Let’s Do That Thing That Doesn’t Work

Janice Fiamengo pokes through the outpourings of Sophie Lewis

Only a Marxist-feminist could pledge with a straight face that children will be better off when they are raised by a shifting coalition of non-relatives—or that being paid (by the state, one presumes) to raise someone else’s children will be more gratifying and less tiring than looking after one’s flesh and blood.

But Lewis’s utopianism is undeterred by evidence or common sense. “To abolish the family,” she has stated reassuringly in interview, “is not to destroy relationships of care and nurturance, but on the contrary, to expand and proliferate them.” To prove this point, Lewis’s book includes a historical survey of Marxist and queer imaginings of new types of social-family.

Given that such ideas stretch far back into the nineteenth century, one is struck less by the radicalism of Lewis’s propositions than by their tired predictability and centuries-old lack of viability. Does Lewis ever stop to ponder why attempts to replace the family have never managed to sustain themselves, even on a small scale? […] Does Lewis ever ponder the fact that it is mainly Marxist-feminists and queer radicals who seek a world in which caring for children could be farmed out to acquaintances?

Ms Lewis and her fever dreams have of course been mentioned here before

So far as I can tell, and despite Ms Lewis’ theorising, mothers-to-be don’t generally feel a need to parse their pregnancy in terms of “abolishing the private nuclear household” and “global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation.” Or indeed to champion abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, as a form of “anti-violence.” But that’s probably because – to borrow a phrase from Joan – they haven’t been tugging on the intersectional crack pipe.

In this laughably pretentious review of Ms Lewis’ laughably pretentious book, we learn that the author wishes us to embrace the disintegration of the family – our families, all families – “until they dissolve into a classless commune on the basis of the best available care for all.” As if the “best available care” would somehow be an obvious result of family disintegration, despite decades of real-world evidence to the contrary.

Supposedly, we would learn to love the “plural womb,” “radical disinheritance,” and “a world beyond propertarian kinship and work alienation.” The children we have will no longer be ours, it seems, and this will apparently make us happy. It’s a “queer, communist, speculative future.” A narcissist’s experiment. And we are to be the guinea pigs. 

See also, inevitably, Laurie Penny, whose blatherings on the subject tell us more than she seems to realise, chiefly about herself

Update:

In the comments, ccscientist adds,

[M]aking a successful family requires one to do things out of love. You take care of your kids because you love them. You give to your spouse out of love. You may have to take parents to the hospital. None of this is comfortable for narcissists. It isn’t about them. It is about the other people.

Which, I think, rather tickles the nub of it. And so, we find a seemingly endless parade of preening, pretentious dolts telling us that poverty, and staying in poverty, never has anything to do with bad choices, including the choices that they themselves encourage. As, for instance, when telling us, emphatically, that “a couple cannot raise a child better than one [person] can.” And that the “diffusion” of the family unit – which is to say, absent fathers, hardship, and subsequent dependence on the state – “is one of the most exciting things to happen to the American social pattern since sexual liberation.”

Yes, divorce, estrangement and sudden-onset poverty. It’s all terribly exciting.

A less romantic, or less deranged, view of family breakdown, complete with data and statistics, can be found here. It turns out that the “abolition” of the family – its “diffusion” and disintegration – doesn’t in fact result in “comradeliness” or “the best available care for all.” More typically, it results in deprivation, misery, maladjustment, and quite a lot of resentment.

In short, bad medicine.

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