Women’s Suffrage Part Two: Let Girls Get Pregnant!
Note: This story originally ran in 2010 on True/Slant. I assume they’ll kill off their archive sooner or later, so I’m migrating some pieces to my site.
Proving that extremely learned people can hold unbelievably ignorant notions, an acclaimed British novelist, Hilary Mantel, says that men are holding girls and women back by discouraging teen pregnancy.
Mantel, whose first novel is titled ‘Every Day Is Mother’s Day,’ told London’s Sunday Telegraph that she was “perfectly capable of setting up and running a home when I was 14.”
And why didn’t she? I mean besides laws, policies and the presumed commonsense of her parents?
Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society’s timetable,’ she said.
Where she says “women,” in that snippet, read “girls.” And where Mantel says “in the interests of society’s timetable,” read “by male dominance.”
So, in the interest of liberating all females, men should be allowed to have sex with children who themselves should be encouraged to have children, a situation that historically has impoverished and disenfranchised women.
That could be called holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously in one’s mind. Often, being able to do so is a mark of intellectual sophistication. But Mantel’s two ideas don’t conflict so much as they annihilate each other.
Mantel might want to look around at the hyper-sexualized images of teens (or faux teens) in ads everywhere. Or even around the country clubs to see how young the trophy wives are.
I’m not so sure that men have sex with young women in order to liberate them, and I’m even less convinced that any significant segment of girls want a birth certificate more than they want a driver’s license.
What possibly is significant is that Mantel suffers from endometriosis, a terrible and incurable condition that turns her menstruation process inside out. It has prevented her from having children.
What she has gone through no doubt has added to her writing — writing that many feel is brilliant.
But anytime you find your opinions on maturity in synch with Jerry Lee Lewis, Bristol Palin and Drew Barrymore, it’s time to re-evaluate your values if not your prescription mood stabilizers.
