Mollie Hemingway is a vicious sexist who hates women and wants to hurt them. She’s demanding that they not have careers and spend their whole lives barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen! Watch where this kind of amazing argument comes from, because it tells us quite a bit about the endless weirdness of leftist politics in the 21st century.
Many observers have argued that “the left has no theory of mind of the right,” a conclusion that draws on the work of the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. When leftists attack conservative views, they can’t quite pull it off, because they just don’t know what they’re arguing against. They don’t have the vocabulary. They spend their lives fighting their projections of a guess of a misconception, endlessly demonstrating an extraordinary capacity for misinterpretation.
You’ve watched this. You’ve seen slogan-chanting journalists struggle like a drowning man in the face of arguments they can’t begin to perceive, trying to take a statement and turn it into what they think it is: “What you’re saying is …” Speaking with someone who doesn’t chant the ritual slogans, they try to channel the discussion so it can flow into the grooves that have been carved into their minds by years of mindless compliance.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced that she plans to freeze her eggs so she can possibly one day buy her own baby from a medical corporation as a product, conservative writers, especially conservative writers who are mothers, wrote that she was making a bad choice. At The Federalist, Katy Faust wrote about the pleasures of family, describing the fun she and her husband had with their children: “They grew up knowing that children weren’t an interruption to the good life. Children were the good life.”
Chasing the same themes of connection and the pursuit of a satisfying life, Jordan Boyd wrote about the costs and complications of medicalized pregnancy, comparing it unfavorably to the old-fashioned kind. On video, AOC said she was seeking control over her life by buying fertility; in fact, Boyd wrote, she’s chasing “a very pricey illusion of control,” one that can fail, in the context of a choice that suggests significant social decline:
Infertility is rising, birth rates are dangerously low, and unhappiness, especially in single, childless females, persists. The solutions to these issues are widely and ferociously debated. All data suggests that getting married young and optimizing your chances at natural conception by trying for babies during peak fertility years can’t hurt, though.
The conservative critique of frozen eggs among women who are turning to IVF as a lifestyle choice rather than a medical solution to impaired fertility is an argument about connection, social ties, humanity, pleasure, and the meaning of family. They’re talking about ways to escape social atomization and the thing Stella Morabito has called “the weaponization of loneliness.” Buying a baby unit out of the freezer isn’t as much fun as making a baby. The conservative argument about families and babies is an argument about living well. You’ll like it. It’s a way of living that offers considerable pleasure.
Now: At the self-parodying politics-as-lifestyle website Salon, Amanda Marcotte angrily denounces conservatives for their hypocrisy: These people say that they like babies and want people to have more of them, but then they say that AOC shouldn’t perform fertility procedures. See what liars they are?
As the 36-year-old New York Democrat was no doubt aware would happen, MAGA commentators lashed out at her for preserving her ability to have kids in the future. Christian right commentator Allie Beth Stuckey said she was “selfish.” Podcast host Matt Walsh called Ocasio-Cortez’s choice “backwards and ridiculous.” The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued that the congresswoman’s video was a “sad public performance/display of unnecessarily unwise decision making.”
In the MAGAsphere, it’s not enough for a woman to want motherhood. If she doesn’t give up her career and even her personal happiness in the process of making babies, it doesn’t count. Being pregnant isn’t enough. Conservatives also seem to require the “barefoot” and “in the kitchen” parts of the traditional job description.
See that? “If she doesn’t give up her career and even her personal happiness in the process of making babies,” conservatives hate it. Pregnancy is ruin. You crush your life against the grindstone of babies. The right demands that pregnancy be miserable and agonizing, and they won’t allow women to have careers. Conservatives believe that motherhood must be a crucible of degradation, obviously. Critics like Hemingway and Stuckey, Marcotte concludes, are “blinded by their own sexism.”
“The right’s reaction revealed what the White House has been trying to hide from swing voters all along,” Marcotte writes. “Their chatter about fertility rates was never about happy families or a prosperous nation. To the contrary, as evidenced by the draconian bans in red states, Republicans will gladly sacrifice happiness and prosperity for the goal of subjugating women.”
If you think really hard, you can probably spot the flaw in the argument that the high-profile media professionals Allie Beth Stuckey and Mollie Hemingway believe that motherhood means women can’t ever be allowed to have careers.
But Marcotte isn’t arguing with conservative critics of AOC’s decision. She’s arguing with the crazy lady in the mirror, and projecting her psychological inventions into the public sphere. This is why we don’t have ordinary political debate anymore. OH YOU MEAN YOU WANT TO GRIND YOUR HANDMAIDS UNDER YOUR NAZI BOOTHEEL, some lunatic screams at a mom who says she had fun raising children with her husband. It’s like a game of tennis where you hit a ball over the net and it comes back as a hand grenade. The “what you mean is …” maneuver is the end of all possibility of mutual understanding.
The strangest thing in all of this is that Marcotte is blasting right through a bunch of choices that are extraordinarily easy to criticize from a set of leftist ideological priors. A natural and simple process that people can quite easily do the natural way has become an expensive product. The commodification of children shouldn’t come naturally to critics of capitalism, but they have no political views that aren’t purely oppositional.
The same goes for the remarkable view that women shouldn’t sacrifice their careers to have children. You should abandon the idea of family so you can climb the ladder at a corporation, argue … people who are uncomfortable with the profit-making function. Can we call them Walmart leftists? Serve that corporation, atomized girlboss!
A place in the culture where left and right should be able to meet, the satisfaction of a rich family life, demands ritual denunciation. The socialist historian Christopher Lasch argued that the family was a “haven in a heartless world,” the moral center of a healthy society. But Trump says he likes babies, so this is proof that baby-making is a very dark thing that has to be wrestled down and controlled. There aren’t enough psychologists in the world to get to the bottom of this.
Anyway, I have to go oppress my wife now, because her tears are my delicious wine. Raise that baby, slave!
