An Open Letter to Oppressive Humorist Mommybloggers

Dear Kelcey Kintner of The Mama Bird Diaries (and all other Mommybloggers Who Would Dare Lead Impressionable Women Astray),

Greetings from a suburban mother, housewife and blogger from a flyover state! I don't believe we have met before (Though, some fancy sophisticated East Coast bloggers who ought to have been setting an example for me did convince me to get a little drunk at my last BlogHer, and my memory of subsequent events is a little fuzzy. So who can say for certain?).

I am writing you a letter because I hear that you are apparently oppressing me with humor.

I suppose my female mind has been poisoned by all of the amusing anecdotes about motherhood that I have recently read on the internet, because I cannot, for the life of me, figure out just how it is that you are managing to kill feminism and force misguided Midwestern women like me to be mediocre with your humorous posts about wearing pants.

But now that I have been informed about how dangerous women writers like you are, before I go and try to write another post over at that political blog I write along with a bunch of other mommybloggers (by the way, that blogger who is telling the whole internet that women like you who write about funny stories about parenting are ruining humanity for the next generation of women might want to check our little mom-run political blog out, actually — the First Lady once posted there — I certainly hope we humble mommybloggers didn't corrupt her accomplishments by association), I think that perhaps I ought to cleanse my mind of the evil influence of women who dare to write publicly about the dirty, drudgerly work of raising children by contemplating some dead male social pundits' ridiculous bloviations on the supposed intrinsic inferiority of women:

The man who fights for two or more in the struggle for existence, who has all the responsibility, and the cares of tomorrow, who is constantly active in combating the environment and human rivals, needs more brain than the woman whom he must protect and nourish, the sedentary woman, lacking any interior occupations, whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive.- -Paul Topinard

Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and more understanding than women, who have but small and narrow chests, and broad hips, to the end that they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children. -Martin Luther

Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted — in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word. Consider how a young girl will toy day after day with a child, dance with it and sing to it; and then consider what a man, with the very best intentions in the world, could do in her place.  -Arthur Schopenhaeur

Well, that was certainly an effective washing of my mommyblog-addled brain! A bracing reminder of —

Wait a minute.

I just noticed something.

All those men. Those unevolved, sexist, influential historical men who believed that women were inherently inferior. In all those quotes I just quoted, they weren't just talking about the inferiority of women, were they? 

No, it seems to me that all those sexist men I just quoted mentioned that inferior women were made inferior on purpose so that they would be perfectly suited to the inferior work of raising children. Which is obviously inferior work, because it is done by inferior women, who are inferior!

Hmm.

Could it be that labeling the work of raising children as an inferior occupation that women should avoid talking about so as not to be seen as inferior actually sets back feminism?

Because you know what? I'm pretty sure all those men I just quoted would be really pissed off by a bunch of women writers having the gumption to assume that their stories about motherhood might actually be wortth publishing in public.

Well, Kelcey. I guess you're not really oppressing me at all, are you? In fact, since the rise of blogging, women like you have been successfully subversively pissing off not just certain self-hating feminists, but also the patriarchy. Fancy that!

Carry on, mommybloggers who write humorous stories about pants.

Carry the revolution right on.