Make Helen do it
Giles Fraser wishes everything were more like the good old days when everybody stayed home except rich men.
Last week the Evening Standard – now, of course, a propaganda rag for George Osborne’s Remain-inspired end-of-the-world fearmongering – led with the following front-page headline: “Who’ll look after our elderly post Brexit, ask care chiefs”.
I’m still spitting blood at the arrogance and callousness of that question. It summed up all that I have against the Osborne neoliberal (yes, that’s what it is) world-view. And why I am longing for a full-on Brexit – No Deal, please – to come along and smash the living daylights out of the assumptions behind that question.
Is he standing up for exploited workers? Haha no, that’s not what he’s raging about at all.
First, let me answer the question. Children have a responsibility to look after their parents. Even better, care should be embedded within the context of the wider family and community. It is the daughter of the elderly gentleman that should be wiping his bottom. This sort of thing is not something to subcontract.
Of course; the daughter. She has nothing else to do, the lazy bitch – don’t talk to me about her job and the kids and dinner, she still has to wipe her father’s bottom, and her husband’s father’s bottom too if he needs it wiped. That’s what she’s for, god damn it.
Ideally, then, people should live close to their parents and also have some time availability to care for them.
Not people; women. It’s not men’s responsibility to look after their parents, it’s women’s. It’s important to keep that straight.
But, to drop the sarcasm for the moment, what of his first, less sexist version of the claim? What of “Children have a responsibility to look after their parents”? Do they?
I would say no. There may be other ways of saying they should, other things being equal, but I think “responsibility” is the wrong word since they never at any time had a chance to agree (or not) to take on the responsibility. The responsibility is in the other direction: parents owe it to their children. It doesn’t flow in the same way in both directions.
To a considerable extent, parents don’t want to be their children’s responsibility, if they can help it. It feels like being a burden and many people recoil at it. I suspect Fraser would say that’s because we all grow up in this atomistic greedy individualistic society, but then we can reply that the obverse is societies with a rigidly hierarchical view of age such that parents are always in a position to exploit their children (especially daughters) if they want to. At any rate I think his flat assertion that children have a responsibility to look after their parents claims way too much.
Back to his drivel about what a bad thing freedom of movement is:
Social mobility is very much a young person’s value, of course. Get on. Get out of your community. Find a job anywhere you please. Undo the ties that bind you. The world is your oyster.
This is the philosophy that preaches freedom of movement, the Remainers’ golden cow. And it is this same philosophy that encourages bright working-class children to leave their communities to become rootless Rōnin, loyal to nothing but the capitalist dream of individual acquisition and self-advancement.
Well, it’s perfectly possible to change one’s address without becoming loyal to nothing but the capitalist dream of individual acquisition and self-advancement. People can leave the home city to do idealistic things, useful things, generous things; people can grow up and make their own choices about where to live. It’s not becoming for Giles Fraser to say they mustn’t.
Always on the move, always hot desking. Short-term contracts. Laptops and mobiles – even the tools of modern workplace remind us that work no longer has any need of place. All this is a philosophy that could not have been better designed to spread misery and unhappiness. Human beings need roots for their emotional and psychological flourishing. They need long-term, face-to-face relationships; they need chatting in the local post office; they need a sense of shared identity, shared values, mutual commitment. No amount of economic growth is worth sacrificing all this for.
What garbage. Freedom of movement does not mean mandatory constant movement, it means freedom of it. Maybe some people do need to live in the same place all their lives, but if they do it’s for them to find that out, not Giles Fraser to impose it on them as a rule.
My GP friend is Muslim, and a fairly conservative one I think it’s fair to say. We were eating in a Pakistani restaurant in Tooting. All around us extended Muslim families were sitting together, children and the elderly, aunts and uncles. It was a buzzy hub of a homogeneous society – the sort of society that the West sometimes criticises for being inward looking. “They must integrate!” comes the familiar line, which, in effect, means they should disperse, learn the values of progressive individualism.
From where I was sitting it is these people – and not George Osborne swanning off to his new £3 million chalet in Verbier – that have got it right.
