So I realized today that this gloom and doom environmentalism I subject myself to on a daily basis - hello social media - is really quite sexist. Indeed, it came to me in a flash today that, at its core, the environmental movement is yelling at girls and young women that it's wrong for them to want to bring children into this dying world.
Well the world has been dying since forever. Social media just amplifies its death throes.
I remember how much I wanted children once I wanted them. I also remember having a couple of guilt trips laid on me for my selfishness, as if I wasn't aware of the state of the world, as if it didn't sadden me that the big mammals were threatened with extinction everywhere.
So I tried cloth diapers for the first week while my nipples were cracked and bleeding from breastfeeding. Then I wrote a letter to Michelle Landsberg, who had a column at the time in the Toronto Star, about how sexist cloth diapers were. My point was how hard it already was in a society that expected too much of us. We didn't need to be blamed for Toronto's landfill problem, too.
She got it, too, and referenced part of my argument in a later column, even taking my side.
Anyway, now those children I had are young women (and a young man) and they're surrounded by guilt trip layers and it irks me that they are. So I'm going to tell them and all the other young women I meet hither and yon to close their ears to the gloom and doomers and do whatever the fuck they want.
Even if I don't actually do it I know that it's the only way to live this life - do whatever the fuck you want.
By the say, full disclosure, I'm pretty sure this realization came to me today from watching Comedians in Cars earlier with my eldest. Jerry Seinfeld is awful but it's my kind of awful, an awful I find incredibly life affirming. Jerry Seinfeld doesn't even pretend to give a shit about anything except what he does give a shit about.
So refreshing.
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