A Modest [Feminist?] Proposal

35 thoughts on A Modest [Feminist?] Proposal

1. man, if she’d just argued that these things should be made available to all young people free of charge, I’d have been on board. I guess if you make it mandatory it’s less about empowering young women than punishing them for being dirty sluts?

2. She may be serious. Remember this?

   And you *know* how I feel about bad satire.

   I’ll put the oil on to boil and start poking the wolverines.

3. Ugh. At first I thought she was advocating making long-term birth control available to young girls, but the last sentence is pretty unmistakable: …the idea of enforcing sterility on girls under 17 seems to me a least worst option.

   One of the uglier class-based slanders I’ve seen recently.

4. Why girls? Why JUST girls? Why not boys too?

5. I’m leaning toward satire, mostly because of this section:

   And silly young girls could get on with the education that is meant to produce serious, responsible taxpayers, not benefit recipients.

   Now, many people will see this modest proposal as little short of horrific – nothing less than state interference in our reproductive lives.

   “modest proposal” makes me think of Jonathan Swift — his modest proposal was written totally seriously and fooled many. Also, “silly young girls” and the implication that education is not meant to benefit recipients both strike me as sarcastic.

6. <

   strong>Why girls? Why JUST girls? Why not boys too?

   Probably because, for a number of reasons, they dont have the means to do it to the boys. Sheesh, this just has got to be satire.

7. “modest proposal” makes me think of Jonathan Swift — his modest proposal was written totally seriously and fooled many.

   That was exactly what made me think it might be satire. But satire usually has some sort of bite to it — Jon Swift’s proposal was written seriously, but it was an over-the-top suggestion intended to shed light on an ugly reality. I don’t really see where Weldon is doing that, since this whole essay is just a re-hashing of conservative talking points.

   Although, as I said in the post, I will be really happy if it turns out I’m wrong.

8. She lost what little credibility she had left when she wrote an ad masquerading as a novel several years ago.

9. It is entirely possible that she thinks that women who are educated have educations for the benefit of others, and not for themselves, and that they owe some nebulous responsibility to her … um, to society to use it in the way she *ahem* society deems prudent.

   There’s no view in there that couldn’t be serious. I don’t think it’s satire. I think she has perhaps entirely taken leave of her senses.

10. …..’The hell? It’s so hard to find good satiric writing these days. Shit, somebody just resurrect Jon Swift, already.

    “Why not boys too?”

    Because that would be violating a human male’s divine right to be an autonomous being and full citizen, since they’re the real humans, after all. 😉 I’m starting to hate articles and columns more and more each day. I wonder if any literature or journalism professors/teachers have ever killed themselves over pieces of writing like this (or just quick their careers)?…especially if it turned out to be one of their students.

11. Fuck. That should be “quit,” not “quick.”

12. man, if she’d just argued that these things should be made available to all young people free of charge, I’d have been on board.

    In Britain, they are available to all people free of charge.
    I paid … hmm, maybe £2 for my IUD fitting. For the bus back because I couldn’t walk home.

13. Sorry Jill, you’ve got it wrong on this one- a pity, because you’re almost always spot on. The original comments by Dawn Primarolo were *nothing* to do with forced sterilisation of teenagers… merely a very sensible change in policy to encourage health authorities to *offer* young women the whole range of contraceptive options at family planning clinics.

    Far too often in the UK long term methods just aren’t being talked about to girls, which is stupid because they are often the most efficient ways of preventing pregnancy in teenagers, with much lower failure rates than other methods. Long term contraceptives- IUDs, Mirena, injections and implants- need to be discussed in schools and universities. This isn’t some kind of Big Brother womb-control thing- nobody is going to be forced to use contraception who doesn’t want to, whether they’re 14 or 44- but it is going to make sure that young women get ALL the options.

    Basically, now when teens go to get the pill or contraceptive advice (all of which is free for everyone over here) they’ll be given info on longer term forms of contraception as well, along with strong encouragement to back up whichever method they choose with (free) barrier methods. Rather than belittling young women, it’s actually acknowledging their capacity and right to choose from the whole range of options.

    So, please don’t get the impression that things are going Nazi-shaped over here in Blighty. The government is adopting a policy which we fought for last year at the National Union of Students Women’s Conference, and I think it is just absolute common sense.

