I posted a thread recently with two propositions:
Children are an oppressed class.
Pets are slaves.
I wasn't bought in, and I even said so, because the two framings project adult concepts of equality onto dynamics where they don't cleanly apply. But I argued the two "hot takes" were useful anyway, because they force you to stare at unilateral control we'd otherwise call normal.
More than a hundred replies, and the disagreement didn't surprise me. The anatomy of the refusals did, though. A Christian homeschooling mother, a self-identified leftist, an older conservative, and a moderate liberal responded with similar rhetoric.
Some treated the question as if it were a category error. One user, asked to look at the unilateral control adults hold over children: "that is not oppression, that is biology."
The biological argument is defensible for an infant, because human survival requires unilateral control. But we tend to maintain that control well beyond the point of biological necessity, and the structure of childhood remains rigid even as the dependence fades. Naturalization uses the image of the infant to defend the teenager. So if we just relabel the dynamic as biology, the relationship becomes pre-political, and if the asymmetry is just nature itself, the question gets to be written off as illegitimate.
Others argued for the welfare inside the relationship. "My dog lives better than medieval nobility."
The argument implies the arrangement must be fine because the welfare is good, but it relies on the most sympathetic cases to represent the whole. To defend the system of engineered dependence, they pointed at the spoiled house-cat and the labradoodle, but nobody bothered to reach for the lab beagle or the dairy cow whose calves are removed. The inclination to defend an arrangement by pointing at outcomes inside it is universal. The move tracks the power imbalance.
A third group turned on the questioner (me). Comparing housecats to historic slavery was "pretty fucking gross." The inquiry itself was illegitimate. Another user diagnosed the sociology of anyone who would even entertain the thought experiment, citing liberal arts degrees and too much free time. Others demanded the focus shift to "the slaughter of children in Gaza."
The act of asking was being prosecuted.
the mirror
The refusal was shaped by who was answering, not necessarily what the inquiry proposed.
The homeschooling mother has children, the welfare-shield deployers have pets, the leftist and the older conservative had nothing in common ideologically but both had pets and kids, and ended up on the same side.
Sociologists track this as motivated reasoning, where we evaluate arguments based on our exposure to their conclusions, and the pattern repeats wherever asymmetric power exists. If we were to ask a manager about at-will employment or a homeowner about zoning, the defenses from inside the arrangement would come in similar shapes.
When a reader with no skin in the game looks at unilateral control, they see nothing more than an abstraction, but when a reader who maintains that control looks at the same thing, they'll often see a mirror.
the accelerant
The obvious counter is stakes. Outsiders are calmer because they have less to lose. A parent or pet owner defends aggressively because the structure is their life.
But if stakes alone guaranteed the hostility, the defenses, ideally, would stay material. Defenders would point at the welfare of the dog and stop, but that didn't seem to be the case. They ended up escalating to moral disgust and character assassination.
We could even keep the stakes constant and change only the words. Parents fight custody battles in the language of "best interests of the child" and "custodial authority." Practically everything is on the line, and they fight like their lives depend on it, and they do not treat "custodial" as a moral insult, because the vocabulary is neutral.
Now if we were to move into the vocabulary of liberation sociology, call it "oppressive power," we'd get to see the defense mechanisms start up immediately. Nothing really has changed about the stakes, nor did the power dynamic, but only the words themselves. The stakes set up the defensiveness, but the language dictates the shape.
The words we have for asymmetric power: oppression, domination, subjugation, tyranny, slavery. Each word packages structure and malice together. The language treats unilateral control and malevolence as one. We have no word for necessary asymmetry, for arrangements where one party holds total power over another but does so benevolently. To point at a relationship that is asymmetric but not malicious, you have to borrow from the malicious vocabulary.
The words smuggle the malice back in.
When a childfree person hears "children are an oppressed class," the smuggled accusation lands on no one in particular, and the structural claim costs them nothing. But when a parent hears it, the moral claim has a very specific target.
And the parent isn't hallucinating, because the word "oppressed" indicts the group on the powerful side, and the three families of refusal are evidence of a successful translation. Defenders deployed these moves to protect their moral character from an attack the language actually delivered.
the broken analogy
If the vocabulary deficit explains every rejection, the framework is a closed loop, so we have to know what a legitimate structural defense looks like beforehand. It could be one that looks past the welfare of the dependent and and also ignores the questioner, attacking the analogy at its core and making a case for purpose.
