The start of a beautiful friendship?
Ah you see it’s a long-term relationship, not at all a rent a woman’s uterus situation.
(First of all, the inelegance of the grammar – “us “demanding” a random woman is our surrogate” – ick. Should be “our ‘demanding'” because gerunds are nouns, but much more…demanding a woman is our surrogate? Come on. That’s what the subjunctive is for. Demanding that something is just makes no sense: who needs to demand it when it already is? If you hate the subjunctive too much to use it then make it “demanding a woman should be” but NOT “demanding a woman is.” Guy’s barely literate.)
But the substantive part is this “it’s building a long-term relationship with someone as a friend and a member of our extended family who [gestates a baby to give to us] for altruistic only reasons.”
I’m trying to picture how that’s going to work. I wonder if they’re working on such a relationship now, and if so, if the woman they’re grooming knows that’s what’s going on. I wonder – do they not already have woman friends? No, probably not, given how obviously Benjamin Cohen hates women. But so then how do they expect to be able to start now, when Benjamin C is being so frank about their plans? What kind of long-term relationship as a friend and a member of their extended family would they be able to create when their goal is not friendship and extended family but the opportunity to exploit the body of their “friend”?
In short how fucking creepy is that? What woman in her right mind would ever want anything to do with this guy?
Re the lack of subjunctive: that’s probably a dialectal difference; the subjunctive is a lot less common in British English than American English.
I know, but the problem remains. “Demand that X is” just doesn’t work. As I mentioned, there is always “should” if the subjunctive can’t be tolerated.
I often attribute mangled grammar on Twitter to typos. In this case, the intended text may have been “a random woman as our surrogate”.
Still not great, but not so broken.
Ah, good point, I didn’t think of that.
Still…given what we already know of what BC is saying, I think he meant “these people seem to believe we want to order a woman to be our surrogate” but muddled it by saying “demand” instead of “order.”
Ophelia, you got right to the point as usual:
And who is this friend and member of his extended family? Does he already have this friend? No, no he doesn’t.
Seriously, if that’s what this actually were, he wouldn’t be getting raked over the coals on twitter. Instead it’s like a dishonest ‘personals’ ad. He thinks women will flock to interview for the marvelous opportunity to bear his brilliant child and then fuck right off afterwards.
One of my friends since college, who began a long-term relationship with another fellow back in his twenties, actually did what Benny pretends he wants to do. He and his (now) husband got together with a lesbian couple they knew, and drafted an arrangement for shared custody. They are all moms, they are all dads. The other couple bore children involving my friend’s and his husband’s genetic contributions, and the arrangement went along happily for decades, a happy, complex American family. The boys have just finished college.
They did this successfully because they are all nice people. They all respect each other’s humanity, each other’s needs, each other’s choices. For example, my friend doesn’t hate women.
Benny doesn’t want this. He makes it clear that only he and his husband will be the child’s parents. He wants the mother to go away, and not be a mother at all anymore. Maybe the mother could be an occasionally seen Auntie, allowed to occupy the guest room in his summer house for a week a year, if she keeps her mouth shut. So magnanimous is Benny Cohen.
Fundamentally, Benny wants to prostitute a woman, whether he pays directly or not.
Papito, he seems to want the woman to go away only after she is no longer needed for breast feeding. So, more labor from said woman, and altruistic…so she gets nothing but warm fuzzy feelings for putting her life at risk and giving her time for people who really don’t give a flying fuck what happens to her.
Oh, and his comment about the 1950s? In the 1950s, as soon as it was available, a lot of women were shifting to formula (my mother did not until her last child in 1970). But there was a huge movement back toward breastfeeding in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is still very powerful today. I don’t know any friends in recent years that have had a baby and not breastfed. And it can get ugly. I was unable to breastfeed, and my son was losing weight rapidly (he was a small baby anyway), and I had to switch to formula. I got raked over the coals by the back to nature sorts.
Of course, this is in the USA. Things may be different in the UK.
What he appears to want is an incubating, childminding wet-nurse, duties to begin at conception and end when the child has been weaned onto formula. I doubt that Mr. & Mr. Cohen will ever think of a surrogate as the mother to the child, she will forever be ‘the surrogate’.
Expecting that people use the subjunctive mood at all, never mind the present subjunctive, is a lost cause at this point. I’ve been fighting that battle since fifth grade.
Same thing with the genitive+gerund construction, my railing at the sky notwithstanding.
Long is the list of basic grammar sins that I consciously endure every day.
