A good keyboard-chum of mine reminded me the other day about all of the overwrought histrionics surrounding my supposed advocacy of male infanticide. I’ve found it all so amusing, really, the way the slightest anti-male thing gets purposefully misconstrued as violent, irrational, and haphazard, that I haven’t felt the need to counter it with any sort of dignified response. For me, the raving attacks on me have only served to show my opponents in all their saturated male-identification. But, for clarity, I thought I’d revisit that situation.
This is all I said:
We could do this [free ourselves from men] by refusing to be mothers to males. Even in places where abortions or other adequate birth control are lacking, women could refuse to nurse male neonates.
Then, Bird, whoever she is, in the very next comment, equated this, refusal of reproductive (and sexual) services to males, with killing them. Apparently, If you’re not offering up your wombs and extended nipples to the bastards, you’re KILLING THEM, I tell you! Says Bird:
I’m sorry, since when did feminism, even radical feminism, justify advocating infanticide?
Now, I, being the stickler for principle that I am, didn’t feel a need to justify such exaggerated offense with a response. So, knowing that I had not advocated any sort of infanticide, I told her exactly what I thought about infanticide, seeing as how she’d brought it up. And, yes, if the topic is infanticide, I still believe exactly as I did last year, that it would be a better lot than many women are offered in this world. And, I know this may be hard to fathom, but I can believe that without advocating its perpetration against men.
I’d say infanticide, especially in the cases of very young infants, is certainly more merciful than the murder and/or other abuse of fully aware women and girls.
That right there? I still believe that. I stand by it. Men are crueler to girls and women in allowing us to live than we need be in getting rid of them. How’s that for irony?
In any event, and just to be perfectly precise about my perspective, I know that we must drastically reduce (if not eliminate) the male population in order to assure girls’ and women’s safety from prostitution, marriage, rape, sexual indebtedness, and reproductive slavery. And, yes, I see birth control, abortion, and abandonment as being the route toward that reduced (or eliminated) male population.
Abandonment is not murder. Certainly, men faced with the prospect of abandoning their daughters aren’t jumping to the frenzied conclusion that it’s exactly the same thing as just snapping their little necks. Men go on with their lives, generally never to consider their abandoned little girls again, except in some cases when men come back tired of life’s thrills expecting a little of the family time they missed out on. (And they’re generally obliged.) Yet, mothers so deeply identify with their little patriarchs that, at least at that forum, they immediately leap to exactly this conclusion.
Considering the number of unhinged over-male-identified women who have followed me to other web places calling me a baby killer and waving this thread in people’s faces as proof of my everlasting insanity, with no doubt in their minds that they’ll be believed, I’d say their type of stand-by-your-son invective is pretty common and socially approved. In other words, it’s not radical.
By the way, saying that something isn’t radical isn’t an insult, you know. It’s not radical that I’m about to drive 5 miles across a tangle of intersections and overpasses in a car spewing pollutants to a desk job (that I only got because of my special set of privileged circumstances) in a capitalist economy. But I do just that five days a week every single week of the year. I don’t need anyone to pat my woolly head and tell me that my doing this is a good, radical thing, or that it makes me a good person. In fact, I don’t want anyone to console me about my complicity in systems of oppression. I certainly don’t consider that sort of condescendingly tender treatment to be friendship in any way.
So, I’m off to play my part in oppressing black and brown women and girls harvesting minerals from dumps and landfills and mines for the parts in the computers I use, and black brown women and girls living next to the chemical factories that make the plastic on just about everything I use, and black and brown women cleaning my office, and degree-less women, plenty of whom could do my job but over whom I was privileged (and will continue to be). I’d rather talk about my very real complicity in the suffering of other women and girls on the planet. I want to talk about the very real ways in which women my age are being compelled to add to that complicity, motherhood being a major way. I want to talk about the way that mothers wield this aura of (patriarchy-ordained) sanctity against other women, who are never allowed to critique the institution lest we offend Mothers.
We can talk about my diet of male babies when I actually eat one; until then, it is merely a reactionary diversion from the facts at hand and my arguments in light of them.
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12th-August-2008
