motherhood

Over the weekend, St. Vincent's upcoming album, Strange Mercy, started streaming on NPR. The woman behind the band, multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Annie Clark, started out as a member of the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens' tour mate. She is known for juxtaposing sweet, Feist-like vocals with dark, often violent imagery. The disconnect between body and soul (that is, between the material and spiritual) is a central theme of her third album. The newest single, Cruel," examines this disconnect in the context of the trivial cruelties of day to day family life. 

With little over a week to go, it’s hard to imagine anything stopping William and Kate walking down the aisle—but that wasn't always the case. Up until their engagement was announced, it was assumed that one woman stood in Kate’s way: her mother.

Some women I've written about before, celebs like Jennifer Aniston, sidestep the issue all the time instead of owning their ambivalence (or however they feel! Just own it!). Barbara Walters and Oprah talked about how it is a difficult thing. So why don't we hear more women talking about the flip side of having kids—or rather, why don't we have more proud childfree role models out there?

Oprah and Babs talk about how tough it is to have kids as a working woman—or in Oprah's case, the unambiguous lack of regret in regards to opting out. Skip to 7:30 in the video, where the discussion about having kids starts. Transcript after the jump.

In my opinion, the strangest persistent belief about childfree women is that we're selfish. From the jump, this is problematic as this logic negates the experiences of infertile women, women ambivalent about motherhood and parenting, and women who would—for any number of reasons and because of any combination of circumstances—perhaps like to be mothers but have opted out nonetheless. It's also a pretty big slap in the face to queer women, who may not face the same social pressures to procreate but may still be held to the same weirdo standard when they don't have children.

MTV’s been having a good summer. In part, that’s because the second season of its reality series Teen Mom has been generating huge ratings for the network—it is this summer’s third-most-watched original cable series in the coveted 12-34 demographic. The show, which documents the lives of four young women after they gave birth to children as teenagers, along with its sister show and predecessor 16 and Pregnant, has already generated a fair amount of cultural chatter on the question of whether the show is a valuable educational tool or just, as most seem to have concluded, regular old exploitation of the young women in question. There’s something to this argument, of course. MTV’s ratings success makes for a strange contrast with the fact that Teen Mom’s stars have been occupying the front pages of celebrity weeklies like US complaining that they are dead broke, doesn’t it?

I’m of two minds about the argument. On the one hand I certainly don’t have much faith in MTV’s dedication to social messaging, at least not enough to believe it extends much further than what advertisers are comfortable with. I’m not the first, for example, to point out that abortion, as an option, is not something that’s seriously discussed in the context of the show. You can spin that fact as having something to do with showrunners needing to have a more extended narrative arc than, "Now I’m pregnant, now I’m not." But Teen Mom does follow one young couple, Catelynn and Tyler, after they’ve given their child up for adoption, so sponsor queasiness seems a more likely explanation.

 

Sometimes a simple acknowledgment of douchery just isn’t enough. Sometimes you have to step back and marvel at how consistent, how dedicated, how impressively shameless a person’s commitment to being a total asshole is. And that’s why Bitch has decided it’s time to start recognizing those individuals as the All-Star douchebags they are. Practically, it just makes sense: We plan to be awarding Douchebag Decrees for many years to come, and there are some people it would just be easier to mention once, acknowledging that not only have they already amassed an impressive body of douchebaggery, they will surely keep it up for the foreseeable future.

It’s in this spirit that we give a nod today to the lifetime douchechievements of Mrs. Caitlin Flanagan: author, columnist, wife, mother, professional scold, and 24-karat-gold douchebag.

Do a quick search on the Internet and you'll see that there are lots more people waiting to adopt a healthy newborn these days than there are babies out there ready to be adopted. Gone are the (ahem) "good old days" when a pregnant woman finding herself in less than optimal circumstances could be shamed, coerced or forced to give up her baby as a matter of socially accepted course (for more on THAT history, check out Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away). Access to safe, legal abortion (while awesome when it occurs) has done a real number on the adoption industry.

So how can we, as feminists, approach adoption?