Feminist model Emily Ratajkowski announced her pregnancy Monday in an essay in Vogue and it was a fascinating study in how a progressive pro-abortion white feminist dedicated to the #MeToo movement wrestles with the contradictions inherent in the intersection of pregnancy and the liberal orthodoxies of gender and race.
To give you an idea of how ultra-leftist Ratajkowski is, this was the Bernie-supporting woman who declared Hillary Clinton “pretty extreme and very, very, you know, to the right of where I'd like to see the party headed” during the 2016 primary. Any radical left-wing Hollywood action that’s been taken in recent years, Emily has been there, from getting arrested at an anti-Brett Kavanaugh protest to marching with Black Lives Matter.
So, it’s no wonder that she would obsess over the implications of the gender of her child, complaining, “I don’t like that we force gender-based preconceptions onto people, let alone babies,” and ranting about “the undeniable constraints and constructions of gender.”
When people ask her and her husband about the sex of their baby, she wrote:
We like to respond that we won’t know the gender until our child is 18 and that they’ll let us know then. Everyone laughs at this. There is a truth to our line, though, one that hints at possibilities that are much more complex than whatever genitalia our child might be born with: the truth that we ultimately have no idea who—rather than what—is growing inside my belly. …
I like the idea of forcing as few gender stereotypes on my child as possible. But no matter how progressive I may hope to be, I understand the desire to know the gender of our fetus; it feels like the first real opportunity to glimpse who they might be.
Hmmm, so maybe gender is more than just a social construct? Later, when she wrote about how her body is changing, she noted: “My husband has no physical symptoms in ‘our’ pregnancy, another reminder of how different a woman and man’s experience of life can be.” Ironic that just as she is gaining new appreciation for the uniquely feminine ability to sustain life and give birth, she is committing heresy as woke scolds will no doubt come out of the woodwork to say, “Men can experience pregnancy, too!”
Even her contemplations of who her child will be betray the pro-abortion line. Her love for Planned Parenthood comes out when she uses the sterile phrase “our fetus,” but she ultimately can’t help but embrace pro-life language, concluding, “I’m already learning from this person inside my body.” Amazing what a clump of cells can teach you!
Still, Ratajkowski draws harsh conclusions from the feminist theory she has been fed all her life and believes in. She worries about having a girl because “I still fight subconscious and internalized misogyny on a regular basis,” but she’s “scared of having a son” because of #MeToo and white male privilege:
I’ve known far too many white men who move through the world unaware of their privilege, and I’ve been traumatized by many of my experiences with them. And boys too; it’s shocking to realize how early young boys gain a sense of entitlement—to girls’ bodies and to the world in general. I’m not scared of raising a “bad guy,” as many of the men I’ve known who abuse their power do so unintentionally. But I’m terrified of inadvertently cultivating the carelessness and the lack of awareness that are so convenient for men. It feels much more daunting to create an understanding of privilege in a child than to teach simple black-and-white morality. How do I raise a child who learns to like themself while also teaching them about their position of power in the world?
The psychosis that white guilt has plagued mothers with was shown even more clearly in the next paragraph. How much has society been training people to hate white men? Ratajkowski wrote of a friend who cried and grew to resent her husband when she found out she was having a boy.
My friend who is the mother to a three-year-old boy tells me that she didn’t think she cared about gender until her doctor broke the news that she was having a son. She burst into tears in her office. “And then I continued to cry for a whole month,” she says matter-of-factly. After a difficult birth experience, she developed postpartum depression and decided that she resented her husband more than she’d ever imagined possible. She told me she particularly hated—and she made an actual, physical list that she kept in her journal, editing it daily—how peacefully he slept. “There is nothing worse than the undisturbed sleep of a white man in a patriarchal world.” She shakes her head. “It was hard to come to terms with the fact that I was bringing yet another white man into the world. But now I adore him and can’t imagine it any other way.” She also eventually learned to love her husband again. The sound of his perfect sleep next to her at night is now tolerable.
Ratajkowski didn’t really have anything to say about that, no exploration of the consequences of liberalism ad absurdum or what she can learn from it.
There were a lot of half-baked musing that almost sound meaningful in this essay, if only she would connect the dots and repudiate the poison of an ideology that rejects the differences between men and women, denies the humanity of the unborn, and teaches white women to hate their husbands and sons. Who knows? Maybe motherhood will moderate this radical and one day her scattered thoughts will give birth to something more fully formed and mature.
