nomad42 wrote:
=
A woman more than likely isn't judged by her career, in fact the higher a career the less the dating prospects. where it can be rougher (i would think) is child bearing, dealing with the screaming motherly instinct. a father isn't expected to do much besides throw a ball or change a diaper.
Anyone else have an opinion on struggles?
I often wonder what it's like for a woman who has no motherly instincts to speak of. A woman who, even were she to give birth, would have about as much attachment to the baby that has just popped out of her as she would to a piece of waste she has just deposited in the toilet (possibly less, as the stress of a pregnancy would likely have made her so irritated, she would be like "good riddance").
What some of us don't think about is that in all the discussions of abortion and adoption (and I certainly don't mean to start a political debate about either of those things in this thread), there is a lot of support provided to women who feel sad/grief-stricken at having to give up a baby. But when you think about it, that could easily come across as an implication that pregnant women
should feel somehow sad, guilty, or whatever about giving up a baby, or else they are bad people. To a woman who, due to neurodiverse brain wiring, lacks the capacity to feel this kind of attachment (and who would feel guilt solely due to social pressures), this could be a burden that I feel I as a male may only be able to imagine in a theoretical sense--a judgment that may possibly be as severe as the judgment of "unwanted" males when looking for a sexual outlet.
I once had this moment--I was undergoing a treatment for something chronic illness-related, and on occasion such treatments can change my brain chemistry enough to feel empathic sadness, something I rarely feel. Though such empathic sadness is still not directed at the kind of people NTs feel empathic sadness for, rather at people who are neurodiverse yet face things I ordinarily would not even consider. While on a walk around the neighborhood, I imagined a girl who had just given birth to an unwanted baby, and who almost couldn't get rid of it fast enough. I imagined the way that some people might react to her seeming lack of regret, to her desire to get on with her life and not deal with the responsibility of caring for a being that she didn't wish to create in the first place. Effectively, her pregnancy had been like a period of illness, that she was now "cured of". But some people would see her as giving up what is to them a great blessing, and would see her as some sort of monster. It was one of the very few times I've cried as an adult.
Basically, the woman would be judged as selfish for doing something that every other one of us wouldn't be judged that way for, just because she had been unlucky enough to have a body grow inside her (that, in itself, caused her lots of trouble). When we walk past a crying baby in a public place, we aren't judged as being horrible excuses for a human being just because we don't stop and feed/take care of that baby--yet a woman who gives birth (even if it was an unwanted pregnancy) may be judged that way. This doesn't mean that the person is totally uninterested in any other living thing--I mean we can stop to pet a cute dog on the side of the street but we're not expected to bring that dog home and take care of him/her. But women who give birth are treated differently (and those who abort are treated almost as poorly--if not, by members of certain religions--worse).
19 Jun 2017, 3:19 pm
