A Feminism Embedded in Human Nature

What happens when elite women get what they want? Mary Harrington’s Feminism against Progress is in part a tale of a dream fulfilled: a feminism of pure freedom, driven by the ideals of progress, achieving its goal of unfettered self-actualization. However, viewed up close, the promised utopia is not as Edenic as it seems. In fact, it’s an anti-Eden: a rootless, borderless realm of liquidated social bonds, populated by atomized, disembodied selves, and the only deity walking amidst them is the devouring Spirit of the Market.

Harrington, erstwhile citizen of this anti-Eden, takes on the role of Virgil, a prophetic guide through our purgatorial present, regaling us, her readers, with an account of where feminism went wrong, and what can be done about it. The book unfolds in three parts, which can loosely be described as a glance backward at where we’ve come from, a hard look around at where we are now, and a glimpse of where we might go from here.

First, Harrington treats us to feminism’s origin story as a response to the situation of women in the era of industrialization. She describes modernity as a great disembedding, an uprooting of the productive, gendered household, in which work was once centered for both men and women. In this premodern model, the sexes were not seen as interchangeable units of production; rather, their distinct spheres of influence and activity were complementary and interdependent, as well as conducive to childrearing and family life. Their shared economic life was grounded in a “web of relationships,” and gendered asymmetries were sources of synergy, rather than exploitation.

 

According to Harrington, industrialization shifted the center of productivity from the household to the factory, thus introducing a schism between “work” and “home.” Under this new model, in order to engage in economic activity, women had to be estranged from their children and labor in cruel conditions. Families who had the option would send the men out to work and keep the women at home, in a newly narrowed domestic sphere centered on consumption rather than production. Harrington argues, with help from Illich and Marx, that industrialization “reduced women’s economic agency,” opening an era of separate spheres, where “women were to a far greater extent at the mercy of their legally and financially all-powerful husbands.” It is in this context that the first feminist movement emerged—not in response to the bogeyman of patriarchy, but to the effects of industrialization. As Harrington puts it, the “challenges addressed by feminism are less evidence of eternal male animus than effects of material changes.”

This nascent women’s movement, from the outset, was marked by a tension between what Harrington calls a “feminism of care,” which resisted the logic of the market, emphasizing interdependence and the domestic realm, and a “feminism of freedom,” which “embraced the individualist market logic, and sought women’s entry into that market on the same terms as men.” The movement, Harrington contends, was more or less balanced in an “ambivalent tension” until the mid-twentieth century, when feminism’s embrace of contraception and abortion tipped the movement decidedly toward the market. From this point on, “feminism largely abandoned the question of how men and women can best live together, and instead embraced a tech-enabled drive to liberate humans altogether from the confines of biology.”

In the book’s second arc, Harrington provides a dizzying and dismal tour of the impact of feminism’s alliance with transhumanism, which has wrought a “cyborg age.” Here, she shows her writerly knack for coinage: Bio-libertarianism, Cyborg Theocracy, Progress Theology, Meat Lego Gnosticism. “Bio-libertarianism” is a particularly helpful term that captures the gist of what freedom feminism has become—a worldview that “focuses on extending individual freedom and self-fashioning as far as possible, into the realm of the body,” in order to pursue “self-created ‘human’ autonomy.”

Harrington argues that what is cast as moral advancement—i.e., progress—is the “revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits.” Those limits, as it turns out, are difficult to dismantle. Much easier to destroy are the social practices and codes we have “developed over millennia” to help us navigate those limits. What gets dissolved along with those norms are bonds: the bonds between the sexes, the bond between mother and child, and the bond with one’s own body. Bonds inhibit freedom. Love calls for sacrifice; even, at times, suffering. And so, in the name of freedom, bonds must go.

 

What, then, can provide social cohesion in the wake of widespread dissolution? The market. This is the central claim of Harrington’s critique, the sharpest point in her skewer: “Whatever has been smashed in the pursuit of progress ends up reordered to the atomised laws of the market.” The downstream effects of this “liquefaction” of bonds—and the commodification of what remains—are numerous and bleak. The sexes use one another, forgoing covenant and commitment; the female body is subjected to “biomedical mastery”; the innate bond between mother and child is pathologized and replaced by “impersonal, tech-mediated care”; and, with the advent of the “trans kid,” even children are now invited to dissociate from their bodies and pursue Meat Lego customization. Every aspect of human personhood that is accessible by tech, down to our secondary sexual characteristics, has been commodified.

As a critic of progressivism, Harrington will probably get mislabeled “conservative,” because we are increasingly unable to think beyond that bifurcation. But thinking beyond it is exactly what Harrington is trying to do. One of the strengths of her analysis is its resistance to easy political categorization. She relies heavily on Marx and Engels in her account of industrialization and its effects, and maintains steady suspicion toward the demiurge of the market. She also exposes the flaws of flimsy conservative narratives that scapegoat feminism for social ills that originate in the disembedding of industrialization and the transition to a market society. The conservative nostalgia for “traditional” gender roles, she aptly points out, is actually a nostalgia for “industrial” sex roles, not traditional at all, but peculiarly modern. While conservatism looks naively backward toward an idealized past and progressivism gazes deludedly toward a Meat Lego future, Harrington, in the final part of her book, offers a positive proposal grounded in the here and now, in the complexity of our bonds and the boundaries of our nature.

In this third section, Harrington successfully avoids two common pitfalls of the culture critic: maintaining a purely critical mode, which is always easier than making a positive proposal, and hovering safely in the theoretical and the abstract. Harrington does neither, instead focusing the final part of her book on what an alternative to bio-libertarian feminism could look like. In doing so, she takes what might be called an approach of subsidiarity, emphasizing the need to “think concretely as possible” within the smaller sphere of interpersonal relationships, rather than sweeping, top-down policies.

This positive program depends on reclaiming the notion that the well-being of women depends on the well-being of men, and vice versa. In sketch form, Harrington’s practical strategies are, first, to reinvigorate marriage and an interdependent, productive solidarity that is centered in the home—a twenty-first-century take on the premodern model. Second, to roll back the beige-ification of society, i.e., mandated gender neutrality. This would mean allowing men and women to form separate social clubs, as well as reestablishing sex realism in any sphere where sex dimorphism is salient, like prisons and military combat units. Third, Harrington makes a bold, pro-embodiment, pro-desire case for “rewilding” sex by ditching the birth control pill—that first transhumanist technology that sets women at war with their own bodies, and displaces sex from a context of trust, commitment, intimacy, and the thrilling risk of new life.

Harrington offers her proposal under the banner of Reactionary Feminism—a feminism that positions itself against the bio-libertarianism of progressive feminism. This framing is provocative, and appeals to the rebel spirit that has animated, in one form or another, the various waves of the women’s movement. It also highlights an uncomfortable truth: the delusions of Progress Theology have proven to be destructive to both men and women, but it is undeniably women who are the guardians—or as Harrington puts it, the “priestesses”—of this quasi-religion. According to Harrington, it is the “majority-female mid-tier knowledge class” that most benefits from and currently curates the alliance between feminism and bio-libertarianism, to the detriment of almost everyone else. This means that Harrington’s heretical feminists are not warring with an amorphous patriarchy, but with other women. It is elite women who “have always been the guardians of moral and cultural norms,” as Harrington puts it, and so it is elite women who must now rise up as reactionaries.

 

I’m all but ready to sign up and join Harrington’s army of feminist heretics—if there is one point to quibble over, it would be that this re-envisioned feminism has to be more than reactionary; it can’t simply remain locked in unending mimetic rivalry with Progress. I want to shift the terms slightly to emphasize that this reformulated feminism needs to have a reactionary phase, but must also be proactive.

This is a rhetorical quibble, because Harrington’s articulation of reactionary feminism gives a clear sense of what it offers, not merely what it rejects. “It is not enough just to resist,” she writes near the end of the book; “reactionary feminists need to take positive steps to institutionalize a worldview capable of supporting men and women as we are.” I emphasize those last three words, because here Harrington gets to the heart of the matter: a reclaimed feminism has to offer a coherent and abiding account of human nature—specifically human nature as sexual. This is something feminism, in all its forms, has never done. The entire trajectory of bio-libertarian feminism, to put it simply, has been an ongoing project of denaturalization, a flight from the very idea that we have a nature. Feminism has thus assumed an empty, atomistic anthropology, one easily shaped and co-opted by consumerism. On her penultimate page, Harrington calls for a “positive restatement of human nature” in the face of cyborg theocracy, and her book as a whole reveals the contours of that nature: embodied, generative, sexual, interdependent, relational, prudential, capable of love, commitment, and sacrifice. And as relational, this is a nature that must be formed and cultivated through healthy social bonds: we have a nature that requires nurture.

This new feminism must be realist, rather than utopian, grounded in the muck and magic of the real, even as it offers ideals to be pursued and enculturated. Those ideals, however, must be grounded in the contours of our nature—not in a transhumanist fantasy, but in a vision of what our nature looks like in a state of flourishing. Progress theology divorces human flourishing from human nature, and thus the flourishing it offers can only ever be inhuman.

In contrast, Harrington offers a rich and complex social vision, one that, in my opinion, is not adequately captured by the word “reactionary.” Yet Harrington is right that in our cultural moment, an embodied, relational feminism—one that does not see sexual difference as a threat—has to be reactionary; it is countercultural by default. Those hoping to realize that vision need to be against progress, but also for something more stable and enduring: a feminist movement that recognizes and embraces the limits of our nature, as well as norms that steward that nature; that guard it from pathological excess and enervation. It’s time to reject the utopian lie that we can “be anything we want to be.” Instead, we must learn to become what we are.

We Were Known For Our Rivers

Kimberly Garza grew up going to the river, which depending on the day and her family’s mood could have meant the banks of one of a few bodies of water: the Frio, the Sabinal, or the Neuces. All three rivers are in close proximity to Garza’s hometown of Uvalde, Texas:

RIVERS ARE PLACES OF FORGETTING, of memory. But they are also places of healing.

The use of rivers and water in therapeutic practices is millennia old, employed by nearly every Indigenous culture known around the world. The term “river therapy” refers to the practice of swimming in a river or walking near one and drawing positive benefits and relief from the space and its elements. River sounds are used in relaxation training systems to soothe and calm people. Studies have shown that just listening to a river can alleviate stress.

The term “spa” derives from the Latin phrase sanitas per aquas—” health through water.”

UVALDE IS NO LONGER known for rivers but for tragedy. We are part of a terrible tradition of Texas towns with this fate, among places like Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, and Allen. Since the massacre of May 24, 2022—the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary—we have seen our unraveling, our sorrow and our rage, broadcast to the world. We have watched our town’s name, the names of our neighbors and families and friends, carried on a current farther away from us. We grieve, even today. Some part of Uvalde always will.

But the rivers are still here, the moments of respite in the waters around us.

I hope the healing is coming, too.

What the Surge in LGBTQ Self-Identity Means

We are now a year removed from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. In the flurry of protests that followed the late June 2022 decision, LGBTQ-identified persons and organizations paid a surprising amount of attention to the Court’s decision. The rainbow flag was a mainstay at Dobbs protests. Even a shallow dive into written backlash against the Court’s decision revealed that LGBT people were concerned about Dobbs at least as much as women in heterosexual relationships were, despite the latter’s lopsided contribution to actual abortion numbers. The most obvious reason for the former’s concern was Justice Clarence Thomas’s reference, in his concurring opinion, to reconsidering other “substantive due process precedents,” like those in the Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas decisions.

But some share of the political angst no doubt comes from the fact that there has been a surge in LGBTQ self-identification among young adults who do not display homosexual behavior. That’s right. New Gallup data analyses put the LGBT figure among Zoomers (i.e., those born between 1997 and 2012) at 20 percent. Data from the General Social Survey—a workhorse biennial survey administered since 1972—reveal that the share of LGBTQ Americans under age 30 exploded from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 16.3 percent in 2021. No matter the data source, it’s clear that in 11 short years, LGBTQ identification among young Americans tripled. And yet under-30 non-heterosexual behavioral experience, while climbing, remains just over half that figure, at 8.6 percent (in 2021).

