‘Pregancy is Barbaric’ and Other Firestonian One-Liners

66 thoughts on ‘Pregancy is Barbaric’ and Other Firestonian One-Liners

1. I think an essential part of feminism is about feeling grounded and at home in one’s own skin, barbarity and all…

2. Oh, Firestone. I love her. But I’m a radical feminist, too 🙂

   Her views seem much more than slightly out of place in 2007, and shock even the most avid feminist theory student. I always read the “Dialectic of Sex” as the great lengths we’d have to go to, at this point in societal evolution, with the huge amount of damage we’ve done, in order for male oppression of women to end. As to whether or not this mechanical, technology-based existence is really a feminist utopia, I’m on the fence.

3. Without the history of nine months of uncomfortable pregnancy followed by an emergency C-section between us, how would my mother have the ability to get me, at 34, to do exactly what she says?

   Those are gonna be some resentful, disobedient Firestone tube-babies, I tell you what.

4. “Does pregnancy or sex comes first for women who desire both?”

   Try asking a lesbian who wants children. I like your blog, but this question is blatantly heterosexist.

5. I personally think that there is more than one feminist text from the 70s that was theoretically important at the time to get people thinking about things differently, but end up looking kind of absurd and/or laughable today.

   This strikes me as one of them. Feminism had a reputation for a long time of not valuing mothers and motherhood as an important part of womanhood. This was probably important at the time, to try to break the instant connection between womanhood and motherhood. I understand that we still haven’t broken that connection for everyone, and the message that there is nothing wrong with women who do not want children is still a work in progress. But I’d also like to think that feminism has moved past devaluing mothers to make a point. And though I have not read the text, from this description of it, what I’m getting is a message that is very offensive to the very large number of women who have desired and had pregnancies, when what we should be encouraging is reproductive autonomy.

6. I don’t think it’s barbaric, it’s just nature. Sure, it’s painful for many women and unnecessarily fatal for far too many, but “barbaric” seems like an odd adjective to use to describe childbirth.

   I’m going to have children one day, by myself, with a spouse or partner, with a group of friends, or on my own as a single mom –naturally, or through adoption– one way or another, it’ll happen. If I choose to go through pregnancy to have my own biological (well, 50% at least) offspring, I think I’d be kind of offended by anyone calling me a barbarian for doing so.

7. I don’t really get what is barbaric about pregnancy…it may be primitive I suppose, but you could therefore class anything our biology does as primitive.
   Is it really uncivilised to be pregnant?

   Also, there seem to be an extremely judgemental attitude towards women who do want to take on the “typical” mother role (whatever the hell that is meant to be…all women and all mothers are different, no matter what little boxes people want to put them in).

   Maybe I am totally mis-reading, but the whole thing reeks of someone telling me how I should feel about pregnancy. Screw that.

8. Does pregnancy or sex comes first for women who desire both? What do you think?

   How can we ever know? Women are so socialized to view their desire for sex in teleological terms (“it isn’t that I’m horny, I just want to have a baby … yeah that’s it”) that even the subjective experience of “I wanna get pregnant” may very well be a sublimated desire for sex. OTOH, speaking as a man, one does have a drive to impregnate (and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a drive to be impregnated) — c.f. the desire not to wear a condom — although even this may be a matter of socialization that infects even those of us with the most liberal upbringings.

   At the very least, I’ve always suspected that “my biological clock is ticking” is really more a matter of sexual desire being expressed as a desire to get pregnant. Of course, evolutionarily, we may have evolved to have increased sex drives at certain life periods — e.g. for women at their last chance to have kids before menopause. But even still, just because we are evolved in a certain way for a certain reason doesn’t mean we can only accept our desires based on the reasons for them: why can’t we accept that we are horny and not feel at some subconcious level that we have to come up with excuses for it?

   Her concept of “households” of large groupings of people living together under ‘contracts’ and licenses overrides the traditional view of biological families that most of are used to

   Don’t you mean “traditional” view? As we all have pointed out, the nuclear family is hardly traditional … while the large groupings of people constituting a clan, or what not, usually are biological families, the traditional way of living was certainly far more communal than how many of us live nowadays.

9. Try asking a lesbian who wants children. I like your blog, but this question is blatantly heterosexist.

   It sounds like it’s Firestone’s construction, not Auleila’s. If Firestone is saying that women don’t want pregnancy, only sex, and pregnancy is merely a side effect of the desire for sex, where does that leave lesbians who want children in Firestone’s world? It sounds like they don’t exist at all, but I’d need someone who knows her work better to explain that.

10. Aulelia, I think you may be in danger of treating a witty and deliberately provocative feminist polemic as if it is a literal manifesto likely to be implemented immediately.

    I’m a huge fan of Firestone’s Dialectic. It is worth considering it in context as a riposte to a prevalent summer-of-love climate which idealised earth mothers and “free love.” Firestone sets out to blow this out of the water, which she does, most radically, by suggesting that it is possible to see pregnancy as disgusting and barbaric rather than beautiful and magical.

