On Motherhood. A Polemic.

I like Rebecca Adlington, despite all her precocious success. She comes across as down to earth, witty and all round just decent. I felt like if I met her she wouldn't be weird and distant like many famous people, but pleasant and chatty.

This week, though, I saw in the paper that Adlington had had her first baby. Good for her, she must be ecstatic and relieved that her new baby arrived safely and healthily, and is probably gurgling adorably in between feeds.

Except Adlington also described having the baby as her greatest achievement. Adlington, who earned two Olympic gold medals before she was 20, thinks the unconcious conception and automatic expulsion of a child is the greatest thing she has ever "achieved".

I should say now that I don't decry Adlington for a very normal and understandable delight in her first baby. While it may be a natural phenomenon so expected it's downright boring, nonetheless it's an important milestone for the parents. What prickled me is the way Adlington's gushing echoes a primitive and harmful mantra that Western society cannot seem to shake - the canonisation of mothers, and the glorified office of motherhood.

Women are biologically geared to carry offspring - that ability is a key defining point when determining male and female in most species. Yet human women are capable of so much more. Humans have the ability to shape the world around them, to invent, to tackle ancient dangers such as illness and natural disasters so that more people survive an earthquake than die, so that slowly we are eradicating every disease that previously thhreatened everyone at every level of society. There is also a performative aspect to "male" and "female" categories that has led to people from all points of the spectrum blossoming out of their expected gendered roles to create their own identities, perhaps linked to the stringent biological essence of their bodies, perhaps eschewing their expected gender or even the notion of "gender" completely, to realise themselves truly.

 As we throw off these repeated, boring and frequently oppressive attitudes to our biological realities, at the current end of history, mankind has been able to shake loose outdated concepts that limited and undervalued womankind's considerable contribution to this awesome progress. Women have never had as much freedom as they do now to enter whatever industry they choose, their involvement automatically increasing the brain power that comes up with solutions to make life better, creating more angles from which it is thought about, highlighting promising ideas that would not have been considered without that one, bright individual who saw it's potential, an individual who would previously have had a 50-50 chance of being frozen out of the development a mere century ago. One must consider how many potential inventors and innovators lived and died without the opportunity to operate in a field that would have thrived with their input, just because they were born with the wrong parts.

And yet the aged, rubbery superstition remains. That the greatest thing that a woman can do, for herself or for others, is to have a baby. The height of potential is always to be a mother. Don't believe me? Popular media throws out constant reinforcements of this pathetic point of view. In the last Avengers film, Black Widow (a super-assassin who can wipe out 20 guards in under a minute using nothing but back-flips) wept because she could never have children. Some commentators found the scene offensive because Black Widow mentioned that her super intense assassin training, and the fact that her assassin school had sterilised her, made her feel like a "monster," and was thus implying that being a barren woman was a sort of deformity. I found it offensive too, but my interpretation is slightly different. To me, it was clear that Black Widow was disturbed by the severity of the training she received, the things she did as an assassin, and that the assassin school had modified her (through sterilisation) deliberately to make her a more effective killer, making her perception of herself as a "monster" understandable, if not correct. This is ultimately not offensive at all to me. What is offensive, irritating and downright hackneyed, is Black Widow's apparent mourning for her lost motherhood, and the use of it in the film as a reason for us to sympathise with her.

Being a mother is seen as a state of sublime emotional integrity and honesty. The superstition holds that by having a child, and fulfilling that atavistic, primeval demand, a woman achieves a state of wisdom and kindness that all childless women are permanently locked out of. Going through a pregnancy, and then labour, apparently allows a woman to tap into an ancient, integral truth about humanity and life, the cosmic mysteries revealed to her as she slides into a Mother Goddess/Buddha-like role. Holding the baby also moulds the previously clueless woman further into a quasi-divine, sanctified role, that of a lion headed goddess, where she is allowed, nay, expected to defend her child at all costs, permitted a horrific ferocity against any threat (real or otherwise) while gaining levels of enlightenment years of meditating could never achieve.

Next time you listen to the TV, or the radio, or to the people out in the street, listen out for references to mothers being wiser or more knowledgeable, simply because they managed to do something any idiot with a working uterus can do by accident. Note how often a woman uses her motherhood to increase her authority when making a point on a topic ("Speaking as a mother...."), that frequently does not have any bearing on parenting or children. Look at how we are instantly carolled into feeling sympathy with someone just because "they have kids", and how few times that person is a man. There are groups who believe that women with children should not be put in prison, as though their crimes are mitigated by their used wombs.

