The Stroller

Twice recently I've seen the stroller come up in things I've read. Most recently, there was a New York Times op-ed, ostensibly about the ethics of sharing stories about your children online, but with a part philosophizing (in fairness, the author, Agnes Callard, is a philosopher) about how "people warn prospective parents that having a baby is expensive, but that isn’t exactly true. What’s expensive is getting away from your baby." Among the items listed: "A stroller so you don’t have to carry them."

Then there was the (brilliant, and to be discussed more elsewhere) short story, "The Feminist," by Tony Tulathimutte, in n+1. It's the story of a disillusioned and ever more resentful male feminist. He sees those around him settling down, thinks everyone else can find love, but that he's somehow cursed. But his breaking point is "a fleet of strollers":

He flattens against the plastic wall to let three, four strollers pass, then tries to enter the restaurant when a fifth woman approaches, pushing an enormous three-wheeler with BMX tires and a crusty-eyed baby scrunched inside it. ...

[H]e catches up to them and (carelessly, with his injured foot) delivers a solid righteous side-stomp to the stroller’s chassis, which the mother catches just before it tips over, and he gives another wild kick before he shoots off through traffic across the street. Their shouts degrade into noise as he rounds the corner at a hobbled gallop, and he makes sure they hear him laughing.

We own basically one expensive thing and it's this stroller. More than this 4-year-old computer, and more than the non-existent car. More than any item of (Ikea and Craigslist) furniture. More than those other carlessness-related 'investments', the giant Canadian parkas. It seemed ridiculous, and still seems it, but wasn't.

Is it a status symbol? It is and it isn't. Yes, it's practical - snow-compatible (necessary for a December baby in Toronto), and this particular model came with a detachable bassinet that was also the 'crib' for the first I no longer remember how long. But there's something pleasing about getting your child the best possible start in life, with something new (a used stroller being apparently but probably not really a death trap?) and, why not, a bit glamorous. Only the best. Expensive baby clothes are clearly not useful, but in the case where the expensive thing is also the most useful one, why not lean into that?

If it's status, it's perhaps less the stroller itself (and the prices of these would horrify even those who were merely assuming they're expensive) than the implication: The stroller-pusher, if the parent of the child, has everything sorted out. If the stroller is big and/or the mother is older, her life got to a place where a baby was possible, a desirable abstract situation even for many with zero interest in having kids.

There was also, I'm remembering, a third stroller reference, in a tweet I'll never locate, something about a homeless man holding forth about all the dogs and strollers in some gentrifying area, shared not by the homeless man, but rather by someone (presumably) less destitute but in solidarity with the annoyance at those people with the strollers and the dogs. In a city, stroller plus dog implies a lifestyle. Implies, but doesn't necessarily accompany.

I feel guilty when I press the button with a wheelchair icon for it to get through doorways, or sit in the blue seats on the front of the bus. A baby stroller is and isn't a mobility device. It's indisputable that babies aren't about to climb subway stairs or walk down the street, and that if only for medical appointments, they do occasionally need to leave their homes. But there's this alternative, a carrier, that works well for the blip of time when you're recovered enough from childbirth to use it but your baby is not yet too big and squirmy to walk around with strapped to your torso. And the carrier doesn't quite fix things, because you will still take up more than one seat on the subway (the baby's legs need to go somewhere!).

To go around with a stroller - and yes I read the Rachel Cusk excerpt about moving through space with a baby, yes it's amazing, yes I still need to read the book itself - is to engage, despite yourself, in an endless stream of feelings-projection.  You know your presence annoys everyone around you - both from others' responses and from reading accounts of people annoyed by strollers - but you can't know why, so you start guessing. It could be anything! It could be something understandable (your stroller is blocking someone's way to a make-or-break job interview; the person annoyed seeing a stroller is childless not by choice) or obnoxious (someone thinks, because reasons, babies don't belong in coffee shops/farmers markets/supermarkets/cities). It could be, if fiction's to be believed, that the man annoyed at you for pushing a stroller is an incel.

All you can know for sure is that the stroller reads as optional. Optional because babies are often understood these days as an entitled lifestyle choice, but also because look at the space that thing takes up, surely there'd have to be some alternative, not that it's for the annoyed onlooker to articulate what that alternative might be.

