Polly Dunning’s shame boy story is Fairfax’s latest feminism psychobabble

Polly Dunning with her son Alfred. Picture: Instagram / Polly Dunning

Here I was all set to knock out a Christmas column full of cheer and bonhomie but life, or more accurately, Daily Life has intervened.

I normally disapprove of intra-media byplays but Fairfax Media’s Daily Life section has become so full of cranky third wave feminism that someone needs to hold it up to the light. Among this waste of ink and kilobyte street corner psychobabble, comes a contribution from self described feminist Polly Dunning who tells her harrowing tale of giving birth to a shame boy. The good news is she’s slowly getting over it.

I’m not allowed to swear anymore, at least not at volume but this is sorely testing my already fragile grip on self-control.

At first blanch this was merely another addition from women who have recently given birth and have come to believe that having done so, they have unlocked the secrets of the universe. But on further reading this is a tale of a woman not just at war with men but also her own male child.

While Ms Dunning goes onto express boundless love for her boy, there is a disturbing entry where she describes the disparity between feminism and pregnancy.

“There were two parts to the feeling: I had to mourn the life I thought I was supposed to have, the elder daughter of my two girls (why do we plan things we cannot control?!), and I had to come to terms with having a relationship with a son that I had never really considered. There were dark moments in the middle of the night (when all those dark thoughts come), when I felt sick at the thought of something male growing inside me.”

In ten or so years, that woman’s boy child may well chance across his mother’s column. It would come as no surprise if he suffered some form of existential crisis as a result. Personally, I wouldn’t blame him. Perhaps by then she will be deeply ashamed of her post-natal musings and say so. Perhaps not.

Reading on, Ms Dunning guilelessly plots out a two decade long form of thought and behaviour control for her boy.

In this country, you need a licence to own a dog, keep snakes and drive a car but any mug with functioning genitalia can become a parent. You don’t even have to want to become parents. It’s just that easy.

But increasingly when women fall pregnant, they make a list of must have items considered essential for the business of baby rearing. On that shopping list along with the pusher, the cot, the Barney the Dinosaur mobile (or whatever it is the marketers believe neonates simply must have in a mobile these days) and the economy-sized box of disposable nappies, ideology appears front and centre.

What is bound to disappoint Ms Dunning is the simple fact that imposing any ideology on a child is a useless and counter-productive form of inculcation. Anyone who has been the parent of an adolescent will recall the moment when their spotty-faced, awkward teen stood up or more likely shifted briefly on the couch before declaring: “Mum/Dad, your opinions suck.”

Earlier this year, a mate and father of a young girl sent around an email asking about the three waves of feminism, what they were and how they’d developed. It was research for a project his daughter was completing. God only knows what is going on with the curriculum there but let’s stick with the story.

I replied tongue-in-cheek, “The first are your grim-faced Emily Pankhurst types, the second economic rationalists who care only about their child care rebate coming in big and often while your third wavers are the book burners.”

Truth be told, the last part is not really a joke. While those who count themselves among the third wave are all over the place ideologically - some want to criminalise abortion, believe it or not, others prostitution or pornography.

Just like those gnarled old crones in the US from the Women’s Temperance Crusade who joined forces with Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, New School Presbyterians, even the Ku Klux Klan to compel Americans into prohibition in 1920 and for which New York’s Five Families are eternally grateful, the current lot want to criminalise this and ban that.

Third wave feminists are happy to use the mechanics of the patriarchal state they despise when it suits them. The only point of disagreement is what is to be hurled on the smouldering tyre fire of their discontent.

I really don’t mind if third wave feminists’ every thought is directed at having men like me castrated with a rusty dessert spoon. Just leave the kids out of your miserable ideology.