” I had already despaired of life.
The knowledge at that late point in adolescence that there was such a thing as lesbian was joyous because I thought, “Here are women like me: women who love other women because they just do.”
Unfortunately, during the late 1970’s, the lesbian community in the city in which I grew up was already heavily poisoned by the BSDM scene. As a “femme” looking woman with a non-femme personality, I instantly rejected it, identifying it as more of the same old, same old domination and subjection paradigm. More oppression and rape with a female face.
Since then, “wandering lonely as a cloud” around the world, trying to find “my own kind”: so rare. I did not know until some years ago that the BDSM scene was faux lesbianism.
There are many women around the world such as myself; BDSM having done irreparable damage to true lesbianism; keeping us away. Do not hate us for that reason.
Icemountainfire, your last comment has provoked much thought and research because I respect your writing too much for facile replies. A few days, please.
Absolutely, take your time!
And sadomasochism is such a disgusting, sneaky, gaslighting abomination that I can see you perfectly well repelled by it inside the community.
Bronte, I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing with me about with that article.
I’m not hating anyone. It’s Lifelong Lesbians and Butches who are hated — so much so that we are either not shown in the media or are mentioned only to be ridiculed.
My closest friend who spent her high school years in a right wing small town in Florida remembers by 1955 how “Lesbian” or “queer” was known and used to scare girls into being het. I remember the same comments about wearing certain colors on certain days if you were “queer,” when I was growing up catholic in the Fifties and Sixties in Cincinnati.
I’m confused when women say that seeing sado-masochist Lesbians scared them away, because heterosexuality and males are where sado-masochism all comes from. My first contact with a “Lesbian” community (actually a male-worshipping bar culture run by bisexual Fems) when I was 14 in 1965 was terrifying. And that confused me about what a Lesbian meant. But that did not stop me from continuing to love other girls and keep going. My friend who introduced me to her community and was 19 clearly was being oppressed by them and self-hating as a result. It wasn’t until I was 19 and found a Lesbian Feminist community in 1970 that I more understood what was wrong with them and how they harmed her.
In regards to the article, I’m hearing a lot of young Lesbians wanting to find Lesbian land. It’s good to know that some still exist, but I’ve been a Separatist since 1972 and never lived on land. It’s been a very harmful stereotype about us.
@icemountainfire
“Half of what you write I don’t even understand” I appreciate your honesty! 🙂 English is not my mother tongue as well. I can’t express myself as precisely. I’ve thought about “class” the last days. I also came across the post about it on Bev Jo’s blog. I’m probably working class or low middle-class but I don’t know what the criteria really is. I don’t want to be middle-class. I want to be valued as I am. I want to be potentially able to be honored and respected. I don’t have much motivation because no matter what I do I have no role models of success and I’m basically a ghost, a nobody. This leads to depression. Meaning I don’t strive to be normal and don’t want to change places with a woman who is accepted because she conforms. I still prefer realness and integrity. I really don’t like to sell myself. How can I have high self-esteem?
I just don’t think it’s as easy to categorize people as it used to be. The labor market has changed, too. And it’s also not comparable to the US situation as much. I think milieus are more important nowadays. Money of course. But incomes fluctuate and unemployment has become more unpredictable.
“Regarding femaleness, were you born female? Do you have XX-chromosomes? Are you a adult human female now? There you go, you are a woman, inalienable a woman. I fail to see what else is behind it. Sex doesn’t go away just because of someone’s perception. I occasionally get “misgendered” (to use a word trannies and their cult followers use) and I have been called ‘it’ before. Why would I care?”
Yes, I’m female. But I don’t think I’ve identified as female as much as more feminine women. I went into inner retreat pre-puberty I suppose. The gap between me and other females widened continuously while my social isolation lasted. There’s the problem. I get called ‘Mrs.’ But I don’t identify with the women I meet and see. I haven’t identified with my mother. And feminine women are like aliens to me. I can’t help it. I would like to identify myself as woman but I really struggle with it. It’s what hurts me so much. ‘Mrs.’ feels so wrong to me and I just want to avoid somebody calling me that. It’s an insult to me. I feel misgendered by it. I need contact with females I can identify with. Otherwise I will stay broken and hopeless. What rewards do I have for being female when I don’t feel I belong to females? When I’m so far away from them. When feminine women are the only ones who are considered as having female qualities. And I’m just dirt. Recognized as xx but do not count?
