But I think a lot of the angst over women in the workforce, in the US at least, is... an artifact of the most vocal feminists also coming from wealthy families. Money is where real choice comes from.
Feminism is for rich people. Work-life balance is for rich people. Choice is mostly for rich people.
For those of us in the working class, there has never been any real question of women working outside the home. Of course we do. If we are lucky, we have a grandma in the picture who is willing to take care of the kids. If not... every part of moms having outside jobs sucks elephant balls. It's not like we can hire domestic help to replace us at home, and no, men (however decent) are not going to take on an equal share of domestic duties. Having a job just means you work all day and then you come home and do the lion's share of the housework too. Oh, and paid childcare eats most of your paycheck anyway.
I quit my job to raise the kids. Not because we could afford it. But because we couldn't afford *not* to. We ran the numbers: took my anticipated paycheck, subtracted the cost of childcare for three kids, subtracted the costs incurred *by the job*, subtracted a large portion of the stuff I do at home to save us money, but would no longer have time for... and I would have effectively been working a fulltime job just to bring home $100 a week. A hundred bucks with a significant decrease in quality of life for all of us. Not. Worth. It. So we live on a shoestring, buy secondhand clothes, cook every meal at home, grow our own vegetables, and we are never gonna retire, but at least our kids get to have a fulltime parent, and we homeschool (the local schools are terrible-- this is the only way they'd get any education at all).
On the balance, I'm glad we did this. Yeah, we're poor. My mom was the breadwinner in my family, and this was a constant misery to all of us. She couldn't respect Dad (he worked day labor, she had a master's degree and a low-paying whitecollar career, and the family insurance plan), they despised each other, we spent a lot of time in daycare, and at the end of the day neither parent had much energy or emotional reserve left for dealing with kids. I'd rather die destitute than do that to my own children. That's a choice, too. I don't get the same set of choices as women with money, but I do get some. I'm choosing to do right by my kids.
I've been laid out with strep for a week now, and it's showing in a big way. My husband is a good man, but he literally doesn't even *notice* stuff that needs doing around the house. Everything goes to hell if I'm out of town for a weekend, or sick for three days. Maybe it's not the end of the world if he's so laid back that kids leaving dirty socks on the table doesn't bother him. It's a lot less OK that it doesn't occur to him to do laundry or dishes until he's out of clean pants, or has used the last clean plate. To be fair to him, I've made a list of the stuff that really has to get done each day in order not to get a vermin infestation in the house, and he is keeping us up to basic hygienic standards while I try to recover (yeah, not usually online this much, but ATM get winded being upright more than 10 minutes.. ugh). But no, he doesn't do any of that without guidance and prompting. It's not automatic. And while that guidance and prompting is necessary when I'm ill and nobody else can do it... it's poison for the relationship in any routine context. I've tried... and I've chosen to stay married.
Which is not to rag on him. He works twelve-hour shifts, he's a great dad, and he keeps us afloat financially. He's also a pretty good cook, and does dinner on days when he's not working, and this works for us. Division of labor is a functional way to do things, when you don't have both parents working fulltime outside the home. But what I find, talking to people who do have two working parents is... the situation with housekeeping is largely the same even when both parents work-- she's the default for household stuff, he helps some (and often *thinks* he is taking an equal share, because he's unaware of how much other maintenance actually happens), but she does most of it. And this was also true for us back when we were both working.
So it's awesome if you are a dude who takes an active role in the housekeeping. Good on you. That's wonderful. IME it's not the majority. I sincerely hope that's different once you get down to the millenial generation and younger.
Interesting. 'Most of us, it's true.' Not sure that's actually true. Class is obv a HUGE factor in how this stuff gets measured, but all the men I know are AT LEAST actively involved in all aspects of raising a family: laundry, shopping, kids activities, cooking, cleaning/maintaining, school, etc. In addition to the typical 'man stuff' of vehicle maintenance, home repairs, finances, landscaping, etc. I don't know your personal marriage dynamic...but the whole 'mental load' stuff is maddening. Perhaps your guy, after working 12 hr days, etc just doesn't focus on doing things YOUR way. I dunno.
Or, perhaps it's a generational divide, or another case of "rich people privilege". IDK. I'm perfectly willing to believe that this is not your experience, among your social peers, and that's great. But please don't project.
Noted. And to be clear, I'm not looking to provoke, or 'project' (not sure what u mean by that, tbh). But the 'mental load' issue is CONSTANTLY invoked, mostly by married women, and it's just balderdash. IOW, a myth...another one that can never be falsified so it's gains traction. And then we wonder why we can't have nice things. Anyway, hope u feel better soon.
