What Belkin described as opting out in her 2003 piece... was much more about being pushed out as a result of inflexible workplace policies and untenable tradeoffs for working parents. But though fact-based correctives to the opt-out myth have been numerous...it still persists — in large part because the phenomenon, let’s face it, has never been just about parenting, but about using the specter of bad mothering to guilt women away from full participation in the public sphere.In a culture that is increasingly both pronatalist and mom-centric, there’s a benefit to more dot-connecting, not just within the New York Times’ newsroom but across the whole of media and popular culture. … That link is the mediated world where mothers are the only visible agents of parenthood, and thus the ones who shoulder every bit of pressure, blame and stress. ... the burden of parenting is squarely on mothers. Fathers, if they’re mentioned at all, are positioned as tangential to the lives of children; they may not say, like the father mentioned above, This is not my problem, but erasing them from the narrative sends just that message. salon/2014/11/13/nyt_trend_pieces_biggest_blind_spot_why_the_times_cant_get_motherhood_narratives_right/
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 19:00:02 +0000
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