In How Can I Get Through to You?, family therapist Terrence Real tells how his sons were initiated into patriarchal thinking even as their parents worked to create a loving home in which antipatriarchal values prevailed. He tells of how his young son Alexander enjoyed dressing as Barbie until boys playing with his older brother witnessed his Barbie persona and let him know by their gaze and their shocked, disapproving silence that his behavior was unacceptable:
Without a shred of malevolence, the stare my son received transmitted a message. You are not to do this. And the medium that message was broadcast in was a potent emotion: shame. At three, Alexander was learning the rules. A ten second wordless transaction was powerful enough to dissuade my son from that instant forward from what had been a favorite activity. I call such moments of induction the “normal traumatization” of boys.
To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.
I already feel this with my son. The fact that a radically anti-patriarchal home environment could be undone by a silent 10 second interaction is maddening. My entire childhood experience with gender was focused on shame and how shameful it is to be girly. I don’t want that for my sons and I don’t want the impacts of that for my daughters.
Might as well be a CEO who looks at how large their biz has grown like yes that’s all me.
Very apt analogy. Parenting of children is a justified hierarchy that ought to undermine itself over time. If a parent is taking complete credit for their child they are no better than the self-centered CEO. I think the wide range of reactions to your observation happened for a similar reason. Parents have the ability to do a lot of harm, but granting the ability to do good is largely placed in the hands of the larger society. The social infrastructure required to create value in the world is not maintained or provided primarily by the parent, but the training on how to utilize that infrastructure is, at least at first. So to say that the abilities of parents are overestimated is kind of an overly broad statement, but I think the kernel of truth is that atomized liberal society expects parents to handle everything, which just isn’t possible. It’s just yet another false expectation made to make people anxious and feel like they aren’t doing enough.
My experience wasn't shame but a different kind of embarrassment. I didn't learn that doing unmanly things was shameful, but that it might draw unwanted attention to myself. I have many memories of my mom saying something like "you are a man/boy so you probably want x, right?", and she would watch for my reaction. It was always delivered as genuine and not a rhetorical question. I don't ever remember being told I had to stop doing something because it was girly, I was just lead to traditionally manly things when I didn't give any input on what I wanted.
Whenever someone tried to pressure or shame me along the lines of "be a man do x" as a kid, I interpreted it as an attempt to control me by inventing something to be insecure about. Dumb playground behavior like asking someone why they "walk like that" when they are walking normally.
I learned to identify this kind of pressure as just bullying and not something to believe at such an early age I don't remember being taught it. I just always knew it. This single lesson I think shielded me from almost all of the distress of this gendered pressure put on boys. I never took it as a mark against myself, but against the person trying to pull that crap on me.
I have nothing to add except that this matches my experience.
The worst thing about this is that its likely that it will happen and the parent will never know it happened. So it would be very difficult to try to talk to the kid about it after it happens.
It will happen dozens if not hundreds of times. I don’t know what the solution is, but I don’t think we need to address a particular experience to address the phenomenon
Best thing I could think of, is to be close enough to your kids to be able to see how they act/react in situations and around their peer group.
Be the parent that starts conversations with their kid about things they saw them do around their friends/peers if it looks kinds shady. Definitely won't catch the majority of the instances but maybe the few times a parent can mention things will help to balance the kid's worldview a bit.
bell hooks' " The Will to Change" was a game changer for me. I'd recommend all the fellas (especially black fellas, she talks about experience quite a bit) out there give it a read. It's a real breakdown of how we are all broken and because of that we break those around us. It's a bit of a downer at times, but she ultimately gives some solid tools and frameworks for healing and empowering for men, women, and everyone beyond and in-between. I love her focus on the importance of healing first.
This is the second time I've seen this book recommended on hexbear, I'll give it a look.
Yeah it's a rad book. It's written in very clear and emotionally impactful language. I found it to be a good read, but it was kinda tough on my heart at times.
My very small monkey brain was able to parse it, so if my tiny smooth brain can handle it I'm sure yours can too :-). :monke-beepboop:
people shit on homeschooling a lot but how else are you gonna avoid insane shit like this
This is both true and not true in my experience. I also had the double whammy of growing up rural so it made it even harder to socialize. However, there are a lot of advantages that I think I gleaned from that education style and if I could go back and change it, I absolutely would not. Maybe I would have when I was 18, but not now that I have a bit of a broader perspective on the long-term upsides.
They were miserable and awkward after going out in the real world which made them depressed.
well, so are all the people who weren't homeschooled
ok, just have a bunch of parents that are socialists come together. i hate how people essentialize high school, it fucking sucks and i hated everyone there. sexual assault is fucking rampant in the school system and no one does anything about it
Best case scenario you can find a cohort of parents to homeschool with and know that all of you raise your kids in egalitarian ways, but even then it’s not possible to prevent all socialization with “the outside world”
i dunno if it's still around as much as it was when i was younger, but it could be. among parents and the broader culture, there was this notion that boys are "easier" to raise as children. not because they get into less trouble or get injured less, but less taxing emotionally and psychologically is how the story seemed to go.
as i've gotten older and watched my friends and family do their best to try and raise their boys into men untraumatized by toxic masculinity.... i am not hearing the "boys are easier" sentiment much anymore. it's still around of course, in movies and TV and among people that don't see any room for improvement.
when i think about it now and in the context of parents struggling, it really sounds shitty. like maybe it is/was "easy", because no one is/was expected to investigate or even care much about a boys' emotional development, aside from tamping down on most forms of human expression and fit keep them in the mold.