“And I don’t like that you trace the trouble to other women. It’s not other women who are the problem.” In practice they are a problem. They are the people I have contact with. So they can hurt me or alienate me further from identifying with women and from myself. Men can’t do that. Only women can. I was raised by a single mother who did not have male partners. I didn’t have any close contact with men growing up. Since I also did not have contact to any male relatives. So I know how damaging women/mothers can be. I know they are collaborators. But I’m female. They can damage my core identity by their actions. When I have to get along with women I can’t excuse them all the time when I still suffer from my alienation and isolation and have been damaged so much it seems unlikely now I will ever recover.. If you want me to accuse men why do you accuse women in this blog post? Why do you write about them and their choices at all? It’s women who are psychotherapists. When I want therapy I need to get along with married het mothers for example. My last therapist was one. Women who are very unlikely to understand me because they don’t know anything about feminism or have never heard the word “Butch” in their life before. That’s my reality. It’s hard to get my foot anywhere in the door to begin with improving my quality of life. I can’t have therapy while other women seem to be able to get some kind of help I’m just once again left out. As I’ve always been.
p.s. my mother is a different race than I am, too. I know quite much about divison and rejection regarding females. When I’m not welcome by feminists and misunderstood by lesbians it only makes sense. I’ve called myself “collateral damage”. Obviously I’m not able to be a lesbian. But you’d probably say it doesn’t matter as long as I stay celibate. When I’m dead, too at least I forever can’t be impregnated anymore and produce a baby.
This was a really interesting and thought-provoking post.
I don’t want to be all “As a mother…” but seriously, knowing what I know now, I would not do it all again, and I would advise young women not to have children while we are living under patriarchy. I will strongly advise my daughter not to, in the kindest possible way, because although I do not regret having her, and love her very much, I realise now how much of a woman’s personhood has to be destroyed in order for her to “mother”. I want more for my daughter than my own circumscribed life. I don’t read her fairy stories. I read her books about women living alone in the forest. I read her books about witches who meet up with their friends at midnight for parties.
Patriarchy has fucked with, and completely destroyed, something beautiful, is my honest opinion about this topic.
Regarding 3.4
Midwives and doulas wax lyrical about how wonderful the female body is as a form of damage limitation because when male doctors and ob/gyns get near women, they view the female body as deficient, and the damage that is done to women’s bodies by this male interference increases exponentially. Doulas and midwives work to limit unnecessary damage by trying to convince male medical professionals that they shouldn’t meddle in the birth process unless absolutely necessary. It’s also to counteract the medical machine that insists women cannot birth without the assistance of male medical professionals and their machines. This is patently untrue and stats show a homebirth is safer than a hospital birth. It’s crazy for a woman to put herself through the male medical machine which is essentially a disgusting pseudo BDSM set-up they’ve got going in hospitals.
But yes, birth hurts like hell. When I was in labor I wanted a gun so I could shoot myself in the head. I would have done it. I had no idea when it was going to end. Why isn’t this talked about seriously? The topic is just touched upon. Drugs are known to cause other damage to the mother (increased risk of c-section) so I opted for the pain.
I’ve concluded that the pain exists in order to advise us not to have another baby. Our bodies are designed to have, at the most, one baby.
Not seven babies, like my grandmother had. Not five, like my mother had. Not eleven like the mother of a man I know. ONE. MAX. Or NONE.
Outside of patriarchy, fewer women would die and be damaged though.
And though it still holds true that the female body is awesome because of its potential, outside of patriarchy we wouldn’t need to view it as awesome, would we. Because we wouldn’t ever have to compare our bodies to the male body in order to justify our existence.
On a final note: tokophobia and drapetomania! Insanity.
Thank you for your comment and your perspective, cherryblossomlife!
Regarding 3.4, you made me think about this more closely. I agree on your stance on hospitals, and I see where you are coming from with the midwives trying to counteract patriarchal positions, although I’m also critical of midwifery to a degree as well.
(Btw, BDSM ″birth scenes″ with ″midwife dommes″ are a thing).
But it is a fact that human reproduction is a terrible mess due to basic biological factors. We can get pregnant before we are developped enough and after our bodies can tolerate it best, as evidenced by the fistula epidemic. The idiotic ″design″ of sexual maturity before we are fully grown and mentally mature I will write about in another post, I think. Then we have the problem with big-brained-babies versus small-upright-walking-pelvis which is at the core of many troubles with pregnancy and childbirth. Even a healthy woman in her prime with the best care still is ata risk to fall ill and die.
