I lived for years in a sexually liberated lesbian commune, but found true peace when I married a man

Feb 25, 2023 by Jill

by Mary Harrington, Daily Mail:

Up to the point where I got pregnant, I’d taken for granted that men and women are substantially the same apart from our dangly bits.

The experience of being a mother blew this out of the water.

Until then I’d bought uncritically into the idea that individual freedom is the highest good, that bonds or obligations are acceptable only inasmuch as they are optional, and that men and women can and should pursue this equally.

Then I went through the wonderful and disorienting experience of finding my sense of self partly merged with a dependent infant. The kind of absolute freedom I’d accepted as an unalloyed good was suddenly a great deal less appealing to me because I actively enjoyed belonging to my daughter.

It was obviously not in her interests to go on insisting that my obligations to her were optional. Where, pre-baby, I could do more or less what I liked, as a mother I couldn’t refuse to get up and feed my crying newborn at 3.30am just because I didn’t feel like it.

Her interests mattered more than my once-treasured autonomy.

[…] As I’ve set about trying to square these discoveries with my previous beliefs, I have come to rethink my previous belief that patriarchy is a mass conspiracy to oppress women. Instead, I have come to see it as the result of historical human efforts to balance the conflicting interests of the two sexes.

Read here