🎯 In the absence of a wealth bubble (and culture war propaganda), it boils down to household economics and survival. While norms like monogamy and marriage are aligned with the interests of Church and State, they're being swiftly demolished to make way for a more neo-Feudal arrangement.
Even if you haven't got a domineering boss, it's a rare thing to have a *career* that is really intellectually stimulating and personally fulfilling.
Most of us just have A Job. How many women out there would practically kill to trade in that dumb, repetitive, soul-killing Job, to just raise their own kids?
I do it, and I can assure you it's no luxury, and it looks nothing like as glamorous as those 50s LARPer "tradwife" creatures on Insta. I think they must be some kind of plasticene alien hybrids.
But it still beats the hell out of working customer service, which is what I was doing before I quit to raise kids. Customer service is basically a suburb of purgatory. So, you know, the absolutely GIANT question that never gets asked in these discussions is: What, exactly, is the career you'd be trading in, if you quit to raise kids? There's a rather large difference between trading in a stimulating career as a high-powered attorney or a surgeon or an astronaut or something, and trading in a sh*tty job as a waitress, or answering hostile customer emails, or *watching other people's kids*. This is why this whole discussion is by, for, and about rich people. Because you never get the perfectly legit argument: well, my job sucked and raising my kids is significantly better than answering phones.
I *desperately* want to see this discussion redone by, for, and about working class women.
Plenty of women have to work, to avoid their family having to take up residence in a cardboard box. Have you seen the prices of refrigerator boxes these days?
Yes, we have been trying for over two years to scrape our pennies together and buy a refrigerator box of our very own, so we can stop getting sucked dry by the rental market. The real estate crash cannot come soon enough. And when the REI crowd gets hosed and cries and demands bailouts... you can bet a lot of us will be laughing our asses off, setting off fireworks, and hosting all-night bonfires with beer and hotdogs. Should be a national holiday.
I appreciate the comparison to religion and the patriarchal family. Women can take up the patriarchal role of boss but it’s still that. This also leads me to think about all the ways the white collar workplaces pretends to not be this, and in this pretension it obscures its level of control on your psyche. E.g., we’re like a “family”
Feminist mythology asife, it has long be3n evident that the biggest beneficiaries of the Sexual Revolution (the divorcing of sex from reproduction) are not so much women as second-tier alpha males.
Top tier alphas, the JFKs, the Sultan Akbars, the Franz Liszts, have always lived in emulation of feral tomcats.
Just now, the local minigarch no longer has to skulk around or go through the motions of bourgeois propriety and can get straight to the "rutting season" part.
As you noted, most women are hypergamous. Feminist mythology aside, most women want to look *up* to their man, physically and otherwise. Further, as you noted, there are fewer men to be looked up to.
What this means, is that those men and cats with influence and authority can pretty much decide what they want and women can either deliver or settle in other ways. It's never been a better time for alphas.
Loved reading this @Anu, This has been going on in my mind after the horrific rape incident reporting in the media, how can someone stoop so low? Patriarchy is deeply rooted in our society, and earning your own money should not be the only path to achieve parity between the genders. Patriarchy can be viewed from two perspectives: on the one hand, it may confine women to their homes and dominate them; on the other, it may place women on a higher pedestal, granting them rights, comforts, and the respect they deserve. The key is fostering a mindset that values all kinds of work, including household labor, without relying on gender stereotypes. As a society, and especially as women, we must demand justice and teach our men—husbands, sons, and brothers—to respect women in their daily lives by eliminating gender-discriminatory actions. Loved reading all the pointers you have raised, Anu, and articulating them so well.
I appreciate you reading! You’re right about the values and I really wish earning money wasn’t the only way. Do you think there’s a way to change mindsets without women working in Indian society?
Brilliantly balanced and comprehensive, bravo! With a reactionary alliance of anti-feminists, incel adjacents, and natalists rising while demographics fall, Culture Warriors with any hope for peaceful retirement will have to turn their swords into plowshares. Household formation + fertility is THE quintessential question of sustainability, and defaults to old ways if/when the system diverges into disequilibrium. We can either be pragmatic about the pains of social reproduction, as you outline, or continue to let "the beautiful ones" play minPain maxPleasure until its Game Over for society.
As a man who left a traditional male job , tree care , to be a stay at home dad and never went back to work this was fascinating. Many old school male expectations destroyed men in body and soul. My wife thrives on work while I’m a natural caretaker even though I present as a very masculine , tattooed , weightlifting kind of guy. We both feel very fortunate we went our own way and it worked for both of us. She was able to retire at 40 l, now 54, but has worked off and on since then because she enjoys it. I’ve coached youth sports , led meditation in prisons and had several amazing gardens. Thanks for the reminder that we have been lucky to each be able to be fully ourselves and work as a team !!
