why david brooks is a tool

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Empty Nests, and Hearts

[via echidne]

I reached my 35th birthday this year and my uterus still remains uninhabited. It is empty, has been empty and shall remain so. I will die never knowing what it is like to fill with a child; I will never feel my breast swell with milk; I will never watch my body shift and grow tumescent with anything other than a large meal. One by one, my eggs make their slow unpredictable journey to my uterus and they wait for a bit before collecting in my Instead cup and being poured down my toilet. Sometimes they decide to stay home. Perhaps they’ve already figured out that it’s pointless to go all the way down there when only a warm emptiness will await them. This is my body’s cycle and I have chosen to remain empty.

But David Brooks takes my emptiness, a personal vacancy that I’ve purposefully authorized, managed and maintained since adolescence, and wants me to give it up for the good of the nation, so my eggs can be rendered serviceable to the state. “That would be good for the country” he says, because there aren’t enough young people to support the old. My fecundity would become fodder for the aging. My reproductive system an offering to the homeland. In sum, I become servant to my biology for a nation that cannibalizes itself and end up not so very different from my ancestors whose sons and daughters carried the plantation system on their backs, endlessly producing generation after generation of brutish labor.

So, Mr. Brooks, this is what I say to you: hands off my ovaries, my empty uterus and the bloody clots that I flush down the toilet ever month. If my body is the nation, then I shut my borders to your reproductive imperialism and ovarial greed. Your sympathy and desire to give us gender-specific options in the workforce is hollow; if your care was genuine, suggest ways a woman could raise a child without marriage.

It’s been a mere 125 years since the Angel in the House earned the right to leave it and you want us to return to it again. Oh, you want tax-credits for ‘stay at home parents’ but you lie. You want women to stay home. We go in young and fertile and emerge uneducated and useless. In other words, you want us to have the lives our mothers and grandmothers led; lives of deferred dreams and repressed bitterness.

Ah, perhaps that is your game. Time travel.