Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

by Sady Doyle

  This is not to say that we don’t need men, or sperm, or (on the occasions where they coincide) both; it’s not to say that women don’t need help to raise their children, or even that cisgender men and cisgender women can’t make a pretty good go of it from time to time. But nothing about our current kinship structure or gender hierarchy is actually mandatory. Fatherhood—the God-in-miniature that governs traditional family life, the paternity at the core of patriarchy—is not an eternal truth or a law of nature. It’s just one of the ways people have chosen to live. People change.

  Nearly every terrible thing about our sexual politics comes down to the fact that, in patriarchy, patriarchs understand themselves to be inessential. Conservatives defend “family” and fatherhood as if they’re under violent attack. That’s because, as long as women are self-determined and possessed of options, they are. The twenty-first-century war to maintain patriarchy includes not just legislative attacks on the right to abortion, but on birth control, and sex education, which allows people to successfully avoid pregnancy in the first place. The fear here, despite generations of rhetoric to the contrary, is not about “killing babies”; men have always reserved the right to kill or at least abandon babies that displease them, usually after they leave the womb. The fear is that women will be the ones making the decisions; it is not death, but life, that we want to keep out of women’s hands.

  A world without patriarchs is not necessarily a world without heterosexual couples or two-parent families. What it is is a world where those bonds are only a few of the many ways in which one can build a family. This is not a hypothetical: women and queer people of all genders are already changing what family looks like. There is a growing number of voluntary single mothers, indicated by data like the rising number of single women using sperm banks.38 Sperm donation, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy have made it possible for more queer families to experience pregnancy and childbirth. Not only do transgender fathers sometimes give birth, transgender mothers breastfeed their babies.39 The growth of civil rights movements can practically be traced by the number of families that deviate from traditional structures.

  All of these families are moving toward a world beyond patriarchy: where fluid and multiple genders connect in any number of combinations; where men raise children with men, women with women, and some children are raised by neither men nor women but someone else entirely; where parenting is done by one person or three or six or two. It is a world where the relationships between pregnancy and parenthood and maternity and paternity are never entirely settled, where sex occurs how it wants to, and families arise organically, governed by instinct and desire rather than set norms. It uncouples the seemingly indissoluble links between sex and romance, sex and reproduction, romance and reproduction, and lets them come together again in surprising combinations, to create lives that have never existed before.

  This is the world that always stands just ahead of us, in our future, even as we’re assured it belongs to a distant and irretrievable past; the place we’re perpetually just about to reach, and the place our patriarchs would do anything to avoid. Welcome to Jurassic Park.

  Dinosaurs Eat Man, Woman Inherits the Earth

  Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park came out the summer I turned eleven, in a world storm of publicity. The promise of seeing real dinosaurs—or as real as you could get, anyway, through the recently discovered miracle of computer-generated animation—was all I’d thought about for months. And so, as my birthday present, my parents took me to see Jurassic Park on opening day. It was a way to honor my impending adulthood: my first scary movie.

  So I can remember the precise moment she showed up. The screen went dark; the soundtrack pulsed with subterranean rumbles; the concentric circles started rippling through the water on the dashboard. I held my knees to my chest and clutched my half-empty Skittles box for dear life as wires on the fence snapped, and out she came: the monstrous thing, older than the world, snaky and tremendous and female, water dripping from her ancient fangs.

  We all meet Tiamat in our own way. This was mine. Jurassic Park was the first story that told me girls could be dragons too; that somewhere inside me, somewhere so deep I might not even recognize it, was something very old and very strong. Something that did not take kindly to cages.

