Feminists don't really hate babies, as a rule. I though a provocative headline might just grab your attention.

It seemed to work for the women's online mag Double X. Katie Roiphe's essay "My Newborn Is Like A Narcotic. Why Won't Feminists Admit the Pleasure of Infants?" seems to be getting a lot of attention. Not all of it flattering.

In it, Roiphe rhapsodizes on the opiate-like effect of her six-week old son. Driven by a combination of sleep deprivation and a lingering oxytocin high, Roiphe notes that "people often compare having a new baby to the early days of a new love affiar, which is true as far as it goes, but one's physical fixation on, and craving for, a newborn is much stonger and more intense than that. How often in a love affair can you literally find yourself in tears because you were away from a man for three hours?"

Furthermore, she revels in her obsession: "Some of the pressing tasks I do—say, running to the drugstore to buy more pacifiers—are just excuses to think about the baby, to obsess and dwell upon every little thing about him. Here again is the singular fixation that characterizes addiction rather than calm productivity. The new mother will say, “Look how tiny his fingernails are,” or “What I love are his ears.”"

If she had stopped there, I doubt there would have been much fuss over her piece. But, because she's a cultural critic with a long history of firing broadsides on the Body Female, she had to take it the next step:

"One of the minor dishonesties of the feminist movement has been to underestimate the passion of this time, to try for a rational, politically expedient assessment. Historically, feminists have emphasized the difficulty, the drudgery of new motherhood. They have tried to analogize childcare to the work of men; and so for a long time, women have called motherhood a "vocation.""

There's almost no sport in ripping into the work of a person who is, by her own definition, impaired, and with so many unloved babies in the world, you can't begrudge one that is so extravagantly adored. But like every women of childbearing age in America today I have been drafted as a foot-soldier in the Mommy Wars, so I can't just hold fire.

First: while there are probably some feminists who only like babies when they're sauteed in truffle oil and served over the flame-roasted testicles of convicted wife-beaters, they're not in the majority. Roiphe, the daughter of Second Wave feminist Anne Roiphe, well knows that much of modern feminism has been devoted to giving women choice about whether or not to have children, and protecting their rights in the workplace when the choose to have one.

Second: she presents her experience of motherhood as The Truth. This, more then than the anti-feminist salvo, has raised the ire of commenters around the web. Because some women never get the opiate rush of a newborn. Some descend into the kind of hell only real opiates can relieve. Some of us don't really want to have children. Some of us can't have children. Some of us adopt children, but under Roiphe's theory, can't love our babies nearly as much, because we have missed her estatic "musing over and over on the basic miracle: This entirely formed human being just emerged from my body."

Finally, there's the disengenuousness. "The act of caring for a baby is demanding, and arduous, of course, but it is wilder and more narcotic than any kind of work I have ever done,"  she writes. The work Roiphe has done involves writing about how she feels about being a woman in this allegedly post-feminist era. Do we really believe that we're not going to be seeing a book about this experience by the time her little nipper is potty-trained? For a memoirist, there's no such thing as work-life seperation, and it's an insult to her readers to pretend otherwise.

Mommy Lit is almost exclusively the purview of highly-educated, urban, upper-middle-class women. Katie Roiphe has a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Princeton; she's written four books and teaches at NYU. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. She's a smart woman.

But whenever I read these kind of essays, I wonder about the other women -- the women whose maternity leaves are dictated by how long they can go without pay, whose decisions about breastfeeding are driven by their schedules at factories or stores or resturants, whose shopping lists are governed not by local and organic but how to make the food-stamps last the week, whose "choices" over what school to send their child are non-existant.

I wonder about their lives, and how different motherhood in America might be if we honored their stories.
 
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