That is pretty awesome, and I appreciate the gender role flipping there. It should be normalized for men to be caretakers and it's a shame that even despite our desire to do away with gender norms, that one has stayed in place.
I feel like we have built a society made of shackles, which is why we’re uncomfortable wherever we turn.
On the subject of sharing domestic duties even if only the man works, I don’t think that’s necessarily a ‘women wanting it both ways’ issue. First, when kids are small, you can literally work 24/7 and not cover everything, it’s way more than ‘a job’. Not all kids are the same I guess but mine was of such a temperament that if he was awake, you needed to be perpetually on top of him or terrible things would happen. He hated napping and would take ages to put down to naps. And during the naps and when he finally fell asleep there was everything else - the house, the food, the laundry. I have done a bunch of relatively high-demand jobs, with travel and overtime, and none were as demanding as parenting during the first 5-6 years.
So compared to that my husband’s 4 day work week with zero overtime really shouldn’t qualify him for a free ride at home.
Also it’s all too easy for men to just….. not build an actual relationship with their kids. If the mom does everything the kid will naturally go to the mom for everything. Even in our house and even today when he’s 12, my kid will step around his totally free and available father and come dig me out of whatever corner of our home to ask me something.
So forcing them to have points of constant interaction is only a good thing in my mind.
Totally agree that they should have a relationship, and never having done the kid thing I’ll have to take your word for it. And yeah a four day work week isn’t exactly grueling and he should have to help. As for shackles, yes.
"Women had to do so because the neoliberal economic consensus made it untenable for only men to work. A man could no longer earn enough alone to support a family, so feminism was almost beside the point; women had to work, and feminism provided a post hoc ideological justification that led women to see it as freedom."
John D. Rockefeller jr. supported the suffragette movement for the simple reason that it would be better to tax 100% of the population than just 50%.
By the same token he supported WCTU so they would ban alcohol. Why? Cars could run on alcohol, so he sold more gasoline during and after the prohibition.
A change in banking regulation took place, IIRC, in 1974.
Before then, a federally insured bank could take only one family income into account in deciding whether to extend a mortgage loan. A second income was considered "temporary", as if either spouse lost their job, the family's ability to service the loan was called into question.
After the change, the bank could take two incomes into account. The upshot of this change was that both spouses had to work to afford a home in a semi-decent school district, because they were competing with two income families. (This is also one reason why the prices of residential housing soared in the 1970s, as there was more money available to chase real estate.)
For those of us who are not feral cats or hedge fund billionaires, anything else was like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
This rather obscure change in regulation went almost unnoticed at the time. But it probably had more real world impact on the average frustrated American family than all the Supreme Court decisions ever handed down.
We can argue later whether the change was a good thing or not. At this point, good luck getting that genie back into the bottle.
Not really tho. The women in my orbit went to work after the War. 2nd incomes were the norm, at least in CA anyway, by early 70s. All the females my age (b.1965) were ALL going into the labor force. Again, the point is not to pick nits over the timing, but rather to see that doubling the labor force was a tsunami event. And here we are.
>Women should not be blamed for considering status when seeking a mate. Many men dismissively discuss hypergamy as a tendency inculcated by modernity, but it’s as old as human history and should not be considered gold digging on its own.<
I agree that it’s appropriate for women to consider status to some degree, as in I don’t think they should give the time of day to truly low quality men such as incel NEETs living in their parents’ basement (just as I would say men are justified in not giving fat women the time of day).
IMO the primary purpose of dating and marriage is to reproduce and raise the next generation. Many people these days put that aside in favor of pursuing shallow ends such as status or (for men) sexual pleasure. Hypergamy becomes a problem when women favor status-seeking over any attempt at healthy reproduction, and enter into relationships with gaining status as the primary goal and children relegated to an afterthought if even that. To the degree that hypergamy conflicts with healthy reproduction, it should be held in check.
I got this in my inbox and to respond to the first assertion I read in the first paragraph that to paraphrase "The threat of rape serves as a tool to keep women out of participating in public life" that potentially is how the spectator of rape function however I am not convinced without evidence that this was more true in the recent past than it is now, interestingly may be true more in a women's fearful psychologically than in literal happenstance. It's a questionable assertion I hear all the time because people are eager to portray the era prior to the womens movement as one dimensionally bad. I don't think any time period and certainly not in modern times was as bad for women in the west as it is for women in India today.
I’m not sure I ever said the women’s movement was ‘bad’. The earlier feminist demands were absolutely necessary to bring about a more egalitarian society in which patriarchy is no longer official law. But, in more obviously patriarchal societies, rape does serve as a deterrent to women working outside the home, as we see in India.
