This video had me laughing so hard I may have ruptured something :-)
Well at least this is one contraceptive The Church will not disapprove of :-)
It seems not too long ago we were ringing in a brand new year.
And already, I am back to asking questions.
No longer just why, but also nowadays how?
Like...how can these women be women?
Yes, South Africa has 'special' problems, but can this ever be explained by socio-political unrest?
Crass fatherhood is never to be excused, of course. And it takes many forms.
But I don't think I have ever come across a tale like this one before...
Children whose parents break up often blame themselves to some degree.
This poor child will one day know that she is indeed the reason her parents divorced.
For being 'ugly'. And she isn't even ugly at all!
But the first man in her life thinks so.
So she will always believe this.
This father has ruined the life of his daughter before it has begun.
Every young woman needs to know that she is pretty. Especially to her father or his substitute.
This doesn't mean she has to flash her bosom on Facebook.
But she has to know in her soul that she is attractive to someone important to her.
Daddy is the most important man until someone else takes over :-)
This is a highly dangerous woman.
Other than to share her ideas, I shan't discuss her further.
Let's hope she never has a son.
But even so, she is still dangerous to society.
With her ideas, she is condemning her daughters to pain and solitude.
Unless they choose not to listen to her.
Has it always been this diverse?
Or is this a relatively new phenomenon...
5 comments:
I had a previous comment that was deleted. This one may not be as good, but I wanted to get it off before I go to bed.
Parents have been using their children for economic gain since time before memory. In the past, one of the best ways to do this was to have them help bring in the harvest.
In the current age of government disbursements, mothers drinking moonshine to harm their babies in utero and thereby increase their subsidy is simply the contemporary baby mama version of kidspoitation.
Working mothers are also nothing new. In ages past, keeping the home was a full time job for most families. It included skills today's woman doesn't have to mess with. Preserving/storing/rationing food, weaving/kniting textiles, keeping animals. Even familiar tasks like gathering water and cooking looked a lot different and required far more work.
Hi,ST, I agree with Ceerilian that children have always been seen as sources of economic gain, but there is a difference in how that worked in the past compared to today.
You should read the work of a thinker who appears to be in the conservative feminist camp, Jennifer Roback Morse, a book she wrote called "Smart Sex."
Here is an interesting quote: we used to see sexuality and childbearing in terms of community interests: "requiring people to marry before they have sex, or requiring people to accept the responsibilities for any children that might be result, used to be commonplace. These were considered the norms for the protection fo children, women and the future of society."
But today, the language is of personal liberty, to be free of restraints in a world of what she describes as "consumer sex," where sex is about what I can get, sexual pleasure with minimal consequences. As long as I'm happy about what I'm getting, that is all that matters.
Having children (for some) is about what I can get, ie., free money (in general, ie., the US welfare context) and in your example, if the child is disabled. It is all about my choices, and my choices have nothing to do with the greater community.
So we have today the welfare debates and the debates over unfit women (and men) having children. In the past, discussions of "fit v. unfit" were very much discriminatory in harmful ways.
But in today's world, the memory of the discriminatory period drives the opposition of those who don't even want an open-minded discussion of these issues of "fit v. unfit," if anything, because we also live in a time of moral relativism.
In the view of some, there needs to be more social spending, but somehow less state intervention in the lives of individuals receiving social spending. (How do you reconcile that I wonder--social spending comes with intervention). If you want less intervention, rely less upon the state. One would think it is a given.
I was thinking just recently of something related to this. There used to be a lot more homes for women bearing out of wedlock children and greater social pressure for them to give up their children for adoption.
In addition, there used to be greater social pressure for young men to marry the women who had their children. Not today. Choice is not just about abortion; it is about the choice to become a mother under the least beneficial circumstances, and the liberal and radical feminists (and numbers of men) will cheer.
The women will be cheer because on some level, numbers of them adhere to the dominance feminist view of "evil men harming women," so pregnant women are better off without them, and reproductive freedom is about women's choices only. If she wants a baby, that is her "choice," the flip side, Roback Morse reminds us, of the abortion debate.
Some of the men will cheer because it absolves them of responsibility.
In the earlier period, women's reproductive choices were about their choices as it related to the children they bore and the community.
A young woman having a child out of wedlock 50 or so years ago was not seen as a positive; it was seen as harming her baby, who should be raised with a father. If the father was not on the scene, ie., she was "seduced and abandoned by a bad man," or she chose the wrong type of man with whom to become intimate, the consensus was that child should be adopted by a two parent family.
Today, that same young woman would have an abortion of raise the child as a single mother.
Ceerilan,
(I presume Ceer???)
"Parents have been using their children for economic gain since time before memory. In the past, one of the best ways to do this was to have them help bring in the harvest."
Absolutely. I do not dispute that for most people, there has to be some benefit in having children...otherwise they wouldn't do it :-)
To this end, I am sure God knew what He was doing when He made the procreative process.. um... pleasurable, lol.
But bringing in the harvest is also an education for the child. He has to learn how to feed himself one day when Mum and Dad are no longer around. So the benefit to parent turns out to be benefit to child too.
This example of the S. Africans is a whole new ballgame.
As PVW points out, it is now all about the 'choice' of the parent, usually the mother.
It starts with...'it is MY body...' and ends up in tragic consequences for everyone, notably the poor child.
Disclaimer: I don't believe that once a woman becomes pregnant, her body is TOTALLY hers anymore. She happens to be the conduit of another life. She is just the transport for a very important passenger.
This is one reason a woman needs to view sex very seriously indeed.
For her body ceases to be 'hers' once another human being gets on board.
I agree that working mothers is not a new phenomenon. The type of work has changed though, but essentially all women worked, except for the short times in their lives when they really couldn't, eg. in the late stages of pregnancy and when nursing infants.
But perhaps in today's clime, there is unprecedented stress for mothers forced to work far away from their babies, against the best interests of the family and the community...
PVW,
You highlight one of my pet peeves. The word 'choice' when used in the context of 'women's rights' and in particular women's bodies when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth has long irked me.
One of the reasons (I admit!) is of course my own history of extreme prematurity and the stark choice my parents faced at my birth: it's Mum or (likely unviable) baby...choose one...
But I think even without this history, I would have slowly worked my way towards this opinion I have, one way or another, for sure.
Personal liberty (in this context)...hmm. I wonder how truly liberating this is?
@ Spacetraveller
Use of the word choice in that context irks me too. To me, it's a euphemism that equates to support for murder.
Ceerilan,
Tell me about it.
Dishonest use of an honest word...
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