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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35470 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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A recent tragic event: Mother accused of killing three children in Massachusetts

A mother is accused of strangling three of her children before she jumped out a window in an attempted suicide at their suburban Boston home, officials said Wednesday.

An arrest warrant had already been issued Wednesday for Lindsay Clancy for two counts of homicide in connection with the deaths of her 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. Her 8-month-old son, who she's also accused of strangling and was "grievously wounded," has since died, NBC Boston reported.

First responders found three children in the home in Duxbury. The children were unconscious and “with obvious signs of severe trauma,” Cruz said. "Preliminarily it appears that the children were strangled,"

The Culture War angle: Following this event some TikTok accounts have released videos in support of the mother and voicing concern over mothers and their mental health, leading to discussion. Examples: https://postimg.cc/NKpX61ty, https://postimg.cc/vxT8d6jK, https://postimg.cc/CnnyNC9w, https://postimg.cc/8FvttKzK, https://postimg.cc/TK6wKhWK, https://postimg.cc/K3cXXSKv

Considering the nature of the crime I find the wording in the TikTok's off putting. This isn't phrased as something the mother, Lindsay Clancy 'did'. It's something that 'happened to her' and that she 'needs support'.

On a tangential note: This reminds me of an older sex war question surrounding female violence towards children and how women are treated in society. Specifically the terminology of SIDS. Sudden Infrant Death Syndrome. Which became a notable issue when multiple women who murdered their own children ended up, after a few years, being released scot-free. Neven Sesardić, a Croatian philosopher, wrote a very interesting article published in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Specifically relating to Sally Clark, a woman in the UK who was accused of murdering two of her children, and some relevant statistical analysis that cast aspersions on the validity of SIDS as it was relied on by expert witnesses to defend Clark in court. Along with leveraging statistical critiques against the Royal Statistical Society.

The tangential relevance here is whether or not Lindsay Clancy will be afforded similar legal leniency on top of everything else. Though with the hellish nature of the crime, one could only really hope for punishments that far exceed all the comforts that a lifetime in a women's prison will afford her.

I don’t think this woman deserves sympathy, but motherhood today is very stressful. Before feminism, motherhood was considered an important job and girls were raised at a young age to master the skill. Hence, girls were given dolls young so they could model the way their mother raised them at a young age, and so they would learn to multitask activities (mothers would gently reprimand their daughters if the doll was misplaced while eg cooking). Girls would spend time with women and mothers to learn from them and the separate spheres of male/female interest ensured that women didn’t have men’s stressors. Female culture and its emphasis on “nurturing feelings” like making a scarf for a loved one or beautifying a home was simply a way to prepare the mind for the bond required to raise a healthy child. A girl by the age of 14 would probably have mastered all of the domestic tasks she would be using at 24 as a wife. And so the tasks involved with motherhood would be mastered, which means their stress would be minimized. Women by and large did not have stressful work in addition to duties of mother/wife, or if they did, they would have wet nurses and hired help. Once a woman had a child, family would usually come to minimize the stress at the home. Women would also be around their child much more, forming a bond, because exclusive breastfeeding was common for 1-2 years and then intermittently reduced over 4.

We have essentially raised generations of women who are untrained in being a mother. It shouldn’t be surprising that PPP and PPD are high and that women feel overwhelmed. Motherhood is more like a musical instrument than a college course, you simply cannot learn it by studying from a book for a year at 25 or something. When you see a girl raised by a traditional family and especially if she had many younger children (having to act as a mother to them) her entire nature is different, you can literally feel the the nurturing soul.

Women by and large did not have stressful work in addition to duties of mother/wife, or if they did, they would have wet nurses and hired help.

No. What about wet nurses and hired help? Did they have no stressful work, or did they have wet nurses or hired help of their own? Cooking and laundry and spinning used to occupy a lot of women's time.

Once a woman had a child, family would usually come to minimize the stress at the home.

Yes. Living in an extended family is much easier. Judging by the ages of her children, she has been a full-time mom for five years. It's impossible to do this alone and lead an "instagrammable" life at the same time. At some point you have to say, "fuck it, I don't care if your pants are covered in dry mud, they are dry and that's all that matters" or "fuck it, we're eating frozen lasagna today. Again" or "fuck your colic, Imma put the cot outside and listen to some relaxing music instead" or "fuck it, I ain't ironing anything ever again". If you have a sufficiently neurotic personality that you can't do this, you will break down sooner or later.

It’s easy to be confused about the etiology of stress. Wet nursing is not a stressful occupation. Generally speaking, when humans are doing tasks that they evolved to do, the task isn’t mentally taxing. (There was a study last month about how loggers have high life satisfaction, one of the highest of any profession. This is weird until you realize, “wait, men were designed to cut out trees and be in forests, of course they do.) A young woman who previously had a child nursing a child is possibly the least stressful task a person can do. Wet nursing was a regulated and solid profession for these women. Some of the oldest contracts we have are Babylonian contracts specifying nursing protocol for wet nurses. Remember that some women are born with what we moderns call humongous mommy milkers, and that breastfeeding significantly reduces their risk of breast cancer. Someone like Abigail Shapiro was designed by God to nurse babies, not to be an eh opera singer, and because she didn’t nurse babies she had to cut her boobas off (which is a crime against God). Women are literally designed to be around babies and there are a number of studies showing extensive health benefits for woman-child contact. Of course, when you raise every girl from 6-21 in a sterile classroom and tell them they should be a girlboss, maybe it’s stressful for them.

Spinning is a flow state activity. Not only is it not stressful, it is the very antagonist of stress. Cooking and cleaning are not stressful when you were raised to do this at 6 and mastered it at 10. Plug in “cleaning inspo” to YouTube and behold a bountiful gender imbalance. Then check out the gender ratio of whoever watches the great British bake-off.

But yeah, hired help would certainly have stressful lives. They were the bottom rung of society. Today we just feed them GMO slop and over-medicate them and whatever.

While I have no doubt that most women would rather hold babies than make spreadsheets, and that mothering is probably much less stressful for women who are used to being around children requiring active care, being incredibly busy all the time(and just mathematically most women cannot have hired help, at most 50% of them can, and that’s assuming women do literally nothing else) is actually really stressful.

Of course. Women today are stressed because they have to work stressful jobs in addition to being mothers, in addition to being informed citizens. But it’s not busyness per se, it’s disparate tasks, non-mastered tasks, and ennui. The Amish fill up their day with busyness in excess of the girlboss cohort, and yet they have limited stress. This is because many of their tasks fit the Csikzentmihalyi model of optimal flow (among other reasons)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1049386707000369

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