In How Can I Get Through to You?, family therapist Terrence Real tells how his sons were initiated into patriarchal thinking even as their parents worked to create a loving home in which antipatriarchal values prevailed. He tells of how his young son Alexander enjoyed dressing as Barbie until boys playing with his older brother witnessed his Barbie persona and let him know by their gaze and their shocked, disapproving silence that his behavior was unacceptable:
Without a shred of malevolence, the stare my son received transmitted a message. You are not to do this. And the medium that message was broadcast in was a potent emotion: shame. At three, Alexander was learning the rules. A ten second wordless transaction was powerful enough to dissuade my son from that instant forward from what had been a favorite activity. I call such moments of induction the “normal traumatization” of boys.
To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.
I already feel this with my son. The fact that a radically anti-patriarchal home environment could be undone by a silent 10 second interaction is maddening. My entire childhood experience with gender was focused on shame and how shameful it is to be girly. I don’t want that for my sons and I don’t want the impacts of that for my daughters.
When there is any post about parenting on Hexbear, a silent alarm is activated to summon the anti-natalists
For the record antinatalism is a based philosophy that should lead to building socialism to ameliorate the conditions which make the world fucked up.
Reddit antinatalists are stupid because they fail to see how their "muh overpopulation" and "muh welfare queens" memes fall prey to the very captialist pseudoreligious ideology that has contributed to human suffering at a fundamental level. With the alleviation of said suffering being the core of antinatalism itself.
Also I unironically want to broaden my viewpoint on this subject because I really dont see a point to having kids and yet people who are no doubt smarter and more experienced than me still do.
I definitely read your post as JAQing off and asking people to defend the decision to have children. I'm glad to hear that's not the case.
I'd never argue with anyone who chooses not to have kids for any reason, including worrying about suffering. But antinatalism as a philosophy, is either shallow liberalism (everyone should just agree not to have kids!) or unimaginable tyranny (people should somehow be prevented from having kids) in the service of a deeply pessimistic view of existence. Existence involves suffering, but it also involves joy, which is somehow never part of its moral calculus.
What about creating the conditions where more people can choose to not have kids? Soft antinatalism sure, but also I think the only reasonable place to take it
Idk if I'd even identify that as antinatalism, but sure, that sounds good
Yeah thats true, I guess what I think an antinatalist to be (someone who in no uncertain terms recognizes that the world is fucked up on many levels, the status quo gives no hope or meaning therefore they personally decide not to bring more people into this place) is very different from actual serious philosophical antinatalism. Which in all honesty I think falls prey to capitalist realism and new athiest brain, believing that human life will always be suffering because muh humanity bad/muh universe bad and not because of the vagaries of living under class domination. For a time r/antinatalism was very based, in that they recognized the deep suffering of life in an ableist patriarchal capitalist society without resorting to false consciousness, before idiots/CIA/neonazis did their ideological astroturfing and blamed the poors for having too many kids, as always.
For most people, kids are the end, not the means. So there is no point. No larger purpose. There’s a really toxic idea that anyone who was not logically and consciously planned was “a mistake”. I think that unconscious attitude plays a lot into how we’re meant to view the process of getting pregnant. You’re supposed to completely cease reproductive function from the moment it’s physically possible right up until “the time is right”, try vigorously for the pregnancy, and then resume birth control until “the time is right” again. And the secret sauce is that “the time is right” actually means “when the time is least inconvenient for capital”.
In reality, I would wager that most pregnancies are not achieved this way. Even most people I know who have tried for kids basically just took out the birth control and continued sex as normal until they got lucky. And they weren’t trying to maximize the utility of the planet. It was an end, not a means.
I don’t know if any of that helps but there’s my rant and I appreciate you clarification because I also thought you were JAQing off
I understand, thank you very much for taking the time to answer.
I think people do tend to conflate the ideas of "I don't want to have kids, but that's my private business" on one extreme and "being born is a net negative, for you and everyone else," on the other.
Given the current conditions, I am not going to have kids and I scratch my heads a bit at those who decide to. Sometimes this is referred to as local anti-natalism. But I don't believe that's a universal or holds true for every time and place, and I can't for the life of me accept the position that being conscious and alive is inherently a bad thing.
At the very least when we start to talk about this topic we're verging away from politics and into some pretty fundamental philosophical questions, and I think sometimes politics or economics-brained people forget that. It really is worth engaging with the relevant literature if you're going to wade into the field. SEP is always a good place to start.
The problem is that the lines between fundamental philosophical questions and politics are very blurred. For instance, we can see the brainworms of neoliberalism give rise to silicon valley existentialism, and a resurgence of western buddhism as a cope for living under increasingly precarious conditions.
I believe I conflated the first idea with the formal name for the second idea. Because I also think its very stupid to say, as a human being born and raised in the capitalism, that existance itself should cease because of some universal truth, without examining ones own biases and utter lack of knowledge about the nature of the universe first. Thank you for the resources.
c/parenting when