Sexual behavior once comprised the key distinction to homosexuality. Homosexuality, however, has given way to ideological and political self-identity. In light of this shift away from using behavior to self-identity in defining homosexuality, LGBTQ antagonism to the Dobbs decision starts to make more sense. In fact, we should have seen it coming. In a study published last year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, my coauthor Brad Vermurlen and I found that the key predictor of adult attitudes about treating adolescent gender dysphoria with hormones or surgery—a topic you might not equate with abortion rights—was not age, political affiliation, education, sexual orientation, or religion. The best predictor was whether the respondent considered themselves pro-choice about abortion.

 

This surprised us. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have. Opinions about abortion and gender medicine tend to turn on basic differences in how people understand the human person, their own body, others’ bodies, and the very ends for which we exist. Sociologist James Davison Hunter mapped this out in his 1991 book Culture Wars. In what he described then as the “progressive” worldview, bodily autonomy is paramount. We determine who we are, and we should be free to do so through body modification and the control and redirection of bodily processes. In what Hunter called the “orthodox” worldview, on the other hand, bodily integrity trumps autonomy and self-determination. As the Heidelberg Catechism famously opens, we are not our own, but belong—body and soul—to our savior Jesus Christ. Bodies—systems, parts, organs, and processes—have natural purposes and ends toward which they are objectively ordered. They are to be received as a gift. The two are strikingly different perspectives about the self.

The prospect of motherhood can no doubt undermine one’s sense of self-rule over one’s own body. This is particularly the case if you understand your body as “belonging” to you, and that you rule over it by making choices for it. You can permanently alter it, be harmed by it, or be at odds with it. It’s not surprising that a pregnancy can scare people, because—in the progressive worldview—you have the right not to be pregnant, just like you have the right to self-identify as you wish. It’s a cousin to asserting you have the right to body modification in service to your own self-definition. (And why should being a minor prevent such rights?) Dobbs appears to undermine all this; its three dissenting justices claim that “‘there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter’—especially relating to ‘bodily integrity’ and ‘family life.’”

As previous legally effective arguments about fixed, stable sexual orientations give way to malleable sexual and gender self-identities, it’s tempting to wonder whether we’re not simply speaking about different worldviews—as Hunter’s terminology maintained—but alternative religious systems. LGBTQ, after all, is a big-tent system that contains its own rituals, creedal commitments, forms of worship, sacred items and places, a liturgy, a calendar with holy days, appropriate confessions, salvation accounts, martyrs, moral codes, and magisterial representatives. Religious belonging commonly begins with self-identification. Just as not all Christians practice their faith, so too not all self-identified LGBTQ persons demonstrate behaviors long associated with the movement. And just as there are many moral questions that divide Christians, so too is this the case in the LGBTQ world. But the emotional depth of disagreement here suggests core religious belief systems are clashing.

Language and authority structures are no less pivotal in the LGBTQ world than they are in our own faith. British social theorist Anthony Giddens—a leading public intellectual in England and one of the more famous sociologists alive today—articulated the importance of sealing new ideas with new words in his 1992 book The Transformation of Intimacy: “Once there is a new terminology for understanding sexuality, ideas, concepts, and theories couched in these terms seep into social life itself, and help reorder it.” This is why Hunter described culture (in his book To Change the World) as the power of legitimate naming. With regularity we now find ourselves wrestling with our opponents over basic terms. But sometimes even new religious movements get ahead of themselves, bungling their systematic ontology. As one Wall Street Journal columnist noted recently,

Those protesting the (Dobbs) ruling have a particular challenge in that there is now some disagreement among themselves about what exactly they are advocating and for whom. The left has been engaged in a confusing internal debate about what a woman is.

Indeed, this may prove to be a bridge too far. The recent flare-up involving Bud Light and Target Corporation, and the mystifying battle over whether drag queens should read stories to other people’s children, suggest that many people of any and no faith are fed up with the proselytizing. There’s plenty of religious tolerance in libertarian America—including among Christians—but little interest in revolutionary ideas about “queering” the gender binary. Sexual difference is not a problem requiring a solution. The Human Rights Campaign, as close to “headquarters” as it gets, should have seen this coming. Instead, it declared an LGBTQ “state of emergency” in the United States, akin to a plea for religious tolerance. But when parents’ rights are openly undermined by their efforts, the HRC should not be surprised when people of all faiths have heard enough talk about children’s “bodily autonomy,” or their supposed ability to express informed consent. As we are witnessing, mothers and fathers remain a powerful bastion of reason in our new post-gender turn, because they display with and in and through their bodies the reality that Roe sought to hide or ignore.

 

Christians have a distinctive anthropology of the human person and a better, happier long-term vision for human flourishing. Unfortunately, many of us are unable to articulate it. But the time for making explicit what we believe—the true, the good, and the beautiful—is now. While it remains to be seen how our post-Roe society will look and how the present cultural conflict will play out in courts, legislatures, and around kitchen tables, a few things are certain. Subtlety won’t cut it. Gradualism won’t do. Charity—courtesy, kindness, and love—is always in good form. But don’t think that being deferential or nice will evangelize effectively or preserve our longstanding vision of the human person and its design, purposes, and ends from its ideological challengers. To paraphrase one old saint’s remarks about laws concerning marriage and education, it is in these two areas that Christians must stand firm and fight with toughness and fairness, and—if I may add a category—good judgment. A world, and not simply one country, is at stake.

A Step Forward in the Debate about Masculinity

Early in 2019, the men’s razor company Gillette raised eyebrows with a new commercial. The ad depicted stereotypically disordered male behavior—aggression, catcalling, and a “boys will be boys” indifference to both—and contrasted it with a new generation of men taking a stand against that patriarchal past: a father breaks up a fight between two boys, a young man cuts off another’s unwanted advances toward a female stranger.

Many on the right complained that Gillette drew a glib equivalence between masculinity and toxicity, and the commercial was admittedly both myopic and preachy. But the conservative dismissiveness of the ad largely settled into a defensive, abrasive machismo. The ad was simplistic, but its critics missed an opportunity to think through the meaning of masculinity, and about the importance of male—and especially paternal—role models.

Conversations about sex and gender are surely just as difficult now as in 2019. Any talk about masculinity can easily veer into the same sclerotic patterns of the Gillette hubbub: a left that paints with uncritically broad brushes, and a right that gets defensive and dumbs down its beliefs. Richard Reeves’s latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, manages to avoid predictability, blending statistical insight and easygoing wit to craft a fruitful exploration of the male malaise.

Reeves, a liberal economist at the Brookings Institution, bookends Of Boys and Men by presenting the educational, economic, and cultural challenges men face, and he proposes policy and social solutions for each. They’re all insightful and (unsurprisingly) subject to debate, especially, in my view, his discussion of fatherhood and marriage. But one of the most important lessons of the book—which Reeves introduces to reassure readers that they can care about both women’s equality and men’s struggles—is that “we can hold two thoughts in our head at once.” In that vein, we can disagree, even deeply, about some of Reeves’s premises or proposals, while also recognizing that Of Boys and Men models the sort of intellectual dexterity needed to tackle complicated matters in our polarized times.

 

Men Falling Behind

Reeves begins his book by pointing out how boys are falling behind in the classroom. He surveys data showing they are 14 percentage points less likely than girls to be ready to start school at age 5, as well as 6 percentage points less likely to graduate high school on time. Look ahead at college, and young men are 15 percentage points less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s. Women are narrowing gaps between themselves and their male classmates in typically male-dominant subjects (such as STEM), while stereotypically female subjects like nursing and teaching remain so.

Men are also being outdone in the job market. Worries about the wage gap—which Reeves handles with careful nuance—or about a C-suite glass ceiling have some legitimacy, but overemphasizing them paints an incomplete picture. The lack of female representation among Fortune 500 CEOs tells us that a small—albeit influential—proportion of men are doing very well. But by the same token, the people struggling the most economically are more likely to be men. An astounding one-third of men with only a high school diploma (approximately 5 million men) are out of the labor force.

To address these labor market problems, Reeves draws from the women-in-STEM push and calls for similar efforts for men in health care, education, administration, and literacy—or as he calls it, HEAL. In the same way that Melinda Gates pledged $1 billion to promote women in STEM, Reeves proposes an equal “men can HEAL” push. He envisions a combination of government and philanthropic funds for training and scholarships, and for marketing these often well-paying careers. Child care administrators and occupational therapists, two examples Reeves cites, respectively earned on average $70,000 and $72,000 in 2019.

 

One of the most discussed policy proposals in the book deals with educational gaps, which Reeves wants to address largely by “redshirting boys,” or delaying their start in kindergarten by a year. It’s not that young boys are less able than their female counterparts, but rather that they cognitively develop at a different pace, about two years slower than girls. For Reeves, giving boys the “gift” of an extra year before starting school “recognizes natural sex differences, especially the fact that boys are at a developmental disadvantage to girls at critical points in their schooling.”

Reeves’s reasoning reflects an important aspect of his approach: he acknowledges the importance of biology, and thinks that understanding biological factors should moderate a tendency, frequently seen on today’s left, to confuse equality with sameness. After examining data on men’s and women’s different career interests and outcomes, for example, Reeves concludes that we should at the very least consider that biology and “informed personal agency” play some role in occupational choices. He rejects attributing all gender gaps to sexism, or expecting perfect 50–50 representation in all fields.

People of different political stripes can debate the scope and specifics of both the HEAL movement and redshirting boys, among other proposals in Of Boys and Men, but Reeves leaves the possibility of fruitful deliberation very much open. He helpfully frames his discussion of education and jobs so that potential disagreements will be about means, rather than  fundamental ends.

But the same can’t be said about the third aspect of the male malaise Reeves identifies: the cultural status of fatherhood.

Fatherhood without Marriage?

Reeves recognizes a sense of aimlessness has taken hold of many men’s most personal relationships: between men and women, and between fathers and children. But he primarily wants to address the latter problem, and to do so by envisioning fatherhood as an independent institution, considered separately from marriage. We should address and improve relationships between fathers and children first, irrespective of whether fathers are married to their kids’ mothers. Our safety net should expect more than mere economic support from fathers—particularly among noncustodial parents—and reward them for involvement in their kids’ lives. In a nutshell, our culture and policy should reconcile themselves with the reality that we live in “a world where mothers don’t need men, but children still need their dads.”

Why doesn’t Reeves concurrently advance a marital renewal? For one thing, he regards the traditional model of marriage as too rigidly predicated on the expectation of a male breadwinner, and by extension on the economic dependence of women. From it flows a notion of fatherhood that may have encouraged family formation in the past, but that is now “unfit for a world of gender equality.” The decline of marriage poses problems, but it’s largely indicative of positive gains in autonomy for women, in his view.

Reeves emphasizes that many unmarried, nonresidential fathers are very involved in their kids’ lives. Black fathers, for example—44 percent of whom are nonresidential—are more likely than white nonresidential fathers to help around the house, take kids to activities, and be generally present, according to one study he cites. Reeves argues that our cultural expectations of fatherhood “urgently need an update, to become more focused on direct relationships with children” (emphasis added). Since about 40 percent of births in the United States take place outside of marriage, he concludes that insisting on a model that assumes an indissoluble link between fatherhood and marriage is just anachronistic.

But Reeves doesn’t fully reckon with the gravity of divorcing fatherhood from marriage. Chapter 12 of Of Boys and Men, which Reeves dedicates to his independent fatherhood proposal, advances particular policies to support “direct” fatherhood unmediated by marriage, from paid parental leave to child support reforms, to encouraging father-friendly jobs. But he spends surprisingly little time directly arguing against the empirical and philosophical case for fatherhood within marriage as distinctly positive.

For example, Reeves writes that “there is no residency requirement for good fatherhood. The relationship is what matters.” Fair enough. But which model—fatherhood within marriage or nonresidential fatherhood—tends to facilitate more of the positive interactions needed to build healthy relationships between fathers and children? In general, the one where more of those interactions can potentially take place. A study by Penn State sociologist Paul Amato suggested this, reporting that from 1976 to 2002, 29 percent of nonresident fathers had no contact with their kids in the previous year, while only 31 percent had weekly contact.

