“Parentcare”

The erasure of mothers is coming from inside the house

There’s an apocryphal story about a young MP being shown around Parliament by Winston Churchill, and referring to the MPs on the other benches as “the enemy”. Churchill reportedly said “That’s the opposition, dear boy. The enemy is behind you.” A common theme in the gender-critical pushback against gender ideology is righteous fury at the methodical erasure of female-specific terms from HR policies, medical documents, NGO communications and the like: “chest-feeders”, “birthing people”, “people with a cervix” and so on.

Christine Rosen spoke for many when she called this “the new misogyny”: a form of woman-hatred that expresses itself by making femaleness literally unspeakable, and replaces the common-sense gestalt concept ‘woman’ with a jumble of seemingly disconnected physiological functions and body parts.

And there is indeed something misogynistic about demanding a rewriting of the language to erase everything that refers specifically to female sex, or to activities, functions, or social norms associated with that sex. But if the only possible villains you can see for the piece are men, I would humbly suggest that in truth where sex is concerned it’s more that men are the opposition.

Where, then, is the enemy? Consider a recent tweet from prominent liberal feminist lawyer Charlotte Proudman, in which she denounced the baby product shop Mothercare, calling for it to be renamed “parentcare”:

Proudman does commendable work on violence against women. But this tweet is revealing, and sheds light on the perverse-seeming insistence by the organisation she founded that trans women are also women, a position consistent with a concern for women’s safety only if you ignore the great many ways that making women’s spaces effectively unisex might place women at risk.

But this position - is in fact remarkably common. In Feminism Against Progress I’ve set out to argue that since the 1960s liberal feminism has increasingly dominated our shared understanding of what women’s interests are - and that has steadily shifted from seeking equality in the wider world to seeking greater equality - or perhaps we might say interchangeability - within our bodies themselves. This began with the contraceptive pill, whose effect was to eliminate (or as good as) the principal sex difference: pregnancy risk.

The Pill delivered a tremendous dividend of freedom for those women who were well-placed thanks to ability, class and ambition to take advantage of the ability to plan and pursue careers. Not without justification, most such women framed their tech-enabled widening of options “feminism”. But with its advent we also see the roots of that erasure of women. The new power to flatten sex differences through biomedical interventions fed a belief that all embodied sex differences are intrinsically constraining, and any suggestion that our sexed bodies might have a bearing on what we do or how we’re perceived is reframed as “sexism”.

This is, in essence, the view Proudman is expressing when she complains about a baby-products shop being called “Mothercare”. Doesn’t this just reinforce stereotypes about who looks after a baby? Isn’t this just straight up sexism? And from the perspective of a Charlotte Proudman, I can see how it might read that way. After all, for a middle-class woman doing a knowledge-based desk job there really are very few differences between men and women in everyday life. There is, after all, no obvious reason why a clever, hardworking woman should not be as effective a barrister as a clever, hardworking man. And there’s also the risk that to the extent that society still associates women with mothering, interrupted careers and so on, allowing such norms to flourish will impede the professional advance of those women determined to smash the glass ceiling.

Why, then, should we not extend the flattening of sex differences ever further into normatively sexed areas of life, such as motherhood (or rather, now, “parenthood”)?

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t know if Proudman has kids, but certainly in my experience the idea that “parents” are interchangeable works better on paper than in practice. When I became a mother it rapidly became obvious to me that (at least in the early stages) mothers and fathers are a very long way from interchangeable. Yes, there are dads who do a great job caring for newborns; yes, there are devoted adoptive parents; But a multitude of sociobiological phenomena, such as infant attunement and breastfeeding, are primed by the process of gestation. And this means, whether Charlotte Proudman likes it or not, that maternal instinct is not a patriarchal myth, and “mothercare” is not at all the same thing as “parentcare”.

And yet it’s in the political and economic interests of clever, ambitious women aspiring to a high-flying job in knowledge-economy professions to sustain the foundational belief that sex differences can and should be flattened all the way to nothing - and that doing so is “feminist”. But in practice this turns out to be a fancy way of saying “erasing women”: after all, without sex differences what is a woman? No wonder so many modern knowledge-class women struggle to answer that question.

