Afraid of Motherliness
August 21, 2013
HERE is a very good piece by Simcha Fisher at the National Catholic Register about a gender studies professor who has decided that breastfeeding her son was bad for her family because it gave her an unfair advantage over her husband, who could not develop the same kind of closeness with their son. Fisher writes:
She’s been implanted with all sorts of false sensitivities, which tell her something is wrong — even when everything is, by the standards and instinctive delights developed over the entire course of humanity, going just like it’s supposed to go.
This is what happens when you study gender in isolation, like a bug in a petri dish, rather than approaching it in its natural habitat, which is a world oriented toward something higher than equity: love. Gender is not some kind of evolutionarily developed genetic strain that shifts and transforms according to the demands of society. It’s deeper than that. The day-to-day specifics of gender roles can legitimately shift and change. But when a mother feels guilty for feeling like a mother, then we’ve engineered the kind of problem that causes civilizations to fall.