He seems to have forgotten something – a rather large and obvious something. At some point some of those people moved, or their elders did. Pakistani restaurants have not been in Tooting since the Domesday book, now have they.
He’s being badly ratioed. 740 likes, 2800 replies. He’s sulking.
It does no good to say “I didn’t say that at all” when a gleeful mob is after you. Just pour a glass of red and tomorrow is another day.
— Giles Fraser (@giles_fraser) February 22, 2019
I would think so.
One of the things that certain types of busybodies like to ask people without children is “who’s going to care for you when you’re old and feeble? Do you really want some stranger wiping your ass?”
If by “stranger” you mean “a trained professional who is paid for their expertise and general decency and bedside manner, hell yes. What kind of parent wants to put their child in that position? What kind of parent would choose to have children just for that purpose? (Assuming you live in a society where that isn’t the only option.)
I have a friend who essentially put his career on hold for a year or two to care for his elderly grandfather. He did, literally, wipe the old man’s ass. That was a huge emotional as well as career sacrifice.
A friend of mine had arguments with his sister over how to care for their father who had dementia. The sister had moved in with him and was doing all the care. My friend said the father had more than enough money to afford to hire someone to take care of him. The sister said that’s not the point, she’s doing it to be a loving daughter, and she thinks if “Dad” is at all aware of what she’s doing for him he appreciates it.
My friend countered with, “You think Dad would be happy to know his daughter is wiping his butt every day? He’d be absolutely mortified if he knew that was happening.”
Exactly. I was thinking about it while out in the cold for a walk & errands – I think plenty of people, maybe most, prefer to have a detached professional wiping their bums to having their children do it. On their own account as well as the children’s.
I cross-posted with Skeletor, but exactly again. Being glad a child is there holding your hand is one thing, and bum-wiping is quite another.
And what of those children who have been so badly abused by their parents that they can’t wait to get out so nobody whacks them anymore? Nobody pulls their hair? Nobody insults them? Some of us move for reasons that are sound and valid. I could not have gotten a job where I was living, even if I wanted to stay there. No one was hiring women (no one was admitting it, though). Plus I needed to get away from a toxic family. So my family is toxic when I’m younger, they’re toxic when I’m middle-aged, and when they get old my middle-aged self is supposed to wipe their toxic ass? No, thank you. I didn’t ask them to have me, I didn’t ask them to beat me, I didn’t ask them for anything. Now I ask them to leave me the hell alone, and for the most part, they’re doing it.
And my son and I have a very good relationship. I am glad he is living on the coast where he wants to live, doing the things he wants to do, and I would not want him to move here to Nebraska, a state where he has no history, just to take care of me when I’m older. He didn’t ask to be born, either, that was a choice his father and I made, and we assumed responsibility for that choice.
And this? Totally ignores all those old people who decide to move when they retire, either to a place they always wanted to live, but couldn’t because there were no jobs to support the kids (which is what my husband and I plan to do) or they move to a warmer place, or they just move to get away from the kids that have exhausted them, or maybe to allow the kids to grow into mature adults.
People move. Get over it.
Kids don’t always wipe their old parents’ butt. Get over it.
Brexit is a bad idea. Get over it.
Does Giles Fraser have a daughter? Does she know her sexist father has appointed her his bum wiper come his dotage?
The frustrating thing is he comes so close to being right. I do think the erosion of community and the rise of individualism over the last few generations is one of the saddest effects of neoliberalism. I also think societies where caring for the elderly is a shared community responsibility are healthier than our societies, where it’s common for elderly people to be essentially abandoned in nursing homes. And I don’t really think he’s saying care should be done by women – if you read in context the quote about the daughter wiping the elderly man’s bottom, it’s referencing a specific anecdote about a woman he told at the start of his article, it’s not saying that this work as a rule should be done by women.
But then he attacks freedom of movement, when (as Ophelia says) his own example of Muslims in Tooting shows that freedom of movement per se is not the problem. He also comes close to attacking talented working class children for leaving their towns, when often they leave for the simple reason that there are no employment opportunities in those towns. That’s not those children’s fault, it’s what the economic system has done. And most ludicrously of all, he says that all this is why he is “longing for a full-on Brexit.” What on earth will Brexit do to bring a greater sense of mutual care to society? Absolutely nothing, in my opinion.
