Children

Children are endearing, which in itself is no reason for producing them. The creation of a child is in effect the creation of an adult - man or woman. Most adult men live in a state of permanent hell. And the happiness of most women is not only primitive but obtained mostly at other people's expense, so that there is no justification for reproducing them. It would be mistaken to maintain that only women are interested in having children. Men want them, too. Children are one of the two or three excuses by which they justify their subjection to women. Women, on the other hand, need children to justify their laziness, stupidity, and lack of responsibility. Both sexes exploit the child, therefore, for their own ends.

Although the whole world is full of half-starved orphans, every couple produces its own brood. Man must have a reason to be enslaved when, later on, his sexual powers have declined, and this reason must also explain his enslavement to a particular woman. This is simple. She is, after all, the mother of his children. Since woman is the excuse for his subjugation. he can have only one at a time (in every industrial society, man is monotheistic - i.e., monogamous); more than one god (woman) would make him insecure, lead him to question his own identity, and throw him back into the state of freedom he is constantly trying to escape.

Questions such as this do not interest woman. As she does not think abstractly, the problems of existential anxiety do not touch her. She has no need for a deity to give meaning to her life. All she needs is an excuse for making one particular man work for her long after he ceases to want to go to bed with her. This excuse is provided by bearing his children. If men outnumbered women three to one, a woman would not hesitate to have a child by each of three men and let each of them work for his own child, that is, for her, and play the three men off against each other. Their achievements - and her comfort - would thereby be enormously increased. It is a popular misconception that woman is less inclined to polygamy than man.

When a man engenders children. he gives a woman hostages in hopes that she will exploit him forever. It is the only thing that gives him some sort of stability, and the only way of justifying the senseless slavery to which he has been conditioned. When he works for his wife and child, it is less important that he is supporting two particular human beings who do not look after themselves (one will not because she is female, and the other cannot because he is too small): he is working for a system which embraces everything in this world that is poor, helpless, and in need of protection (poor, helpless, and in need of protection as such) and which, so he believes, really needs him.

Thanks to wife and child, man has acquired an excuse, an artificial justification for his wretched existence, for his subjection. He calls this arbitrarily created system, this holy unit, his 'family.' Woman accepts his services in the name of the `family,' accepts the hostages he entrusts to her, and proceeds to carry out his desires by binding him ever more tightly to her and blackmailing him until he dies. And whose gain is it? - hers.

Both man and woman only stand to gain by having children - otherwise they would not produce them. Man's advantage lies in the fact that he appears to lead a more meaningful life and that he is able to become a slave forever - and woman has all the other advantages. These must be considerable, for any female today has the choice between a professional life or having children, and nearly all of them choose children.

This may suggest that women decide in favor of a home and family simply because they love children. But women are not capable of the unconditional love a child should have. This can easily be proved. Women only care for their own children, never those of others. A woman will accept a child who is not her flesh and blood only when she is physically incapable of having her own (and this only after everything has been tried - including artificial insemination by an unknown donor).

Although orphanages throughout the world are full of appealing, needy children, and although the newspapers and TV report daily on the number of little Africans, Indians, or South Americans who are starving to death, a woman would rather give a stray dog or cat a home than a deserted child. And yet she pretends to love children.

It is difficult to prove that women do not really love children, that they use them only to their own advantage. After all, pregnancy, childbirth, and the care of an infant are not without some degree of unpleasantness and discomfort. Such factors are unimportant, however, when one considers what a woman is getting in exchange: lifelong security, comfort, and freedom from responsibility What would a man have to do to achieve a situation vaguely resembling a woman's state?

That pregnancy is not as unpleasant as it is made out to be, has by now reached even the ears of men. Many women feel healthier when expecting a child, and it is becoming fashionable to admit it openly. Why should they worry if they look ugly and unattractive, their figures lumpy, skin spotty, hair stringy, and legs swollen? They are not after a man now. They already have one. He, of course, has no choice but to watch his butterfly turn into a caterpillar. He did it, after all! It is his child she is expecting, his child who is deforming her. What right has he to find her clumsy and repulsive? And, after all, she is losing her youth because of him.

