So, ok.
posted by Sybil Vane
This is going to be long.
No lie, the thread on that post below about friends and their relationships to one's kid made me feel crazy. And it's come up again enough that I want to take a few to revisit, revise, clarify. In a long and intertextual way. I didn't give that much space to the claims about kids and bigotry in the original post because, frankly, I didn't think they were all that controversial. They are, in large part, rehashes of shit B has written here for years. Some examples ...
From this post:
From this post:
And then this one:
Now, to what I wrote. I want to pull out the paragraph, the one of thirteen, that everyone responded to:
There were several comments I made that I feel like expand on this helpfully, and there were lots of comments by readers, both helpful and not, that nicely illustrate some of the problems here, but the post is getting way too long, so I'm gonna not pull them. Instead, I will condense and reiterate some things -
I do know that my rhetoric got increasingly polemical as the thread went on, but seriously, y'all, that is a way measured contention up there from the original post. It would be a measured thing for my real-life self to say, let alone for Sybil Vane to write on a blog called Bitch PhD.
I understand the extent to which people understand their 'I don't like kids" attitude as connected to their feminism. One of the very important works of feminism has been to authorize non-child-bearing/non-maternal subjectivites for women, and that has only been shakily accomplished. I understand, or know of and intellectually understand at any rate, the cultural pressures for women to be mothers and to feel maternal. I endorse wholeheartedly the rejection of those pressures. I reject the naturalness of maternity or maternal feelings.
I also understand that the deployment of an analogy about hatred of other marginalized groups was problematic for people. And I understand why - an analogy implies equation or comparison, it makes a rhetorical gesture that seems to level differences and eliminate nuance. There is, of course, a reason that some people ban analogies. It's rhetorically cheap, I concede. But listen: the way I deployed it in the first place was to ask people to think about how it sounds when they say, "I hate X people." And then, by extension, to think about why it is that it sounds assholeish when they say such things. In other words, it was with awareness of the progressive sophistication of my audience (or hopefulness of it anyway), that I used the device. With awareness that bigotry and stereotypes emerge from unexamined privilege and assumptions, that the presumed sensibility of this blog's readers is such that they know enough to be too damn embarrassed to ever say something like, "I really hate it when there are a ton of deaf people at the store," and that a quick examination of the reasons *why* they would feel shameful about saying such a thing should reveal that those same reasons apply to a statement that places "kids" in the same spot.
I never anywhere suggest that the struggles or lived experience of children are equivalent to or look like even the struggles of gay people or Arab Americans or the blind. I took care not to. I can understand why the rhetorical gesture seems to veer close to this, and again, I concede it was a kind of shock tactic, but really, this is not something I suggested. I do in fact continue to think that it's intellectually credible to think about why some biases are stigmatized and some aren't. In that service I deployed the analogy.
Ok, so. Some people have pointed out that I am being an asshole by accusing people of being bigots when bigotry against children is not an actual thing that exists. In some cases, people compare the non-oppressed status of children to the actually oppressed status of gays/Jews/the disabled/whatever. This oppression Olympics game is not interesting to me. "I am actually oppressed, and any discussion of this bigotry offends me." Just not interested. Until the oppression gold-medal winner is raised up we aren't allowed to think about the runners-up? Good luck with that. Or with thinking in any way about your oppression as you use a computer and the internet and communicate in English.
Does bigotry only exist if we can measure oppressive effects? That is, if you are a bigot alone in a forest, are you still a bigot? People remind me all through the comments that they are never mean to women and children, they do their best to be civil, they just don't enjoy the time. And as I say repeatedly, whatever. I don't care what you feel really, insofar as I can't ever really know how you feel, just how you act. Act decently, that's really the baseline. But there's really no reason why I oughtn't have an opinion about the feelings you feel authorized to express. And to attach values to the source of that authorization.
