Trophy Wives

 Each month seems longer than the last.

April, with its cold winds and a surprise blanket of snow, feels like it’s been hanging on for a year. 

The news pelts us like hail. 

The daily tally of principles we’ve abandoned stacks up as we wait for “precedented” times to return. 

“I’m not holding my breath,” as my father would say. 

I thought of him, as I read every word of a story in the NYT this week, about a gaggle of pro-natalist “influencers” who have been seeding their sexist agenda on the style pages for several years.  

And how he, as the father of daughters -- unlike these bro-mancers of natality -- provided us with a long list of agenda items we might attain before we settled into a life of domesticity.

“Don’t get married until you are at least 25; Don’t get married until you’ve used a passport at least once; Don’t get married until you are at least 30; Don’t get married until you know who you are and what you want.”

I suppose, if I had wanted to settle into a homesteading life, like some of the strange-looking people peering through round spectacles from underneath stark white bonnets, he would have quietly supported that, too.

But he would have been sure to point out that it was, after all, a person should be free to make.

It doesn’t seem like that’s the place this cohort will exhort.

They are often industry titans or their well-funded children, supplementing their trust funds with the proceeds of page clicks for the spectacle of their self-titled traditional values. Where the women raise multiple babies and the fathers … attend conferences to proselytize the lifestyle. 

Whether it’s the novelty or the nostalgia for a time that never existed, the content generates lots of attention. 

And this week another piece showed how this small cohort of fundamentalists are poised to erode human rights even further.  Some of their ideas made my hair stand on end:

• A “National Medal of Motherhood” to women with six or more children;

• Reserving 30 percent of government fellowships for those who are married with children; 

• State-funded education programs teaching women and girls about their menstrual cycle, “so they can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive”;

• $5,000 cash as a ‘baby bonus’

It wasn’t enough that the president said he wanted to be the ”fertilization president,” a statement so cringy that I felt the warm acid of my stomach rise into my throat. Now we have a bro-culture that wants to corral women into a single stall of society. 

It’s telling that they are seeking to pay only lip service toward the strengthening of the family. 

They have no interest in making life easier; making childhood safer; or making communities stronger. They have no plans to bridge the widening gaps in maternal outcomes.

They will strip men and women of a comprehensive health education, and suffice with only a standing ovation of ovulation. And for each infant whose mother gets a push prize, the rest will be hard fought.

They will try to tell you that such hardship builds character and stamina, but it doesn’t. It just creates obstacles and obsolescence. 

This is not about freedom of choice, it’s about control and coercion. 

I can hear my mother’s voice bubble up in my mouth as I think about the medal mothers of myriad multiples will presumably covet in this dystopian short story brought to us by a president made for reality TV: “Would you like a medal or a chest to pin it on?”

The true reality is we want neither. And men, if you think about it, you deserve more, too.

As bell hooks wrote in her book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love:

“In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an antipatriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.”