quizzical pussy

Here are some anonymous confessions for you to read. They are very mysterious!

I sat and read your blog and masturbated and read and read and masturbated until I was raw. I finally came as I thought that there are others who do the same thing, and I realized that I would tell you this, here, which just pushed me right over the top.

No, seriously, I recognize your lack of social skills and romantic experience and find it endearing. But how on earth you could miss that someone stroking your hair while talking about how pretty you are, while on a bed, IS HITTING ON YOU I will never know.

Sometimes I think that everything I do is motivated by sex. It’s really not stereotypical behaviour for a woman. But events I go to, supposedly political groups I join, everything seems to be motivated by the idea of finding someone new. It’s not just the sex, I’ve got a bit of a growing obsession with having a baby. I use contraception but I really wish that I didn’t.

My fantasies are fairly horrific. They are about the reduction of people (of all ages) to objects to be abused in all the worst ways imaginable. I don’t appear in my own fantasies at all; they are just small horror films which I watch. The characters don’t have names or faces. In real life, I get upset and triggered by accounts of suffering and abuse less than what I fantasise about elsewhere. My mini-world is a rape culture world, a feminist’s nightmare, a man’s nightmare too. Sometimes women are the abusers, often it is a misogynistic society run by men. I find it strange because it’s not something I’d want to do in real life at all. I have mostly stopped feeling guilty about it, because my fantasies have been like this from the start, but I can’t tell much of the truth when partners ask for my fantasies. They get the sanitised version – and even then are usually a little shocked.

Now you tell me a secret.

“Having it grow inside you… feeling it move in there, and then having to push it out through a hole that’s–let’s face it–much too small: it’s so… alien. Like an alien parasite”

I hear this a lot in terms of the miracles of pregnancy and giving birth. While I can certainly concede that this a valid feeling about the whole process, it’s not a feeling I share. Conception, pregnancy, birth all seem normal and natural and mundane to me. Female bodies are adapted to do this, although historically we don’t have an incredible amount of luck coming out of it alive. But it’s just that an egg (that’s supposed to be there in the first place) gets fertilized (in a very reasonable and expected way), and then a bunch of things happen to allow it to grow. It’s perfectly healthy, perfectly unsurprising. It honestly doesn’t squick me out at all.

But I still have absolutely no interest in doing it.

My problem has never been the process. I’ve often thought that in an extreme case I wouldn’t entirely mind being a surrogate (like if there was a disgustingly wealthy and completely desperate party that couldn’t adopt and would surely be a parenting tour de force and other highly realistic cases involving actual alien races that were dying out and wanted to give me a magical space unicorn).  It might be an interesting experience to have, though certainly not for its own sake.

The big problem is that I don’t want kids. At all. Never have. And I especially don’t want babies. This might make some dismiss me as selfish, but I don’t care. I also don’t agree because I don’t see having children as a selfless act. Of course, you have to adopt some selfless behaviors to be a good parent, but if you want to have a baby, is having it really selfless? And if you seriously don’t want one, would having one be selfless, or wouldn’t it just as likely be cruel and pointless for everyone involved? Even accidental parents have to get to a point where they want the children they have, or they end up shitty parents, unless I’m missing something.

I’ve often been told that I’ll change my mind, or that if I had a baby I’d bond to it and become a grateful and loving mother. That (edit: the latter) is highly possible, but there’s nothing in me that feels any urge to test it out. I have no biological clock; I have no reproductive motivation. I want to fuck all day and come out of it completely physically unaltered but for some sexily mussed hair.

But if you like babies, and you want babies, that’s cool. I might be a little bummed if we’re friends and your life suddenly revolves around something I can’t relate to at all, but that’s life. I’ll get over it. It isn’t personal. I’m not trying to convert anyone to my barren lifestyle. Although I understand where the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is coming from (“May we life long and die out” kind of thing), I don’t subscribe to their newsletter. I’m not that ready to give up on the human race just yet. Give me a few years and I’ll let you know.

The only thing that I’m saying here is that I don’t really want kids and it’s hard for me to relate to that impulse. A friend of mine who recently had a baby was visiting the other day. Cute kid. Seems to inspire complete devotion in her mother, which I think is a good adaptation. The new mom was describing to me their process of feeding the baby every four hours, putting the baby down to sleep if it’s been awake for 90 minutes, no matter what. She explained that the baby can’t be in the same room as a powered-on television because it would stunt her brain development. She explained how big a production it was to go anywhere.