    It is, as they say, just her opinion; and an opinion intended to be shocking and challenging. Possibly even tongue-in-cheek, though that’s debatable.

    What about women who genuinely want children through natural pregnancy?

    Firestone is presenting a very extreme form of collectivist Marxist radical feminism. She has no interest in preserving individual choice.

    In terms of Firestonian feminism, pregnancy is the root of women’s oppression and can never be a feminist act. Of course, you don’t have to agree with this, but if you actually want to engage with her argument it’s worth understanding why she says it. She is opposed to pregnancy because she sees it as the root of gender differentiation. In her opinion, women will not be able to attain freedom and equality with men until this root cause of their oppression is removed.

    Because in a world where we all want it all now and fast, I don’t think people who want children will substitute the chance to have them simply because one person thinks the natural pregnancy is barbaric.

    No, but I shouldn’t think there’s much likelihood of Firestone catching on at any widespread level, nor of legislation based on her collectivist Marxist radical feminist principles coming to a lawbook near you any time soon.

11. At the very least, I’ve always suspected that “my biological clock is ticking” is really more a matter of sexual desire being expressed as a desire to get pregnant.

    If the person you’re talking to is 25 and saying that her clock is ticking, I might agree with you. But as someone whose clock actually is ticking right now (I’m 39 with no kids), it’s not sexual. It’s the worry that by the time I’m financially and emotionally ready to have children, I won’t be physically capable of doing so. I would feel that way even if reproduction were completely divorced from sex and artificial insemination was the only avenue open.

    It’s a worry about your mysterious insides, where so many things can go wrong and about which you’ve heard many, many horror stories, from women who have three miscarriages in a row at four months along to women who find out that their last-chance fetus has no brain and will not survive to birth.

    So, no, it’s not about sex. That’s why the sex life of couples with fertility problems often suffers — they become so focused on the mechanics of reproduction that they ignore sex.

12. pregnancy isn’t barbaric.

    what the technocratic model of birth does to pregnancy, birth and postpartum is barbaric. thus, anyone can view this process as barbaric.

    or perhaps she just finds the presence of another being growing inside her barbaric. which is one reason why we (americans) have choices in reproduction.

13. You might interested in reading the science fiction of Lois Bujold. Her Vorkosigan saga takes place in a universe where uterine replicators are common, although used in different ways on different planets. One of the primary reasons for adoption of this technology is that it allows most women to have longer, healthier lives without going through the brunt of pregnancy. Some characters come close to adopting a Firestonian stance…although the emphasis on the nuclear family is different. The technology behind this plays a huge role in at least three or four books, most notably Barrayar (a Hugo award winning novel) and Ethan of Athos.

    I think it’s interesting to note how technology in this series changes at least one society’s attitude towards parenting. Instead of seeing the technology as freeing them from responsibilities, they actually see it as a means of controlling when you take the responsibility on. (Contraceptive implants, parenting classes, and licensed sex therapists that actually teach sex are all part of one of the societies in Bujold’s universe. One planet also regards any clones as being children, and that one owes them what any parent owes a child.)

14. I genuinely liked being pregnant and I’m grateful that being pregnant and giving birth were easy for me. I wouldn’t have minded being pregnant more often, if raising lots of children weren’t so hellishly expensive and draining and questionable from an environmental footprint view.

    I think Firestone has an important point with this metaphor, and that it still makes people uncomfortable suggests many folks still don’t like hearing it.

    Pregnancy *is* barbaric.

    It is barbaric specfically in the sense that ‘civilization’ often means getting further and further isolated from/estranged from the messiness that is living in our physical bodies, and pregnancy makes that separation nearly impossible for at least those nine months, longer still if a woman chooses to breastfeed. Childbirth is messy, bloody, painful, and, yes, often poopy. Not unlike life in ‘barbaric times.’ Natural childbirth in my experience, and that of many other women, is more or less exactly like shitting a pumpkin – though I always thought bowling ball, myself, as a pumpkin would give up and get smushed by the pressure. If you forced these things on an unpregnant person – it would be graphic torture, even as narrowly as BushCo. defines it.

    I also think the forced birth crowd absolutely believes pregnancy and childbirth is barbaric, and a kind of torture – which is why it is a suitable punishment for sluts who liked their bodies and sex a little too much.

15. Well, this is exactly why I find Firestone to be misogynist. She takes something that only women can do, that could be read as a tremendous power, and says that’s it’s disgusting. Remember also her passages where she writes about pregnancy deforms a woman’s body to such an extent that her husband is repulsed by her and can’t imagine having sex with her ever again. I do think it is fundamentally misogynist to describe a capacity that only women have as “barbaric.”

    Essentially, what Firestone is arguing is that in order for woment to achieve equality and be recognized as full human beings, we have to become…like men. She’s buying into the notion that men are the normal model of human being, and women–femaleness itself–is some kind of crippling deviation from it.

    Well, bullshit. Pregnancy and childbirth don’t make me less human than men. They are part and parcel of my humanity, and any kind equality will have to accept that women are as normal a model of human being as anybody else.