Intern-sectionality

Because the topic has interested me for so long, after writing about gender and unpaid internships for a wider audience, I did take a close-ish look at the comments, and have reflected on some of them here. Not, this time around, to apologize for having dared say my piece before a mass audience. I'm getting used to the scale of this, but am curious to see others' reactions. I haven't quite kept up with all of them, but there is one point I believe must be addressed:

Many feel that I missed the big picture, namely that unpaid internships are unfair to those from poorer families. (That they're often illegal fails to compel, because then you'll get libertarian sorts arguing that if these arrangements are voluntary, it's the law that's the problem.) While the general unfairness of life for those from poorer families is a point worth repeating, this is not the strongest case against unpaid internships. Against the ridiculous cost of going to college, yes - that very much is the rich getting richer, given that it still helps to go to college (and then some) to get a job, given the difference between graduating with and without debt. Against unpaid internships, no.

So it's not that I forgot to mention this, or that I don't think poor kids getting screwed over is an important social-justice issue. Indeed, as I say in the post, these internships are not of much use in helping you get a job. I'm not convinced that unpaid internships are this great destroyer of social mobility. Social mobility's lousy for other reasons.

Are they needed to break into specific high-influence fields? (This post is in part a longer response to Caryatis's comment here.) They're certainly perceived of in that way, and obviously there are individuals who believe that the connections they made and skills they learned at unpaid internships got them a paying job in their desired area. It obviously sucks to feel that you're missing out on an opportunity, even if in truth, employers only care about proper work experience, and may even prefer candidates who had real builds-character jobs. (I don't believe I've personally been held back by not having ever had an unpaid internship, but who knows - maybe if I'd had one I'd now control the media.) But I think we forget - and this I also mention - that many who had a chic internship and then got a chic job had connections in the first place. I'd like to see (or do?) some research on how many paying entry-level jobs in journalism/publishing/etc. go to ex-unpaid-interns, on how many people with positions of power at these orgs started as unpaid interns.

But also, compensation for work is not something one is only owed if one would be out on the street without it. That's the housewife connection. The gender angle. It's wrong to not pay a female employee, or not pay her properly, because she's got a husband who earns enough for the family. It's extra-wrong not to pay a female employee because she might not need to work to eat, and this is just being assumed on account of she's female, and lo and behold, she's not even married in the first place, or she is and her husband is an aspiring basket-weaver. But once paying women less/nothing becomes the norm, it becomes more difficult for any woman to get paid properly for her work.

What's bizarre is that this continues, only now the assumption is more that the parents/loans of a young woman will foot the bill. And... this does end up screwing over those who don't have some other source of cash. But it's not all fun and games for those who are working unpaid and still able to eat. Being channeled into a path where economic self-sufficiency always seems within reach, but never is, isn't a fluffy non-problem, even if there's a roof over your head, even if you're living in splendor. It's this odd quasi-intersectionality, a branch of misogyny that's about hating "rich girls," but that extends to girls, women, who aren't even rich.

Sharing is caring

Normally, when I write something formal, and often informal as well, I include counterarguments. But when writing that post on parental overshare, I had trouble doing so, because I couldn't quite come up with what the arguments were in favor of the practice. All I could think of was that because the genre is dominated by women (but, as with all traditionally-female topics - see also: food - taken more seriously when the author is a man), it's seen as empowering to women that this option is out there. But otherwise? The argument seemed to be that there's a market for it, and that writers who have stories to tell about their kids are in great supply. Because parental overshare had so long run unopposed, there had hardly been occasion to defend it from any detractors. It wasn't clear to me what, precisely, I was arguing against.

But my post, if it did nothing else, led a bunch of writers and bloggers who share widely about their kids to speak up in defense of what they do. And it's actually been quite interesting to see the reasons they give, reasons I wouldn't have necessarily anticipated. It hasn't led me to believe it's ethically acceptable to write in this way about your own identifiable kid, even if that kid is 17-and-a-half and positively begging you to do so. Nor do I think any criticism of a parent's write to share would likely meet with anything but defensiveness from those most deeply invested (not necessarily financially) in this type of writing; even if I'd somehow anticipated these counterarguments and woven them all concisely into my post, I expect parenting-writers wouldn't have been thrilled. But reading over the response gives me a better sense of where these writers are coming from, and how better to approach the topic if I indeed have reason to approach it in the future.

So, from what I gather, the defense of parental overshare, complete with counter-counterarguments where necessary:

-By writing anonymously/pseudonymously about a difficult topic, you reinforce the idea that this topic can't be discussed in polite company. One of the Atlantic commenters wrote, "How does your argument differ from one that would demand the parents of a rape victim remain silent for no better reason than other people may consider the victim damaged goods in the future?" (Another responded, "It's up to a rape victim - not her parents, not her boyfriend, not her siblings, not her employer, not anyone - to decide whether she wants her story out there," saving me the trouble.)

