This will be a long one today, but as a female MBA who opted out of the cubicle life, and who is now in the process of becoming a business professor, I think I have a pretty good insight into this whole article, and there are some important nuggets of truth here that Dr. Spar almost gets right.
Let’s dive in. Debbie Spar in italics.
http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Feminism-Went-Wrong/141293/
In 2005, I was teaching a first-year class at Harvard Business School. As usual, slightly under a third of my students were women. As always, I was the only female professor.
Really? How curious. I’m looking at the faculty page for HBS and it appears that there are quite a few female professors. They were all hired after 2005?
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/browse.aspx
First woman on the list is Laura Alfaro, and she has been with HBS since 1999. Here is her resume:
I don’t get this at all. Debbie opens with a patent falsehood. She was not the only female professor at Harvard Business School in 2005. But the important thing, I suppose is that she establish herself right from the get go as a victim. A brave soldier standing alone, fighting off the hordes of men trying to push her off the podium.
Ho hum. It’s getting kinda boring at this point, isn’t it?
So one evening, my female students asked me and one of my female colleagues to join them for cocktails. They ordered a lovely spread of hors d’oeuvres and white wine. They presented each of us with an elegant lavender plant. And then, like women meeting for cocktails often do, they—well, we, actually—proceeded to complain. About how tough it was to be so constantly in the minority. About how the guys sucked up all the air around the school. About the folks in career services who told them never to wear anything but a good black pantsuit to an interview.
One of your female colleagues? Wait? Didn’t Debbie just say she doesn’t have any female colleagues? Hello? Editors? How do you not notice these things?
Oh, and women started complaining right away? Shocked and surprised.
The guys suck up all the air around the school? What does that mean? They are in one of the most competitive, renowned MBA programs in the country, and then they go and act all competitive and shit? Well, that’s not gonna help them much in a capitalist economy, is it? Competition? What’s that?
And career services suggests a black pantsuit? How dare they? You mean yoga pants and a push-up bra are not professional attire? Well, that’s bullshit.
Over the course of the conversation, though, things began to turn. The women stopped talking about their present lives and started to focus on their futures, futures that had little to do with conferences or pantsuits and everything to do with babies, and families, and men. Most of the women were frankly intending to work “for a year or two” and then move into motherhood. These were some of the smartest and most determined young women in the country. They had Ivy League degrees, for the most part, and were in the midst of paying more than $100,000 for an M.B.A. And yet they were already deeply concerned about how they would juggle their lives, and surprisingly pessimistic about their chances of doing so.
Yes. Right here. Here is the critical moment when women like Debbie could make a real difference in these women’s lives by encouraging them to be realistic about their own desires and wants and by NOT shaming them for caring more about babies and men than pantsuits and conferences.
The real value in a Harvard MBA, or any MBA for that matter, is that you are surrounded by a pool of eligible men who are likely to be excellent providers. Men whom women are not ENTITLED to, not by any stretch of the imagination. Men whom women have a shot at EARNING. But rather than discuss just how to go about earning the love and loyalty of one of these men, Debbie wonders how she can squelch the younger women’s desires and push them even further down the path to misery and unfulfilled dreams.
http://judgybitch.com/2012/11/03/i-went-to-mba-school-to-get-my-mrs-degree-and-it-worked/
Can women pursue their dreams without losing their sanity?
See what she did there? The women, by her own admission, are dreaming of men and babies and families and motherhood, but Debbie cannot accept that. She assumes that the real dreams, the real goals, the real things worth having are the pantsuits and conferences.
Like many women of my so-called postfeminist generation, I was raised to believe that women were finally poised to be equal with men. That after centuries of oppression, exploitation, and other bad things, women could now behave more or less the way men do. Women of my generation, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, no longer felt we had to burn our bras in protest. Instead, with a curt nod to the bra burners who had gone before us, we could saunter directly to Victoria’s Secret, buying the satin push-ups that would take us seamlessly from boardroom to bedroom and beyond.
Centuries of being protected from the need to earn their own bread? Sheltered from centuries of back-breaking labor? Centuries of being afforded the luxury of working in their own homes, caring for their own families?
Pretty oppressive.
And of course, Debbie is only talking about rich, white women, as per usual. Poor women and black women have never really had the luxury of depending on a man to provide for them. Poor women have never known the oppression of having another adult to pay all the bills. Black women have never really been afforded the opportunity to send their husbands off to work while they drank coffee with the neighbor ladies and watched the kids play in the sprinkler, knowing that the pantry would be full and the water would be hot in the taps whenever they needed it.
Today, most major corporations—along with hospitals, law firms, universities, and banks—have entire units devoted to helping women (and minorities) succeed. There are diversity officers and work/family offices and gender-sensitivity training courses in all tiers of American society. The problem with these efforts is that they just don’t work.
Well, hallelujah for at least pointing that out.
Or, more precisely, even the most well-intentioned programs to attract women or mentor women or retain women still don’t deal with the basic issues that most women face. And that’s because the challenges that confront women now are more subtle than those of the past, harder to recognize and thus to remove. They are challenges that stem from breast pumps and Manolo pumps, from men whose eyes linger on a woman’s rear end and men who rush that same rear end too quickly out the door.
Again, why can’t you make your fucking point without turning men into leering boors fixated on women’s asses? And Debbie, could you stop for one goddamn second to consider that Manolo pumps are specifically designed to emphasize a woman’s ass? No one forces women to wear heels, and even in the face of overwhelming evidence that heels are cripplingly bad for a woman’s feet and entire body, they still choose to wear them.
Have you seen this? Grotesque. It makes me feel queasy. Yet women continue to subject themselves to this torture.
Why? BECAUSE THEY WANT MEN TO LOOK AT THEIR ASSES.
Well, the attractive men, right? How to avoid sexual harassment at work? Don’t be unattractive.
Hypocrisy.
