The Dafoe title above is actually the subtitle of a recent New York Times profile of the actor. Well, sort of. They didn’t include the part about his being a dad of one - I did.
If they had included “Dad of One” in the subtitle, readers would probably assume before even reading the article that maybe he can’t slow down because he needs to make money to help his son, or maybe he gave all of his money to his son and he still needs to pay his own mortgage…Who knows? All readers could possibly surmise from the mention of his having a child is that, somehow, his kid is involved in the story.
And readers would probably surmise correctly, considering the subject of the story is a man. (Why mention the man’s child if the child isn’t at least partially the reason for the story?)
But when the subject of the story is a woman…
One of the many reasons I’m happy to have not become a mother is that becoming a mother would mean becoming a mother. That is, I would cease to be “Kristen,” an individual, and would be only a “mom.” Someone who raised children – period. (Oh, and doesn’t she also write, or…?)
Meanwhile, the man who would be the father of my child would retain his identity – his name, the fact that he is a man, an individual – with “father” or “dad” added somewhere at the end in the list of the many roles he plays.
This is just how our society works. Still. Even now. Today.
Years ago, the Today show inadvertently exemplified the relentless Mommies Matter phenomemom with a story they verbally introduced as, “Coma Mom Defies the Odds.” Click the link, and the headline reads, “Mom defies the odds after devastating accident.”
It’s an incredible story of a woman’s (sorry – a mom’s) survival after a family vacation goes horribly wrong.
But what does the fact that the woman is a mother have to do with the story? I wondered.
Maybe they called her “coma mom” instead of “coma woman” because her children and husband were on vacation with her when they noticed her missing during their moped ride, I thought. Maybe they always note when the subject of a story is a parent.
But then (former) Today anchor Natalie Morales, on the same day, narrated the following teaser:
“A 67 year old California man is lucky to be alive today after his car plummeted off a mountain road into a ravine. His family found him on Thursday during their own search. He may have been stranded there for up to six days.”
The man had children. They were the ones who found him in the ravine.
Strangely, though, the teaser wasn’t “A 67-year-old father is lucky to be alive today…”
An oversight? I wondered.
Maybe, I thought. But then!
Today aired the story “Mom reinvents herself” about a 50-something woman who, after she and her husband lost their jobs, decided to earn a living using escape-artist skills she’d been practicing since she was 17.
There wasn’t a single word in the story about her children. They had nothing to do with her decision. They weren’t interviewed. They didn’t even make an appearance in the form of a picture on the wall.
Still, this person who for whatever reason had been practicing escape artist skills (so cool!) for over 30 years was called a “mom” (apparently cooler?) – while the man in the previous story, the one found in the creek by his wife and children, was a “man.”
The Today show obviously wasn’t the only media outlet guilty of prioritizing a woman’s reproductive status over all else. And I wish it could be said that, “Oh, those stories were from 2011. No one does that kind of thing, anymore.”
Alas:
The above image, tweeted by copywriter and podcast host Ana Paula Picasso (@childfreeco), is a screenshot of a Forbes article written by Ken Silverstein and published in February of this year.
That Nooshin Behroyan - the “young mother” shown above - is a mother isn’t even mentioned in the article until the ninth paragraph, and only in passing, simply as part of her bio.
Interestingly, in January of this year Silverstein also wrote the Forbes article Like Pelé, Lula Can Remake Brazil And Preserve Its Rainforests.
Brazilian president Lula da Silva has five children. (Behroyan only has two.) But that he’s a father isn’t mentioned in the article, and it obviously wasn’t used for the headline.
A Lula piece with a headline in the style given to Behroyan might go something like this: Aging Father of Five Vows to Reverse Trend of Environmental Destruction.
That he also, and secondarily, happens to be President of Brazil would be mentioned in the first paragraph, and maybe there’d be a mention further down of how many kids he has.
Alternatively, a less sexist headline for the article about Behroyan - the kind of headline they wrote for the Brazilian dad of five - would look like this: Paxon Energy and Infrastructure Founder Leads Climate Change Challenge.
And that she has kids wouldn’t be mentioned in the article at all.
“Once a woman becomes a mother, she loses all other identities/roles.” - Ana Paula Picasso
Picasso tweeted the above quote in the thread that followed her posting of the “young mother” image. She also expressed a similar sentiment when she was interviewed by the BBC about being childfree, which she recounts here.
My contribution to the twitter thread about motherhood defining a woman was an excerpt from an Amazon book review I came across that day when I was curious to see how readers liked a book I’d just bought called THE FEMALE LEAD: WOMEN WHO SHAPE OUR WORLD. The review excerpt:
“I appreciate that the purpose of the book is to inspire girls and women to leadership, however there is almost entirely no mention of motherhood - and so many of these featured women are mothers.”
Why do we still place so much value on a woman having a child in her life that once a woman becomes a parent that’s the only HELLO MY NAME IS sticker people want to slap on her chest?
And why do we place so little value on a father’s role that whether a man has children is irrelevant?
Don’t misunderstand: I’m not arguing to report on men’s parental status when they do things (good or bad) worth writing about. Unless having kids is part of the story, it’s just poor writing to plop in that useless detail.
What I am arguing is that this imbalance in how big media identify people surely contributes to how genders assess their own (and others’) worth as human beings in the world.
It subliminally trains men to have confidence in their innate value, with or without children; it trains women that a child clinging to them is what it takes to get Big Society’s quality control team to stamp “approved” on her child-bearing hip.
Great job with the having sex and the getting pregnant, and all that! Never mind all the hard or interesting work you’ve done, whatever-your-name-is.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy my post-Roe v. Wade novel The Age of the Child, which challenges the notion that being a woman also inevitably means being a mother.
I've always found this the creepiest part of how society treats women! Thanks for pointing it out.
Superb read! Love it. Thanks for writing this.
I've been playing about with Substack and Medium. I have a publication up here called Abnormally Normal. Did you know we can put our Substack articles on Medium? Just copy the link and add it in as the canocial link on Medium.
Ali :-)