Against parenting
I was sent to Catholic school for seven years, and as a queer person it fucked me up and I hold some resentment towards my parents for this. Before you say I should be grateful, it wasn’t a private school and also thinking about it now still makes me cry. But how did all of this happen? My parents stripping me of my agency. One day, I was particularly mad at my parents for doing this to me. Why did they put me through such a hellish experience? And how did my mother justify this to me and probably to herself? By saying that she’s my mother and therefore she has the right to do this. And somehow in her mind, she probably also thought she was doing the best for me. But was she really?
You can make so many arguments for why it’s bad to have children, ranging from anti-natalism to simply not wanting them to “it’s good for the environment” to simply the fact that many millennials can’t even get jobs with their university degrees and can barely support themselves, let alone have children. But you also have to remember, that parents themselves are a harmful force. Even if those parents are non-abusive, they’re still harming their child.
“Parents are the first to destroy the inner riches of their children.”
The moment a child is born, a gender is imposed on them and enforced by the parent. Sometimes going as far as to perform surgeries to alter their genitals without consent so they fit into the extremely binary categories of sex which is also a social construct. As they grow older, these parents who view them less as an individual but as an object and will keep trying to mould them. They try to shape the child in their own image instead of letting the child express itself. You have to do this. You have to act like that. This is right. That is wrong. This is true. That is false. Do not act like that. No matter how much you think you’re helping your child and how you think you’re doing the best for them. You’re not. Even if you think you are. You’re still trying to impose yourself on the individual. You are asserting authority over them.
“I fail to understand how parents hope that their children will ever grow up into independent, self-reliant spirits, when they strain every effort to abridge and curtail the various activities of their children”
And then every institution gets its turn as well to mould this child. The state. The church. The family. If you can name it, it’s going to try. But instead of moulding this child into a ‘well-rounded individuality’ or a potent singularity, it is moulded into a patient wageslave, a taxpayer, a righteous moralist (Goldman). It beats out beautiful, uncompromising personality stamped out like a fire (Goldman) as it’s a threat and a deadly enemy to these institutions who dictate anything but the potent singularity that is you.
Parents are constantly reminding their child of how it’s a cruel world, it’s a dog-eat-dog world and they come running home to mummy, running home to institutions. But it’s also just a smaller-scale version of the worker experience where the worker is told how horrible the world is, that they have to work or starve. Humanaesfera posits the idea that one has ‘familism’, the belief that pseudo-capitalist property is something you need to acquire as you have no actual capital of your own. This is your children, your sexual partner, your toothbrushes, your home and so on. It is so you can imagine yourself to be the owner of the means of existence and production (Humanaesfera) and that you have the same interests as those.
And then the child goes to school. The child has it’s natural curiosity smothered with homework, it’s mind baked with patriotism and dead values as that’s what teachers and school curriculums operate with (Goldman). These homes, schools, and universities are very dry, cold, and utilitarian (Goldman) where their only purpose is to use one single method of education to cram as much information they can into the minds of children as fast as they can, usually for tests. And since we are all a potent singularity, it simply doesn’t work. It’s not too different from the herdlike drilling of the military instead of the result of the expression of individuality, the want to naturally learn or anything of that sort.
Then the child experiences their rebellious phase. These traits of rebellion, of the child wanting to express themselves, are slowly and gradually destroyed with the military herd training. And they ‘grow up’ though they don’t ‘mature’. Having something beaten out of you is not ‘maturing’ and then justifying having it beat out of you is not maturity either, that is just Stockholm syndrome.
Often people dismiss the parent-child dynamic as a ‘justified hierarchy’ and argue that there are no better alternatives (honestly I don’t care about alternatives, none of this essay is about alternatives) but there is no way to justify it. The thing is, there are no justified hierarchies as power is like a leech. Justifying it and letting it suck your blood, will only make it grow fatter. Though some continue to insist that parenting is a justified hierarchy but authority is not the same thing as expertise, nor is providing aid to a child, feeding them, and preventing them from falling into a pool (Ziq). The issue is when one starts to see themself as an authority and the child as an object instead of a caretaker. Even though I don’t fully agree, Ziq argues that an anarchist parent would use methods of child-rearing that treat the child as an autonomous individual instead of a subordinate to their authoritarian demands.
You can try to dismiss all of this as just me hating my parents and therefore rendering my points invalid as I’m nothing more than an upset child who needs to go therapy or whatever. But if anything, wouldn’t my hurt just further justify that asserting authority over someone is harmful? I never grew up in an abusive family but many do. And their hatred for their parents is justified too. Someone taking issues with having their agency stripped off them or being abused doesn’t make them a rebellious teen who is going to grow up and become ‘normal’. This normalcy is nothing more than wanting to strip the agency of others and feeling morally righteous and superior for it.
