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}
Re: You're aging these mothers by two years
Date: 2008-06-21 03:16 pm (UTC)2. Having worked in education, I'm well aware of the prejudices, presuppositions, and agenda people - and especially principles - bring with them. Even if they "work with it every day."
3. I know we live in the 21st century -- and the 21st century is deeply flawed. No, I don't want to return to time before penicillin and the Salk vaccine, but I strongly believe that in our mad 20th century rush to "modernity" we (if you'll pardon the use of the expression here) threw a lot of babies out with bathwater. The change in the *definition* of childhood in the Western world in the 20th century and especially in America post World War II is well-documented. And I don't think the change is necessarily for the better.
4. The understanding that most people died at 50 in the past is a flawed paradigm. But that's a rant for another place.
5. I'm well aware motherhood isn't a "job", but it is undisputably equated as such. "Don't have a baby; you can't go to college." As if it were an either or proposition. It came up on the ABC coverage of this story this morning.
Yes, I know I'm bringing my own experience in here (since my mother took infant-me to university lectures in a basket that sat at her feet), and not everyone is emotionally, mentally or organizationally equiped to do that. Even so, this societal expectation that *everyone* must go to college/university is in itself detrimental. Our society faces HUGE student debt right now. I have one myself. It shouldn't be forced (even by implication) on everyone.
Re: You're aging these mothers by two years
Date: 2008-06-21 07:15 pm (UTC)Re: You're aging these mothers by two years
Date: 2008-06-23 02:18 am (UTC)No, I don't believe I did. I believe I said that in the 18th century 14 was the age to start university, an apprenticeship or a trade. Further I said that those actions were closer to adult responsibility than we (20th/21st century people) allow 14 years to take on.
I said nothing whatsoever about age of consent or about 12 year olds.
If someone did, you should have directed your comment at them. I understand you're angry, but to post in reply to something I said about something I did not say in a discussion with over 100 comments is just plain sloppy.
Re: You're aging these mothers by two years
Date: 2008-06-23 07:12 pm (UTC)