The times, they are a changin'
Jun. 20th, 2008 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbCome mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand.
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command,
Your old road is rapidly agin';
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand,
For the times they are a changin'.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g798CHaazwkE1E0TMQv8AZ60Bj1wD91DKPI00
Like all really inevitable and natural development, this one surprised everybody, including me. Well, what the Hell did we all expect? People like babies. Women particularly like babies. Girls - with a few exceptions in whose personal history it is all too easy to read the emotional reasons - intensely love babies. You cannot introduce a baby among a group of schoolgirls without being practically drowned by cooings and bursts of wonder at the cuteness of them. Nobody should have expected that this natural instinct could be for ever silenced by an artificial image of a brilliant career woman, something which, for nine women out of ten, has no reality at all. Women look at Sex and the City with its childless, unmarried, rich, elegant forty-years-old, as they read Hello magazine: as a kind of fable. I do not understand the appeal myself, but I very much doubt whether it has anything to do with daily or real life. Women read their glossy magazines in ordinary, sometimes drab homes, and do not seem to make much of an effort to imitate them. It all seems to me to live in a special space of the mind dedicated to unreality. If any woman identifies with the Sex and the City characters, it cannot be because of their surroundings or careers; it is more a matter of the common complaint about weak, shiftless, commitment-phobic men - which, whether or not it is true, is at least a commonplace female whine. The idea that millions of schoolgirls go out into the great wide world in the hope of becoming top corporate lawyers, marketing VPs, or even fashion designers or Hollywood actresses, seems to me naive in the extreme. Some of them may dream of such things; most of them know that they never will happen. And the universal cultural pressure on girls to regard babies as obstacles in the way of their careers is increasingly nullified by the fact that, across the advanced world, the vast majority of women know that they will have no careers. The idea of spending one's life moving forwards in a job until one achieves a high and permanent rank is outdated, not only for the majority of women, but of men too. The same people who tried to scare us with the fear of being hobbled to babies for life also informed us, in the same breath, that the notion of jobs for life is an outdated superstition.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide;
The chance won't come again.
And don't speak too soon
For the world's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who that it's namin';
For the loser now will be later to win,
For the times, they are a changin'.
It is a case study in the power and limit of cultural consensus. They removed the stigma from illegitimacy; these days, most people who call someone a "bastard" (and weirdly enough, it is a popular insult) do not know what is meant to be insulting about the term. But they could not remove the attraction from babies, or the magnetism from sex. Every attempt to make maternity unattractive or dreaded must founder on the reality of human nature. A number of people will no doubt absorb these attitudes: they are the kind who, for one reason or another, deviate from the human average. The majority may well learn to repeat them by rote, but will never internalize them; their emptiness will become manifest - they will vanish like mist in the sun - at the sight of a single real baby. You have made it easier, not harder, for your children to have babies. The result, as I said, should have been expected; it is only the result of our universal attachment to statistics - which are, after all, always yesterday's news - that kept us from seeing the obvious.
I am not saying that there will ever be a fad for having babies as such among sixteen-year-olds. One good (or rather bad) experience of childbirth would knock that sort of nonsense on the head, and at any rate even sixteen-year-olds are not that silly. The point is rather that the coming generation is beginning to instinctively see its future, not in terms of career - they learned at the cradle how difficult and fickle a thing it is - but in terms of children, of family, of heirs. These girls know that in nine times out of ten, what will give their lives continuity and content will not be the ever-changing, mostly frustrating, sometimes dangerous and unwelcoming, reality of work, but their families; that their real life is apt to be at home, with a husband or partner if they are lucky, but with a baby anyway. And like young people across the world, they are impatient to start.
The line, it is drawn.
The curse, it is cast.
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'.
AND THE FIRST ONES NOW WILL LATER BE LAST -
For the times, they are a changin'.
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand.
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command,
Your old road is rapidly agin';
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand,
For the times they are a changin'.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g798CHaazwkE1E0TMQv8AZ60Bj1wD91DKPI00
Like all really inevitable and natural development, this one surprised everybody, including me. Well, what the Hell did we all expect? People like babies. Women particularly like babies. Girls - with a few exceptions in whose personal history it is all too easy to read the emotional reasons - intensely love babies. You cannot introduce a baby among a group of schoolgirls without being practically drowned by cooings and bursts of wonder at the cuteness of them. Nobody should have expected that this natural instinct could be for ever silenced by an artificial image of a brilliant career woman, something which, for nine women out of ten, has no reality at all. Women look at Sex and the City with its childless, unmarried, rich, elegant forty-years-old, as they read Hello magazine: as a kind of fable. I do not understand the appeal myself, but I very much doubt whether it has anything to do with daily or real life. Women read their glossy magazines in ordinary, sometimes drab homes, and do not seem to make much of an effort to imitate them. It all seems to me to live in a special space of the mind dedicated to unreality. If any woman identifies with the Sex and the City characters, it cannot be because of their surroundings or careers; it is more a matter of the common complaint about weak, shiftless, commitment-phobic men - which, whether or not it is true, is at least a commonplace female whine. The idea that millions of schoolgirls go out into the great wide world in the hope of becoming top corporate lawyers, marketing VPs, or even fashion designers or Hollywood actresses, seems to me naive in the extreme. Some of them may dream of such things; most of them know that they never will happen. And the universal cultural pressure on girls to regard babies as obstacles in the way of their careers is increasingly nullified by the fact that, across the advanced world, the vast majority of women know that they will have no careers. The idea of spending one's life moving forwards in a job until one achieves a high and permanent rank is outdated, not only for the majority of women, but of men too. The same people who tried to scare us with the fear of being hobbled to babies for life also informed us, in the same breath, that the notion of jobs for life is an outdated superstition.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide;
The chance won't come again.
