Let's take a closer look at that bile. Is there bile at all?
I would like to thank this headline/byline combo for helping me set a record for the quickest "gross, pass" I've ever uttered in my life.
Bile is anger. "Gross, pass" is disgust. One might perhaps base an entire career on examining the anger/disgust distinction, but I think the key distinction is the direction of the negative emotion. Anger urges you to take aggression at the source of your outrage. Disgust sends you away. You shun. It's the difference between wanting to attack what you hate and wanting to make sure you don't get any of that on you. Marcotte experiences disgust — "gross" — and immediately shuns — "pass." Her measure of the intensity of disgust is the shortness of the space between the emotion and the reaction. She's open and proud of the absence of rational thought. It's a feeling and a decision all at once — "gross, pass."
Having decided not to expose herself to the text of the article, Marcotte is free to enjoy herself: "The funniest part" — funniest part of the headline — "is framing 25 like it's some daringly young age. The average age of first childbirth is 26." Is that really funny? I haven't read the op-ed yet myself. I saw it, did a quick skim, and decided it wasn't bloggable, but I didn't think — like Marcotte — that my rejection of it was bloggable (i.e., tweetable). I'm going to read it in a minute, but I want to say that Marcotte comes off as privileged. I'm guessing that if the average age is 26, that includes a lot of very young women who are not spending their late teens and early 20s acquiring higher education and beginning career, that is, are not the sort of women who are reading NYT op-eds about timing their reproductive life.
The Marcotte tweet cannot be clicked to get to the op-ed, so let me give you the link: "I Became a Mother at 25, and I’m Not Sorry I Didn’t Wait" by Elizabeth Bruenig. Starting to read it, I see what made me reject it before. It's written at privileged NYT readers who care about the upper-middle class setting of child rearing. The writer finds herself, at age 27, "among a cordial flock of Tory Burch bedecked mothers in their late 30s and early 40s." Sorry, I don't know the brand, but I understand the nudge. "Tory Burch" is telling me these people are upper-middle class. The average age of pregnancy among "Tory Burch bedecked" women is not — I'm quite sure — 26.
When my husband and I compared notes after the [birthday party], he recounted a sly line of questioning spun by a curious partygoer that he thought was aimed at determining how, given our ages, we could afford the ritzy preschool that our daughter attended with theirs.
Speaking of sly... you've let us know your kid goes to a ritzy preschool. Okay. Well, women who plan their reproduction think about the economics. There's going to need to be some info about how you can have your children young and still give them the benefits of an upper-middle class lifestyle. In Bruenig's case, this preschool was free to those living inside Washington, D.C.
Bruenig is clearly talking about highly educated women — women who aspire to affluence:
A 2012 Pew survey found that while 62 percent of women with a high school diploma had given birth by the age of 25, only 18 percent of women with master’s degrees or higher had done the same. In fact, a solid 20 percent of master’s degree holders celebrated their first babies at 35 or older. Unsurprisingly, these numbers track with household income. As of 2018, more than half of women living on less than $25,000 per year between the ages of 40 and 45 report having given birth by the age of 25; among women banking $100,000 or more, the share was a touch over 30 percent....
Highly educated professionals living in major urban centers — in other words, people like me, a lily-white full-time writer with a master’s degree living within rail distance of New York City — tend to postpone childbirth until their late 20s and early 30s....
Yes, she called herself "lily-white." She's talking to white women. But you're not supposed to worry that she's afraid of the so-called "replacement" because she's made it clear — in material I've elided — that she loathes right-wingers.
While my husband and I were never in abject poverty, we understood what it meant to be precariously employed and at the start of our careers.... Reasonable concern about having children before establishing oneself could theoretically be remedied with a generous policy approach....
But what of having children — or getting married, for that matter — before establishing oneself?... When I got pregnant, my husband was a fledgling lawyer and I was a greenhorn journalist....
Once you're pregnant and decided to go through with it, all these economic matters will dissolve into a kaleidoscope of love:
When you have a baby, you do turn toward your child — that “relieved and joyful desertion” may eventually affect your friends, but it first affects yourself. What I didn’t understand — couldn’t have, at the time — was that deserting yourself for another person really is a relief.... My days began to unfold according to her schedule, that weird rhythm of newborns, and the worries I entertained were better than the ones that came before: more concrete, more vital, less tethered to the claustrophobic confines of my own skull.
For this member of a generation famously beset by anxiety, it was a welcome liberation....
You catch glimpses of yourself in time, when life shines through your inner world like a prism, illuminating all the sundry colors you contain. It isn’t possible to disentangle the light from the color, the discovery of change from the change itself.... But she peered up at me from the shadow of my shoulder, and I could see the umber of my own eyes taking shape in hers. There I am, I thought, there I am.
Ha ha. Too bad Marcotte didn't read through to all that. I'll bet she'd find the "sundry colors" and "umber of my own eyes" even funnier than the notion that 26 is a daringly young age to have your first baby.
All these women who are thinking so hard about where on the timeline of life to place their unleashing of reproductive power? Don't think, let it happen, behold your miracle, and exult in your liberation from "the claustrophobic confines of my own skull."
Ironically, that reminds me of Marcotte. As I said above: She's open and proud of the absence of rational thought.
