feminists hate moms.

this isn't exactly on the topic of sex education, though i do hope to cover teaching feminism in sex ed in a later post. however, since my feminism informs all of my work in sex ed, this riled me and i thought i'd share. i barely caught this latest argument against feminism when i saw a letter to the editor about it in today's cincinnati enquirer. the letter which was a tepid response at best, responded to a "your voice" column by an ohio university student that ran on mother's day.

for anyone lucky enough to catch it in the sunday paper, i'm sure it provided several great talking points for brunch. i was nearly ready to quit after the first sentence: "in a world of feminism and women's rights, mothers are devalued and underappreciated." that's right, ms. graham, it's certainly not because mechanisms of patriarchy are in place in every aspect of our lives. mothers are devalued and underappreciated because feminism has TOTALLY TAKEN OVER. this must be why women still make less than men for the same kind of work, why we have no paid maternity leave, and why women are abused and raped and then doubted by the justice system that purports to serve us. oh, how this article makes me long for the glory days of the 1950s when everything was simple.

but it gets better. "in a feminist world," writes graham, "you don't get to choose," since "feminism denies the right of a woman to actually have a child and have as many as she wants." i must have missed this somewhere in my 7 or 8 women's studies classes. i guess i'll have to either revise my plan to have three kids or tear up my feminist membership card, since "in America, the ability to prevent pregnancy has overwhelmed society, so much that women who choose to have more than two children become stigmatized and outcast as religious fanatics." though, it's funny, because last i checked, our ability to prevent pregnancy wasn't exactly overwhelming, as half of all pregnancies are unplanned but only half of these end in abortion. teens aren't doing such a hot job of preventing pregnancy, either, but that's another tirade for another time.

i'd go into graham's logic that sexual liberation means "being able to sleep with as many men as they want with as little emotion as possible" and that the "high standard of mothering ... was created by experiencing that kind of motherhood" and not by the long-standing patriarchal tradition of denigrating women by erecting impossible standards, but everything sort of falls apart there. i'm not really sure how she came to her ultimate conclusion - that feminists hate mother's day.

it seems too easy to note that she cites no sources for any of her sweeping generalizations about feminists, contraception, and the mothering capabilities of women's studies professors, but she's a journalism major, so it kind of makes me want to punch her in the face. fitting that such a poorly written, ill thought-out would end up in the enquirer. this is the stuff i come home for - i mean, it's certainly not to see my mom, because, as a feminist, i hate her and would never want to celebrate the way she raised me to effect social change where i see injustice. certainly not.