For people who keep on about the evil of binary thinking, this sounds pretty damn binary. And for some mysterious reason, what’s “good” is always useful and convenient to neoliberalism.
Also, I would hope that a childish turn of phrase such as “society makes us think” might be avoided in academic discussions but no such luck.
These are all US academics, so the robotic uniformity is not surprising.
I’ve been sitting here all day, listening how being a mother is this horrible thing when we all know it’s really the best. Why are we saying things we know to be untrue? Even when the writer analyzed expresses great joy at being a mother, we immediately have to conclude that she’s a stupid, brainwashed victim. Sounds like a bit of a projection to me.
This is your daily reminder that one of the most dangerous things to a child’s physical health and sanity is a neurotic parent with high anxiety and a non-existent sex life:
There’s no chance these men have been properly laid since the time the children in question were conceived.
This is not a pandemic of the vaccinated or unvaccinated. This is a pandemic of the unfucked.
Nothing bugs me more than seeing female academics whom I know personally and who adore their husbands and children go on and on at academic conferences about how important it is to “subvert the normative expectations about the importance of marriage and childbearing” and how you can be alone and still happy.
Let the women who are alone and happy tell us about it. But it all sounds quite ridiculous when a happily married mother of three who keeps sharing packets of her kids’ photos bleats about the heavy burden of normativity.
On the positive side, I did ask why “freedom of choice” for women is limited to the freedom to abort a pregnancy and never includes the freedom to have children. Especially given that far more women in Spain report not being able to have as many children as they want than women who report not having had as many abortions as they wanted. Obviously, nobody had an answer but two young female scholars nodded vigorously.
This “traditional gender role” we keep denouncing is increasingly a class issue. It’s kind of sick to promote a single, unattached lifestyle when you can afford not to live it yourself and so many women (especially in Spain) simply can’t afford the normativity that they long for. I completely support everybody’s right to be married or single as they wish but it’s an undeniable fact that lonely, unattached, fluid subjects are more profitable economically and useful politically. It used to be the opposite but that system of economic and political relations is long dead.
We keep fighting the battles of 1852, which makes us look like total idiots.
Remember, it’s the grandchildren of these young commissars that will lead us out of this mess. Not by doing anything but simply by feeling absolutely nothing but contempt and boredom when hearing today’s “diverse slogans.”
Of course, we don’t have to wait for the grandchildren of today’s 18-year-olds. We could stop reacting to the slogans ourselves. However, the trick is that after the rot has gone this deep, everybody has to become indifferent to the slogans. 100% of people. It doesn’t matter that there will always be cynical operators eager to exploit the slogans for personal gain. That’s unimportant as long as nobody takes the slogans seriously.
To give an example, if somebody posits a question like this one, not a single person who isn’t completely senile would think, “yes, there might be something to this”:
Do you think Kamala Harris is receiving more criticism because she’s the first woman & woman of color to serve as vice president? White House Press Secretary @jrpsaki answers with a resounding "yes" and adds the criticism has been "harsher" because of Harris' identity.#RuleWithUshttps://t.co/vbRt9pbGEB
It doesn’t matter if people still publicly proclaim this silliness as true. Freedom comes when nobody who isn’t severely cognitively impaired can seriously believe that Harris is being criticized because she’s “a woman of color.”
Since that’s impossible right now, we’ve got to wait for it to happen naturally. Herd immunity to the warm feelings of sweet self-righteousness one can derive from these slogans develops in the third generation.
I know this is not what anybody wants to hear but I honestly don’t believe anything else will work. This is religious fanaticism without a god. I grew up in a country that was built by exactly this kind of fanatics and destroyed by their grandchildren who couldn’t be assed to believe any longer. Since the woke fanatics are into self-worship, they are shitty parents who can’t transmit their faith down the line.* The children are too beaten down to react at all but the grandchildren have enough freedom to not care.
So yeah, by the beginning of the next century, this crazy stuff will be done for sure.
* And that’s how they differ from a traditionally religious society where there is an immutable law outside of the self. That kind of society can last for a thousand years.
P.S. See here:
How do you think her children are going to feel about this stuff when they grow up? Or any children who grow up on this? What about their children? What are the chances they won’t roll their eyes at the silly old lady prattling on about the frumpy old systemic racisms? I adored my great-grandma but it never occurred to me to share her sincere Communist beliefs. Not that she ever tried to inculcate them into me because even though she was a Stalinist (literally), she wasn’t as far gone as the people who buy the “anti-racist baby” books.
I feel sorry for the poor tykes of the batshit crazy momma, of course, but we all carry out burdens.
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