Covid Lockdown: the Motherload Vaccine
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| Injections hurt. But not as much as the disease they teach the body about. |
Perhaps instead the right metaphor would be ‘inoculated against’?
After all, what would I be cured of? To be cured of Motherload – that tentacular, polyvalent term which signifies every woman’s complex relationship with her reproductive function, throughout her lifetime, and always in a fraught social and cultural context – would mean… to be withered, a crone, abandoned, pointless. Redundant. I’m not quite ready for that, being still alive.
No, ‘Motherload’ in that sense, I don’t think can be cured. Like DNA, Motherload partakes of the very stuff of life, it is a principle of creativity. A handy mnemonic to understand that creation always also implies an act of destruction, at once a fusion which elides difference, and a fission which divides, and goes on dividing.
‘Motherload’ is, in the end, just an idea. It is a way of talking about what has always been, for me (but not just for me) a cultural phenomenon: the toxicity of ideas about modern Motherhood in the affluent West. ‘Motherload’ is an idea about ideas. Completely virtual. It does not exist. I made it up.
Motherhood exists. There really are real babies, produced through meiosis.
‘Motherload’, on the other hand, is both mimetic and memetic. It’s a representation (mine) of the falsified nature of Motherhood — and not the real thing. And it’s memetic to the extent that I can persuade others of it. Sell it. Feed it into the cultural bloodstream.
‘Motherload’ is an idea currently more Athena than Metis, but I have high hopes of persuading you all that if Zeus felt the need to swallow his wife so that he could give birth to Athena from his head, there’s been something scientifically bonkers about patriarchy for a very long time indeed. Ideas, like babies, let’s just say, aren’t created or bodied forth off the top of our heads.
What I have always been talking about is the pernicious spread of toxic ideas about what it means ‘to be a mother,’ once women have been liberated from slavery, drudgery, objectification, exploitation, kinship structures, trading and othering of all kinds. Once they have been accepted into workplaces, allowed to have positions of authority. Once their education has moved beyond basic literacy into qualification and achievement. So, in around – hang on, when? Now? 50 years ago? When New Zealand gave women the vote in 1893? When Adam gave Eve permission to go and look round the Garden of Eden on her own? As if she needed it? And really as an excuse to blame her when she starting pointing out some facts? I digress.
Having been allowed into the public world, a construction which has always been advertised everywhere as exclusively male (just read Hesiod and Homer, but also the Vedas and the Upaniṣads), not as tokens, but en masse, of course women are starting to wake up to the fact that whole new forms of exploitation have always awaited them upon their release from prison. Whole new realms of misogyny.
But this time round, they are doing it to themselves, and the menfolk just need to lie back and watch.
Self-hating women – women who think of themselves as despoiled men, girls who believe the lies told about what their bodies should look like, mothers who swallow the nonsense about childrearing, females everywhere who say nothing as their labour is removed from them – are all over the place. It’s not women we should beware. The woman-matrix is just fine. No, it’s women who carry damaged, partial, or crippled images of themselves that we need to attend to. We need to be aware of, be kind to, and sometimes beware, self-loathing women.
Really, I should have called my idea ‘Motherloathe’ — it would have been much closer to the essence of what I was getting at.
But here’s the thing. ‘Self-loathing’ (persuasive though it is) can only ever be half the story. Self-loathing is a crippled version of true self-reflection – which will always show us all of ourselves, the light AND the dark, the shadow and the substance.
All acts of reflection look both outwards and inwards. They are based on comparison, certainly — the similarities to and the differences from others, which invite us to wonder whether we should change, have changed, ought to instruct others how to change… Humanity could not function as a thinking species without self-reflection. And it’s our capacity to recognise where we are not identical with ourselves which promotes innovation, problem-solving, which pricks the imagination, encourages world-building, and drives us on in our dissatisfaction. We are the species doomed only to meet ourselves in our deaths. Permanently restless, we wander on.
So ‘Motherload’ is part of the problem in order to be a solution to the problem.
I have to talk about how we have internalised the misogyny which has always been directed at us, so that I can develop the vaccine which will inoculate us.
I need to speak about how women set out to hurt each other, so that we can all learn that we do not need to do it, or be hurt by it. We are allowed to disagree.
I have to get in under the skin of ‘solidarity’, ‘equality’, ‘sisterhood’, not because I don’t believe in those things, but because I have learnt that they are the always-deferred goal of the quest to liberate men and women from their terrible, limiting ideas about themselves.
They are not where we are now. And they are not good weapons to fight with.
How do I know? Because I was the victim of a woman who set out consciously to destroy me, and because I have been a one-woman laboratory working on the vaccine ever since.
Inoculation works because of creativity, at the cellular level. To recover from shame and self-loathing, we have to vaccinate. We first have to understand the disease, in order to inject ourselves with a little of it, and trigger our immune systems into creating the antibodies that will protect us. The answers to disease lie within the body.
‘Motherload’ metaphorically points at what we load ourselves down with, as if we carried the whole history of the world upon our shoulders, took responsibility for every failed copy of the species, held our hands up and said that we would clean it up.
No one individual can carry everything. Humans did not evolve successfully because of individuals. They evolved by accident not design, and they survived through collective effort, not conflict.
The answers to the lies we have all swallowed about the relationship between the individual and the whole are in recognising that we are partial, never complete. We are made of stars, yes, but also of ourselves. The motherlode lies within us.
I do not speak about myself just to get attention. I do not speak about myself at all. Instead, self-talk offers inoculation. My – and other people’s – painful ‘I’ is the pricking needle, that gives us manageable doses of the dis-ease that surrounds us. It vaccinates us so that we can all breathe more easily.
Get a Motherload of that.
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