So here’s some research out of the University of British Columbia in Canada that says girls who grow up with kitchen bitches fathers who do housework are more likely to choose a career over their families well-being.
http://ca.shine.yahoo.com/dads-blame-daughters-growing-housewives-163032903.html
That’s a nice one-two punch, isn’t it?
Slagging women who make their children a priority and simultaneously blaming men! Quite frankly, this whole “men are to blame for everything” shtick is getting boring. Let’s assume for one second, JUST ONE GODDAMN FUCKING SECOND, that women are rational, thinking, intelligent creatures who consider their options and make choices based on what is best for themselves, their children, their husbands, their communities and their culture.
Can we do that, feminism? Can we act like women are ADULTS, capable of making decisions outside some framework of oppression and victimization? It boggles my mind that any woman, anywhere, would ever call herself a feminist when it so clearly requires that she surrender her basic humanity and lie down to be steamrolled by some imaginary patriarchy.
Feminism
The radical notion that women are children incapable of making any rational, thoughtful intelligent decisions on their own
Feminism
The radical notion that women are victims who can always blame someone else for their own choices
Feminism
The radical notion that women are oppressed and stupid and blind and senseless
Here’s an idea: women who grow up with fathers who model masculinity have an easier time sorting through the lies that feminist culture preaches. When girls grow up seeing men act like men and women act like women, they reject the idea that we are completely and utterly interchangeable and that the needs of children don’t matter.
Women who grow up seeing dependence modeled don’t have a problem accepting that depending on a man when one has small children is not a deep threat to their own existence because they have the lived proof that MEN ARE NOT EVIL OPPRESSORS.
Patriarchy
The idea that men deliberately designed a system to hurt the women they love the most in the world: their mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, nieces, wives
Yeah, that sounds plausible.
There was no patriarchy. Aristocracy and patriarchy are not the same thing. The rich want to hang on to their wealth and privilege and are willing to throw millions of poor people under the haywagon to do so, yes. Absolutely. The rich continue to sacrifice the poor for their own comfort, but rich WOMEN are just as willing to do that as rich MEN.
Hello, Marissa Mayer, building a nursery in her office so she can spend at least a few minutes a day with her baby while forcing all of Yahoo’s remote workers to drop their kids off at daycare and get their asses in to the office.
It’s no coincidence that Mayer rejects the label feminist, because she isn’t one. She’s a modern day aristocrat, with the wealth and power and privilege and opportunity to take care of her own family while sacrificing the families of her minions.
Big fucking surprise there.
Who is oppressing all the mommies at Yahoo? Oh yeah, that would be ANOTHER WOMAN.
So much for the patriarchy.
Let’s take a look for a second, shall we, at who all these stay at home mothers are. The poor saps who grew up with a Daddy who took out the garbage and earned the family’s income rather than let his wife shackle him to the dishwasher.
The first thing we need to unpack is the assertion that most mothers of young children are working fulltime. They are not. From the 2011 US Census, we can see that the labor force participation rate for women with children under the age of six is 68%, but that participation rate does not distinguish between full and part time work. Only two thirds of that cohort work full time, which means that 45% of mothers with kids under six are working fulltime.
Less than half.
And are they working the hours they would prefer? Nope. 62% of working mothers would prefer part time.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/working-mother-statistics/
And look at this: 74% of working mothers would rather not work outside the home at all!
Well now.
Lisa Belkin created a stir with her Opt-Out Revolution piece in the New York Times, explaining how all the high-powered career ladies from elite schools had babies and oops! They fell in love with them, and to hell with the job.
Because those ladies are all ignorant fucks, incapable of making intelligent choices that maximize the welfare of their whole families, right? You see, as long as smart ladies run the feminist gauntlet, get super prestigious qualifications and use those qualifications to earn cold hard cash, they are smart, capable women worthy of the utmost respect and adulation. But the second they decide that their husbands and families are deserving of their intelligence, oh well then they’re just stupid mules who have fallen under the spell of the patriarchy and they are betraying womankind with their refusal to work for other people.
True story: Mr. JB’s boss has a daughter who is fully and completely trained as an ENT (ear, nose, throat) surgeon. She has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, both her own and the state’s money, acquiring this training and now that she is done, what does she want to do?
Have babies and stay home.
And that is exactly what she plans to do. What a clever use of our collective resources. Training a woman to be a surgeon so she can stay at home with her children. LadyDoc wishes she had NOT gone into medicine, now that she is older and wiser and understands what it is she really wants out of life. She may never work as a surgeon. She bought the lie, hook, line and sinker, that she would care about money and prestige and power and her labor market value.