 

In fact, contact with their biological father plays a positive role in advancing the two other major concerns Reeves has for boys: work and education. A 2022 report from the Institute for Family Studies found that “[y]oung men who grew up with their biological father are more than twice as likely to graduate college by their late 20s, compared to those raised in families without their biological father (35% vs. 14%).” According to the Census Bureau, approximately 62 percent of children lived with their biological parents in 2019, and 59 percent lived with married biological parents. In other words, growing up with a biological father is deeply intertwined with growing up with a married father—there are very few cohabitating biological or single biological fathers.

Beyond social science, there’s also a conceptual issue at the heart of Reeves’s proposal. It’s undeniable that many working mothers don’t need men in the same way past generations did—if what we mean by “need” is economic support. But it’s also very clear that mothers do need men. Without men, well, they wouldn’t be mothers (and vice versa) for the very simple yet profound fact that the sexes need each other in order to fulfill their biological end. This is more than a semantic trick—it’s a recognition that mutual dependence is at the heart of our biology. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, men and women could not exist without each other—and that realization should caution us against overemphasizing independence.

Moreover, shouldn’t fatherhood also entail modeling what lasting commitment to a spouse looks like? Reeves is right to stress that fatherhood should mean more than just economic support, but he misses the fact that prospects for decoupling marriage from fatherhood are similarly discouraging in this regard. In a study by the late Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan, 80 percent of unmarried parents were in a romantic relationship (with each other) at time of the birth of their child. But here’s how McLanahan summarized her five-year follow-up with them:

Despite their “high hopes,” most unmarried parents were unable to maintain stable unions. Only 15 percent of all our unmarried couples were married at the time of the five-year interview, and only a third were still romantically involved (Recall that over 80 percent of parents were romantically involved at birth.) Among couples who were cohabitating at birth, the picture was somewhat better: after five years, 26 percent were married to each other and another 26 percent were living together.

In divorcing fatherhood from marriage so hastily, Reeves misses an opportunity to consider why reimagining marriage is a key aspect of reinvigorating fatherhood as well. It’s the biggest drawback of Of Boys and Men.

Nevertheless, Reeves’s proposal has clearly opened a door to fruitful further debate. His case for direct fatherhood should temper a traditionalist reflex to assume that nonresidence is equivalent to abandonment—there are clearly many nontraditional, not-married, or separated fathers who embody dedication to their children. But if engaged fatherhood is so empirically and conceptually intertwined with marriage, then we would lose key aspects of both by separating them. We shouldn’t idealize marriage or how it affects fatherhood, but we shouldn’t hastily decouple marriage and fatherhood either.

Successfully reimagining marriage and fatherhood will probably even entail letting go of some of the overly rigid gender roles that Reeves criticizes in Of Boys and Men: more female breadwinners and paternal homemakers, as well as various policies and workplace arrangements to support the parent–child bond are all likely to be a part of the future of the family. But so should giving boys and men not just the tools to excel at school and work, but the habits and vocabulary to strive toward commitment, dedication, and love in the most personal dimensions of their lives.

 

Improving the Debate

Of Boys and Men is a book about men, written by a man, claiming that our culture doesn’t take men’s problems seriously. In the wrong hands, it would have been the latest entry in a seemingly incessant culture war, a callback to the silliness of the Gillette controversy. Yet it has been a resounding mainstream success. In matters of gender and sex, some might believe it’s impossible for there to be any interest in men’s issues across the ideological spectrum. The success of Of Boys and Men suggests that’s not the case.

Of Boys and Men has a point of view, but Reeves doesn’t close off the possibility of exchange or criticism by making a caricature of his opponents. This is the sort of book that not only exposes an often ignored issue, but elevates the quality of our conversations about it, even amid disagreement. That is perhaps its most impressive feat.

The Peace of Parenthood

What is it like to be a parent, and what might it teach us? In my own life, questions that had once seemed abstract have quite rapidly taken the form of an immersive experience: I have eighteen-month-old twin daughters, with a third daughter on the way in October, and so perhaps I can be permitted some reflections ahead of Father’s Day that I hope will resonate with others. Parenthood is full of surprises, but I’ve been struck by how I’ve come to understand it as fundamentally peaceful.

Peace is not the first thing that people typically associate with parenting. According to a Pew survey earlier this year, most parents describe parenting as “rewarding” or “enjoyable,” but significant numbers also find it “tiring” and “stressful.” These findings reflect the cost-benefit lens through which the modern world tends to view parenthood: a generally exhausting ordeal that imposes fearful constraints and burdens, while occasionally providing moments of happiness. In many ways, our most urgent social and political challenges—declining birthrates and family formation; pervasive feelings of isolation and anxiety—are the inevitable products of a cultural fixation on the costs of parenthood.

I’m not immune to cost-benefit reasoning (especially when buying diapers for twins), but I now realize that it neglects the core truth that being a parent is essentially peaceful in nature. It is peaceful not in the contemporary sense of freedom from discord (did I mention twins?). Rather, parenting is peaceful in the deepest meaning of the term, which is when we understand, embrace, love, and find joy in one another as gift.

 

By emphasizing the peace of parenthood, we might provide a useful corrective to the prevailing cultural narrative that views the enterprise with such ambivalence. The relationship between peace and parenthood was not obvious to me before I had kids, and I think the same is true of other young people who might be pondering the questions I opened with. While familiar notions of parenting as happy, rewarding, stressful, or intense tell us something, they don’t quite capture the whole story.

Peace

In our secular age, peace is often defined in negative terms of what is lacking or missing, such as the absence or end of conflict. In this account, peace in the public realm means freedom from civil disturbance, while inside our minds it means freedom from troubling thoughts or emotions. In this latter sense, Augustine’s view that peace is “the tranquility of order” finds faint and distorted echoes in the modern emphasis on subjectivity and psychological analysis.

But there is a deeper, spiritual dimension of peace that I believe the experience of parenting helps bring more clearly into view. We might consider the Hebrew word shalom, a comprehensive term that encompasses the positive aspects of flourishing relationships, not just the absence of hostility. We might also note that in the Catholic Mass, just before congregants offer each other a sign of peace, they are reminded that Jesus said to his apostles, “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you.” Far from an instruction to withdraw into solitude, this is meant as an affirmation that true peace is a gift from God, something positive and relational that enables us to open up to each other and establish new connections.

 

This model of peace also works as a basic description of parenting. More than any other experience, being a parent opens us up to new life, and it deepens existing relationships within our families: husbands and wives grow closer, grandparents watch children become parents. It also encourages us to honor and delight in something outside ourselves. Our failure to see peace in its fullest sense as openness to the gift of God in others is, I think, related to growing cultural misgivings about parenthood. If we increasingly fail to see peace as something positive and oriented toward others, then we won’t associate it with parenthood. And to the extent that we see parenthood as daunting and isolating—as anything but peaceful—then it will be ever more difficult to encourage young people to form their own families.

Gift

Contrary to the modern focus on the costs of parenting, I have learned through being a parent that the true meaning of peace is the condition in which we understand one another as gift. Of course, there is a rich biblical tradition of viewing children as a gift, or a reward, from God. More broadly, this is related to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic view that creation itself is a gift; not self-standing, but created ex nihilo, from nothing, in a free expression of God’s love that is impossible for us to reciprocate. In this sense, creation is a gift in itself, a gift that signals a relationship, and a gift that instantiates its recipients. Something similar is true of the parent–child bond, and this bears upon parenting in three important ways.

First, the category of gift highlights that parenting involves reciprocal exchange even within the context of a highly asymmetrical relationship. Parents give time, care, and love to their children, who are entirely dependent and seemingly unable to reciprocate. Yet parents also know that children do offer reciprocal gifts in the form of laughter, smiles, joy, and love. This kind of reciprocal exchange cannot be expressed in economic terms, but it’s a profound part of the parent–child relationship.

Second, when we define peace as understanding one another as gift, it follows that we give part of ourselves to the recipient. An Aristotelian philosopher might describe this as the cause imparting something of itself to the effect. By analogy, a father recognizes that to give part of himself to a child—to welcome, treasure, and love the child—is to imbue the child with something of his own character. It might be true that modern parents exaggerate the impact of their efforts, but I still treasure the time I share with my children precisely because its usefulness is not measurable. Time, care, and attention each mediate, and give meaning to, the parent–child relationship.

Third, the category of gift reminds us to embrace what we receive from our children. As social media feeds demonstrate, it’s all too easy to celebrate the pleasurable parts of parenting, the conveniently photogenic occasions when the trip to the beach goes perfectly according to plan. But what about the less glamorous moments? As Public Discourse writer Nathanael Blake observed: “Changing a diaper is not that difficult. Doing it in the dark at 3:30 a.m. after a few weeks of rarely sleeping for more than ninety minutes at a stretch, while being screamed at, is the hard part.” Like so many others, I’ve learned that embracing the hard parts of parenting turns out not to be so hard after all; it’s a natural function of the peace of parenthood, of finding joy in what comes to us from our children—in all its gloriously messy forms.

 

Joy

So far, I’ve suggested that peace is not just the absence of conflict, but something positive, a state when we open up to the new life for which we are responsible and which presents itself to us in its own unique way. In addition, the other aspect of peace that I’ve come to appreciate through parenting is that it is characterized by joyful relationships. In his excellent dictionary of scholastic philosophy, Bernard Wuellner defines internal peace as “the calm and joy of soul in its love of a possessed good without further intense effort or uncertainty.” As it relates to parenting, I’d add that peace is not simply an internal state, but something outward-looking, oriented toward others.

That parenting is joyful might not seem like much of a revelation. On the other hand, parents often look harried and feel panicked. Though parenting is stressful, it gives rise to joyful relationships in which we feel fundamentally at peace because we’re not afraid or distracted, no longer striving for unattainable things or preoccupied with trivial concerns. There is, as Wuellner put it, no need for “further intense effort or uncertainty.” Michael Oakeshott noted that a child’s game is joyful because it has “no ulterior purpose, no further result aimed at; . . . it is not a striving after what one has not got.” The same might be said of parenting itself, of loving and treasuring our children for who they are and not for the value or utility of what they can offer.

Today it often seems that parenting is seen in the same way that some historians have viewed history: just one thing after another. One more obstacle to overcome; one more fire to put out. But my own experience has taught me not only that peace is (perhaps surprisingly) central to parenting, but that parenting itself offers us a positive vision of peace to inhabit—the opportunity to embrace, love, and find joy in one another as gift.

ARG for thee and me

When I joined a tech company after working for myself for 20 years, the corporate world had changed in many ways. One, in particular, struck me. My old jobs had existed in environments so laddish and rowdy that even I, as a man, had felt uncomfortable in them. So I’d gotten out.

For 20 years, I ran my own businesses. I prioritized impact over profit. I prized adherence to a set of beliefs over survival. If marketplace disruptions made pivoting to an ugly business model the only way to keep a company going, I shut that company down—even when I wasn’t sure what I would do next.

After shutting down enough of my companies to convince me that maybe “business” wasn’t my strength, what I did next, in 2019, was to join Automattic, Inc.—the people behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Simplenote, Tumblr, and other web-based empowerment tools.

It’s nothing like the places where I used to work.

We believe in Open Source. Follow a Creed. Instead of laddishness, we support and even celebrate difference. One way that support flows is through Employee Resource Groups, which we at Automattic call Automattician Resource Groups, or ARGs—so that’s the name I’ll use here.

ARGs are communities, formed around personal identity and situation, where colleagues connect with and support each other and work together toward common goals.

At Automattic, we have several of these ARG communities. Eventually, as the lead of Automattic’s Employer Brand activity, I plan to join them all. Initially, I joined two: Neurodiverseomattic and Queeromattic. I saw myself as an ally. In joining these two ARGs, I hoped to become wiser and kinder; to increase my ability to support, live, and work with family, friends, and colleagues; to deepen my interpersonal skills; and to grow in compassion and understanding. 

I accomplished those goals, but I also gained something I hadn’t expected.

It started with Neurodiverseomattic, a group that provides support and resources for neurodivergent Automatticians (including but not limited to autism, ADHD, dyslexia) and their allies.

As the dad of an autistic daughter (who also suffers from an alphabet soup of additional diagnoses), I have the joy of loving, living with, and learning from one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever encountered. But I also have the challenge of supporting someone whose life, through no fault of her own, is often painfully difficult.

I must listen when she needs an ear. Advise when she seeks help—and occasionally when she doesn’t.

Autism, in my daughter’s case, simultaneously includes remarkable, magical, wondrous capabilities, along with painful, mostly social, disabilities. 

Some Neurodiverseomattic members are neurodiverse themselves; some are neurotypical but support neurodiverse family members; many, maybe most, are neurodiverse themselves and also support neurodiverse family members.

Over months, the more I shared experiences with members of my ARG, the better I became at meeting the challenges of parenting an autistic, depressed, anxious, dyslexic, artistic, gifted, emotionally intense, profoundly insightful teenager. And the more I came to realize that other members of my family had also been on the spectrum. Like my late father. And maybe my late brother. And, in a different way, my late mom. And…

And the more Ava shared her past experiences of being bullied, misunderstood, abandoned, and confused, the more I realized that I myself had had many of the same feelings and experiences growing up that she was having.

Like Ava, I had gone through a period of crying every day at the thought of going to school. The terror of brutal bullying and the shame of not fighting back. The shock of trusted friends laughing at me, not with me, or pretending not to know me. Lubricating their rise in the social ranks by pretending to find me ridiculous. Or maybe not pretending.

Like Ava, I’d concocted strange fantasies to try to understand why these things happened to me. Had I committed some crime? Was I a mistake? Had my parents been bribing my school friends to pretend to like me, and then run out of money?

So much of what Ava experienced, I had experienced. And so, it seemed, had many of my neurodiverse colleagues who courageously shared their stories.

And, finally, reader, it sank in:

I’m not just the president of hair club for men, I’m also a customer.

I’m on the spectrum. Of course I am. And always have been. Of course. And just never, ever knew.

Once I saw it, I was amazed that I’d never realized or even wondered about it. 

Once I saw it, I was grateful to work at a place where we’re afforded the kind of support that can not only help us improve our people skills, but can also introduce us, on a deeper level, to ourselves.

 

And meanwhile, as an ally, I also joined Queeromattic. Need I say more?

Okay, I will.

The world I grew up in was so homophobic, and the romantic films I grew up watching were so prescriptive, that I got in touch with my heterosexuality long before I reached puberty … and didn’t recognize my queer side for decades.

Not even when I made out with a boy. (Hey, I was drunk.) Or years later, when I made out with another boy. (Hey, I was drunk, and, anyway, he looked like a girl.)

My new self-knowledge is mostly academic. Divorce has freed me of certain illusions, a spiritual practice has brought a taste of inner peace, and aging has eased up on the hormonal gas pedal, so that I no longer confuse attraction for a plan, or feelings for fate. Parenting keeps me plenty busy and fulfilled, and singlehood may not be exciting, but I’ve had enough excitement for multiple lifetimes.

Romantic love is for those still willing to risk everything. I prefer to hold onto what I have left. Because I know it’s a hell of a lot.

Thanks to the wisdom, vulnerability, truthfulness, and compassion of the friends I’ve made through my company’s ARGs, I have come to better know myself. It gives me pride, no pun intended. It even grants me serenity. And for that, I am grateful.

---

Illustration by Ava Zeldman. This article also appears on Medium.

The post ARG for thee and me appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

The Duggar Family and “Shiny Happy People”

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil the new documentary about the Duggar family, Shiny Happy People....

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Fidelity to Place

Editor’s Note: This essay is the third in a symposium that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here. 

As Aristotle held, human beings are by nature political or social and are ordered to community of necessarily limited size—the appropriate size being that of a polis. We come together to achieve certain ends essential to our flourishing, of which the act of being together is itself an important part. When we sense—and it most often indeed will be just a vague sense—that the communities to which we belong no longer support us in our flourishing, then we will naturally, perhaps without even knowing what we intend, redirect our attentions elsewhere.

This is exactly what many of us have begun to do. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam documents the ever-increasing solitude, loneliness, withdrawal, and alienation of Americans from their long traditions of communal life. Rod Dreher recommends reconnecting with one another by turning to small communities in The Benedict Option. Still, our society has made a general choice along the lines Putnam describes in favor of withdrawal, on the part of modern Americans (and modern Westerners more generally), from community. The social map, even as these new, intentional communities that Dreher describes come into being, persists in its general trend toward fragmentation and alienation.

What is missing from modern life is fidelity—and not just fidelity in general, but fidelity to those things that are given us and that we can never, at least fully, choose for ourselves. By this I mean our places of birth—our block, our neighborhood, our village, our state—and the families and communities into which we were born.

Filiation and Affiliation

The late Edward Said was known for his distinction between filiation and affiliation. Filiative relations are those that come to us naturally, those that are givens of our birth and into which we are born. Affiliative relations are those we purposefully forge. In Putnam’s America, most people withdraw increasingly into solitude—into mere loneliness. But, as Said suggested, are not many of our chosen affiliations acts of withdrawal in themselves? Are they not retreats from filiative associations into affiliative ones—with an emphasis on the word “retreats”?

They certainly are. But is there anything wrong with that?

Many years ago, I heard a lecture at Notre Dame by a former student of Alasdair MacIntyre’s. He alluded to MacIntyre’s mordant suggestion that being patriotic in regard to the United States of America was a bit like pledging one’s love to the phone company. We need to belong to smaller scale communities, said this former student; he did not want to belong to a great country, he did not want to belong to the masses of a cosmopolis, but to a polis. And then, he gestured out the window at the gorgeous campus all about us, and concluded, “I want to belong to a polis like Notre Dame.”

 

While I shared this man’s love of that university, I could not help but notice that—despite its abundant acreage, its own post office and ZIP code, its power plant, basilica, and even the great farmlands the students once tilled to raise food for their dining halls—despite all this, I say, a university can never constitute a polis. This is so not merely because its population consists largely of unmarried young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. Rather, a university, like a monastery and a bowling team, is affiliative down to its bones. This student had effectively endorsed Dreher’s proposal on MacIntyre’s terms, but he had also shown the necessary weakness of that proposal.

Affiliation is often a tragic necessity, a chosen alternative but a reluctant one, after filiation fails. Any good human life will contain chosen attachments and, most likely, many of them. What I want to defend is not filiation against affiliation but rather the relative superiority of filiation to affiliation and, furthermore, the intrinsic dependence of all affiliations on those natural attachments that Said called filiations. Those communal attachments that are given to us are greater than those we choose, and those we choose, great though they may be, depend for their quality on the priority of our given attachments. I distinguish not between good and bad, but between root and vine.

Unchosen Bonds

For this reason, fidelity to place, to the community of one’s birth, is not merely one virtue among others, but a foundational and formative source of our character. We first learn to be faithful husbands and wives from the unchosen example we witness of our own parents. We first learn to be faithful citizens as we explore the small postage stamp of terrain that we did not choose to go to, but simply awakened to with our first dawn of consciousness. Our care for our towns and cities is rooted in the upkeep of our homes.

Finite creatures that we are, these first unchosen relationships form all future ones. Their failings often mar us; their successes help us to flourish. Although it can only ever be a rule of thumb, one might think twice before allowing a young man who has been a lousy son to become one’s husband. Is it more or less likely that the young woman enrolled at Our Lady’s University will be a good citizen of that temporary “polis” if she arrives there hating the place she comes from?

 

Fidelity to our first, natural communities is more than just a temporary schoolhouse for our future affiliations. A kind of fidelity is possible in those communities that is generally not available otherwise. When one knows a place and accepts it as given rather than chosen, its faults and weaknesses become not an occasion for leaving but for recommitment, forbearance, and reform. We are less likely to feel we have wasted our efforts in service of our natural filiations—bonds that were given with our birth and so have the strength of nature behind them.

The small communities recommended in The Benedict Option are real and beautiful communities, but they are marred as well. They have intrinsic in them the memory of prior communal failures, which can tempt their members to believe that what has been freely chosen can be just as freely and easily unchosen. Actual Benedictine congregations, of course, require of their monks a vow of stability. In a monastery, statues of the Virgin and Child always depict Mary seated—a sign by which she tells us “I am not going anywhere.” Vows can overcome some of the weaknesses built into choice. But, even here, those religious who first loved their natural community will have proportionately stronger vows.

Return to Roots

Over the years, as I have admired Robert George from afar, I have first appreciated his uncompromising commitment to God and to the everlasting country so frequently on display in his fidelity to his conscience. I have always especially treasured this anecdote David Brooks relates about George, in his essay “The Organization Kid”:

George described a moment when he and a colleague were urging their students not to commit plagiarism. The honor code goes against it, George told them; the Internet makes it easier to plagiarize, but also much easier for faculty members to catch plagiarists. Besides, he concluded, God will see you doing evil.

Little less have I appreciated his fidelity to his West Virginia roots, whether suggested by his occasional tributes to the life of his father or his accomplished banjo playing. One can sense that George, the Princeton professor, is a better Princeton Tiger for having first been a good West Virginia Mountaineer.

 

I believe it thus, at any rate. When two years ago I had the opportunity to move back to my region of birth, Michigan, I had been waiting a dozen years and jumped without reservation. I knew, when growing up, the trials and failings of the place, but also was able to see its goodness through and despite those failings. I could be a faithful citizen not only because I loved the place with good reason, but because I could love it even when the reasons were not so good.

Perhaps in an age such as ours, the withdrawal from the failing, dominant institutions of society, and the attempt to build up smaller, intentional ones, may seem the best available option. I would suggest, however, that there is something even richer in the “unoptioned” and the “optionless.” Fidelity to the places and communities of our birth is an irreplaceable good, one that may beget other kinds of goods, but for which there can be no adequate substitute. Learn to be faithful to what was first given to you, even when the roots are sick and the prospects seem dreary.

On Marital Fidelity: Its Personal and Public Benefits

Editor’s Note: This essay is the second in a three-part series that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here. 

In the famous story of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, we hear about a woman who faithfully waited for her spouse, Odysseus, to return home from war. Despite the attention of more than a hundred suitors, the queen of Ithaca employs diplomacy and cunning to defer their attentions for twenty years, symbolically weaving and reweaving a burial shroud to buy her time. Not until she could confirm that Odysseus had died was she willing to entertain the idea of remarriage. But what about Odysseus? Was he faithful to her?

It depends on how you look at it. During his arduous ocean journey home, he meets up with two separate seductresses. The first, Circe, uses her magic to charm Odysseus into an intimate relationship as she provides for his every desire. After a year of island comforts, however, he asks her to release him and his crew so they can return home.

 

Later in the journey, Odysseus is shipwrecked alone on an island, where the obsessed nymph Calypso makes him her amorous prisoner for seven years. She offers Odysseus immortality if he will stay and become her husband forever. But every day, he goes to the shoreline to weep and pray, longing to return to his wife and son. Eventually, Zeus intercedes, and Calypso is forced to free him. He finally makes it home to an epic reunion with Penelope.

My reading of Odysseus’s entanglements is a merciful one, of a hero who falls but ultimately triumphs in the virtue of fidelity. The commitment to marriage is often fraught with difficulties and missteps, but what matters is turning things around, healing wounds, and persevering in faithful married love.

What Is Marital Fidelity?

In modern lingo, marital fidelity is often taken to mean abstaining from sex with anyone other than one’s spouse. However, this involves not only an oversimplification, but a hyper-focus on the sexual aspect of marriage. If marriage is what natural law teaches it is, namely, the union of a man and a woman who 1) give their whole selves to each other: minds, wills, hearts, and bodies; 2) are open to begetting children; 3) agree to a lifelong union; and 4) are exclusive (no side-partners allowed), then it’s not merely about keeping our hands off others, but primarily about being faithful to the whole gift of self being given and received in marriage.

Therefore, we can distinguish among different kinds of infidelity that offend different parts of the marital union. Infidelity of mind and will involves intellectually desiring or wishing for intimacy with another person outside the marriage bond—which includes neglecting to care for one’s spouse, even if no other person is involved. Emotional infidelity, on the other hand, involves misdirecting the heart, allowing one’s feelings to attach to someone else, and/or neglecting our spouse’s emotional needs. And physical infidelity, of course, involves the body and includes succumbing to outside physical, including sexual, acts of affection, and/or neglecting our spouse’s physical-sexual needs.

Essentially, it is possible to cheat not only through sex but in several ways, including by creating intellectual and/or emotional bonds with an opposite-sex friend other than our spouse. Indeed, intellectual and emotional infidelity are often the ladder rungs that lead to the slide down into sexual infidelity. We are body-soul unities, and the sharing of our souls (through our minds and emotions) naturally leads to the sharing of our bodies. So, guarding marital love includes directing our most intimate treasures toward our spouse and warding off alternative appeals, as Penelope did. Or after falling, getting up again, like Odysseus.

It takes concerted effort to avoid indiscretions on all these fronts, but that is where the complete gift of the will matters. When fidelity becomes difficult and a thousand Siren songs are playing in our ears, we tie our will to the mast and take the necessary measures to avoid entrapments. This is made easier by the positive effort to focus on weaving (and reweaving) the two strands of the marriage, man and woman, into one. Committed couples strive toward a more perfect union every day, focusing on daily collaboration, mutual understanding, forbearance, making compromises, patiently bearing each other’s faults, displaying good humor, and making creative sacrifices to add joy to the daily grind. In this way, the lion’s share of romantic energy and attention is already in the right place, and there’s not much of either one left over for others!

 

Modern Criticisms of Marital Fidelity

Clearly, marital fidelity involves a lot of hard work, so it’s reasonable to ask: is it worth it? For decades, we have been hounded with messages that nonmarital sex, easy, no-fault divorce, cohabitation, and same-sex romantic relationships are acceptable, and that we should lighten up on the commitment to faithful marriage as the one and only ideal. Today, we hear new voices calling for society to loosen further, to consider polyamory and support open marriages and polycules, what academics call “consensual nonmonogamous (CNM) relationships.”

Still other (more cantankerous) voices are calling for society to do away with mononormativity altogether (which, like heteronormativity, is used as a term of disparagement—in this case, toward the monogamous ideal). These voices claim it’s discriminatory to put monogamy on a pedestal over and above other romantic relationships.

It’s worth pausing to ask, do they have a point? Or do the cost-benefit scales still tip in favor of fidelity?

Personal Benefits of Marital Fidelity

Social-science research on CNM partnerships is still in its infancy, but the best data to date are not flattering. Participants report lower overall happiness, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction than monogamous couples. Researchers hypothesize that this is due to minority stress, or the social stigma that still exists toward nonmonogamous partners. If only society were more accepting, the story goes, these groups would experience better outcomes. However, experience-based wisdom suggests other reasons related to the nature of the arrangement itself (and not external social factors). Here are a few of the more obvious hypotheses.

First, a firm marital commitment engenders deep psychological benefits. Once the promise to be faithful, exclusive, and permanent is given, and after some time living that way, couples experience a deep sense of psychological peace. Essentially, they realize they can trust each other. Neither has to worry about whether interest is waning, if the other has his or her eyes on the door, or if there might be a new partner on the side.

Fear of the future is also reduced, as faithful couples have confidence that they won’t be all alone as they face tragedy, illness, old age, and finally, death, especially the longer they stick together through hard times. And fears about parenting and children’s futures are reduced, as mothers can count on the father’s help and fathers can count on the mother’s help. As both sexes pour their unique talents into the parenting enterprise, a great synergy of their strengths gives children the best start in life.

By contrast, consensual nonmonogamy promotes distrust, insecurity, and fear. With no promises to be faithful, exclusive, or permanent, these relationships are unstable and prone to dissolution. Naturally, real or perceived comparisons to other sexual partners will lead to deep insecurities and frail self-esteem. The cluster of relationships will feel unfair; someone will certainly feel less loved and valued than others in the group.

Those in polyamorous relationships will also be more fearful for the future, as the instability inherent in this arrangement makes for precarious long-term planning and investing. In the case of a polycule, high-maintenance group members (the ill, aging, depressed) will be let go to fend on their own.

Challenges multiply when children enter the question. Fights over different perspectives on childcare and discipline will increase, as the revolving door of lovers means more adult opinions have to be managed about what to do with kids. And there is, of course, a heightened risk of novel sexual disease transmission, with the accompanying stress, accusations, and blaming.

 

Second, permanent marital partnerships accrue material and financial benefits. Faithfully married people are better off financially because they pool their resources, with no sharing with additional romantic partners.

They invest together in their own assets, savings, retirement accounts, and education. This investment includes the manual labor that goes unmonetized—time spent helping with children, chores, and upkeep of other material goods—rather than on outside partners unrelated to the primary home.

Married couples can also sign couple-exclusive contracts with confidence, taking advantage of longer-term opportunities including insurance policies, homeownership, and entrepreneurial endeavors.

Nonmonogamous couples, by contrast, experience greater financial confusion and struggle. Myriad questions about how to handle expenses will bring on stifling decision fatigue. In an open marriage, fights will emerge around who pays for what, lives where, and how much can be spent on new romantic pursuits.

Jealousy seems inevitable as partners spend money on outside relationships, making budgeting an emotional minefield. The instability of polyamorous relationships will preclude much long-term financial strategizing.

Third, faithful marriages generate an ethos of unity. To make the relationship last, spouses must learn to negotiate, compromise, and carve out win-win solutions. Compromise strengthens character and builds emotional resilience. Checks on personal autonomy guarantee growth in selflessness, which leads to more humble service to others, including spouse, children, neighbor, and greater society. Mercy and forbearance are required to hang on, giving rise to more compassionate spouses.

 

But open marriages and polycules foment an ethos of division. These relationships give primacy to each individual’s self-actualization through subjective feelings rather than to spousal unity, so tensions and disagreements will more likely to lead to standoffs and exits than to compromises.

Each partner will prefer to release tension outside, on new distractions and abatements, further weakening the primary relationship. Open marriages and polycules will be more susceptible to division and divorce and will bring that spirit of separation to their parenting style, being more willing to separate children from biological parents and established relational bonds. Questions of paternity, fatherly responsibility, and abortion have the potential to sow deep discord and bitter conflict.

Public Benefits of Marital Fidelity

Besides the personal advantages that marital fidelity confers, there are numerous public benefits as well—especially to children and lower income families.

Benefits to children. About 25 percent of the U.S. Population is children, and this sizable portion of our society is also the most vulnerable, dependent on us adults for their well-being. Faithful marriages provide these benefits to kids: 1) A more stable home, meaning greater stability for the child, a greater probability of a lifelong home and family. 2) A safer home, by virtually eliminating the number one risk of child abuse: an unrelated adult male in the home. 3) Higher quality parenting, due to the gender-balanced synergy described above. 4) An anchor for the child’s identity, satisfying the human desire to know and be loved by one’s biological kin. 5) Better educational outcomes, as these kids are statistically more likely to achieve higher grades and degrees, which are correlated with higher earnings later. 6) Increased financial resources, as described above, including inheritance and family-owned assets.

Benefits to the poor and to working-class men. Other vulnerable segments of our society include the poor, and working-class men. Marriage benefits them in several ways: First consider the  Success Sequence: 97 percent of millennials who follow the success sequence—that is, they graduate from high school, get a full-time job once their education is completed, and marry before having children—avoid a life of poverty. The power of this sequence, which includes monogamous marriage, can catapult many vulnerable individuals upward.

 

Marriage is also associated with better mental and physical health for men. Men faithfully married to a woman are less likely to report depression, and they experience higher levels of happiness. Likewise, men do better financially when faithfully married.

All the above benefits of faithful monogamous marriage ripple out to benefit society as a whole (see graphic). They yield more unified and stable families that strengthen the social fabric. Their ethos of unity generates “a web of trust across generations, giving rise to the acquisition of virtues and immense social capital (pp. 9–10 here).” By contrast, all the instability, brokenness, and infidelity of nonmonogamous unions will pull and tear communities apart, increasing relational anarchy and human harm, especially toward the most vulnerable: children and the poor.

 

Let us acknowledge that, in our wounded world, brokenness is often inevitable. Life happens, and often we cannot live up to the ideal, no matter how much we might try. With compassionate mercy, we can avoid painful judgments of particular people in particular situations. Nonetheless, we cannot give up on fidelity to the marriage ideal, which is the source of human healing, unity, and flourishing. Only when we acknowledge an ideal for what it is—a gold standard by which all other options are calibrated—can we work to shore up less-than-ideal situations to become the best versions of themselves possible.

Those in stable, intact families bear a special responsibility here to reach out to those who are relationally wounded, to share their relationship riches, and to offer apprenticeships in healthy family formation, so as to promote social healing writ large.

Conclusion

Over the past several decades, our civilization has experimented with a number of alternatives to faithful marriage. Yet the evidence is abundant that from a personal as well as a public perspective, we are most likely to flourish when faithful, monogamous, natural-law marriages are plentiful and the norm.

To all our modern marriage heroes, those facing challenging situations and doing all they can to put the needs of their spouse and children before their own self-centered desires, we salute you. Thank you for your national service. You are walking the path of fidelity, which leads to a brighter future for you, your family, and the entire nation.

What’s Missing

If you spend any time at all in archives of early American material, you will stumble over genealogies. Lots of ways and types of producing genealogy. What I call “vernacular genealogy.” (And you can see lots of examples on my Instagram, where my handle is VernacularGenealogy.) Although the John Carter Brown Library is known as a world-class collection of early American printed materials (books, maps, prints about the early Americas and the Caribbean), with one major archive, the Brown Family Business Papers, we do also have a few codices. And last week I stumbled over one I hadn’t read before, an account of the Kimber family of England, New York and Pennsylvania. This notebook of family history was written by multiple hands, from the mid- 18th into the mid-20th century. 

There’s a lot that’s interesting in this volume, lots of ways it echoes other like family histories, but one thing caught my eye immediately. There are pages missing. Right at the start of the volume, one page is torn, and one is cut. I can see some letters from words in the gutter of the latter, nothing of the former (torn too close). I always wonder what could possibly have been there to warrant its removal. It could be sensitive material. Or it could be that, like many of us and like many of their contemporaries, the authors of the volume started to use it one way, then decided on another purpose and just got rid of the first few pages.

What’s helpful about these kinds of material observations is they remind me to stay close to the purposes of the work–even when that’s obscured. Someone had intent here in the production of these texts, the full volume itself, and even in the pages torn and cut away.

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The Watermans in Your Pocket.

“Hannah Waterman Her Book and Hand wrote at Warwick January 14 AD 1770” is a family record book, just 16 pages, comprised of folded and single sheets stitched together with a few tantalizing suggestions of what might be missing.  It is both like and unlike the many examples of such eighteenth-century genealogies I’ve seen in my research.  Not many start with a woman’s hand and authorship, for example, though this one likely didn’t either.  It clearly includes pages written by earlier generations –the first page by Hannah’s father–and as the work of multiple hands it is very like other family records.

Last month I participated in the marvelous Archival Kismet conference, an informal online conference developed by historian Courtney Thompson to, as she put it in a blog post on Nursing Clio, allow the archival materials you stumble across “to guide you, and [to be] open to questions and topics well outside of your wheelhouse.”   She had in mind that historians would explore more and different literatures and fields, learning as we go, rather than focusing always on one place/ time/ topic.

I confess I subverted the remit a bit by talking about a family history record!  But it’s one I only started to work with last Fall as I first began to explore in earnest the collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society.  I’d worked in the RIHS collections some years ago, but only returned to deeper now that it’s just a few blocks from where I work.  What extraordinary collections they hold and, as ever, family histories aren’t always where you’d expect them to be within it.

Two things I’ll point out about Hannah Waterman for now.  First, the title page is itself both provocative and compelling.  Bringing together not only the information but also the texts written by others and then titling the little book as hers makes this unusual.  She would have been twenty when she wrote that it was “Her Book.”  

And second, the size of this volume is perfect for a pocket– a woman’s pocket, that is.  Plenty of good scholarship has explored how and where women wrote as well as what they wrote.  Size of books made from folded papers is somewhat confined by the size of standard papers.  But that size, shown here as relative to my pencil, was an intimate one.  It was befitting of the intimacy of the material it contained.  Losses– a brother who never returned from going to sea–”Remains on Heard of”–and parents dying old, children dying much too young.

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My father’s story

When he was eight years old, my dad taught himself to take apart watches and put them back together. He supported his mother by doing watch repairs at that age out of her little jewelry stand, and a few years later by delivering clothes for a Chinese laundry.

As a laundry delivery boy, he earned no salary—he lived off tips. Emanuel Romano, a starving modern painter and customer of the laundry service, could not afford to tip Murray, but in lieu of cash, he offered to teach the boy how to paint. My father accepted the lessons and painted for most of the rest of his life. (Our home in Pittsburgh would one day be filled with Murray’s paintings. All would be lost in the flood that later destroyed his home.)

In his early years, Murray couldn’t read. He was probably autistic and dyslexic, but nobody back then knew from that. And a public school in Queens in the 1930s was certainly not going to have the resources to help a child with those issues. When beating him didn’t improve his skills, the school labeled him “sub-normal” and stuck him in Special Ed. He would likely have remained there and become a janitor, or a grifter like his father (my grandfather). But one remarkable public school teacher spotted Murray’s gifts. “This boy is brilliant,” he said. 

That changed everything.

(Everything except my grandfather, from whom my dad got nothing but violence and psychological cruelty. When Murray was one of two kids from his neighborhood to be accepted into Bronx Science—a rigorously academic public high school specializing in engineering, mathematics, and the sciences—his father said simply, “They’ve made a mistake.”)

Murray enlisted in the Navy at 17 to fight the Nazis, but they surrendered before he reached Germany. The navy then shipped him off to Japan, but the atomic bomb got there first.

On returning after the war, he attended CUNY on the G.I. Bill, studying electrical engineering. He eventually took his Masters—not bad for a slum kid from a poor family. He would go on to work in robotics, fluid hydraulics, and even early typesetting computers. He came the director of a Research & Development laboratory in Pittsburgh, and afterwards, spent 25 years working for himself as an author, consultant, and lecturer.

Below is his biography from twenty years ago. At the time, he was still vigorous, still flying all over the world as a consultant and lecturer. If you wish, you may skip down to the bottom, where I tell what became of him.

Maurice Zeldman, President

A world authority in the field of project management, Mr. Zeldman has consulted and led seminars for over 180 client organizations. His in-company and public seminars have been presented around the world. Advanced project managers use his special techniques to create realistic estimates, time frames, and implementations which enable the completion of these development projects on schedule and within budgets.

Before launching his EMZEE Associates consultancy, Mr. Zeldman served with Rockwell International as the Corporate Director of Technical Development for the Industrial & Marine Divisions. Responsible for all of the division’s new product and process development projects, he designed, built, and staffed an Engineering Development Center for the corporation.

Previously Mr. Zeldman served with Perkin Elmer in the development of an Atomic Absorption Spectrometer, and with American Machine & Foundry as Chief Engineer of the Versatran Robot business venture.

He is the author of “Keeping Technical Projects on Target” and “Robotics: What Every Engineer Should Know.” (Book links at Amazon.)

My mother died in 2000 after seven years with Alzheimer’s.

My father remarried the next year.

His second wife divorced him when he came down with dementia at age 91.

He was also experiencing seizures. While he was hospitalized for one of them, his house flooded, and everything he owned was destroyed.

My brother Pete found our father a clean, decent nursing home to live in.

There, his dementia progressed quickly.

The last time he saw me with my daughter, he mistook her for my wife and asked how we two had met.

He accused the nursing home staff of soiling his underwear while he slept.

He often sneaked out of the facility to buy scissors, which he smuggled back into the home. (Scissors were contraband because the home feared that their demented patients would use the blades to harm themselves. He had no practical use for the scissors, but was incensed at being told he could not have them.)

During the first year of the Covid pandemic, he contracted pneumonia.

He died at age 93 while in palliative care. He was alone.

#

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Secretive religious group "The Family" tied to anti-LGBTQ+ death penalty bill — again

Christian group formally known as the Fellowship Foundation linked to anti-gay legislation in Uganda

My son’s autistic language

My son’s language is made of a bundle of sounds that do not exist in the Spanish that we speak around the Río de la Plata. He repeats syllables he himself invented, he alternates them with onomatopoeias, guttural sounds, and high-pitched shouts. It is an expressive, singing language. I wrote this on Twitter at 6:30 in the morning on a Thursday because Galileo woke me up at 5:30. He does this, madruga (there is no word for “madrugar”, “waking up early in the morning” in English, I want to know why). As I look after him, I open a Word document in my computer. I write a little while I hear “aiuuuh shíii shíiii prrrrrr boio boio seeehhh” and then some whispers, all this accompanied with his rhythmic stimming of patting himself on the chest or drumming on the walls and tables around the house.
My life with Gali goes by like this, between scenes like this one and the passionate kisses and hugs he gives me. This morning everything else is quiet. He brings me an apple for me to cut it for him in four segments. He likes the skin and gnaws the rest, leaving pieces of apples with his bitemarks all around the house. He also brings me a box of rice cookies he doesn’t know how to open. Then he eats them jumping on my bed. He leaves a trace of crumbles. Galileo inhabits the world by leaving evidence of his existence, of his habits, of his way of being in the world.
When we started walking the uncertain road to diagnosis, someone next of kin who is a children’s psychologist with a sort of specialisation in autism informally assessed him. She ruled (diagnosed, prognosed) that he wasn’t autistic, that we shouldn’t ask for the official disability certificate (because “labels” are wrong, she held), and that he should go on Lacanian therapy and music therapy on Zoom —now I think this is a ready-made sentence she just gives in general to anyone.

The most violent intervention in Galileo’s subjectivity is denying his being-disabled in an ableist world and his being-autistic in an allistic world. We, as a culture, have internalised the terror of disability so deep in our minds that we hurry to deny it. We are not willing to accept that what causes us so much angst and dread actually exists, that it is not an imagined ghost. Denying like this, in this delusional way, is an instinct only humans have. It is so human (so stupid) that it is not a survival instinct. When we deny autistic affirmation, we prepare the ground for its annihilation, i.e., for the annihilation of everyone who is autistic. Being autistic isn’t being an imperfect allistic, a not-yet-allistic person. Being disabled isn’t the same as being a flawed abled person. The denial of disability doesn’t amount to affirming an alternative ability, it implies the ableist annihilation of all vulnerability. But when disability is negated, able people do not survive either. We are born and we die in disability. How did it happen that we dare to imagine we can supersede need? (Maybe by the same process by which it is believed that capitalist profits are meant to satisfy human needs).

The instinct of denying disability is not innate, though. It is an intelligent trap designed to break communities apart, to disorganise, to debilitate us: not to make us disabled but to make us unable, powerless. This is how ableism works, de-politicising vulnerability and unease, making disability, at most, an object of pity and compassion, a matter of bad luck, a fate to try to twist and avoid.

***

Galileo’s spoken language has the musical texture of a genre he alone can perform. There was a (short) time when I thought that my role in his life was to be her translator, a mediation between him and the rest of the world. This is impossible for many reasons. The most important of them isn’t that I don’t get him (I don’t), it isn’t that I don’t speak his language (I don’t), or that no one (much less a mother) can or should mediate anyone. The main reason is that Galileo speaks as someone who plays in their instrument a piece that they have composed for themselves.
Sometimes language is comprehensible only insofar as one gets ready to listen to it as if they were in an empty church in front of a little bench where Rostropovich is about to play Bach’s suites with his Duport, and as if he were Bach himself. Then, and only then, we understand that we don’t understand, that we are at the gates of the incomprehensible. When is language more language than when it is spoken so incomprehensibly? The impossibility of interpreting oneself, myself, comes not only from the fact that no one controls or owns language. No one plays their own scores because no one creates their own language. No one, but Galileo and his equals. The autistic non-verbal language is that impossible thing that we try not to talk about when we talk, that we try to drown by talking too much, moving our hands, and writing for example this text. Autistic languages say what can’t be said in any articulated allistic “normal” language. Galileo speaks a language that complements other languages. This language of his is not the opposite of language: it perfects other languages, like music or silence do.

***

Does my son have a mother tongue? Do we speak to each other as mother and child? What do we tell each other when we chat? My son’s autism and his magic words lend me a whole new vocabulary for my own neurodiversity, a new and authentic view on my severe misophonia, hyperacusis, and hyperosmia, and on my life-long inability to grasp the majority of the rules of interpersonal relationships, among other things I thought were personal flaws that made me inferior. I won’t mask it anymore. I won’t keep it a secret anymore. Now I know how to talk about it, now I have names to name it. Maybe he will never speak his mother tongue or any other “normal” language, but he has taught me to speak a language in which I now can say what I couldn’t formulate in an allistic alien tongue. Stripping me of all the allistic and ableist expectations that have shaped the way I was meant to raise my children has liberated me from the suffering of trying to meet them myself. The truly difficult thing, besides raising an autistic child in an allistic world, besides being a non-verbal autistic child in an ableist world, is how to de-internalise all this life-long inferiorisation.

But I know he will tell me how.

Putting Children at the Center of Family Policy

The landscape around marriage and the family has drastically changed over the past sixty years. Culturally, adult sexual desire, choice, and identity have been elevated as the highest goods. Legally, no-fault divorce transformed what used to be the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known into a vehicle of adult fulfillment. Same-sex marriage took that adult-centric mindset to its logical conclusion. Technologically, we severed sex from babies with the birth control pill and then separated babies from sex with IVF and surrogacy.

What do these profound changes to the American family have in common? The answer is that—in culture, law, and technology—too many people are prioritizing what adults want above the natural rights of children. All too often, children are the real victims of marriage and family policy, suffering the loss of fundamental rights while their voices are rarely heard.

As we debate pro-family policy in the post-Dobbs era, we should recognize and respect the rights of children, especially each child’s right to a biological mother and father in a loving and durable union. Despite the deep political differences that exist among Americans, we were each born of one man and one woman, and we each understand the importance of being loved by the man or woman who gave us life, or the pain of being denied a relationship with one or both.

Our departure from the historic understanding of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is rooted in the careless neglect of the rights of children. To get back on track, and to formulate effective pro-family proposals, we must put children at the center of our efforts to form culture, shape policy, and resist new technological threats to marriage and the family.

 

Biology Matters

Despite rapid cultural, legal, and technological change, children’s rights and needs remain the same. Pop cultural mantras such as “love makes a family” have failed to produce child outcomes comparable to those of the traditional family. The gender-neutralizing of marriage and parenthood law and the proliferation of reproductive technologies have not erased the benefits children receive from being raised by a man and woman. Our best efforts to remake the family are powerless to change the realities of the child. What is that reality? That when it comes to making and raising children, biology matters.

This means that pro-family policy needs to prioritize biological parents. There are three key reasons to start from here. First, children are more likely to thrive and feel loved if they are raised by their biological parents. Not only are one man and one woman required for a child’s life to begin, but a child’s biological parents are statistically the two adults most likely to ensure that the child be safe and loved. For many years, social science studies have consistently shown that unrelated adults tend to be less invested in and protective of children. Similarly, the Pew Research Center found that people in stepfamilies “typically feel a stronger sense of obligation to their biological family members than to their steprelatives.”

This empirical research supports the testimonies of children who have been denied a biological connection with their parents. In the words of one woman who experienced many years of feeling rejected and insignificant within the context of a stepfamily situation:

Behind the scenes, my original siblings and I have all experienced much pain as a result of combining families because of the favoritism to my step-siblings by my stepmom. … I guess you could say that often the husband goes along with whatever the wife puts effort into, and there is often a distinct difference in the effort the mom naturally puts into her own kids. As a result, her kids were favored over my original siblings.

Second, biological parents can grant children a more rooted and stable sense of identity, helping children to answer the question “Who am I?” We can best understand how biology affects a child’s identity by listening to the children who were raised without the security it promises. According to a survey by the American Adoption Congress, 65 percent of adoptees expressed a desire to meet their birth parent and 94 percent expressed the desire to know which birth parent they resemble most. According to a 2020 survey by the resource center We Are Donor Conceived, a majority of their members “hope to form a close friendship with their biological [donor] parent” and believe that there is a “basic human right to know the identity of both biological parents.”

Third, biological parents provide the complementary benefits of mothering and fathering in the life of a child. Despite the media’s efforts to assure us that gender is a social construct and academic studies with dubious methodologies purporting to show that same-sex-parented children fare “no different,” robust social science scholarship continues to demonstrate what we’ve always known: kids often suffer without a loving male and female parent. Biology matters because it ensures that children at least have the possibility of receiving the range of benefits that mothering and fathering provide, even if those benefits are not always fully realized.

 

Changing the Story, Shaping the Culture

Our culture has shifted drastically, but children haven’t changed. In fact, they continue to be victimized by practices and policies that prioritize adult desires above children’s rights. It’s past time to start putting them at the center of our national conversation. That begins with clearly and courageously defending children’s rights by shaping culture, reforming law, and rethinking our approach to technology.

First, we need to recognize that building a stronger and healthier marriage culture means building an understanding of marriage as a matter of fundamental justice for children—because that’s exactly what it is. To help achieve this, we should leverage the emotional power of personal narrative in shaping political outcomes. Put simply: to protect children’s rights and to strengthen marriage and the family, we need to tell a better story.

Those who prioritize adult desire over children’s needs have continually succeeded in shaping laws and culture, redefining marriage along the way, not because they have a corner on natural law, strong research, or reliable data. They continue to destabilize the family because they elicit a more sympathetic view of their victims—adults seeking validation of their sexual feelings, choices, and identity. In response, traditional marriage advocates too often relied on cold statistics. To change the culture, we need to broadcast stories of the true victims—children—who have suffered under the redefinition of the modern family. The best counter to an article itemizing the struggles of two men seeking to be fathers via surrogacy is the story of a girl with two fathers who desperately wanted a mother.

But same-sex couples who adopt shouldn’t be singled out. It’s also important to highlight the child-harming impact of no-fault divorce, sperm and egg donation employed by both heterosexual and homosexual couples, and single motherhood or fatherhood by choice. All adult groups are guilty of victimizing children. For this reason, we must insist that all adults—single, married, gay, straight, fertile, and infertile—deny their own wants so the rights of children are protected. This approach emphasizes that we’re not discriminating against certain adults; instead, we’re fighting for every child.

In time, we might replace vacuous phrases like “love is love” with deeper, more substantive insights that remind us that kids are not commodities and that adults should sacrifice for kids, rather than insisting kids sacrifice for us. As the next generation emerges from the most fragmented families of our nation’s history, spotlighting child loss will increasingly resonate.

 

Supporting Pro-Family Policy

As I suggested last year, the marriage movement needs to change hearts and change laws. When it comes to marriage law, bad laws and bad rulings prohibit making relational distinctions between same-sex and opposite-sex couples. Thus, pro-child lawyers and policymakers must propose creative legal incentives based not on adult relationships with one another, but on adult relationships with children.

In particular, we need state-level proposals that reward biological parents for raising their children together in a married relationship. By employing language like this we convey that such incentives aren’t just good for children, but for society as well:

THIS STATE will offer tax breaks to the biological parents of children who are in a married relationship. The state extends a $400-per-child annual credit while the child’s biological parents are married to one another, and $700 annually per child if the parents married prior to the child’s birth.

Biological parents are statistically the safest, most connected to, most invested in, and most protective adults in a child’s life. This tax credit protects children by incentivizing the formation of a household where children suffer the lowest rates of neglect and abuse, obesity, drug use, poverty and incarceration.

This child tax credit also minimizes the need for government anti-poverty funds, child protective services, academic support, police involvement, and other state emergency aid.

This approach offers three advantages. First, it eschews words such as mother, father, man, and woman, focusing on the rights and needs of children rather than the claims of specific adult categories. Second, it applies equally to unrelated same-sex and opposite-sex homes, reinforcing the idea that this is about protecting children rather than discriminating against adults. Third, it focuses the debate not on the legitimacy of adult feelings, but on the family structure data—which is exactly where the marriage debate should have been all along.

For those wondering about programs and benefits for couples who adopt, hefty statutory and tax programs already incentivize adoption, and most states rightly treat natural and adoptive children the same. What is needed now is incentive that reinforces bonds between children and their biological parents.

Beyond marriage, we must put children at the heart of legal efforts to roll back no-fault divorce, recalibrate the anti-father family court system, reject the adulteration of children’s birth certificates, and limit the definition of parenthood to biology and adoption. The goal would be for the next generation of policy and legal thinkers to be seen as arguing for children, rather than against adults.

Resisting Technological Threats to the Family

In addition to forming culture and changing law, we should resist and reverse the expansion of the lucrative fertility industry, which is built on the denial of children’s rights. Annually, the fertility industry probably has a more destructive impact on unborn life than abortion. The pro-family movement must understand that abortion and reproductive technology are two sides of the same child-commodifying coin, and act accordingly. The children who do emerge from the IVF process alive have often had their right to their mother and father violated via use of “donor” sperm and/or egg.

 

Of course, we should extend empathy to heterosexuals struggling with infertility, as well as support our friends and family with same-sex attraction or unwanted singleness. At the same time, we should work tirelessly to oppose the availability and abuse of technologies that victimize children. We must insist that if technology is to be involved in baby-making, it cannot violate the rights of the most vulnerable. As such, we should consider the following proposals:

• Ban embryo-freezing. This practice is responsible for nearly one million souls on ice in America. Every embryo that is created should be implanted fresh, with no “leftover” or “surplus” babies to be discarded, experimented on in the name of research, or “donated” to another couple.
• Ban “donor” sperm and egg. Regardless of whether they are raised in a heterosexual, homosexual, or single household, use of third-party gametes is always a violation of children’s rights.
• Ban surrogacy. Whether gestational or traditional, commercial or altruistic, surrogacy intentionally severs the maternal bond which is critical to the well-being of children. When children experience maternal loss as a consequence of unexpected tragedy, we mourn. When that maternal loss is inflicted intentionally, we should also see it as an injustice.

When it comes to marriage and the family, we must seek to form culture, change laws, and resist technological threats, because children’s lives and well-being are at stake. If we center the rights of children in every conversation about family structure, good policy will follow. If we fail, children will continue to be neglected and treated as commodities to satisfy adult desires.

Children will not, and cannot, change. The question we need to confront as we seek to strengthen marriage and the family in the post-Roe era is: will our culture, law, and technology protect children, or victimize them?

From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Em

This essay was originally published at The Rumpus on September 11, 2019.

I. Sister

For her twenty-first birthday, Kiều’s younger siblings set fire to her bed.

It was intentional, of course, and when she came home from work to find thick black smoke billowing out from under her shared bedroom door, as she stood before the remains of her pitted mattress crackling merrily in shades of red and gold, she wondered if it was time to leave at last.

This was a futile contemplation—they would have to murder her and roll her stone-cold body to a crematorium before she’d abandon them—but in the moment, her pulse leaped in time with the flames, her blood heated till she thought it might combust and melt her into fuel.

“Mai!” she screamed. The culprit could very well have been one of the boys, but no one was capable of stirring up trouble on the level of her little sister.

The pattering of plastic flip-flops reached her before Mai did. “Wow, Chị Kiều,” said Mai, tipping up her face to frown in mock concern. “You don’t look so good.”

Indeed Kiều’s eyes were blistering and tinged crimson from the smoke, and her teeth were bared in a twisting snarl. She stabbed a finger at the fire, which, while burning strong, was unnaturally contained to her half of the room. “Put it out.”

Mai pouted, though her almond eyes were gleaming in satisfaction. “I can’t put out something I didn’t start.”

Minh and Kỳ Lân materialized at the end of the hall, looking considerably more cowed at the sight of both sisters, one towering and furious, the other four feet tall and grinning. “Who?” Kiều snapped. “Which one of you little shits did this?”

Kỳ Lân, the second-oldest at fifteen, opened his mouth first to confess—which meant the culprit was quiet Minh, easily swayed and forever tucked under his older brother’s protection. “Minh,” she said. “Come here and put this out. Now.”

He shuffled forward, not meeting her eyes. The smoke parted around him, twined about his skinny legs but never touched, and when he raised his palms, still chubby with baby fat, the fire shrank as if it were a foal being coaxed, and finally sputtered out. “Sorry,” he mumbled in Kiều’s general direction. “I thought it’d be funny ‘cause we didn’t have candles or a cake.”

Kiều hadn’t the slightest inkling of how setting fire to her bed might come off as funny, but she was always softest on Minh—he so often had peculiar notions like these, and it never helped that Mai was there to play them to her advantage—and she’d just come off a ten-hour shift, and her weariness drove bone-deep. The smoke dissipated, inconsequential to their nonexistent alarms.

“Did you eat?” she said at last, addressing all three. The question was habit; it was comfort, a crutch; it signified home.

They all nodded.

“Homework?” It was a Saturday night, but a necessary follow-up. They nodded again. “Then go to bed.”

Kỳ Lân asked, “Where will you sleep?”

She glanced at Mai, at the anticipation and guilt warring across her little sister’s face. She knew Mai had hoped to get a night—tonight, of all nights—of sleeping alone. Minh’s pyromaniac idea had simply been a convenient tactic.

Kiều also knew she could repair her own bed with a wave of her hand and a bit of concentration. But she was exhausted, and her sister needed the space. “I’ll crash on the couch tonight. Go to bed now—we’re up early tomorrow.”

 

In the cold quiet of the living room later, unable to fall asleep, Kiều played with stars. A twitch of her fingers, wiggling them above her face the way an infant discovers its hands, and bursts of light perforated the darkness. Not exactly stars, in the astronomical sense; these were a multitude of colors, the shapes that swam across her eyelids when she rubbed her eyes too hard. Kiều watched them zing across the stucco ceiling. Tiny shreds of magic in a land otherwise devoid of it, a land intent on breaking down people like them. You had to seize such joys when you could. She liked to imagine the little powers they possessed had originated in the depths of an untamed jungle across the Pacific, where tigers ran rampant and spirits ruled the rivers and mountains, and a many-greats ancestor had been blessed or cursed with the ability to conjure fire and stars, and it had tracked their lineage across generations, across an ocean, to provide comfort in this lonely land. Immigrants who might lack in power of the institution, but whose veins ignited with an innate power all their own.

Down the hallway in their split room, Mai might have been doing the same—if she shared the same strange blood that ran in the others’ veins. Mai was their youngest sibling, of that there was no doubt, but she had never been able to raise or quell a flame, conjure sparks at her fingertips, drench a room with sudden rain. She blamed herself—no. She blamed Kiều. Especially on two particular days of the year: today, March 29, their father’s sixth death anniversary, and April 30, their mother’s third.

Kiều wasn’t around often enough to feel that blame directed at her. She blamed herself for that, too.

The photos taped on the wall above the couch crinkled and wailed as they sensed her sorrow. Only the two photos propped up on the altar in the far corner, one portrait for each parent, was framed. Pictures left to hang without barriers of glass or plastic tended to make more noise, audible only to their ears, and none of them could yet bring themselves to un-mute their parents.

“Shut up,” she muttered to the loose photos, and snuffed out the stars, and forced the sleep to draw to her like a rushing tide.

 

II. Younger Than

The temple was a sea of brown. Brown robes over brown skin over brown earth, from monks to nuns to regular Sunday devotees. The sea undulated with the pulse of the masses as people shuffled in and out between two meditation halls and the kitchens, chattering in rapid Vietnamese, bearing platters of homemade and temple-cooked offerings, discarding sandals at the doormats and thumping cushions on the bare wood floors. Usually Kiều would not have dragged all three children to Sunday prayers, preferring to leave them home and drop by before her shift to catch the final chants. But today’s weekly remembrance service would feature their father—and Mai knew her sister was nothing if not a dutiful daughter.

Mai bit down on her protests as Kiều shouldered a path through the crowd, instructing them all to keep their heads down. Orphans drew attention, invited sympathy. Especially at a gathering of a community with too little power and too much to prove. It’s on us to survive, Ma had said. Family means family and no one else. Subtext: dependence was a weakness when exercised outside the bonds of blood. Even Mai had understood that at eight years old. The only thing she didn’t understand was why Ma hadn’t brought her along to the supermarket that day nearly three years ago instead of Kiều, because Ma knew she was going to die, had possessed a terrifying ability to predict the time and place of a person’s death, and Ma knew Mai was not powerless, knew that her youngest daughter had been practicing bringing freshly dead little birds and mice back to life. But Ma chose Kiều—was always choosing Kiều, the hardest worker, the smartest student—and in the last desperate moments of her life, her oldest daughter was unable to save her after all.