Ever since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, American women have been haunted by the problem of more. Spurred by Betty Friedan’s plaintive query, “Is this all?”—inspired by feminism’s struggle for expanded rights and access, seduced by Astronaut Barbie—we have stumbled into an era of towering expectations. Little girls want to be princesses. Big girls want to be superwomen. Old women want and fully expect to look young. We want more sex, more love, more jobs, more-perfect babies. The only thing we want less of, it seems, is wrinkles.
And there. Debbie does it again. Women want sex, love, babies and to be beautiful. But she has to throw in that “more jobs”, too, even though that is just what most women DO NOT want.
The ideal employment situation for the vast majority of women is to be out of the workforce completely when they have pre-school children, and then to only work part-time thereafter. Most women can’t do that, because they have not been prepared by either the culture or older women to set up their lives so they actually have a choice about how and when and under what circumstances they wish to work in the paid labor force.
This is one of my biggest beefs with feminism: how much it lies to young women and encourages them to make choices that will ultimately give them no choices at all.
None of this, of course, can be blamed on feminism or feminists. Or, as one former radical gently reminded me recently, “We weren’t fighting so that you could have Botox.” Yet it was feminism that lit the spark of my generation’s dreams—feminism that, ironically and unintentionally, raised the bar for women so high that mere mortals are condemned to fall below it. In its original incarnation, feminism had nothing to do with perfection. In fact, the central aim of many of its most powerful proponents was to liberate women from the unreasonable, impossible standards that had long been thrust upon them.
Impossible standards like crippling footwear? Women wear those by CHOICE. Women will use any tool at their disposal to remain beautiful and sexually appealing? That is because women CARE deeply about those things.
As an aside, Botox doesn’t work. It makes you look hideous. Wear sunscreen and get enough sleep. That is far more effective than injecting botulism into your face.
Feminism didn’t raise the bar. If anything, it lowered it. Now, paying some poor woman of color to clean your house and raise your children is seen as a marker of respect and considered “good enough”. What feminism mostly did is destroy the bar outright.
“No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma,” Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.
Most women will choose to be at home with their children, cared for by the men they love. Feminism KNEW that from the get-go and was determined to destroy the family.
And they have very nearly succeeded. But they cannot destroy women’s hearts. They still long for babies and men and home.
As feminist ideals trickled and then flowed into mainstream culture, though, they became far more fanciful, more exuberant, more trivial—something easier to sell to the millions of girls and women entranced by feminism’s appeal. It is easy, in retrospect, to say that women growing up in that world should have seen through the fantasy to the underlying struggle, that they—we—should have realized the myths of Charlie (both the angels and the perfume) and fought from the outset for the real rights of women. But most of us didn’t, not because we were foolish, necessarily, but because it’s hard, coming of age, to embrace the struggles of your parents’ generation. And so we embraced the myth instead, planning, like Atalanta, to run as fast as the wind and choose the lives we wanted.
Fanciful? Exuberant? Trivial?
Wow.
The real rights of women? And what are those? From where I sit, feminism’s biggest accomplishment appears to be awarding women the right to kill their own children. So they can “choose the lives we wanted”?
Nope. Exactly the opposite. Feminism is designed to get women to reject the lives they want. A core group did NOT want men or babies or children, and there are plenty of women, feminist or not, who are STILL not interested in men or marriage or family or children, and good for them. I really don’t care what any one individual thinks about children or family. But feminism as an ideology is designed to get the majority of women who really DO care about love and men and children to set up their lives to make it impossible to pursue those goals as a dream.
Feminism REMOVES women’s choices. It does not expand them. It destroys them.
Meanwhile, none of society’s earlier expectations of women disappeared. The result is a force field of highly unrealistic expectations. A woman cannot work a 60-hour week in a high-stress job and be the same kind of parent she would have been without that job and all the stress. And she cannot save the world and look forever like a 17-year-old model.
Okay, first of all, those expectations did not disappear because women are still women. And the highly unrealistic expectations are the ones that tell women they should care more about their jobs and careers and bank account statements than the overall well-being of their families. No one can work a 60 hour week and be a good, hands-on parent. Not men, not women. No one.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timmaurer/2013/08/20/men-want-it-all-too-work-and-family/
And the harsh reality is that women are NOT saving the world. They are working in the paid labor force doing all the same work they used to do at home for their own families. Taking care of children, the elderly, cooking, cleaning, making coffee and keeping shit organized.
And don’t you just love that little “look like a 17 year old model” toss-off? Would that be because men tend to love beautiful 17 year old women, or at least how they look? Is she advocating that women attempt to appear underage? Is this a tacit approval of statutory rape?
I’ll just wait here for some feminist to call her on that one.
*crickets*
Yeah. Let’s have a man make that statement and see what happens.
No man can do that, either; no human can. Yet women are repeatedly berating themselves for failing at this kind of balancing act, and (quietly, invidiously) berating others when something inevitably slips. Think of the schadenfreude that erupts every time a high-profile woman hits a bump in either her career or her family life. Poor Condoleezza Rice, left without a boyfriend. Sloppy Hillary, whose hair is wrong again. Bad Marissa Mayer, who dared announce her impending pregnancy the same week she was named CEO of Yahoo. She could not pull it off (snicker, snicker). She paid for her success. She. Could. Not. Do. It. All.
And that anger comes from the expectation and the LIE that women should “want” to do it all. Women are not stupid. They know that it is OTHER WOMEN who are peddling the lies. Men have been, and continue to be, willing to support their wives and children in exchange for the traditional relationship between adults that emphasized loyalty, fidelity and a shared life.
Goober said it beautifully:
How deluded are these women that they don’t see that ALL of their privilege is due to the fact that men like them as companions rather than slaves?
Because they can’t possibly be all things at once, women are retreating to the only place they can, the only realm they have any chance of actually controlling. Themselves.
Most women would prefer to retreat to the realm of family, but they have conducted their lives in a way that makes that almost impossible. They have not made the choices that will give them a choice.
And feminists have cheered those women straight over the cliff.
