The Just Me Generation
Further to Guy Dammann’s regard for the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, Darleen has unearthed another display of unspeakably radical selflessness over at Feministing:
Along with the emancipation of women, sexual liberation has become very much a part of politics around the world. To the conservatives, both these issues challenge ‘family values’. But what if there were no families? What if we say no to reproduction? My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression.
Sorry, I should have warned you; there’s quite a bit of boilerplate.
Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism.
Families with children are selfish, see, and squanderers, and prone to consumerism. I hope you’re taking notes.
So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, reproduction has to go. Of course there is an ecological responsibility to reduce the human population, or even end it.
But of course. Again, note the approving nod to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, the ultimate goal of which is “phasing out the human race.” Until that glorious scenario is achieved, VHEMT strives for a world in which the human population is, ahem, “less dense.”
With density in mind, readers may be interested in several comments by Feministing regulars:
I definitely agree that both nuclear families and reproduction have got to go. As long as parenting is seen as a private endeavor, there will always be child abuse and neglect that go unnoticed. As long as there is inheritance, equality is just a hollow word.
And,
I think most people would agree that it is wrong to intentionally cause suffering and death to others just because you feel like it, yet they have no problem with intentionally reproducing, which is exactly the same thing.
There are, of course, curious tangents too:
[A]dvertising is inherently set up to subordinate people-who-are-looked-at to the needs of people-who-look.
The author of the piece, “Freethinker,” describes him/herself thus:
I’m a freethinker against organized religion and social hierarchies, a radical feminist, a social anarchist, an antiestablishmentarian – revolutionary to the core.
His/her website bears the following announcement,
Read as I perform an archaeology in the mind, the society, and our cherished convictions, and talk about why things need to change.
and features further rumination:
[M]arriage and family are social institutions that like other institutions, work mostly to the benefit of the dominant class – men with wealth and power… Married life is often about ‘getting settled’ and that means you’re not free to take chances with your life anymore. For me, it’s a commitment that will only hold me back from the academics and activism that I want to apply myself to.
Based on the seamless arguments above, I’m sure academia will be thrilled.
Let me see if I can’t express it better
Radical Feminist + No children + Time = No Radical Feminists
David, your problem is what exactly?
“Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered and classed social set-up.”
Wow. Why didn’t my wife tell me our marriage exists solely to oppress women and perpetuate social hierarchy?
TDK,
“David, your problem is what exactly?”
Um, well, I suppose it could happen faster.
Brian,
“Why didn’t my wife tell me our marriage exists solely to oppress women and perpetuate social hierarchy?”
Her silence on the subject is damning evidence of patriarchal oppression. You fiend.
“My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression.”
Is this bint saying gender is sexual oppression? And without family people wouldn’t have genders?
“Radical Feminist + No children + Time = No Radical Feminists”
Sadly this is not the case. Extremists are not necessarily born from other extremists. Instead, the extremists have captured our education system and are busy churning out their products there.
“As long as parenting is seen as a private endeavor, there will always be child abuse and neglect that go unnoticed”
No child abuse in state institutions, oh no. Incredible.
Rob,
“Extremists are not necessarily born from other extremists. Instead, the extremists have captured our education system and are busy churning out their products there.”
It’s asexual reproduction, then. Or maybe a parasitic infection.
Anna,
“Is this bint saying gender is sexual oppression? And without family people wouldn’t have genders?”
It’s hard to be sure exactly what (s)he’s saying, and it’s harder still to fathom how (s)he can be so confident in whatever it is (s)he’s saying. The entire piece is basically a torrent of tendentious assertion. Unpacking the assumptions would take some time and would, I fear, be unrewarding.
Hmmm –
“Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered and classed social set-up…”
I remember reading lots of things like this in the student papers at my uni. The authors had a special talent for finding oppression in the most unlikely of examples, presumably working from a general assumption that they were oppressed. They weren’t good at arguing, per se, but they were certainly imaginative at finding or making up endless examples of oppression (or, in some cases, good old conspiracy theories).
