Feminism Taught Women Of My Generation
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Written by: jakiechesummit
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Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 |
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So I spent my childhood trying to prove my worth-despite my gender. When my brothers swung high across a sandy creek on a rickety old rope swing, I would swing even higher. When they picked up a snake, I did too. When they fed a grasshopper to a frog, I watched. Surrounded by seven rowdy brothers, I measured my success in a soccer game on how many speckled bruises I got, whether or not I was bleeding anywhere, and how badly I had frightened people with my snarling defensive plays. My mom cried when I told her I was thinking about becoming a fighter pilot.Yet when puberty came, and I started growing breasts that hurt when I was tackled, and when my broad-shouldered brothers started throwing footballs the length of the park, I secretly despised myself.Feminism taught women of my generation that anything a man can do, a woman can and should do, too. While appealing, this theory is based on faulty logic and, perhaps, a bit of wishful thinking. But mostly, it is based on a world in which there are no children.Or consider the recent study that indicates that, while women are more liberated than ever, we are also unhappier. While the cause of such unhappiness remains elusive, I can vouch at least for this: The identity of a modern feminist is shattered by motherhood. I spend my days feeding, cleaning, cooking, cuddling, wiping dirty little body parts and putting them to bed on time so that I can start the whole routine on the morrow. My life is in its third year of this constant state of vigilant babysitting, and it will linger for another decade at least. No weekends, no holidays. No pay or health-care benefits.
G.I. Jane feminism, no matter how lofty its goals might be, cannot change the fact that women are biologically programmed toward motherhood, and smart motherhood at that. In a study on university students who were randomly propositioned for casual sex, 75 percent of the males agreed, but not one woman was interested. Women instinctively know that once we become pregnant, we will undergo powerful changes over which we have no control, and that, suddenly, we will be responsible for two lives instead of just one.Our bodies will become stretched and distorted, our hormones will drive us nutty, and, if we don't have a stable father-husband figure in our lives to lean upon, provide for us, and protect us-all three of us!-we will feel all the cruelty and bitterness of our situation. Of our child's situation.And then, the child arrives and we are utterly helpless. We shuffle around the house in our pajamas with the child in our arms, trying to do everything with one hand that we used to do with two: make breakfast, clean up breakfast, undo our pants to go to the bathroom, brush our teeth, apply mascara. And then we cry out our mascara because we're exhausted and look ridiculous wearing pajamas at three o'clock in the afternoon.
You see, the point at which modern feminism breaks is the point at which the reality of a woman's fertility kicks in.As girls, we are taught to excel at everything, to do well at school, to go to college and get an education. And indeed, women now outnumber men enrolled as university students by a staggering 60 percent. Young mothers-like me-might even be frowned upon because we gave up our freedom too early in life. Inconvenienced by the drudgery of motherhood, we will miss out on what really matters-a career, of course. Many women, however, are finding that, when the time is finally "right," their biological clock has already expired. Essentially, we are told that we should become whatever we want as long as what we want isn't motherhood. And so modern feminism teaches us to belittle our greatest potential, the very thing we can do that men cannot, our ability to give and nurture new life. But when we cannot do that while working 60 hours a week without breaking, modern feminism would tell us we have failed. Take the recent example of a single mother from Georgia who was arrested for failing to show up for military deployment because there was no one to take care of her ten-month-old son. She refused her duty to her country on the grounds that if she left, her son would become a ward of the state. In the movies, as she tumbled around in the mud and fired off heavy artillery, G.I. Jane never had to think about that one.
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Source: Feminism Taught Women Of My Generation
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