Today, a full-time job and stay-at-home parenthood are BOTH full-time jobs that often spill over into what's left of one's personal life. The difference, as my mother used to note to my father sometimes, is that the mother's job is never done; she doesn't get to relax much at the end of the day because the kids always need something. When we were on vacation, it was easier, but kids still need to be watched and taken care of, and my father tended to fall asleep wherever he was, whether at home or somewhere else. Yet back then, his job ended at 5pm five days a week. Today people in the workforce are expected to be on-call and working damn near every waking minute. So it's difficult to raise kids at all, and worth expecting Dad to handle at least *some* of it even if Mom is SAH. Maybe not half the responsibilities, but maybe 20%? 25%?
I’d say not more than 25%, if you can even portion it. Expecting half or more of the domestic work from a person working full time otherwise doesn’t seem fair to me, but I’ve also never had a kid. And it shouldn’t preclude the time spent bonding for whoever has a job.
There's something to be said for expecting a man to pull his weight. I'm 61, and women my age look at what men have accumulated for retirement. Not everyone did, or was able to, but in Ontario the divorce or split-up laws can be brutal to both parties, halving everything down the middle. If I ever wind up living with someone again, there will absolutely be a legal cohabitation agreement (we have them, it's a thing) to make sure I don't lose half my savings to someone else. And men, I'm certain, feel the same way. Probably some have more than I have in retirement, and I can't blame them for not wanting to lose everything in the event of a split.
Maybe I could provide some perspective: in mainstream feminist discourse, I don’t see anyone talking about women with mental disorders, who live in fear of doing anything that is traditionally feminist (getting married plus raising kids PLUS working full time) because they fear the stress and despair that other people tell them will automatically come with doing all those things. I’m someone who has an anxiety disorder, and who has had trouble keeping jobs because I tend to be highly critical of myself for being in a job I deem as “beneath me” (I.e. I work as an administrative assistant in a private preschool, which is a high school level job, but I also have a bachelor’s degree from a highly regarded university in my area). I think this is due to the fact that I grew up with learning disabilities and was placed in a lower track in school, in subjects (math and hard science) that I believe elite society regards as superior to the subjects I am actually good at (language, literature, music, history and social science). Ive spent a lot of time thinking about how I can try to convince people that working in a job that is commensurate with my intelligence, experience and skills is more important than raising a family, because I believe I am naturally highly skilled and patient in caring for other people’s children, so much so that I believe can reduce the amount of stress I could possibly feel with raising my own children and therefore parenting will be relatively easy for me, and therefore I can focus most of my energy on building a career that is personally fulfilling to me. But anytime I feel a premonition to share this with people, I’m afraid of being accused of being a pretentious asshole who mistakenly believes that as a woman, I CAN have it all in today’s society, though no one around me would ever seriously say that to me. Are there other women here who feel that way I do?
I honestly don’t think a regular woman can have it all. The laws of physics don’t allow it UNLESS you’re rich. Then you can have anything. Are you saying you never encounter the idea that staying home with kids is a waste of potential? It’s not that everyone believes it but that enough people do for it to matter
Well, I don’t encounter the idea the staying home with kids is a waste of potential, I actually encounter the opposite: that being a mother is the most important job in the world, and family should always come before work and perhaps (this is an extreme generalization coming from my own mind) you are less of a relatable person if you choose to have kids. I get the sense that people think that family is forever, but a job is not, so if you lose you job, which you highly identify with (which I plan to) and you have no family, then you have nothing meaningful in your life.
Yes to everyone having choices.
But I think a lot of the angst over women in the workforce, in the US at least, is... an artifact of the most vocal feminists also coming from wealthy families. Money is where real choice comes from.
Feminism is for rich people. Work-life balance is for rich people. Choice is mostly for rich people.
For those of us in the working class, there has never been any real question of women working outside the home. Of course we do. If we are lucky, we have a grandma in the picture who is willing to take care of the kids. If not... every part of moms having outside jobs sucks elephant balls. It's not like we can hire domestic help to replace us at home, and no, men (however decent) are not going to take on an equal share of domestic duties. Having a job just means you work all day and then you come home and do the lion's share of the housework too. Oh, and paid childcare eats most of your paycheck anyway.
I quit my job to raise the kids. Not because we could afford it. But because we couldn't afford *not* to. We ran the numbers: took my anticipated paycheck, subtracted the cost of childcare for three kids, subtracted the costs incurred *by the job*, subtracted a large portion of the stuff I do at home to save us money, but would no longer have time for... and I would have effectively been working a fulltime job just to bring home $100 a week. A hundred bucks with a significant decrease in quality of life for all of us. Not. Worth. It. So we live on a shoestring, buy secondhand clothes, cook every meal at home, grow our own vegetables, and we are never gonna retire, but at least our kids get to have a fulltime parent, and we homeschool (the local schools are terrible-- this is the only way they'd get any education at all).
