Motherhood, Feminism and The GDP
Motherhood is at once reviled and lauded throughout this profoundly sick Society.
Reviled, in that it is deemed unworthy of a living wage, and all too frequently blamed for children’s problems, it is not a ‘career choice’ and is seen by many as an obstruction to their personal fulfilment.
Freud certainly did nothing to elevate motherhood beyond the slavery of Christianity and The Factory System. He blamed the mother, the son, the daughter and let the father run free.
Jung did not puncture this false imagery, merely embellished it.
The laudatory aspect is really a fig leaf for what I have just written.
Marylynn French, in The Womens Room, punctured the bubble of silent pain in the same way that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring blew open the hubris and the pain of massive pesticide use… both writers were mothers….
And we owe so much to them for their courage and diligence in their work. We all owe motherhood more than we can even imagine, irrespective of our particular circumstances.
There have been many women who have fought, and thought, and written about the woman’s experience as an inferior in this Society…
And yet….
Mothers are praised when they bury their dead soldier husbands, sons and daughters, they are given a flag, a medal and a series of hollow pronouncements are uttered at the graveside and in vacuous political speeches all too familiar.
The mothers of Iraq were not featured in the News stories about the Iraq War. The cost they paid in dead and maimed children, in dismembered boys and girls, in hours of literally picking up the pieces, blood and bone, gut and sinew of their children was never mentioned. Instead they are reviled for wearing the Hajab or Burqa. You see this on the streets of the UK every day.
Mothers Day is an ‘occasion’, a marketing and propaganda tool. Once every 364 days or so.
Motherhood and it’s meaning is all but invisible. Cloaked by devices worthy of the Klingon Psychosis.
In Julius Ceasar, the Shakespeare play, Mark Anthony speaks “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him; The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones, So let it be with Caesar”
And he continues to work his way into praising Ceasar, in an attempt to bury the evil, and exhume the good. Ceasar is The State. The Boss. The Bickus Dickus!
Yet looking at motherhood in realistic terms, with regard to the lived experience of mothering, Mark Anthony’s opening statement is a statement of fact – and the speech tops there – mothers are blamed for the damage society causes to them selves and their children. The good they do is pretty much unrewarded, in effect ignored. Interred.
Mothers Day is a feeble capstone in Memoriam. The flowers are for a living grave. Ask Mothers how they feel when the children have left the home and it is empty…
The failure of the mainstream Feminist Movements and of all of us, men included, are simply this :
The Feminists and the Blacks and the Irish and The Gays and all who struggled and fought for equal rights in an oppressive system, did so as single issue projects, out of self interest, yet not to change the system itself or to replace it with something more humane, more child friendly.
The Feminists fought to be seen as equals to single men in a career system, to break the so called glass ceiling, yet who amongst these fought for the right, nay the respect for the natural expectation to be seen as Mothers with equal rights to a solid income and an elevated status based on the work they do, the understanding and compassion the constantly exhibit in action, on a day to day basis, under the circumstances they find themselves in.
Why did the Feminist Movement NOT fight tooth and nail for the mothers? Why is Green Peace NOT fighting for all the mothers of life?
Why is it that, even still, motherhood is not factored into any economics philosophy currently practiced? It is not measured in the GDP?
Why is it that motherhood, and parenting in general, is being put under extreme strain by consciously applied economic policies that coerce both parents to work to pay a debt to very rich people who make the money they 'loan' out of thin electronically charged air, but pocket the REAL CASH they are given plus interest?
Why is it that so few can actually SEE this?
Why do so few challenge this, and when they do, are derided from all sides?
Why is it that it is an unquestionable practice to tax a single earner in a household that is caring for children at the full rate of taxation?
Why is it that so few people can see the value in nurturing motherhood, an 18 year contract of 24/7 concern and care as being at the very core of our society?
Why is it that so few people understand empathically that the wilds of nature are our mother and father in every possible way, ad that they too are being subsumed to the needs of the economy?
Mothers are being fucked over in every possible way.
International Woman’s Day is coming soon, this very weekend.
Let’s make it a day to realign with Mothering as a fundamentally vital process of nurturing a society into being, into which one would happily, joyously want to bring children who would enjoy their lives naturally untainted by the processes of conditioning, marketing, racism, fear, mistrust and greed that define our culture.
You want a revolution? Well try this for a start …
Pay the Mothers, you Mother Fuckers!
