NOVEMBER 10 — Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata is perhaps proof that gender issues are not a modern affectation but something centuries old.
The story of the play is how some women decide to try and stop a war by urging married women to desist from having sex with their husbands until they call off the fighting.
This “sex strike” has even made its way into modern feminism with US actor Alyssa Milano also exhorting women to stop having sex as a means to avoid pregnancy, to protest an abortion ban.
Milano’s suggestion is problematic in a lot of ways because it falls on age-old stereotypes of women wielding sex as a weapon, their one trump card against men.
Where does that leave women who are celibate by choice or who do not sleep with men in the first place?
The cost-benefit ratio of children
The thing I’ve been pondering most, however, is the loud, unrelenting voices that call on women to have babies.
China, Singapore, South Korea, Japan — these countries are seeing low birth rates and are trying to persuade and cajole their women into getting married and keeping their population numbers up.
China being China, parts of its babymaking campaign involves cracking down hard on LGBT communities and making getting an abortion very hard.
I have no pity for China. This is the country who once tried to enforce a one-child policy, which included heavy-handed measures such as forced sterilisations and abortions.
Now the gender balance is skewed due to many families selectively choosing to have boys and now China is panicking, realising that fewer babies are being born despite relaxing the one-child restriction.
It mystifies me that what all these governments (ours included) seem to be collectively forgetting is that children are expensive.
My sister’s tales about how expensive it is to give birth in the US, where maternity leave isn’t even mandated, makes me wonder how people afford to have kids there.
Even Malaysian medical insurance often refuses to cover pregnancies in most cases — so if I die from bleeding out after childbirth, well, too bad. Unless I pay extra for some rider to cover that.
Insurance companies probably know, number crunchers that they are, that giving birth is not a straightforward process.
Natural births come with possible complications and even when you’re in a hospital, any number of mishap could cause the death of the mother, baby or both.
Poor couples skipping out and leaving their babies in hospitals because they could afford neither the bills nor the actual baby is not a rare occurrence.
Even the entire nine months before the pregnancy involves regular checkups, supplements and of course acquiring baby-related paraphernalia.
I remember my Facebook feeds being full of my mommy friends sharing details of baby fairs and sales because it was important to find savings wherever they could.
Sometimes I wonder if Mothercare went into administration because all the mommies chose to wait to buy from them at clear-out sales.
Everything needs to be free
My middle-aged friends have kids in primary school but are already stressing about college and whether they can afford to pay for that on top of their 30-year mortgages.
I’m just thankful that my main problem with my dog is trying to convince him that having fried chicken every day is just as bad for him as it is for my bank account.
A social activist I follow recently took in two underprivileged girls, sharing how they had to drop out of school as they could not afford to go.
The girls are now back in school but the thing is, there should be funds and contingency plans at all schools to aid impoverished pupils.
Instead we keep seeing nauseating poverty porn in the media about teachers using their own salaries to buy uniforms and food for their students.
Bad enough that many teachers have to pay out of pocket for classroom teaching aids; why should they be forced into charity?
It’s not like our country doesn’t have the funds, no matter how much bleating there is about 1MDB. There is plenty that can be trimmed from our country expenditure — no official cars, just give serving government workers and elected reps allowances and a one-time car purchase deposit payment.
Trim the Cabinet, we do not need so many deputy ministers whose jobs seem to be to just give statements that were probably written by their long-suffering press secretaries.
Let the press secretaries embrace that thing the last administration was so fond of — PDFs.
Create transparently-run (humorous, I know) funds for education and training that private firms need to contribute to on a sliding scale.
Perhaps, however, things will only change if for once, we don’t get horrible kiss-ass press releases from various parties that praise our announced Budgets to the sky.
In the meantime though, women have no recourse but to spend a lot of time and resources to reach out to each other... to help them learn how not to have babies.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