In my country we have a saying: Every child a tooth. And from what I see around me – perfectly healthy middle-class mothers in their twenties with endless support and excellent health care, some of them passionate “home-birthers″ – , this proverb is not entirely wrong. Some women I know got teeth problems from pregnancies – and this in a EU country with socialised health care and a social custom of seeing dentists every year or so (none of them smokes or drinks)! I have read that in Mongolia mothers traditionally got to drink mutton broth quickly after the birth to ″tighten″ their teeth in the jaw again, so this indeed seems to be an observable effect.
One of said ″home-birthers″ I know had to have physical therapy because she suffered long-term back damage from her two pregnancies. She was/is healthy, fit, slim, sporty, slightly taller than average and didn’t gain overmuch weight. Still her musculoskeletal system just couldn’t handle to be pregnant twice, despite some years to recover between the pregnancies.
So, I think I have to draw the conclusion that our bodies are really not that well suited to have children, in particular more than one.
I didn’t include this in the post, but here is an interesting BBC documentary:
(I like the whole series because I like the female team very much. This one is interesting too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hftGJbPXo2w)
However, that it even is biologically possible for a basically child-sized woman to fall pregnant with triplets shows how utterly messed up human reproduction is. No amount of feminist empowerment will change this. And patriarchy of course won’t either.
The professors in that documentary were amazing.
You make a good point about too-young girls being able to conceive before they have even finished growing. There is something very wrong with that. Perhaps mother nature was not prepared for the evil that would be inflicted on women. It may be that outside of patriarchy conception and birth would take a different form. Men wouldn’t be able to get near young girls to impregnate them for a start. But considering nature invented males with their faulty X, females should have been given more of a fighting chance to survive shouldn’t we. And right now birth and the way we rear young is a complete mess. Women who can should really choose not to have children while men are ruling over us.
Also, women tend to seek out tall and big men which is kind of a disaster when it comes to birth because they are then growing a genetically big baby. I think this is a socially constructed desire. I went for an Asian man myself, with a delicate bone structure and who was roughly my height, perhaps because I was subconsciously terrified of carrying a baby, and believed a genetically smaller baby would increase my chances of survival. My kids are smaller than your average Caucasian.
“Faulty Y” that should have been!
You are absolutely right that childbirth is part of a bigger biological picture which includes the brittle Y-chromosome as well. I actually thought if I should include this in the post, but I wanted to keep it short-ish.
The breeding before maturity thing happens with other animals too, e. g. guinea pigs in captivity (which is why they should be sex-seperated as early as possible, since they also have no problem with incest). I have to look deeper into this, but I really wonder if that isn’t something animals do only under duress.
This is something I want to write about in a later post about paedophilia and patriarchy. Won’t be the next post, though. It is a nasty topic.
It seems that much if not most reproduction among mammals is simply rape and sometimes the female is killed, and if she already has a baby, that is killed as well. Sea otter males also rape baby seals to death and then keep raping the body until it rots. So much for socialization. Some females band together and treat males as dangerous, which they are. It’s really not good for a species when one male kills all the babies and then all the next babies are siblings. So much for heterosex causing genetic diversity. Something went seriously wrong.
Ants and bees with their sisterhoods with almost no males have worked out the best solution for their species.
Many other species have very few males, like many spiders. But male spiders rape females too, though it’s oral (pedipalps to the vagina — like human females, female spiders have three openings) The males also risk being killed when approaching the females, as it should be.
At least placental mammals give birth to tiny fetuses.
Thank you for bringing this up – humans are one mammal among many mammals, one animal among many animals, and it is crucial to see that in context.
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So much to comment on! Thank you for this excellent post.
In no particular order:
I am SO glad to hear someone talking about how lib fems have screwed women with their nonsense about “equality”, especially regarding things that are family/child related. In the mad dash to prove that we are oh so equal, they threw away the few things where we actually had an “advantage”: custody, childcare. There are good reasons why men were not considered acceptable childcare providers (or even parents, outside of being a provider and to beat the kids into submission, oh I mean discipline…) – they are baby rapers and abusers!!! even in the best case where they aren’t molesting/ raping/ beating kids, they are simply careless, dangerous, make stupid choices, and put kids n harms way for no reason at all. Hell they may not even notice how they are deficient even in the most basic stuff. All the praise men get for doing the basics like changing a diaper and feeding with a bottle is because we all know (both men and women) what useless shits men are when it comes to anything like childcare. (and no, I don’t wanna hear how wonderful *your* daddy was- outliars do not negate the truths of the majority.)