I was certainly an easy child to raise and I had no idea how to emotion until I was an adult in therapy.
I dont mean to ask this question to hurt, spread blame, or attack any parents here, rather, I want to humbly know what you see that I fail to see.
Why create more individuals when the world is such a fucked up place? Is there a sincere hope for the future? Pragmatic reasons?
When there is any post about parenting on Hexbear, a silent alarm is activated to summon the anti-natalists
For the record antinatalism is a based philosophy that should lead to building socialism to ameliorate the conditions which make the world fucked up.
Reddit antinatalists are stupid because they fail to see how their "muh overpopulation" and "muh welfare queens" memes fall prey to the very captialist pseudoreligious ideology that has contributed to human suffering at a fundamental level. With the alleviation of said suffering being the core of antinatalism itself.
Also I unironically want to broaden my viewpoint on this subject because I really dont see a point to having kids and yet people who are no doubt smarter and more experienced than me still do.
I definitely read your post as JAQing off and asking people to defend the decision to have children. I'm glad to hear that's not the case.
I'd never argue with anyone who chooses not to have kids for any reason, including worrying about suffering. But antinatalism as a philosophy, is either shallow liberalism (everyone should just agree not to have kids!) or unimaginable tyranny (people should somehow be prevented from having kids) in the service of a deeply pessimistic view of existence. Existence involves suffering, but it also involves joy, which is somehow never part of its moral calculus.
antinatalism as a philosophy, is either shallow liberalism (everyone should just agree not to have kids!) or unimaginable tyranny (people should somehow be prevented from having kids)
What about creating the conditions where more people can choose to not have kids? Soft antinatalism sure, but also I think the only reasonable place to take it
Idk if I'd even identify that as antinatalism, but sure, that sounds good
Yeah thats true, I guess what I think an antinatalist to be (someone who in no uncertain terms recognizes that the world is fucked up on many levels, the status quo gives no hope or meaning therefore they personally decide not to bring more people into this place) is very different from actual serious philosophical antinatalism. Which in all honesty I think falls prey to capitalist realism and new athiest brain, believing that human life will always be suffering because muh humanity bad/muh universe bad and not because of the vagaries of living under class domination. For a time r/antinatalism was very based, in that they recognized the deep suffering of life in an ableist patriarchal capitalist society without resorting to false consciousness, before idiots/CIA/neonazis did their ideological astroturfing and blamed the poors for having too many kids, as always.
I really dont see a point to having kids
For most people, kids are the end, not the means. So there is no point. No larger purpose. There’s a really toxic idea that anyone who was not logically and consciously planned was “a mistake”. I think that unconscious attitude plays a lot into how we’re meant to view the process of getting pregnant. You’re supposed to completely cease reproductive function from the moment it’s physically possible right up until “the time is right”, try vigorously for the pregnancy, and then resume birth control until “the time is right” again. And the secret sauce is that “the time is right” actually means “when the time is least inconvenient for capital”.
In reality, I would wager that most pregnancies are not achieved this way. Even most people I know who have tried for kids basically just took out the birth control and continued sex as normal until they got lucky. And they weren’t trying to maximize the utility of the planet. It was an end, not a means.
I don’t know if any of that helps but there’s my rant and I appreciate you clarification because I also thought you were JAQing off
I think people do tend to conflate the ideas of "I don't want to have kids, but that's my private business" on one extreme and "being born is a net negative, for you and everyone else," on the other.
Given the current conditions, I am not going to have kids and I scratch my heads a bit at those who decide to. Sometimes this is referred to as local anti-natalism. But I don't believe that's a universal or holds true for every time and place, and I can't for the life of me accept the position that being conscious and alive is inherently a bad thing.
At the very least when we start to talk about this topic we're verging away from politics and into some pretty fundamental philosophical questions, and I think sometimes politics or economics-brained people forget that. It really is worth engaging with the relevant literature if you're going to wade into the field. SEP is always a good place to start.
At the very least when we start to talk about this topic we’re verging away from politics and into some pretty fundamental philosophical questions
The problem is that the lines between fundamental philosophical questions and politics are very blurred. For instance, we can see the brainworms of neoliberalism give rise to silicon valley existentialism, and a resurgence of western buddhism as a cope for living under increasingly precarious conditions.
I believe I conflated the first idea with the formal name for the second idea. Because I also think its very stupid to say, as a human being born and raised in the capitalism, that existance itself should cease because of some universal truth, without examining ones own biases and utter lack of knowledge about the nature of the universe first. Thank you for the resources.
Not the fucking place. Bring your anti baby shit to struggle session please. For the good of all of us
I just discovered that im not a philosophical antinatalist but a "local antinatalist". I have no energy or desire to argue about this because who am I to judge others more wiser and skilled than me about matters like these based on my limited worldview. I simply want to see what others see.
I saw it as related because the original post relates to suffering that children face under the current mode of production, if it is off topic then so be it, I wont get more answers and Im perfectly fine with that. I really dont care enough to start another thread.
Going into a thread made by a parent about how toxic masculinity is enforced by society at a young age and parents can have very little control over it. Coming in and asking "Why do people have kids in the first place?" Is rude, detailing and self centered. This was made by someone who already has a child and the overall topic is tangentially related only in that a kids are the topic. Whether or not you think people should give birth is irrelevant to the issues facing children and parents that currently exist. If you don't care enough to make your own thread then keep it to yourself
Don’t forget accidents, lack of access to birth control, lack of sex ed, welfare benefits, and keeping a partner under your thumb
Or just… it wasn’t a logical choice and doesn’t have a logical explanation