Against Marriage
Well, first of all, marriage originates from a place in history where women were considered property. The word for family originates from the word ‘famulus’ meaning slave or servant (Humanaesfera). And in this category of slave and servant, the children and the wife is included. And part of this ‘familia’ is primarily constituted by the power to punish (by starving) and to reward (by ending that hunger) according to Humanaesfera. In the past and still, in many places, marriage is treated as a woman leaving the house of her father and entering under the authority of her husband.
He beheld every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master’s name, her master’s bread, her master’s commands, and serves her master’s passion; who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation, — not at her desire; who can control no property, not even her own body, without his consent, and from whose straining arms the children she bears may be torn at his pleasure, or willed away while they are yet unborn.
This is a quote from Voltairine de Cleyre, though this was written many years ago and is no longer necessarily an accurate reflection on modern marriage, it is still a very good description of marriages of the recent past.
Though modern family and marriage have changed. Now marriages are less an exchange of property but done for ‘love’. But when you begin to peel back the layers, you see this is not the case. Love and marriage aren’t synonymous as if you legally force someone to stay in your life or if you have one partner dependent on the other or unequal distribution of duties, these often crumble. You are forcing someone to legally stay in your life for most or the rest of your life when in reality, people come and go from your life. Also, love is something often described as spontaneous and intense but instead, people choose to regulate with the cold dead husk of the church and the state. And it’s steeped in centuries of superstition, customs, and gender roles.
And this is where I will touch on gender roles. As we have entered the 20th and the 21rst century, women have entered the workforce at levels which they hadn’t in the past. Historically, women were taught that marriage was their ultimate goal for their future. In the past they’d be treated like a beast being fattened for the slaughter, especially with the skills they’re taught in the home.
“The children used to spent most of their time on the streets (“world of curiosities and wonders”) playing with their friends (while the daughters were treated as ultra-protected “dolls”, helping the mother in housework, to be future housewives and not “women of the world”)”
But even now, the daughter is still given a doll with a little pram so they can act like a mother and a wife. The daughter is also often taught to do mostly inside chores like cooking and cleaning which is why you get studies saying that women still prefer to do these chores like taking care of children. But the daughters will also receive larger amounts of control from their parents, not being able to do things like date while other siblings might be able to and so on. This makes me think of one of my lesbian friends who is the only daughter while she has two brothers. Her mother expects from her a marriage and children and also ends up doing more household chores which her brothers are never held accountable for. And this same pressure to have to get married and have children still persists. It essentially peer pressure to continue the cycle which I will touch on further down. But the thing is, that the home, though not so large a prison as a factory, still has more solid doors and bars (Goldman). It is a mere machine for the nation and capital. Women are turned into a mere machine. Men are turned into a mere machine.
Just like the slave or the servant, historically the marriage has rendered the woman into what Goldman described as a parasite. She is utterly dependant on her husband, it paralyses her, and then the same thing that paralyses her, promises to care for her. Even though many of the newer generations aren’t going to become housewives, they’re still found among the older generations. And this is where your life becomes utterly miserable. Once you become a housewife, your life becomes utterly mundane, only cleaning and wiping the bottoms of your children while your husband barely talks to you, let alone will have sex with you. And you can’t escape as you’ve completely surrendered yourself to someone else. According to Goldman, it is the surrender of all faculties, absolutely incapacities the average woman for the old side woman.
But even if you’re a man, it’s still horrible. It’s horrible for anyone involved, no matter if you’re a man or a woman or outside of the binary. Even homosexual marriages aren’t good. Anyway, if marriage were effective and something worked, we wouldn’t see the divorce rates we currently do and additionally that 15% to 20% marriages result in what is a dead bedroom, so a sexless marriage (Donovan Mauer). We observe things like 10% or less of the marriage population below the age of 50 have not had sex in the past year. And it’s 20% for those who report only having sex a few times a year under the age of 40. And according to Tina Tessina, the most common cause of these so-called sexless marriages stem from one partner becoming too busy and neglectful while the other one had their feelings hurt or had been turned down too many times. But also things like communication problems, work schedules, stress from children, incompatibility, lack of trust, and so on.
Why would you need the cold emotionless state and church rubber-stamping a seal on your spontaneous and wild feelings of love? Why would you use the law to force someone to stay with you when emotions and love don’t work like that? Why would you nearly bankrupt yourself to afford a wedding? Not because it’d make you happy but because of peer pressure from your family to have a gorgeous wedding, and then participate in customs like taking up your husband’s last name or “giving away the bride”, echoing a time when marriage was an exchange of property (women) instead of anything remotely for love. And I’m not shaming anyone for the things they willingly chose to do, I’m simply stating that many of these things come from unsavoury places where it comes from and some of these things don’t really work out in the long run. But it is your life, feel free to do with it what you wish and find happiness in whatever places where you wish. I am not here to tell you how to live your life.
