Monday, March 13, 2017

It's Anti-Feminist to Shame the Parents in the Video of Kids Crashing the BBC Interview


Earlier this week, a hilarious video of two kids crashing their dad's BBC interview began making the rounds on my Facebook. Since Jeff and I both often work from home--often without childcare--it seemed like a window into our future. Being interrupted by children on live TV is probably near the top of every working parent's list of worst nightmares. We both found comfort in the sympathy most people seemed to feel for the two parents in the video.

The sympathy and amusement didn't last long. Within a day or two, people in my newsfeed started calling the video sexist. New Statesman published a ridiculous article calling the video "patriarchy in a nutshell." Because apparently all feminists have time to do is criticize other women and their parenting.

What the video really exemplifies is not patriarchy, but the conflicting demands working parents face: between working and spending time with the kids; between laughing at a child's antics and pushing her away because mommy or daddy really needs to get back to work so the family doesn't starve. Working with kids is hard, and doing so from home is even harder. The fact that the professor in the video was working from home coupled with his children's comfort entering his office points away from, not toward, a patriarchal message.

But a bunch of feminists, most of whom are not parents, want us to believe that this video is sexist because the mom is caring for the children, and/or the dad pushes the child away when she interrupts his live television interview.

You know, because parents who don't react with absolute perfection under stress and surprise are monsters. It also seems we're supposed to now believe that any time at all that a woman cares for a child, it's sexist.

Really?

Petty, mean-girl attacks on families such as this make feminism look trivial. Like we don't have serious issues, including with parenting and familial division of labor, to tackle.

I don't know this family. Consider, though, that they might be like mine: Dad squeezes in a few moments of work while mom watches the kids. Later, the two reverse roles. Maybe equality is really important to them. Maybe they're modeling that to their kids. Maybe mom and dad support each other at work, and mom took a lot of time to help dad prepare for his interview.

How must it feel for them to now be the subject of international feminist ire? How is that good for anyone?

Judging a person's parenting or family based on a non-representative sample of their life is inherently sexist because the judgment falls disproportionately on women. Protip: Unless you see someone beating their child, you cannot judge the quality of their parenting based on a 46-second sample.

Feminists who want to judge this family need to think about what purpose that judgment serves. Do they think they'll improve society? Make life better for the family? Or is it just an attention-seeking gesture that shows no concern for how it makes feminism look or how it affects the human beings involved in the video?


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