On one level, the tweet by Democratic former actress Alyssa Milano is a perfect example of how easy and vacuous much of today’s feminism is.
To see how empty this argument is, just do the handy old trick of reversing the roles. If Milano overheard my wife tell our oldest daughter, “Take care of your dad while I’m gone,” the actress-turned-activist could just as easily tweet: “Can we stop saying to our daughters things like: ‘take care of your father while I’m gone.’ This is insinuating that women have to spend all their time caring for men. And it’s bullshit.”
Either way you assign the roles, it’s sexism!
My hypothetical example above is, in fact, a far more common complaint than Milano’s. Everywhere you look, you can find journalists or activists objecting that “women do a majority of unpaid care work in all cultures.” Set aside for a minute the Left’s weird tendency to dehumanize and neuter language with clunky phrases like “unpaid care work” to describe looking after your children or family and think about the implication of these two objections combined.
- It’s belittling to expect men to take care of women
- It’s oppressive to expect women to take care of men
Well, that makes it pretty simple: It’s bad to expect any individual to care for another individual. If you pay attention, this view pops up in many corners these days. The argument in defense of abortion is often explicit in stating that unborn babies cannot justly expect their mothers to continue nurturing them in utero.
The argument for subsidized day care rests on the idea that the government needs to liberate parents from caring for their children. President Joe Biden is making a similar argument about people caring for their parents.
Then recall Bernie Sanders’s old line to the United Way, “I don’t believe in charities.” On one level, that’s a call for a government to take care of all needs. On another level, it’s a call to liberate individuals from any responsibility to care for those who need it.
All of this is as inhumane as it is insane. Doing “unpaid care work” or “unpaid emotional labor” is also known as “loving your neighbor” and “being part of a family.”
I’m very open to arguments that loving your neighbor doesn’t get enough credit. I’m not open to the idea that we would be better off if we expected less of it.