Rather than focusing on the external goals that might once have united them, women are micromanaging the corners of their lives and, to a somewhat lesser extent, those of their children. Think about it: How many stories will you find in women’s magazines about the pursuit of anything other than bodily or familial perfection?
Because those are the things that women care about. Women’s magazines are run for profit, and if women were not completely obsessed with beauty and family, they would not generate the kinds of profits that guarantee the same stories appear over and over again.
Women are still women.
To be sure, this turn to the personal is not restricted to women. It follows a trajectory that can be traced back to Woodstock, or, more precisely, to the jagged route that befell the members of the Me Generation. Along the way, the struggle for individual liberties was transformed into the mantle of individualism.
Yep. Baby boomer women, led by the Chief Whiner herself, Betty Friedan were taught at a very young age that the only thing they should ever consider is meeeeeeeeeee! And that resonates with very young women who have yet to feel the pang of longing when they gaze upon a newborn or a wedding dress.
And by the time the day of reckoning comes, many will find they have missed the boat entirely. Germaine Greer was almost 50 when the pleasures of a little girl named Ruby blew her world apart, and she realized she had missed out on the most important part of life.
The baby, Ruby, “lit up my life in a way that nobody, certainly no lover, has ever done”, [Greer] wrote. “I found her scrumptious, delicious, ineffable, adorable, and was astonished.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/727950.stm
That is a legacy that can be laid directly at the feet of modern feminism. There are certainly women who do not want and will never regret not having children, but the majority of childless women are utterly heartbroken that they allowed the experience to pass them by.
For what?
Just as Reagan and Thatcher led the fight to privatize markets, so, too, have women raised since the 1960s led the charge to privatize feminism. It’s not that we’re against feminism’s ideals. Indeed, younger women are (not surprisingly) far more likely to be in the work force than were their mothers. Younger women are wholeheartedly devoted to birth control and to sexual freedom. They account for a majority of this country’s college students and a growing chunk of its professional class. Sixty-six percent of mothers with children younger than 17 work outside the home.
Slut culture
+
useless liberal arts degrees
+
motherhood
–
marriage
–
breadwinner
=
must work to survive
66% of women with children under 17 may be in the workforce, but most of them are part-time workers. And women with children under 6 are especially likely to be working part time. Most of those mothers would prefer to be out of the workforce completely. Fully 84% of women surveyed by Forbes Magazine would prefer not to work outside the home at all while raising a family.
84% of working women told ForbesWoman and TheBump that staying home to raise children is a financial luxury they aspire to.
The really sad thing is that so many women resent their partners for not making that possible, when it’s feminism that is largely to blame for the destruction of the family wage.
…one in three women resent their partner for not earning enough to make that dream a reality
Many of the women who are working fulltime with small children are single mothers. Again, they have been encouraged to make an absolutely disastrous mess of their lives by a culture that explicitly acknowledges single motherhood as a viable option for women.
http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/us-working-mothers-with-children.aspx
Yet because these women are grappling with so many expectations—because they are struggling more than they care to admit with the sea of choices that now confronts them—most of them are devoting whatever energies they have to controlling whatever is closest to them. Their kids’ homework, for example. Their firm’s diversity program. Their weight.
Again, women are not focused on their weight and their children because they long for something to control. Nonsense. They long to be proper mothers. They long to be as beautiful as they can be.
Women are still women.
My generation made a mistake. We took the struggles and the victories of feminism and interpreted them somehow as a pathway to personal perfection. We privatized feminism and focused only on our dreams and our own inevitable frustrations. Feminism was supposed to be about granting women power and equality, and then about harnessing that power for positive change. Younger generations of women have largely turned away from those external, social goals.
The mistake wasn’t that feminism turned into a Solipsistic Love Fest for Special Snowflakes Everywhere. It started out as that, and that was the primary goal: turn women away from their innate interests in caring for others, especially their own children, and convince them to care only for themselves.
Younger women are seeing the betrayal, and they are lost as to how to fix the situation, because older women continue to lie and lie and lie.
So what, then, do we do?
Indeed. What do we do?
I’m not going to quote any more of the article because it’s just more of the same old shit. What I am going to do is lay out how I would craft the conversation. How I WILL craft the conversation, to my daughters, to my son, to all their friends, and most importantly, to the undergraduate students I will be teaching soon enough.
Here is the truth, ladies. Most of you will eventually want to get married. Most of you will eventually want to have children. And when you first lay eyes on the beautiful little being you have created, nothing else in the world will ever matter to you again the way that little person matters.
Your heart will break if you do not get to spend your days with your baby.
It may not seem that way now, but for most of you, it will happen.
All those strategies designed to reduce guilt among working mothers? They exist because most mothers are crippled with guilt when they leave their babies to be cared for by strangers. Just keep in mind that people hardly ever feel guilty for doing the RIGHT thing. Guilt is your own conscience telling you that you are doing something very, very wrong.
You will be angry and miserable and so very wretched if you do not set up your life to give you what your heart will demand. It’s going to come down to one thing, and one thing only. Whether you get to keep your baby close to you and do the work every molecule of your body will be screaming to do depends on just one thing:
Your husband.
The man you marry will be the biggest factor in whether or not you really have any choices. Your older sisters and mothers have created a world in which men are pretty much insane to take on marriage. The laws and customs of modern feminist culture make marriage a very risky business for men. They stand to lose everything: their children, their home, their income, even their freedom if they do not turn over their income to you.
No one wants to talk about this anymore, but as young women, you need to know this: you are going to want to be with your baby and you will need to depend on a man to make that happen. That probably takes your breath away because you have been taught to hate and fear men and never, ever trust them to take care of you.
But when a man first lays eyes on the beautiful little being half of his genes created, he will also feel a need so profound, so compelling, so overwhelming that nothing in his life will ever matter the same way, either.
He will do anything to ensure that baby survives. He will work the longest hours, take on a second job, sacrifice all his pleasures and luxuries to make sure that baby lives and thrives. And he will see that his child cannot survive without a mother.
And he will take care of you, too.