She does not care. She cares about her children, her husband, her family. Now that her parents are growing older, she cares deeply about them, too.
The idea that women who are at work are intelligent, confident, capable human beings worthy of respect and admiration, while women who are at home are brainwashed idiots incapable of determining the course of their own lives pisses me off something fierce, for obvious reasons.
But what really irritates the shit out of me is the idea that it’s somehow men’s fault I’m a stay at home wife and mother. If I’m going to be stupid, at least let ME be stupid. If I’m going to branded an idiot for loving my husband and children more than a cubicle, then at least let ME be the idiot.
It’s true that men are really good at accomplishing things. But you know, I’d like the privilege of owning my own shit, the good and the bad. If you’re gonna do research to show why I’m such a moron to be at home, at least pay me the respect of treating my decision as if it were MY DECISION.
Feminists can ride the Blame Train to the ends of hell, as far as I’m concerned. I’m getting off right here, at the corner of Adulthood and Accountability.
It’s a nice part of town. We’re all grown-ups here. We make our own choices, and most of them are pretty smart. And the ones that aren’t so smart? Ah well.
I can live with those, too. My decisions are still MY decisions.
I don’t need to invent a theory of universal oppression just so I have someone to blame. I already have someone to blame.
Myself.
Good thing I rarely make bad decisions. Saves me a lot of trouble, really.
A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
John Burroughs
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
Sorry for the nitpick, but let’s not cry too many tears over the poor widdle wymmmins having to actually come in to work now at Yahoo. Corporations are not charitable institutions. Rightly or wrongly, Mayer is doing what she feels she needs to do to improve her company.
I doubt anyone who works at Yahoo will end up flipping burgers if the policy change requires them to find another gig.
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It’s not the women I would cry for, dude.
It’s the babies.
😦
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Marissa Mayer’s case is like an inexhaustible gold mine of illustrations of how the modern, feminist-inspired view on gender is terribly wrong.
“Women are just as capable to be CEOs as men.” Yes, some of them, but Mayer was put at the helm of a company in decline that has seen a high rotation of incompetent CEOs, and her appointment feels a lot like a PR stunt.
“Women are as productive as men.” As long as they don’t have kids. Mayer seems to have gotten pregnant at the last possible moment for her, which was, to put in mildly, very inconvenient for the company she was supposed to save. It was basically a big middle finger to the people who trusted her, she knew they couldn’t do anything without the PR stunt backfiring.
“Successful women can balance a family life and a high-flying career.” Yes, a few can. Mayer said she’d return to work right after giving birth, and we now see she can do that because she can afford to have a nursery in her office, which the average worker can simply not expect.
And now we have “if women were in positions of power, the world would be nicer, milder, people would have more social privileges.” As you pointed out, bullshit, women in power act like any male aristocrat in power: give as little to the people underneath them as they can get away with so they can improve their own lives.
Of course, feminists will take any negatives from Mayer’s case as an exception, and everything positive as the rule.
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One of my favorite people in the world left her job to raise her daughter even though she made $500k the final year she was employed. Even better, her husband was totally on board with it. Her former boss frequently asks her to go back but she’s totally not interested.
In my opinion they did everything right. They always planned for her to quit working and used the money to shore up their financial future so she’d never have to go back.
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“Women are as productive as men.” As long as they don’t have kids.
– adding ” why do you think men are so productive in the first place?” seems like it would make the statement an epic food-for-thought point and such (feels like there’s a better moment for it, but i need to build up motivation for maths(numbers make my brain go numb). very bullshit move on mayers part, putting who knows how many kids into daycare service just so she could have a few minutes with hers. and yahoo isn’t very well liked already
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It’s the Woman’s choice. Children always suffer or benefit from the decisions of their parents, beyond their control; one may blame the distal causes (government, corporations, et al.) all one wants, but that still supposes that such institutions exist solely to make life convenient as possible for oneself and make difficult decisions magically disappear.
As TMG said, Mayer’s job is to do what is in the interest of Yahoo; she answerable primarily to the shareholders. If she does anything less… then she wouldn’t be the CEO for long, now would she? Feminists are bitching and moaning about the fact that *gasp* a woman is simply doing her job, rather than throwing shareholders and customers under the bus so the sisterhood can keep having its cake and eating it too.
Does it force the employees (mostly women) who worked from home to make a tough decision? Yeah. Tough shit, that’s life.
Maybe they should’ve been thankful Yahoo ever allowed the arrangement in the first place. They’ve had a good run, but now it’s time find another job, go to work, or leave work altogether for a time. Their choice. Can’t blame Mayer for that.