Because it doesn’t stop at wanting to rename shops. Once we’ve accepted that it’s good, feminist and emancipatory to use tech to evade our embodied limits in the name of our desires, why should we limit such practices only to aspects of female physiology that read as “disadvantages” in the modern employment marketplace? Why shouldn’t males use medical tech, for example, to become women if they want to? And once you accept all this in principle, you’re left with a vision of “womanhood” that really is just a set of opt-in characteristics.

In effect, it’s a vision in which there really is - or should be - no meaningful difference between (say) trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney and Alissa Heinerscheid, the Anheuser-Busch VP of marketing who caused a firestorm by hiring Mulvaney recently, for a marketing spot promoting Bud Light. And perhaps from where they are both standing there really isn’t much difference. Heinerscheid, after all, has availed herself of every emancipatory difference-flattening technology out there, including hiring other women to gestate her three children. Should Mulvaney ever use tech to overcome the natural limit being physiologically male imposes on someone’s prospect of motherhood, by using a similar service, this will be the same cyborg version of motherhood enjoyed by Heinerscheid: cyborg, because inseparable from the technologies that delivered it.

And by virtue of being equally available to both sexes, it’s yet another step toward the “parentcare” Proudman called for in her tweet. This cyborg “parentcare” is part and parcel of the same woman-erasure that renames women “birthing people”, and simply extends its logic: we will only be free when we are all interchangeable. This message is now so widely promulgated it even takes monumental form, as in the epicene sculpture pictured at the top of this post. Fittingly, it stands outside an institution in Aarhus, Denmark, once known as the “Women’s Museum” but recently renamed the “Gender Museum”.

Of course, as campaigner Katy Faust argues, no one here is giving much thought to what children might need. And as I’ve also argued recently, waging war on biology in the name of freedom buries the great dirty secret of “liberation” on this template: social class. If women’s emancipation is a Ponzi scheme, “Parentcare” conscripts our bodies themselves into that scam: for the fantasy of total post-sex interchangeability only works at the top of the social scale.

It doesn’t matter how much you wang on about ‘parenting’. Reproduction still involves both egg and sperm, and a living woman to gestate the baby - and as such, it’s not that motherhood has been erased; it’s just been proletarianised. Reframing our sexed reality as a jumble of parts and services may look like freedom from sexist stereotyping and oppressive bodily limits for the likes of Proudman, Heinerscheid - or Mulvaney. But with the transformation of “mothercare” into “parentcare” comes a panoply of new forms of exploitation for those women who are still toiling away doing the bits you still need an actual woman for.

But none of this cuts much ice with the wealthy women who still dominate the discourse about what “feminism” means, and for whom male “women” represent not erasure but opening-up. What the rest of us experience as erasure is, from this perspective, the steady dwindling of oppressive stereotypes, whether expressed in the culture or in our flesh itself. And elite women remain overwhelmingly net beneficiaries of this kind of post-human freedom. Whether or not that vignette with Churchill ever actually happened, feminists who still known biology exists would do well to bear its insight in mind. Sex is real, and it matters. And for feminists who still know that this is true, the enemy is behind you.

***Mary elsewhere***

It’s been a busy week or so in the runup to the US publication of Feminism Against Progress. I write this from a plane that’s whizzing me to Washington, DC for the start of a short East Coast book tour - all the dates are here if that’s your part of the world.

NB: the NYC book launch party venue has changed, after the alphabet police went on manoeuvres and the venue cancelled the booking. The event is still on, though!

Elsewhere, I spoke to Connor Tomlinson of Lotus Eaters, Bret Weinstein for the Dark Horse podcast, Tara Henley for the Lean Out podcast and Beverley Hallberg for the She Thinks podcast, to name but a few. Lots more coming up over the next few weeks, and I’m too British to list everything here, so follow me on Twitter for all the news…