It’s how human reproduction works. Our babies don’t stagger bewildered to their feet moments after birth like a newly born fawn. They require years and years of sacrifice and commitment and work.
But ladies, it isn’t free. You have to earn that commitment. You have to be worthy of the risk. You have to offer something in return for a man’s labor.
http://judgybitch.com/2012/11/12/sluts-lower-the-value-of-all-women-heres-how-to-compete-with-them/
Love. Loyalty. Fidelity.
It’s really that simple.
Think about that when you decide how you will participate in the paid labor force. Think about taking years off, dependent on a man, and then re-entering the workforce. Choose a career or job that will permit you what I guarantee most of you WILL want. If it turns out you are perfectly happy to turn your baby over to the nanny, then it’s no harm, no foul and carry on.
Women who “opt-out” do not regret opting-out, no matter what the media tells you. What they regret is not having kept a toe in the workforce to ease the eventual transition back. Think about that, carefully. Think about how you will leave, and how you will return. Plan for it. If you never use the plan, that’s fine.
Don’t find yourself trapped in an impossible situation because you failed to prepare. And understand that more and more women are making the choice to be at home when their children are very young. You won’t be alone.
Historically, the Census Bureau’s annual population survey shows that there are more mothers at home now than in the mid-1990s.
In 1994, 19.8 percent of married-couple families with children younger than 15 had a stay-at-home mother. Last year, it was 23.7 percent of families — an increase that Elliott said was statistically significant. “I don’t think we exactly know why,” she said.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/revisiting-the-opt-out-revolution/?_r=0
I know why. It’s because younger women are starting to realize there is actually nothing wrong with loving babies and men and marriage and family.
Trust yourself. Trust what you want. Trust what your heart is telling you. And most of all, trust men. Pick a good man, and then trust him. Utterly. And be worthy of his trust in return.
Freedom comes down to actually having a choice. Make the kinds of choices about what you study and whom you marry and when you have children wisely – make them so you actually have a choice.
And don’t take Women’s Studies, for the love of god. Do you really want to work at Starbucks?
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
LOL! The author’s quote about wanting to wear high heels (Manolo pumps) which induce lordosis to bring attention to her ass–right in the same sentence in which she complains about men staring at her ass–is hilarious. Unfortunately, the author has no idea she’s the butt (see what I did there?) of the joke she just created.
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Even if you never tell us what university you’ll be lecturing at, we’ll know, because we’ll read about you in the news. “Outraged feminists demand that Patriarchy mouthpiece be removed from her classroom!” I give you one week before the s***storm starts.
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Like many women of my so-called postfeminist [sic] generation, I was raised to believe that women were finally poised to be equal with men. That after centuries of oppression, exploitation, and other bad things, women could now behave more or less the way men do.
News flash, Debbie darling: women are behaving like men, as they never have before in human history. But you see, dearie, unless they are gay, men DO NOT want anything to do with women who “behave the way men do” (and who usually do a really horrible job of it to boot). THIS, dear Debbie, is why your female students, should they follow your lead, are likely to wind up alone and bitter by middle age, dwelling in condos full of cats.
For all the weight of your PhD, dear Debbie, it appears that you slept through or cut a few classes and lessons in your high school years, to say nothing of your undergrad years. Let’s go back down to college, dear Debbie, and enroll you in Cause and Effect 101.
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he really sad thing is that so many women resent their partners for not making that possible, when it’s feminism that is largely to blame for the destruction of the family wage.
…one in three women resent their partner for not earning enough to make that dream a reality
To the second paragraph of the above quote, two words: BULL and SHIT.
News flash, ladies: Odds are great that your husband CAN support you and your children on his current salary. But it takes at least three things to make this work: creativity, frugality, and self-control – on the part of BOTH spouses.
What do these mean?
Well, for starters, it means not living in a McMansion. It might mean renting a house rather than buying one, or, if you do buy a house, not buying one in a new, upscale neighborhood (live among the proles? HEAVEN FORBID!).
It means shopping for food and household supplies in bulk, clipping coupons like crazy, buying generic brands whenever possible, not eating out every other day or relying on fast food when you’re too lazy or “inconvenienced” to cook, and getting creative with recipes.
It means not buying a new car –or carS— every two years (or, better yet, not buying NEW cars AT ALL).
It means not having cable TV with all the premium channels (98 percent of which are esoteric garbage you won’t ever watch anyway).
It means not going on vacation four times per year using credit cards you’ll never be able to pay off.
It means not buying the kids all the latest electronic brain-wharpers that do nothing but turn them into incorrigible zombies (which too many parents love, because it alleviates them of the responsibility for, you know, actually being PARENTS).
It means not treating your children like entitled royalty in a manner that costs you their college fund or your household savings (whoever invented concepts like throwing your two-year-old a birthday ball needs to be strung up, doused with napalm, and set ablaze).
In sum, it means not keeping up with the Joneses, who are mostly likely shallow assholes you want nothing to do with anyway and who will wind up in the poorhouse before you will.
It’s true, to use a trite phrase, that “YMMV,” but in general, you CAN get by, and perhaps even THRIVE on one income – as long as you put your priorities in order and stop being part of the hurd.
My wife and I did this for the first ten years of our marriage when I was still on active duty earning pennies (relatively speaking), stationed in one of the regions of the U.S. with the highest cost of living, and with two children to raise. My wife was a SAHM for almost all of it and we managed not only to not starve and live in the ghetto, but to live comfortably, if very modestly by “entitled American middle class” standards. How did we pull this off? By not “having it all”, or thinking that we were entitled to such.
As any economist will tell you, life is all about tradeoffs. NO ONE can “have it all” just because they feel entitled to it. To the ladies, in response to paragraph two of the above quote, I ask you this: what are your priorites? Money and status, or a stable home and family? Pick one, but do it before you get married, make sure your husband-to-be agrees with your choice and is willing to support you in it, and LIVE WITH YOUR CHOICE ONCE YOU’VE MADE IT.
