"When Lewis demands 'full surrogacy now,' she isn’t talking about commercial surrogacy.... she uses the surrogacy industry to build the argument that all gestation is work..."

"... because of the immense physical and emotional labor it requires of those who do it. She often refers to pregnancy as an 'extreme sport.' If all forms of pregnancy count as work, we can take a clear-eyed look at our current working conditions: 'It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us,' she says... 'This situation is social, not simply "natural." Things are like this for political and economic reasons: we made them this way.'... She imagines a future where the labor of making new human beings is shared among all of us, 'mother' no longer being a natural category, but instead something we can choose.... Her radical proposition is that we practice 'full surrogacy' by abolishing the family. That means caring for each other not in discrete private units (also known as nuclear households), but rather within larger systems of care that can provide us with the love and support we can’t always get from blood relations—something Lewis knows all too well.... In Lewis's utopian future, the family as we know it no longer exists. Everyone, regardless of gender, is a surrogate; we mother each other.... Lewis has found that when she talks about family abolition people respond as though she’s 'not even speaking English anymore … like [I’m] not even making syntactical sense,' she said at the e-flux lecture. 'Real brain explosion emoji to the max.'"

From "We Can't Have a Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family/The feminist thinker Sophie Lewis has a radical proposal for what comes next" (Vice).

ADDED: It's so absurd to think that because there's not enough love in one place that you should go all-in on something completely different. Many people run their own life on reasoning like that: My husband/wife isn't fulfilling my dreams/satifying all my needs, so I've had it with this marriage. I need to grab for my last chance at true love/next chance at sexual gratification with this appealing stranger/the next person who comes along.

AND: Lewis manifests the left-wing instinct for leveling. It's not that the proposed system would create interlacing supportive love for everybody. It's that it would rid us of the love billionaires — those privileged few who have selfishly acquired happy families for themselves.

"When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot."

News from half a century ago trickles out. The boy was one of 45 million deaths in Mao's Great Leap Forward. Another death was the father himself, who died one week later — of grief, as people who lived through that time, perceived it.

Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party...

As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another....

One police investigation from Feb. 25, 1960, details some 50 cases in Yaohejia village in Gansu: “Name of culprit: Yang Zhongsheng. Name of victim: Yang Ecshun. Relationship with Culprit: Younger Brother. Manner of Crime: Killed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.”

The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.

Via Instapundit, who writes:

Socialism starves. Capitalism enriches. It’s been proven over and over again. But remember: Communism is about “human dignity.”...

63% of Americans define the term "family" to include a gay couple living with at least one child.

According to a new Pew survey.

When I read that I thought...
	I'm surprised so many people think that.
	I'm surprised so few people think that.
	Sounds about right.
pollcode.com free polls

"Family Becomes Extinct, To Be Replaced with Feminism and Gender Equality."

A headline in Pravda.

The Russians gradually lose interest in marriage and family. Recent opinion polls conducted in the Krasnoyarsk region showed that 72 of each 100 marriages end with divorce. Demographers say that family as a social unit became irrational because of the financial crisis. Psychologists explain the current trend with the development of new culture and substitution of notions. It is not ruled out that the institute of marriage will vanish in the near future....

What makes Russians live in loneliness? Every specialist would have their own opinion regarding the subject and all of them would be right in their own way.

As long as I'm reading Pravda...

"Pregnancy: Mystical Condition Full of Superstitions."

It was believed that by denying a pregnant woman’s request, people incurred all kinds of misfortune. If a pregnant stranger knocked at someone's door, she had to be let in, fed and given overnight shelter. You could not raise voice at or scold a pregnant woman.

"Hellish hairy sea monster cast ashore." (Oh, now I may have to skip dinner.)

"Belka and Strelka: 50th Anniversary of Space Dogs Flight."

Russia on Thursday marked the 50th anniversary of the space flight of two dogs who became the first living creatures to circle the Earth and come back alive.

How many came back dead?

"Cat crosses Siberia to find its home."



"Bush's Legs Strike Back." What?!

American chicken legs, widely known in Russia as Bush's legs...

???!!!!

"After everything we had heard, I was picturing a monster..."

"Here was someone who had dreamed up a scheme to murder her family and manipulated people into carrying out her plan. And then in walks this tiny, meek, blond-headed girl who couldn’t fight her way out of a wet paper sack."

(Via Metafilter.)

"In Poland, kids are adored to death, but they are compliant."

"They know that they are small pegs on the planet. They know that parents rule. Moms whisper sweet, tender pet names, dads issue directives and little ones toddle along, waiting for that kind word, the kiss, the pat of praise."

"We started analyzing what it was that we were really missing. We were missing being around each other."

"As long as we can keep decreasing our bills we can keep making less money."

