Around year 1985, the literature of developed countries began to feature female characters whose only dream was to attach themselves to a man who’d treat them like a baby. They very aggressively didn’t want to have a baby because they wanted to be the baby themselves. It’s been forty years but the genre of novels about middle-aged women pursuing the dream of being treated like literal babies by their male sex partners is still going strong. They buy adult-sized onesies, spend most of the day sleeping, pout, lisp, and throw the most vicious tantrums when told that it’s time to grow up.
Before then, novels about extremely childlike women whose only ambition is to be babied by often very random men were not a thing. Dickens has one such character and makes it clear that an adult-sized female baby is a curse to any man dumb enough to marry her. Literature about women showed them being interested in life, relationships, marriage, writing, reading, growing, doing. But since 1985, there’s been an inundation of novels of aggressive female de-growth. This Story Might Save Your Life is a recent example. Its main character, a podcaster named Joy, tries to figure out which man can better accommodate her childishness but never considers that an infant in her mid-thirties isn’t very cute. Especially since she is rewarded for her behavior with immense riches and every possible comfort.
In this sense, the US literature is where the Spanish novel was 30 years ago and Argentinean 15 years ago. Spanish-language authors haven’t rewarded their overgrown babies with great wealth and general adulation since Claudia Piñeiro’s A Little Luck (2015). In the Anglophone world, self-infantilizing women are still in literary demand.
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