Women = Breeders?

Have you ever heard that women in Japan get annoyed, angry, and upset when they are considered as machines to produce babies?

Feminists believe that to get married, to get pregnant, and then to deliver the baby and to breastfeed him/her is NO LONGER considered as women’s destiny in this life. Women DO NOT NEED to feel obliged to get married, to get pregnant, to deliver the baby and to breastfeed him/her.

It seems that this belief is embraced strongly by Japanese women so that the prime minister complained about the sharp decline of the birthrate. Therefore, he insisted that women be machines to produce babies again so that in the future, Japan will not lack younger generation.

I read the news about women-become-machine-to-produce-babies in the local newspaper in my hometown some days ago. When reading it, I remember a college friend who was often abused by her husband, “Look at your embarrassing body! Why don’t you join any aerobics or do any other exercise?” isn’t it very degrading for a woman’s confidence? Couldn’t he say in a more polite way?

This psychological abuse was also accompanied by financial oppression because the husband didn’t give her money for months with the reason that he used the money for business. Unfortunately, because they are Catholic—and as far as I know Catholic doesn’t grant divorce, my friend got difficulty to divorce her husband, until one day she told me that she had found support from a church and the minister and the congregation to help her to divorce her husband. However, because at that time her priority was to finish the study first, she postponed the plan for a divorce until she graduated.
Some months later, she changed her mind. She said that her five-year-old son wanted to have a younger sibling. She told me, “So, the first plan to do after I graduate is to get pregnant. After that, I will divorce my husband.”

GOSH!!! Why didn’t she just divorce him, look for another man, and marry him and have a baby from him, BUT NOT FROM THE MAN WHO HAS ABUSED HER?

I know that her research for her thesis, she used feministic perspective that of course had her read lots of books about feminism. And to me, feminism is a matter of making our own choices—without depending on man—doing anything we want---without any physical limitation. Nobody forced her to go on living in a hellish marriage only to have the second baby from the man who often said to her, “How embarrassing your body is!”

Making a choice to have a baby from the man she used to love and adore but then abused her is absolutely ILLOGICAL. Didn’t she realize that women are free to choose to have a baby from a man they loves and not from the man who abuses women?

To me, apparently, this friend of mine still cannot leave the dichotomy of women as a whore and a virgin.

PT56 22.00 060207