38. Fatherhood

During the decades we have debated sexual equality few things have amazed me more than that no one has challenged woman's near-monopoly on parenting. If anything is a sign of the sluggish state of our collective consciousness, it's that we don't question the altogether arbitrary idea turned truism that women are better suited than men to care for children. However true it is that only women can bear and nurse babies, where's the proof that after weaning them women are more apt than men to nurture the children and that kids are better off this way?

Human vs animal parenting

We could say that for the human species reproduction doesn't stop with birth, since the product, the infant, is so far from ready to function on its own. Bringing children into the world, then, is just the beginning of human parenting; a mere prelude to the many years of arduous and unremitting work it takes to prepare them for adulthood in an ever-changing and steadily more complex world. Mom and Dad must not only transmit values and morals (preferably by example) but also encourage the kids to think for themselves. As distinct from their animal counterparts, human parents have a two-fold task: first helping their young to fit into their cultural environment and then to gradually modify it.

As I see it, when handing men a constricted paternal role (typically one of wage-earner and disciplinarian without much room for emotional closeness to their children), society dealt a severe blow to their sense of wholeness. Because not to allow men to freely develop their emotive intelligence is to block them from using the entire range of their humanness; i.e., to cheat them of a vital part of their manhood.

But in so doing we also cheat ourselves. Because, in my opinion, a chief reason why we remain on an adolescent level of emotional development is that we spend our formative years with too little experience of true fatherliness--or the nourishing presence of a steady fatherly concern. This, I argue, is chiefly why we're incapable, as a collective, of establishing fair and equal social systems and, as individuals, of living the full and well-rounded life that is the birthright of every human being.

The parental roles

It's therefore high time we open a discussion about what we mean by 'fatherly' and 'motherly' and what the parental roles ought to be. Not in terms of making a strict division between dad’s role and mom‘s role, but rather to clarify why two separate roles are needed and what effects we want them to have. How do we best define these terms so that they cover the masculine and feminine principles of the psyche that they are based on? 

Might for instance a motherly task be encouraging children to BE--stay true to their inner selves, affirm and embrace life as it is (as Fromm suggests in his book The Art of Loving)? And might encouraging them to BECOME--use mental concepts, master new things and change other things--be a fatherly task? To work, I think the parental influences must complement each other, one pointing inwards, the other outwards, because what makes it so hard for us--women as well as men --to grow up is not getting enough input from both parental sources.  

Whichever way we define the parental roles, the end in view must be that children learn enough from both to become able to use--and value as highly--both sides of their psyche. It doesn’t matter whether father plays a 'motherly' and mother a 'fatherly' role since each parent is capable of fulfilling either function. By the way, some of the best ‘mothers’ (e.g., in the sense of being patient, attentive, non-judgmental) that I've met in my life are actually men.

Parental equalityThe underestimated father role is a major ingredient in the male inferiority complex, and therefore an important catalyst of men’s animosity toward women. To me, men's derogatory attitude toward the maternal role (the only thing women can do) is nothing but an example of 'sour grapes.' Since becoming mothers (and wielding their
special power) is out of reach for them, men choose to depreciate the entire female sex.

I seriously doubt we’ll ever see the end of sexism until we stop denying and instead emphatically affirm two crucial--and embarrassingly obvious--truths. One, that the male is born with as much of a paternal instinct as the female is with a maternal. Two, that fatherliness is as indispensable as motherliness for the proper growth of human beings. 

If we affirm these truths and if men make the paternal presence in their kids' life (from birth onwards) as active, palpable and unfailing as the maternal presence, then gone with the wind will be every reason for men to resent the power of motherhood. Because now fatherhood will have the same power, and Dad will be as influential as Mom in molding the hearts and minds of his kids..  

And in the wake of this wind gone will also be a main incentive for misogyny. 

Let me now sum up this blog, which has been an outline of my ideas about the origin of the sexist society and why we still live in one. See next post.


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7. The Return of the Repressed

Because she conforms to the prevailing pattern of male privilege, a mother earns rewards for indulging her son’s whims. In reality, though, this behavior not only does the child a disservice, it’s committing a hostile act against him. First, it fails to perform the most fundamental task of parenting, which--besides giving the child affection and basic protection--is encouraging him to stand on his own two feet, secure in himself and reliant on his own authority. Second, it prepares him badly for a world that expects him to postpone gratification, face challenges and take responsibility, i.e., be an adult. Especially today when men can no longer count on having wives to serve them.

What mother gets out of pampering her son is an opportunity to show what some would call maternal sacrifice (protectiveness, forbearance, love). To me it seems more like masochistic martyrdom--a cover-up for an underlying antagonism against the kid--because it exposes him to the risk of becoming either over-dependent on female reassurance or unwilling to enter a close relationship with a woman. In the most extreme case, a mother’s instinct to love her child turns into a passion specific to all forms of sadism--having absolute control over a living being.

The terms sadism and masochism were first introduced as sexual perversions by the German psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. He saw power rather than pain as central in both syndromes and showed that sadism is often masked by reaction-formations like over-goodness and over-concern. Bribed with material things, assurances of love--anything but being allowed freedom and independence--a child of such a parent may become fearful of love, yet cover it up by compensatory feelings of eminence and perfection.

Inflated motherhood

Time is greatly overdue for us to face the monstrosity we’ve created out of the maternal role. From having originally been an important natural, yet always finite, source of power for a woman, motherhood mutates into a legitimate outlet for many of the frustrations inherent in being female. Although there certainly are mothers who hit their sons (who then in turn hit their wives), I propose that most maternal behavior illustrates what Freud called the “return of the repressed,” i.e.,it expresses in an indirect way the aggression that’s never confronted directly. Because it is in the practice of motherhood that most of the injustices ever done to womankind come home to roost. 

Lacking properly drawn boundaries, the maternal role includes features like mother spending most of her time in physical closeness to her children, concentrating her major energies on them and deriving the bulk of her prestige from their achievements. This relationship is unfair to both mother and child, because while only remotely concerned with the good of the kids, it makes mom responsible for whatever goes wrong with them.

There’s a tendency, especially here in the West, to think that everything a mother does is an act of love. When she smothers her kids with attention, we say she “loves them too much,” and when she pays them little mind she’s “good and firm.” Is romanticizing motherhood a way for men to expiate guilt for sins committed against the female sex? Or is it simply wishful thinking on their part? As French writer George Sand puts it, “The virtue of woman is a fine invention of man.” Whatever it is, seeing proofs of motherly love also in the most outrageous child-rearing practices, is to condone a category of child abuse that I call ‘soul rape.’

The mother complex

I consider the illusion about an inherent maternal goodness to be one of the most important reasons why men’s inferiority complex endures, because it perpetuates the misperception that women have a higher rank than men. A misperception that goes all the way back to the magical belief that women create children on their own, but which is also kept alive by men's envy of the closer bond women have to their children.

Isn’t it highly ironic, then, and even amusing that so many men feel threatened today when new opportunities are saving women from having to make a career of motherhood? When a primary source of men’s sense of inferiority towards women is finally drying up! And along with it also the not uncommon sequel to wifely subservience: the shameless manipulation of husbands?

Now to understand how an archaic superstition about female superiority can still haunt men--if only on a subconscious but therefore so much deeper level--we must face what to me is another hugely consequential truth. Far from having a destructive effect only on sons, the inflated maternal role overflows its banks into neighboring territory to also knock the bottom out of the paternal role. That father isn’t considered to be as necessary for children nor valued as highly as mother (despite some latter-day progress in this regard) is a strangely overlooked fact, and one we need to examine. See next post.


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For the full blog click originofsexism.blogspot.com