If it’s been a rough week, and you’re craving a little nostalgia for the never-has-been, feel free to read Emily Yoffe’s column on the state of the American family here. Thank goodness Yoffe is able once again lead us through her black-and-white world (for nuance check here), where marriage equals happiness and smarter kids. Just don’t feel too bad if you don’t make the cut…
It’s not that I have a problem with this popular author, after all, who isn’t charmed by the revelations in “What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner.” I won’t call her names like some naughty bloggers, and it’s not even her neo-conservative agenda on Slate (she’s not the only one) that bothers me. Rather I take issue with her disguise, that of advice columnist and truth-teller, particularly as truth-teller for women.
Amazingly, Yoffe seems blissfully unaware that her pseudo-scientific prescriptions have long outgrown their usefulness and that as a modern-day bearer of 1950′s “family values,” her comfortable (read patriarchal) advice is not only ignorant, but dead wrong. Take for example her claims about intelligence and out-of-wedlock births, “the increase in single-parent families—mostly due to unwed motherhood in the past few decades—’can account for virtually all of the increase in child poverty since 1970.’ A recent study found that the stress of early childhood poverty can literally damage developing brains.”
I’ll admit, as Emily plays connect the dots, my mind is wandering to other sites of childhood poverty in the world, few of which I see changing through her chaste white fantasies. But perhaps, like Bush, we should deny aid to those who don’t abstain–a “choice” that gets a bit foggier for those of us outside picket fences. Or perhaps we can educate the women of the world to ask Yoffe’s rhetorical question, “How is this man worthy of fathering children?” If her goal is to daily reestablish women’s position in society as primarily reproductive, she has chosen her niche well. Hidden behind her mask of women’s advocate, she is perfectly positioned to launch an attack on women making alternative choices (or living in alternative circumstances).
In conclusion, I was reminded of another recent article, this one in the Wall Street Journal. After some travels in Scandinavia ten years ago, I knew that marriage had long since fallen out of favor there and that for many young people this is no longer even a question. It looks like Finns do have opinions about what makes their kids so smart (hint: it’s not their marriage rate). To add to this increasingly obvious argument for changing family structures, I hit on this article in the Washington Post. It turns out that 70% of children born in France (in 2005) were born to unmarried parents AND like Yoffe mentions (jaw agape) these children are created by choice. Holy shit, perhaps by looking at what family structures are already like, and say, supporting families (the French government gives tax breaks for the number of children not simply for obtaining a document that many of our citizens are currently denied), we would actually be able to do something worthwhile…But I suppose clear thinking wouldn’t suit Yoffe’s purposes, after all, then we wouldn’t need her.