“Wow. Yeah, I… that sounds exhausting,” I said (although I will note here that getting the mail also sounds exhausting to me most days).

“Sure, but you go through all this stuff and run around like a chicken with its head cut off and then when you feel like you need to collapse she smiles at you, and it’s all worth it.”

“Hmmm,” thought I. Thought but never said, “She just smiled at me for free.”

This attitude isn’t just why I’m not going to have children, it’s also reason #478 why I shouldn’t have children.

(image source)

This past fall/winter was truly a time of prodigious fucking. I say this because out of my friends and family, roughly 6,000 people have babies due this summer. It’s madness.

I don’t get the whole baby thing. My reproductive drive, my biological clock, is completely absent. I’ve never wanted kids; I’ve never even thought “maybe someday…”. I didn’t like to play with dolls as a kid (My Little Ponies FTW), I wish I were sterile now, and nothing has ever shaken my utter disinterest in baby-having. Which is weird considering that my baby-making (read: fucking) drive is insatiable and biologically you’d think those two things might be linked. I guess I just prefer orgasms to changing diapers. Actually, when you put it that way it’s not even slightly weird.

I realize that everyone is different, and evolutionarily speaking, I’m the one who’s broken here. I’m an evolutionary dead-end and all these happy mommies-to-be are passing on their genes. Still, it boggles my mind that there are people so enthusiastic about living my worst nightmare. But however hard it may be, I try to be polite when people are getting excited about their waxing bellies and baby registries and so forth, and I make an effort to listen to their thoughts on impending parenting challenges.

One of my friends (due in August, I think) is a feminist and an engineer. She’s unsure of whether she’s carrying a boy or a girl, but either way she intends to practice gender neutral parenting as far as practicality allows. Gender neutral parenting, as I understand it, tries to insulate a child from expectations to conform to gender stereotypes (e.g. girls wear princess dresses and play with dolls, boys get all the cool toys), allowing children the freedom to make up their minds about interests and preferences. This parenting style sounds awesome… idealistic, difficult, and probably frustrating at times, but awesome.

My friend mentioned several things, including the fact that she’s becoming more and more sensitive to gendered sayings like “boys will be boys”, and that she doesn’t intend to dress her child in the traditional pink or blue to denote her/his sex.

I don’t dislike pink, but I really, really dislike the practice of slapping pink on something (e.g. a cell phone, skateboard, or gun) and expecting it to automatically appeal to women. I also dislike the fact that little boys– hell, even men– are discouraged from wearing and liking pink for no good reason. Far be it from me to say that you can’t dress your little girl in pink or your little boy in blue. I don’t care how you dress your child. But I’m not sure I buy the suggestion that these are innate color preferences dictated by gender.

One study performed a few years ago by Newcastle University researchers reported that female test subjects tended to like colors at the redder end of the spectrum compared to men. Apparently because they found that this pattern was true for a handful of subjects born and raised in China, so the researchers concluded that the preference is biological. According to one of the researchers: “Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours – reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces. Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference.”

I don’t understand how you get to exclude social conditioning and cultural impact as factors just because 37 of your subjects come from a non-isolated foreign country. That seems wildly assumptive to me.

In Western society, pink=girl blue=boy is a very recent phenomenon, emerging in the last hundred years or so. More interesting still, many sources suggest that in the past these colors were reversed, and many magazines and books listed blue as the correct color for girls and pink for boys. Blue was seen as delicate, pretty, and feminine, while pink was seen as the diminutive of exuberant, manly red. The current color standard definitely doesn’t date back to the earliest flickers of civilization.

It doesn’t really matter if women generally prefer pink to blue. Maybe they’re just taught that pink is for girls, or maybe their primitive minds really are seeking out ripe berries. Maybe it’s a little of each, or maybe there’s something else altogether going on. It’s intellectually worthwhile, though, to challenge anything that reinforces cultural stereotypes by saying “we’re just wired that way”. Reducing our behaviors and thoughts to the remnants of a simpler time when all humankind was interested in was eating, fucking, and raising young is lazy. It lets us just ignore thousands of years of social pressure, and countless other variables. It’s too easy, and it’s too easily manipulated. You can end up with lots of hilarious assumptions, but often not much science.