Trading money for time together. A trend? A good trend regardless of the condition of the economy? There's a lot you can say about this, but I'm taking it from a Peggy Noonan column, so let's see where Peggy goes with it:

The cities and suburbs of America are about to get rougher-looking. This will not be all bad. There will be a certain authenticity chic. Storefronts, pristine buildings—all will spend less on upkeep, and gleam less.

So will humans. People will be allowed to grow old again. There will be a certain liberation in this. There will be fewer facelifts and browlifts, less Botox, less dyed hair among both men and women. They will look more like people used to look, before perfection came in. Middle-aged bodies will be thicker and softer, with more maternal and paternal give. There will be fewer gyms and fewer trainers, but more walking. Gym machines produced the pumped and cut look. They won't be so affordable now....

This will be the return of an old WASP style: the good, frayed carpet; dogs that look like dogs and not a hairdo in a teacup....

More families will have to live together. More people will drink more regularly. Secret smoking will make a comeback as part of a return to simple pleasures. People will slow down. Mainstream religion will come back.... Bland affluence breeds fundamentalism. Bland affluence is over.

Everyone will become Peggy Noonan!

A writer with a writer parent does it right.

RLC notes my complaint about Rebecca Walker and points out another article in the Sunday Times, which I missed:

Here's a really nice article about a famous writer's son who achieved literary success on his own, practicing his craft for years, suffering the rejections that come with the territory, even changing his name in order not to use it for advantage -- because he understood that it would hurt him as a writer to do so. I admire this young man, and I'm eager to read his book.

The first linked article is about Joe Hill, who hid his identity as the son of Stephen King until after his book "Heart-Shaped Box" was published and received great reviews. Give credit to Joe and to Stephen too.

But who's to say what people do from force of character and what they do out of inherited personality traits?

Like his father, Hill married young, has three kids and lives in an isolated part of New England. Also like his father, he shows his manuscripts to his wife. “A lot of people marry their moms,” he said. “I kind of married my dad. I’ll go from the manuscript I gave her and the manuscript I gave him and go back and forth, and it’s the same comments.” (Hill’s wife, Leanora, and King are so in sync that she reads King’s drafts too.)

Hill is even more protective of his privacy than his father was for much of his career. (King didn’t have Google Maps and other online search devices to contend with.) Though Hill’s fallback demeanor is congenital niceness, he wouldn’t even consider an interview in his hometown and cut off any questions about his children. Hill is certainly no stranger to aggressive fans. When he was 12, he found a six-pack-toting ex-convict at the front door. “I just got out of Thomaston Prison,” Hill remembered the man saying, “and I just wanted to tell you that your dad’s books are the only things that kept me from killing someone in there.” Here, Hill made a sound effect to suggest that at that moment his head exploded, cartoon-style. “My memory is that my dad went outside and had a beer with the guy.” But, he added, “there have been people who have broken into the house. You get into a little bit of a defensive crouch.”

Hill did concede this much: He lives in a remote part of New Hampshire, not Maine, where he grew up. And he works at home. In his office, Hill keeps files full of letters that mark his long literary apprenticeship. Rejection. Rejection. Rejection. He could have had it another way.

Alice Walker's daughter writes about her motherhood.

I'd never heard of Rebecca Walker before, but today I see two articles about her in the NYT. The first thing I read -- this piece in the Style section -- is that she's the "estranged" daughter of the radical feminist writer Alice Walker. Then I see there is also this article in the Arts section. So, presumably, you don't get an article -- certainly not two articles -- just for being the estranged offspring of someone famous. There must be a book.

The book is called "Baby Love" -- which must piss off Joyce Maynard (if not Diana Ross) -- and subtitled "Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence."

The Arts section article, by New York Observer editor Alexandra Jacobs, has a deliciously grouchy first paragraph that blames birth control for the genre of "mom-oirs." If it's a choice -- Choosing Motherhood! -- you've got a story to tell, right? Good for you. I support free choice about motherhood, but that doesn't mean I want to hear the details of how you made the very mundane choice. The details of a commonplace story can be worth reading. It might even make the best reading -- if you're the best writer. Just as motherhood is not destiny, however, having a mother who is a writer doesn't automatically make you a writer.

Jacobs clearly detests Walker's book, which she calls "merely a paean to pampering."

A Tibetan doctor, the daughter of one of the Dalai Lama’s private physicians, offers her 'little silk bags of herbs”; hovering in the background, meanwhile, are an osteopath, doula, pedicurist and masseuse....

Not to begrudge the author such luxuries, but there was no need to make the world privy to them.

But that could be good if brilliantly described, self-aware, and hilarious, don't you think? (I'm thinking of this Spalding Gray book.) Maybe Jacobs is jealous. [ADDED: And maybe -- maybe, baby -- the book sucks.]