[Jumping down off of soapbox and chopping it up for firewood]
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I think that JB has an advantage here (and correct me if I’m wrong in my assumption, JB) in that she isn’t going to rely upon a teaching position as a bread and butter occupation, and that she won’t particularly care about “offending” anyone for that reason. Sure, she might be “asked to leave” her position at some point and even if she isn’t, probably won’t be offered a tenured faculty position(oh, hurt me…imagine being offered captaincy of the Titantic just as the iceberg is approaching the bow).
In other words, the headline you envision would probably be one of the more satisfying moments in JB’s life, and given the future of traditional colleges and universities in the digital age (i.e., the same future buggy whip factories were staring down in 1900), would only be a boon to her overall future.
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Beautifully said and I couldn’t agree more. We have a very comfortable life and my husband earns a good salary, but we have also made choices that make our life possible.
We live in a small town far removed from a major urban center. We have an older home that cost $136 000 to buy. This same house in the city closest to us would cost close to a million dollars. We have one car. We go on vacation to my dad’s cottage and go fishing. Mr. JB and I have been out for dinner at a proper restaurant TWICE in twelve years.
The second time was just this August, for our 13th anniversary. And while I loved being “out for dinner” and getting dressed up and wearing lipstick and everything, it almost killed me to see dinner and wine came to $150! And it wasn’t even that good! I could have made better filet mignon at home myself for a fraction of the price.
Our kids – get ready for this one – SHARE A ROOM! Yep. Unheard of these days. Three beds lined up in a row, and they actually love it. They usually push their beds together and sleep like puppies in a pound, all piled on top of each other.
I don’t spend money on expensive clothes or shoes or furniture or knick-knacks. I don’t go to the gym. I go for a walk or ride my bike. The kids wear mostly hand-me-downs from the older kids in the neighborhood. We don’t have cable TV. A big treat is to go to the movies.
I do spend a lot of money on good food, but I once calculated the cost of making pizza and it came out to less than $5, and that’s with premium ingredients. I am the coupon lady at the grocery store, and I love buying in bulk because you can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl. There’s nothing quite as heart-warming as 80 cans of tomatoes lined up on the pantry shelf. That feeling after the harvest of having your cellars stuffed with food – it still makes me very happy. I’m pretty sure I have a years’ worth of food in my house.
I think the key thing here is that young couples set themselves up in a life they simply cannot afford without two incomes, and then it becomes very hard to make the necessary sacrifices. And it can involve a huge financial hit because they didn’t plan their lives very well.
My message is for young couples to NOT assume they will always have two incomes. Assume rather that they WON’T. How many women would be willing to spend $20 000 on a wedding knowing they will not be earning an income for the next ten years? How many couples will rush into a $350 000 mortgage knowing their income is about to be cut in half?
Just being honest with younger men and women about how their lives are going to play out would be a fantastic place to start. The vast majority of women WANT to be at home with their babies and small children. In countries that offer paid maternity leave, almost all women take it. I don’t agree with maternity leave at all, but that’s another story.
It absolutely comes down to choice. But we need to be honest with the younger generation about what those choices will involve and then encourage them to make plans that will actually give them a choice!
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You’re correct. Once I’m tenured, which almost all BUSINESS professors are, because we offer real value to the university, there is little any butthurt feminists are going to be able to do to me.
Business faculties do tend to be overwhelmingly male and I doubt many of my male colleagues will be of the feminist persuasion. The ones I do copy-editing work for here certainly aren’t.
I’ll have to do a little thought policing until I secure tenure, but all the incentives at biz schools are to make that happen as fast as possible. Plus, I’m a woman who speaks English in a highly sought after specialization.
There are 394 jobs currently posted on HigherEd.com that I can apply for.
And 12 Women’s Studies positions.
I’m not too worried about pissing anyone off.
And again, we’ll mostly be saving the money I earn, so losing it won’t really affect our lives in any meaningful way.
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I see you’ve hit again on the feminist meme that men are bad, evil, selfish, and not to be trusted.
I appreciate that when you quoted my previous comment on this matter that you gave it context, because it could sound somewhat menacing and threatening to someone who didn’t understand the context. It was in no way meant to be either.
On the contrary, my comment was meant to be a comfort to women who have listened to the feminist narrative and now fear the bogeyman that we’ve been turned into in that narrative. It was meant to show the way things INVARIABLY WOULD BE if men were truly as horrible as feminists love to paint us, and show that because things are not that way, there must be something untrue about the feminist narrative.
This should prove to any free-thinking individual that women’s happiness and fulfillment must carry more intrinsic value to men than any feminist would care to admit.
For example, my happiness is inextricably tied to that of my wife and daughter. They see to my happiness, and I see to theirs – it’s the very opposite of the selfishness that feminists endorse, and in the end, I think it makes us all much more happy than we could ever be seeing to our own hollow desires.
It is also very close the relationship that a healthy mother has with her child. The mother puts everything that she is into that child’s happiness, and in return, a happy child brings more joy to that mother than any paycheck or corporate accomplishment possibly could.
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How many women would be willing to spend $20 000 on a wedding knowing they will not be earning an income for the next ten years? How many couples will rush into a $350 000 mortgage knowing their income is about to be cut in half?
Perhaps a better question is “how many SANE women…” and “how many SANE couples…?”
The answer, of course, is none. Unfortunately, most people have what economists call high time preference; they “want it, and want it NOW, the future be damned.”
The second time was just this August, for our 13th anniversary. And while I loved being “out for dinner” and getting dressed up and wearing lipstick and everything, it almost killed me to see dinner and wine came to $150! And it wasn’t even that good! I could have made better filet mignon at home myself for a fraction of the price.
Something tells me that to enjoy a home-cooked JB meal would be one of life’s more memorable experiences!
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Well, that’s not gonna help them much in a capitalist economy, is it?
Capitalism is Patriarchy. Of course, why feminists would want an MBA at all, much less from Harvard, is beyond me.