  At its core, Jurassic Park is a myth, one which disguises its ancient tropes with contemporary sci-fi trappings—casting brawny Marduk’s struggle to overthrow the world-serpent as a tale of heroic male scientists working to contain carnivorous, reptilian female dinosaurs. Like all Tiamat stories, Jurassic Park centers on the terror of uncontrolled reproduction, of pregnancy and birthing occurring in ungovernable female bodies and outside of male control. The pure, scientific, patriarchal reproduction of Jurassic Park takes place in the form of DNA splicing; a miracle which can not only revive dead species but engineer them precisely to the scientists’ specifications. But the reality underlying that reproduction is, well, Jurassic Park: where chaos is always imminent, where all the dinosaurs are female, where fences break and monsters attack and unlicensed dinosaur births keep occurring, because—as Jeff Goldblum hath foretold—life, uh, finds a way.

  The parallels are obvious. Yet Jurassic Park is also—what with all its hubristic scientists reviving the dead—a retelling of Frankenstein. It is a story about how patriarchal systems can never fully override or erase the organic truths of the world, a story in which control is always an illusion. The technological, capitalist enterprise of the park—turning the primordial forces of reproduction out for profit—is meant to seem like an atrocity, and it is also meant to fail. In any version of Frankenstein, a creature must turn against its master; the rides, pace Goldblum, were always going to eat the tourists.

  Yet I find Jurassic Park more hopeful, and more fundamentally liberating, than many stories of its kind. For one, the reproductive chaos of the park is surprisingly nonbinary. Thanks to a kink in their engineered DNA—“like that of frogs,” Sam Neill notes, failing to fake either an American accent or enthusiasm—the dinosaurs can change their own reproductive anatomy, impregnating each other at will. The messy, biological, fertile body is still the monster here, but gender fluidity is included among its monstrous qualities; like the cult of Cybele, the anarchic fertility of the park is both deeply female and profoundly anti-essentialist. The dinosaurs, whose genital endowments we can’t guess and shouldn’t try to, are all referred to as “she.”

  Finally, and wonderfully, Jurassic Park suggests that this gender-fluid, female-powered, anti-patriarchal world is not just powerful, but actually inevitable. Repression is futile: Once the fences have broken down, and the archaic mother is out of her pen and eating Jeeps, “victory” doesn’t consist of killing her, let alone re-caging her. “Victory” is just getting off the island and out of her way.

  Recall the last shot of the T. rex: knocking her own fossilized corpse out of the way, standing beneath a banner that reminds you she once “RULED THE EARTH.” She still does; the promise of Jurassic Park is the idea that humanity itself is too small to stop her, that no matter what we do, as long as she’s on the planet, she will inevitably rule again. Women, once unleashed by the social progress of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, can only keep going. We will take back the world, our bodies, all the possibilities that have been denied us. When we open our mouths, our oppressors will fall silent. Where we walk, the earth itself will tremble.

  I am Woman. You there, in the Jeep: hear me roar.

  * The vast majority of people who bear children today are, seemingly, female-identified; transgender men often pursue hysterectomies as part of the gender confirmation process, and trans men who give birth are often treated as rare enough to be newsworthy, as in the case of Thomas Beatie, who entered the Guinness World Records in 2008 after the birth of his first child. However, statistics and news stories are unreliable—trans people are just beginning to come out in numbers that reflect their a
ctual presence within the population, so we have no idea how many trans men have actually given birth. Ultimately, I’ve focused on birth as a female phenomenon because, like menstruation, it is deeply ingrained in our myths of femininity; the way we think about birth determines the way we think about women, and vice versa. That said, a transmasculine or nonbinary writer could easily cover the same territory from a different perspective, and I do hope to read that book, even if I’m not qualified to write it.

  6.

  FAMILY

  They’re using us. They’re using our bodies. They’re eating us alive.

  —The Unborn (1991)

  In 1771, Mary Ricketts—well educated, responsible, renowned for her truthfulness (“from her early childhood she evinced a love for reading, and an aptitude for mental improvement,” according to the magazine that presented her account to the public, and she “quickly outstripped” her older brothers in “book learning”)—wrote to her husband to say she had abandoned their house.1

  It was not a decision a wife could make for herself, especially not in 1771. The house, a country manor named Hinton Ampner that they were renting from the widow of one Lord Stawell, was a good one; whatever reason Mary gave had better be good, too.