Of course, we all know the truth. Becoming a parent, mother or father, does not do anything to increase your IQ, you're inherent understanding of the world, nor does it make you a better person. It doesn't make your views any more worthwhile, or an authority on anything other than your own children. These views are not stated outright, but they are there. And we all should know they are bullshit. Getting pregnant does not require a degree, any particular effort, and zero skill. Women with children do not immediately become more tuned into the world, or more sensitive to violence - if that were the case, those mothers who kill their own children, prostitute them or sell them into slavery would not exist, when they most certainly do. Indeed, talking very generally, I find that when a woman has a child she does not gain a macro, philosophising understanding of everything, but that she becomes even more selfish, petty and shortsighted. All of a sudden, everything must be judged from how it will affect her family, and everyone must modify themselves to fit her. If you dare make it clear that this selfish, unqualified twat and her growing colony of parasites don't factor in the way you live your life, being a mother seems to excuse rudeness when she takes these undeferential heretics to task. When a café in Canada posted that screaming toddlers would no longer be welcome in their business, which was for adults wanting to chill, the owner received death threats. Why? Because everyone, at all times, must be ready to welcome in the miracle of life, even when it's not their miracle, even if it isn't actually a miracle. A police officer in Liverpool recently told her colleagues that they couldn't rely on her to assist in taking down a violent offender, as "I have kids at home." As though the other officers didn't also have children, partners or lives they wanted to keep, or that they just simply didn't matter as much as hers.

Similarly, a few years ago, Mary Beard, professor of Classics and Ancient History at Cambridge University, appeared on Question Time, where she spoke favourably about immigration. She pulled out documents from a local town, and with them she pointed out that the vast majority of immigrants were young, employed, and contributing. Later on in the program, Prf. Beard was shouted down by a local woman, who indignantly yelled that immigration was actually strangling the town, and that she knew this because her friend was a midwife, and when you walked down the high street, it was like being in a foreign country.

It is possible that Prof. Beard may have cherry picked the report. That she was editing bits to portray her point, and that there was actually a considerable negative impact of immigration in the area which she had either missed in her research, or not taken seriously. However, as a historian, Beard knows the importance of evidence, how to read stats, the importance of being objective.... One thing historians have over most other disciplines is hindsight that they can draw on from hundreds, and in Beard's case, thousands of years. They are good people to listen to, even if they do get it wrong, as they draw attention to the most important factors and the most obvious logical pitfalls.

None of the papers or the media pointed this out, however. What they did point out was how this clueless academic had been showed up by a straight talking mother of three. But they did not mention any actual qualifications she had - she was not a councillor who encountered her constituents' problems, she was not a nurse or a doctor (though she apparently knew one.) At all points, the papers identified that this woman had children, and failed to mention her work or area of expertise (if she had one at all.) Why did they feel that it was important to note that the woman had children? Would they have been so delighted at Beard's downfall if it had been a woman who didn't have children who shouted her down? Either way, the headline hatefully reinforced the most ridiculous belief that women like me have to put up with. A woman with children, who emphasises her identity as a mother, as just a mother, has more interesting things to say than a woman who does not, even if the childless woman has actually achieved something of serious merit, even when the self-aggrandised mother has barely any authority and an obvious bias, even when the woman with real achievements speaks more sense, is more rational. Mary Beard actually has children too, but she has the understanding, the realism, the education not to base her identity on that - while having children is a joy, a poignancy that perhaps helps give her life meaning, it is still personal. She chooses to be judged on her actual achievements, things not everyone can do. Perhaps that's why so many women pathetically chase after that mythological, precious status of "mother." Feeble as it is, it's the only thing of note that is worth that they have done. It's not skilled, or difficult, or rare, or even remotely needed, in this age of overpopulation. But there is admittedly an element of difficulty about it, and a false sense of selflessness attached. Thus the women become martyrs of a false status that masks and flatters their innate selfishness, their underwhelming lack of achievement obfuscated by exalting the ability to produce offspring, never mind that drug addicts, children and every animal on the planet also manages it without even trying.

"Speaking as a mother, this subject...." Stop. Motherhood has no direct affect on your knowledge on anything other than what it's like to have a child, and then, only your child.