    Weldon also seems to have misread the Primarolo policy ideas. I think she must be “dumbing down” these days though- she’s writing for the Daily Mail, which is the vilest of the tabloid press. I’m sure this article was segwayed between some kind of immigrant-bating crap and a column on how all women are dirty asking for it biatches. Blee.

    Interestingly, Weldon was apparently pregnant herself when young and unmarried- perhaps that has coloured her views on the subject.

14. Sorry Jill, you’ve got it wrong on this one- a pity, because you’re almost always spot on. The original comments by Dawn Primarolo were *nothing* to do with forced sterilisation of teenagers… merely a very sensible change in policy to encourage health authorities to *offer* young women the whole range of contraceptive options at family planning clinics.

    Ah got it. I was going from Weldon’s description, which made it sound a whole lot more coercive than that.

    And for the record, I don’t oppose free and full access to all kinds of contraception. I do oppose forcible and coercive contraception and sterilization, though.

15. And Jenny, I’ll fix the post to be accurate to the politician’s actual position.

16. Awesome- to be honest, I’m not surprised that the Daily Mail printed an article which misrepresented the politician’s views to begin with, it hasn’t exactly got a great reputation as a paper.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_page_id=1772&in_article_id=423549&in_author_id=322 – they printed this crap after the murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich, where the columnist reckoned “… in the scheme of things the deaths of these five women is no great loss.”

    I actually cried with anger when I read that article.

17. Just because Primarolo’s proposal is sane doesn’t mean Weldon’s piece isn’t odious. Take a look:

    Neither do I believe it will encourage “promiscuity” because girls will feel they have nothing to fear in sleeping around. In truth, they seem to be doing that already. I’m afraid we are now in a time when sex is mere recreational pleasure to thousands of young women.

    The trouble is that pregnancy no longer holds the fear for teenagers it once did. The social stigma has gone.

    Indeed, for many, it seems, a child has actually become a kind of perverse badge of honour.

    * * * *

    Suddenly, they can give birth to someone who will offer unconditional love in a bleak, busy, money-grubbing world.

    The council will offer a free home away from nagging parents. They will have independence, sexual freedom and no more humiliating exams to try to pass – because, more than likely, their education will fall by the wayside.

    * * * *
    Love is seen as little more than a neurotic dependency to the young.

    The fear of pregnancy used to stop girls having sex. To be pregnant and unmarried was a major life disaster (as it is still in some of our ethnic communities.)

    You were disgraced, soiled goods: the child was removed, no one would marry you.

    This condemnation of the sexually imprudent was not meant to be unkind. People were poor, babies without fathers suffered and there was no way women could earn money if they had a child.

    It was a moral issue but the stigma was born out of necessity: a desperate attempt to stop girls from doing what came naturally until a father and a home could be provided.

    * * * *
    in this country, getting pregnant while still at school has become a status symbol for the girls, as ASBOs have for the boys?

    * * * *

    A certain proportion of teenagers like to defy fate – and the more you warn them not to smoke, drink, have sex, stay up late, join gangs, the more they will.

    * * * *

    The trouble now is that the girls – who once wanted just to be loved by someone, anyone – are under intense peer pressure, don’t want to be outdone or be seen to be ‘square’, and so behave like the boys.

    So much for gender equality in the classroom!

    It seems that many of today’s girls just like being pregnant, and emotionally and physically – not just practically – have more to gain than lose if they are. Sex education hasn’t helped, and may indeed have harmed.

    * * * *
    But it’s not working. That’s why I think sterilising girls for a few years isn’t such a bad idea after all – and, when you think about it, it’s a tempting solution for the State, too.

    Once you stop your under-20s having babies, there’s no end to the social improvements you could make.

    If girls go on to college instead of minding babies, fewer children overall will be born. The more educated a girl, the fewer babies she is likely to have – education and fertility rates being in inverse proportion.

    * * * *
    Watch young mothers slap their troublesome offspring in the supermarket and see what I mean. Because you wanted a baby does not mean you wanted a child – with its separate, possibly difficult personality.

    So the children of teenage mothers can suffer, too.

    * * * *
    Since science has now devised a way of stopping girls getting pregnant without damaging their longterm reproductive health, the idea of enforcing sterility on girls under 17 seems to me a least worst option.