In my own vague way I hated this stuff, but didn’t know what to make of it – didn’t have the intellectual tools or thinking habits yet to unpack it and its assumptions. Reading a lot of it now I often feel like laughing and making fun of it.
Anna,
“Is this bint saying gender is sexual oppression? And without family people wouldn’t have genders?”
Yep.
http://notesofafreethinker.blogspot.com/2008/12/gender-as-social-construct-and-origin_12.html
“Gender as a male/female dichotomy is a social construct more than anything else… The only reason gender dichotomy seems like a fact is because of the way the society is organized and because our perception is distorted by unconscious confirmation bias… Men in our country also love to point to ‘strength’, mental and physical, as a point of difference. And they need to be told that if women were not conditioned into gender-appropriate behaviour that renders their bones and muscles week from disuse and their minds unassertive and submissive, they would have all the strength. Fear of heavy-set shoulders and bigger wrists, I have been told by many girls, is what kept them away from swimming and volleyball… This gender differentiation is dehumanizing.”
Etc.
Strange how the “free thinking” that’s so triumphantly professed amounts to the verbatim regurgitation of standard far left boilerplate. And strange how this “free thinking” entails a great deal of bald assertion but remarkably little evidence or genuine questioning. If anything, it seems an awful lot like faith.
“Gender as a male/female dichotomy is a social construct more than anything else… The only reason gender dichotomy seems like a fact is because of the way the society is organized…”
Strange too how “social constructs” and “the way society is organised” are deemed to determine how people behave above and beyond all else, but are rarely, if ever, entertained as the possible consequences of biological facts. There doesn’t seem to be much willingness to ask whether “the way society is organised” has at least a little to do with evolutionary biology and (gasp) human nature.
“Men in our country also love to point to ‘strength’, mental and physical, as a point of difference. And they need to be told that if women were not conditioned into gender-appropriate behaviour that renders their bones and muscles week from disuse and their minds unassertive and submissive, they would have all the strength.”
I suspect that one or two weight lifters, male and female, would take a different view. One based on first hand experience, rather than ideology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_records_in_weightlifting
Is Freethinker actually female –or just a wuss?
Karen,
“Is Freethinker actually female –or just a wuss?”
It isn’t clear. There is this:
“I like children, but every time I fantasized of having one, I felt pangs of guilt over how for this ‘impulse’ of mine, someone else would have to put their body on the line.”
But while Freethinker’s partner would apparently be the one having to “put their body on the line” – which I take to mean “be pregnant” – that could just as easily imply a lesbian coupling. And “gender differentiation is dehumanizing,” remember, so perhaps it’s best not to ask. What with the patriarchy and all.
They will end up like the Shakers – occasionally recruiting someone who was “reproduced”, but decided that the philosophy was worth supporting. In the end, however, they should go extinct. In the ideal case, they would leave behind some incredibly beautiful furniture, but I don’t think that these people know how to work with their hands. Unfortunately, I think that many of these people are supported by trust funds, which could be used to support future accolytes for a looong time.
The problem that all of these utopian/idealistic groups have is that they cannot convince everyone to follow their ideals, and as long as there remain one Adam and Eve out there who do not aggree, the human race will not go extinct. And in the case of this particular group, there are a LOT of Adams and Eves who will never agree with them, but instead are preaching the opposite side, and are reproducing like crazy.
Same with the peace organizations (“Why can’t we just get along?”). All it takes is one bully who realizes that these people won’t fight back, and they are toast.
Probably best to save our breath and ignore them, at least till they take up a position as Secretary of Defense, or Secretary of Reproduction…
“As long as parenting is seen as a private endeavor, there will always be child abuse and neglect that go unnoticed.”
So to make sure all children are 100% safe they should be raised by… the public sector? The local council?
If he/she/it is such a “free thinker”, how come I’ve heard or read every idea in that dreck before elsewhere?
A couple of quotes spring to mind. I first think of Orwell’s dictum that only an intellectual could say something so stupid. And then, paraphrasing, there is P. J. O’Rourke’s assertion that population control is the means by which progressives allow themselves to be racists.
As Mark Steyn would say, if western societies fail to reproduce, who is going to inherit the earth? Muslim societies, for example, are reproducing more than ever. Africans are still reproducing.