Certainly no one disagrees that children are a vulnerable and exploited class. Not up for debate. And we know they are more vulnerable to all sorts of things (poor nutrition, economic disadvantage, laxly enforced regulations about product safety, insular individualistic behavior) than their adult counterparts. I don't know, as I asked in a recent comment, what precise data you would want to see if you wanted to see information about the systemic and institutional implementation of anti-kid bigotry. I assume you want to know that children suffer as a result of your hating them before you feel compelled to modify your attitude, yes? Is that a good-feeling position? Obviously, employment stats, earning potential, imprisonment rates, these are not the right metrics. I do think this should be legible to everyone: when you drop a friendship with a person because he has become a parent, when you roll your eyes or make a shitty comment to a parent or kid about that kid's (not pathological or destructive) behavior in a public place, the kid may not experience what you are putting out there, but you alienate/isolate the parent. You do. And that sense of alienation/isolation trickles down to the care the kid receives and to the messages she gets about her role in the world the role of parenting in society at large. It does.
People repeatedly justified hating kids on the basis of kidness being temporary. Those unlikeable behaviors are the result of incomplete socialization, they say, and will eventually be left behind. I will treat, this logic implies, that creature as fully human when she leaves behind her partiality. The silliness of this should be apparent - firstly, because while each individual kid may grow up, kids as a class will always exist (I think I ripped that line from Twisty but I can't look for it); secondly, because it full-on admits the figuring of childhood as something to be gotten over, a handicap to be cured of, a regrettable but necessary stage on the way to full humanity. Which, I assume, is again relinquished once one enters a stage in life, either by virtue of age, disease, or accident, when one is not capable of fully autonomous and self-contained existence. This is - and here is my most basic point - the thing you are supporting when you say, "I hate kids," and then insist on claiming it is just a social preference, a little personality quirk, perhaps one you even feel proud of, and one that no one has any business assigning a moral value to. You are contributing to the discursive reduction of children to sub-human status. Childhood is not a bad smell you get to hold your nose around until it passes. It is an iteration of humanity.
When I called this attitude antifeminist, I didn't even originally mean the thing some readers mentioned, which is the extent to which kid hatred tends to disproportionately isolate women and/or be a veiled discursive gesture towards critiquing mothering. What I mean is that as an intellectual/activist sensibility, feminism (and so here I guess I mean something more like radical feminism than cultural feminism - terms that may not really work as oppositional, but for illustration's sake ...) is fundamentally opposed to patriarchy. That is, to systems that are based on oppression/pathologizing of the powerless by the powerful.
[ETA: I just noticed that blogger published this without my final concluding paragraph - it had FLOURISH!! - which I can't find the energy to remember/retype, so I will conclude with this instead.]
No lie, the thread on that post below about friends and their relationships to one's kid made me feel crazy. And it's come up again enough that I want to take a few to revisit, revise, clarify. In a long and intertextual way. I didn't give that much space to the claims about kids and bigotry in the original post because, frankly, I didn't think they were all that controversial. They are, in large part, rehashes of shit B has written here for years. Some examples ...
From this post:
Why do we take the institutional status quo as authoritative, as normative even, and NOT take basic facts of human biology as authoritative and normative? Yes, individuals can choose not to have children. More power to them. But collectively, on both the social and species level, we cannot make that choice. Being living creatures and all. Moreover, the economic disadvantages of having kids pretty much accrue because we've all agreed to alienate our labor. Ok, fine, but let's don't pretend that it is the children, rather than the social structure, that is the "choice."
From this post:
[Children] are human beings. Actual members of society. Who, yes, happen to be in a dependent position. Nonetheless, inasmuch as they are members of society, they have a claim on society to help care for them in their dependence so that they do not starve. Now, since they have parents, there are many aspects of their dependence that society needn't bother with: y'all don't have to wipe Pseudonymous Kid's ass, you don't have to give him his bath, you don't have to read him mouse books over and over and over again. [...] But yeah, goddamnit, you do have to deal with his presence in public spaces, even if he's acting like a little turd; you do have to recognize that because I have all that other stuff to do, I might be slightly less at the disposal of my employer for a few years (then again, no one should be at the disposal of their employer 24/7 anyway); you do need to deal with the times when I bring him into work because there is work I can't put off and there is no one else who can care for him on that day; and you do, I think, have an obligation to figure out social and economic policies that take into account the fact that this is not only my life, but the life of most adults at some point sooner or later. And in exchange, my friends, I and he have an obligation to deal with you when you have had a shitty day and are being a turd in a public space; or when you have to leave work early to pick up a friend at the airport or because you have opera tickets or a hot date; or when you have to call in sick; or when your illness turns out to be acute and far more expensive than any individual can afford; or when you get old and need to retire, and yadda yadda yadda.
