"As a student of the family, you might be interested in a small but poignant detail in today’s New York Times, a photo of the great tsunami roaring in towards an Indonesian tourist beach. A mixed group of adults and kids are running like hell away from the wave, while a young woman, closer to the foreground, appears to be running towards the wall of death, and towards the fleeing children, as though to save them. I hope she and they made it. Was she driven by patriarchal social indoctrination towards maternalism, or by the instinctive, automatic heroism of parenthood? I do think it’s the latter."
I always get upset when I hear men either denying the maternal instinct exists or worse yet, attempting to claim it as their own.
The above quote is an example of the sorts of politically correct bullcrap that has been floating around for the past decade or so. That there is no maternal instinct, no mother/child bond...but instead there exists a 'parenting' instinct which both mother and father possess in equal amounts.
I often think when I hear these sorts of things is there anything that men won't try to lay claim to? Is there any resource, person, place, living being, thought or even an instinct that greedy selfish men don't want for themselves?
Sadly the answer appears to be no.
The bottom line is there is no evidence whatsoever that a parenting instinct exists or frankly that even a fatherhood instinct exists. Fatherhood is a social construct. There is no bond or link between father and child, other then the one that is created after birth, of which there is nothing instinctual about it.
It's entirely a product of the human imagination, as the sheer numbers of paternity fraud cases today makes abundantly clear... The every ease of its creation probably also explains the ease of its dissolution, thus the existence of the 'prodigal fathers' of today that appear to be one of the most intractable problems faced by western civilization and has been since the time of Rome. Augustus Caesar faced the same problem for the same reason and failed just as we ultimately will to solve the problem.
As there is no solution basically, none...
You cannot force people to feel some emotion that you think they should feel. So try as we might we are never going to get men to FEEL, THINK OR ACT like mothers towards their children...
Sorry...
That being said, the people I'm really furious at right now, however, are the men that let this mother in the article down.
First the patriarchal society she was born into, that obviously cared nothing about the young of their country, since they had two hours notice and could even have ordered police officers, driving around with bullhorns, to warn people so they could evacuate.
Second the blasphemous comments from the man who posted this, witnessing the picture of this mother's death agony, yet was so selfish, so self-centered, so concerned with the male role in this (which was nothing) that he just couldn't resist trying to get points for himself and every other male in the world by attempting to divert attention from this mother. She raced into a wave, in what was a heroic but probably futile attempt to save her child and he turned her sacrifice into a self-righteous pat on the back for himself and a backhanded slap at every other mother.
Does it ever end?
The maternal instinct exists in every species including our own and has been there since before man, woman, patriarchies, social indoctrination, gender neutral propaganda or politically correct speech were invented. Attempts to deny it or degrade it's existence by redefining it into a 'parenting' instinct is just another example of men trying, once again, to make themselves the apex of everything.
This so-called parenting instinct is nothing but another attempt by men to interfere with the critical mother/child bond, which is the very essence and heart of every mothers' existence.