    Does pregnancy or sex comes first for women who desire both?

    There was a time in my life when I had quite a strong sex drive and knew that I wanted to have kids sometime in the future. For the past few years, the urge to have children has become amazingly more intense, and the sex drive has dropped away–not completely, but to a great degree. Which is to say, I don’t have a problem imagining the next 10 years without a sexual partner, but imagining the next 10 years without a kid makes my blood run cold.

16. And oh yeah, I’m not even touching the chapter where she goes on and on about how in the utopian world, children and adults would have sex with each other regularly, because that would free children from the ideology of childhood.

17. also… in re the “household” model – I spent the first few years of my violet-y little life on a kibbutz, one which had been around since 48? 49? anyway. what was supposed to happen, and what everyone planned to have happen in the first years of the thing was that babies were raised communally, and apart from their parents. And the to-be mothers knew that coming in, but then when they had their babies they WOULD NOT HAVE IT. These were women who fervently believed in the communal living of the kibbutz and who felt it offered them enlightenment and rest for their souls chose it with eyes and heart open but when it meant separating them from newborns, well, communism had to turn around right fast and give the babies back if they were gonna have anyone living on the kibbutz at all. Yes, bc of the blood and the pain and the muck and the hormones women are bound to their biology and the products of it in a way men aren’t (or, well, they are, but aren’t compelled to recognize it?) but I think that is a fine thing and… and… I don’t know.

18. The thing I like the most about Firestone is that, unlike plenty of other feminist theorists, she offered an alternative. So much feminist theory is about pointing out the flaws of the system but what do we put in its place? Of course, her vision is also problematic but at least she offers an alternative for us to critique.

19. If the idea is that the ability to become pregnant is the root of our oppression, than she may have a valid point. It IS a huge factor in discrimination against women. But I would rather the solution be a cultural change that values women and children than articificial reproduction.

    I do find the idea of calling pregnancy barbaric to be mysogynist. Because it is a natural function it is barbaric? So is sex, but she seems to support sex. (I’ve only read excerpts, so correct me if I am wrong on that.) I think pregnancy can be very empowering and awesome if (and that’s a big IF in the current medical establishment) a woman is well-supported by those who surround her. It was for me.

    But generally, I read theory with a grain of salt. It’s meant to push the envelope and get people thinking outside the box and not always meant for practical application. I would say that MOST theory does not apply to my life, but still, it’s thought-provoking to read.

20. Rather like EG above, I find this description of the Firestone philosophy – “She is opposed to pregnancy because she sees it as the root of gender differentiation. In her opinion, women will not be able to attain freedom and equality with men until this root cause of their oppression is removed.” – somewhat disturbing. To be free, women have to be like men? Ugh. How about a feminist philosophy that has respect for female biology? If this was the kind of think floating around in the 1970’s, then I’m not surprised that some saw feminism as hostile to mothers and motherhood.

    And nope, I don’t see this question – “Does pregnancy or sex comes first for women who desire both? What do you think?” – as hard at all. I went through my 20’s wanting sex, but very much not wanting pregnancy (you know, the contraception thing). Then when I decided the time was right for a child, I desired pregnancy. That didn’t stop me desiring sex still too, and as far as I’ve been aware amongst friends who went through a similar process, this isn’t weird. My partner and I were very careful not to turn sex merely into a mechanistic, functional thing. Yes, one thing led to the other, but the two functions (fun and procreation) are not mutually exclusive.

21. I wonder how old she was when she wrote that.

    Did she have children by then? If not, why not? Does she have a partner with children? If she didn’t want children then, did she want any over the ensuing years? If she had children, do they have children? Did she see herself being a grandmother, an aunt?

    See, this is why I’m not a Feminist (capital F)…

    …and reading the comments, EG, you are my hero. Thank you for putting what I’m feeling into coherence.

22. Well, thanks! But as a capital F Feminist, may I recommend Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born to you? In many ways it’s a direct reply to Firestone, and it’s important because it undoes the myth that feminism is necessarily hostile to pregnancy and childbirth and mothering.

23. I like conceptually that Firestone offers a solution. But her work is quite problematic. As a 25-year-old who did not either have or have much intimate knowledge of children, her discussion of what is best for them in Dialectic implied that they are like small adults with similar ability to be self-sufficient, but unfairly kept dependent. She also seems to ignore the child’s need to bond. I don’t think this need requires a traditional male-female married couple. But I think it’s critical for the child to have at least one main parental figure, plus, if it’s a single parent a close relationship with a family member or adult friend of the gender opposite to that of the parent. I don’t think this gets accomplished in the commune scenario.

    Not to mention that the technological replacement to pregnancy is completely unworkable. Many pregnancies happen before such actions could be taken. I agree with Catherine Martell that much of Dialectic could be rhetorical or a riposte, but I fail to see how effective it is to contemplate a solution with no roots in reality.

