Parents, when emotional, sometimes regret deciding to be parents and other great surprises

I’ve been quiet today because I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the great feminist DOS attacks of the moment and the long long long threads discussing them: who’s responsible, what they were reacting to, whether what they claim actually occurred, who’s right, who’s wrong etc etc etc. One of those threads is currently running at 1000+ comments.

Short summary:

• Womensspace, a website founded by radical feminist (and notorious successful ex-fundamentalist litigant) Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff aka Heart, has been shut down due to DOS attacks.
• Heart has discussed this on her blog, which is run on a separate site.
• At least one and maybe more script-kid “hacker” forums have bragged about the coordinated DOS attack on Heart’s website and the websites of several people associated with Heart, and some people with an axe to grind over this incident have also sent Heart and commentors on Heart’s blog hate-mail and comments threatening rape and murder.
• The “justification” for the attack on Heart’s websites is that a blogger named Biting Beaver (BB), who acts as moderator on one of the discussion boards on Womensspace, posted about her distress on finding her teenage son masturbating to porn. She was so upset at his disregard of her teachings about the way porn degrades women that she wrote something like this: that at the moment she found him she felt herself wishing that she had gone ahead with the abortion she considered when she first fell pregnant. She also expressed concern that he would be influenced by porn to become a sexual coercer and even perhaps a rapist. The DOSsers and their defenders are judging such statements as child abuse, and thus they defend their attacks: BB must be exposed. The attacks have also led to BB making her own blog private, open to being read by invitees only.
• Many of the people defending the attacks on Heart’s website seem to be confusing Heart with BB, as well as confusing comments made by other posters in response to BB’s remarks as if BB wrote them. This sloppy reading is demonstrated in various other confusions of fact.
• Many of the people defending the attacks on Heart and BB seem to also be outraged by BB’s notoriety from last year, when she became a feminist cause-celebre after an unplanned pregnancy following contraceptive failure, and subsequently being denied Emergency Birth Control by so-called pro-life doctors, mainly because she was cohabiting with her lover but not married to him. Fundraising was done so that she could afford an abortion, as she felt the children she had already were enough for her.
• These same people get all the facts of that (now terminated) pregnancy confused with BB’s posts about the marital rape that resulted in the birth of the son with the burgeoning porn habit, and act as if BB had been engaging in a casual one-night-stand and thus morally deserved the punishment of pregnancy and childbirth, and if you’re confused as well by now I’m not surprised.
• Because both Heart and BB are controversial, nay notorious, radical feminists, these attacks aren’t getting anything like the coverage that the threats against tech-blogger Kathy Sierra did earlier this year. She wasn’t asking for it, see? Both have also been involved in their fair share of interblog spats with other feminists, so that in some ways the pool of sympathy for either of them is limited within the femblog community.

For the record: what BB said about fleetingly wishing that she’d gone ahead with an abortion? Harsh. Hurtful. Nasty. If she’d actually said it to her son.

There’s no evidence that she did – she posted the sentiment on a forum where the other people there were people she trusted, and she had no reason to believe her son would ever see it. Other people on the forum said even harsher things about their occasional wishes that they’d chosen differently about becoming mothers. Thanks to the actions of the DOSsers, it’s now almost inevitable that he will find out that his mother said these words, and quite possibly that what he reads will attribute the harsher words of other forum contributors to his mother. That is going to hurt. I’m adding my bit to the pile-on because if he does read those words I hope he’ll also end up reading the next paragraphs.

Think about it: is what she said any worse than what many teenagers have said to their parents? “I wish I’d never been born! I wish you were dead!” Teenagers say that stuff to parents so often that it is a cliche – why is it apparently so unforgiveable that a parent, a mother, might sometimes feel exactly the same about their offspring in tense and emotional confrontations?

In moments of heightened emotion, people often say appalling things to each other, and those appalling things do not, despite some pop psychology myths, necessarily represent deep, hidden, “real” feelings. The loving companionship and nurturing between family members every single day is what’s real, not necessarily those dark, ugly, spiky words that boil up when people are angry and hurt.

The DOSsers and and/or their defenders are arguing that by raising her son to read Dworkin and regard porn as degrading instead of as a way to assuage “natural pubertal curiosity”, and that by teaching him that any coercion at all in the area of sexuality is the start of the slippery slope to rape, that BB is distorting his masculinity. I’ll certainly agree that what BB is doing in that regard is not the normal socialisation of male children in our society, which usually socialises male children to objectify women and disregard women’s autonomy. BB has a painful personal history, and like most parents is compensating for the life experiences that hurt her by attempting to raise her own children differently. But are her different beliefs on their own enough to constitute child abuse? On the sole evidence of some emotional venting on blogs and discussion forums?

There are many imperfect parents out there who nonetheless love their children and do the best they can for them. Some people, not just the DOSsers, are rushing to the conclusion that this emotional outburst and a few others that they’ve found from BB are signs of severe emotional instability that means she should have her kids taken away. I have to say: how many of you are experts in family psychology who have conducted a thorough clinical examination? I haven’t examined here either, but if venting pseudonymously on blogs about how parenting is not always a beautiful thing means that one is mentally ill and an abusive parent, there’s going to be an awful lot of kids taken into care.

If there was actually evidence of abusive parenting I’d be all for removing BB from her children’s lives, but there is no such evidence. Are we absolutely sure that pseudonymous rants on the internet are a well supported clinical sign of child abuse? How many conservative bloggers and MRA bloggers will fall into that net if you spread it that wide? Surely posting threats of rape and murder in comments and in email would be considered just as much a sign of an abusive personality? Have the DOSsers thought their principlies through here? Or is this just another case of grasping at anything to attack the radfems?