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Ecco la risposta sul New York TImes del 9 november 2010 (nel blog Motherlode) all’articolo di Erica Jong apparso nel Wall St Journal del 6 novembre, 2010:
By Katie Allison Granju and Jillian St. Charles
Erica Jong has always been a master provocateur. Usually, however, she’s pushing cultural buttons having to do with matters far more risqué than the mundane details of parenting.
In her op-ed in this week’s WSJ, however, the 68-year-old Jong sets her sights on exactly that – on the imagined consequences of the choices made by those of us currently in the mothering trenches.
The premise of Jong’s incredibly broad and unfocused screed against “today’s parents”  — a messy amalgam of multiple parenting cliches — seems to be that we current moms are naively, even stupidly unaware of just how imprisoned we are by the way we are choosing to raise our kids.
If only, Jong seems to suggest, we trapped, unfulfilled moms of today could understand how much better we could have it if we would stop committing multiple sins such as  “collecting” (Jong’s incredibly offensive term for the creation of families via adoption)  the “African and Asian children” that are nothing more than props to “advertise openmindedness.”
With scathing criticisms aimed at everyone from Madonna to Dr. William Sears, Jong is off and running in her lengthy, preachy and ultimately pointless laundry list of crimes she believes modern parents are committing. She is especially caustic in her assessment of those of us who choose to parent our babies and young children in an attached, hands-on way.
Jong’s stock in trade as a writer and a cultural observer has always been toprovoke outrage via the outrageous. These days, however, her ability to shock via suggestions of sexual boundary-pushing have become more than a little passe.
Thus, she’s apparently now decided to attempt to stir the pot by singing the praises of some sort of detached, Jongian-style “zipless parenting,” in which — as she says — “there are no rules.”  It’s a convenient position from which she can throw bombs at any target that doesn’t reflect her own choices.
But there’s really nothing new in what Jong has to say in her essay. In fact, American women have already heard this whole spiel about how we are trapped and imprisoned by our roles and choices as parents, and that criticism came from many in Jong’s generation of second-wave feminists.
In the late ’60s and throughout the ’70s, women were encouraged to free themselves of the excessive guilt and demands of motherhood in favor of a new womanly ideal that denied the reality that many women actually enjoy and are fulfilled by parenting their kids.
While second-wave feminism got so many things so very right, and made possible a great many of the career and life choices my generation of women enjoys today, many in that group of feminist thinkers got one thing fundamentally wrong, and that is this: even for those of us who are also productively employed outside the home — whether by choice, necessity or both — our most valued, fulfilling role is the one we take on as mothers to our children.
I do not sleep with my baby because some “guru” told me I should. In fact, lots of experts continue to tell women that we absolutely should NOT do this very thing. No, I sleep with my baby because after a day spent away from her at work, I enjoy feeling her snuggled next to us at night.
And while I feel guilty about a whole lot of things as a mother — as Jong admits she  also does in her essay — I don’t feel one iota of guilt about my decision to breastfeed or spend plenty of time with my kids. I am not imprisoned by my parenting. I enjoy it, most of the time.
And as for Jong’s assertion that mothers today don’t tell each other the truth about the difficult, challenging and even dark parts of the world’s toughest job, well she obviously hasn’t read any momblogs or any of the wave of “momoirs” that have been released in the last decade.
In fact, I am proud to say that the current generation of mothers is perhaps the first in history to proactively openly  and freely discuss the fact that on some days, parenting our kids is demanding, exhausting, heartbreaking and even boring beyond belief.
Perhaps the most irksome assertion that Jong makes in her essay is that we mothers today are so trapped and burdened by the way we’re choosing to parent our kids that we’ve become “perfect tools of the right” and thus, are prevented from working for progressive political change.
This is both insulting and inaccurate. Wearing my baby in a frontpack when I go out for a walk doesn’t make me a “tool,” and it also isn’t the reason for the continuing gender gap in workplace salaries.
Organic baby food isn’t the reason we still haven’t had a female president and some women’s decision to use cloth over disposable diapers for environmental reasons isn’t having any impact on the fact that working women in the U.S. are often back on the production line only a few weeks after giving birth.
Jong says that our hyperfocusing on our parenting choices allows us to avoid facing our broader, outward-facing  duties as citizens of the country and the world. In fact, however, she’s got it backwards.
Progressive politics begin at home, with the way we raise our children, and many women will tell you that becoming a mother was the most politically radicalizing experience of their lives. Suddenly, the personal really is political, in a very tangible way.
Instead of attacking the very real social and political pressures working against modern families, she turns individual women into both perpetrator and victim. Apparently our buy-in to the “ ‘noble savage’ view of parenting” removes us from rights and opportunities her generation of feminists worked hard to secure.
With no real concrete suggestions forthcoming, one is left to wonder whether Jong thinks women should ever do this whole mothering thing at all.
My suggestion for Jong is to quit blaming mothers for the things the feminist movement has yet left undone. As a politically active feminist and a mother myself, I believe her time and ability to command editorial space in The Wall Street Journal would be far better spent opining about things like the need for better family leave and health care policies, improved access to birth control and higher education and affordable child care for working mothers rather than whether Angelina Jolie plans to adopt again or how long my friends plan to breastfeed their babies.
Shame on Jong, a feminist celebrity herself, someone with a big voice and a big platform for using her celebrity status to promote such a mindless, infantile image of so many women and our deeply considered choices.
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