Pregnant with a boy in the wake of woke

I had a dream the other night. Two soldiers were confronting each other; one had a gun pointed at the other´s forehead. The man with the gun was whispering threats. An act of unbearable cruelty was about to take place. Then I woke up.

I`ve never had a dream like that before, at least not one I`ve remembered. But I am pregnant with a boy now. He is the size of a mango, according to the app, and I can feel him bubbling and fluttering beneath my ribs. In a corner of my unconscious mind, I am wondering how I will be able to keep his body safe, once it`s in the world.

Others are having similar thoughts. At work last week, I was getting my makeup done before I went on-air. “I`m terrified about the Wehrdienst,” (conscription) the makeup artist said, as she spread powdered foundation across my cheeks. Her son is sixteen, and delicate. Germany hasn`t yet reintroduced compulsory military service, but the conversation is shifting that way.

“You`ll have to handle puberty,” I inform my husband, outlining all the ways in which I`m unqualified: I have no idea what it feels like to have a penis; to lose control of your voice when you are still half a child, the humiliating squeaks echoing against uncompromising classroom walls. To be expected to carry the heavier box.

I understand the objectification of the female body. Walking down Grafton Street in Dublin as an eighteen-year-old with my then boyfriend, we bumped into a classmate of his. I have never forgotten the sensation of that other boy scanning me from head to toe. It happened in a nanosecond, as fleeting and subtle as a packet of ham passing through a till. I still remember the clothes I was wearing; a figure-hugging sleeveless yellow shirt and black three-quarter-lengths. I passed his test.

In the following years, I sat in college tutorials talking about the male gaze and getting cross with headline writers who used passive constructions when reporting on male violence against women.

My knowledge of the male body and experience, on the other hand, is remedial. I was stunned to learn that baby boy fetuses are often identified in ultrasounds by their tiny erections. Instances, I’ve learned, of the nervous system practising its functions.

Now I am going to mother a boy, and am thinking about the myriad ways his body will be scanned for its worth. For every novel I read growing up in which women were the objects of desire, or limited to their domestic roles, he will encounter stories of boys and men in trenches, or down mines. For every billboard I saw of women with complexions and facial symmetry I could never achieve, he will see chiseled jaws and six-packs to aspire to. For every impenetrable algorithm that has made me feel less of a woman, there will be an equivalent Internet pathway, enhanced by AI, picking at his self-esteem.

He will be born into an extraordinary cultural moment. A time when the tide of moral progress is receding. A time when the current US president – democratically elected twice – is a man who brags about “grab[bing] women by the pussy” and whose response to a female reporter asking him about his connection to a serial sexual abuser is: “quiet, piggy.”

What will he make of it all, I wonder? How will our culture have evolved by the time he comes of age?

In the past decade, working in a Berlin newsroom, I experienced the sudden global awakening to women´s experiences that came with the #MeToo movement, and the resulting rush from management to introduce new directives on sexual harassment in the workplace. Even then it all seemed a little knee-jerk, as if implying that inappropriate behaviour had hitherto been acceptable, but must now be explicitly banned. When older male colleagues asked if they could still tell me I had nice hair, or a pretty dress, I responded with some version of: just use your common sense.

I think back particularly to one man, already counting down to retirement when we met. A former soldier, he´d ended up in journalism by accident. He had a reverence for the intellectual calibre of his colleagues that seemed rooted in the feeling that they came from the “right” background, and he did not. He talked to me a lot, and I listened.

He told me about a young woman in Thailand whose mortgage he was paying. “I`ll always take care of her,” he said, meaning to sound gallant, I think, but unaware of how deeply problematic it sounded to my ears. He was less interested in sex than he used to be, he clarified unprompted once – before reporting on a long-ago incident in a sauna, where a woman he knew tried to entrap him by titillating him.

Among my contemporaries, the prevailing feeling towards men like my colleague was contempt. There was no way he´d bombard a male colleague with his inappropriate anecdotes. Probably not an older woman, either. I knew all this, and still, somehow I couldn`t bring myself to tell him to stop.

The loneliness seeped out of him. I could almost see it, forming a puddle on the newsroom floor. I did not respond to his retirement email when it came. I was tired. But I wonder if he made it to Thailand, as he had dreamed, and how many mortgages and massages his pension might cover.

If I had been a slightly less empathetic person, and perhaps a little braver, a conversation with the “People” department could have seen my colleague canceled. But my total conviction in his complete lack of self-awareness made this seem like an unnecessarily cruel course of action. I thought of him as a young soldier sometimes and the reverence he had for the desk job he did now.

When I consider the regressive cultural shift we are experiencing now, what strikes me most about the form of wokeism I myself inhabited is how greatly it underestimated male fragility. It did this to such an extent that men became hysterically angry. Throughout history, we have accepted their bodies being sacrificed for the cause of nationhood, valour or economic sustenance. Finally then, a new age of reckoning arrived. But it offered neither relief nor reassurance.

Instead, it asked them to atone for crimes ranging from complimenting a haircut to committing rape. For those whose bodies were closest to the firing line, it was an unforgivable humiliation. For those whose bodies were furthest from it, like Donald Trump, it was an opportunity.

What we have got now is a dual casualty. If wokeism banished common sense, what has followed it is killing common decency. Both need to be mourned, then restored.

As a future mother to a boy, I have an interest in finding hope in the disarray.

It begins by accepting a truth which our culture has so far refused to reconcile: binaries are real, and they reside firmly on two ends of a spectrum. We can talk about male and female while accepting that most people are going to sit somewhere between the archetypal traits of both. This applies as much to politics: are you a liberal or a conservative, as it does to gender.

The boy inside of me might well be wired to prefer diggers to unicorns. He may end up physically stronger and less emotionally attuned than his older sister. But if he doesn`t, I will happily place a unicorn into his little hands. I will cradle both him and his sister close and hope that I am doing the only job that really matters: fostering decent, sensible human beings. Then I will close my eyes and hope that neither of them will end up collateral damage in a senseless culture war.

This is the little boy I`m writing about

If you like reading essays like this, please consider also subscribing to my Substack here: https://secondthoughtsbykateferguson.substack.com/