“Why don’t they make disposable clothes for these dwarfs?”
So speaks Diana Trent, who has fallen out with boyfriend Tom, and left her retirement home to be the live-in nanny for her niece Sarah in London. Diana is comically (“Waiting For God” is a sitcom) ill-suited to the role: a former war photographer, she’s about swashbucking, not keeping house. The relentlessness of the poop-change-clean cycle of home life with a baby is new to her, and her reaction to it is an extreme version of that of an exhausted new mother: is this really what it’s come to? Is this all there is? The baby is fun, but the accompanying previously-unfathomable surge of housework not so much. The advice (from where??) to just let the house go seems to assume “the house” is a place you’d previously been dusting, and not that you are trying to launder food- or diaper-related incidents between rounds of running an unsurprisingly given the workout it gets frequently broken dishwasher.
But, “dwarfs,” argh. Why? If you set that aside (but can you? getting to that), Diana’s delivery is perfect, and the sentiment behind it is impeccable. I think of the question itself constantly, and it’s Diana’s image that appears in my head when doing so. I think of it when the clothing itself reaches a state where the temptation is indeed to just chuck it (I do not often do this, but it has happened), or when ordering new clothes at a price point that suggests Diana’s dream is 2021’s reality. (Thank you Joe Fresh whatever you are.) I think of it when I think of the whole discourse around fast fashion, and how this is imagined to be about young women hankering for the latest thing, when no it is about late-30s parents living in a pandemic where you’re not supposed to go outside but still need to buy small children clothes, and if you don’t even know if they’ll fit, yeah maybe you don’t go with investment pieces.
I know there’s a parenting school of thought that involves keeping everything pristine and handing it down (beyond siblings), because the environment, but I comfort myself in believing that this method, be it for cloth diapers or high-end garments, simply involves swapping out textile waste for wasted water. (The further-into-adulthood version of the time when I had a roommate who didn’t want us to use the dishwasher our cheap NYC rental miraculously had, because the environment, so I had to show her some article about how Actually handwashing is more wasteful.) But the truth to Diana’s line is that obviously in the moment you simply do not care about landfills and will grasp at anything that would in any way streamline the process and give you the smallest minute to the baby or yourself.
But I can’t get myself to celebrate the line, as delivered, because, obviously, it is offensive to refer to small children as “dwarfs.” Offensive in a very in-character way for Diana—she complains about “sexism” and “ageism” but she’s against “political correctness” (she uses the term) in a very 1990s way, when pc meant clunky phrases like “differently abled.” But still, one of those sitcom lines where, if you were to go around quoting it out of context, it would be potentially hurtful, as well as not particularly funny. Maybe it’s distractingly hurtful to some in context as well—my own lived experience here is merely that of someone quite short.
But that is what Diana says. It’s good that Britbox doesn’t bleep it out (although watch them find this newsletter and do so…), because it’s what the character says. A record of sorts. It stays not because it’s a line to go around reciting (and I know there’s a real schoolyard craze for reciting lines from 1990s Britcoms about retirement homes) but because it is part of a bigger whole.
I was reminded of this, in a roundabout way, by the ACLU’s much-dunked-on tweet that removed “women” etc. from a Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote about reproductive rights.
The whole “pregnant women” vs “pregnant people” debate is aggravating in its pointlessness. Yes, trans men and non-binary people with certain anatomy can get pregnant. Also yes, virtually everyone who does get pregnant is a woman. In some ways it’s like “happy holidays” as a way of acknowledging the minority who don’t celebrate Christmas, except in this analogy, it’s women, not members of a dominant religious and cultural group, so. Gender minorities may be more oppressed than women (I’m agnostic on this but it feels possible) but this doesn’t make women society’s haves in any broader sense aka any one that includes men. (Cis men one is tempted to say, but somehow it’s implied. Too tired to unpack that.)
But ultimately both are fine, who cares. “Pregnant people” or “pregnant women.” Say the one that pops into your head at the moment. But most of all, don’t be offended by someone else saying the other, because guess what both are accurate. Both speak to a truth about the world. My own inclination is to say “pregnant women” and that could be its own essay but I also do not care if others go a different route on this. I don’t wince when I see it on obgyn wall posters, nor has it in any way impeded my care (or prevented any health professionals for sizing me up as the boring cishet lady I am.) This means don’t be that person (heh) who combs through social media posts from health orgs or politicians (let alone randos!!) for references to “pregnant people” so as to call this out. But also? Don’t treat the use of “women” in a quote about a woman’s right to choose as akin to Diana’s use of “dwarfs.” “Woman” is not a slur. It’s a truth, parallel to “people.” The two are not interchangeable but can be interchanged and it’s fine. What’s not fine is to interchange key words no less in a quote.