But what's interesting here is the "remain silent." Is it silence to refrain from writing in the national press about your child? Which is, alas, how some appear to have interpreted what I wrote. Obviously parents have the right - obligation, even! - to seek help for their kids, be it medical, legal, etc., and obviously this means using the child's real name and explaining the details of whichever problem. What I was suggesting wasn't some kind of vow of silence on the part of parents, but rather that parents refrain from publishing private details about their kids. Which leads me to the next counterargument...

-Parents should be able to do everything within their power to advocate for their children. And if that means telling the entire English-speaking world about your child's weight concerns or undiagnosable off-ness, so be it.

Once again, however, I'm left wondering why getting help for your kid would require consciousness-raising on a national scale, in which your child's identity is revealed. I kind of understand why use of real names is thought to be of greater comfort to other families, who will read whichever article/memoir and find it reassuring that a family willing to be identified is talking about the same concern they have. (Somehow seeing one's troubles represented in fiction is no longer sufficient.) But best-case-scenario, this would seem to be sacrificing the one child's right to privacy, such that even if the kid gets whichever help he/she needs for the original problem, there's now a new problem.

-Parenting can be lonely, and stay-at-home parents especially can feel isolated, whether or not their children have special needs. The internet provides a sense of community. Being able to share is a lifeline for parents.

This strikes me as altogether reasonable. But once more, I fail to see why "mommy-blogging" (loosely-defined, and including daddy-blogging) necessitates a) using real/full names, and b) involving the national press/a published memoir. What's wrong with anonymous forums, blogs, or emailing friends? There isn't some kind of stark choice between Luddite isolation and going on a NYT blog to share your kid's troubles.

-Sharing is sharing, and there's no difference between pseudonymous, fictional, and confessional, given that it all points back to the same true story. While this notion is mildly horrifying to a literature grad student trained in being super-clear that a character isn't a real person, even if it's a protagonist who shares a first and last name with the author, I can kind of see this point. Lots of "fiction" is thinly-veiled ranting, and the names behind pseudonyms can get revealed. Similarly, children's stories could go public if an email ends up in the wrong hands, or if a parent inept at or sloppy with privacy settings writes something that gets picked up by one of the big gossip blogs.

But surely there is a difference between a story about a child that could theoretically reach the wrong audience, and one that is presenting itself as objective fact to be shared with a mass audience? Or is this my literature-grad-student bias speaking?


-Children don't have privacy.

This I'd be more inclined to accept from the "reputations" angle, if not the "relationship with parents one" - a child can definitely be humiliated. But is it true that anything said about anybody under 18 is magically struck from their record? Aren't children and adolescents constantly being told that anything they put on Facebook, anything they text, is headed straight to college admissions offices? If your father wrote a memoir about how you were a pot dealer from ages 13-15, this remains on the record forever. It seems clear enough that even if the law doesn't quite know how to protect it, common sense dictates that children do have privacy.


-There is a right to tell one's own life story, which almost by definition includes details of others' lives as well. Everyone has a story. It's snobbish and sexist to deny ordinary moms this right.

-Memoir is Art.

-The perennial 'lighten up!' argument, which by natural law must appear when anyone criticizes anything. So what if you write about your kid throwing a tantrum? There are bigger problems in the world, and the kid will get over it, or go to therapy, no big deal.

And, I believe that covers it. But I am, I suppose, collecting these, so if anyone thinks of others...

Natural Nordic beauty indeed: UPDATED

"In his early 20s, he travelled to the U.S. to have plastic surgery on his nose, chin and forehead."

Allow me to contradict myself and to point out that dude, in the "before," had one heck of a schnoz. Forgive me, Dan Savage, I so see where you're coming from.

UPDATE

Apropos of nothing (although boy did they have a good lead-in if they'd opted for it!), the Well blog announces that one in three who want a nose job are mentally ill, with body dysmorphic disorder. I was struck by the fact that this is coming from a study done in Belgium. My first thought, when noticing that, was to be surprised that anyone's even getting nose jobs there. Not that everyone in Belgium has a Grace Kelly nose, but it's a procedure I thought went along with trying to look less "ethnic." (See: Jackson, Michael.) If the nose-job-seekers in Belgium are for the most part ethnically Belgian, which I suspect, however large or small their noses (and there's the full range), it's unlikely they're going in for this for that particular pragmatic-if-unfortunate reason. Somehow I doubt that of the many NY women of a certain age who've quite visibly had that procedure, 1 in 3 would get that diagnosis.