Markup View

Author: Heatherly

Jun 4th 2010 at 4:04:42 PM

Well, first your premise is factually incorrect. You're mixing correlation with causation. The rise of divorce rates and decreased emphasis on two-parent households didn't create the single mother (the single mother has historically existed as long as the biological rule for humans has been that men have orgasms and women have babies). Divorce rates increased because getting divorced became less socially taboo and emphasis on two-parent households dropped because the ''number'' of two-parent households dropped and single parents fought to be recognized as valid families.

Second of all, your first paragraph has stereotypes about the single mother (welfare benefits and community outreach programs? You do know there are millions of single moms that don't, in fact, rely on those to raise their children, right? Particularly given that using them is so thoroughly designated as a thing to be ashamed of that a lot of people won't even apply) coated in detached analysis.

If you're going to do a detached analysis that includes stereotypes about the type of woman who becomes a single mother, why don't you touch on why it's usually the single mother instead of the single father?

Plus, you have a stealth-hostile subtext permeating the whole thing about how unrealistic it'd be for a woman to manage a career and a child at the same time by herself. (Children starved for attention and an ill-kept household are what ''real'' single mothers deal with? Really?) And by the way, if a woman is managing a career, not just holding down a job- which is a totally different thing- her resources for juggling it and a child are going to be significantly higher.

There's also an ongoing assumption that single parenthood is the result of partner loss or separation, not engaging at all with the idea that women actually can and ''do'' choose to have children by themselves, and have been doing so for decades.

I'm not going to deny that this is a trope (successful single mothers are on TV, their numbers aren't negligible), but the description as is smacks of "nudge, nudge, wink, wink, we know what women who have kids by themselves are ''really'' like, right, guys?" RealityIsUnrealistic indeed.

Stepping aside from the politics for a moment, it's also not exactly an appropriate write-up for a trope. It reads like an essay. I'm not browsing TV Tropes for an academic breakdown of your opinions on why single parents exist, or what policy makers are trying to do about it, I'm looking for that thing where single moms on TV magically don't have all those problems that single moms in real life sometimes do. Trope descriptions should be descriptions of ''the trope'' first, not the reasons why there is a trope and what it has to do with real life. This is why you see the "Alice and Bob doing verbs" descriptions, or entries written in the second person.

If these criticisms seem mututally exclusive? They're not. Either make the political analysis more neutral (and, frankly, a bit more grammatically sound- you've got run-on sentences and one where a single mother manages to be ''both''...three things, rather than the two things implicit in the word "both"), or make the description less of a political ThoughtsOnYaoi.