As far as giving birth itself is concerned, the fantasies still surrounding it are so hairraising that it would never occur to man that women bear children for their own sake and not for his. The phrase, 'she presented him with a child,' so popular in the novels of previous centuries, may well have gone out of use in contemporary literature. But it has been fixed in the consciousness of men, and when the offspring, arrives they are filled with feelings of guilt because of the sufferings of the woman (not those of the newborn infant, please note).

Yet a man only, has to imagine that, in return for spending six hours at the dentist, he will be offered a sinecure for life: he would certainly accept such an offer. Of course, difficult births do occur, but they are as a rule painless since the advent of anesthetics. In general, a woman suffers no more during childbirth than she would during a prolonged session at the dentist. What women tell men about giving birth is usually shamelessly exaggerated. The ear-splitting shrieks from the delivery rooms which penetrate their ears are no more than a sign of the same lack of self-control and pride that we have already dealt with at length elsewhere. Painless birth has existed for years. By doing exercises women can train themselves to have their children without anesthetics or discomfort. It would be to women's advantage to decide whether or not having a child is painful. As long as some say one thing and others something else, they lose credibility and thus damage their common interest.

Of course, an assumed air of helplessness and a subsequent excuse for spending their lives doing easy work without a boss ordering them around is not the only reason why women produce little human beings. One day, for example, a woman may discover that her body functions rather like a slot machine. You put in something insignificant and trifling, and something different and fabulous falls out. Of course she is tempted to try this wonderful game. And when she has played it once, she will repeat it over and over again. It nearly always works: exactly nine months later out comes a human being. She is astonished and delighted. The operation of this slot machine is fundamentally as legitimate as when a person hits another on the head (and the latter immediately collapses). simply because it is biologically possible. If each game with her body slot machine did not involve some future effort, she would soon become insatiable. So she draws the line: at the point where one more child would increase her work load and decrease her security and comfort.

As a rule this limit is easily determined - usually by the degree of automation in any one household. In highly industrialized countries, the average woman aims at having two or three children. In North America, where housework is almost wholly automated, the optimum is nearer three. In Western Europe (where certain appliances are not yet used) the ideal is nearer two. An only child is seldom desirable, and more than three are considered antisocial because of their noise and the smell of washing.

An only child affords no benefits, only disadvantages. The woman never seems as unprotected and tied to her home as she should he. Apart from that, something might happen to the child, possibly when the mother is past child-bearing age. Then she would have no excuse left for having things made comfortable for her, and her husband would have no reason to go on working for her alone. Also, an only child has no playmate, and the mother would have to play with him; if there is anything a woman loathes, it is having to play with children. Children are curious about absolutely everything, but a woman has no interests at all except the few idiotic forms of entertainment offered by her house and her own body With the best will in the world, it is difficult for a mother to enter into the adventurous world of a child. She may have a small repertoire of insipid stock phrases to amuse a toddler (`look who's coming now'), but by the age of two a child has started to think for himself and woman is left behind. The cliché about the common interests of father and son (father cannot stop playing with his son's model railway) cannot be applied to mother and son, or even to mother and daughter. If a woman makes an effort and spends half an hour playing with her child (more might stunt its mental development), she tells the whole world, as if it were a great achievement, which of course it is - in terms of self-denial.

To guarantee material security and allow a woman to seem helpless and incapable of earning a living, two to three children are necessary. This minimizes the risk of old age without children or grandchildren who prove their respect and love, their gratitude to her for being such a good mother and grandmother. Besides, the children keep each other amused, leaving mother free for `superior' occupations, sewing, for example, or baking. Her maternal care consists of locking the children in a room together and coming in only when one of them gets hurt and screams loud enough to summon her.

It follows that raising and training two or more children is much easier than bringing up one. To instill obedience into an only child, the mother has to evolve complex methods to outsmart and persuade it, and get it to see reason; or it has to be punished. Since this is a nuisance, a mother usually leaves it to the father. Several children, on the other hand, can be trained by emotional blackmail. As they are all dependent on their mother's approval, she has only to show a slight preference for one and the others will do anything she tells them to. Every child lives in constant fear that its mother will withdraw her 'love' and give it to someone else. And if this fear does not create affection between siblings (as if woman would care!), it at least increases their competitiveness and performance.

[Source: Esther Vilar - The Manipulated Man]