  “Without the utmost confidence in my veracity—which I believe you have—you could not possibly credit the strange story I must tell,” she told her husband, but “be assured, my dearest life, I did not take this painful step while it was possible to continue there.”2

  She was right: this story was very, very strange. Mary’s husband, William Henry Ricketts, had been called away to his business in Jamaica. (Slave trading, to be precise; as is so often the case, once you peel off the old-timey veneer, these were not great people.) Their second child, a daughter, was less than a year old; Mary decided to stay home in order to spare the children from traveling. Yet, from almost the moment William left his family, the house had been terrorized by phantom invaders.

  Mary heard conversations in empty rooms. Knocking and booming resounded through the halls at night. Doors slammed by themselves, over and over, swinging back and forth in perfectly still air. A woman’s silk dress rustled, impossibly loud, all night long, until Mary became ill from lack of sleep. One night, she heard “the footsteps of a man, with plodding step, walking towards the foot of my bed.”3

  This could be nerves, the projected vulnerabilities of a woman alone in a big house with two small children. But Mary wasn’t alone. She had servants, and they heard noises, too. Mary began to sleep with another woman in her room; that woman claimed to see and hear the same phenomena Mary did. Mary wrote that a nurse named Hannah Streeter, “who lay in the room with my children, heard the same noises, and was so appalled she lay for two hours almost deprived of sense and motion.”4 In fact, Hannah was one of the most afflicted people in the house; “there was scarce a night past that she did not hear the sound as if some person walked towards her door, and pushed against it, as though attempting to force it open.”5

  The ghosts—for this, Mary reluctantly concluded, was what they had to be—were oddly particular about who they bothered. The women in the house, especially those in proximity to the children, were relentlessly assailed, but Mary’s brother, John, didn’t hear anything until Mary told him about the problem. That night, he woke up in a panic, convinced that he’d heard something huge and heavy fall through the ceiling into his room. There was, of course, nothing there. “It is very unfit your family should continue any longer in [Hinton Ampner],” he wrote to William after the fact.6

  It was the butler, Robert Camis, who got the clearest look at what was haunting them; he was “thrice called at the window in a voice he well remembered, that of the steward of the late Lord Stawell.”7 That steward, the servants agreed, was no good. He had stolen things. He had done something else, too, some unspecified and horrible bit of “dishonesty,” but no one would say what. A kitchen servant named Lucy hinted at a story about Stawell’s beautiful and unmarried sister-in-law, who had lived with the family at Hinton Ampner:

  Lucy said, “God knows whether these noises were not in consequence of their sins.”

  I replied, “What did you suppose they were guilty of?”

  She said, “God knows whether she had a child and killed it; but I cannot say; it is not for us to suspect them, God knows.”8

  After Mary left the house, it was demolished. In the demolition, the house’s secret was finally uncovered: a box, hidden under the floorboards, with a tiny skull in it. A monkey, some people offered hopefully. The baby, Mary knew.

  In the years to come, a definitive legend would grow around the ghosts of Hinton Ampner. The master impregnated his sister-in-law; the sister-in-law killed her baby; the steward hid its body in the house, where it evidently grew into something angry and lost, wailing for recognition. What else does a baby do but keep adults awake all night—demand attention, wake up the nurse, make noise? Lacking a mother, or a body to cry with, who else could the baby reach out to, and how else could it be heard?

  Then, there’s this: despite all the people who saw or heard things in Hinton Ampner, Mary’s children were completely unaffected. The thing practically broke down the door of the nursery every night, yet only the nanny heard it; the children slept in peace. Whatever was in that house, the rage it expressed was reserved for adults—for mothers, specifically. It held no grudge toward the children. It left them alone.