And note this: I am not saying you have to deal with children because someday they will deal with you; or that other people have to deal with you because you have dealt, or will at some point deal with them. I am saying we have to deal with each other because refusing to do so is wrong, anti-social, anti-human. Everything else comes after that.
And then this one:
[T]his "children are okay, as long as I never have to deal with them" thing--including the resentment of people who get "more" resources because their health insurance covers their family, or because their kids get tuition breaks at the colleges where they teach, or who breastfeed in public, or whatever. Children are part of society. They are human beings. They are not exotic pets. They get to go into restaurants; they get to eat in places other than public bathrooms; they get to have bad days; they get to have their needs met, too.
Yes. Kids have certain needs that are specific to being kids. [...] Admittedly, other people are inconvenient sometimes.
Now, to what I wrote. I want to pull out the paragraph, the one of thirteen, that everyone responded to:
Now, maybe I meet someone who doesn't necessarily dislike Little V in a personal way but who is "not really a kid person." And here I mean not necessarily someone who doesn't want to have kids or who doesn't have any experience being around kids or someone who lives a lifestyle that doesn't produce any exposure to kids. I mean someone who is expressive about a "I don't really like kids" attitude or a "I hate going to restaurants or museums where kids are making noise" attitude or a "of course it's fine for other people to have kids but I don't want to be around them" attitude. This sort of thing is a deal-breaker for me. I've gotten pretty rigid about it in recent years as I become more assured in my certainty that it's an anti-feminist attitude and you suck if you hold it. Kids are a vulnerable, disempowered, inevitable portion of the human community and you do not get to "not like" them or to wish that weren't a part of your public space. Not allowed. I invite you to swap out "kids" for any other disempowered community in the above phrases ("women," "schizophrenics," "hispanics," "the blind") and notice what an asshole you sound like. If you are the type to espouse this position, you and I are never going to be close.
There were several comments I made that I feel like expand on this helpfully, and there were lots of comments by readers, both helpful and not, that nicely illustrate some of the problems here, but the post is getting way too long, so I'm gonna not pull them. Instead, I will condense and reiterate some things -
I do know that my rhetoric got increasingly polemical as the thread went on, but seriously, y'all, that is a way measured contention up there from the original post. It would be a measured thing for my real-life self to say, let alone for Sybil Vane to write on a blog called Bitch PhD.
I understand the extent to which people understand their 'I don't like kids" attitude as connected to their feminism. One of the very important works of feminism has been to authorize non-child-bearing/non-maternal subjectivites for women, and that has only been shakily accomplished. I understand, or know of and intellectually understand at any rate, the cultural pressures for women to be mothers and to feel maternal. I endorse wholeheartedly the rejection of those pressures. I reject the naturalness of maternity or maternal feelings.
I also understand that the deployment of an analogy about hatred of other marginalized groups was problematic for people. And I understand why - an analogy implies equation or comparison, it makes a rhetorical gesture that seems to level differences and eliminate nuance. There is, of course, a reason that some people ban analogies. It's rhetorically cheap, I concede. But listen: the way I deployed it in the first place was to ask people to think about how it sounds when they say, "I hate X people." And then, by extension, to think about why it is that it sounds assholeish when they say such things. In other words, it was with awareness of the progressive sophistication of my audience (or hopefulness of it anyway), that I used the device. With awareness that bigotry and stereotypes emerge from unexamined privilege and assumptions, that the presumed sensibility of this blog's readers is such that they know enough to be too damn embarrassed to ever say something like, "I really hate it when there are a ton of deaf people at the store," and that a quick examination of the reasons *why* they would feel shameful about saying such a thing should reveal that those same reasons apply to a statement that places "kids" in the same spot.
