Mindless, thoughtless breeding isn't the only way to 'have a stake' in America. And why don't Republicans also damn neglectful, MIA 'sperm donors'?
If I was still on Usenet’s alt.support.childfree, they’d be losing their minds over J.D. Vance’s three-year-old Fox News interview in which he asked, “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” He complained the United States was run by "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too."
I am childfree by choice, as we preferred in alt.support.childfree. I’ve owned two cats total, and not at the same time. I am not a Crazy Cat Lady. I’m a Crazy Cat Video Lady. I believe there is no such thing as too many cat videos.
Sorry, J.D., I made my choice at eighteen and have never regretted it.
It beats being a Pathetic Porno Pud-Pounder, which is what I might imagine some single men are like.
Okay, he didn’t make the comment during his nomination acceptance speech. But still, he needed to defend it. So what did Vance do? He went into Woke Snowflake Mode. Waaah waaaah waaah, someone’s holding me accountable!
The account-holder was Jennifer Aniston, who knows a thing or two about childlessness. She’s struggled and failed for many years to have a child she now wants after being damned in the media during her heyday because she wasn’t getting pregnant. She cared about her career more! they accused the virgin womb-monster.
Which they never say about the millions of men who care about their careers more than they do making babies or, more damnably, the families they fertilized.
What did she say to enrage J.D. Vance so?
She made a respectful reference to his daughter, so it looked an awful lot like the common snowflakery that characterizes the right as much as the left.
“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” she said on an Instagram post. “All I can say is… Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
Touché. Republicans removed abortion rights and now they’re going after IVF treatments. In MAGAworld, women should be forced to have babies they don’t want, and not allowed to have babies they do.
Every child an unwanted child.
The Sperm Donors of MAGAworld
If one applies Republican motherhood measures equally to fathers, Trump fanboy Elon Musk is one lousy, shitty father. He’s a sperm donor, nothing else.
Musk suffers from the delusion that the world faces an underpopulation problem.
He’s got ten surviving children from three baby mamas and he runs (poorly) three large companies. If ever there was a sperm donor who in no way can possibly be anything approximating a decent father, it’s Elon Musk.
Republicans agonize over mothers who work rather than take care of their children from home, conveniently forgetting the complex world that now necessitates a two-paycheck household in order to barely make ends meet, and which they themselves helped forge after destroying unions, the primary reason so many Americans were middle-class mid-last-century. They never ponder the long-term absent father effects unless said father is black. All such ‘fathers’ are merely sperm donors. Hop on, hop off, handle it, babe. Musk plays with his bio-toys when it’s convenient. Comedian and television talk-show host Nick Cannon is even worse: He’s got twelve children by six baby mamas.
It’s not enough to be rich enough to keep all one’s progeny in a reasonably accommodating style; parenthood, as preachy Republicans remind us when they’re talking about mothers, requires parental attention. They emphasize the importance of a father in the family and the need to bring respectability back to marriage; I agree. But that’s all they think a father needs to do; he can essentially be married to a single mother who raises the kids by herself, and who keenly feel their father’s seeming ‘rejection’ as much as any poor kid with a disappeared dad.
They never, ever, obsess over single mothers as long as they’re married to a sperm donor with little time for the family who values his career over being an actual, present father.
The only way to induce a sperm donor to do that, it seems, is for some crime or sexual imbroglio to shame him into stepping down from his exalted position to learn the names of his spermseeds.
If the Republican obsession with the two-parent family is as all-fired important as they claim, why do they never question the effect of paternal truancy?
Because, of course, it’s always been about returning to a patriarchal family structure in which the man makes all the decisions and women submissively comply.
“Father deficit” as a public health issue
Let’s talk about the countless ways absent fathers—married or unmarried—affect their co-creations.
According to a Psychology Today article, the list of pathologies children of sperm donors suffer include (and I’m really editing down here), feelings of emotional abandonment; maintaining an intimidating bravado to cover feelings of insecurity; periodic self-loathing; dropping out of high school; poor academic performance; delinquency, youth and violent crime; jail time; promiscuity and pregnancy; girls may become susceptible to exploitation by men; feeling rejected by their fathers; drug and alcohol abuse; running away; physical problems; mental health disorders; homelessness; lousy job prospects; and early mortality, including childhood.
PT calls this ‘father deficit’ a public health issue.
The article speaks mostly of non-residential and non-custodial fathers, but as it turns out, the rich aren’t like you and me, they’re much more similar to the poor. According to a Guardian article by a man who’s interviewed many wealth managers of the insanely rich, they have much in common with the opposite end of the economic spectrum. They don’t work; they express insane beliefs; they’re drug addicts and philanderers with a particular yen for other men’s wives; and they’re really quite lazy: Trump’s day when he was President, for example, began at 11:00am.
An LA Times op-ed notes that the U.S. is run by crappy fathers (pathetic porno pud-pounders?) who don’t see their children any more than Nick Cannon or a tenement tomcat. Absentee parenting, as it notes, is the price of success.