  The Mother Knot

  The archaic mother—Tiamat, or the T. rex—is an unlikely role model. Even in all her power, she’s ugly: slimy, roaring, irrational, seemingly little more than a uterus with some anger management issues attached. (But enough about me!) She is not more beloved, or more highly rewarded, than conventional women—only more feared. Who would want to identify with that?

  Well, for starters, anyone who’s tried mothering the way it is now. Men may want the power and legacy that comes from having children, but they do not want the work. Nor should they. Above and beyond the physical risks incurred by pregnancy, children—especially young infants—require literally constant attention, and equally constant patience. They need someone who can be responsive to their needs at all hours of the day or night, who can be available whenever the child is sick or hungry or bored or just needs a ride or an audience or something fun to do, and who can do so while respecting their helplessness and fragility, so that a colicky newborn isn’t abandoned during its first three-hour screaming fit.

  This constant, private work is deeply at odds with the time and focus it takes to build and consolidate power in the public sphere. It’s a workload that is inherently too big for any one person, and which will obliterate all other priorities for the person who attempts to do it single-handedly. The obvious answer is not to do it single-handedly—upper-class women have always been able to pawn some of this work off on employees, like Mary Ricketts passing her responsibilities and her ghosts along to Hannah Streeter; in large, extended families, the baby is often passed around like an adorable hot potato; in some mythic feminist households, fathers even spend time with their own children, though a worryingly high percentage of them still refer to this as “babysitting”—but patriarchy as we know it is built around one particular bad solution.

  Men need children if they are to rule the world—there would be no world to rule without them—but they can’t raise those children themselves. And women, who must be kept away from seats of power at all costs, need something to do; something to eat away at all their ambition, or brain space, or potentially subversive free time. Hence, patriarchy created the mother: not the archaic serpent or the chthonic priestess at the gates of life and death, but the domesticated and unthreatening Mama who haunts sitcoms and greeting cards and parenting manuals, the woman who is “inherently” suited for childcare work and can only be fulfilled by doing it. Lots of it. Preferably without getting or even requesting help from anyone else.

  Thi
s image has haunted us for centuries—the Victorian “angel in the house,” or the happy housewife of the ’50s—but it would be a mistake to view her as a mere historical artifact. In an essay for The Paris Review, author Heather Abel writes that early exposure to the massively popular “attachment parenting” manual The Baby Book by Dr. William and Martha Sears nearly destroyed her will to work. The core of it, she says, is a “horror story”:

  The plot is this: Mama gives birth to Baby, and she must not put her down. She must not leave her. She must be with her at all times, if possible, awake or asleep. She cannot do sedentary work or even read for pleasure because Baby prefers movement—although Mama can, while Baby is strapped to her, perform housework. Only in situations of dire financial need and with great trepidation may she pass off Baby to a caregiver. She must not nourish Baby with a bottle, which, like cribs, strollers, and jobs, will interrupt her bond with Baby and thus diminish Baby’s prospects for any happiness…. If you put your child on the floor to play or in a crib to sleep or in a stroller to walk or with a caregiver, she will forever feel wrong, act wrong…. Against this bleak eventuality, how could Mama’s time matter? Her sleep? Her sanity?9

  For a mother to do anything outside of child-rearing and domestic chores is borderline negligent, particularly if it involves the baby crying for more than a second or two without maternal comforting—on his website, William Sears writes that the “cry-it-out approach,” popularly used to train babies to sleep in their cribs through the night, may have “harmful neurologic effects that may have permanent implications on the development of sections of their brains.”10 (Meanwhile, actual scientists insist that Sears is wildly misconstruing several studies, most of them relating to nonhuman animals or babies that have experienced severe abuse and neglect.) In a 2012 TIME magazine profile, Martha Sears claims that a relative who was a “colicky, fussy baby,” and who was allowed to cry in her crib, developed lifelong mental illness as a result: “That almost is like Exhibit A for the cry-it-out approach,” she insists.11