Which is also what Lisa Belkin said in story yesterday on the impact that the age of a father has on his child's health. The long-known potential health problems associated with older mothers, like higher risk of Down Syndrome, are now being matched by data that shows that older fathers are more likely to have children that suffer from autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or low IQs.
Belkin writes, "The push and pull between timetables and dreams, between our bodies and our babies, is at the core of many women’s worldview, which also means it is at the core of relationships between the sexes. This tension feeds the stereotype of woman as eager to settle down and men as reluctant, and it’s the crux of why we see women as 'old' and men as 'distinguished.'"
Belkin writes, "The push and pull between timetables and dreams, between our bodies and our babies, is at the core of many women’s worldview, which also means it is at the core of relationships between the sexes. This tension feeds the stereotype of woman as eager to settle down and men as reluctant, and it’s the crux of why we see women as 'old' and men as 'distinguished.'"
She posits the fundamentally game-changing question, "If those underlying assumptions were to change, would all that follows from them change as well? A world in which each man heard his clock tick even a fraction as urgently as each woman could be a very different world indeed. All those silver-haired sex symbols, and balding sugar daddies, and average-Joe divorced guys who are on their second families because they can be while their exes are raising their first set of kids — what if all of them became, in women’s eyes, too darned old?"
What if?, indeed. It would mean more gender-equity, certainly, when it comes to family planning and career planning. Combined with paternity leave from the workplace, it could be the stimulus for a much-needed move toward balance in professional and home life for women and men.
Our current way of thinking about childbearing also assumes that women are guilty-before-proven-innocent, and that their age is a limitation, and that family decisions are subjected to the inevitable aging process a woman goes through (which is perceived almost as disfiguring when it comes to beauty). If men were to share the responsibility of changing their life plans for the benefit of their children, the lens through which we view and plan parenting trajectories would change dramatically, and for the better. -Sara
2 comments:
While I understand that Belkin intended to address only relationships in which one male and one female participate, I think it’s relevant to point out that people in relationships that don’t fit this model have found ways of resolving this “push and pull between timetables and dreams,” as Belkin puts it, that could be useful for heterosexual couples as well. People in same-sex relationships have taken advantage of a range of options for raising children that remove the pressure on any one woman to personally produce offspring by a certain age. Options include not having children at all, adopting, or sharing the responsibility of raising one’s own and others’ children as part of a community.
I am happy to see studies that show that men and women have more equality in terms of biological clocks than generally thought, but I guess I don’t want anyone to be viewed as too “washed-up” to be worth having a relationship with.
I hope that in addition to the points Belkin raises we also question the underlying assumptions that women should be partnered with men, that all people want to (or should) personally produce children and that the primary goal of a partnership is to bear/raise children.
Adrienne,
I agree that Belkin's (and my) analysis is quite narrow. But I'd like to respond to your comment that we should question the basic assumptions underlying heterosexual relationships, and "that the primary goal of a partnership is to bear/raise children."
I agree that there are cultural assumptions that need to be pushed. But I also see many many people, some of whom are feminists, who see childbearing/rearing as a major life goal within a traditional nuclear family, and I think it is equally important that we honor those decisions, and search for more gender equity within that family model as well.
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