Misogyny means I should carry a fucking Punnett Square with me everywhere I go. I cannot tell you...

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.