Garfunkel and Oates have another song called “The Loophole,” in which they sing about being good Christian virgins and how they have anal sex with their boyfriends so as to avoid losing their (vaginal) virginity. Somehow, I don’t think anything about that song is supposed to support the viewpoint expressed. Might be the same with the Pregnant Women Are Smug song. But in any case, I’m sure they appreciate the extra publicity Frylock has given them!
As a male, I’ve (obviously) never been pregnant. But when my wife and I were going through the adoption process, MANY people (friends, family, co-workers) asked me “Do you want a boy or a girl?”
And the TRUTHFUL answer was, in fact, the cliche answer: “I really don’t care.” I’d have been thrilled with a baby of either sex and/or any ethnicity.
If that struck people as an evasive answer, it wasn’t. And if anybody who heard that answer thought I was a smug jerk, well, that’s THEIR problem.
As it turned out, we got a boy.
The questioner in the song is told:
Kate: Oh, doesn’t matter as long as it’s healthy
Riki: Really? 'Cause I don’t feel that those two things are related. It’s not like one or the other.
Your answer leaves out the false comparison that implies that the questioner is superficial/shallow/sexist, while the pregnant woman is concerned with what Really Matters, the health of the child. It’s not that you have to have a gender preference, just that you should not strive to make what was surely meant to be a polite display of interest into an opportunity to shame the asker.
Can we just go back to shaming people for using apostrophes incorrectly or something?
That or maybe it’s a way around saying “Well my husband wants a boy and frankly it seems pretty sexist and I’m scared be won’t love it as much if it’s a girl, and anyway he has all this family pressure to carry on the name or some bullshit like that that I also don’t agree with. In the meantime my mom is already buying dresses and picking out girls names, but my aunt is afraid it will remind her of the girl she lost in '72. And everyone keeps telling me it’s a boy because it’s low even though that is a big myth and you know what I DON’T CARE, can you stop asking questions that come with a ton of baggage?”
Huh. For whatever reason, I don’t hear it as implicitly criticizing the questioner, rather, just saying, in so many words, “we don’t care.”
I guess I can see how the words could be interpreted that way. (And I can also see how someone IRL could easily be misunderstood as communicating ‘you shouldn’t ask’ when they really just meant ‘we’re okay either way’.)
I’d just like to thank **Frylock **for sharing one of the funniest and cleverest songs I’ve ever heard and for introducing me to such brilliant humorists (Sex with Ducks!!!).
A nit-pick though.
The not-pregnant woman doesn’t ask “(Do you know) is it a boy or a girl?” She asks “So, do you WANT a boy or a girl?”
The response is presented as the pregnant woman PRETENDING she doesn’t have a preference, and making the question seem vapid, which is a smug thing to do.
It reminds me of an associate from years ago (who I didn’t care much for) who asked me “So, when you get married, how many kids do you want?”
I responded by explaining that since I thought it was a lot of fun growing up with many siblings myself, I’d like to have at least three kids of my own.
Then when I asked the same question to him, he very smugly said “As many as god blesses me with.”
. . . Errrm . . . Okay. So *that *was the right answer? Got it, thanks.
Also,
You want the song to feel bad?
Do you want the singers to feel bad for making this (satirical) song?
Do you want listeners to feel bad for liking this song?
Or do you just want those people who actually believe that pregnant women in general are smug to feel bad?
After this week’s episode, I wonder if Frylock will now post that Garfunkel and Oates should be ashamed of asserting that there is a “gay agenda” to use the media to convert children to homosexuality.
I wondered in my last post to you whether you had something on-topic to contribute.
While I don’t think the song is clever at all (as you can guess) I want to reiterate that I’m more than happy to introduce you guys to these performers, and I hope they make some money off of me.
Concerning your other points:
What I’ve been suggesting is that people are misinterpreting certain responses as “trying to make the questioner look vapid” when the actual intention is simply to deflect a difficult question. If you ask “do you want a boy or a girl” and they answer “it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s healthy,” they’re not necessarily saying “you shouldn’t ask such a vapid question,” they’re saying “we will be happy either way–and so as to avoid answering in a way that sounds curt, I’ll add a meaningless polite rider onto what I just said.”
And what I want is for the actual song itself to feel bad. I would like the song itself to apologize for what it’s done, and I would like the song itself to rewrite a new song in praise of Venus the All-Loving.