I've been reading Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Father Time, which is a companion volume to her two books Mother Nature and Mothers and Others. Hrdy is a biological anthropologist who looks at parenting, including alloparenting. Specifically, she looks at how human evolution was shaped by our need to first produce and then keep alive fat little expensive babies, which have to be carted about for two or three years and then provisioned for ten or fifteen more years.
That's a huge investment in calories and time, and if we're going to compete as a species, we need to produce, and keep alive, three or four children per woman. Hrdy's overall thesis is that this is impossible without the help of alloparents (which is to say, people besides the parents who are willing to invest time in and to provide calories for the babies). In this new book, Father Time, Hrdy repeats that thesis, but looks more specifically at fathers, and at men, and at how being around babies shapes human males. She also looks briefly at the effect not being around babies has on human males. She's talking about the biological effects -- brain growth, hormones, that kind of thing -- as well as the cultural effects.
This is a fascinating book, and I encourage everyone to read it. Among other things, Hrdy looks at how our current generation of fathers and men have changed and are changing; she talks about how grandparents and fictive kin are encouraged in various societies to help provision and care for children; and she looks at what happens when a society focuses on the rights and honor of men and the ability of men to control women, rather than on those babies and the need to care for them and keep them alive.
Which brings me to my secondary point -- the "Pro-Life" "Christian" culture which our current "conservatives" keep claiming as their own.
Oddly, this culture has very little to say about caring for or feeding children, except that parents should not expect anyone to help them feed or take care of those children. Its "pro-life" aspect, as we all have seen, is focused entirely on forcing people to continue pregnancies against their will. That's got almost nothing to do with babies and almost everything to do with controlling women (and people the GOP defines as women).
Our current GOP and "conservative" culture are focused -- well, they're focused on wealth concentration and capitalism, obvious, capitalism being their true religion.
But the "tradwife" movement and the "pro-life" movement and the push to remake the US into a Christian nation, ruled by the laws of a very few sects of Christianity -- those are all about control of people the GOP considers inferior, which is to say women, immigrants, poor people, and LGBTQ people.
You can tell because none of what they are trying to force the rest of us to accept has anything to do with provisioning people or helping families. You can also tell by the lies they tell and the laws they want to impose on us, all of which are about control, and none of which are about helping their fellow citizens.
Haitians are eating dogs and cats? That's about trying to control brown people, poor people, and immigrants, by bearing false witness, by the way, which is one of those ten commandments they idolize.
Democrats want to make it legal to kill newborn babies? That's about controlling the bodies and fertility of those inferiors.
Democrats are coming for your guns? The right of (certain) men to control others through violence shall not be infringed.
The things Christ actually said, which have to do with wealth redistribution, feeding the hungry, giving to the poor, and staying with and taking care of the family (which is why Christ forbids divorce), those are things our current "conservatives" not only ignore but actively treat as anathema. You should see my local FB page when they talk about beggars. It's not at all Christlike, that's all I have to say.
Christ, by the way, had nothing at all to say about gay people, or trans people, or abortion, for that matter. The only thing he had to say about violating sexual taboos has to do with not throwing stones. Our current conservatives do nothing BUT throw stones.
They don't want Christianity. They want control. They're the Christian version of the Taliban, and everyone who looks at them can see it.
