I Made a Person. I Also Do Everything Else Men Can Do. Tell Me How That Makes Women Inferior.

*Note: I originally published this piece on Daily Kos at the urging of a client. 

I had a baby 11 months ago. There’s nothing terribly impressive about that. After all, women have babies every day. And we live in a society in which, if women do something men can’t, we treat it as unremarkable. Birth is unimpressive, but scoring two points higher on a spatial reasoning test? Now that is amazing! 

It’s this sort of ridiculous reasoning that enables us to accept, with a straight face, that men are in some way superior to, stronger than, or smarter than women. I’m tired of it. So I have a question for the men who continue to argue that women aren’t destined for careers or are too emotional or whatever the sexist argument is this week: I made a person. I did it while doing everything men do. How does that make me inferior?

The Sexism of the 'Mommy Wars': Why It's Anti-Feminist to Belittle Parenting Disputes

Breastfeeding or formula? Crib or co-sleeping? Hospital birth or birth at home? Cry it out or attachment parenting? If you have an opinion on any of these issues and you're a woman, then you're part of what has been dismissively labeled the "Mommy Wars."

You know, because parenting is trivial, women are crazy, and whenever a woman has a strong opinion on anything it must be dismissed. So pervasive is the Mommy War narrative that, in many spaces, women cannot even discuss parenting philosophies without being criticized for participating in this "stupid" and "pointless" debate.

People fight about lots of things, and lots of things that matter significantly less than how we rear the next generation. Yet only disputes between women about something still viewed as women's work gets dismissed as a pointless debate unworthy of consideration. Want to endlessly compare Star Wars to Star Trek or devote your afternoon to analyzing whether unbaptized heathens get into Heaven? Completely valid. Dare to question whether the dominant parenting paradigm is healthy for children, though, and you've just crossed the line into trivial, empty blather.