And that’s a huge problem in our society.

Occasionally, even if it’s rare, men become single fathers without maternal support (women can abandon the children they give birth to, even though it’s a lot more common for biological fathers to abandon children).

Or two men, usually a gay couple, adopt a baby. (They’re almost always super rich like Neil Patrick Harris, because adoption agencies can still be homophobic and only a lot of money can counter that.)

Or there’s my childhood scenario, which is probably a lot more common than the previous two scenarios I mentioned, where the father actually is a much better parent than the mother, because the mother is a cold, heartless sociopath. (“Hi Mom!”) My parents were married until I was 19, and the Crawley family had all the superficial appearance of being nuclear.

nderground, it sounds like your situation was kind of like the situation my father was in. Except either you divorced your child’s mother, or you were never married to her. And you got primary custody, whereas my parents shared custody in the typical way that married couples who live together and never have a child custody battle typically do. (In retrospect, keep in mind I’m a kind of “only child” with much older half siblings and no younger siblings, I’m really glad my parents separated when I was 19. It meant there was no child custody battle. One that, even though my father was the only parent who properly loved me, he would have likely lost to my mother.)

I’m an enthusiastic third wave feminist, so you can only imagine how I feel about MRAs. I can easily acknowledge that a lot of women are good mothers, and that my own mother was an atypical woman in that sense. But this whole “women are natural mothers” bullshit hurts people like me who have had abusive or absent mothers. It also hurts women like me in my decision to never become a mother. Additionally, it hurts men who happen to be very good nurturers of children.

And it’s one of the many vectors that drive men into the “Men’s Rights Movement.” When this whole “women are natural mothers” crap, like other varieties of sexism that hurt men (such as toxic masculinity), are actually extensions of patriarchy!

“Hey sweetheart! You stay in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant and tending to the other children while us BIG MANLY MEN do BIG MANLY MEN stuff like have careers and fight wars and make VERY IMPORTANT DECISIONS about politics and power and technology that’s way over your pretty little head. A WOMAN’S job is to be a mother!”

A woman can be a stay-at-home mother and still be a feminist, most definitely. It’s not the situations that women (and men, and nonbinary gender people) are in, by choice or otherwise, that are inherently feminist or sexist. It’s generalizations about gender that are sexist and anti-feminist. “Women are natural mothers” as opposed to “a lot of women are good mothers.”

Sure, “women are natural mothers” is a compliment. So how could it possibly be sexist?

Well, in Canada and the United States in the 21st century, there are positive stereotypes of people of (oriental) Asian descent. “Asians excel at academics, they’re so smart!” But Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Canadians and Americans often believe that it’s a hurtful stereotype. Imagine how Jason Chow of Toronto feels when he wants to pursue professional sports after high school instead of the University of Toronto.

Or “gay men have great fashion sense!” There are gay men who love fashion. But what about all of the gay men who don’t love fashion? Any one of them would probably be pretty annoyed if I asked them about Marc Jacobs’ Spring 2017 collection.

“Positive” stereotypes are microaggressions (google the word) too. The Chinese Canadian kid who wants to be in the NHL rather than a Ph.D program. The gay man who’s happiest wearing sweatpants all day. The woman (like me) who wants to avoid motherhood.

Instead of seeing us as unique individuals with SOCIOLOGY defining what we have in common with our demographics, it’s seeing us as PSYCHOLOGICALLY having to have a specific trait because of our demographic/marginalized groups.

Confusing demography for being a PSYCHOLOGICAL concept rather than a SOCIOLOGICAL one is a hallmark of prejudice.