18. This is particularly disturbing, considering the ways in which mostly black women and teens were coerced by Medicare and welfare rules in the U.S. to do exactly this — become sterile for several years whether they wanted to or not. Oh, and the government paying to have the Norplant put in but not paying to have it taken back out even when the women faced debilitating side effects. Check out Killing the Black Body, for those who haven’t. Interesting and terrifying stuff.

19. Whatever – 5-year birth control? I want it.

20. The daily mail prints some sickening piece of class-baiting every day, as far as I can judge. Even if it ws possible that Weldon wrote it as satire, they surely printed it with a straight face.

21. “The original comments by Dawn Primarolo were *nothing* to do with forced sterilisation of teenagers… merely a very sensible change in policy to encourage health authorities to *offer* young women the whole range of contraceptive options at family planning clinics.”

    I’m not really sure. There is something worth discussing. The proposal isn’t to “force” them to take anything, but “steer” them towards particular options in the knowledge that after they’ve made them they won’t be able to change their minds for a couple of years. There’s something creepy about offering very young and impressionable children long term and binding decisions because you want to forstall any chance of them backing out and doing something you don’t want over the long haul.

    There is a very interesting subtext to all this. Wheldon’s piece does articulates what Primarolo is thinking, though won’t say in public. Labour have tried the sort of comprehensive sex ed program of education about and access to contraception which people like Jill champion, and they’ve seen it fail them. So they’re now trying a different tack.

    Their assessment is that their teen pregnancy policy has failed because most teen pregnancies are either volitional, or in kids who are indifferent about pregnancy. And a good proportion of the remainder are in kids who are too badly educated or emotionally disordered to use any contraception method which requires any real thought. I think they’re correct about the this: and there are real limits to what comprehensive sex ed can do. But in their desparation they’re now turning to methods which don’t require education and don’t allow people to reject access once they’ve bought in at 13, which I do find slightly creepy.

    P.S. I’m a different James to the one who posted above.

22. James– so far as I understand it, people CAN ‘back out’ and get an IUD removed if it doesn’t work for them. All forms of birth control can have weird side effects… getting one inserted without knowing how it will affect your particular body and then having no option to remove it is just… impossible. There would be about 60 lawsuits a minute.

23. i’m about to be smacked… but this is too good of an opportunity…

    se, i believe in mandatory, automatic birth control. put it in the water, i don’t care. i don’t mean the hormonal crap that is used atm (and gods, i miss my norplant!). i mean, i really wish we had a way to effectivly and automatically make everyone “sterile”, and then could offer something to turn OFF the sterility. so that every pregnancy was wanted. the “pill” that gets rid of the sterility, in my fantasy utopia, would be offered free of charge, and have to somehow be done to insure that someone does not slip it into someone else’s coffee without consent.

    i know im prolly gonna be blasted, but before the yelling, please think about it. not a hysterectomy, or anything radical. something that is TOTALLY within each person’t ability to control. but something where, instead of remembering to take a pill, or change a patch, or go and have something put in, to stop unwanted pregnancy – you have to remember to take something in order to GET pregnant. both men and women. (that is important, otherwise pregnant women could be left with the explanation of “she was trying to trap me”.)

    *ducking for cover*

24. Jill wrote:
    I’m all for improving access to education and decreasing the teen pregnancy rate, but not at any cost. And forcing all girls to be sterilized is a pretty high price to pay. It’s simply wrong. It’s a violation of bodily autonomy and basic human rights, just like forced abortion and forced pregnancy. It is not something that any pro-choice person should ever consider reasonable.

    Etc.

    So basically women should be free to choose physical, emotional and financial misery for themselves and their (accidental) offspring? And the rest of society should just shut up, pay up (welfare etc.), and cheerfully accept the higher crime rates and general social decay that are sure to follow? Right…

    Sterility is a BLESSING, even though most people are too stupid to realize it. Pregnancy and childbirth are the curse of womankind, and the primary source of their misery and oppression throughout the ages. Patriarchy isn’t the real problem; your own biology is. TRUE ‘feminism’ would seek to empower women through (safe and affordable) testosterone supplementation, genetic engineering (for greater mental & physical strength and guaranteed lifelong sterility, among other things) and artificial wombs. Also, it would be pro-gun, anti-immigration, and fiercely, uncompromisingly anti-religion.