Of course, anyone who wants higher prices, reduced productivity, higher unemployment, and an all-round clumsier economy is welcome to insist that let economic optimization take a back seat to political convenience. I just wish I didn’t have to share the economy with them.
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I, for one, oppose Marissa Mayer’s decision. We need to take into account that the single mother is going to be the dominant family structure from here on out. The only other reasonable decision Mayer could have made is to provide childcare at the office much as she does for herself. Instead, she’s deliberately providing a dis-incentive for breeding because that takes away from potential work time. Like all employers these days, she wants the 24 hour employee, who is always ready to work more, and who is not distracted by trivialities such as family life.
The only way to survive in this environment is to not have children at all. If you’re powerless to change the system, then starve it. Don’t provide the system with another generation of slaves.
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The ENT who just decided to not even bother- that is so common with women- usually they’ll work a few years at least then drop out altogether. What a whacked society we now live in.
Something new suddenly occurred to me this week at work.. if women choose their careers to be ‘fulfilled’ then that puts a kind of INSANE burden on co-workers, doesn’t it? I mean in other words, I’m only supposed to there to help each and every last female feel ‘fulfilled,’ while still having to hit my quota each month. I’m supposed to create some kind of fantasy wonderland that showers constant attention on these creatures? Uh, not happening.
Yahoo is still around? I didn’t know people even used that anymore – I thought that went out with MySpace. What a cruel finger in the face that witch is giving to all the mothers who work for her. It’s like flaunting something in your face that you can’t have.
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Paying a woman to work eo ipso provides a disincentive to breed (same goes for paying a man to work, but the man’s role in breeding is of course less of a hassle). It by definition increases the market value of one’s time, increasing the ‘opportunity cost’ (economics jargon) of not having children (presumably, because one is working).
Given the nature of the current economy, there is an excess of workers and a shortage of jobs; thus it makes perfect economic sense that the economy (and actors therein, such as corporate CEOs) would increase their expectations of employees or decrease their pay and benefits – because employees are now more disposable due to a higher unemployment rate. In other words, it’s a buyers market when it comes to labor, and that means benefits (like getting to work from home) or pay inevitably decline for the sellers of labor (employees).
In short, Mayer’s decision makes economic sense; the job shortage enables the company to cut back on labor costs by withdrawing a benefit that costs it money (in the form of reduced employee efficiency). Sounds rational enough, no?
And the fact that in a job shortage, economic changes discourage ‘trivialities such as family life’ could just as easily be characterized the system readjusting toward a new equilibrium from an excess population; fewer jobs and a stagnating economy cannot very well support a growing population, so one can expect such an economy to impose a greater premium on having children in such a situation.
However one feels about it, the fact is, the economy, kind of like nature, doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings.
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Mayer’s decision only makes sense if you DON’T consider babies to be the basic unit of economic production.
But of course, they are. No babies, no market. No babies, no consumers. No babies, no producers. No babies, no economy, basically.
Anything a society does to lower the marginal rate of utlity to produce one extra baby is going to have a positive impact in the LONG RUN for that society.
We’re doing the opposite. We’re INCREASING the rate of ultility and quite nicely fucking ourselves.
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Nobody’s suggesting no babies. But fewer babies? Sometimes yes indeed. Human beings are not merely producers, they are consumers, and when they consume more than they produce, they detract from the economy. Your assumption of ‘more babies is always better’ has the obvious counterexample of the acute overpopulation of places like Bangladesh and much of Sub-Saharan Africa. Simply put, they have too many people, and not enough resources for everyone (at least, not enough resources to allow for them to live with what we in the west consider a decent standard of living).
Consider a family farm, and a couple who operate it. They need to have a few kids because after all, two people can’t run a farm very well. Having one kid improves efficiency (once said child is old enough to work, that is). Two, even better. But at some point, you reach an optimum, maybe 3 or 4, and beyond that point, each additional child consumes more food than he/she produces. For a given amount of land and capital (equipment, etc.), beyond the optimum # of children, each additional child is detrimental to the microeconomy of the farm. Obviously if you have 40 kids working the farm… yeah, sure, you’ll plant and harvest pretty quickly, but all the new ’employees’ in the world won’t make the land yield more food to feed all those kids.
In that situation, once the optimum number is reached (say, three kids), it is in the interest of the mother and father not to have more children; at least not until they manage to procure more land or better fertilizer or whatever, which requires them to save up more capital, and therefore devote themselves more to work (developing the farm) and less to breeding.
At the pre-optimum stage, improving productivity is as simple as making babies; once optimum labor capacity is reached (or new technology allows fewer kids to do more work, reducing the optimal labor force size), it behooves the family not to have more children; and if ever more children are to be had, they must first expand their resources (like working toward saving money to buy new land) to increase the optimum, so as to make having more children economically viable.
