Thursday 11 April 2013

Congratulations - it's a Beautiful Bundle of Cultural Assumptions!

March was so action-packed and industrious a time that I had no opportunities to come here and rant about things that really matter, like why daffodils make me angry. I know - it's everyone's loss.

And yes, I had thought about a Thatcher-related rant, but honestly, I have very little to say that hasn't already been dredged up on Facebook. The whole thing has been ridiculous overall: often disappointing and frustrating, sometimes heartening. I have never much liked Russell Brand, for example, but reading his piece on Thatcher has made me start to re-evaluate him, at least as a writer and thinker of some ingenuity.

Anyway, I didn't come here to type about that. What I want to discuss this evening is perhaps less topical, but it's an issue lurking, nonetheless, waiting to jump out and smack you some day soon.

I'm at one of those ages, you see, where my dearest friends have begun to procreate. Personally I am not that interested in very small babies apart from the fact that holding them is pleasant because they are very warm and I chill easily. On the other hand, however, I am VERY interested in my dearest friends and have high hopes for the potential brilliance of their various offspring.

Despite my lack of first-hand parenthood experience, I understand that having a baby is Quite A Big Deal, and Life-Changing, and Stuff Like That. I understand that babies are a long-term investment, so to speak, and that the new arrival will be around for a long time. Their existence will be incorporated into my relationships with my dearest friends and their partners. I want to be able to mark the advent of the baby in the lives of my friends (and to a lesser extent me) in a meaningful way. I want to show respect for my friends' new "creation", and offer them my heartfelt congratulations. I want to show respect for the baby, as a miraculous new life, and as a person in their own right, and as a being that is naturally and nurture-ally a lot like my dearest friends and brings them joy.

And how do I do this? Dunno - how do most people mark such an occasion? Glad you asked.

FACT TIME: Babies come in two flavours, and luckily for the likes of me, card manufacturers the land over have got both options covered. You see, gender entirely determines everything about all humans that have ever existed, and it is important to begin reinforcing annoying gender stereotypes as soon as the baby can scream its first breath.

Yes, yes, I know: I'm a fool to approach a shop full of greeting cards expecting any kind of proper insight or even the most basic employment of decency and common sense over a tidy little sick-pile of emotionally-redundant mawkishness. I am well aware of the use of Hallmark as a byword for the grossest kind of impersonal bollocks masquerading as the feelings of a real person you've met before. But bloody hell - I perused two well-known chain stores, hoping for some kind of let-up from the relentless pink and blue, pink and blue, pink and blue... there was none. Honestly: I couldn't find a single card that I could send to my friends. I'm not even saying 'I couldn't find a card that astutely and wholeheartedly expressed my sentiments as an individual'; I literally mean 'I couldn't find a card that didn't make me actually shrink away from the card racks with horror and embarrassment'.

I'm not even certain why exactly this bothered me so much. It's not like I don't know about how lots of stuff is sexist. It definitely isn't news to me that our society finds the weirdest ways to reinforce gender as a divisive, conformist thing so that by the time we're at an age to question it, we've internalised so many bullshit cultural assumptions that half of us end up believing the 'That's the way it is in nature' arguments put forward by those who are less inclined to challenge it. It isn't as if I haven't seen the resulting problems of these kinds of assumptions going on every day, with widely varying degrees of subtlety, in the young people with whom I work.

But I dunno... there's something so sad about this. Not exactly about the fact that cards give something of a miracle such trite and tawdry treatment - although that's a bit pathetic too. No - I think it's partly the sheer lack of imagination, and partly the depressing way that it shows just how early we're marked off as being this or the other, and all the arrogant assumptions that go along with that. The new baby is not someone we know, admittedly, so we can't exactly acknowledge them as a snappy dresser/good cook/obsessive golfer or whatever - but then the card isn't really for him or her. It's for the parents. If I had carried a whole fucking person, albeit a tiny one, around for months, and fed it, and come to terms with the fact that it would be urinating inside me repeatedly, and thought of names for it and started a savings account for it and gone through hours of labour to deliver it safely into the world, I'd want it to be acknowledged as something more than simply a "potential footballer" or a "potential ballerina". The idea that something so amazing - and the arrival of a new life IS amazing, however underwhelmed one might be by an actual small baby's social skills or conversation - can be reduced to something so pat... yes. That bothers me. IT'S A BOY. IT'S A GIRL. THAT'S ALL.

Some might say it's all relatively harmless, and maybe in the whole huge grand scheme of things they're right, but in my gut I didn't feel that way when I was standing in those shops, and I don't feel that way now.

In the end, I found one card - ONE card - which was pale yellow and had a bunny on it and no references to genitals of either persuasion to be found. It was nothing extraordinary, but finding it felt like a relief. For my other friend and her new baby, a card with a Cary Grant quote about madness in families on the front - much more appropriate and appreciated, and something I could buy without hiding my face at the till, leaving other people to purchase the remainder (willingly or not).