    But you don’t get this, do you? It does not compute; the Liberal chip inside your head gets switched to overload. The sad truth is that you are your own worst enemy, and if you ever get fully liberated, it will almost certainly be due to the heroic efforts of enlightened MEN, who’ll have to drag you, kicking and screaming, all the way to freedom and empowerment.

    Anyway, mandatory, standardized “long-term contraception”, preferably combined with some kind of parenting licence, would certainly be a good start. The financially, mentally & physically unfit should be prevented from breeding (mindlessly, recklessly, foolishly) for both their own sake and that of society in general — at least until we have the technological means to eliminate poverty, insanity, low IQ, (hereditary) disease, and other fundamental problems. If most people are irresponsible fools, then reason and responsibility have to be enforced by an enlightened central authority, simple as that.

25. Hm, the long term methods they’re talking about are reversible- Mirena coil can be removed at any point and your fertility is back quicker than if you were coming off the ordinary contraceptive pill, and the implant can be taken out (albeit with a little more difficulty). Yes, its more tricky than just stopping taking a tablet every day, but there’s no question that the option for removal would be on the table if required- and as its all free under the NHS, no problem of financial coercion like discussed above.

    I don’t think Labour have tried this before- contraceptive discussions yes, but sex ed classes rarely go beyond the pill and the condom. As sabbatical women’s officer at Oxford I was actually quite shocked at the low levels of knowledge about contraceptive options among the girls there- very few knew about IUDs, even fewer about hormonal ones. Those who did tended to be from abroad. I think this is a major problem, which needs addressing in schools and family planning clinics.

    I agree with you that the exact mechanism needs to be handled carefully- where does “steering” turn into “coercion” etc. But I think genuinely *offering* teenagers choices in contraception, including long term options has to be a great thing.

26. Parapondera is a joke right?

    My satire button must be off…both of these things seem to real to me.

    Trading one power structure for another is not freedom.

27. Becca wrote:

    I’m leaning toward satire, mostly because of this section:

    And silly young girls could get on with the education that is meant to produce serious, responsible taxpayers, not benefit recipients.

    Now, many people will see this modest proposal as little short of horrific – nothing less than state interference in our reproductive lives.

    “modest proposal” makes me think of Jonathan Swift — his modest proposal was written totally seriously and fooled many. Also, “silly young girls” and the implication that education is not meant to benefit recipients both strike me as sarcastic.
    — ————-
    I think she is comparing two groups of people: serious-responsible-taxpayers on the one hand, and benefit-recipients on the other.

    It didn’t seem like satire to me, just so off the wall that I was mostly interested in the Britishisms. Like “benefit recipients” instead of “welfare mothers” or “freeloaders,” and “jab” instead of “shot” or “injection.”

28. wow, paraponera thinks it’s the turn of the 20th century. next thing you know s/he’ll (i’m leaning towards he’ll) be telling us how begging and epilepsy and syphilis are all hereditary and we need more tall young white men to fight our imperialist wars.
    history = great big cycles. we’ve already heard your argument and debunked it for the classist, racist bullshit it is. like fucking 30 years ago.
    *snooze*

29. Parapondera is a joke right?

    I’m hoping so, and I kind of liked the “I Don’t Like Mondays” reference, but I’m a little scared it’s not a joke.

30. I hear what you’re saying, Kristen, but I just don’t happen to believe that everyone is entitled to have has many children as they want.

    I believe that the ability to limit pregnancies is a fundamental human right, but not the inverse, and definitely not as long as taxpayers are forced to provide housing and subsistence to pregnant women and mothers who cannot provide these necessities for themselves.

    If you don’t want to be told how many children you can have, or don’t want to be encouraged by the state to use certain forms of birth control, then don’t live in a council estate or be on welfare.

31. I doubt Parapondera is a joke. I think this is the Platonic form of misogynist: a hater so hateful that he believes the best thing that can be done for women is to get rid of them entirely. I think he’s entirely serious.

    Right now, it seems very sad to me that, if he walks out the door and gets run over by a bus, I will not know about it and will therefore be deprived of the opportunity to rejoice at the departure of a very bad person from the world.

32. Mezosub, deciding who can breed and how is the problem; mandatory reproduction is just the flip-side of mandatory sterilization. While you might be able to make a debating-society separation between the two, politically the forces of telling some women to breed are also the forces of telling some women not to; to fight them, we have to fight to all women’s reproductive self-determination.