By the time the four siblings found cushions in the back row of the meditation hall, Mai was throbbing with fury. The temple always brought this out in her. Maybe it was the constant battle of faith and loss exuded by the devotees’ breath, or the wall plastered with the wailing unframed portraits of late sangha members, or the simple fact that there was no escaping people in general. It wasn’t fair—her older siblings thrived off collective energy, siphoned threads of it to amuse themselves, perfectly at home in the community. Mai could only quash her irritability and anger, the effort blocking any possible concentration needed to resurrect even a fly. She was forever em, the younger and youngest, the pronoun connoting love but also less. Nothing she could do would ever measure up. Well—saving Ma’s life would have, but that chance, too, Kiều had stolen.

As she shifted to stretch out her sleeping feet she noticed a drop of condensation track its way across the floor. Minh brushed his index finger in an idle circle in front of his cushion, and the water answered, drawing from the exterior of cold bottles and the moisture in the walls, slowly pulled to the stirring of his finger. Kiều noticed. Said nothing. The monks leading the chant at the fore of the hall droned on and on.

Another time, Mai might have ignored them both. But yesterday’s attempt at getting Kiều to crack had been far from fruitful and the rising late morning heat broke her out in sweat and all she wanted was for Kiều to punish Minh as she would punish her, for life to finally be fair, and she was so, so close to boiling over.

Crowds and anger were blocks to her power. Fine. There were other cards to play. She was still a child, after all.

With a deep breath she threw back her head and let loose an ear-splitting wail. The intoning monks stopped short. The entire congregation twisted, still cross-legged, to stare at the little girl shrieking and weeping in the back. Kiều’s entire face blotched red. She snatched up Mai’s arm and towed her to the doors, smiling awkwardly and holding up a hand in apology, the boys hurrying after.

To Kiều’s credit, she waited until they were all piled in the battered family van before whipping around and screaming, “What’s wrong with you?”

Mai had ceased her display the moment the van door snicked shut. She glared at her sister, not knowing how to condense all her wild fraying thoughts into words on her tongue, not knowing how to say you’re not being fair, you don’t understand without sounding even more like the child she didn’t want to be.

So instead she yelled back, “I don’t want to be here! I don’t want this! I hate you!”

Kiều just clenched her jaw and faced forward and sat for a long, pregnant pause before turning the key in the ignition. The van was dead silent the whole way home.

 

III. Less Than

Kiều didn’t show her face at the temple for a month after Mai’s episode. And just like all the previous times when Mai had acted out in one way or another, she never brought it up again other than confiscating her dolls for a week. She had no idea how to prevent her little sister from pulling such stunts—in fact, she was fairly sure Mai no longer even played with dolls, but she had no other possessions to take away as punishment.

And so life continued as it had for the past three years. Kiều went to work, six and a half days a week. She’d gotten her AA in accounting from community college last year, and was always meaning to apply for a bachelor’s program, but there were endless bills to pay even though the mortgage itself had been covered before Ma died, and how could she leave her siblings even more alone?

Once every so often a well-meaning woman from the temple would call her, offering to babysit or inviting them to birthday parties. Kiều always declined, politely. She enjoyed being around other families, but she had also been raised to be self-sufficient. Slacking on responsibility was not, would never be, an option.

Their little house was quiet—subdued—for the next weeks, until one Friday night Kiều returned to find a large shaggy dog loping about the living room, barking like mad as the boys laughed and tossed it bits of last night’s beef.

“Mai!” she yelled immediately. “What is this?”

To her shock, Mai dashed out of their bedroom with a wide grin that was pure elation, no malice. “Chị Kiều! Look what I did!”

“What’d you do? Where’d this dog come from? Why is it—”

“His name is Tiger, and look at his left side!”

The dog slid to a halt before her, panting happily. She leaned over to peer at its side and almost gagged. There, sunken in and nearly concealed by its shaggy black fur, were undeniable tire marks of reddish-pink skin. She looked up at her little sister in horror. “Explain.”

“I’ve been practicing for years—just the little sparrows I find in the front yard sometimes, and one time a mouse—”

“Practicing … on dead animals?”

“I’m not powerless!” Mai cried in joy. “I can do what all of you can!”

“None of us can bring back the dead,” said Kiều, even as her mind whirred, dredging up terrible memories she’d worked so hard to bury—the car ride, the final words—

Mai was already frowning, withdrawing, sensing her older sister’s distress rather than the astonished pride she had hoped for. “Well, I can,” she snapped. “I found Tiger down the street coming home from the bus and Minh helped me drag him back and Kỳ Lân got home and screamed a little but I did it, I saved his life!”

“Dead things are meant to stay dead,” hissed Kiều. “We don’t understand how our own powers work—what if it took your life to revive it? How do you think I’d feel, coming home to find you dead or hurt over a dog?” Fat tears brimmed over Mai’s eyes, but Kiều drove on. “Don’t try this again. Kỳ Lân, go put the dog outside. It probably wants to go home to its family.”

“No!” screamed Mai, but Kỳ Lân silently rose and herded the dog to the door. There was no arguing with Chị Kiều when it came down to it. Fear forbade it; hierarchy permitted fear. Mai and Minh and Kỳ Lân were all little siblings after all, em to chi, loved but still lesser.

Mai let out a shriek of helpless fury. “You’re always taking things away from me!”

They all dispersed to separate corners of the house after the dog was gone.

 

This time, the stars were ice. Frost webbed over Kiều’s hands as she manifested the miniature stars, again sleeping on the couch to avoid Mai’s temper, and she welcomed the bite. She considered making up with her sister by getting a real dog from the pound and immediately dismissed the idea—there was no way she could afford another mouth to feed.

Was this destined to be her life? Was she doomed to play guardian to three children who weren’t hers, not exactly, until they grew up, if they grew up? They weren’t an American family, even if their passports, bound in neat navy blue after Ma and Ba passed the citizenship test, said otherwise; she couldn’t just kick them out once they turned eighteen.

A twinkling shard of ice, illuminated from within by a heatless red light, fell on her brow. She brushed it away irritably. A traitorous shred of her heart jumped at the color, even if it wasn’t the exact shade she had come to fear.

Three years ago, that icy winter day, shifting in the passenger’s seat as Ma raced down the highway to get to the supermarket before closing, Kiều’s hands had glowed red. It was sudden—one second she was staring out the window and in the next she’d glanced down and shrieked, because the only other time her palms had shone that violent crimson was when Ba was in the operating room and five minutes later the surgeon had walked out with somber, pitying eyes. Ma looked over at Kiều’s hands and an inexpressible sorrow had clouded her gaze.

“There’s a reason for everything, con,” she’d murmured to Kiều. “I can see a lot of things, most of them things I don’t want to see, but there’s no preventing what’s meant to happen.”

“Ma,” said Kiều, a sick feeling ballooning in her stomach. “What do you mean?”

Ma only gave her a small, weary smile. “Con, nhớ chăm sóc em nha.”

My child, remember to look after your little siblings.

And then the car slipped on ice to the left, into opposing traffic, and the ringing went on forever.

Lying there beneath the twisted metal, Kiều had believed she was paralyzed. But that was only the shock, the doctors told her after, because she’d escaped with not a scratch on her body. She’d never broken a bone or experienced a major injury before in her life—she’d never had an opportunity before the crash to realize she was unbreakable.

Now, with floating ice dotting the living room ceiling, her head spinning years away, Kiều squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of nice things, bland things, anything to drive away the memories: electric bills, grocery lists, Sunday pizza nights, upcoming birthday gifts—

You’re always taking things away from me.

In the chaos of the dog, that particular cry had gotten lost. Of course, Mai had meant the dog, or the dolls that had been confiscated—

Kiều recalled how Mai had begged to go to the grocery store that day, how Ma had refused with a firm and knowing glance, had chosen Kiều instead. And Kiều had turned out to be unbreakable, but Mai—Mai had turned out to be a resurrectionist.

Ma had known. Said nothing. What was more, Ma hadn’t needed to bring anyone with her in the car, if she’d known she was going to die.

The great family arsenal of guilt, ancient and brutally effective. Kiều had been drawing from the seemingly bottomless well of it ever since that day. Had used it to keep herself working, praying, moving at all times; had used it to maintain that distance between herself and her little siblings. Nhớ chăm sóc em.

She sat up and got to her feet.

There were things that needed to be said.

 

 

***

Rumpus original art by Dara Herman Zierlein.

***

A note on Vietnamese pronouns: Chị is used to address an older sister or general older woman. Em is more versatile, and can be used to address a younger sibling or general younger person (regardless of gender), though it does tend to carry a connotation of femininity. It can also be used to show affection (a boyfriend to a girlfriend, for example) or to call out a person’s lesser status in a social hierarchy.

Of Innocence and Experience

In a provocative essay, scholar and author Sophie Lewis, best known for her 2022 book in support of “family abolition,” makes the case for how society can not only protect trans children, but also learn from them. This is a call for a more expansive, generous, utopian way of thinking about the potential of youth:

The fear I inspired on the parent’s face riding the subway was what distressed me most about the incident in New York. Later that day, when I recounted the anecdote on Facebook, an acquaintance commented – unfunnily, I felt – that I was a “social menace”. A threat to our children, et cetera. Ha, ha. But what was the truth of the joke? What had I threatened exactly? A decade after the event, “The Traffic in Children,” an essay published in Parapraxis magazine in November 2022, provides an answer. According to its author, Max Fox, the “primal scene” of the current political panic about transness is:

a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact.

In other words, by asking “are you a girl or a boy?” (in my case non-hypothetically), the child reveals their ability to read, question and interpret — rather than simply register factually — the symbolisation of sexual difference in this world. This denaturalises the “automatic” gender matrix that transphobes ultimately need to believe children inhabit. It introduces the discomfiting reality that young people don’t just learn gender but help make it, along with the rest of us; that they possess gender identities of their own, and sexualities to boot. It invites people who struggle to digest these realities to cast about and blame deviant adults: talkative non-binary people on trains, for instance, or drag queens taking over “story hour” in municipal libraries.

Valediction

When my mother was pregnant with my younger brother Pete, my father took her to see West Side Story in New York. My mom said every time the orchestra played, Pete kicked in her womb, keeping perfect time. Some people are born to play the drums. Pete played before he was born. He never stopped.

He loved music and courted danger. At age two, one day, he took my father’s LPs out of the record cabinet, spread them on the floor, and walked on them. When my father came home, he spanked Pete. The next day, Pete did the same thing again. And again, my father punished him. Every day it was the same. One day my mother tried to intervene as my brother was just starting to lay out a fresh pile of LPs. “Peter,” she said. “Do you want Daddy to spank you?” My brother shivered in fear. And continued to spread the records on the floor. Finally, my father put a combination lock on his record cabinet. My brother picked the lock.

Pete had his own ideas. Most were better than walking on Dad’s records. Many were brilliant. Some people march to their own drum. Pete marched to a whole set. 

You could not stop him. He was full of life, full of energy. My idea of a great summer vacation was inhaling the musty aroma of books in an air conditioned library. But my brother was out from sunup till sundown—running around, making friends, buying candy for all the other kids in the neighborhood out of his tiny allowance. He loved other people. He paid attention to them.

I have a lifetime of stories about him. So does everyone who knew him. He was full of life, full of energy, a clock that never wound down. And now, he’s gone, leaving a Pete Zeldman shaped hole in the universe. 

Goodbye, brother. I love you. I will keep your memory close. And maybe when time ends for me, too, I will see you again.

---

Written for Funeral Service, 31 March, 2023.

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College in Idaho Removes Abortion Artwork, Citing State Law

Six works in a Lewis-Clark exhibition about health care were perceived to run afoul of a law that prohibits the use of state funds to “promote abortion” or “counsel in favor of abortion.”

Bowling with the family!

This week was my spring break, which I spent in South Carolina with family– my mother, aunts, uncle, cousins, and of course my sister and her kids. Last week I posted about my goals for the week, which included low-key nature walking in state and town parks. I did that, and will blog about those… Continue reading Bowling with the family!