From the taking the fun out of everything file, some feminist expert has taken umbrage over the phrase “bun in the oven.” Not an actual bun in an oven but a baby (the bun) in a woman’s womb (the oven). She claims the term “reduces the role of the mother to a mere incubator.”
It’s a kind of cutesy little way of saying that someone is pregnant to say they have “a bun in the oven.” That metaphor is really old – it first appears in texts by Hippocrates about 2,000 years ago to describe the process of gestation.
But if you think about that, if you’ve baked bread, the real work of baking bread goes on before you put it in the oven – the proofing the yeast and kneading the dough. That work takes time, it takes skill, it takes effort. Once you put the dough in the oven, all you’re doing is waiting.
So why do we use that metaphor to describe pregnancy? That suggests that the active work has been done, presumably by the man, and then the uterus is just like this incubator that’s growing this thing that was already made. I don’t think most people who use that metaphor are being misogynistic. But I think it actually does come from a deeply misogynistic tradition of thinking about women’s bodies as passive.
Kathleen Crowther is – or at least claims to be – a historian of reproductive medicine with an eye toward making sure we all know who is doing the baby-making work. I’m sure it’s a fascinating area of study, working out how the ancients perceived the roles of conception and gestation, so much so that Crowther wrote a blog about it. But I’m not sure for whom she wrote the book. If you read the NPR interview, there’s a sense that a majority of humanity clings to ancient ideas about life that are male-centric, but I doubt I could find anyone who agrees.
Men have been reduced to the status of sperm donors. The wars on parenting and marriage have escalated the number of single moms and one-parent households with devastating effects on children, learning, and culture. Girl power won, so how the ancient perception of pregnancy – while fascinating – relates to a modern culture of baby mamas, many of whom won’t be able to read what Crowther wrote – seems like a pander to guilty white liberal women.
A coffee table book from which you could quote meaningless but interesting tidbits about the idiom “a Bun in the Oven.”
Perhaps her next book will be on how, historically, while men play very little part, society continues to insist they pay for everything for close to twenty years while refusing to let them have any part in the child’s life.
HT | The National Pulse
