We discuss the Twitter scandal I unwittingly caused by talking about the connection between children and art. What was meant as an offhand remark made people angry beyond belief. The thing, as I find out, is that “kids” are a touchy subject in left-liberal creative circles, largely because America is schizophrenic place where the economic reality and culture are very out of sync. As I recently wrote, liberal feminism here liberated women to work and have sex freely, yet motherhood has remained a private matter — there is no subsidized childcare, no maternity leave, no universal healthcare, and all things related to childrearing remain largely unchanged from the 1950s and this has only gotten worse because of how expensive everything has become and how little wages have grown.
I keep saying how I increasingly feel like I come form the future — not just in terms of growing up in post-collapse 90s Russia, but also in terms of having Soviet expectations as a woman that are way beyond what American feminists had won here. I grew up with the idea that you can be a mother and a woman and have a career or an art life and be independent of the earning capability of your husband because of things like socialized childcare, healthcare, and leisure activities for kids. It might sound utopian, but all this existed in the USSR and has remained somewhat in place in Russia today. Where I come from — the future — women were fully liberated in 1917…liberated in ways that America still has not reached today. What I’m learning is that at its core America is a profoundly conservative and backwards place that hides this conservatism by peppering it with various cultural freedoms and psyops, slogans and PR spins.
Yasha and I discuss how this reality is at the core of the backlash against my tweets. Many people have been convinced they don’t want children, but really they were robbed of the chance at being parents or have been forced to delay it indefinitely. They’re touchy about it and are lashing out.
—Evgenia
