At Touchstone Magazine's Mere Comments, James M. Kushiner drew our attention to the fact that
Jonathan V. Last at The Weekly Standard has written an article about the rising tide of anti-childbearing sentiment, in which he writes:
It is a quirk of the movement that while the most committed childfree people tend to be women, being childfree is not primarily a feminist pose. In The Childless Revolution, Madelyn Cain describes three types of childfree women: “those who are positively childfree, those who are religiously childfree, and those who are environmentally childfree.” It is this last aspect that undergirds much of the movement, particularly at the policy level.On the connection between being childfree and the environment, or more precisely, population control and "climate change," see also our new Salvo article, Baby Freeze.
Back to Jonathan Last:
Yet for all the Malthusian worry-warting, at the street-level, being childfree is mostly about disdain for conservative traditionalists. Thus, the childfree refer to parents as “breeders” and mothers who breastfeed as “moomies” (as in cow). Those are the nicer terms. (The site happilychildfree.com cheerfully catalogues childfree slang.)
Now if someone posted a list of offensive names for an ethnic group..
Though a negative visceral reaction to some parents may be justified; reading the "childfree lingo" on happilychildfree.com revealed two things to me. 1) The people who are part of this movement are deeply hurt and 2) are blissfully ignorant of their extreme narcissism.
ReplyDeleteI never knew about these terms being used. It hurts me. Not because the terms are particularly offensive to me personally, but because of the people who say them. There appears to be a great amount of repressed pain which manifests itself in the form of taunting. It doesn't matter if you're gay or straight, taunting is always a reflection of some insecurity or past wound. It's like kids on a playground...ironically enough.