Wow, that was lovely. I actually read it twice.

There is a strong disrespect for the work of motherhood and parenthood in this society. You can see it in feminism as well as in society as a whole. The push to hide children away and pay for someone else to raise them hurts families. It hurts them economically and emotionally. I don’t have kids but I am 100% here for…

I mean, I work in an office where people play video games at work on breaks, and nobody bats an eye. (I work in video games.) Yet we manage to create a really good product.

I’m sorry. I’ll stop doing that. :-P

The whole, “oh, I’m entitled to a child-free existence” mindset seems to be a Western construct in my experience. It’s bizarre, too, because how do these people think that they came to exist?

How “lucky” we are to live in the West, where we have these imaginary lines drawn between “work” and “home.” Never mind that we now have companies arguing for “work-life integration,” we still must keep kids entirely out of the way lest they interrupt us.

The erasure of mothers, and in particular poorer mothers, is such an issue. It’s one of the ways the feminist movement makes it abundantly clear that the needs of upper-class white women are paramount, while everyone else needs to take a backseat.

This story is bullshit, and the actions of her “friend” were bullshit, too. Here is some inspiration for all the working moms from the Italian MEP Licia Ronzulli.

When your country decides to actually provide decent paid maternity leave, then perhaps we’ll talk. Till then....nope. You don’t get to whine about this.

I used to comment regularly on Jezebel for years (under a different name) and stopped because of the feeling the author describes when someone she assumed would be an ally made her feel unwelcome.

I agree. Nobody is less charmed by children than me, but I am even less charmed (negative charmed!) by those people who pretend it’s a reasonable worldview to insist that children should be kept in their homes and away from polite society until they’re 17 and 4 months.

Oh for fuck’s sake. The attitude that you can’t go to someplace without your kid because it’s “professional” and that you need to have a babysitter or child-keeper at all times is anti-feminist to the core and supports notions that the only people who “deserve” to reproduce are the affluent.

Jesus this is such an amazingly apt picture. Not only is the heart broken but now you’ve cut your finger and it’s bleeding everywhere but your other hand has a piece of glass in it and your brain has completely shut down so it has no idea what to do about your bleeding finger except to watch it drip blood all over…

“5a. Anticipate that the new one will act much as the old one did and plan accordingly.”

No thanks. It may work for some people but I know that I would probably try to come up with something to say even if I didn’t have anything to say just because I think that’s what I’m supposed to do. It would totally be counterproductive for me. I would think hard on the days before the review trying to find anything…

Completely agree. I divorced my husband due to his cheating and I can honestly say I can’t imagine a worse way to end things. Instead of having a serious talk about what the future should look like for us, either together or separately, our marriage and family was blown up overnight. It was absolute destruction and…

I live in a world of respect for my wife. If I feel like the sex isn’t enough or I’m not happy, I’m going to talk to her about it. I’m not going to go out and have sex with another person or another relationship and feel like the one I made a commitment to (which was a choice) has no say in the matter. If she isn’t ok…

No problem. You don’t want monogamy, ask your wife if she’s into exploring swinging. If she isn’t, decide if that relationship’s worth it and make a decision.

Because we managed to solve the vast majority of childhood/infant deaths, which brought the average age waaaay down. People weren’t suddenly dropping dead in their 30’s 300 years ago. You’re perpetuating a widely believed myth.

The best thing about Jez lately is how progressively grumpy Madeleine Davies has been getting. I love it.