I never anywhere suggest that the struggles or lived experience of children are equivalent to or look like even the struggles of gay people or Arab Americans or the blind. I took care not to. I can understand why the rhetorical gesture seems to veer close to this, and again, I concede it was a kind of shock tactic, but really, this is not something I suggested. I do in fact continue to think that it's intellectually credible to think about why some biases are stigmatized and some aren't. In that service I deployed the analogy.
Ok, so. Some people have pointed out that I am being an asshole by accusing people of being bigots when bigotry against children is not an actual thing that exists. In some cases, people compare the non-oppressed status of children to the actually oppressed status of gays/Jews/the disabled/whatever. This oppression Olympics game is not interesting to me. "I am actually oppressed, and any discussion of this bigotry offends me." Just not interested. Until the oppression gold-medal winner is raised up we aren't allowed to think about the runners-up? Good luck with that. Or with thinking in any way about your oppression as you use a computer and the internet and communicate in English.
Does bigotry only exist if we can measure oppressive effects? That is, if you are a bigot alone in a forest, are you still a bigot? People remind me all through the comments that they are never mean to women and children, they do their best to be civil, they just don't enjoy the time. And as I say repeatedly, whatever. I don't care what you feel really, insofar as I can't ever really know how you feel, just how you act. Act decently, that's really the baseline. But there's really no reason why I oughtn't have an opinion about the feelings you feel authorized to express. And to attach values to the source of that authorization.
Certainly no one disagrees that children are a vulnerable and exploited class. Not up for debate. And we know they are more vulnerable to all sorts of things (poor nutrition, economic disadvantage, laxly enforced regulations about product safety, insular individualistic behavior) than their adult counterparts. I don't know, as I asked in a recent comment, what precise data you would want to see if you wanted to see information about the systemic and institutional implementation of anti-kid bigotry. I assume you want to know that children suffer as a result of your hating them before you feel compelled to modify your attitude, yes? Is that a good-feeling position? Obviously, employment stats, earning potential, imprisonment rates, these are not the right metrics. I do think this should be legible to everyone: when you drop a friendship with a person because he has become a parent, when you roll your eyes or make a shitty comment to a parent or kid about that kid's (not pathological or destructive) behavior in a public place, the kid may not experience what you are putting out there, but you alienate/isolate the parent. You do. And that sense of alienation/isolation trickles down to the care the kid receives and to the messages she gets about her role in the world the role of parenting in society at large. It does.
People repeatedly justified hating kids on the basis of kidness being temporary. Those unlikeable behaviors are the result of incomplete socialization, they say, and will eventually be left behind. I will treat, this logic implies, that creature as fully human when she leaves behind her partiality. The silliness of this should be apparent - firstly, because while each individual kid may grow up, kids as a class will always exist (I think I ripped that line from Twisty but I can't look for it); secondly, because it full-on admits the figuring of childhood as something to be gotten over, a handicap to be cured of, a regrettable but necessary stage on the way to full humanity. Which, I assume, is again relinquished once one enters a stage in life, either by virtue of age, disease, or accident, when one is not capable of fully autonomous and self-contained existence. This is - and here is my most basic point - the thing you are supporting when you say, "I hate kids," and then insist on claiming it is just a social preference, a little personality quirk, perhaps one you even feel proud of, and one that no one has any business assigning a moral value to. You are contributing to the discursive reduction of children to sub-human status. Childhood is not a bad smell you get to hold your nose around until it passes. It is an iteration of humanity.
When I called this attitude antifeminist, I didn't even originally mean the thing some readers mentioned, which is the extent to which kid hatred tends to disproportionately isolate women and/or be a veiled discursive gesture towards critiquing mothering. What I mean is that as an intellectual/activist sensibility, feminism (and so here I guess I mean something more like radical feminism than cultural feminism - terms that may not really work as oppositional, but for illustration's sake ...) is fundamentally opposed to patriarchy. That is, to systems that are based on oppression/pathologizing of the powerless by the powerful.
[ETA: I just noticed that blogger published this without my final concluding paragraph - it had FLOURISH!! - which I can't find the energy to remember/retype, so I will conclude with this instead.]
Labels: bigotry, dead horses, sexism, women and kids
Posted at 5:50 AM
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