You mean yoga pants and a push-up bra are not professional attire? Well, that’s bullshit.
Bullshit, indeed. I’d totally hire the first woman who showed up for an interview in yoga pants and a push-up bra. If she was good looking, at least.
Most of the women were frankly intending to work “for a year or two” and then move into motherhood. These were some of the smartest and most determined young women in the country. They had Ivy League degrees, for the most part, and were in the midst of paying more than $100,000 for an M.B.A. And yet they were already deeply concerned about how they would juggle their lives, and surprisingly pessimistic about their chances of doing so.
These are the smartest and most determined young women in the country? I highly doubt that. If the were so smart, why would they be going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt for degrees that they didn’t really intend to use and probably could not afford. Doesn’t sound very smart to me…
we have stumbled into an era of towering expectations….We want more sex, more love, more jobs, more-perfect babies.
And generally they want it given to them. Earlier she said that women of her generation had been raised to believe they were the equal of met, that they were just like men. That’s one of the biggest lies of feminism: men never expected to have “more” given to them, they understood that if they wanted “more” they had to work their asses off for it, that nothing was going to be “given” to them. Men never expected to “have it all.”
But if you look at modern feminism’s main complaints about the so-called “work-life balance” you’ll see that their proposes solution is to have not only society, but business in general change from their core mission (being profitable) to accommodate women’s “special” needs. Society should provide “affordable” childcare (subsidized, ‘natch), state-funded pre-school, flexible hours (read: “I’ll work when I feel like it”). If you still have to insist that the world must bend to your needs, then you are not the “equal” of men.
None of this, of course, can be blamed on feminism or feminists.
Of course not. That would involve taking responsibility and one of the core pillars of feminism is that women must never have to face the consequences of their choices. At first it seemed as if she were about to place the blame not on feminists, but on women, but she veered away in the end with the “impossible standards that had long been thrust upon them”, of course, by men.
But most of us didn’t…because it’s hard, coming of age, to embrace the struggles of your parents’ generation.
No, because it’s hard being a man in modern society and you wanted to be just like men, but when y’all realized that, you shied away from the truth because it would have destroyed the movement. Neither society nor men placed unrealistic expectations of hard work and the consequences of making choices about work and family on women. Women did that all on their own. And they still can’t face that realization, which is why feminism increasingly demands handouts.
My generation made a mistake. We took the struggles and the victories of feminism and interpreted them somehow as a pathway to personal perfection. We privatized feminism and focused only on our dreams and our own inevitable frustrations.
That’s not a mistake. That was the goal, wasn’t it? To be like men, to be equals? You got exactly what you asked for, and now that you have it, you find that you don’t like it much. Tough shit. Men have been grappling with that forever. Suck it up, cupcake…
JB may not want to delve further into the article, but I will:
[On sex] For men—in general—the focus of those encounters is likely to be purely sexual. For women—in general, again—there is more of an emphasis on, or at least desire for, a relationship. Right from the outset, then, this imbalance puts women at a disadvantage.
Wrong. Sure, many men are just out to get laid, but these days so do many young women. Men want relationships, too, but are usually spurned early on and cleaned out later on. This doesn’t disadvantage women at all. She then bemoans the fact sexual harassment policies demanded by feminists in businesses can actually hurt women by making men reluctant to mentor woman or sometimes even travel with female colleagues. Ooops.
And finally: If women are ever to solve the “women’s problem,” they also need to acknowledge that they can’t, and shouldn’t, do it alone. Men must help.
Oh, really? So you can’t quite get the hang of this feminism thing and you need men to do it for you? I do so relish irony. Especially when it bites you in the ass.
But I’m a nice guy, so I offer this as my contribution to “help”: Don’t expect others to bear the responsibility or the consequences of your choices, that’s your job. Men have been doing this since the beginning of time, so if you want equality, step up to the plate and don’t complain. There. You’re welcome.
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To me, this is the most offensive part of the thinking. Let me try to explain why.
Now, understand, I have no problem with women choosing their own path, if you want to be a super businesswoman, go for it. If you want to be a stay at home mother, great. Either choice is fine.
but… STICK to your choice.
The problem with female freedom to choose path does not come from the choice, it comes from societal acquiescence to half-heartedly change directions later in life. Moving back and forth between the business world and motherhood has serious consequences for men and women, many of the consequences women do not even bother to think about because they never have to deal with them.
Here’s an example. We’ll pretend we have a little society in a bubble that we can poke at and experiment with. Lets presume that in this society’s economy, we have a potential labor force of 4 people total; Two men, and two women. And, additionally, we will presume (ridiculously) there are enough jobs for all 4 people to work, but promotion is limited as it is in the real world. Now in order for our society to grow, or even maintain population, both women need to produce two children. For the sake of argument, lets presume that our society does not need to grow, it only needs to maintain population to be stable.
Now, lets suppose that both couples have their first child, and couple “A” decides that both parents will work. Let’s suppose that the wife from couple “B” is nice enough to work from home and offer daycare services to couple “A” while both parents from couple “A” work. The father from couple “B” also works. Now, because the economy is small, they all work at the same company. Now, lets suppose that the wife from couple “A” gets promoted over the father from couple “B”. She’s given more responsibility, and more pay. Yaay for her, she’s being successful.
Only a year or two later, both couples have a second child. This is good, now if all goes well, society will not collapse with underpopulation. However, now the situation gets quite complicated as far as day care goes. If both parents from couple “A” are to keep working, the wife from couple “B” now has 4 kids to look after, 2 of which are mere infants, and all of which need their diaper changed. That’s a heavy load, she’ll likely want to charge a lot more for daycare. What usually happens about the time of the second child, however, is the wife decides that she would rather be around her kids more, either working part-time, or leaving work altogether. So, lets simulate that, the wife from couple “A”, having now decided that she likes the idea of motherhood, decides to leave work, and become a stay-at-home mother.
Everything is ok, right? Nothing wrong with this? Most people look at that situation and say, “Well, she’s just experienced all life had to offer her, nothing wrong with changing her mind,” right?”
