Girl is to mother as boy is to man

In honour of International Women’s Day*, I bring you a Serious Post. I was going to write something fluffy about fashion. But then this particular issue started to really get on my tits.

Madeleine Bunting wrote in yesterday’s Guardian that pregnancy is no longer seen as something to congratulate someone on. She coined the term “anti-natalist” to describe this “bias against having babies [that] has permeated our culture”, and refers to those births that do indeed take place as “spectacular everyday acts of rebellion”.

It’s an interesting argument, and I can see her point about how motherhood flies against the consumer culture. But I take exception at the implication that not having babies is a selfish, immature, inherently consumerist choice.

Mostly, though, I take exception at the way a private decision to breed or not to breed has been politicised by all sides. And when attacks on breeders are being made, it’s women on the receiving end. As Zoe Williams recently pointed out, also in the Guardian, people seem to forget that this is — generally speaking — as mutual a decision as it is possible to make. Why? Because deep in our collective unconscious is the idea that having babies is absolutely integral to womanhood.

A 12-year-old girl getting her first period (and hence a potential mother) is often congratulated: “You’re a woman now!” Really? The law doesn’t consider her a consenting adult for another four years. New mothers tend to gush about finally feeling “fulfilled as a woman”, and conversely, childfree women are used to being asked if they don’t feel they’re missing out on a vital experience of womanhood. When these questions are directed at men, there is a full stop after “vital experience”. I have never, ever heard it suggested that a man isn’t fully a man until he’s a father.

Women, even childless women, are often described as “motherly” or “Earth mother types”. The closest masculine equivalent, in common usage, would be “avuncular”.

So it’s no wonder women have to bear the brunt of all this concern with the reproductive rate. Women who don’t have babies are called selfish (despite the very reasonable arguments that can be made that it’s breeders who are the selfish ones). Women who do, and work? Also selfish. How dare you put your career ahead of your children’s quality time! Women who have babies and don’t work? Betrayers of the feminist cause, letting their education go to waste that way.

We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. And they say feminism has nothing left to achieve.

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* It's also National No Smoking Day. Kids, don't puff. There, I've done my bit.