More feminist fun times in the pages of the Guardian, where Nicola Heath is bemoaning her womanly lot:

It feels very personal, the fight you have with your partner about who does the laundry or cleans the bathroom. But the second-wave feminists were right. The personal is political. 

“The personal is political,” says she. Well, so I hear. But it’s also worth considering just how often the political, or allegedly political, is a function of personality and a self-flattering rationalisation for personal shortcomings and sub-optimal choices. Not least among the kinds of people who loudly announce that the personal is political. In fact, hold that thought.

The unequal division of labour at home is a systemic issue that needs structural social change to solve it. 

In this instance, the claim of inequality and the case for “structural social change” are not entirely compelling:  

Like many heterosexual couples, it was the arrival of children that set my husband and me on divergent paths at home. I’ve been an avowed (and untidy) feminist since I was old enough to say the word. We were together for 10 years before the birth of our daughter – he knew his co-parent had zero aspirations to be a homemaker… Becoming a parent is… a huge transition. Your identity is reforged in the crucible of sleep deprivation and newfound responsibility. The pre-kid lifestyle of Friday night drinks, free time and sleeping in becomes a distant memory. 

Yes, in a shocking and unguessable turn of events, becoming a parent is usually a life-changing experience, a major development that entails compromise and sacrifice. A shifting of priorities. If only all of the other parents on the planet throughout human history had an inkling, some clue. Our Guardian writer is of course determined to frame the subsequent division of labour in the Heath household as a result of dark forces – including “social conditioning,” “prescribed gender roles” and the oft-invoked “gender pay gap.” An allegedly oppressive phenomenon that doesn’t actually exist. And then, inevitably, a whiff of self-pity:

When you have someone to take care of menial stuff such as running your life, there’s little incentive to change the status quo. It’s nice having someone wash your clothes and cook your food. When you don’t have to expend mental energy keeping track of grocery lists and family birthdays, you have the cognitive bandwidth to think about other things.

She’s expending mental energy on grocery lists. Someone bring medals, big ones.

“Labour Party. Socialist. Teacher.”

Put another way, “State education is generally sub-optimal and often shockingly bad. Let’s make sure that’s all there is available.”

We’ve been here before, of course. As when we heard the claim, conveniently unchallenged, that doing one’s best for one’s own children – in contravention of “social justice” – is merely a “cultural construction,” and therefore, presumably, ripe for deconstruction. By our betters.

And we’ve been here more than once.

I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.

In the video linked above, feminist “theorist” Sophie Lewis informs us that the foetus, a nascent human being, is “violent,” does violence to “gestators,” and that abortion is a corrective killing, an “unmaking,” a means of “going on strike against gestational work.” “We need to move away from… arguments around when human life begins,” says she.

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.

Ms Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. When not arguing for the destruction of the unborn, and the “abolition” of the family – which is to be replaced by comradeliness, apparently – she “participates in the Out Of The Woods anti-capitalist ecological writing collective.”

Update, via the comments:

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.

Via Mr Muldoon. Somewhat related.

In case you missed it in the comments:

The Secret Life of Pets 2… effectively acts as an animated ode to heteronormativity, toxic masculinity and patriarchal worldviews

Woke reviewer Carlos Aguilar watches an animated film intended for children and gets terribly upset.

It occurs to me that when the reviewer of a children’s cartoon is whining at length about a lack of discernibly gay pet-owning couples and the oppressive “heteronormativity” of a character choosing to get married and have a child – an act that is “conservative” and therefore bad, apparently – then the problem isn’t the film.

In the comments, Liz adds,

Reproduction is ‘conservative’. Normality is a ‘trope’. Sounds like someone’s been severely educated…

Such that Mr Aguilar, a 30-year-old man, is seeking validation of his own niche sexual politics in a children’s cartoon about talking dogs.

While scanning the New York Times, Ben Sixsmith notes the odd parental priorities of author and journalist Jancee Dunn:

The article in question, titled My Marriage Has A Third Wheel: Our Child – and which helpfully includes a photo of the couple’s apparently problematic nine-year-old – can be found here. In it, we learn that the author “would never have dreamed of sharing anything remotely personal with my parents,” but “wanted a different kind of relationship with our daughter.” And hence happily directing a media spotlight onto said youngster while waiting for applause.  

Jancee Dunn is the author of How Not To Hate Your Husband After Kids, her account of an attempt to “salvage” a “faltering marriage.”

And yes, the family does live in Brooklyn. And no, they don’t share a surname. And yes, the adults have availed themselves of professional counselling services.

Also, open thread.