Mommy Dearest
How patriarchy has conspired for millennia to force women into reproductive service
Well, Actually is an ongoing reader-supported newsletter series debunking the mythconceptions and outright lies told by those invested in upholding patriarchy. For the price of a monthly glass of wine, I’ll supply weekly facts, figures and funnies to break down all the patriarchal myths and nonsense you need to help you stay calm at the next family dinner! You can find the introduction post here.
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Firstly, to my subscribers please accept my apologies! I meant to have this published last Friday, but I have been battling an annoying cold and just coming out of it now. The bone chilling winter we’re experiencing right now is a FUCKER.
Much like the Honey, I’m Home series from a couple of weeks ago, I’ve realised this topic is so vast that I’m going to split it into a few different posts. This first one is a bit more of a broader overview and I’m making it available to all readers. (Please note as well, I go into this even deeper in my book I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage which you can buy here!)
This series will be split into three parts, and I’ll upload them each day this week:
Overview
The Philosopher’s Bone: How the Ancient Greeks set the myth in motion
Burn the Witch: How the demonisation of midwives, nurses and women in the (european) Middle Ages entrenched the notion of Good Woman Vs Bad Woman
Pretty Little Brains: How science, misogyny and male “expertise” conspired in the so-called “Age of Enlightenment” to keep women out of public life by reframing their reproductive capacity (and their obligation to motherhood) as an inherent emotional imperative.
Okay, let’s get into it!
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“Henceforth, women were not to be viewed merely as inferior to men but as fundamentally different from, and thus incomparable to, men. The private, caring woman emerged as a foil to the public, rational man. As such, women were thought to have their own part to play in the new democracies - as mothers and nurturers.”
- Professor Londa Schiebinger, Stanford University
If it’s inane opinions about women’s biological purpose that you’re looking for, there are any number of places you can find them. There’s the internet, obviously, which has been proudly boasting made up theories on the subject for around thirty years now. At thirty, the internet has officially become old enough to be considered still a scallywag of a young boy (if he’s a white man) or a decrepit old crone ready to be rolled out to pasture or sent to the glue factory (if she’s still unmarried with no children) or, as a final option, a threat to humanity who needs to be removed to the bottom of the sea (if she’s still unmarried with no children AND intends for this to remain the case until death.)
Tangential to the internet is the “podcasting space”, which is a term people use to make themselves feel better about buying extraordinarily expensive recording equipment. Perhaps one of the clearest arguments against the conspiracy theory that we live under a global feminist dictatorship is that we haven’t yet made it illegal for men to even buy microphones, let alone speak into them. If such a network of feminist tyrants really did control the political, legal and medical systems, outlawing male podcasters would surely be one of the first steps. It’s always possible that allowing men their kitchen konfidentials is part of a long-con to gather evidence for the guillotine trials later on, but I feel like the bad far outweighs the good on that front. Regardless of the dystopian future that may or may not loom in front of us, what is true is that we have to deal week in and week out with hearing men talk about subjects they are blatantly unfamiliar with, women being the foremost topic in this category.
Finally, we can look to the more formal settings of government legislatures, the media landscape and educational institutions. Here you’ll find no shortage of men eager to share their views on women’s reproductive health, biological purpose, emotional landscapes, mental fragility and overall pointlessness.
The common thread between all of these men, whether they spout off in comments on Instagram or on the floor of the Senate, is that they hate themselves. They might not think they hate themselves, but they do. Patriarchy has taught them to fear being weak and inferior to other men, but feeling weak and inferior to other men is unavoidable in a system that also relies on an established hierarchy of power to survive. The majority hate themselves for being either mid or low on the rung of that hierarchy, while the minority of those with some tangible power feel aggrieved at still having to be subservient to other men. To avoid having to think about the actual reality of patriarchy (versus the constructed reality these men devote themselves to upholding), they pretend that men as a whole are a monolith of visionary leadership and world building prowess - and that their reward for this is to be catered to and waited on by eager women desperate to be kept under the wing of their protection.
But what to do when women reject this position? What to do when women not only fail to be impressed by their status as men and to lavish attention on them accordingly, but also insert themselves into that hierarchy of power and risk forcing them even lower down the ladder? Now it’s not just men whose privileged position above them causes them to feel weak and inferior - it’s also women, many of whom could already make them feel weak and inferior (and angry!) just by rejecting them as a mate.
To these men, women pose an inconvenient paradox. Firstly, they need women to provide them with an unending source of sex, domestic labour and procreation. It’s the only salve they’ve been offered to soothe them from the persistent sting of patriarchal emptiness, which is made more profound by seeing other men have what they don’t. But they also need women to provide them with care and a welcoming bosom in which to bury the insecurities, fear and rage that living amongst other men instills in them, and to do it with the absolute assuredness of confidentiality so that other men never witness their need. Essentially, in order to to go out into the patriarchal (artificial) reality men uphold for themselves, they need women to act as a kind of emotional loading dock for all the shit they bring home with them.
Men need women far more than we need them. Fact. That isn’t to say women can’t enjoy being around men or that men are incapable of respecting women. It’s to state the obvious - which is that men cannot survive a system that holds dominance and oppression at its core if there is no one else to a) subject to being dominated and oppressed or b) turn to to alleviate the shame and guilt that comes from participating in that system.
But this is all too terrifying to confront, and so men who embrace patriarchal reality have had to establish women as peripheral objects in space, unnecessary to the purpose of world-building, innovation and leadership. This is why it’s not uncommon for the aforementioned internet commenters, podcast dickheads and sometimes even politicians to assert as fact their belief that women not only have a finite period of usefulness (the babymaking years) but that we are in essence completely superfluous to human history beyond our one allowable job of popping out more men to create the world and more women to create the men.
Of course, the world’s male population isn’t just made up of loud mouthed fuckwits who think their every thought is worth broadcasting. But just because Average Nick doesn’t buy a RODE microphone to scream about how women without babies will become lonely old hags crying into their pillows while furiously rubbing themselves with a vibrator in an effort to feel something doesn’t mean he hasn’t picked up some remnants of the old ‘women are happier when they become mothers’ propaganda of old. Unfortunately, the woman-as-natural-caregiver myth has become so deeply embedded in social belief that most people believe it to one degree or another.
Guess what? It’s not true! And I’ll prove it to you by drawing on something very few of these men have ever bothered to investigate: women’s history.
Tomorrow we’re going to delve into the obnoxious history of long dead male philosophers and their lasting impact on misogynist myth making, women’s healthcare and male podcasters!