The Great Divide

When it comes to the ways in which parents and children are discriminated against and why those discriminations are inherently anti-woman, some people just don’t get it. Kate Harding, it seems, is one of those people.

She is one of the people to whom some feminist mothers may point when discussing the (sometimes pleasantly unnoticeable, sometimes seemingly insurmountable) divide between those who have had children and those who haven’t. She is someone who I personally agree with on many feminist issues but often, when it comes to a topic relating to parenting (usually concerning parenting in public), I find myself defensively reaching for that old cliché: “You couldn’t possibly understand, you don’t have children.” Whilst I dislike that line and think it is mainly unhelpful in a goal of creating positive discourse, there are times when its use is tempting when engaging with (or reading) someone who is just so not…getting it.

Just as I’m sure attempting to explain the realities of race or class inequities and pressures to someone who has not lived through them can feel quite frustrating and fruitless, so too can reading and responding to commentary that comes across as ignorant, insensitive and hypocritical from an otherwise smart, savvy and progressive woman.

Take, for example, Harding’s latest article on Salon’s Broadsheet, which was written in response to film director Kevin Smith being kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight because he was deemed too large for a single seat and hadn’t purchased two, in accordance with Southwest’s ‘person-of-size’ policy. As a fat-acceptance activist on another popular site, Harding took issue with this and linked the incident with the general air of hostility and hostility-disguised-as-concern aimed at fat people in public. Her impassioned, well-written piece shows how important this issue is to her, and many others.

But as I read her post, I couldn’t help but see extremely similar parallels between what she was railing against and what she herself had written just a few months ago in an article entitled ‘Screaming Toddlers on a Plane!’ In it, she discussed the removal of a two-year-old child and his mother from an airplane for the child’s ‘disruptive behaviour’ (which consisted of excitedly shouting “Go plane, go!” and “I want Daddy!”). While she expressed “sympathy” for parents flying with toddlers, she went on to admonish us to at least try to ‘control’ them. Because if she couldn’t see that we were ‘trying’ hard enough? She “reserve[s] the right to smugly judge [us], damnit.”

Essentially, she supports the idea that if a child cannot conform to social and behavioural norms and if its parents/carers do not actively take steps to ensure the comfort of others around them or at least apologise profusely for inconveniencing them (even if said ‘annoying’ behaviours are completely age-appropriate and nothing can really be ‘done’ about them, short of violence) she agrees that that child, and subsequently those with him/her, should be removed. At the very least, she reserves the right to express her disdain for what she perceives as the parents’ failings. Openly.

Yet, here she is in this instance, angry as all get-out that anyone would dare try to prioritize the comfort of other passengers over one person’s right to exist, or allow a long-held prejudice against a vulnerable group of people (who may or may not have any control over their ‘condition’) to be voiced. The collective disgust at the lack of ‘control’ a fat person or excitable child is seen to be exhibiting; the ways in which society seeks to punish those who encroach on our space or do not adhere to what is defined as normal or acceptable; the arrogance and privilege displayed by those who feel it is their right to criticise and complain when they are inconvenienced in any way by someone they don’t view as worthy of respect…can she, and others, really not see the ways in which fat-bashing (and other forms of intolerance) follows similar patterns to child/parent-bashing?

Now, Ruth at Look Left of the Pleiades has already drawn attention to the ways in which fat-acceptance is similar to child/parent-acceptance so I won’t repeat her many, many good points and analogies here, but I urge you to go read her post and then come back. Because I want to demonstrate why Harding’s perceptions of and attitudes towards children and parents in public are as harmful as the perceptions of and attitudes towards larger people that she so passionately disputes in her latest article and why this kind of disconnect contributes to the perpetuation of a ‘divide’ between feminist parents and childless feminists, as it does between those who are of ‘acceptable’ body size and those who aren’t.

Let’s start here, from the Kevin Smith article:

Perhaps they [those who complain about sitting next to large people] even had the special misfortune of sitting next to a rude fat person, the kind who doesn’t even seem contrite about infringing on someone else’s severely restricted personal space…There’s no shortage of rude people of all sizes, but it seems like everyone’s got a story about that whale who made a two-hour or three-hour or even five-hour flight pure hell for the adjacent paying customers.

Just like how everyone has a story of a screaming baby or toddler making their flight pure hell, huh? And, like, the freakin’ parents didn’t even APOLOGISE, can you believe it?!

From the ‘Toddler’ article:

I also believe, however, that unless he has special needs that make public screaming both more likely and far more difficult to end, a toddler hollering in a closed space for a prolonged period about something other than physical pain is very unlikely to evoke much sympathy. And the adult in charge has a responsibility to try to calm him and reinforce that this is inappropriate public behavior.

Reinforce that this is inappropriate public behaviour?! To a two-year-old who is stuck on a plane and is probably hungry, thirsty, scared, uncomfortable, bored or all of the above?!  That is at least as laughable and useless to parents as “Just eat less and exercise more” probably is to severely overweight people. I’m also not keen on how Harding sets conditions on her sympathy: “If you do x and y, I’ll put up with you. But if I don’t think you ‘tried hard enough? I reserve my right to judge you and have you ejected.” Eerily similar to the conditions often placed upon sympathy for fat people: only if they are actively trying to minimise their mass and stay out of thin people’s way are they allowed any.

