The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the notion that family can be entirely based on individual choice, highlighting the unrealistic expectation of maintaining endless options.
Christopher Lasch's quote reflects on the contemporary belief that family structures can be purely voluntary and flexible. He suggests that this perspective stems from a misguided idea that individuals can always choose from an array of options without facing the constraints or commitments typically associated with family ties. In essence, he argues that real familial relationships involve responsibilities and bonds that cannot simply be discarded at will.
In practice
In a discussion about modern family structures at a community event.
Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities β for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
My mother had taught me about the importance of finding a 'good provider,' so when my boyfriend proposed, I said 'yes' in a heartbeat. I was still just a kid, and I didn't know what was coming in life.
Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.
It feels like a simple human right to be able to be yourself, and yet, what trans people have to go through in order to get to there, it can be so complicated.
There was a war going on in our house. A silent war that sounded no guns, and the bodies that fell were only wishes that died and the bullets were only words and the blood that spilled was always called pride.
One of the things I have always said about the man-woman relationship is that I don't want anybody to walk ahead of me, and I don't want anybody to walk behind me. I want a man who will walk along beside me. And that's how I feel about equal rights.
The more one loves a mistress, the more one is ready to hate her.
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