Against Family and Adulthood
I often see people talking about the collapse of the family, how important family is to the heart of society, and all that garbage. It’s a constant barrage that places family as the most important institution in our lives. I hate the family and the idea of tradition which people appeal to. Family, the thing that entraps men, women, and their children which eventually creates a doomed circle, always repeating. And I hate how we place so much cultural importance on these concepts when they do nothing but to hurt us. And this is where I would like to remind you of the ‘familia’ and it’s power to punish and to reward, enacting authority over others. It serves as nothing more than a method of control and I don’t know why anyone would want to idolise and fetishise this the way many do.
But the thing is, all of these aforementioned things like buying a house, getting married, and having children are the hallmarks of what makes someone an adult. Being an adult is less of a stage in life but more of a checklist of things you have to do. You live as a child, then a teen, you go to university, you find someone, you settle down, you purchase a home, you have children, and then you retire. That is our perceived idea of our lifespans and that’s how we segment them out. Even I do it. It’s why I feel like there is a large gap in my life after I turn 25 as I simply have no interest in pursuing most of these things.
It reminded me of a woman who’s article I actually read on Medium where her entire relationship was defined by her dragging her husband behind her in directions which according to her made sense to those in a committed relationship. Instead of the spontaneity of love, she decided they had to have a marriage and a family though neither of them really wanted it. She only wanted to tick off milestones because she was an ‘adult’ and her husband just followed along. It was the doomed cycle of reproduction and marriage. Marry and reproduce.
I don’t really have a word for this doomed circle aside from ‘chromonormativity’ but I have a very good word for the opposite of this circle. It’s called queer time. There is no right age to partner off, have children, purchase a home, settle into a career, and then retire like the rest of society (Jaffe). And even feminism can disturb this life path that is laid out for many people, but for no other group is this ‘disruption’ more obvious. It’s for the trans person who transitions in their 20s, becoming a teen while they are 25. It is the gay couple who will perhaps never marry or have children. It is something as generation changing as the aids pandemic. It removes both items off the checklist but also destroys the linearity of the cycle as well.
But it can also be argued that right from the start, the protoqueer doesn’t run on the same time as those who are cishet do. People like Kathryn Bond Stockton suggest that the ways we think of “growth” in children are predictable and linear concepts of maturation but many queer kids do not experience this. She claims that this protoqueer cannot make sense of their desires, pleasures or experiences until they are older. Of course, being queer is a social construct, just like being cishet is. No one is inherently either but either way, they still affect our lives.
“The child who by reigning cultural definitions can’t ‘grow up’ grows to the side of cultural ideals.”
For me personally, I embrace the negation of identity and use ‘queer’ only as a description of how others perceive me and how I fit in the gender class system. But there are also others who reject the heteronormative fantasy of adulthood. The rejection of family and marriage. For them, it’s a political identity where conventional adulthood is no longer accessible but also undesirable.
As queer people will never hit many of these things that make one an adult in society or outright reject them, they are also more likely to engage in things that are considered irresponsible and not respectable for people of their age. Things like dance parties, sexual promiscuity, and recreational drug use while they are in their 40s and 50s. Dear reader, if while reading this, felt a flicker of judgement spark up. Judgement at these people who are not doing things that are required of adults or because they’re acting “slutty” instead of settling down. Maybe think about why this flickered up for you.
They’ve never needed to stop in order to have children and get married. What is considered age-appropriate for a 50-year-old, doesn’t work when you hold the yardstick up to someone living in queer time. As Sara Jaffe said, she used to be read as much much younger when she was 38, due to a blinkered version of what it means to “look one’s age” and to “act one’s age”. But now as a parent with a child, the visual of her being a mother is what they’re seeing and they perceive her as an adult.
Conclusion
I would also like to add a brief reminder that throughout this, at no point did I suggest an alternative for how we should do things. None of this is about changing society as a whole. You can take some of this as instructions on how to change your own life but simply do what makes you happy. I am not here to tell you how to live your life. Or maybe you took this as a reinforcement of your own beliefs or a more clear wording of your own beliefs if that’s the case. Good for you. This essay just acts as a critique without proposing a solution. I am simply pointing at the problems to make others aware that they are there without actually saying we should implement communal parenting or this or that. I simply don’t care.
Sources
- Voltairine de Cleyre, Sex Slavery
- Elena Donovan Mauer, The Big No: The truth about sexless marriage
- Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love
- Emma Goldman, The Child and its enemies
- Humanaesfera, AGAINST THE (NEW AND OLD) FAMILISM — DOWN WITH THE FAMILY!
- Sara Jaffe, Queer Time: The Alternative to Adulting
- Ziq, Anarchy Vs Archy: No Justified Authority
