felicitousconceits:
therkalexander:
Misogyny means I should carry a fucking Punnett Square with me...
Misogyny means I should carry a fucking Punnett Square with me everywhere I go.I cannot tell you how many times in a given week I face subtle and not so subtle jokes about whether or not my baby was fathered by my husband.
R has dark brown hair, I have auburn hair. Baby has blond hair. My husband and I both had blond hair as children. I have had to repeat those fucking sentences at least three to five times a week since the baby’s hair started growing in platinum blond.
And the response afterward is usually “Well at least his face looks like his dad”. Or even “well, he must look like R because he looks nothing like you.”
Ergo, the standard response to “joking” that I was unfaithful and the baby isn’t R’s, is to completely erase me from the baby’s life. To turn me into a vessel.
I write about women in the ancient world. Often when babies are born, their features resemble their fathers. It’s no small secret that the punishment for female infidelity in the ancient world was death. So because of male hatred and distrust, because they saw women as vessels and not as people, I’m willing to bet that the reason most babies look like their fathers at birth is because of an unnatural selection imposed on our species.
Meaning, if babies looked too much like the mother, the mother was murdered along with the baby. So the generations that carried our current set of genetics forward were those children who looked most like their fathers at birth, erasing any doubt of cuckoldry.
In myth, married women who had children out of wedlock, even if that baby was a child of Zeus, were cast out. Danae was locked in a box with Perseus and thrown into the sea. The extraordinary and miraculous events in hero cults often began with the hero’s own survival of infancy.
So next time you laugh at the “oh have you heard” meme, or heard an alt-right fascist scream “cuck” as an insult, or joke about the milkman, or a manosphere terrorist in Toronto trying to justify an “incėl rebellion” by murdering 10 people, 8 of them women, just remember that those ideas and events are backed up by a legacy of matricide and infanticide, and the still very present concept that women are barely human, not to be trusted, and only exist for the pleasure of men to produce more men.
I’m making a guess here, but I bet that absolutely none of these people were actually asked to comment your baby’s appearance, much less pass judgment on the strength or weakness of familial resemblance.
I don’t say that to detract from the other important parts of your post, because I was moved by how you articulated why about familial resemblances is a loaded topic. I say that because I was ready to flip tables at the outset, when it sounded like people were yet again wading in to pass judgment with no care for whether it’s appropriate, kind, or even interesting to the person being judged. (she said, typing more slowly and second-guessing whether this paragraph is ironically hoist by its own petard)
But really. This thing you’re dealing with repeatedly sounds so believably frustrating. It should be simple: your baby. Not their baby. Unless you’re charging admission for a baby peep show, then perhaps they could skip the yelp review.
It seems very significant to me that there is no polite way to inform a person that their unsolicited opinion was unwelcome or threatening. We all stick our foot in our mouths, but I wish it was more normal to shut that down (somehow) than to place the burden of explanation or subject-changing on the person who didn’t even bring up the topic.
Fucking exactly.
And yes, I have invited none of those people to comment on my baby’s legitimacy, or to give me parenting criticism “advice”, or any number of other judgements that society uses to cut down women with children.
I was having a conversation about this with someone who messaged me early today because they are often on the verge of tears thanks to people harping on how her baby isn’t a carbon copy of its dad.
So I thought a good way to be direct and challenging but polite is to simply ask something like “What is it you are trying to say? Can you repeat that?”
Because if someone is a good person, they will immediately stop their line of questioning and self examine. And if someone is an asshole that should be categorically avoided, they’ll probably tell you to lighten up, or they were just joking, etc.
And then it’s either up to me to explain it to them or to remove myself from their sphere.
