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.
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.