Just because you don’t have a baby doesn’t mean you can’t be fulfilled! You can still strap something to your chest and walk around town singing to it, even if your cervix is entirely unvarnished. Once you liberate yourself from the oppressive socially-constructed matriarchal mythology that constrains female choices and dictates that it’s only acceptable to swaddle a “baby,” you’ll find a new of realm of empowerment and sociopolitical mobility available to you. You can have it all!
Cat
It’s amazing how much the world will open up to you once you don’t feel pressure to stay home with the cat all day. Now you can go to the park, or the library to think about finding a job, all with your little snuggle bunny in tow. Is it “crazy” to carry your heavily sedated cat around in a sling? No, feudalistic political establishment, it’s not.
Soccer Ball
You love soccer more than your friends love their babies, and you shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed or inadequate by the neoliberal agenda. Fasten a soccer ball to your chest and walk around the mall. It’s 2015. You have a right to support the head of something that doesn’t have a head!
Houseplant
What takes as much of your time and energy as raising a baby would? Keeping the plant in your kitchen alive. But society and the lamestream media say it’s okay to publicly swaddle one but not the other. Why? Follow the money.
Book
You’re proud of the book you’re reading and you should let everyone know. A source of comfort and pride, it should be the first thing everyone sees when they encounter you, and it should ultimately come to define you. The difference between your book and a baby is that when you’re done with your book you can throw it in the trash and buy a different, better book. If you did that with a baby? Uhummm, you would be crazy!! Cuddle up with a book while reading a book.
Half & Half
What’s more useful than a helpless high maintenance three-month-old human? Literally anything else. Take a pint of half and half and safely wrap it in a $70 fleece garment. See how easy that is? It’s better to tote the resources you use several times a day instead of creating a resource drain that uses you. When articulated this way it makes a lot of sense, but for some reason no one’s having this conversation in the public sphere. And that reason is “entrenched patriarchy and essentialist female desire suppression”. Get your dairy swaddle on!
Having a baby and carrying it around with pride is a fine choice if you’re comfortable being capitalism’s abject handmaiden. But if you’d like to combat the policing of female ambition, grab a bed sheet and something that won’t grow to resent and disappoint you, and say to the oligarchical fat cats on Capitol Hill: #YesAllSwaddles.