An large economy, though obviously endlessly more complex, follows the same principles, but with an added twist: one cannot fire one’s children; employees (and therefore, indirectly, their families) can however be fired from a company. So, if the job market contracts and there is an excess of workers (or a healthy supply of kids at the orphanage with which the farm family can replace their own at will), then the workers (or children, in my rather cruel example) must work harder and longer for the same compensation in order to keep their place, knowing that they are now more easily replaced. Adding more possible employees (having more children) makes the existing employees even more disposable, further devaluing their work and reducing their effective wages.
The marginal utility curve for children (like essentially any other “product,” as one learns in intro economics class) is not linear; it is a curved figure, like the linked image below. Each new child reduces the marginal productivity, and at a certain point, more of them is more detrimental than productive. Think about it, if more people were always more productive, then why aren’t companies hiring up all the unemployed people? Simply put, they’ve reached their optimum workforce size. So, if every additional person consumes on average the same as the last person produced (demand cannot go below a certain level, the subsistence level), but each marginal person does not produce the same amount, they produce less. Obviously, at some point, marginal production/supply drops below demand; more food is needed than can be produced. And people starve. Which means that in this situation, instead of having that last (now starving) baby, the parents should have instead worked more; if ever that next child is going to have his time to come into the world, better that they should work first to improve technology or garner more resources to allow for its subsistence. And if they cannot do so, then better they not have the child, as it would merely starve.
An extreme example, but it is sufficiently illustrative of how the economy (or necessity, in earlier ages) regulates the production of children, an down-regulates it if necessary.
Link to marginal cost/utility curve:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1600&bih=705&q=marginal+utility+curve+equilibrium&oq=marginal+utility+curve+equilibrium&gs_l=img.3…745408.752129.1.752313.22.1.5.16.20.0.219.219.2-1.1.0…0.0…1ac.1.5.img.zdVlyAuXVbE#imgrc=HoPBtX8_gXsgcM%3A%3Biw0ef0DyTHeY9M%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.embracingchaos.com%252Fpix%252Futility-curve.GIF%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Feco-comics.blogspot.com%252F2009_08_01_archive.html%3B525%3B408
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I could argue this with you, Mark, but I would probably lose!
😛
My point is simply that any theory of economic activity requires actors and those actors do not spring fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus.
They begin as babies.
No babies, no actors.
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I don’t think ‘poor women who have to come to work’, but I do think it’s an unfortunate policy. Many people at many corporate jobs do their own work in their own cubicles/offices. They don’t need the other people around to do their job. Some people work better in an office setting, but plenty of others have found that they actually accomplish more at home without all the office distractions.
A good business doing real work should be able to set targets for what an employee is able to accomplish, and discipline those who are not meeting standards. If a work-from-home employee isn’t working, that employee should be fired – no need to conclude that the whole system doesn’t work.
It baffles me that in the modern age of computer work and easy communication, white collar jobs, city gridlock, and environmental awareness, so many people are still so hung up on being physically in an office together.
I wonder if it could be related to people not understanding each other’s methods. Most CEOs are extroverts, which is logical, but most extroverts don’t understand introverts. Perhaps the powerful extroverts in a company couldn’t imagine successfully working from home themselves, and simply don’t understand that there are others who function very differently who work as or more efficiently without being around other people all day.
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A small few people are capable of being CEOs. That group includes both men and women, but more men.
People without children, or not interested or needing to be a primary caregiver are more productive than involved parents.
All people make tradeoffs – you can’t be an involved parent and have a big career. A family can only sustain one big career if the kids are to be given a reasonable spending of time.
Women and men get to make the same choices, but only women complain about the simple fact that their choices have tradeoffs.
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I think a lot of people confuse fewer babies with no babies. Yes, the human race needs another generation or it doesn’t exist. But that doesn’t mean every person needs to have kids, or lots of them. “you’re not producing part of the next generation!” is really meaningless until we are in a situation where we are actually running short of babies. (If the person does nothing else to contribute to society either, that can certainly still be used against them separate from the babies issue).
It would be a duty of women to have babies in a world where the race was dying out, (assuming we took for granted a duty to save it). But we’re not there, and it really isn’t any more virtuous for particular people to reproduce. (though if you choose to, it is worthy of acclaim to do it well.)