On the balance, I'm glad we did this. Yeah, we're poor. My mom was the breadwinner in my family, and this was a constant misery to all of us. She couldn't respect Dad (he worked day labor, she had a master's degree and a low-paying whitecollar career, and the family insurance plan), they despised each other, we spent a lot of time in daycare, and at the end of the day neither parent had much energy or emotional reserve left for dealing with kids. I'd rather die destitute than do that to my own children. That's a choice, too. I don't get the same set of choices as women with money, but I do get some. I'm choosing to do right by my kids.
Would to God that I could uplike this comment a hundred hundred times.
The cover of the September 9, 2024 issue of "The New Yorker" is most instructive. Brown nannies supervising white kids.
How does this myth that the men don't do 'equal' shares of domestic duties stay alive?
Because for most of us, it's true.
I've been laid out with strep for a week now, and it's showing in a big way. My husband is a good man, but he literally doesn't even *notice* stuff that needs doing around the house. Everything goes to hell if I'm out of town for a weekend, or sick for three days. Maybe it's not the end of the world if he's so laid back that kids leaving dirty socks on the table doesn't bother him. It's a lot less OK that it doesn't occur to him to do laundry or dishes until he's out of clean pants, or has used the last clean plate. To be fair to him, I've made a list of the stuff that really has to get done each day in order not to get a vermin infestation in the house, and he is keeping us up to basic hygienic standards while I try to recover (yeah, not usually online this much, but ATM get winded being upright more than 10 minutes.. ugh). But no, he doesn't do any of that without guidance and prompting. It's not automatic. And while that guidance and prompting is necessary when I'm ill and nobody else can do it... it's poison for the relationship in any routine context. I've tried... and I've chosen to stay married.
Which is not to rag on him. He works twelve-hour shifts, he's a great dad, and he keeps us afloat financially. He's also a pretty good cook, and does dinner on days when he's not working, and this works for us. Division of labor is a functional way to do things, when you don't have both parents working fulltime outside the home. But what I find, talking to people who do have two working parents is... the situation with housekeeping is largely the same even when both parents work-- she's the default for household stuff, he helps some (and often *thinks* he is taking an equal share, because he's unaware of how much other maintenance actually happens), but she does most of it. And this was also true for us back when we were both working.
So it's awesome if you are a dude who takes an active role in the housekeeping. Good on you. That's wonderful. IME it's not the majority. I sincerely hope that's different once you get down to the millenial generation and younger.
Interesting. 'Most of us, it's true.' Not sure that's actually true. Class is obv a HUGE factor in how this stuff gets measured, but all the men I know are AT LEAST actively involved in all aspects of raising a family: laundry, shopping, kids activities, cooking, cleaning/maintaining, school, etc. In addition to the typical 'man stuff' of vehicle maintenance, home repairs, finances, landscaping, etc. I don't know your personal marriage dynamic...but the whole 'mental load' stuff is maddening. Perhaps your guy, after working 12 hr days, etc just doesn't focus on doing things YOUR way. I dunno.
Or, perhaps it's a generational divide, or another case of "rich people privilege". IDK. I'm perfectly willing to believe that this is not your experience, among your social peers, and that's great. But please don't project.
Noted. And to be clear, I'm not looking to provoke, or 'project' (not sure what u mean by that, tbh). But the 'mental load' issue is CONSTANTLY invoked, mostly by married women, and it's just balderdash. IOW, a myth...another one that can never be falsified so it's gains traction. And then we wonder why we can't have nice things. Anyway, hope u feel better soon.
I have seriously never encountered the term "mental load" WRT housework. Again, perhaps it's a generational divide.
🎯 In the absence of a wealth bubble (and culture war propaganda), it boils down to household economics and survival. While norms like monogamy and marriage are aligned with the interests of Church and State, they're being swiftly demolished to make way for a more neo-Feudal arrangement.
The elephant in the room is that work does not set you free.
The corporate environment is functionally indistinguishable from a feudal society.
So women who work have simply traded a domineering husband for a domineering boss.
Even if you haven't got a domineering boss, it's a rare thing to have a *career* that is really intellectually stimulating and personally fulfilling.
Most of us just have A Job. How many women out there would practically kill to trade in that dumb, repetitive, soul-killing Job, to just raise their own kids?
I know quite a few human females who are bitterly resentful that SAHM have the luxury of staying at home.