24. pregnancy is barbaric as are most bodily functions. We work pretty hard to escape death (also barbaric) perhaps because it happens to both (all) genders. Why do we not work as hard to escape pregnancy too?

    Pregnancy is one root cause of women’s oppression, so changing the way we create children could help the problem.

    Also, I resent being told that having children is what makes one a woman. I guess I’m “like a man” because I don’t / won’t reproduce.

25. Biologically speaking, I think pregnancy is barbaric. It does horrible things to your body. The fetus cares not for your wellbeing – if you don’t have enough calcium the fetus will take it from your bones and your teeth begin to fall out. Your internal organs are compressed, your balance is thrown off, many women become physically ill, joints get loosened, and on and on. The only reason pregnancy is considered better than having a belly full of tapeworm is that you get a baby out of it. Evolution only makes things good enough, which is why pregnancy and childbirth suck so much.

26. We work pretty hard to escape death (also barbaric) perhaps because it happens to both (all) genders. Why do we not work as hard to escape pregnancy too?

    Because death ends one’s life. Pregnancy does not. I don’t really see any connection between the two events besides the fact that both are functions of the body. So is growing hair on my head and having sex, but I don’t work hard to escape either of them. Many women find pregnancy to be a meaningful and fulfilling event–why would they want to escape it?

    Pregnancy is one root cause of women’s oppression, so changing the way we create children could help the problem.

    I see nothing to support that assertion. Certainly men and patriarchal institutions have used pregnancy as an excuse for oppressing women, but there’s nothing intrinsic to pregnancy about that. Why do you think it’s more feasible to change our bodies to fit patriarchal conceptions of what a “normal” life should be than to change those conceptions?

    Also, I resent being told that having children is what makes one a woman.

    Sigh. Nobody has said that. What I said is that pregnancy and childbirth are things that only women can do. That is not the same as saying that in order to be a woman, you must experience pregnancy and childbirth. Menstruation is something that only women experience; it does not mean that to be a woman you must menstruate.

27. people have already mentioned the offering a solution, which I do agree is important, and the idea of what being “barbaric” really is, which also I like. and I do feel that one reason I don’t ever ever want to get pregnant is what it does to your body-barbaric might not be the right word, but if you divorce the concept of pregnancy from the “miracle of creating life” misogynist rhetoric(I know that won’t be popular, and if it gets this comment banned, well so it goes), it’s pretty hostile to women’s bodies. Which I’m sure Firestone said. I don’t know-I guess I really think that while it might be okay to come back to women who want to play the typical mother role, I do think that trying to make sure we “keep a place for them” is trying to make sure we keep a place for patriarchy. Same issue I have with the “traditional family”-the patriarchal socialization of that needs to be broken first before I think it’s a good idea-while the groups Firestone proposed may or may not be “happier”(just like raising a child with a mother and father may or may not be “happier” than a single mother-and I put happier in quotes because I have a lot of questions about for who and how you measure that) I do think they’d be better for women.

28. and EG, I will point out that growing lots of hair is at least sometimes called barbaric. It’s more in tune with nature, less with “civilization”. Embracing your body/nature seems to get that label-hence why I agree that death is barbaric, though not necessarily bad, as really pregnancy is, the issues in the previous comment notwithstanding

29. RE: Her concept of “households” of large groupings of people living together under ‘contracts’ and licenses overrides the traditional view of biological families that most of are used to. Would these ”households” have more merit and happiness than standard families? I would love to see a modern day experiment of this. Now, that would make good TV.

    —

    As you wish:

    http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2005/07/introduction_to.html

30. Well yes, that’s why I specified “on your head.” But the fact that something is natural or bodily doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not it’s a good thing. Seeing is a natural bodily function too.

    My problem with your comment is that you can’t divorce pregnancy from creating life (I’m not a fan of the “miracle” formulation). That is what it is doing. The experience of pregnancy is exactly why it is so important that women have access to abortion. But there are plenty of women who find deep meaning in the experience of pregnancy, and dismissing their experiences and views is equally troubling.

31. There’s also a real problem here in the casual use of the term “the typical mother role.”

    What does that mean? Are we talking, in Rich’s words, about the experience or the institution of motherhood? What it means to be a mother has changed dramatically over the past fifty years. Pregnancy and childbirth does not automatically equal giving up all of one’s ambitions in order to focus exclusively on your child.

    The problem with “smashing the family” as they used to put it, is that most people don’t want to–the family as we know it has also changed dramatically over the past 50 years, and many, many people find great strength and happiness in it.

32. I should also add that while I agree with all those who want to interrogate what we mean by “barbaric” and whether or not we think it’s an intrinsically bad thing, there’s really no question how Firestone means it or how her readers are supposed to understand it. She uses it in conjunction with “disgusting,” “deformed,” etc. For her, it’s negative.

33. I think it important to remember that in 1970, more women had pregnancy forced on them and were not given the choice as to whether or not to proceed. In that context, pregnancy is barbaric and Firestone’s view holds a purpose. The right to liberty, to terminate a pregnancy, becomes a bit complicated to address if one can’t express in stark terms how pregnancy can be a horrible physical experience for a woman. One is hard-pressed to get the message across by appealing to how wonderful the process is and how satisfying and empowering it is for women. One of the most ardent anti-choice people I’ve ever had the displeasure to meet argued that because pregnancy is so wonderful and empowering, women should be forced to go through with it for their own good. The silly, frightened girls just didn’t know any better, you see.

34. I hear what you’re saying, Anatolia, especially about how much bleaker pregnancy and childbirth seem in a pre-Roe world, but it seems to me that what both Firestone and your anti-choice acquaintance have in common is the desire to overwrite individual variation and individual decision-making and pregnancy and childbirth with One Official Version of What Pregnancy Means.

    What you say also seems to underscore my main problem with Firestone, which is that she doesn’t understand state regulation of women’s bodies to be the problem–in fact, she advocates for it; instead, she understands women’s bodies themselves to be the problem.

35. I often struggle with understanding extremist views, but I do see there is some purpose to taking them when a position is tipped very hard to one side. Imagine a seesaw, where there is a large group of people sitting on one end weighing the thing to that end; it is difficult to sit in the middle and get balance restored. It might take a few extreme positions on the other end to get people to start moving toward the middle. For example, if one can get people arguing against state regulation of women’s bodies from the other end of the spectrum, they might begin to see the folly of arguing for state regulation from their own end. Of course, I concede outright that’s probably a very optimistic view of the process.

36. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, EG, but I believe that if the choice existed to bear a child in your body vs to bear the same child in a uterine replicator and not have to endure pregnancy, a *lot* of women would benefit. It is, of course, vitally important to stress that this should be offered as a *choice*, and that Firestone’s world where women aren’t really allowed to get pregnant and aren’t allowed to raise their own children afterward is in my view dystopian. But if I had had the choice to have my own genetic children without having to ruin my body to do it, I would have jumped on it. Pregnancy was a horrific experience for me, post-pregnancy has brought many seemingly permanent health complications, and I would be a better mother and a happier person if I hadn’t had to be pregnant — it was a sacrifice I made willingly in order to have my babies, but it was only willing in the sense that right now there’s no alternative.

    If you’re a woman, your lover is a man, and you want genetic children, you must endure pregnancy. Some lesbians *might* be able to get out of it under rare circumstances (eg, your lover wants to bear your child and doesn’t want to pass on her own genes because there’s a genetic disorder in her family, so she will happily be pregnant with your donated egg and some stranger’s donated sperm and then the two of you are both biological mothers in some sense), but women in het relationships cannot avoid it if they want biological children. And I think it would be great if it *was* something we could avoid, if we chose. Just as long as it was a choice, and society didn’t look down on women who chose to be pregnant instead (and yes, that’s a pipe dream, I’m aware of that. We would almost need to change society more radically than even Firestone envisioned to get rid of the need people have to judge one set of women and their reproductive choices against another set of women and their choices and decide that one set is bad somehow.)

37. Eh, pregnancy’s pretty barbaric. I mean, if I had been given a choice of methods of reproduction, Mammalian Standard With Optional Large Head is not the one I would have chosen. It wouldn’t even have made Top Three.

    bc of the blood and the pain and the muck and the hormones women are bound to their biology and the products of it in a way men aren’t

    And Ledasmom continues her campaign for Worst Mother of the Year by saying that, about a day after giving birth, she would gladly have turned her newborn over for communal raising. Honestly, after you’ve played with a baby for an hour and changed a few diapers, you’ve exhausted all the variety you’re gonna get in the day.

38. I wonder how much this debate is colored by whether one has read about uterine replicators primarily in Brave New World or in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series?

    (I highly recommend the latter.)

39. I have to me-three the recommendation of Lois McMaster Bujold’s books.

40. Third on the Bujold—never read Firestone (though it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that Bujold had) but the Vorkosigan books offer a variety of viewpoints. Mine happens to be with #25—foeti are parasites, pregnancy is miserable, were uterine replicators just as good or better, and available, that’d be my choice. And for the women who love being pregnant, feel great while being pregnant, great! Hey, let’s go one better, and figure out why some women get more energy, glowing skin, lustrous skin, and revved though processes while they’re pregnant, instead of having their intellects go to mush and feeling exhausted all the time. More options are always a good thing, both for birth, and family arrangements.

41. But I would rather the solution be a cultural change that values women and children than articificial reproduction.

    I’ve often told my guy that if he could be the pregnant one, I’d be 100% willing to spread some genes. As is, I’m planning on never experiencing those 9 months. It’s not something I want to do. It is inconvenient, messy, painful, etc. No thanks.

    I’d rather have the artificial reproduction regardless of whether it solved any social problems. As is, I’ll probably just adopt, but the part of me that wants to continue my genes is not nearly as sastisfied.

42. apropos of nothing, feministe has become my go-to site for guest bloggers who bash (old-school) feminism.

