Jennifer Lopez released the video for her latest single entitled, I Ain’t Your Mama, and I ain’t impressed. Lopez is jumping on the feminist bandwagon, treating it like a fad, spouting rhetoric that has killed the American family and continues to separate women from their men, their children and from each other, with lyrics like, I ain’t gonna be cooking all day / I ain’t your mama. I ain’t gonna do your laundry / I ain’t your mama.
Wait a minute.
How often does Jennifer Lopez find herself cooking all day or doing anyone’s laundry? And is she sure she ain’t my mama? Because she sure sounds like her, and this sort of talk is what left my mother unmarried, with three fatherless children, and no home life as she enters her AARP years.
This is my mother’s feminism and it does not work.
Both men and women need helpmates, and a woman who won’t do something based solely on what she thinks is feminism, is in no way a viable helpmate. In the same sense, if a man refuses to do something just because it doesn’t support his patriarchal bull, what sort of helpmate can he be? And since when does a woman have to be your mother in order for her to make a meal or do laundry? And since when is being someone’s mother and/or a woman who cooks and cleans a bad thing? As with men, once a woman breaks the law of reciprocity, what is she to expect from her mate or anyone else in her life? Is she then willing to hear a laundry list of things a man won’t do for her? What if a man proclaimed he won’t care for her, cook, clean, support or help her because he ain’t her daddy?
All hell would break loose.
Don’t let this dated feminist anthem lead you astray. Don’t let Jennifer Lopez ruin your life as she tries to join this conversation in the middle of hers. Feminism is not about a set of communal rules. Feminism is about a woman’s right and ability to choose what sort of life she wants and her role in that life. It is her right to choose and choose again if she likes. She doesn’t have to live by any particular set of standards, except the ones she defines for herself. And at anytime she changes her mind, she can live by a whole new set of standards.