The ones who split their verdicts did exactly this, agreeing on children but rejecting the pet framing, or vice versa. They were signaling that the original pairing was flawed.
The purpose of parenting is the eventual autonomy of the child, and the asymmetry is designed to dissolve sometime in the the ruture. The purpose of pet ownership, on the contrary, is perpetual dependence; the asymmetry is engineered to last forever. Applying possessive vocabulary to a relationship designed for liberation would be a structural failure.
So when defenders reject the word "oppression" for children, they are not necessarily panicking, because they are correctly identifying a bad analogy. If a relationship exists for the flourishing and eventual autonomy of the dependent, the language is correctly declining to apply.
But that would only protect the ideal state of parenting, not what we see in practice. When a parent refuses to let go, let's say in high-control religious environments or families where adult children remain subordinate, the goal of autonomy is abandoned and the dependence artificially extended. The practice fails the ideal, and the oppression vocabulary actually becomes an accurate diagnosis, and can't be waved away as a category error.
A pet owner would argue their arrangement shares the parenting defense: the purpose is the flourishing of a being that wouldn't flourish elsewhere. The asymmetry is permanent, but the logic of said benevolence is justifiable. The framework catches on the origin of the dependence. We (human beings) constructed the dog's vulnerability, breeding them to require us. Rejecting the vocabulary of extraction for an insufficiency we engineered is harder to defend.
George Fitzhugh, a pro-slavery social theorist, did not think he was a monster as he defended chattel slavery by claiming a civilizing purpose, a paternalistic mission preparing people for eventual freedom. He made the same defense the parent makes.
Why?
Because inside the arrangement, most folks believe their asymmetry is benevolent. The discriminator is not the stated purpose, but the reality of the practice. And no one inside the relationship is really positioned to evaluate that.
The most honest response came from a user named jackiek_: "I've had that thought about pets before but not sure it's the right way to put it given all the humans who've suffered under slavery... but kind of yes."
Her "kind of yes" is the sound of an insider holding the tension intact. She made the separation knowing the framing was imperfect, conceded the asymmetry held some merit, and just sat with them both.
after the asterisk
The temptation at the end of an essay like this is to fix the problem by calling for a new dictionary. To suggest that if we just invent a cleaner term, something bloodless like "benevolent asymmetry," we can finally have the conversation without anyone feeling attacked.
But that is an evasion. We don't have a word for benevolent absolute power because the language tracked the cases that demanded naming, and the malice is bundled into the vocabulary because the absolute power almost always produced the malice.
I, too, am implicated in this. I have no children nor pets, thus no skin in this specific game. I chose the words "oppressed" and "slave" for the original thread because they were loaded. Bloodless words don't force a confrontation, so I indeed relied on the malice in the vocabulary to pick the fight, then sat safely outside the blast radius to audit the aftermath of the people trapped inside it.
But that panic is the mechanism working as designed.
When you ask people to examine a power dynamic they benefit from or actively maintain or uphold, many will hear an accusation. It's almost guaranteed that they will relabel the dynamic, point at the welfare of the dependents, or attack your position to even ask the question in the first place.
We tend to treat these type of defenses as a failure to communicate, but it's really not. It is the required friction of making structure visible. A system that justifies its asymmetry through love cannot be audited using its own bloodless vocabulary. The only way to force the confrontation is to use language that refuses the premise, language that smuggles the malice back in.
Neutral words let everyone stay seated. "Custodial" makes no one examine anything, but "oppressive" does, and the panic itself is the instrument.
We cannot know in real time, from inside the conversation, whether a given panic is the legitimate friction of making structure visible or a defender correctly rejecting a bad analogy. The slaveholder thought the analogy was broken, and the parent also thinks the analogy is broken. One is defending an atrocity, the other might be right, and in both cases the panic looks identical.
The vocabulary isn't really there to help us tell which, but it is there to make sure the question gets asked at all. The next time someone asks you to look at yours, watch the vocabulary do its work in your own mouth.