43. My mum loves being a mum, considers it the most important and best thing she’s ever done, and her word for pregnancy wasn’t barbaric. It was, if I remember accurately, “degrading.” She said pregnancy was what made her stop believing in God, or at the very least conclude if there was a God he really didn’t give a fuck about us. (though she got some faith, of a different stripe, back when I was actually born. hmm). She fucking hated every second of being pregnant. And it had nothing to do with the fact that pregnancy is something women do and everything to do with the fact that, both with me and with my brother, she had severe morning sickness–not the first trimester, mind you, the entire nine months–she generally felt physically awful all the time, and with my brother, she almost died and had to spend four months on bed rest.

    So, I don’t think Firestone is right that pregnancy is disgusting, or inherently “barbaric,” and I don’t think women for whom pregnancy was a happy, joyous, glowing time are lying or acting out of false consciousness, but the women for whom pregnancy is truly awful are women too, and their experiences shouldn’t be discounted either. I don’t think we should hate anything just because it’s female-only, but I don’t think we have to revere things that are female-only either.

    It sort of reminds me, on a larger scale, over the discourse on menstruation. No, I don’t think menstrual blood is gross because I think vaginas are inherently nasty, I think menstrual blood is gross because ew! Blood! Blood is gross and unpleasant, no matter where it comes from! I don’t hate having my period because it’s a reminder of my womanness, I hate having my period because I get cramps to fell an elephant, I have less energy than usual, and getting blood out of your underwear is a pain in the ass. Some women don’t experience any of these things. Some people aren’t grossed out by blood. I am very happy for those people, but I am not one of them.

44. Certainly men and patriarchal institutions have used pregnancy as an excuse for oppressing women, but there’s nothing intrinsic to pregnancy about that.

    I agree. Some men seem entitled to exploit the vulnerability of a mother, or even agree to or push pregnancy as a means to create a vulnerability. Its really quite diabolical. And, they get to disguise themselves under the cloak of “family man” as they do it–brilliant!

    Sure, we could avoid that oppression by avoiding pregnancy/mothering, but what if we WANT to be pregnant/be a mother? Choosing not to reproduce when you desire to because you are afraid of being oppressed is not free choice. Removing the vulnerability–by changing the attitudes of men, by creating more stability for mothers and children–that creates true choice.

45. Bujold rocks. In one of the books one of her characters, Cordelia, says, “All true wealth is biological”.

    And let’s not forget, with modern technology (any infertiles reading this shall now commence laughing their asses off) women *and* men can have children with a bio connection yet not using their own bodies.

    Speaking as a woman who struggled long and hard to get pregnant, I can’t say I understand the idea of pregnancy being barbaric at all. Giving birth isn’t pretty, but it is a natural process. And let’s not forget that hoary old nut, if you want kids but don’t want to get pregnant, well, there are plenty of kids in foster care and orphanages (cue more hilarity from certain sections of your readership). But of course, that means giving up that genetic tie…

    Not the easy decision it sounds on the screen when it comes down to it.

46. Another plug for Bujold, with the caution that the Cordelia/Miles books have gotten much less interesting since most of the characters got married off and became respectable.

47. Okay, I’m going to totally threadjack, but I’m way too excited to run across other people who’ve read the Vorkosigan books.

    Another plug for Bujold, with the caution that the Cordelia/Miles books have gotten much less interesting since most of the characters got married off and became respectable.

    The last one was definitely dull, especially since she’d spent two books setting up Ekaterina as a heroine who surprises herself and then pretty much dropped her. But I have great affection for A Civil Campaign. If nothing else, it has the second-funniest dinner party gone horribly wrong that I’ve ever read.

    I think the problem is that she’s grown to love her characters too much and doesn’t want to kill them off anymore, so they all have to be given happy endings. It’s an occupational hazard when you’re writing a series.

48. @Jamie – It is heterosexist but Firestone deals with heterosexuality and how it affects women mostly so I was only trying to illuminate that.

    @Catherine Martell – I can barely get my head around her work so I just wanted to hear people’s thoughts about her. Although, when people write books, they must be prepared to be taken literally. I think she meant it literally judging by how passionate and guns-blazing it is in its’ literary style.

49. I think the problem is that she’s grown to love her characters too much and doesn’t want to kill them off anymore, so they all have to be given happy endings. It’s an occupational hazard when you’re writing a series

    That’s pretty much exactly how I see it. I mean, compare “Shards of Honor” and “Barrayar” to the more recent books, not to mention “The Warrior’s Apprentice”. And a good bit of the interest in the early books came from people who didn’t exactly approve of Barrayaran mores and laws nevertheless working within that society – there was much more tension (one of my very favorite Bujold works is “The Mountains of Mourning”. In fact, the short works that were published together as “The Borders of Infinity” are my favorites overall).
    It’s not that I want the characters killed off, but realistically it’s not going to be all hearts and flowers for all of them.

50. @Catherine Martell – I can barely get my head around her work so I just wanted to hear people’s thoughts about her. Although, when people write books, they must be prepared to be taken literally.