Wrong.
The man from couple “B” was passed over for promotion in favor of someone who had no intention of staying at her job long term. This means that the man couple “B” is suffering from less income, reduced career potential, and less prestige for his entire family all because a woman wanted to take up a spot in the work force that he could just as easily have occupied. How is it fair to the men to be displaced in their careers by drive-by-careers that women go through? It’s one thing if the woman values her career enough to be serious about it for life, that’s fine. But if she never had any intention of staying in the work force, why displace the fathers of other kids, reducing their lifelong possibilities, just so she can feel like “modern” woman?
Understand, nothing wrong with female choice of life. Everything wrong with forgiving women for creating a large, persistent disturbance in the labor force by moving around at whim in a way that damages male career potential.
Why do I say this?
Because men have nothing else. We cannot make babies and rear them like women can. Our careers are just about all we have outside of family and hobbies. Without a career your average man will realistically *never* have a family or significant hobbies. Women judge men as potential mates by their success in business and yet women perversely want to displace men in that same labor force.
Women deciding they want to displace men in the work force is little different from scientists replacing women in the reproduction department. Can you imagine the outcry from women if an artificial womb became a consumer item and men could simply make their own babies at home like they look after a fishtank? Women would (rightly) be incensed at being replaced. They would feel rejected and useless seeing all the men who were taken off-the-table as marriage material because their womb had been replaced by science. Well, ladies, how do you think the potential fathers around you feel when you get promoted based on appeasing affirmative action? That’s right, they see another decade of slogging away at a job that won’t promote them, and dealing with a woman at home who doesn’t respect him because he wasn’t promoted. 5 years later, that woman who was promoted over him won’t be there, having left to go tend to her baby rabies.
Again, I repeat myself, for emphasis. I have no problem with individuals, of either sex, choosing their course in life. I have a huge problem with the destruction of male career potential by allowing women to displace men while waffling back and forth between motherhood and career, and then those same women crying about wage disparity and the classic, “Where have all the good men gone?”
They’re unemployed because you stupid bitches replaced them.
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I think the author is ironically shooting herself in the foot, in blatantly admitting that feminism is the guilty party in putting young women under too much pressure to be amazing (perhaps feminism wouldn’t be so bad if it had evolved beyond the 1960s), but doesn’t have the backbonal fortitude (for lack of a better word) to admit it.
On an unrelated note, watch Peaky Blinders – if it’s as good as it is made out to be, check this out (you might have summat to say on it anyway JB and co!
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Agree one million %!
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Oh, actually, here’s a better example.
Just imagine ladies, if there were these consumer “fishtanks” in which men could deposit sperm and get a baby of their own in 9-12 months. Now imagine if the men started changing their minds back and forth about whether or not they were going to make their own kids, or choose a wife to be the mother of their kids. This may take some serious imagination, but please try to imagine this. You would be a girlfriend to a guy who had no biological need for you. He could replace the sex with the huge choice of tools for that available on the internet. He could replace your biological motherhood with a tank, and could just have a kid in his own apartment before ever consulting you, or ever proposing to you. In fact, you would be cut out of the genetics and motherhood before you had even had a chance to make your case for being the mother of his kids. This is the horror that would accompany a commerically-available, and relatively inexpensive artificial womb in a society that did not recognize the threat to women’s primary purpose in creating such a thing.
This not much different from how your just-out-of-college male who is trying to start a career so he can start a family feels when he sees women come and go as they please into and out of career/motherhood and get promoted over him while doing so. Believe me, I’ve witnessed EXACTLY THAT. In fact I’ve seen women who only have their first bachelors degree get more perks, and higher visibility with management/customers over men with PhD’s who were trying to start a family. I’ve personally witnessed this. You don’t think those guys have a good reason to be horrifically bitter at feminism? They do. Lucky for you ladies they generally don’t have time for being bitter, they’re too busy trying to start a family.
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JB – it really is amazing how similar your experience is to mine. My house was $132,000, and was 19 years old and in pretty sad shape when I bought it. We also live outside of urban centers where the same house would be well over a half million dollars, and with the property and location we have, more like 750. I just paid the mortgage off last year.
My kids won’t have to share rooms, though. When we bought the house, it had an unfinished basement that wasn’t legal to live in because it didn’t have egress routes, so I excavated a new staircase to the back yard with lock-block retaining walls and concrete stairs, and cut a double French door into the foundation wall at the bottom of the stairs, then dug out all the window wells and made them egress-approved, also. Then we finished the basement, complete with a rec room, living room, block fireplace, a huge bedroom, an office for me, and a bathroom with an ejector pump. So we have plenty of rooms. I’ve also had two full time jobs for a while now, one to make money, and one to spend it on working my ass off on the damn house…
Did it all myself so we didn’t go into debt for it. I figure that I added another $100k in equity to the house, easy (we doubled the livable square footage) and since I did it all myself (including plumbing, electrical, drywall, flooring – the works) we only spent maybe $30K on the project.
That’s if you don’t count the hernia surgery I had to get to fix the rip in my abs that I got from setting that retaining wall. And no, I’m not kidding.
All in all, with the sprinkler system, outbuildings, the basement being finished, the gabled, covered patio addition that I did last year, along with the new roof, siding, and windows, and the new kitchen layout that I finished this spring (I did not do the cabinets. Had to pay for those. Finish carpentry and I are only passing acquaintances – a man’s gotta know his limitations…), I’ll bet it’s worth two and a half times what I paid for it now.
And yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve had a dinner at a restaurant that I couldn’t have done better at home.
The only real splurging we do anymore is to buy gas for the boat…
Oh, yeah, and a 4 day trip to the San Juan Islands on the 20th – Mrs. Goober and I are celebrating our ten year wedding anniversary. WOOT!
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I know this is not the topic of today’s post, but it is one I am interested in. I apologize in advance if I end up hijacking it.