But lib fems just could not wait to rid themselves of their “sexism”, which not only screwed all women, but also endangers children as well (girls the most, of course). Remember when a man at the playground, or as a babysitter, was considered the sign of a pedo? Now if you dare say men as a group have no business alone with kids, and the ones in child related jobs are likely abusers, *you* are bigot! Now we are stuck with scumball men, and we are supposed to be thrilled about this!
Another awful reversal.
There is NO equivalent, where men have vigorously given women power and praise, handing them advantage and entry into anything ruled fully by men. Look at the reception women in tech get, just for existing? Construction? Etc etc. As usual it’s WOMEN giving to men, hurting ourselves, whole men retain their power.
Typical patriarchy.
Second
If younger women are reading please take my advice- either don’t have kids, or don’t have any boys. I would still have had my daughter, but I would not have had a son. I have no illusion that he will be a special snowflake or Nigel. Moms have little to no influence on them, and their male traits will exist whether you like it or not. People love to say that parents are oh so influential, but that’s only because it’s easier to blame women fully when you can say they are responsible. Men get a pass, as usual. My son is all boy. So is his dad. I have no illusions and it’s hard to manage.
Thank you, freefromsexpozzies, for your comment!
We sure agree on things regarding child care and men. It is reckless to let men be around children, because there is no meaningful sign of who will be a predator and who won’t. And I sure see how men are treated differently when they deign to take up a bottle. A young single father will be admired and coddled, while a young single mother is treated like trash. I had a collegue at university who specifically took his nephew to the playground because he knew that would make the women swoon over him and he could “score”.
Childcare itself not so complicated, and wiping baby shit is not genetically determined, so it is relatively easy for men with an agenda to worm their way into childcare if they want. However, it is risky to actually let men do that for the obvious reasons.
As you say, women are too welcoming in this. And unfortunately women also eagerly want to give men all the legal access to “their” children they want. It is something they actively want, giving away the rights that other women before them fought for so hard (Caroline Norton comes to mind). On the other hand we must avoid to fall into the essential trap of declaring all women should be mothers, just because we could be.
Women eager to give rights to men over kids seem to be operating from the standpoint of women as mothers and mothers as vital to the health and success of family and children. They think this because of the propaganda extoling the virtues of motherhood and the essential place of a woman. Women mistake this to mean they have value, and are required, even important, in this way.
They are wrong, so very wrong. While women may be vital to birth the kids and breastfeed them as babies (pre formula), but they are utterly disposable otherwise. This is why in more strict patriarchies (like Islamic nations) abandoned/divorced moms only get custody until the kid is 3, maybe 5. Once the baby has been weaned, toilet trained, and is able to fend for itself a bit, Mom is no longer needed. She may be replaced, even killed.
She can make herself useful enough to remain with her family ONLY IF she is subservient enough to the men, as a fuck hole, domestic slave, worker. It’s a useful way to control women, classic patriarchy.
We have forgotten all of this in the rush for “empowerment”. Lib fems (of which I was one) see the gains we made and think this means “our” men are different, but they are the same. It’s just a difference of expression and the degree they hide their hate and agenda. We could be right back where we started if we aren’t careful.
On the childcare thing-
The only point where I had any disagreement was calling choosing to be a SAHM idiotic. While this is true for many, from an economic standpoint (assumes moms can even get or keep jobs that provide any safety), it can be really important for your kids safety. So the decision is made that’s (usually) worse for mom but (frequently) better for kids, because being with mom is better than being in many childcare situations.
This is one of the many reasons why the myth that all women should be moms must be destroyed. Few can actually have daughters in any safety, and the kids safety is paramount in a moms decision tree.
On homebirth and NCB-
Don’t get me started on this patriarchal reversal. Women in privileged places finally get to have babies with minimal pain, and much less odds of dying. So we have to reverse this with home birth. Way too many HB MWs are baby killers and utterly paternalistic and uncaring of a womens needs. It sucks because women looking to escape the mess of modern medicine will look to what they perceive as a female centered option where they are respected. What they get is even worse, more retrograde beliefs, plus a huge increase in danger and death for themselves and their babies. I’m in the state w one of the highest HB rates and these so called wise women are all over hurting, killing, and acting like hateful men, under the guise of loving women. I see the death toll up close and it is really ugly. More on this another time.