We give the rich a free pass and damn the poor for the same sins: Absentee fatherism. We give sperm donors a free pass to neglect their families but not their egg producers.
I’m not arguing for giving mothers a free pass; the PT article notes that American society isn’t set up to support parental fulfillment responsibilities, and notes that at least some of the inequity results from “non-custodial” or “non-residential” fathers forcibly removed from the homes (I’m assuming they’re not talking about violent, abusive fathers).
The LA Times op-ed quotes a National Marriage Project spokesperson regarding the toxicity of extensive travel by Dad on children. “There’s no question that the research would indicate — including research on military families, military fathers in particular — that spending long periods away from your children is harmful.”
The poor, meanwhile, don’t see their kids as much because they’re working multiple jobs attempting to make ends meet.
Rich dads have much more time on their hands, yet often make little time to see their families either. Does anyone think the Trump kids (five children, three baby mamas) seem happy and well-adjusted? Maybe Tiffany, who stays with Baby Mama #2 behind the curtains. Trump is finally making time for youngest child Barron, who’s attained adulthood and who, it appears, is finally interesting.
But let’s be honest: J.D. Vance’s new boss is mostly a sperm donor.
To be fair to Vance, he noted in his acceptance speech, “My most important American dream was becoming a good husband and a good dad. I wanted to give my kids the things that I didn’t have when I was growing up.”
I will pump my fist for him for that, and hope that means his personal time and not just a fat paycheck.
I wish he’d acknowledge the problem in his own backyard; crappy fathers are not just the problems of his childhood poverty in Middletown, Ohio. Fathers are either critical to the family or they’re not; and if they’re not, leave working mothers alone, especially since most of them have to work whether they’ve got a residential partner or not.
Especially those educated and privileged enough to pursue real careers outside of blue- or pink-collar professions. A mother, for the MAGA bunch, who works long hours at a law firm or hedge fund is far more condemnation-worthy than a high-producing sperm donor. How much time is Vance spending with his children now that he’s campaigning with Trump?
I don’t know, or if he’ll have much time if he and the sperm donor win. Given his boss’s aversion to work, he may have more time on his hands than most Vice Presidents. Unless he has to step in if his doddering boss dies or is Amendment 25’ed.
The spotlight is on Vance’s family now, and Aniston’s comment isn’t likely to be the worst thing said about his daughter as a running mate and perhaps a Vice President. I strongly encourage him to put her in touch with Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton.
Short shrift for responsible parenthood
I never had children for the best of all possible reasons: I didn’t want any.
I genuinely believe parenthood is THE most important job in the world. Parents are tasked with raising another human being. It doesn’t matter whether that baby human is a kid in a trailer park or or another one of Elon Musk’s hop-on-hop-offs: Every child should be wanted and valued. If you’re not up the to task, don’t do it!
I would have made a lousy mother. I didn’t want to do it. Just as I gave up on radio and journalism work, which I’d thought I wanted to do but changed my mind after I worked for a few radio stations. It wasn’t what I expected. I wasn’t up to the task.
Children are not like poorly-chosen careers. The problem is those baby humans depend on you. You are their mother or father. The child is half your genetics. I don’t believe you can abandon a child as easily or morally as a career choice.
J.D. Vance, and so many other privileged Republicans, don’t get that. They pay only lip service to the importance of children and raising them properly. If they did give a crap, they’d work with the other side to forge a better society that supports both parents. They’d recognize that not all women want to stay at home full-time; some would like to work a little outside the home but not entirely; and some simply don’t want to do the Mama Thing.
A career-driven woman with a ‘barren womb’ is as acceptable as a Master of the Universe with ‘wasted seed’.
The drudgery of stay-at-home mothering and housewifery is what drove the Feminist Revolution in the first place: Betty Friedan was the first to name the unidentified malaise and depression driving so many so-called Happy Homemakers to the liquor bottle and prescription drugs.
Some men have recognized that, like women, they ‘can’t have it all’; they can’t be a high-powered executive and a good father. They can, however, be a good breadwinner and a good father, as can be his wife. Many men discovered over the pandemic that they loved spending more time with their families; it’s why there’s been so much pushback for companies mandating you have to be in the office when you can do your job just as easily at home.
There are more real fathers and fewer ‘sperm donors’ in the world than there were ten, twenty, or fifty years ago.
There are far fewer ‘crazy cat ladies’ than J.D. Vance imagines. So many times over the decades I’ve said to myself, “This is why I’m glad I don’t have children.”
Procreate only if you’re truly committed.
But let’s hold all procreating humans responsible and accountable, and accept parenthood isn’t for everyone. Some are childless by choice while others, like Jennifer Aniston, are not. Let’s support the folks who want to be parents, and stop trying to force the rest of us square pegs into your round little holes.
I hope J.D. Vance will walk the parenthood walk rather than just talk the talk, especially if he becomes our Vice President—and, it’s entirely possible, President before January 20, 2029. ‘Coz his codger boss ain’t gettin’ any younger. Or more mentally coherent.
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