    What an extraordinary thing to say! You’ve just written off the whole of allegory and satire. Do you think Swift should have been taken literally when he wrote A Modest Proposal? Is it valid to watch The Colbert Report and believe every word? And what about reading The Bible? Or a novel?

    I’m not saying that Firestone is necessarily writing satire or allegory, but that is one possible reading of her work. Ditto Valerie Solanas, though that’s opening up a whole nother can of feminist worms. In any case, people who take all books literally are going to miss out on an awful lot of subtlety and humour, and personally I consider anyone who thinks the written word is literal truth to be very dangerous indeed.

    It’s easy enough to drive a truck through Firestone’s argument if you’re going to decontextualise one particularly eyebrow-raising assertion from her book, and then challenge it in the context of a totally opposed political framework. This is what you’ve done. You’re trying to argue with a sole contention of Firestone’s from the basis of third-wave feminism and a sort of libertarian-capitalist individualism.

    Ultimately, this approach is a waste of time. Though I certainly don’t agree with everything Firestone wrote, and nor would I argue that anyone needs to, political tracts like hers are only worth reading if you’re prepared to try to appreciate them as a complete philosophy and get inside their argument. You can open any political manifesto at any page, quote it out of context, and pick holes in it simply by adopting the opposite point of view. But that game gets a bit pointless after a while.

    Firestone’s central contention, if you do want to get your head around it, is that Marxism is on the right track apart from one gigantic omission: that Marx and Engels failed to identify women as the most oppressed class. She believes that the oppression of women as a class is the basis of all oppressions in the world, including racism, classism and the belittlement of children. The barriers to women’s freedom must be removed in order to end all these oppressions. While Marx and Engels argued that the workers must rise up and seize the means of production, Firestone argues that women must rise up and seize the means of reproduction. Hence her contention that women will not be liberated until babies can be created outside the human body.

    Now, you can read this as satire, as tongue-in-cheek, as a philosophical contention, as literal intent, as a call to arms, as a complex balance of all these things – however you like, really. And you can decide it’s absolutely true or dismiss it as a pile of crap. But you aren’t going to get anywhere close to understanding it by picking out random chunks that offend your individualist presumptions and attempting to figure them out through the prism of third-wave libertarian feminism. It’s like you’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

    Again: I’m not saying that Firestone is right or wrong. And I’m not saying that you have to be a second-wave socialist feminist. But you probably do at least have to get what second-wave socialist feminism is in order to understand her argument.

    I think it’s worth understanding, anyway, even if you decide her book is a filthy pack of lies and you hate every word. Which you’re fully entitled to, and clearly lots of Feministe commenters do.

    @Morgan no 42 above: exactly.

51. What about “Brave New World”? In my view, handing over pregnancy to technology is the ultimate subjugation of women. Aldous Huxley’s disutopia has it right, women would gain nothing from handing over reproduction, because handing over reproduction to technology necessarily means taking it out of the hands of women and placing it in the hands of men.

    I personally think that this was one of the greatest mistakes of the feminist movement, although it has been a fruitful line of philosophy and will no doubt continue to spark debate and critical thought, I don’t know how anyone can conclude, given the state of pregnancy and motherhood in the US, that separating women from their biology will lead to liberation? I prefer the the status of motherhood in Herland (Perkins Gillman), to that of Brave New World any way you cut it.

52. [H]anding over reproduction to technology necessarily means taking it out of the hands of women and placing it in the hands of men

    I have consulted my scars, and I believe it would be worth it.

53. I dispute that women would have nothing to gain from handing over reproduction, or that the concept of uterine replicators even entails “handing over.” As ever, I am about choice, and if a woman wants to give a body birth, I wouldn’t gainsay her that. But I don’t see introducing new options as “handing over control”.

    This is why I prefer Bujold’s vision to Huxley’s–she didn’t remove the control entirely, but reintegrated it back into a new idea of family and society. (Also, her societies are not universally homogenous in their approach to this technology. See, Ethan of Athos, below.) I also think that she, having borne at least two children, had one very clear idea about the most immediate benefit that Huxley did not really touch on: Being pregnant and giving birth is hard work. It’s great that modern technology and health care has ameliorated much of the consequences, and that there are women who feel awesome while going through the process. BUT…it’s still a rough process for many women. (Me included. My very brief experience of pregnancy was not salutory. I was throwing up six times a day, couldn’t keep food down, was dehydrating, lost five pounds. I’m still willing to go through the process to create children, but man, I really wish I had the option to use a uterine replicator.)

    Also, I doubt you could ever remove women from the process entirely. One of Bujold’s stories, Ethan of Athos, demonstrates this concept: Athos is a planet with only men. It’s actually a very calm, peaceful, if authoritarian sort of place, but even with uterine replicators and egg lines creating sons for generations, eventually the viability of the original genetic material dies. (Since they aren’t making any women, ever, they are forced to rely increasingly aged cultures.) Thus one of their number is forced to go into the outside world and deal with biological companies, and in the end, a woman, to acquire the genetic material he needs. (I love the final sequence in Ethan of Athos, btw, when Ethan salutes his long dead mother, a doctor of sciences who donated her own eggs to the Athosian lines.)

