Maternity Metastasized

One of the most dangerous forces in the Western World today is unrequited maternal instinct

One of my neighbours is a middle-aged lady who teaches English as a Second Language at the local college. She’s a perfectly charming and sincere person, and a pillar of the local church.

We were discussing her job and the type of students she sees. There has always been, in her class, a smattering of everyone from everywhere - India, Asia and so on. In addition to that, there always seems to be a dominant group based on the current migration trend. After the expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe, she saw a lot of students from there, especially Poles. After Brexit, the Europeans started to leave, and were replaced by students from the Middle-East, Somalia and Afghanistan. Lots of Afghans.

I asked her if these were mostly fighting-age males. She nodded, and said they were mostly ‘boys’. A few ‘girls’ as well, but mostly ‘boys’. She was quick to tell me, unprompted, that they miss their mums. I noted straight away that she was infantilising these students. They are in fact, all adults. She admitted they are mostly single young men. This desire to infantilise them is a very feminine impulse, but it’s also wrong-headed and dangerous.

She told me, “One of them found himself in a shipping container, and by the time he arrived here in the UK, he was the only one left alive in it”. She looked as if she was about to cry while telling me this.

I noted the language she used, which was designed to absolve the fighting-age male illegal immigrant of any responsibility for his own predicament. The truth is, he didn’t ‘find himself’ in a shipping container. He paid a large sum of money to organised criminals to smuggle him over national borders. They provided a shipping container. He climbed into it voluntarily. She waved these questions away in a manner that told me she understood these points perfectly well and could not refute them, but basically wasn’t interested in thinking about it.

I find myself wondering exactly how and why he survived when all the others died. What exactly happened in that shipping container, when it was parked for an eternity on the quayside of some port somewhere, when it was rocking back and forth on a humming ship for days on end, full of human stowaways? How did they share the scarce resources? How did they cope with the stress? How did they deal with conflicts? It obviously never occurred to her to ask.

The only way she seemed to apprehend this story was from the point of view of a mother, who sees only a human tragedy, reacts on a purely emotional level, and just wants to care for the poor little lost children. There certainly is human tragedy involved here, but it is entirely preventable, and I wondered why, instead of employing women to cry about it, don’t we just stop it.

I asked her this. “If you want to stop any more of these tragic deaths, shouldn’t we stop the illegal people-trafficking trade?” She seemed to throw up her hands in despair. “But how can we stop it? I’m not even sure we can!”

We could use the Navy, I suggested. We can start properly managing the border, which is what most countries in the world do, and it’s what we used to do, up until about five minutes ago. She just looked absent and confused, and I didn’t pursue the point any further.

The very same Leftists who constantly drone on about the Atlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century (but never mention any other slave trade in human history), passionately defend this new English Channel Slave Trade, and call you a fascist if you so much as mention it.

Among middle-class liberals, the self-delusion runs deep.

I was struck by the blank despair that she showed when I suggested stopping illegal immigration. She literally had no idea whether we should even try, let alone how it could ever be achieved.

Her whole attitude, to me, tasted of femininity. Now, don’t get me wrong - there is nothing wrong with femininity. I’m a huge fan of it, actually. But there is a time and a place for everything, and enforcing the laws and defending the border against invasion are plainly not areas where femininity can shine brightest.

It struck me that my neighbour is in a relatively harmless position, working as a teacher. Imagine if people like that were making the decisions in Border force or the Home Office. I suspect that this is exactly what is happening in some cases. I think the current migration crisis has more than one cause. There are too many, in fact, to go into here. But there is one in particular that strikes me as under-examined.

I have been thinking for a while now that one of the most dangerous forces in the Western World today is unrequited maternal instinct. Feminism has actively encouraged women to remain childless and to enter the job market instead of becoming mothers.

The Social Constructionists on the Left of course deny that there is any such thing as maternal instinct, and think it’s all an evil plot by the Patriarchy to enslave women. If you put women out to work in a call centre, they’ll soon forget these ridiculous ideas about becoming mothers and embrace their true destiny as Capitalist debt-slaves.

However, the left is wrong about this, as about so much else. Of course there is such a thing as maternal instinct. How do you think humans managed to survive for so long, through all those countless millennia before we discovered Critical Gender Theory?

So, women are badgered into going out to work, and delaying motherhood, and at least some of those women choose ‘caring’ professions, where they can vent their frustrated maternal needs on proxies, which might include third-world fighting-age ‘boys’ who have entered the country illegally with who-knows-what intention.

There is probably nothing to be concerned about, though. I expect they just miss their mums.