I do it, and I can assure you it's no luxury, and it looks nothing like as glamorous as those 50s LARPer "tradwife" creatures on Insta. I think they must be some kind of plasticene alien hybrids.
But it still beats the hell out of working customer service, which is what I was doing before I quit to raise kids. Customer service is basically a suburb of purgatory. So, you know, the absolutely GIANT question that never gets asked in these discussions is: What, exactly, is the career you'd be trading in, if you quit to raise kids? There's a rather large difference between trading in a stimulating career as a high-powered attorney or a surgeon or an astronaut or something, and trading in a sh*tty job as a waitress, or answering hostile customer emails, or *watching other people's kids*. This is why this whole discussion is by, for, and about rich people. Because you never get the perfectly legit argument: well, my job sucked and raising my kids is significantly better than answering phones.
I *desperately* want to see this discussion redone by, for, and about working class women.
Plenty of women have to work, to avoid their family having to take up residence in a cardboard box. Have you seen the prices of refrigerator boxes these days?
Yes, we have been trying for over two years to scrape our pennies together and buy a refrigerator box of our very own, so we can stop getting sucked dry by the rental market. The real estate crash cannot come soon enough. And when the REI crowd gets hosed and cries and demands bailouts... you can bet a lot of us will be laughing our asses off, setting off fireworks, and hosting all-night bonfires with beer and hotdogs. Should be a national holiday.
They'll get their bailouts. Don't kid yourself.
And the real outcome (if not unstated goal) of every program to "make home ownership more affordable" is to raise housing costs.
Something much the same can be said about higher education. And read my comment on banking regulation.
Most workplaces are set up like family or religious hierarchies. Tricking women into believing this is freedom is the best scam ever.
I appreciate the comparison to religion and the patriarchal family. Women can take up the patriarchal role of boss but it’s still that. This also leads me to think about all the ways the white collar workplaces pretends to not be this, and in this pretension it obscures its level of control on your psyche. E.g., we’re like a “family”
Usually, when a job calls itself a family, they want something from you.
Feminist mythology asife, it has long be3n evident that the biggest beneficiaries of the Sexual Revolution (the divorcing of sex from reproduction) are not so much women as second-tier alpha males.
Top tier alphas, the JFKs, the Sultan Akbars, the Franz Liszts, have always lived in emulation of feral tomcats.
Just now, the local minigarch no longer has to skulk around or go through the motions of bourgeois propriety and can get straight to the "rutting season" part.
As you noted, most women are hypergamous. Feminist mythology aside, most women want to look *up* to their man, physically and otherwise. Further, as you noted, there are fewer men to be looked up to.
What this means, is that those men and cats with influence and authority can pretty much decide what they want and women can either deliver or settle in other ways. It's never been a better time for alphas.
Loved reading this @Anu, This has been going on in my mind after the horrific rape incident reporting in the media, how can someone stoop so low? Patriarchy is deeply rooted in our society, and earning your own money should not be the only path to achieve parity between the genders. Patriarchy can be viewed from two perspectives: on the one hand, it may confine women to their homes and dominate them; on the other, it may place women on a higher pedestal, granting them rights, comforts, and the respect they deserve. The key is fostering a mindset that values all kinds of work, including household labor, without relying on gender stereotypes. As a society, and especially as women, we must demand justice and teach our men—husbands, sons, and brothers—to respect women in their daily lives by eliminating gender-discriminatory actions. Loved reading all the pointers you have raised, Anu, and articulating them so well.
I appreciate you reading! You’re right about the values and I really wish earning money wasn’t the only way. Do you think there’s a way to change mindsets without women working in Indian society?
Brilliantly balanced and comprehensive, bravo! With a reactionary alliance of anti-feminists, incel adjacents, and natalists rising while demographics fall, Culture Warriors with any hope for peaceful retirement will have to turn their swords into plowshares. Household formation + fertility is THE quintessential question of sustainability, and defaults to old ways if/when the system diverges into disequilibrium. We can either be pragmatic about the pains of social reproduction, as you outline, or continue to let "the beautiful ones" play minPain maxPleasure until its Game Over for society.
I wish it wasn’t so incredibly difficult to raise a human being. If it was easier, I’d do it.
Few things in life are easy, but many are worth it. Cultivating a family is one..
As a man who left a traditional male job , tree care , to be a stay at home dad and never went back to work this was fascinating. Many old school male expectations destroyed men in body and soul. My wife thrives on work while I’m a natural caretaker even though I present as a very masculine , tattooed , weightlifting kind of guy. We both feel very fortunate we went our own way and it worked for both of us. She was able to retire at 40 l, now 54, but has worked off and on since then because she enjoys it. I’ve coached youth sports , led meditation in prisons and had several amazing gardens. Thanks for the reminder that we have been lucky to each be able to be fully ourselves and work as a team !!