And don't speak too soon
For the world's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who that it's namin';
For the loser now will be later to win,
For the times, they are a changin'.
It is a case study in the power and limit of cultural consensus. They removed the stigma from illegitimacy; these days, most people who call someone a "bastard" (and weirdly enough, it is a popular insult) do not know what is meant to be insulting about the term. But they could not remove the attraction from babies, or the magnetism from sex. Every attempt to make maternity unattractive or dreaded must founder on the reality of human nature. A number of people will no doubt absorb these attitudes: they are the kind who, for one reason or another, deviate from the human average. The majority may well learn to repeat them by rote, but will never internalize them; their emptiness will become manifest - they will vanish like mist in the sun - at the sight of a single real baby. You have made it easier, not harder, for your children to have babies. The result, as I said, should have been expected; it is only the result of our universal attachment to statistics - which are, after all, always yesterday's news - that kept us from seeing the obvious.
I am not saying that there will ever be a fad for having babies as such among sixteen-year-olds. One good (or rather bad) experience of childbirth would knock that sort of nonsense on the head, and at any rate even sixteen-year-olds are not that silly. The point is rather that the coming generation is beginning to instinctively see its future, not in terms of career - they learned at the cradle how difficult and fickle a thing it is - but in terms of children, of family, of heirs. These girls know that in nine times out of ten, what will give their lives continuity and content will not be the ever-changing, mostly frustrating, sometimes dangerous and unwelcoming, reality of work, but their families; that their real life is apt to be at home, with a husband or partner if they are lucky, but with a baby anyway. And like young people across the world, they are impatient to start.
The line, it is drawn.
The curse, it is cast.
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'.
AND THE FIRST ONES NOW WILL LATER BE LAST -
For the times, they are a changin'.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 01:09 pm (UTC)I've also read ... fascinating sociological accounts on pregnancy and childbirth. *shudder* They're quite descriptive.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 01:12 pm (UTC)I am not a baby/children person either, and while I have always endeavored to be kind to children, I was never one of those people who fawn over babies or bounce over to pregnant women and congratulate them, etc.
Then I had my own and discovered that I really didn't know anything at all... about just about anything important. :)
And I do love my own child, and think she's the most adorable child ever. So one of my biggest mistakes was expecting to have a maternal instinct for someone else's child...!
no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 01:19 pm (UTC)Pregnancy sounds like ... almost fun compared to looking after a child! I can't imagine having to get up at 4 am to change a diaper. Or having the responsibility of ensuring that another life is physically well as well as intellectually and emotionally stimulated. Not to mention I've read studies on how children tend to do better in life if they're looked after by stay-at-home parents who have an university education. :| I'm definitely not cut out for domestic life.
If I did have a child, I'd obviously want to give it the best opportunities in life. I just don't think, given the choice, I'd choose to do have a child.
All this sounds awfully selfish. *sigh*
What made you choose to have a child? (if you don't mind me asking) :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 01:30 pm (UTC)I was right.
I would not say that everyone should undertake this thus; you have to be willing to let it shape you and not resent it for changing you for it to have this benefit. But it is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, and yes, it is changing me just as I had thought. The duty is more difficult than I had imagined in my wildest extrapolations... but the joys are vaster, and completely unanticipated. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 01:32 pm (UTC)I personally feel that my choice in career will be my chance to grow as a person. I've chosen something that I can and hopefully will be passionate about.
What can I say? I have the makings of a workaholic!
no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 01:34 pm (UTC)What career have you chosen? It sounds exciting. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 12:02 pm (UTC)2) I've heard that the physical is very difficult, you might want to add a gym membership to your studies.
Good luck, I hope it works out for you.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 12:10 pm (UTC)i frankly never really got the whole secrecy over applying thing. but hey, since there is, then i'll comply.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 12:27 pm (UTC)In any case, I'd be awful out in the field! I'm too fond of honesty. Plus, I don't have a drivers license and that's apparently a requirement!
I'm pretty sure I know some of your friends here in Canberra. I know quite a lot of roleplayers here. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 09:02 am (UTC)I was thinking that, too, but decided it would be rude for me say it. And there's this whole 'reform' agenda based around the concept of recruiting honest people that kicked off 15 years ago. I don't know how it went, but it would be cool if it worked out.
I realise that the other aspect of job secrecy (even if you're not in the field) is that it sets you up as a target for spies - if it's easy to find out that you've got information worth having, then they're that much more likely to lean on you.
You probably do know some of my friends in Canberra, I'd count many of the people who went to Phenomenon as friends, and I like pretty much everybody who goes.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 09:06 am (UTC)Yep, then I definitely know them.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-21 01:53 pm (UTC)