joanna bujes wrote:
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> Anyway, and what is this thing about "brats"?
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> Joanna
It's a name for other people's children (usually but not always applied by those who have had no children of their own). Other people's children, even when behaving in a fairly normal fashion, can be intensely annoying. So can one's own children of course. The latter fact grounds one of the major ways of keeping women in their place: they are made to feel guild at being annoyed at their children. If they were competent mothers their children would not be children but mannikins. Brats are just one of the prices we pay for living in a male supremacist social order. Probably they will not disappear from the scene very soon.
Incidentally, today's elementary school children are far less apt to kill each other than was the case in the past. This endangers the social order by threatening to lessen the pressure on parents. Hence it is necessary to give extravagant publicity to those cases in which children or juveniles kill each other to maintain a proper fear in all parents and provide newspaper editors with grist for their lectures on the responsibilities of parents.
Carrol