I know. It’s not going to stop me though.
Nullius, I gave up on semicolons a long time ago; I’m not sure my students even know what a semicolon is, let alone how to use one. And pronouns? Not the she/her, he/him, they/them aspect, just…using them properly at all. Starting an entire research paper with “They”. They did this. They did that. It was this. It was that. No nouns anywhere to be seen, which means incomplete information. And ‘less’ vs ‘fewer’? No hope.
I don’t claim to be brilliant at writing – despite having two English teachers as parents (I’m the black sheep of the family as I went into the sciences). I still try and hold onto semicolons though. Problem is that most youngsters are know taught business writing, which holds that punctuation is fussy and slows down reading (speed apparently being everything). Apparently the idea is that you use minimum punctuation and rely on clear basic sentence construction to ensure that context takes care of understanding. Fine I guess until you are trying to discuss highly technical, interlinked and complex situations. Don’t get me started on bulleted lists.
Not fine at all! Terrible! Philistine and terrible!
I posted a big rant on Facebook the other day about the way too many people omit the necessary second comma in constructions of the type: The leader of the opposition, J. G Smithers, said today…
Instead we get: The leader of the opposition, J. G Smithers said today…
which is barbaric and clarity-destroying. Either omit both commas or use both, but DON’T use the first and drop the second.
Just had to delete a stray word from that so you see how tricky it gets…
You need to understand that I used ‘fine’ in the same sense that my partner uses fine. As in, when I realise that something I’ve done or said has pissed her off and I say “Are you ok?” and she replies “Fine” with a particular emphasis of the F and a crisp shortening of the remainder of the word. I instantly understand that everything is not fine and I’m in deeper shit than I thought.
My two favourite example of why punctuation matters is that
helping the old man, Jack, off his horse, and helping the old man jack off his horse are very different things.
Damned Muphrey’s Law* in action there. When commenting on mistakes, one is certain to make a mistake.
*Not Murphey’s; similar, but with a subtle difference.
Apparently there has been some study that shows Gen Z (or whatever they end up being called) feels that period use by old people (us, in other words) is hostile. They don’t believe in punctuation. And judging from my students, not capitals, either, unless the capitals are in some odd place where a capital does not belong. At the beginning of a sentence? No! A proper noun? Hell, no!
I have toyed with the idea of switching to nothing but multiple choice everything so I don’t have to try to struggle through their writing, but I just can’t give up that easily. So I grade their grammar, correct their construction, and bang my head against the wall a little more. And yeah, that missing second comma. I hate that!
AoS, We have a copy of ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ by Lynn Truss (Profile Books, 2003) at work. The title comes from what a Panda does (and does not do). Nice little book.
As one who couldn’t define a subjunctive without, a gun held, to my head; and has no doubt committed a goodly number of syntactic (or is it syntactical?) and grammatical infelicities here and elsewhere, I’m a bit less judgmental of Mr. Cohen for his, um, fox paws. Lots of otherwise we’ll educated people are pretty poor writers. And from what I’ve read about publishing, even accomplished professional writers would come off much less well in print without a strong editor to clean up they’re prose.
So their.
And so, it has come to this.
Jeez, Bruce, you’ve made my eyes bleed! Apparently, words can be actual violence.
Rob, I’ve got a copy of that book somewhere. In a similar vein, I recommend John Humphries’ Lost for Words. The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language (Hodder & Stoughton, 2004). It is a wonderfully entertaining rant by a seasoned journalist and broadcaster who is passionate about language (an increasingly rare quality among the younger members of his profession and in many other fields where words do matter).
On the other side of the coin is Oliver Kamm’s accidence will happen. The NON-PEDANTIC GUIDE TO English (all sic), (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2015), in which Kamm tries to persuade the reader that any native speaker of English is already a master of English grammar, and that the ‘rules’ of English language and grammar are mostly superstition and prejudice. Oddly, he agrees with many of the rules on grammar and on correct word usage, his attitude seems to be that although he understands and follows them, it’s fine if those of lesser intelligence than he possesses do otherwise.
According to a James Shapiro quote among the blurb on the cover, Pedants are going to hate this book – and quietly take its lessons to heart. Spoiler Alert! He’s only half right.
This thread is a perfect (or as my cat would say, purrfect) example of why I love this site. How many places do you know where you could start of talking about surrogacy, and end up talking about commas, semicolons, and subjunctives?
And this is the perfect, or purrfect, time to leave you with the wisdom of the noted grammarian and polymath Albert Yankovic.
https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc