An Animal You Only See in Zoos
An Animal You Only See in Zoos
never in the wild
If you havenāt seen it, hereās video of the āsocially mindedā CEO of Harryās Razors describing his commitment to nurturing both ābirthing peopleā and ānon-birthing peopleā at his company. Remember this public language, and letās talk about something else for a moment.
A few years ago, I spent a week trying to recruit other families for a quick weekend camping trip into the mountains. I failed, so I told my daughter ā my wife regards sleeping on the ground in the woods as so incomprehensible an activity it seems barely human ā to expect a quiet weekend of hiking and reading.
And indeed, it started that way.
But, as my uterus-having birthing partner and I often note in discussion, weāve somehow created a ruthlessly efficient machine of extroversion. The first time I looked up from my book, my daughter was sitting on the other side of our campsite with another girl; twenty minutes later, she was up to four. By dinner there were too many for our campsite, and the roving child army expanded across the neighboring stream and into the hillsides, effortlessly achieving tactical superiority.
She has done this in twenty states, gathering children.
When youāre the lone adult man on the campsite where all the children go, the other parents eventually come over to offer a friendly hello, by which I mean that they eventually come over to make sure youāre not Scott Wiener or offering free candy out of your panel van. Iāve been hey-how-are-youed by open carry dads in deep red territory and by REI-geared dads in my home state who end up talking about their academic field and the cultural trajectory of the small liberal arts college. Iāve done this exchange in all conceivable cultural settings short of āAmazonian tribe making first contact with the outside world.ā And in every setting, every time, absolutely without fail, it goes like this:
āHey, Iām Kaylaās dad, I see sheās been hanging out over here. I hope thatās okay.ā
Left dads, right dads, left moms, right moms. They say, thatās my son, or thatās my daughter, and Iām [name hereās] mom or Iām [name hereās] dad. Period. Always. Then you bullshit for a while, and then the dads come back with beer, and then you bullshit some more.
In parentworld, you lose your name for a few years. At school events, people introduce themselves as āJaneās dad,ā and identify you by your child. āHey, you must be [name hereās] dad, Iām [name hereās] mom.ā
But never ā never once, anywhere, ever ā have I encountered any form of āHi, thatās my child, Iām zher front-hole-having bleeder parent. iāM tHeIr uTErUs hAVeR!!!!ā A maybe eight year-oldish boy stormed over to our campsite on the remote California coast once to show us the proper way to burn things in a campfire, using a technique that mostly involved shouting; his parents, who ended up hanging out on our campsite for a couple of evenings, were sculptors and painters (with a strictly non-figurative aesthetic) who worked as professors of studio art. I am extremely confident that they werenāt in any way culturally or politically right-facing. They were Jackās mom and Jackās dad. He was their son.
Our increasingly deranged performative gender language, spinning endlessly into more and more Khmer Rougian invention ā bonus hole-having chestfeeders! uterus-having birthing person bleeders! ā is a public language, a cultural commodity for the stage and screen. No one does this. I live in woke-suburban Los Angeles, my wife is a working member of the WGA, our daughter attended a precious little Westside private school until the irritation overwhelmed me and we fled, and I spent years in grad school and then teaching as a humanities adjunct in a variety of academic settings. You canāt live in a deeper blue milieu than I live in. No one has ever spoken to me this way. Itās a thing public figures do on television.
I canāt prove this, but I know it in my bones: When the woke CEO who talks on stage about equity for front-hole-having bleeders goes to his childās parent-teacher conference, he holds out his hand to the teacher and says, āHi, Iām Gretaās dad, good to meet you.ā The people who do this performance as public figures donāt do it as people.
Weāve evolved an aggressive cultural performance that doesnāt exist in any form of nonperformative interpersonal human life. Itās only media product.
It exists between mediated identities, not between people, which means that it isnāt real and should be aggressively disregarded. Live as a person.
Source: Tell Me How This Ends