Welcome to the weekly Fairer Disputations round-up: your one-stop shop for the best in sex-realist feminism. This week: Jason S. Carroll on why we need dads, Featured Author Mary Harrington on internet patriarchy, Anastasia Berg on motherhood and transformation, breastfeeding, a gender whistleblower targeted, what Editor Serena Sigillito is reading—and more!
In honor of Father’s Day this Sunday, our first featured piece highlights the irreplaceability of dads.
Next, Featured Author Mary Harrington calls out the proponents of “internet patriarchy” as “moral bottom-feeders” uninterested in serving real relationships between men and women.
Finally, a fascinating excerpt from the new book What Are Children For? (see what editor Serena Sigillito is reading, below!) on whether motherhood transforms—and why telling women it does might not actually serve mothers.
More Great Reads & Listens:
- When Breast Isn’t Best, Heather Welford, The Critic
- Gender Dysphoria Cases Soar After Pandemic, Eliza Mondegreen, UnHerd
- A Doctor Told the Truth. The Feds Showed Up at His Door. Emily Yoffe, The Free Press
- Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing That’s Most Worth Having, Ruth Whippman, The New York Times
- American Women Are at a Breaking Point, Elliot Haspel, The Atlantic
What I’m Reading: Serena Sigillito
I just finished the thought-provoking new book by Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg, What Are Children For? It can be tempting to dismiss not only the proudly and aggressively “child-free” but also those millennials and gen Zers who are struggling with fear and deep ambivalence about whether to have children, classifying them as immature and selfish. Wiseman and Berg do not. Rather, they take their concerns seriously, distilling these worries down to their core—the problem of pain and the problem of evil—and engaging these anti-natal arguments in their strongest and most compelling forms. Ultimately, they argue for the innate goodness of human life.
I’ll be writing a full review soon, where I’ll get into more detail about the book’s strengths and weaknesses. But in the meantime, I recommend it to those who want to understand the roots of our falling birthrates—and those who want to reach those who have lost faith in their own innate goodness with a life-affirming message of hope.
