Princesses and Pornstars

In my eyes, my mother will always be the ultimate feminist. She never campaigned for her right to work or vote, she never wrote essays or participated in protests. But she is a passionate advocate for women's rights to their own bodies. She has worked alongside many women who have had those rights violated. She is a homemaker, but she is a homemaker because that's what she wants to be. She is not a homemaker because she feels societal pressure to be so. If anything, she has had pressure in the opposite direction. Her greatest life ambition was to raise children and to devote her time to her family, and she did this despite the disapproval of her pro-career generation.

My mum would never call herself a feminist, though. To her, feminism is embodied by single career-women with little respect for family. To her, feminism means man-hating.

Emily Maguire, in Princesses & Pornstars aims to debunk exactly these kinds of myths. She discusses why feminism is about equality, and why equality is still something we need to strive for. In recounting her own experiences and those of many friends and acquaintances, she shows that feminism is not a dirty word and it is not a fight that is behind us.

I was especially drawn to the chapters about marriage and child-rearing. Compared to women in generations gone by, I am exceptionally lucky. I have political rights. I have intellectual rights. I have rights in the workplace.

But.

I am a young woman with no desire for a white 'meringue' wedding. Or domestic 'bliss' of the suburban white-picket-fence sort. Or children.

People seem to find this extremely threatening.

If it comes up in conversation, I am either deemed an abnormal woman (it's just natural to have the desire to create a family), a naive youth (my biological clock will surely kick in soon and I won't want anything but a husband and a family), or a selfish individual (people who don't have kids only ever look out for themselves). I sometimes wonder what people think they're achieving by saying these things to me. Really, they succeed only in strengthening my resolution to prove that childless women are capable of being valuable, moral, wise members of society.

I've been lectured and I've been scoffed at. Very rarely have people treated my goals as legitimate life-choices.

Apparently, I'm supposed to spend my life trying to snag a husband and then (subsequently) trying to convince him to have children. A lot of guys my age have no particular desire for marriage or children, and nobody scoffs at them. It's OK for men to be resistant to these things (that's the natural way), but not women. Which is strange, if you think about it, because in our society it is usually the female partner's life which is radically changed by the decision to have children. Men become fathers, but they continue on pretty much as before.

I am aware that I'm still young and it is entirely possible that I will change my mind later. But even if I do end up with a couple of children, I fiercely believe that it is not at all strange or immoral for a woman to choose not to reproduce. My personal reasons are simple: I don't particularly want a domestic family life, and there are other (mutually exclusive) things I do want. For example, I want to work full-time in a job which allows me to use my mind. Nobody would look down on a man for wanting the same thing.

If I lived in Emily Maguire's utopia, where fathers are just as open to becoming primary caregivers as mothers, where I might be able to simply carry on with life after procreating (the way most fathers do now), perhaps I'd feel less negative (simply abivalent) towards reproducing. But I don't live in that kind of world.

For that reason alone (and there are plenty more), feminism is still required.

Maguire makes it clear that it's not rights so much that are at issue here, as conceptions. Despite forty years of feminism, society still perceives us (men and women both) in strong gender roles. I suspect that the Problem of Parenting lies not so much in how we view women, but in how we view men. Society thinks less of men who earn less than their partners, let alone those who forgo their salary altogether to look after the family.

Why?

I fail to understand why, in a society where we go on and on about personal choice, we scoff so much at examples which fall outside the norm. I fail to understand why being the primary caregiver (as opposed to the primary breadwinner) should be any less rewarding for a man than it is supposed to be for a woman. I fail to understand why I am abnormal for not wishing to take part in a ceremony in which the responsiblity for my 'care' is 'given away' by my father.

And I fail to understand why the lack of desire for these things should be considered so strange in me, when it is considered quite natural in most men my age.


Buy on fishpond: Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity