"The Taliban in a minivan."

[elfs]

I work at a bookstore. I was cashiering today when a woman and her two kids (a boy and a girl, both somewhere between 13-15) came up to the register. The mom was buying 2 celeb gossip magazines, and the boy put down a book. The girl then walked up and set down the newest volume of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.

The mom says "You can't buy that."

Girl: Why?

Mom: Because it's too big.

Girl: [Brother] is buying a book that big. It's not very expensive.

Mom: [Brother] is a boy. You're a girl. And girls shouldn't read big books like that. It's too thick. Boys don't like girls who read thick books. You want boys to like you, don't you?

The girl went and put the book away.

This appeared first in this post at LJ's customers_suck community, although I found it through a byzantine route that took me through Pharyngula and Byzantium Shores.

One of the many, many comments I've seen on this one has the idea that, well, if Mom is raising her daughter to be a baby-making machine, this is one of the things she has to do: build within the kid a character interested first in being attractive to boys and second with being herself. There's an entire movement in this country dedicated to this notion. It's called Natalism, and these people are serious: the culture war will be won by the ones that breed the most, and conservatives breed more than liberals, therefore conservatives will win. There's nothing surprising is the exchange going on in my quote: the mother is doing exactly what she thinks she must do, not only for the long-term success of her kid but for the success of her ideology.

I don't agree with it. I just don't find it nearly as shocking as most of the commenters do.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

... if Mom is raising her daughter to be a baby-making machine, this is one of the things she has to do: build within the kid a character interested first in being attractive to boys and second with being herself.

This also, of course, implies that boys don't find intelligent, strong-willed girls attractive. Sadly, there are plenty of "boys" (some of them well past the age of majority) for whom this hypothesis is correct.

There's an entire movement in this country dedicated to this notion. It's called Natalism, and these people are serious: the culture war will be won by the ones that breed the most, and conservatives breed more than liberals, therefore conservatives will win.

This already affected the outcome of the 2004 election -- note that Bush won 2000 by a quirk of the electoral system but 2004 by an actual popular majority.

But this shouldn't surprise anyone. The opposite ideology, Zero Population Growth, was obviously doomed to fail, because its adherents would fail to breed and hence be assured of minority status. What I find ironic about this is that many of the Natalists don't believe in evolution and many of the ZPG'ers do, yet the Natalists chose an Evolutionarily Stable and the ZPG'ers an Evolutionarily Unstable Strategy! (as per Dwwkins).

[tagryn]

"This already affected the outcome of the 2004 election -- note that Bush won 2000 by a quirk of the electoral system but 2004 by an actual popular majority."

The 2006 election results pose a problem for that hypothesis. Supposed demographically deterministic trends like that don't just turn themselves around in two years.

Personally, I think the anecdote Elf cites is likely more driven by a simple belief on the mom's part that looks are what get you ahead in life (think Anna Nicole Smith), rather than any deeper political philosophy.

[emeric1120.livejournal.com]

Next the mother will have the girl wearing a promise ring and all that... Yes, a proven failure of a program, but also a proven way to increase the population.

Even though her beliefs go against some of my beliefs, there are days I'm glad my daughter is an atheist and rabidly pro-choice. I'm proud she's her own person (well, most of the time... she is a teenager, after all). She also reads more, and she's a lot smarter than me.

Her best friend-that's-a-boy is openly gay, which is pretty courageous in ultra-conservative Indiana, especially in high school. He's pretty cool, if a bit strange some days.

Oh, and she's worried I'll like the nerdy-type boys she wants to hang out with. She already knows I like the nerdy girls she hangs out with. Ah, teenagers.

Ameriduh

[kenshardik]

"Idiocracy" wasn't as good a movie as "Office Space" but it frightens me as to how likely it is to happen.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Hmm. There is a tension there between the rights of the girl to be an individual and the rights of her mother to use her reproductive powers to support her ideology.

The silver lining is that the more you lie to kids about easily verifiable things ("Boys don't like girls who read thick books"???) the more likely the kids will find you out. At that point they'll either start thinking for themselves or collapse into a state of permanent cognitive dissonance, self-medicated by whatever means are available (probably one form or another of the opium for the masses).