    Mnemosyne: I can stand a little thread hijackery myself when it’s one of my favouritest subjects ever. I keep hoping she’ll do an Ivan story. I really enjoyed seeing him run around in Civil Campaign. BTW, what’s the first funniest dinner party gone awry? Please share.

54. To expand, if one rules out the use of such a thing as a uterine replicator (assuming we ever manage to create such a thing), one is then insisting that any woman who wants to reproduce her genes must put herself in jeopardy of life and limb each time each time she does so. Whosoever wants the unique power, experience or what-the-heck-ever of giving birth is welcome to it, but I don’t quite see why a willingness to stretch one’s intimate tissues should be a prerequisite for genetic parenthood.

55. BTW, what’s the first funniest dinner party gone awry? Please share.

    It’s in Jennifer Crusie’s Strange Bedpersons and culminates in a woman throwing up on her future mother-in-law’s Manolo Blahniks. But the future MIL really, really deserved it.

56. [H]anding over reproduction to technology necessarily means taking it out of the hands of women and placing it in the hands of men.

    Only if you assume all scientists are men and only men can use technology.

57. Dialectic was a polemic in early radical feminist days. Biology as destiny. The world has come a long way in working around this so-called disadvantage. Advocacy of work-family policy, affordable child care, the new masculinity/fatherhood and the increased estimation of women and mothers.

58. I’m certainly not against the development of artificial uterus-pods; I quite agree with Alara. I’m sure they throw up a whole host of struggles for feminists to fight (will insurance cover them, why should employers extend paid maternity leave if that selfish female worker could just use a pod, bad mommy mudslinging), but so what else is new? We’d just have to fight them.

59. Bujold rocks. In one of the books one of her characters, Cordelia, says, “All true wealth is biological”.

    Nitpicking here, but it is, in fact, a man who says this–Aral Vorkosigan, Cordelia’s husband.

60. Mnemosyne: Oh…..yeah….I have Strange Bedpersons. (I’d still rank Miles’ dinner party above that one, but yeah, that was pretty damn funny.)

    Good point about the scientists who would theoretically control this reproductive technology–why would we assume they’d all be male?

    BTW, there has been some testing within the guidelines of the FDA and IVF legislation for the US….and lo and behold, these teams are headed up by a woman. (At least the US team was.)

61. Ah, it was Aral. Figures.

62. Dialectic was a polemic in early radical feminist days. Biology as destiny. The world has come a long way in working around this so-called disadvantage. Advocacy of work-family policy, affordable child care, the new masculinity/fatherhood and the increased estimation of women and mothers.

    Actually, labor feminists were advocating those things in the 1950s.

63. The role playing game Transhuman Space uses the word “exowombs” for uterine replicators. Bujold has priority, but the other word is shorter. 🙂

    Almost anything I’d have added has already been said, so I’ll continue the hijack, and note that the last Miles book hardly seemed like happy shiny endings to me. Near-death experience, with permanent internal scarring probably taking a couple of decades off the life expectancy of the main character and his friend — happy?

64. No, I don’t think menstrual blood is gross because I think vaginas are inherently nasty, I think menstrual blood is gross because ew! Blood! Blood is gross and unpleasant, no matter where it comes from! I don’t hate having my period because it’s a reminder of my womanness, I hate having my period because I get cramps to fell an elephant, I have less energy than usual, and getting blood out of your underwear is a pain in the ass.

    Ever read the Connie Willis story “Even the Queen”?

    It’s about some point in the fairly near future–a woman who’s around my age (early 30s) has a daughter just out of college and another who’s in her mid teens–when, through a combination of drugs and something called a “shunt”, women no longer have to menstruate unless they’re planning to get pregnant. The older daughter of the narrator has decided that she’s going to join a group called the Cyclists, women who menstruate on purpose. The leader of the group the daughter’s planning to join comes to meet the narrator and several of her family members, including her mother and mother-in-law, to talk about being a Cyclist, and says words to the effect of “Women called their menses ‘the Curse’ because they had been browbeaten by patriarchal authority into thinking of this natural cycle as something to be reviled and hated.”

    And the mother-in-law says, “Actually, I called it the Curse because I thought an evil witch had put a curse on me.”

    Oh yeah. Preach it.

    My mother was never anything but matter-of-fact and supportive about my period–none of this slapping me in the face crap that some mothers seem to think is necessary. I have never had the slightest feeling that menstruating renders me unclean in any sense but the purely physical. I don’t even get bad cramps. But if someone offered me a way to do away with it? There’s not even the slightest question.

65. I have never had the slightest feeling that menstruating renders me unclean in any sense but the purely physical. I don’t even get bad cramps. But if someone offered me a way to do away with it? There’s not even the slightest question

    Oh, hell yeah. There just is nothing about it that I look forward to.

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