Why does the Times think it is ok to print this horrible article about "Breeders"

[MmeLindt]

Shudder

I absolutely hate the term "Breeders".

Why do childless people think that it is ok to use terms like this? I don't go around thinking that I am superiour to them because I pushed a baby out of my fanjo. I would never refer to a childless person in such a derogatory way.

The comments are just horribly smug.

I first encountered the word "breeders" in a Dan Savage compilation, which I found hysterically funny, so I don't really mind it.

However, reading this thread has reminded me of an incredibly viscious bitch old college friend of DH, who (when I was calling our babysitter the first time we left DS1 [6 mo then] overnight, for a mutual friend's wedding) commented that people with children were unable to talk about anything else. I had been so looking forward to the wedding as an opportunity to talk to grown-ups, and I had been so disappointed that no-one would let me talk about anything other than DS1 that I burned with resentment every time I met her after that.

Till she became a breeder, and never stopped going on about her fabulous DS1.

I felt really sorry for her DS2.

SGB, I don't think all that many people who use 'breeder' derogatively would recognise the idea that there are 'non-breeder' parents. Mostly I've heard it used completely indiscriminately - if you've had children, you're a 'breeder', if you're a mother, you're a 'moo', and so on. It's classic dehumanising language.

Yes there are parents with crappy attitudes just as there are drivers with them and dog owners and nonparents and just people with them. That's why it's so easy for people who want to find examples to rant about - because by looking for 'breeders' they can criticise they've got a huge pool of people across all walks of life. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Occasionally someone on a cf 'ranting' forum where 'breeder' is in common use will refer to a parent who's a friend as a 'parent not breeder', but that's a bit like a racist feeling uncomfortable with racist language when they think of their nice black neighbour, but otherwise being happy to use it. Being nice about the occasional parent they know, while using dehumanising language about the rest they don't know personally, shows a really depressing, hateful attitude.

To throw another grenade into this - how about those parents who reproduce every year - Ms fourteen kids in a council house to paraphrase the DM.

Now I would call those parents breeders because it becomes their profession as well as their choice. There's no bloody way you could have 14 kids and not be a bit child focused in your chatter.

But to say 'ooh you have one child and ergo you must be boring and only able to think about that child' that's barking! I know at least one mum who had a child, went back to work the next week and frankly most of us wouldn't have known she'd had a child if she hadn't got prodigiously fat during her pregnancy.

I think one thing that must piss some "child-free" people off is that people assume they really do, or did, want kids and are just bitter and jealous.

If you really do not want to have DC, that must be the most annoying thing in the world. However a complicating factor is that it is in fact often true. Some of the most anti-having-children people actually ARE jealous and bitter about it - like Liz Jones.

We have some friends who for years have declared how much they can't bear kids and would never want to have any - not so tactful to us when we had our DS, but whatever, we put up with it. Now this couple have split up and began recriminating with each other that it was the other one who didn't want kids, each of them personally would have, it turns out. Yet all those years both of them slagged off kids and parents like nobody's business. I did secretly think, especially about the woman, that she was protesting too much and actually did have a longing for a baby. I told myself off for being so presumptuous. I was actually right all along.

I think a lot of this anti-"breeder" bleating arises in some cases because it's actually very hard for people to say "yes I do want kids but it's not happening and I am upset about it". It's a very painful thing.

Not in all cases of course and there are genuinely happy child-free people - I think they are often the less bitchy and most child-friendly ones though.

LadyofBath I think you are right in many cases. The happily child free have no reason to bleat - why would they? They've made a choice they are happy with. But never ever offer this opinion to someone who claims not to like or want children and makes disparaging remarks, because tbh they may not even admit it to themselves (as with your friends).

My boss is in her fifties, children never happened for her and her husband. She admits to finding lots of chit chat about kids painful so I try to limit it. She doesn't hate children or claim to. She just finds it, still, very upsetting that she wasn't able to have children. I struggled to conceive so I can hugely sympathise, and who knows if she was in the same boat now things might have been possible for her that 20 or 30 years ago couldn't be done. It's very sad.

Absolutely Georgimama - at times I was tempted to bring it up with her but I never did - I would either have got a nasty mouthful, or upset her a lot.