The problem with thinking for oneself in a monolithic culture, of course, is that one ends up losing one's family; on the other hand, they never really considered one to be fully human - rather, a tool, an instrument of their ideology.

But would I want to live in a state that "rescues" kids from that sort of ideological abuse? I don't see any way that such a "rescue" would work for me.

(Full disclosure: I grew up in a family which held just that sort of ideological bias. Children were indeed instruments of world dominion. The family rid itself of each of the three oldest children as we started thinking for ourselves; the fourth was coopted into the plan.)

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

But would I want to live in a state that "rescues" kids from that sort of ideological abuse? I don't see any way that such a "rescue" would work for me.

Indeed, all that such a policy would accomplish would be to give the State another weapon to use against nonconformists.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

It may not be shocking that a natalist would do this, but natalism is shocking. It could not happen unless a large part of a whole generation of human beings had been just plain raised wrong. The communities where those people are accumulating are going to be miserable places, huge burdens on the rest of us, within a generation.

How many natalist families can afford to spend both a reasonable amount of time with 5 kids and enough money to educate them all? One natalist family in the middle of a normal city is OK, but if everybody around is a natalist, who is paying for the excess burden on the schools?

Typical private schools charge $20k+/year to educate one child, right? So where is the money coming from? If the family isn't in the top 10% of households, that slack has to be picked up by the public schools, which are funded by local property taxes, paid by... other natalists?

People raised this wrong will end up raising their kids much, uh, wronger: poor education, no free time or attention to supervise them properly; and in a generation there's a bunch of kids, all raised wrong, all getting to driving/drinking/fighting/stealing age all at once, all crammed into a few small places without a lot to do.

Yeah.

Excuse me while I go looking for a way to simulate long-term put options on real estate in Douglas County.

[dossy.livejournal.com]

If girls are reading big books, then the terrorists have already won!

:-P

Depressing...

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

There is something fundamentally depressing about seeing a mother choose to shape her daughter into a baby factory, to teach her to subsume her intellect for that sake.

Women were once considered property, and it was a long, hard fight to change that. And now, there are women who seek to condemn (and yes, I do mean condemn) their own daughters to a similar role?

I hate literary dystopias. I like real-life efforts to bring them about even less.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Of course the Natalist and woman==baby-incubator crowd also aren't exactly the greatest supporters of science. Let alone do they have even the slightest inkling of what science is or why it works so well.

Some days, I start to feel that people like the Natalists don't deserve science or the technology it makes possible, or the benefits of that tech.

"No science for you."

Sad, yes, that they're dooming their descendants to the nasty, brutish, and short lives of the coming Dark Age they're laying the foundation for. But we who are science-literate tried. They've spurned us. Their descendants will suffer the consequences.

(It's just too bad that we can't really say, "No science for you," to them, so that they can personally face the consequences of their actions.)

[slfisher.livejournal.com]

Shriek.

[kyriani.livejournal.com]

I recently watched Idiocracy for the first time, and this reminds me far too pointedly about that movie. >_<;;;;; The whole concept seriously makes me want to cry. And slit my wrists now. Especially since I specifically, personally, will not be breeding. >_<;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; GAH!
(Have I EVER mentioned how VERY GLAD I AM that you and Omaha had a kid?!? Meep. You two rock EVER so much. ^_^)

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wouldn't worry about her. The very best way to get your teenaged children to turn on you, your religion, your philosophy, and your sexuality is by feeding them bullshit like that. Sooner or later they'll realize that you're feeding them bullshit and call you on it.

That girl will be the biggest flaming liberal atheist dyke you've ever seen in about 3 years.

[amythis.livejournal.com]

I already commented on this mom in someone else's LJ, so here I wanted to say that what the natalists don't get is that kids are not clones. Think of every queer or otherwise alternative person you know, and 75-90% of them were raised in "traditional" families. So the natalists might be better off having fewer children and encouraging gay marriage, etc, on the assumption that kids are going to rebel anyway.

[littleone66.livejournal.com]

*hands daughter ANOTHER thick book*

I'm going for intelligence.