That is pretty awesome, and I appreciate the gender role flipping there. It should be normalized for men to be caretakers and it's a shame that even despite our desire to do away with gender norms, that one has stayed in place.
I'd bet MOST men are caretakers. We just also have to work.
I feel like we have built a society made of shackles, which is why we’re uncomfortable wherever we turn.
On the subject of sharing domestic duties even if only the man works, I don’t think that’s necessarily a ‘women wanting it both ways’ issue. First, when kids are small, you can literally work 24/7 and not cover everything, it’s way more than ‘a job’. Not all kids are the same I guess but mine was of such a temperament that if he was awake, you needed to be perpetually on top of him or terrible things would happen. He hated napping and would take ages to put down to naps. And during the naps and when he finally fell asleep there was everything else - the house, the food, the laundry. I have done a bunch of relatively high-demand jobs, with travel and overtime, and none were as demanding as parenting during the first 5-6 years.
So compared to that my husband’s 4 day work week with zero overtime really shouldn’t qualify him for a free ride at home.
Also it’s all too easy for men to just….. not build an actual relationship with their kids. If the mom does everything the kid will naturally go to the mom for everything. Even in our house and even today when he’s 12, my kid will step around his totally free and available father and come dig me out of whatever corner of our home to ask me something.
So forcing them to have points of constant interaction is only a good thing in my mind.
Totally agree that they should have a relationship, and never having done the kid thing I’ll have to take your word for it. And yeah a four day work week isn’t exactly grueling and he should have to help. As for shackles, yes.
"Women had to do so because the neoliberal economic consensus made it untenable for only men to work. A man could no longer earn enough alone to support a family, so feminism was almost beside the point; women had to work, and feminism provided a post hoc ideological justification that led women to see it as freedom."
John D. Rockefeller jr. supported the suffragette movement for the simple reason that it would be better to tax 100% of the population than just 50%.
By the same token he supported WCTU so they would ban alcohol. Why? Cars could run on alcohol, so he sold more gasoline during and after the prohibition.
A change in banking regulation took place, IIRC, in 1974.
Before then, a federally insured bank could take only one family income into account in deciding whether to extend a mortgage loan. A second income was considered "temporary", as if either spouse lost their job, the family's ability to service the loan was called into question.
After the change, the bank could take two incomes into account. The upshot of this change was that both spouses had to work to afford a home in a semi-decent school district, because they were competing with two income families. (This is also one reason why the prices of residential housing soared in the 1970s, as there was more money available to chase real estate.)
For those of us who are not feral cats or hedge fund billionaires, anything else was like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
This rather obscure change in regulation went almost unnoticed at the time. But it probably had more real world impact on the average frustrated American family than all the Supreme Court decisions ever handed down.
We can argue later whether the change was a good thing or not. At this point, good luck getting that genie back into the bottle.
Once the labor force was essentially doubled post WW2, it was inevitable Captalism make the necessary adjustments. It's a feature, and a function.
Except it wasn't. Most women, to the extent they worked during the War, went back to what they were doing before the war.
Timeline might be a bit off, but point was the mechanism was in motion, and the next generation went directly into the labor force.
Timeline was off by some 30 years.
Not really tho. The women in my orbit went to work after the War. 2nd incomes were the norm, at least in CA anyway, by early 70s. All the females my age (b.1965) were ALL going into the labor force. Again, the point is not to pick nits over the timing, but rather to see that doubling the labor force was a tsunami event. And here we are.
>Women should not be blamed for considering status when seeking a mate. Many men dismissively discuss hypergamy as a tendency inculcated by modernity, but it’s as old as human history and should not be considered gold digging on its own.<
I dedicated an article to this: https://persononline.substack.com/p/are-women-responsible-for-the-consequences
I agree that it’s appropriate for women to consider status to some degree, as in I don’t think they should give the time of day to truly low quality men such as incel NEETs living in their parents’ basement (just as I would say men are justified in not giving fat women the time of day).
IMO the primary purpose of dating and marriage is to reproduce and raise the next generation. Many people these days put that aside in favor of pursuing shallow ends such as status or (for men) sexual pleasure. Hypergamy becomes a problem when women favor status-seeking over any attempt at healthy reproduction, and enter into relationships with gaining status as the primary goal and children relegated to an afterthought if even that. To the degree that hypergamy conflicts with healthy reproduction, it should be held in check.