So the world will be inherited by adherents of a 7th century death cult and a bunch of people who are embroiled in historic corruption, violence and incompetence?
But I’m sure Muslims and Africans will be BRILLIANT stewards of the earth’s resources, there are so many things they’re doing now that prove it.
As Stalin had it, “No man {person}, no problem.”
By all means, Freethinker, if you don’t want to reproduce, go to it. On the off-chance that your genetics plays some part in molding your highly deficient intellect, and your freely-expressed wish to not keep you genes in the gene pool, I see a win-win for you and the rest of us.
“Think of it as evolution in action.”
I regret my weiner. I used to be so proud.
On further thought, the thread that runs through all these stories, from this one, via the Dalrymple article on modern art and the fool wringing his hands about being beastly to the Taliban school-bombers, to the Guardian thumb-sucker on parenting (to list a scant few such) is the sheer solipsism of the Leftie protagonists. Other people are not regarded as agents but simply as props in a ‘narrative’. There’s been discussion here before about the vacuity of viewing everything through the lens of politics, but this isn’t a lens, it’s more like a pinhole in front of a mirror.
“Other people are not regarded as agents but simply as props in a ‘narrative’.”
It’s often been my experience that those who rush to profess their compassion for humanity can also regard actual people as, essentially, furniture. It’s rather like the way that Guardian commentators are perpetually concerned for those deemed “voiceless” and “disadvantaged”; but if those same people start grumbling about paying too much tax, the “voiceless” suddenly become “middle England,” and thus evil incarnate.
Didn’t George Lucas make a movie about this? In that movie, wasn’t all this considered a bad thing?
http://movies.ask.com/c/video/THX-1138/48303?q=THX+1138&qsrc=2247
It’s amazing how the left can change its mind.
We are getting on a slippery slope. How long before some environmentalist nut shoots up a school, and then rationalizes it as a necessary ‘culling of the herd’ of kids who have not yet reached the age of reproduction? And there will be a whole movement DEFENDING this school shooting.
How long before this nutty movement justifies the massacre of other people’s kids?
Murdering certain types of people was tried before some where around 1933 to 1945.
With more people like this there would be fewer people like this.
“Help Help, I’m being oppressed”.
Someone had to say it.
“…there is P. J. O’Rourke’s assertion that population control is the means by which progressives allow themselves to be racists.”
So true. I think he titled his piece on the overpopulation bed-wetters “Just Enough of Me, Way Too Much of You.” Their mindset in a nutshell.
Maybe she just really doesn’t know where babies come from.
“As long as parenting is seen as a private endeavor, there will always be child abuse and neglect that go unnoticed.”
This person isn’t actually arguing what they are arguing. The virtue of child rearing as a private endeavor is that it preserves individualism. This presents a huge problem for the left because individualism is a stumbling block on their road to universal tyranny. A world in which children are not raised by their parents, but by state apparatchiks, is a veritable wet dream for the left because it would prevent mass revolt of their victims from ever becoming a possibility. The left’s plans don’t merely extend to world conquest and the reshaping of society in their own twisted image, but to the perpetual domination of humanity until the end of time. The freedom to raise one’s own children is a threat to all of that.
Sadly, this useful idiot most likely does not even understand what he or she is arguing for. This person is not privy to the true agenda, but swallows and repeats the shore story they are spoon fed.
Great article-great comments. The depopulation of the planet is the endgame of the radical environmentalists-“anarcho primitivists”.
When this is understood a whole array of policies proposed as “progressive” take on a darker ominous tone-open borders enables transnational authorities to impose one social model (which coincidentally produces a falling birthrate)exhaustive taxes and business regulation deindustrialize whole nations in favor of sweatshops (more easy to manage a shoeless hungry peasant)which in time deconstructs whole societies (see: Detroit) that were previously, well, civilized…
When examined in this light the whole culture complex of “progressives” (not) are in fact about effecting a devolution, a degeneracy, and extinction.
Oh the Oppressed
The hatred of men is quite common in feminist circles. But now the loathing of family is oozing to the…