Feminist: We Can’t Have a Feminist Future Without Getting Rid of the Family

Feminism is poison injected directly into the brain of everyone that foolishly buys into it. If it gets deeply rooted enough, you start spouting insanity like this:

A little more than two weeks before I planned to meet the feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, her mother died….Earlier that month, at a lecture in Lower Manhattan hosted by the arts journal e-flux, Lewis, who is 31, reflected on what some might see as an obvious irony to her crisscrossing the ocean to care for her ailing mother: Verso Books had just published her first book, Full Surrogacy Now, a polemic that calls for abolishing the family.

…When Lewis demands “full surrogacy now,” she isn’t talking about commercial surrogacy, or ”Surrogacy™,” as she puts it. Instead, she uses the surrogacy industry to build the argument that all gestation is work because of the immense physical and emotional labor it requires of those who do it. She often refers to pregnancy as an “extreme sport.”

…She imagines a future where the labor of making new human beings is shared among all of us, “mother” no longer being a natural category, but instead something we can choose.

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At this point, “surrogacy” becomes somewhat metaphorical: Lewis isn’t asking that we all agree to physically gestate fetuses that aren’t biologically ours. Her radical proposition is that we practice “full surrogacy” by abolishing the family. That means caring for each other not in discrete private units (also known as nuclear households), but rather within larger systems of care that can provide us with the love and support we can’t always get from blood relations—something Lewis knows all too well.

…Even those of us who might call our family situations relatively “happy” should sign onto this project of demolishing their essential structure, Lewis says. Nuclear households create the infrastructure for capitalism, passing wealth and property down family trees, concentrating it in the hands of the few at the top of our class hierarchy. Maintaining the traditional family structure over time has also meant exploiting people of color and disowning queer children.

…Lewis isn’t concerned with incremental changes within our existing systems—Full Surrogacy Now, for example, doesn’t make any concrete policy proposals or spend time worrying over issues like the gender pay gap and paid family leave. She’s concerned with much bolder possibilities: In Lewis’s utopian future, the family as we know it no longer exists. Everyone, regardless of gender, is a surrogate; we mother each other.

By just about every statistical measure imaginable, kids that grow up in a traditional nuclear family do better than kids that don’t. So naturally, her suggestion is to destroy what works and set up some kind of hive where you’re assigned children to raise as part of some collective. What happens if you want to have your own child to raise? That’s probably called “birth crime” because it’s offensive to feminists, “people of color” and “queers,” as if they aren’t better off in nuclear families just like everyone else. When I read this kind of feminist drivel, I can’t help but think back to this quote,

In her case, she sounds like she blames daddy for her life being a mess…

We started at the beginning: Lewis was born in Vienna, Austria, where her parents had been working as journalists, but she spent most of her childhood in Geneva, Switzerland, and parts of France, moving around often for her father’s job, which she said often took precedence over her mother’s job, or her family’s other needs.

This arrangement was an indicator of other, darker family dynamics, according to Lewis. One of her earliest family memories was of an argument she had gotten into with her father when she was just three years old: Lewis and her brother were both singing the Queen of the Night’s part in The Magic Flute, an opera they loved watching as children. Her father scolded them both, telling them that they shouldn’t sing the Queen’s part because the King had banished her, and she’d deserved it. Lewis sobbed. “If you skip forward seven years or so, he’s asking me: Why hasn’t there ever been a female Mozart? Why hasn’t there been a female Shakespeare?” Lewis said.

Years later, her father doubted Lewis when she told him she was raped at 13, writing to her partner in an email that rape is “good for the feminist CV.”

She left the house the first chance she got.

Was daddy horrible or is his daughter exaggerating it all for effect? It doesn’t really make a difference. It’s someone who’s unhappy with her family life coming up with a nonsensical ideological solution to her own personal problems, which is feminism to the core.

There’s a reason feminists get stereotyped as “ugly.” It’s because beautiful women thrive under the current system and “ugly” women don’t. So who is going to be more motivated to change the rules so that whichever women are more interested in women’s studies and hating men that don’t want to date them are the “winners?” Right.

People look at feminism today as a bunch of unhappy, angry women getting together to hate men, but it’s really a bunch of unhappy, angry women that hate men getting together to change the world to make it easier for women like them to be on top. Even if it means destroying the nuclear family.