Also, “social mobility” has only-coincidentally-to-do with *physical* relocation. That made me cringe as just plain-old atrocious writing.
PD @ 7 – but talented working class children, and all others, should be free to leave their towns (i.e. the ones they started out in) if they want to. It’s not something to frown at or condemn, much less try to force a stop to. Some people want to see more of the world, or a different climate, or a new landscape, or simply a change. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think people like Giles Fraser should be making them feel guilty just because he has a bee up his ass about Brexit. I also don’t think there’s much need for nostalgia for a time when people couldn’t move around no matter how much they wanted to.
Lady M: He has two daughters and two sons. So I guess the girls can share the duty between them.
I find the idea that children are automatically responsible for their parents horrific and not just because of the various cruelties mine inflicted on me. After one too many “while you live under my roof”s they got what they wanted and I didn’t live under it anymore. For a while, I didn’t live under any roof at all. So I’m not particularly inclined to live up to the responsibilities they themselves failed at. Not that they’d actually want or expect me to, I think.
But my case aside, the idea makes me genuinely shiver with horror. To be groomed into believing from an early age that you have to be grateful you were born or that your parents didn’t just decide to kill you or dump you somewhere…. and that this responsibility lasts your entire life regardless of their own behaviour….. and that your own chance of a fulfilling career or of being with someone you love might well be compromised because of it….
That noise can go to fuck.
‘golden cow’–it’s either ‘sacred cow’ or ‘golden calf’, make up your mind.
‘Always on the move, always hot desking. Short-term contracts. Laptops and mobiles – even the tools of modern workplace remind us that work no longer has any need of place. All this is a philosophy that could not have been better designed to spread misery and unhappiness. Human beings need roots for their emotional and psychological flourishing. They need long-term, face-to-face relationships; they need chatting in the local post office; they need a sense of shared identity, shared values, mutual commitment. No amount of economic growth is worth sacrificing all this for.’
I’m mostly inclined to agree with this sentiment…but all these people moving and hot desking are doing it under the compulsion of the same people who will compel them, even more, without any wider constraint on worker welfare from the EU. How could anyone imagine that the business elite, who create these working conditions, will become more ‘family-friendly’ and ‘community-friendly’ with less control? Idiot. And disingenuous idiot at that–at least take responsibility for the words you wrote that everyone can read.
“Children have a responsibility to look after parents.” This makes me so angry I find it difficult to type.
Talk to me about caring for parents when yours are deranged, abusive, have transient psychotic episodes, call in false police reports that you’re “missing” when you won’t answer the phone, extract thousands of dollars, and drive away friends and associates by claiming your son is insane.
I’m not the only one with parents like this by a long shot.
Coincidentally I saw the last 20 minutes or so of Carrie last night, so yeah. Yeah anyway, but for a vivid picture of it see Carrie.
Would Giles Fraser be willing to do the same for his mum? My grandmother’s primary carer is one of her sons / one of my uncles, yet he is most certainly not the one that helps her shower. A trained geriatric nurse comes in and does that, subsidised by the Australian government, specifically because it is well understood that that is not appropriate for parent-child relationships. And 25 years ago, my grandmother was the primary carer for her father… and also did not help him shower, for exactly the same reasons.
Holms, when I was taking care of my mother after one of her surgeries because my father had just had surgery and couldn’t do it, they didn’t ask me to bathe her, partially because of the inappropriateness of it, and partially because such things also require specialized training so you don’t hurt the person you are caring for. When my mother-in-law was in the hospital once, I was quite awed by the way they managed to get her around using a strap to make sure she didn’t fall, and when she did fall, it was a careful technique to get her back up without hurting her and they didn’t want me to help. Because I was not trained on how to do that, and they knew I would not want to hurt her, but could, because I wouldn’t know how to move her.
Showering is the same way; a delicate operation when one is old and fragile.