ETA:
Mothers and het women (again, I’m a mom and formerly het now celibate) are NOT more discriminated against than lesbians, especially butch ones. Our oppression is the same oppression as all other women; some places where we can get a bit of advantage, others that are a harder kick in the teeth. But this is garden variety women hate. Lesbians get all that plus an extra metric ton of hate. This gets confused because womens plight is awful all over, and some see avoiding men as a privilege. But it’s a hard won choice, and comes with it’s own dangers. The smart choice not to sleep with men is just that- a smart choice. But it doesn’t eliminate or even lessen the hate towards lesbians. Truly, lesbians are the most hated of a group already on the bottom.
I have heard moms say it’s mean to be proud of avoiding men because if insinuated that that person is superior. I say, so what? It’s not true, but even if if was, why can’t our bravest, smartest, most daring of women have this pride? Must we strip them of it like a male would? Let’s just admire and learn from those able to see the truth sooner.
Stay at home mothers are willingly delivering themselves into slavery and poverty in old age. This choice IS idiotic.
In and by itself, there is nothing inherent to a mother that makes her a better suited carer than any other person putting effort in it.
As for safety, the family is the most dangerous place for children, statistically speaking. Plenty of mothers stand by or actively help the fathers or brothers (or grandfathers or lovers or neighbours or or or) hurt their children. Some may even be genuinely unaware what is happening right under their noses. And even those mothers who make active steps to protect the child (e. g. by approaching divorce) have a much harder time to win their case against the father than, say, the neighbour. Children of SAHMs are also more socially isolated, so potential signs of abuse go unnoticed for longer than they would if there were external childminders. Plus, a SAHM is economically dependent and socially under pressure. Not exactly a powerful position. Experience tells that mothers are willing to overlook a lot in order not to lose their privileges.
All in all is to say that feminism is for women’s liberation. Women victimising themselves in the interest of children are adverse to this.
You are extremely brave to write this post! You say the things that other women WISH they could say! Now, if a hetero woman reads this post, it will hopefully awaken her consciousness, and help her to understand why society treats her so badly. For radfem women like myself, I was smiling joyfully as I read your writing! I am SO glad I chose not to have children! The truth is that I prefer a dog or cat ANY DAY over a screaming (possibly male) baby! I don’t have to worry about being an around the clock slave to the kid, I don’t have to worry about finding a dad, or getting married, or to have to deal with the stigma of the single mother, etc. I am free!! Free to accomplish anything I desire in life, and to be who I truly want to be. Some women need an identity, and find it through choosing to bear children. They feel that they are “doing what a woman is created to do,” and we all know that this is not true. I have heard boys and men who grow up to be criminals blamed on the MOTHER! No kidding! I actually have heard this ridiculous statement, and other women chiming in; agreeing with each other! Its so easy to blame women for everything that is wrong with this world. Nevermind that we are all essentially oppressed in this patriarchal society. We have to fight tooth and nail for everything we have, as well as minor stuff like simply walking down our own streets without being sexually harassed or intimidated! Sometimes I just wanna get from point a to point b with no bullshit! Sometimes that just is not possible. To bring a child into the mix is something that I choose not to do, and I enjoy my “freedom” too much to be a housewife and slave…
Blaming the mother is the safest bet to get sympathy, support and early or immediate acquittal. What baffles me most in this is the transparency of the logical fallacity behind it.
People like Freud and other women-hating “experts” were card-carrying women-haters. Therefore they started to identify mothers as the root cause of all evil. When later the first psychologists started to “work” with rapists, serial killers and psychopaths, they were already so convinced of their “mother = bad” mantra they started to suggest this to their “clients”. Criminals tell psychologists what they want to hear in order to be rewarded. Psychopaths lie habitually. And the newly-developping field of “forensic psychiatry” lapped up the criminals’ happy obligement to blame their mothers. At this point, “blame the mother” has become circular logic: If someone does something wrong, the mother is to blame. So everyone who does something wrong is ushered to blame the mother. Because we all know, if someone does something wrong, it is always the mother who is behind it. Proof? All the criminals are saying it! That can’t be accidental, can it?
The vilest thing in all this is that in many cases the mothers can’t defend themselves anymore. In the Fritzl case here in Europe the female forensic psychiatrist “expert” did not only follow Fritzl’s claim of a bad mother, she also spread his sob-story as the absolute truth in the media. She went so far as to announce the motives and mental state of Fritzl’s grandparents – sometime back in the 1910s. Fritzl’s mother (let alone his grandparents) are dead. So this “expert” has NO sources to say anything about them except what Fritzl tells her. And she takes that for pure truth, never mind he hates women so much that he already raped other women before he locked up his daugher and used his wife. Very reliable witness. But Fritzl is smart enough to tell the “expert” exactly what she wants to hear. And she is delighted to have one more psychopath validitate her gospel of the bad mother.