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Fair enough. A healthcare economics professor who taught me a while ago noted the macabre nature of his job, which involved asking the class such questions as “how much is a human life worth?” And expecting a cash value answer. On average, it’s about $3-10 million; that’s human beings as appliances, incubators, utilities, and long-term investments. Sentimental value not considered, of course, as when the state or an insurance companies is making life-and-death policy decisions (which must invariably be made, however uncomfortable), the ‘everyone is a snowflake, unique and an end in him/herself, and invaluable’ simply doesn’t jive with the math.
Perhaps an irrelevant anecdote. I suppose the point of it being that it doesn’t take much imagination to see why economics is called ‘the dismal science.’
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Hi, JB. You are exactly correct with your assessment of female MDs. Here is an essay on how pushing for broads to get scarce med school slots is dramatically worsening the doctor shortage in the U.K.:
http://www.angryharry.com/esIstheTrainingofWomenDoctorsAWaste.htm
MinnesotaSmith
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Oh, and about Marissa Meyer, starting her family at age 37 or 38: she’s running up against this:
” …there is something insidious and horrible that starts to kick in around age 34-35 for women conceiving children. It is universal for all women, cannot be tested for to avoid, and cannot be avoided. Basically, there is a roughly even trade off between advancing genetic maternal age after that point and reduced vitality and life expectancy in daughters. So, if a woman aged 39 (when the ovum is extracted) conceives a daughter, about 6 years, or 10%, is taken off any daughter’s lifespan and health. At 44, it’s about 10 years, or 15%. And, it’s not “they just die at 72 instead of 82, with everything else the same until then”. All through those daughter’s lives, their health, their vitality, their vigor, their life expectancy are reduced at every age. This is not a good thing to do to darling little babies you’d want to put in dresses and put bows in their hair.
Please, please, please, aspiring mothers, for the sake of your future children, have all your children naturally before age 30, if at all possible.”
MinnesotaSmith
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Totally agree with you (Kai) and Mark on this one. These kinds of arguments are part of why Mr. Z and I decided not to procreate. There are 7 billion people on this planet. Yes, there needs to be a future generation or the human race dies out (though if I’m not going to be here anyway, and I have no offspring here, I’m not sure why I care one way or the other about that in the long run, but I digress).
But it would actually be better at this point if many people DID opt out of procreating. We live on a finite planet and exponential growth cannot continue without MASS suffering and die out. It’s why hunters are encouraged to thin out the deer population when it gets to be too much. We took out a lot of their natural predators so now we have to be their predators.
With longer lifespans, advances in healthcare, and a growing population… we are becoming those deer.
Mr. Z and I chose not to have babies not because we are selfish, but because we are not. (Note: I do NOT think people who have babies are selfish. I think women who have a strong desire to have and raise children should be able to do so. I opted out and feel other women without strong maternal drives should opt out so they CAN without too much exponential growth that harms our entire ecosystem. ME having children is stupid because I don’t have a strong enough drive and I would just be adding to overpopulation.)
We additionally don’t like the direction society has gone. (all the feminism crap that we feel is bad for both female and male gender identity and roles. We both respect not everybody is gender-typical, but the majority of men and women who are, are pretty much screwed in our society.) We don’t like all the big govt. and how increasingly the govt. is more and more in people’s business on how to raise their own offspring. We don’t feel the economy is stable and a worldwide economic collapse resulting in major suffering for pretty much everybody is not a totally “out there” concept. In that event, the likelihood of two grown adults surviving together is a little higher than two adults with small dependents to worry about. Given all these things, we feel it’s wrong to bring a child into this world to suffer under all this crap when we don’t have a high enough drive to parent.
If more people would think this through and ONLY those who really really really wanted to be parents would have children, our world would be a lot better. Bringing kids here just for the sake of bringing them here is pointless and cruel. Only mothers who are willing to dedicate themselves to the role of motherhood full stop, should be bringing children into a world with 7 billion people. Otherwise, children are just an accessory and status symbol, and the next generation deserves better than that.
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Dear JB,
I personally respect your decision, as being a stay at home mum, as I do respect a career woman’s decision of being a working lady. Likewise, being a man, I respect a man’s decision to be a working dad, or a stay at home dad. Everyone should have the right to do as they wish. people who criticize other people’s decisions, decisions which affect their own lives and no one else’s, have something wrong with them. You don’t. Moreover, never underestimate yourself, you’re making a difference to the world, and a lot of men. Your writing makes me believe that women too understand and care for men’s rights. You have made me and many other men like me respect women again. You have shown that women can be feminine, domestic and yet powerfully intelligent, in a world of crazy men and women. You shun the claims of mysgonist guys that women are not rational or intelligent. How can I believe after reading your writing? And let me tell u a little secret. Most men who read ur site are secretly in love with you, as I am! Mr Jb is lucky to have you.
Lots of Love,
Stupid guy
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