And perlease do not respond with whiny complaints regarding fatherhood - that is a distraction, a tactic to divide - because Motherhood and Fatherhood are one and the same, and it is merely myopic thinking to miss that point
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The future human
from : http://www.violence.de/prescott/byron/article.pdf
The human brain is the organ of our emotions, social relationships, moral values and cognitive/intellective development. The developing brain of the infant/ child is encoded or programmed either for depression or happiness; for peace or violence and for human equality or inequality. These are learned behaviours rooted in the biology of our early life experiences (Montagu, 1971).
The transformation of a violent culture to a peaceful culture begins with the transformation of the individual who, as an infant/child, is placed on a life path of acceptance rather than rejection; of joy and happiness rather than rejection and depression; of love rather than hate; of peace rather than violence. This transformation of the individual requires the building of a new cultural brain, one that embodies and expresses naturally peace, love and happiness. That brain can only be built with radical cultural change. Clearly, these changes are not possible without a restructuring of culture in ways that support and enable mothers to be nurturing mothers.
National legislation that interferes with mother-infant/child bonding must be replaced with legislation that supports nurturing parents and families.
The need for infant and early institutional child day care should be eliminated and public funds now utilised to support commercial infant/childcare enterprises should be used to support mothers and fathers directly, a policy whose proven effectiveness has been well established in Scandinavian countries.
Bowlby (1953), Cook (1996) and Belsky (2003) have warned the world of the dangers of institutionalised day care of infants/children and Montagu (1971) informed the world of the dangers of loss of mother love, lessons that have been ignored by the modern world.
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This is the true cost of two parent working families, and is the hidden social engineering intent, given the refusal of 100% of Governments and Health and Education Departments and other Institutions to accept the implications of this research and respond accordingly.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Do what you love, it's your gift to universe
5 comments:
I like reading your posts... they make me wordless... and that's something that doesn't happen often. I'll be sharing this on my FB fanpage
Thank you for this. The way you put it, it makes so much sense. I've been wondering why mothers are not paid for a long time...and why we have to make such difficult choices to provide for our children, pursue our life's dreams and be the best mothers we can be. How do we get the powers that be to sit up and take notice?
This is what I feel : We can make the changes in how we define and organise our lives at the grass roots, and as we do this, as we work with and learn with others, we can build our way from our experience. The powers that be really don't give a damn ..... it's a sad fact, yet that's how it is.... And as we get on with that reorganisation as best we can, we will build communities and resilience that will at the very least give the system less traction in our lives.... in time it could undermine the systems ability to cause so much damage... our children will thank us for that...
You are missing the point completely, first there are a lot of different types of feminisms and not just the one you mentioned: a BIG group of feminists fight for the mother's pay for quite some time! And second, the pay would prevent women to go to work, and you even start that this can be seen as preventing their personal fullfilment... read a little before you post!
Good points Serena. Let me add this by way of further elaboration.
My point about pay is to underline the fact that society does not support natural parenting, as most parents spend their time WORKING rather than parenting, not out of choice, but out of economic necessity.
And most children spend most of their time in a coercive environment designed not for their benefit, but for the benefit of the Economy. I have addressed the system of Compulsion Schooling in this regard in some detail in other posts.
Of course it is true too that many women choose to work, and devote parts of their lives to their careers or chosen life activity, and that is both appropriate and beneficial in many, many ways - and nothing I am saying is intending to take away from that at all.
The idea that a 'womans place is in the home' is to my mind restrictive and repulsive. It sits alongside 'children should be seem and not heard' as an authoritarian dictat.
As for preventing personal fullfilment, that one might choose to characterise what I am saying as such does not define what I am saying.
When any adult decides to host a new life, they have to recognise that the new life is neither an extension of themselves nor is he or she to be taken for granted. Parenting is one of the most important societal roles, and at the roots of the well being of any society - it ranks higher that Economics in that parenting is linked directly to the formation of happy, secure, psychologically mature people.
Olive James book 'Affluenza' explores this is detail, and is one of the clearest works on this available.
The work of James Prescott in the 70s also shows this to be the case.
The Mainstream Feminist Movement, like all emergent grass roots movements, has to a large extent, though not completely, been co-opted by the system precisely because the critical analysis emergent from it has and is seen as a direct challenge to the status quo of what I call power based relationships, wherein access to power is dependent upon the willingness to partake in the established processes rather than challenge of change them. Thus for example, CEOs and Ministers who are female perform the same roles, and carry out the same policies as their male counterparts.
I have read widely on these subjects, over a long period of time, and cannot, for obvious reasons deal with the detail of every aspect of what ever subject I choose to write about.
The key point about blogging is that the responses to any ideas presented in a blog are part of the overall discussion, a way of sharing information and sensings... an open source discourse if you will, that in the end, is designed to benefit all of us.
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