Get wise to the dark side of feminism in my podcast her:
https://soberchristiangentlemanpodcast.substack.com/p/s1-scgp-feminism-deception-rebroadcast
I got this in my inbox and to respond to the first assertion I read in the first paragraph that to paraphrase "The threat of rape serves as a tool to keep women out of participating in public life" that potentially is how the spectator of rape function however I am not convinced without evidence that this was more true in the recent past than it is now, interestingly may be true more in a women's fearful psychologically than in literal happenstance. It's a questionable assertion I hear all the time because people are eager to portray the era prior to the womens movement as one dimensionally bad. I don't think any time period and certainly not in modern times was as bad for women in the west as it is for women in India today.
I’m not sure I ever said the women’s movement was ‘bad’. The earlier feminist demands were absolutely necessary to bring about a more egalitarian society in which patriarchy is no longer official law. But, in more obviously patriarchal societies, rape does serve as a deterrent to women working outside the home, as we see in India.
Today, a full-time job and stay-at-home parenthood are BOTH full-time jobs that often spill over into what's left of one's personal life. The difference, as my mother used to note to my father sometimes, is that the mother's job is never done; she doesn't get to relax much at the end of the day because the kids always need something. When we were on vacation, it was easier, but kids still need to be watched and taken care of, and my father tended to fall asleep wherever he was, whether at home or somewhere else. Yet back then, his job ended at 5pm five days a week. Today people in the workforce are expected to be on-call and working damn near every waking minute. So it's difficult to raise kids at all, and worth expecting Dad to handle at least *some* of it even if Mom is SAH. Maybe not half the responsibilities, but maybe 20%? 25%?
I’d say not more than 25%, if you can even portion it. Expecting half or more of the domestic work from a person working full time otherwise doesn’t seem fair to me, but I’ve also never had a kid. And it shouldn’t preclude the time spent bonding for whoever has a job.
>hypergamy... should not be considered gold digging on its own.... [W]anting to find someone making as much or more than them doesn’t qualify
So, just to clarify: you're not saying she's a gold-digger, but she ain't messin' wit no broke n****z?
There is gold digging, and then there's acting on evolved impulses, yes lol
There's something to be said for expecting a man to pull his weight. I'm 61, and women my age look at what men have accumulated for retirement. Not everyone did, or was able to, but in Ontario the divorce or split-up laws can be brutal to both parties, halving everything down the middle. If I ever wind up living with someone again, there will absolutely be a legal cohabitation agreement (we have them, it's a thing) to make sure I don't lose half my savings to someone else. And men, I'm certain, feel the same way. Probably some have more than I have in retirement, and I can't blame them for not wanting to lose everything in the event of a split.
Maybe I could provide some perspective: in mainstream feminist discourse, I don’t see anyone talking about women with mental disorders, who live in fear of doing anything that is traditionally feminist (getting married plus raising kids PLUS working full time) because they fear the stress and despair that other people tell them will automatically come with doing all those things. I’m someone who has an anxiety disorder, and who has had trouble keeping jobs because I tend to be highly critical of myself for being in a job I deem as “beneath me” (I.e. I work as an administrative assistant in a private preschool, which is a high school level job, but I also have a bachelor’s degree from a highly regarded university in my area). I think this is due to the fact that I grew up with learning disabilities and was placed in a lower track in school, in subjects (math and hard science) that I believe elite society regards as superior to the subjects I am actually good at (language, literature, music, history and social science). Ive spent a lot of time thinking about how I can try to convince people that working in a job that is commensurate with my intelligence, experience and skills is more important than raising a family, because I believe I am naturally highly skilled and patient in caring for other people’s children, so much so that I believe can reduce the amount of stress I could possibly feel with raising my own children and therefore parenting will be relatively easy for me, and therefore I can focus most of my energy on building a career that is personally fulfilling to me. But anytime I feel a premonition to share this with people, I’m afraid of being accused of being a pretentious asshole who mistakenly believes that as a woman, I CAN have it all in today’s society, though no one around me would ever seriously say that to me. Are there other women here who feel that way I do?
I honestly don’t think a regular woman can have it all. The laws of physics don’t allow it UNLESS you’re rich. Then you can have anything. Are you saying you never encounter the idea that staying home with kids is a waste of potential? It’s not that everyone believes it but that enough people do for it to matter
Well, I don’t encounter the idea the staying home with kids is a waste of potential, I actually encounter the opposite: that being a mother is the most important job in the world, and family should always come before work and perhaps (this is an extreme generalization coming from my own mind) you are less of a relatable person if you choose to have kids. I get the sense that people think that family is forever, but a job is not, so if you lose you job, which you highly identify with (which I plan to) and you have no family, then you have nothing meaningful in your life.