Breeder
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Breeder is a slang term (either joking or derogatory) used by childfree people to refer to parents who focus on their children and abandon their previous friends and lifestyle, or to women who give birth to what they believe to be an ungodly number of children. Implicit is mocking by connotation of animal husbandry.
The use of breeder in this way is not new. It appears, for example, in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, in which Swift repeatedly uses breeder to refer to human breeding:
“The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couples who are able to maintain their own children, although I apprehend there cannot be so many, under the present distresses of the kingdom; but this being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand breeders.”- Jonathan Swift
Swift's piece was meant as black humor, and refers to the breeding of children for the table. Some parents resent being referred to as breeders, and feel that the word reduces the process of raising their progeny to mere animal husbandry.
[edit] "Breeder" in gay slang
Breeder can also be used as a derogatory term used to describe heterosexuals, primarily by homosexuals (not merely by childfree) It is drawn from the fact that while homosexual sexual activity does not lead to reproduction, heterosexual sex can. [1].
Another slang term referring to heterosexuals is egg packer, which mocks the connotation of the slang term for homosexuals, fudge packer.
