In an interview, cultural commentator Konstantin Kisin argues that identity politics cause suffering in the lives of real people. An example of this phenomenon is “Screaming on the Inside,” a screed against motherhood and meaning by New York Times writer Jessica Grose. I came across the title of the book last year with a tidbit about how it was chosen (mothers everywhere are silently suffering. They are all—all of them—screaming on the inside!). I laughed. It was amusing in its ignorance and hyperbole.
But Grose is super serious! Humorously, I stumbled upon Grose’s book on the same day I checked out “Hannah’s Children,” and, thus, read them in tandem, which was a fabulous exercise in mental dexterity to inhabit in the same week worlds that were so profoundly different.
Grose tries to argue that mothers are a particular kind of person, and that person is suffering due to patriarchy, expectations, and mean old discrimination. All while she writes as a successful writer from a dual-professional household of parents who are still married and highly supportive of her and her worldview and life choices and willing and able to help care for her children, whilst she is married to a man who is tremendously supportive of her personal decisions, whatever they are, and her professional aspirations. What exactly is the problem? She chose to go off a pharmaceutical, chose a new job, and had morning sickness. The injustice!
Now, I jest, but seriously, that seems to be the extent of it. Can illness induced by pregnancy be debilitating, sometimes life-threatening, etc.? Of course! But it wasn’t dreamed up and foisted on unsuspecting women by those evil patriarchs. What rendered Grose’s life such a hellscape of unending suffering as she was baptized into motherhood in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy was that she thought she needed to follow Sheryl Sandburg’s advice and got a spiffy new job right around the time she became pregnant. She writes as if recounting an act of heroism that she watched a lot of Suzanne Somers workout videos on YouTube while preparing to write an article to coincide with the release of Somers’ book or something.
All I can say is: Honey, that’s a hobby, not a real job. There is a good chance I would attempt something so frivolous and fun, but I have had the benefit of just enough reality to know that I should not expect to be paid loftily and accommodated grandiosely if pregnancy renders the completion of an article about workout videos proved difficult. No such awareness dawned on Grosse.
In her telling, the real suffering came from weaning herself off an anti-depressant, which she evidently intends to continue consuming for life. No one told her she should get off the drugs. Her mother, a physician, told her to continue use of that happy little pill that a full quarter of US women rely on to get through the apparent misery of their daily lives. But her idea of being a great mother, nay a perfect mother, meant getting off the pharmaceutical and, absent any apparent positive lifestyle changes, she opted to have a very stressful job change, assuming, perhaps implicitly, that pregnancy was nothing significant and could not possibly lead to physical changes that would require rest, proper nutrition, and calm and reasoned intervention.
I will stop myself there. That’s probably enough ill-advised humor unleashed on the humorless. The point of all this is to illustrate that Kisin is correct: Identity politics cause real suffering in the lives of real people. The pain—the screaming on the inside—of Grose’s life occurred not because she was a pregnant mother, but because she had adopted a set of ideas and a lifestyle that are unhelpful for navigating the way things are.
It is perverse as the book continues to see that Grose attempts to use her unfounded identity politics to forge some kind of sisterhood with single mothers trying to find childcare while working a job at a fast-food restaurant. Ah, yes, where have we seen this total lack of all proportion and miserable self-imposed suffering? As previously noted, Grose is successful and relatively affluent with two married parents willing and able to help her, a committed husband who is also willing and able to help her. In other words, she has basically nothing in common with a single mother working a minimum wage job.
Is Grose’s life sometimes difficult? Of course! Everyone’s is! Is some of her unhappiness due to bad ideas? Yes, but they do not belong to the patriarchy, whatever that is. The feminist principles that guide her life led her to unrealistic expectations (you should want to get a more challenging job while pregnant; pregnancy should not inconvenience you at all; your life should not be disrupted by a baby). That’s where the most suffering comes from.
As Kisin correctly identifies, when people become fixated on their own supposed victimhood, even in the face of so much overwhelming evidence of advantages and benefits, an objectively good life can seem like one of unending injustice and pain. It need not be so.
If you express doubt about the feminist claims and advances, you will often be told that it was necessary because women had to “get angry” for anything to change. Have you met angry women? They are often severely constrained in their ability to get anything done, and, worse yet, are susceptible to manipulation because anger consumes us and robs us of the capacity for rational argument.
Edited to add: Many women, myself included, never knew anger until having children. It’s understandable that this seemingly causal relationship could be interpreted as verifying Grose’s claims. I will grant that there is a lot of anger that can erupt when you are wholly unprepared for the task at hand and lacking the necessary help to maintain calm and order. However, the solution is not to spend the next 18 years stewing. Recovering the lost art of respite is an excellent first step.
There are many mothers who are not “screaming on the inside.” If you want to know their secrets, you have to disengage from the self-soothing narrative that this is all someone else’s fault. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but on the other side is freedom. Besides that, if someone really is oppressing you, calm and self-control render you much more likely to succeed in outwitting him. Failure to govern oneself well is an invitation to further oppression.
