"Products of Gestational Labour"

[allmywhat]

Article by Angela Nagle here:

Not sure what happened there, sorry. This is very worth reading.

thelampmagazine.com/2020/12/15/products-of-gestational-labor/

Nobody would have believed just a few months ago that, say, abolishing the police would become a tenet of mainstream American liberalism. Even rightwing politicians have been cowed more or less overnight into publicly agreeing with things beyond the wildest dreams of the most radical anarchist of just a few years ago. If the abolition of the family is the next demand of our successful cultural revolutionaries, it is easy to imagine how the legal infrastructure undergirding could be dismantled; its moral and cultural foundations are already vulnerable old structures just waiting to be tipped over. Who exactly is going to stop them?

ps: I was trying to work out if the Sophie Lewis here is the same queer theory academic there was a thread on recently, with a transcript of her talking in a video. Was that thread memory holed?

I think you had a little link problem there, allmywhat:

thelampmagazine.com/2020/12/15/products-of-gestational-labor/

I think you had a little link problem there, allmywhat:

Thank you! I think there must be a keyboard shortcut that is equivalent to hitting "Post." I don't know what it is, but whatever it is I pressed it!

I told my three year old DD she was mine then corrected myself and said she belonged to herself. She was extremely upset by the idea and adamant she wanted to belong to me.

You can theorise all you want about ending the family but we will always be human animals who want to be with our kin. No state has never done a better job of rausing children than families, and even if it could I think most of us would still prefer to take our chances with the ones who love us irrationally and imperfectly.

Sounds like a dream come true for child abusers.

We need more public support for caregiving such as free or subsidised childcare and adequate elder care. We also need to accept that there are forms of family that are just as good as the nuclear family in terms of raising children (eg same sex parents). But the basic fact is that people don’t care for others in the same way they do their own family and having these sorts of communes that people like Sophie Lewis write about is likely to lead to increased neglect and abuse of children. I think they trialled it in communist states and it basically doesn’t work.

None of this sits alongside any form of actual scientific theory about human relations, or psychological development that I’ve ever seen. Human children absolutely need to be brought up by dependable adults who love them. we are born so much more vulnerable because our brain plasticity is so much more flexible. In order to be able to do things like think and develop bullshit theories like this, we need to have a much more malleable brain and that means we are not born able to walk for example.

I really object to things like this that seem to see people (and children in particular) as widgets that can be passed around. not least because most of the adults who promote theories like this demand a huge level of flexibility from everybody else and respect for all of their personal foibles and yet seem to think that children can be treated like factory widgets.

It’s honestly one of the most hierarchical things I’ve ever seen, where people who aren’t them are basically just Play-Doh to be ordered about while they sit in their ivory tower and are terribly terribly sensitive.

It’s all rather, Lenin had to have silk boxer shorts because he’s got sensitive skin.

Agree. It’s absolutely possible to raise non-biological offspring with just as much love and care as you’d give a child you birthed yourself but there needs to be an acceptance of utmost responsibility that doesn’t naturally arise in communal settings.

Adoption and fostering hasn’t become formalised due to humans having an inherent love of red tape, but because we have come to understand the good and bad in human nature and broadly agree that measures need to be in place to protect the vulnerable from the bad.
Which is what safeguarding is all about.

Ohhhh Sophie Lewis also wrote this infamous pile of steaming horseshit.

www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.amp.html%3f0p19G=0232

More discussion of her horseshit here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3829572-Sophie-Lewis-article

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3501964-How-British-feminism-became-anti-trans-according-to-the-New-York-Times

This is very interesting, thanks for sharing @allmywhat!

Horseshit has a purpose and unless trodden in, harms no one. Sophie Lewis's work is worse than that.

I found that description of a political vision for raising children absolutely chilling.
From a safeguarding perspective but also the cruelty and lifelong damage of removing children’s access to normal human relationships and their ability to form them in future.

@nosswith

Horseshit has a purpose and unless trodden in, harms no one. Sophie Lewis's work is worse than that.

Good point.