Monday, January 12, 2009

Feministing's Modest Proposal   [Mark Hemingway]

You should run on over to the weblog awards awards and cast a vote for Jim Treacher for "Best Humor Blog." However, can I express for a moment my dissappointment that Feministing isn't one of the options? There appears to be a bias against blogs that are unintentionally funny. See here:

Along with the emancipation of women, sexual liberation has become very much a part of politics around the world. To the conservatives, both these issues challenge ‘family values’.

But what if there were no families? What if we say no to reproduction?

My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression. Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered (as I analyzed here) and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent money the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism.

So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, reproduction has to go. Of course there is an ecological responsibility to reduce the human population, or even end it , and a lot was said about that on the blogosphere recently (here, and here), but an ecological consciousness is not how I came to my decision to remain child-free.

Because reproduction is seen as a psychological need, even a biological impulse, that would supposedly override any rational concerns arising out of a sense of responsibility, ecological or otherwise, I would like to propose emotional conditioning to counter such a need or impulse to reproduce. Using my own life as a case study, I conclude that I came to a resolve not to reproduce through largely unconscious emotional reactions . I like children, but every time I fantasized of having one, I felt pangs of guilt over how for this 'impulse' of mine, someone else would have to put their body on the line.

I'm tempted to believe this really is some elaborate satire but the commenters seem to be embracing it earnestly, so that's an indictment of the Feministing community in and of itself. Still, I'm waiting for someone to bring this argument to its logical end: If reproduction and families are so oppressive why not just avoid men altogether? I think I speak for the vast majority of men when I say that avoiding particularly virulent and illogical strains of misanthropy masquerading under the rubric of "feminism" would be a mutually beneficial arrangement.

(h/t: Ace)

01/12 02:59 PMShare