I'd rather hear Walker tell about that estrangement from the famous writer/mother. That's an inherently more interesting subject, and not just because we love celebrities. The desire for an infant has nothing to do with a particular individual. Even if you honor your unborn child as an individual, that individual is an abstraction. It's when that baby develops a mind of its own that the story gets interesting.

So let's check out the Style piece. It's called "Evolution of a Feminist Daughter," and that title caught my attention. Yet there's nothing in this article that connects the mother's feminism to the daughter's estrangement. The most interesting thing here is that before becoming a mother, Rebecca Walker wrote about how the relationships you make are just as important as blood connections, but in her new memoir she takes it back. Confronted on the contradiction, she says she came upon the first idea to deal with her own problems with her parents, and that having a child changed her mind.

“To grapple with how my parents raised me I had to come up with a philosophy that could sustain me. Having my own child gave me the opportunity to have a completely different experience. So hence a different view.”

This shaping and reshaping of ideas to go along with one's condition in life is thoroughly human, but it unless the writer is sharp and funny and self-aware about it, why would you want to read her?

"My Dad the Dud."

That's the way The Daily News paraphrases Andrew Giuliani. The actual quoted statements -- from a TV interview -- seem more pro-mother than anti-dad: "I got my values from my mother," "She's a strong influence in my life," "She's a strong woman." And also: "I have problems with my father," "But it doesn't mean he won't make a great President," and "we are both working on our relationship."

If Rudy Giuliani's campaign is any good, we should see a nice father-and-son presentation immediately.

UPDATE: Rudy's response:

"I believe that these problems with 'blended families' are challenges, and challenges are best worked out privately," he said.

Giuliani said his wife was not to blame for the family feud, and it was not her job to fix it.

"I believe the responsibility is mine," he said.

This probably is a better response than what I was asking for -- the parading of the son in public.

Reversed trends.

Stephanie Coontz neatly sums up an old theory:

The main reason that educated and high-achieving women have trouble finding or keeping mates, according to observers past and present, is that they won't play dumb enough to assuage a man's ego or act submissive enough to put up with unfair treatment.

And notes the new trend:

[C]ollege graduates and high-earning women are now more likely to marry than women with less education and lower earnings....

The same holds for high-earning women....

[C]ollege-educated couples have lower divorce rates than any other educational group....

Educated men and women are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than others. And guess what? They have better sex lives, too.

Much more at the link. (Via A&L Daily.)

Sperm donor 150 reads in the paper that his children are looking for him.

And 15 months later, he contacts them. Why did he wait that long? The 50 year-old-man, Jeffrey Harrison, was afraid of disappointing. He hadn't made that much of his life, and yet he'd been so popular as a sperm donor:

Once one of the sperm bank’s most-requested donors, with a profile that described him as 6 foot and blue-eyed with interests in philosophy, music and drama, Mr. Harrison, 50, lives with his four dogs in a recreational vehicle near the Venice section of Los Angeles.

“I make a meager living,” Mr. Harrison said, taking care of dogs and doing other odd jobs.

A daughter's actual reaction: “He’s sort of a free spirit, and I don’t care what career he has."

It's hard to read the article without thinking whether he would have made more of his life if he'd spent all these years with his children, but there's nothing to blame him for. He donated sperm when he needed to make money, and he helped women who wanted children give birth to human beings who would not otherwise exist. He had no option to live with this family, so he is nothing like a father who estranges himself from a family. One wonders what effect it had on his mind to know there were children of his out there that he could not know (until recently). I would think most sperm donors feel vaguely good about it, but maybe it makes them feel sad and lonely sometimes, especially if they don't find their way into a family of their own.

Here's the original article he read:

For Danielle, of Seaford, N.Y., contact with her half-sibling JoEllen has helped salve her anger at what she describes as "having been lied to all my life," until three years ago when her parents told her the truth about her conception. It has also eased her frustration of knowing only the scant information about her biological father contained in the sperm bank profile - he is 6 feet tall, 163 pounds with blond hair and blue eyes. He was married, at least at the time of his donation, and has two children with his wife. He likes yoga, animals and acting.

For JoEllen, whose two mothers told her early on about her biological background, it helps just to know that Danielle, too, checks male strangers against the list of Donor 150's physical traits that she has committed to memory.

I wrote about this article at the time. Here's what I said (which I'm reading after writing the text above):

If you were a sperm donor, originally intent on remaining out of the picture, but you knew that a large group of your children had sought each other out and formed powerful love bonds, would you have a change of heart? What if there were dozens of your kids out there, and they all got together and started to see themselves as a big family, with you as an absent presence? Would it make you sad? Would it make you lonely?

It's interesting to me that the words "sad" and "lonely" came to mind for me then and now.