Children Are Boring Discuss - Road to the Middle Class

HALF A CENTURY ago, in her Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir called woman “the victim of the species.” Actually, she included in her chapter on “The Data of Biology” the idea that all female mammals were thus disadvantaged. For instance:

The fish and the bird, which expel the egg from the body before the embryo develops, are less enslaved to their offspring than is the female mammal.

The name of the game, you see, is “autonomy.”

So when journalist Helen Kirwan-Taylor exclaims in print “Sorry, but my children bore me to death!” you can see where the idea came from when “she argues provocatively that modern women must not be enslaved by their children.”

The thrust of Beauvoir’s life and work is that the data of biology should not get in the way of more important things, like autonomy, creative work, writing painting, sexuality, and all that sort of thing. In fact the central evil of the existentialism that she and J-P Sartre gave the world is “bad faith.”

That doesn’t mean lying, by the way. Writes Austin Cline:

According to Sartre, bad faith occurs when someone tries to rationalize our existence or actions through religion, science, or some other belief system which imposes meaning or coherence on human existence.

Translated, that means that it is wrong to use knowledge to explain the world, because almost all our knowledge of the world comes from other people.

The point of life is to be an autonomous creative, self-inventing individual, not a slavish follower of other peoples’ ideas. “In the absence of any fixed human nature or absolute, external standards, we must all become responsible for whatever choices we make.”

Obvious, the data of biology have a way of severely restricting this kind of freedom. In fact, we could say that the data of biology, which have exploded in the last half-century, tend to raise more and more questions about “the absence of any fixed human nature.” When it comes to nature vs. nurture, nature has been putting points on the board consistently for decades.

You can understand, again, why the feminists had to destroy Harvard President Larry Summers. If women are indeed different from men, and are indeed programmed by a fixed human nature to be child bearers and child nurturers, then the dream of perfect autonomy and equality and an end to underrepresentation in the professions and competitive occupations is a fantasy.

But Helen Kirwan-Taylor has a point. Children are boring, or rather, they are work, and they will suck everything out of you and then ask for more. It is much more fun to work with interesting intelligent adults in fashion journalism as she seems to do. Rich women since the dawn of time have opted to pay other people to look after their children.

It is just the bourgeoisie that has made a cult out of child-raising. The question is: Why? Why has the middle class made such a big thing out of childhood and parenting?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: TuttAssauby on 01/13/08 5:53pm

Make peace, not war!

Posted by: Walt on 07/28/06 3:14am

Boring people have boring children. I read in Clavell's book, Tia-Pan, where a charicter said "I wish to to be an ancestor". I was ten at the time, and have never forgotten that line. Great site! I'm reading Fogel's book, genius!