With Mother's Day approaching, of course many TV ads are focused on consumerism for Mom's Big Day. One well-known card company has a 30-second commercial extolling the wonders of motherhood and how touched she will be if you give her one of their cards. Yes, she is sure to get all misty and everyone will hug in an idyllic setting sprinkled with roses and diamonds while lovely background music plays. Oh, how lovely it will all be, for mothers and their daughters everywhere.
Uh, pardon me. Mothers and their daughters?
What about those of us who have sons? Don't we get to be glorified by the card company too? Apparently not, since there isn't a single male in this commercial. Used to be they encouraged everyone, including husbands and sons, to rush out and buy their cards to show the mothers in their lives how much they care. Not this year. Apparently they've decided men's money isn't good enough for them, and Mother's Day should be a celebration for women only. Let's all celebrate the matriarchy and the power of womanhood, the ad suggests, and if you're unfortunate enough to have popped out one of those - ugh - boys don't expect to be invited to the ceremony. And while we're at it, let's pretend we didn't need a man to help produce any of those beautiful women. Your mother wouldn't be reduced to having sex in order to bring you into the world, now would she?
Right after I saw this thing, this insult on TV, I thought maybe I was imagining this. I've spent a good chunk of every day for the past couple of years immersed in discussions and activism projects relating to men's issues, so maybe I'm overreacting, I told myself. My husband has been saying I work too hard, so it's possible I'm overly sensitive.
I turned my attention to my other interests for a while, in order to clear my head. Then in a discussion of something totally unrelated, one of the participants made the comment that I couldn't possibly understand the 'struggles of women' since all I had was a son. I was, she implied, somehow deficient. I am less of a woman because I'd never known the travails of raising girls. Gee, thanks.
Has feminism taken a bizarre new turn? If only mothers of daughters count, what does this make the mothers of sons? Since when has it become a walk in the park to raise boys? At what point does raising boys become a different thing than raising children? Does this mean that boys are not children? Had I been less infuriated, I may have continued the discussion, possibly getting some answers to these questions, but past experience suggests that the terms, 'logical' and 'discussion' are oxymoronic in the world of feminist discourse, so I'm probably better off for not having tried to pursue it.
If a major US corporation devoted time and expense to promoting this idea I think we can be fairly certain this is not just the ravings of one woman who forgot to take her medication. Add another group to those who can and should be discounted. This is the message I'm getting: Mothers of sons are different than we are, they're not quite people, like us.
The hate goes on, doesn't it?
But I think this may well be the point where feminism went too far. I sometimes think of feminism as an ugly monster that mutated out of something that when it was created, was healthy and promising. Only now it seems as if the monster has somehow turned in on itself and begun consuming its own entrails. Of course I realize that feminists have consistently betrayed their sisters, time after time, but it has never been this overt. So in some kind of backward way, maybe the card company has done us all a favor. Because how many other mothers of sons will feel vaguely insulted by this commercial? Not all of them will be writing about it or even phoning their friends, but perhaps the seed of doubt will have been planted.
It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!