See, those of us who are and/or love people to whom airlines’ “person of size policies” apply don’t automatically envision the discomfort of getting stuck next to a fatty; we envision the physical and emotional pain of being the fatty crammed between two potentially hostile strangers, at the mercy of flight attendants who might decide we’re fine on one flight and a “safety risk” on the next.

I don’t automatically envision the discomfort of the people around me if my child cries on an airplane either, though I am all too well aware of the disapproval. My first duty is to my children and their well-being, not the flight enjoyment of those surrounding us. I do my best to minimise noise and disturbance but if, like what happened to me the last time I flew, my child is crying and howling because she was woken (in the middle of the night according to her body clock) by the flight attendant and made to sit back up and put on her seatbelt, I’m not going to care two jots if the people around me are put out. They might think I’m ‘doing nothing’ by simply sitting there with a hand on her shoulder, waiting for the upset to pass, but what they don’t know is that if I had kept shushing and fussing and cajoling, the wails would have undoubtedly gotten even louder. Funnily enough, some parents know their kids better than perfect strangers and what appears to be ‘ignoring’ to an outsider is actually preventing things from escalating further. The stares, the mutters, the annoyed glances, the outright commands to “shut that kid up”…these make for a pretty tense flying situation too. I would expect someone who has endured the same but for body size to be a bit more sympathetic to the enormous strain and embarrassment this causes the concerned party.

…the risk of smaller-scale humiliations — sitting next to someone who complains about their size; absorbing flight attendants’ naked disdain; overhearing someone say “I hope I don’t have to sit next to her”; being told, as Smith’s seatmate on his later flight was, that they should really purchase two seats in the future to avoid making other people uncomfortable; plus the aforementioned dirty looks and heavy sighs — is often enough to keep them at home.

Yep, know that feeling too. One man, on approaching his seat across the aisle from me and my six-month-old daughter, who was happily smiling and looking around, commented very loudly to his wife, “Oh great, we’re sitting next to a baby. See if we can change seats when the flight attendant comes by.” When they weren’t able to change seats, many heavy sighs and dirty looks ensued for the duration of the flight whenever my daughter made so much as a peep. I remember sitting there, tears silently coursing down my cheeks, as I held my finally-asleep baby — unable to move, go to the bathroom, eat, drink or read for fear of waking her and invoking the wrath of that horrid man. It made me forever fearful of the reactions of people around me and made me question whether I was the selfish one for wanting to go visit my family.

In the last paragraph of the Kevin Smith piece, Harding’s emotions come to the surface. Her rage at the lack of human decency and understanding becomes apparent and she says:

And I read comments from lots of people who are less openly hateful, but still think that fat people should buy two seats or lose weight or stay home — not that the airline has any responsibility to, say, ensure that adequate seating is available for everyone or treat people of all sizes like equal (not to mention individual) human beings — and you know what I think? Forgive me, but sometimes there’s no other way to say it: Fuck you. That’s what I think.

Sing it, sister! I agree with you 100%. I too wish that airplanes (and many other public spaces) were more accommodating of larger people, those with disabilities, families…the way most things are modelled on one body and type and under the assumption that one is travelling alone is very frustrating. I just wish you could apply those same strong feelings about accepting our bodies for what they are to accepting children and the nature of parenting for what they are. I wish you could be open-minded enough to know that even if you never experience parenting first-hand, it is something that you share a common bond with; that you (and all people) have a vested interest in making parents and children feel more welcome and included in our society, not ostracised. Those who were unaccepted for what they were as children can become the very people you struggle against now — the rigid, the selfish, the unkind. Setting out prescriptive behaviours and expectations for one group of people according to how their presence impacts others, not according to what is best or appropriate for them, is exactly what feminism (and fat-acceptance) strives to eradicate.

Just as you don’t want to be judged for your size, nor do we want to be judged for our reproductive and parenting choices, especially by those who haven’t walked a yard in our shoes, let alone a mile. In a homogenized world, I suppose everyone would be thin, every child would sit quietly and every parent would happily and healthily manage to work and bring up their children. But we don’t live in that world nor would any of us want to, I imagine.

As feminists, we celebrate diversity, challenge privilege and patriarchy and constantly question our own prejudices in order to grow and become better allies to those on the outside who need our help most. We mind our language, respect those with different needs, backgrounds and experiences from us and know when to say “I haven’t lived that. Tell me how I can stand with you and help you battle these injustices.”

In order to do that we need to become invested in fights that are not our ‘own,’ look for connections and similarities instead of divergences and dissimilarities.  We need a feminism that ‘gets it’, or at least tries to. Not just about fat, not just about kids, but all of it. Because if we can’t support these basic tenets, and each other, what hope do we have of changing anything at all?

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