Feminist Harpies Deny that Babies are Fun, a response to Katie Roiphe

Amanda Marcotte has her customarily devastating take-down of this Katie Roiphe piece that appeared on DoubleEX on Tuesday: Why won’t feminists admit the pleasure of infants?

First off, it’s a confusing title. I read it and thought, for a second, that Roiphe — a first-time mom to a baby boy — worried that advocates for women’s equality go around denying that little babies experience pleasure. Of course, she means something else:

One of the minor dishonesties of the feminist movement has been to underestimate the passion of this time, to try for a rational, politically expedient assessment. Historically, feminists have emphasized the difficulty, the drudgery of new motherhood. They have tried to analogize childcare to the work of men; and so for a long time, women have called motherhood a “vocation.” The act of caring for a baby is demanding, and arduous, of course, but it is wilder and more narcotic than any kind of work I have ever done.

Amanda has done an excellent job unpacking the absurdities in Roiphe’s argument, and Amy Bloom points out all the feminist authors who did write about adoring their offspring, writers whom Roiphe either hasn’t read or ignored. There’s no question, of course, that Roiphe is not alone in experiencing this extraordinary sense of joy in being with a baby. My wife and I have had our lives turned upside down in the most delightful way by Heloise’s arrival. My wife seems to crave the baby physically; when she’s been away from Miss Mouse for more than a few hours, she goes through what she describes as “withdrawals”. For me, who did not carry this baby inside of me, the addiction is less physiologically intense, but it is powerful nonetheless. Roiphe’s feelings about her child ring true to us, as I imagine they would to many other parents.

Others have made the case that Roiphe is wrong about feminists, and plenty of folks agree that she’s absolutely right about the joy that babies can bring. But that pleasure isn’t felt universally; not every woman bonds with every baby she gives birth to in the ecstatic manner that Roiphe describes. And the problem, of course, is that she writes from a position of the very sort of privilege that feminists have fought for. She writes:

Of course, in my drugged baby haze I do occasionally recognize that the baby will not always be six weeks old, that I will one day sleep more than two hours at a stretch. I also recognize that if you had a newborn every day of your life you would die. But for now, I feel like closing the shades and staying in the opium den. I know somewhere out there is a great world where people talk and think and write, but I am not interested in going there yet.

Newsflash, Katie; many mothers — many people, period — never get to spend much time in that “great world where people talk and think and write”. I get to be in that world, Katie Roiphe is in that world, but far more mothers have jobs outside the home that are dull and not particularly intellectually stimulating. And when you’re on kid #3, and the first two are still young and clamoring for your attention, there’s no time to stay in the “opium den”, no chance to close the shades and retreat into a world of oxytocin-infused bliss. And just to be clear, who is fighting for paid maternity leave so that more mothers have the time to close the shades? Those very same feminists Roiphe despises.

In the end, one excellent reason why feminists don’t over-exert themselves in paeans to motherhood is because so many other forces in our culture already do do just that and do it well. Feminists know well that for women, opportunity quickly becomes obligation — telling women that having a baby will be the peak experience of their lives marginalizes those women who genuinely have no interest in being mothers, repeating the old and ugly lie that a woman who doesn’t grow life in her tummy has somehow failed to fulfill her most important destiny. Feminists know that some women — many women — don’t respond as Roiphe does; the greater our rhapsodizing about the joys of having babies, the more we shame those who don’t find the process as ecstatic as they were led to believe.

As individual parents, feminist writers (Amy Bloom named several) have written a great deal about having children. Roiphe seems to have only heard of the books in which feminists expressed ambivalence about motherhood, or emphasized the toil that comes with reproducing and raising the result. In the blogosphere, plenty of feminists write about their love for their children and their joy in being mothers or fathers (I think of Lauren Bruce, one of my blogging heroes and designer of this blog.) There is no feminist consensus that demeans motherhood, unless you consider making the case that having babies isn’t the sine qua non of a woman’s existence to be demeaning.

To be fair, Roiphe’s condemnation in DoubleEXisn’t as full-throated as in her far more destructive The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism , a now-dated tract that functions as little more than a defense of rape. But the piece does end up titled “Why won’t Feminists Admit the Pleasure of Infants?”, and given that tack, it is not surprising that a great many feminists (including those who happen to be parents) roll their eyes.