From The Other McCain is a post with the wonderful title Silence of the Vagina Warriors, discussed the dearth of feminist blogging on the octuplet single mom:
There is exactly one narrative Amanda Marcotte is interested in, and because the octomom story doesn't confirm that narrative (indeed, it may be dispositive) then it is ignored as long as possible. When it cannot be ignored, throw some pretzel logic and fulminations about "choice" at it, then move on.
This is exactly what happened just before I was banned at Pandagon. If you recall, I asked Amanda, at the outbreak of Blagogate, why she hadn't made a single, solitary comment about the affair, given her amazing capacity for mockery when Republicans were caught in wrongdoing. Her answer boiled down to "You can't make me!", which is precisely what Robert S. McCain is saying.
And frankly, this is the problem with most leftwing blogs I visit. If the story fits their talking points, it gets splattered all over the blog. If it doesn't, the story doesn't exist. What? A woman with six kids and no husband goes and has eight more? No story there. If said woman had been married and the couple said they believed God was in charge of birth control, then Amanda would write post after post about the stupidity and misogyny of the people involved. Here, we just have a woman who either has a mental problem or is just selfish or shallow (thinking her story is worth millions).
That's not to say there haven't been any bloggers discussing the octuplets and their wayward mother. The argument tends to be that this couldn't have been her choice because no sane person would have chosen this. In other words, the woman is still a victim, but, in this case, she is perhaps a victim of either Teh Patriarchy, which has a Cult of Motherhood going, or of some mental illness. I don't know if she suffers from any mental problem or not, but this was still her choice to do this. No one made her.
But you won't see a discussion of this at Pandagon, or, probably, most other feminist sites. Because it doesn't fit the meme about female oppression.
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