This is about misogyny and men's eternal issue with the fact that we are the ones who can grow babies, which has caused us not a little bother these last few millenia.
If they can't grow babies in men or in vats (yet) they move instead to remove the language from us and therefore our connection to it that way.
It's a sort of aggressive jealousy. I can't have it so why should you? I want it. You have to share it. Who are you to say I can't?
The term mother, like woman, girl and female is a concept as old as the dawn of time and understood by all mammals. We would have known what a mother was, as a species, before we had language.
It's got nothing to do with gender or stereotypes or how you act or anything at all, it relates to biology.
As with everything else this must be verboten.
So we have lost woman and girl. Female is nearly gone. Now mother.
The reason women get so upset about this stuff I think is that in the thousands of years of global patriarchy, our biology was the one thing we had, in common, it was the cause of our oppression, but it also was distinctly ours, and the ability to birth children, even though used against us so hideously and still is, is still a pretty amazing thing. That men CANNOT do.
Of course they want to devalue it, take the language, remove it from us. They couldn't do it literally > men cannot get pregnant and give birth. So they do it by other means.
The fucking ridiculous thing is that everyone knows, EVERYONE knows what girl, woman, female and mother mean.
If they want a word they can have maternal which for me has much more gendered overtones. I describe my husband as being very stereotypically maternal quite a lot, he is more so than me. That's fine. Have the gendered words FFS, maternal, feminine, ladylike, what the fuck ever, most of us never wanted or liked them anyway.
To give men the factual, universal stuff that is all we really have is just, I'm getting really angry about this.
And the consequences of dehumanising women in this process and disconnecting us from it may well be a shift in the overton window>> hello commercial surrogacy, hello more restrictive abortion laws etc
e.g. in nature the idea of taking a newborn animal from its mother is scary and horrifying. In humans, most people still react quite viscerally to the idea of taking a newborn from it's mother, which is why surrogacy makes so many people feel really quite uncomfortable.
Change the language and you are simply taking the baby from one of its parents. Why not? One parent is as good as another, in fact any person is
I am not tying to offend or upset anyone who has adopted children or other similar situations
BUT we need to be able to say that pregnancy and birth are a pretty major thing, that newborns only really know their mother having been literally a part of her for months, that we don't really know if any person is really as good as the one who just gave birth to them, how much they mind being put somewhere else... The fact that we don't know is already a product of misogyny, the idea that say in the 60s a baby was better off in a cot down the corridor by itself than with its mum. Our role and importance is already devalued. Soon to be removed completely.
And also when women speak others say sarcastically "won't someone think of the children?" >> yes because we do, don't we. Of course fathers do too and some mothers are shit and abusive but in general the health and wellbeing and protection of societies young falls to women, to mothers. You can see this clearly in the press whenever anything goes wrong. Who benefits if we are pushed away?