[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_19

On women, Susan Sontag, 1970 – 1975

Unlike my friends and peers, I have never had many "sentimental relations. " Unlike them, however, I had a lot of quick dates. This behavior, far from being seen as a choice, caused disturbance; it was unusual, suspicious, and “unnatural,” in their words. Which implied there was something very wrong or even perverse about me. Especially when I clearly expressed that motherhood disgusted me and that I found small children annoying. Not wanting a love story as the ultimate goal of my existence and not feeling the tenderness of a mother in my chest made me a species apart, not a woman like them. I was more like a prostitute who, in the famous vision, is still perceived as a creature outside the binary definitions of man - woman.

The men's reactions weren't much different. When I used to teach at the state school, the fact that I moved to a different region to work every year and that I did it alone aroused suspicion and concern.

“We don't understand how a beautiful girl like you is still alone.”

They excluded a priori the possibility that the life I led was my own will. And it didn't intrigue them; it scared them. They tried to hit on me, even if they were married, even if they were old enough to be grandparents because it was the only way to bring me to “my place”: the place behind a man. And once rejected, they avoided me with venom. For them, unlike for women, I was not a prostitute; I was something worse, something evil, unclassifiable.

The comments I received are infinite, but all similar to each other: "You are in your 30s, you are running out of time", "in a few years, you will regret these choices," "Motherhood is natural for a woman," “life as a couple is wonderful,”

“you don't want to take on responsibilities,” “You're a bit selfish.” They are phrases from people of different genders, ages, backgrounds, and nationalities who share the same vision of life. Particularly about the lives of others. In these situations, I thought a lot about my aunt Susanna, the only one in the family who didn't want to have children. I have always found her to be a happy and carefree person, but, as a child, I had not realized that her serenity could be linked to the fact that she had not reproduced. Indeed, her choice seemed to be a negative mark because her sisters accused her of selfishness and not wanting to take responsibility. Hearing the same comments thirty years later but - this time - directed at me, made me understand many things except what is good in taking on responsibilities of this type or what is wrong in loving yourself.

Susan Sontag's text is fifty years old, but what it says about family could have been written yesterday. I immensely enjoyed reading: “The modern nuclear family is a psychological and moral disaster. It is a prison of sexual repression, a playing field of inconsistent moral laxity, a museum of possessiveness, a guilt-production factory, and a school of selfishness.[…]. The nuclear or basic family is the useless family - an ideal invention of urban industrial society. Its function is just that: to be useless and a refuge. Deprived of all economic, religious, and educational functions, the family exists solely as a source of emotional warmth in a cold world. The glorification of the family is not only a piece of rank hypocrisy; it reveals an important structural contradiction in the ideology and workings of capitalist society. The ideological function of the modern family is manipulative - more accurately, self-manipulative. Genuine values are incarnated in the nuclear family.”

If creating a family seems to be the only “emotional warmth in a cold world,” being alone means living in frost and despair. Which translated means: if having a family is already hell, think about being alone! The problem, as Sontag suggests, is not only that kind of hypocrisy but the moral investment made on nuclear family; the fact that the fundamental values of life seem to be within the concept of family. That’s the reason why I scared my colleagues and my peers. If a woman does not want to be a mother, she is doubly blamed: first of all, because she is not doing her natural duty as a woman, second because she is operating in an immoral sphere. In England, there is an acronym for couples who don't want children: D.I.N.K (double income, no kids). And it is used in a derogatory way. As if not having children was an ungrateful, selfish, immoral gesture. It was as if having children was a duty towards the community, not a choice of love.

 Instead, behind this fake facade, what the community expects is not the continuity of the species - the responsibility of having a vagina and using it without selfishness - but the continuity of an ordinary condition that often coincides with unhappiness. D.I.N.K. people earn more money, have more time, can travel more, and have less stress. What is blamed on those who don't have children is not so much the fact that they don't have children, but rather, they can live happily despite not having had them. In other words, there is happiness outside morality, not sin. It is something that one can admit, especially when someone is grown up thinking that having children was the only way to realize themselves and, instead, it caused them to withdraw, renounce, and conditional happiness.

It is not by chance that a mother can ask a childless woman if she regrets her choice, but that woman cannot ask the same question to the mother.