All this is so crystal clear.
Yeah, they always blame the mother. The way I figure it you’re the only one responsible for your actions. But, the “experts” need to remind us that women are always to blame for the crimes men commit. I am not familiar with that case but that sounds like some very biased journalism. In the USA, every time some pissed of man or boy goes on a mass-shooting (which is often) “mental illness” is blamed along with the fact that mental health care is poor here. Well, the way I see it, the problem is men. Only a tiny, tiny percentage of mass shootings in the US have had a woman or girl as the perpetrator. You can bet that even if one mass shooting done by a female got sensationalized, there would be suggestions that all women are mentally ill/should not own guns. If I suggested that men be subjected to stricter gun laws based on them committing nearly all the mass shootings, I would be accused of reverse sexism or be pointed to as an example of “toxic” feminism or feminism gone too far and those are the nicer names.
The common factor is sex. The male sex is the one committing these crimes. In addition, quite a lot of these men were white too. They will paint the target on women, particularly mothers or on the backs of the mentally ill. It’s men, not mental illness and not their mothers who are committing the crimes. Plus, how do you explain men like Ted Bundy who had a loving family? Plenty of criminals had a functional childhood.
That’s another thing, “childhood trauma/sexual abuse” is blamed for criminal behavior too. If being sexually abused as a child made people into serial killers, then most women would be serial killers.
Personally? I would encourage other women not to have kids or at least not to have boys. Besides, overpopulation is killing the planet and us, so the more people who don’t reproduce the better.
And yeah, psychopaths always lie and I’d bet money that any criminal who can get acquitted or have a less harsh sentence for blaming his mother will blame his mother.
Exactly. No need to google Fritzl, btw. Nothing out of the extraordinary. They do the same with other criminals as well. For some reason “experts” seem to think they can spot lying. What an illusion.
Just found you. Much of this, and the ‘men are not broken’ piece present stuff I think, but cannot say. None of the people I know would be able to hear it. It’s electrifying to read it, and to see other women agreeing with it. Thanks.
Actually…I do try to say things…sometimes…I wish I had more guts
I just linked you again to our Radical Feminist Coffee House discussion and couldn’t stop reading. This is even better than I remembered!!!! So much for the “age” divide among Radical Lesbian Feminists….
Thank you!!!
The age divide is about the same thing as the lie of us as white and middle class – dividing us from each other, manipulate and gaslight us. Luckily, it doesn’t (always) work.
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So very true, the voices of women without children are seen as less, in the very least, by women who have children. I experience this with my female friends that have children, including lesbians and supposed feminists (all of whom now fully embrace the current trans rhetoric that a trans woman is a woman and vice versa), I even experience this with women I know who want kids but can’t/haven’t had them. “At least they *want* kids”.
The idea that a woman can be fertile and choose to not bear children and still be as full a woman with as much authority as a mother, does not equate in some peoples minds.
I don’t agree 100 percent with everything you say here, but I do appreciate much of what you have to say. I’m taking steps to start seeking more radical women online, as they are actively disappearing in the world around me.
Thank you very much, brigidwild! I hope you stick around and find your path in radical feminism.
One thing I want to add and I really hope that you are going to understand my “rambling” is the absurdness of the whole “feminist motherhood”.
By becoming mother you are giving patriarchy and the men that hate women ultimate thing they want, you are doing them a biggest favor a woman can do in this world.
All those men spending days online and in real world talking how much they despise women, sharing tips how to hurt/kill them consider women useful only if they give birth.
Patriarchy and misogynistic men say: Women are worthless subhumans, stupid and beneath us in any way, the only thing they are good for is birthing superior beings- boys.
“Feminist” moms(especially SAHMs) respond: Ok then we will become mothers and do the thing you want, but that is somehow fighting the patriarchy and i am proving you that I am not stupid by leaving my career/job/ambitions/hobbies to stay at home and waste life, while I support the almighty husband to succeed and prosper.
How can you reconcile being a radical feminist and doing the thing the fuels the patriarchy the most and does the ultimate favor to the men that hate women.
Sorry for the delay – thank you for your comment!