I prefer LIz Jones honesty. She is the basket case that she is!! we all have a little bit of inner basket..

I think Liz probably would be less self-absorbed if she had a child, but that's incidental, as a journo, she's said more of value (criticising fashion industry) than HB.

Had to laugh at ladythompson's description of HB's yellowing portfolio of regurgitated chat!

The first time I heard the term 'breeder' was in margaret atwood's A Handmaid's Tale where women are used as breeding machines by men.

I couldn't give a monkey's arse what the daft bint thinks but the book is certainly worth a read.

Look, it's only very recently that people who are childfree have felt able to point out that they are childfree by choice without being harangued from all sides about how unnatural and selfish and wicked they are. Women, in particular, have always been picked on and patronized and insulted for daring to say that, actually, domestic service doesn't appeal, that they have other interests. The worst breeders btw are the ones who have found parenthood not to be that great after all: they are trapped in the home, bored, no money, so they have to mount a more and more hysterical defence of Wonderful Parenthood, Total Fulfillment, and anyone who suggests they might like a break or at least a change of conversational topic is Just Jealous.
There are also reasonable arguments to be made for the selfishness of having lots of children, or of spending fortunes on endlesss cycles of fertility treatments that don't succeed when the world is full of unwanted children already.

SGB - all those things are true. It doesn't justify such a disdainful, dismissive and downright viciously meant term. It's meant to hurt. Why? Revenge? How would it be taken if we called the child-free 'the barren'?

FFS

don't understand the ffs comment.

It's an interesting thread.

I do hate the 'parenting as lifestyle' crap thatvhas sprung up over the last decade. Also think there is an unbearable smugness about stay-at-home yummymummy-dom and an attitude that having children means the rest of the world should give way to you and your offspring (I am a sahm with three children btw)

me too, but I think what you describe is a media invention. In real life, I don't know anybody who is that smug.

"the rest of the world should give way to you and your offspring" especially on MN.

give way to you........ what does that mean even!!?!?

Tolerate your presence at the next table in a very average, moderately priced restaurant at 6.30pm??

No. The fact that P&T parking creates such a sense of outraged entitlement, the rage that gets caused by baby things being put up a flight of stairs in Boots, the fact that people don't instantly get out of the way for a buggy and old people have the nerve to stand around chatting and blocking the pavement, buggies not being allowed in surgeries, people with dogs causing panic amongst some parents.... the list is endless. You must have seen all the threads maggie. Some parents beleive that the world does have to rearrange itself for them.

For me the biggest outrage in all of this is that people get paid to write this twaddle. It was bad enough when it was just "breeders" who cluttered up the papers with their banal whitterings about the "trials" of (invariably affluent) parenthood. Now the non-breeders are getting in there.

When people buy a paper, do they buy it to read this crap? I honestly don't think so. It's beyond me why the press, currently under so much commercial pressure apparently, continue to pay for such unimaginative bollocks.

OrmIrian - the sense of outraged entitlement baffles me, too. But it isn't confined to, er, pram-pushers.

oh yeah, I hear you orm. I don't post threads like that.

I bet when those people worked they were all "omg, I have to go up two floors to order a stapler, it's so ridiculous"...

i suppose rallying against parents is retaliation for gushy mushy articles about i am woman i am earth goddess and trials and tribulations of maximus gluteus at prep school

Could be maggie, could be.

Well those articles annoy everybody!!

I'm a sahm but I think o jayzus when I see another article about a 42 year old who gave up her 100k a year job and relocated from the City to Sedbusk in Yorkshire and made muffins in a basket for neighbouring delis.... and then, only then was she rewarded for her femininity by seeing the blue line (after she'd given up). Now she realises how unhappy she had alwasy been living in london eating in Nobu and going to the theatre,

I mean, those articles make everybody retch don't they!?

is there a w in retch!? i don't know how to turn on spellchecker.

I feel like I wasted a valuable few minutes of my life reading that article. Drivel.

equally hate the gushy motherhood completes me articles.authors who earned squillions,travelled world,high achievers who are now happiest smelling of baby sick - being smug at all the wage slaves