/lit/ - Literature

The real-world dystopia for the majority of women in the age of Trump is not that they are being forced to have children by a repressive traditonalist state but that they’re being compelled not to by far more insidious forces, and those that do are financially and socially punished at every turn.

What has happened instead, a half century on from the sexual revolution, is something more complicated — a total hegemonic fusion of the corporate and the countercultural, of progressivism, modernity, and the market. It is pregnancy, not birth control, that burdens our current system with awkward unprofitable human functions and needs.

The mythologies of our age in the West are not enforced by repressive theocratic regimes, but by the market command to be free, to be creative, to be flexible, to love what you do for even the most uninspiring of jobs. Work flexibility and freedom from ties to family duty and hierarchical institutions promised by the corporate-counterculture that reached its zenith in the 1990s has turned out to mean increased precarity and a race to the bottom in living standards. The promise of this vision has become, for those who can’t enter adulthood but are edging closer to natural infertility, a permanent CV-building career ladder leading to nowhere.

Trump’s courting of anti-abortion conservatives and the fervent anti-feminism of his online traditional wife-seeking male fans certainly suggest a worrying turn but we are still far from Gilead. The real material unfreedom women experience today is a product of the subordination of everything to the market, not to traditionalism. Indeed, the rightward turn represented by the emergence of the youthful Trumpian right may be in part a product of the failure of progressive movements to diagnose our new problems of loneliness and atomization with calls for more of the sixties — individual freedoms, self-expression, and non-conformism. Today, women having children are treated as an expense and a nuisance. Traditionalists long for a past to which they can never return. But in an age of automation we should all be working less and having more time for the things that give life meaning yet somehow the reverse has happened.