    Rights are things people have even when they use them in ways we consider irresponsible. Otherwise they’re not rights; then they’re privileges.

33. i think fay weldon is falling apart as a writer. just before she wrote a commercial for swarovsky disguised as a novel (because she had respect as a writer and had a good name to sell) she wrote a messy, disorganized novel based in rhode island, where i live. she got the history wrong, changed character’s appearance and personality halfway through, and worst of all, dissed nurses with the most dated misogynist cliches. i suspect that the novel was knocked off for foxwoods casino, because they figured prominently in the book, and what else was weldon doing in our parts anyway?
    too bad, because she used to be a writer.

34. ok, now i’m pissed…

    i was all set to defend my proposition, when Parapondera came along and made it look all moderate.
    by being a stupid asshole, i grant.
    did ya catch that if we were “really” feminists, we would be pushing genetic manipulation to turn us into men? or that he seems to think (erroneous, as far as studies show) that men are smarter than women?

    also, he says stupid people shouldn’t breed. and neither should anyone with any genetic defects. or anything else. maybe we need to have a eugenics board to pass first? is that what you mean, Parapondera? we are not “real” feminists because we don’t practice eugenics? is miscongeniation on your list of no-nos? how about reprodutive assistance? O.Bs? after all, some women would die in childbirth without medical assistance; should they die, and not pass on that faulty plumbing?

    grrrrrr. i hate when i have a radical position and it is made moderate by something even more extreme…

35. You know, I used to actually support shit like this. It took a long time — and a lot of seeing statistics abused in cases where I *knew* what was really going on didn’t match what the statistics seemed to claim — before I figured out the real problem with this.

    The fact that the children of teen mothers have hard lives is correlative, not causative, to the fact that the mothers are teens. Basically, women who become mothers as teens share a number of traits, on average, that are unlikely to go away so much once they grow up. Being part of a poverty-stricken underclass with no real hope of getting enough education or being enough of a financial success to escape that underclass is not the kind of thing that *most* women escape by just making it through their teens without having a kid. In fact, if most women in that situation could escape it by not having a kid, there would probably be vastly less teen pregnancy among women in that situation.

    The reason middle-class girls who expect to go to college don’t get pregnant in their teens at nearly the same rate as poor underclass girls who expect to do nothing with their lives except work shit jobs and have babies is not because middle-class girls are smarter than poor underclass girls, but because the costs to the two sets of girls for having babies while teenage are not the same. The middle-class girl who has a child while a teen, thus derailing her college ambitions, is going to be seriously hurt by it. She may very well eventually work her way back into the middle-class, but for a while, she and her baby will probably be dirt poor… whereas if she had waited to get a college degree and get started in a career before having a child, she and the baby would be in much better shape.

    However, the poor underclass girl does not have a career waiting for her. She does not have a college degree in her future. She has a lifetime of being a cleaning lady or working at Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. It doesn’t matter if she has a baby *now*, and later gets a job at Wal-Mart, or gets the job at Wal-Mart now and later has the baby. In fact in some ways having the baby now makes more sense — she’s younger, at the peak of her health considering how bad the health outcome for being a poor member of the underclass is, and she can probably recruit help from her own mother. She’s not going to be able to support that baby on a Wal-Mart salary anyway, no matter what, so why not have the baby early and collect welfare and then go to work for Wal-Mart when the child is older and in school?

    The proposal to “encourage” teen girls who see no good reason to use birth control to get on some form of long-term birth control basically assumes that the teen girls who see no good reason to use birth control are idiots who can’t see what wonders the future holds for them. But that’s a patronizing attitude that comes from privilege. When you’re a member of the poor underclass, education and work *don’t* hold wonders for your future. Having a baby, however, is a reliable way to get someone to love you, get some respect in your community, and establish yourself as an adult in a world where whether you’re a teen or an adult, you’re likely to have about equally bad, equally poorly paid jobs.

    The solution here is to provide these girls hope for a real future. Not just to take away their ability to have children until they hit the magic number of 18. The stats that show that children of older parents do better are hopelessly conflated with the stats that show that people delay child-bearing the more education they hope to get in their lives and the better financially they expect to do in the future. If you give these girls a chance to get decent, good-paying jobs that will protect their future and the future of any children they have, and they need to delay childbearing in order to land those jobs, wow, I’ll bet they will suddenly find a good reason to use birth control.

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