Evolutionary Dead-Ends

Here is another exam­ple of what extreme fem­i­nism hath wrought:

My under­stand­ing of repro­duc­tion is that it is the basis of the insti­tu­tions of mar­riage and fam­ily, and those two pro­vide the moor­ings to the struc­ture of gen­der and sex­ual oppres­sion. Fam­ily is the social insti­tu­tion that ensures unpaid repro­duc­tive and domes­tic labour, and is con­cerned with ini­ti­at­ing a new gen­er­a­tion into the gen­dered (as I ana­lyzed here) and classed social set-up. Not only that, fam­i­lies pre­vent money the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accu­mu­lates in a few hands to be squan­dered on and bequeathed to the next gen­er­a­tion, and that makes fam­i­lies as eco­nomic units self­ishly pur­sue their own inter­ests and become espe­cially prone to consumerism.

 So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, repro­duc­tion has to go.

First of all, the writer refers to hav­ing a fam­ily as “unpaid repro­duc­tive and domes­tic labor,” as if the Almighty Dol­lar should be the sole deter­mi­na­tion of whether or not to do some­thing. (Far-left fem­i­nists are usu­ally social­ists or com­mu­nists as well, but this ratio­nale seems to smack of cap­i­tal­ism to me.) Even if we dis­re­gard the spir­i­tual or reli­gious rea­sons to marry and raise a fam­ily, the fact remains that the tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits increase expo­nen­tially with each suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tion. If a man and a woman have three chil­dren, and each child has three chil­dren, then the orig­i­nal cou­ple will have nine peo­ple to assist them in old age. In the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate, I pre­sume that Amer­i­cans will not be able to depend on Social Secu­rity and Medicare once the enti­tle­ment pro­grams, unless they are reformed, bank­rupt the gov­ern­ment. Of course, chil­dren are expen­sive, but this more than com­pen­sated by other factors.

One can­not put a price tag on the intan­gi­ble ben­e­fits. I have never had chil­dren, but I am sure that any mother would not take $1 mil­lion in return for never see­ing her child grad­u­ate high school, get mar­ried, and have a child of his own. But there is more to it. The birth of a child is a beau­ti­ful promise that sym­bol­izes the poten­tial of human­ity as a whole. (In a sim­i­lar thought, an old Jew­ish adage from the Tal­mud states that sav­ing one life is the same as sav­ing all of human­ity.) Every child that is born might be the one to cure can­cer, invent a form of per­ma­nent alter­na­tive energy, or per­haps even be the Mes­siah him­self. Rais­ing a fam­ily is a form of self-sacrifice that soci­ety needs peo­ple to do. But extreme fem­i­nists like the author seem to focus on self­ish, mate­r­ial things: It’s unpaid labor! It keeps money in the hands of families!

I like chil­dren, but every time I fan­ta­sized of hav­ing one, I felt pangs of guilt over how for this ‘impulse’ of mine, some­one else would have to put their body on the line.

And this is one of the pri­mary faults of extreme fem­i­nism: Women expect nature to change to suit their arti­fi­cial world­views. It is nat­ural for females to want to have a fam­ily, but the writer just wants to sweep this pri­mal instinct under the rug since it is not polit­i­cally cor­rect. One should not expe­ri­ence “pangs of guilt” over how Nature — or God, if you believe — cre­ated humans. The truth is the truth, whether one likes it or not.

I was raised in an extended fam­ily set­ting with a lot of women, and as they got mar­ried, I noticed their lives becom­ing either extremely stressed (if they chose to work) or extremely lim­ited in their scopes, and some­times even threat­ened in a preg­nancy. This feel­ing was rein­forced when people’s indif­fer­ence to women’s con­di­tion frus­trated me.

Oh no — stress! God for­bid that a per­son has any stress in his life. I once asked my step­fa­ther how he han­dled the stress of rais­ing my lit­tle brother, and he told me, “Every time I look out the kitchen win­dow and see him play­ing in the back­yard, it makes it worth it.” I am sure this is true for any fam­ily. As I wrote in an ear­lier post crit­i­ciz­ing the Dalai Lama for sim­i­lar com­ments he made in a speech, a stress-free life is not the ideal. If some­one has no stress, then he has noth­ing in his life about which he truly cares.

And the idea of lives spent rais­ing a fam­ily being “lim­ited in their scopes,” well, that is an opin­ion based on a faulty premise. As Vox Day has writ­ten, a mother rais­ing a fam­ily well is more impor­tant than a woman being a renowned CEO or some other workaholic:

Moth­er­hood is a sac­ri­fice. It may mean putting off a col­lege edu­ca­tion and a career, or even giv­ing them up entirely. It may mean sac­ri­fic­ing a flaw­less fig­ure. It may mean sac­ri­fic­ing dreams. It def­i­nitely means putting two, three, four or more lives ahead of your own. But moth­er­hood is also an expres­sion of hope. Moth­er­hood is a vote of con­fi­dence in the future of mankind. Moth­er­hood is the brave voice of a woman say­ing, “I will not live life for today. I will cre­ate life for many tomorrows.”

So much for the lives of moth­ers being “lim­ited in their scopes.” At least soci­ety will not have to worry about peo­ple with these beliefs for long. As Vox Day put it else­where, these “evo­lu­tion­ary dead-ends” will not have any chil­dren through whom to pass on these inane ideas.