“Our kids – get ready for this one – SHARE A ROOM! Yep. Unheard of these days. Three beds lined up in a row, and they actually love it. They usually push their beds together and sleep like puppies in a pound, all piled on top of each other.”
This is a topic I am interested in and have had discussions with friends about it. In my humble opinion it would be a good subject for a future post. My opinion is there is nothing wrong for brothers and sisters to share a room. I believe it is actually a good thing. I seem to be in the small minority, some think it is ok only when they are very young (prepubescent). There is a lot of discussion on the internet about what age they need there own room. This makes the assumption (and wrong one in my opinion) that it is wrong for older brothers and sisters to share a room. Some even say that every child needs there own room from birth and any parent that can not do this should have there children taken away. It is only in very recent history that the idea of everyone having there own room came to being. Not very long ago multi-generational families lived in one room houses. I have a hypothesis that children who share rooms learn to respect each others privacy much more than children who have there own room. (Similar to the concept of family toys vs MY TOY!) These children will grow up to be more compassionate and understanding adults.
I am unaware of any research into this. If there is not any peer reviewed research, it would seem a very large oversight since this is something every parent with more than one child has to consider.
Semper Fidelis
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Can you imagine the outcry from women if an artificial womb became a consumer item and men could simply make their own babies at home like they look after a fishtank?
This would never be allowed to happen. Why do you think there is no commercially available male oral contraceptive? It would take too much control and “power” away from women, an that will never, never be allowed…
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OK, took the link to read the referenced article and almost puked/stopped reading. But came back to here to realize that Judgy did the same. D. Spar … God that was horrible. Then I almost quit on Judgy too … please just get to the point … but glad I hung in to the end.
Some of the stuff towards the end is priceless and should be read by all women. There is one big problem though. Yes, women have to depend upon a man to make and support a household. Yes, a woman who bears a child will have the reaction described and will willingly sacrifice her “career” to be with her child. The problem is HUGE though. Feminists and the man-hate culture they have created have made in near impossible for ANY man to commit to a woman. They would have to be insane to to do so. My experience is typical of most men.
We do not have Courts or a Justice system in this country any longer. Laws do not apply. There does not to have to be a crime. There does not have to be any evidence. And you have no rights. IF YOU ARE A MAN. I refer to this as the Judicial Mafia. It is a gang of criminals whose sole purpose is to RAPE AND DESTROY MEN.
Some might call it extortion: turn over all the assets you have ever acquired and all assets you ever will acquire or you will go to prison. And they have Guns and Court Orders !!! They will arrest you, beat the crap out of you, frame you for something you didn’t do, and put you in prison … all in the name of Protecting Women from something that didn’t even happen.
If you were faced with rape, torture, and years in prison for doing nothing wrong, would you ever get married ? Honest answer says “NO”. The MGTOW movement is proof and it will only get larger and larger. The Japanese have Grass-Eaters; we have MGTOW. Story is the same. Men opting out and avoiding committing to a woman, ALL WOMEN, at the risk of losing our lives.
Women you created this mess; it is up to you to fix it.
I have a suggestion: set up a Gallows outside every Family Court in America and storm the sanctuary of male rape and drag the Judges outside to be executed. Next will be the lawyers they conspired with to rape, murder, and destroy men and kill them too. When these criminals are put to death then MEN may have some hope of returning society to normalcy.
Sans that, there is no hope and as a man I will only be too happy to watch as our society does a slow burn into a final death spiral. And we are well on our way there, in case you haven’t noticed. Can you name for me that last successful society that was dominated by Women ? Amazonia ? Other than that (and its a myth), there isn’t one. And so our society will end up the same way. Extinction.
Men Going Their Own Way. We left … we ain’t coming back.
Ladies you ought to be proud … you got what you wanted. You you like it.
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For information, what are your objections to maternity leave?
What do you think of the European Model where women are well paid to have children. Up until a couple of years ago the cut off for one type welfare in work, called tax credits in the UK, was £58,000 (around $100,000). The proposed salary limit for government help for working parents childcare is £150,000.
The problem is that only single mothers and the immigrant population re having children, same as before these reforms.
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How would the fishtanks effect the MGTOW effect?
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Modern women do not deserve husbands, babies, families, or happiness. They have chosen selfishness, solipsism, irrationality, and bigotry. Let them choke on it.
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The public has no idea that they teach hatred and resentment against men, boys and christians in womens studies classes.
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Not putting words into JB’s mouth, but I’m guessing her objection is in how it distorts the job marketplace (or how it hamstrings an employer). Mat leave requires employers to keep a position in stasis for up to a year (depending on jurisdiction), wherein the company not only loses the expertise of an experienced employee for that time, that employee is not growing/learning with the company, and a permanent replacement who could grow/learn with the company cannot be hired. Plus, the company is paying the salary of the temporary replacement, plus some percentage of the full salary of the employee on leave.
But that’s just a guess.
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Thank you. I was about to comment with something similar, but you covered it well.
Women are displacing themselves from women’s natural dyadic roles, and in doing so, they’re also displacing men from men’s natural dyadic roles. So when women decide to change course and ask, Where have all the good men gone? The answer is, What you see is what’s left after you destroyed the rest of us.
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Reading this I thought of the Model T. A nice old car, really did well in its time. They made it for years.
But that wasn’t enough when technology and taste made it obsolete.
The technology of birth control and the automation of work made the need for your own personal man obsolete. That allowed for tastes in men to change. Now just a good old functional man is no longer good enough. You need the Ferrari. The Cadillac. You’ll put up with a Nissan or a Chevy when you’re young, but you’ll trade those in as soon as you can afford better.
And Cadillacs really aren’t that reliable, but goddamn they’re stylish, and after all, that’s really all that is important, isn’t it?
Except…men aren’t cars, are they? And they see the shit that’s going down. And maybe when you really need one, they won’t be there.
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would probably boost it since men would be able to cut out the middle-woman (the accuracy of that is disturbing) and jump straight into having a family, with no need to work around a woman’s bullshit to do so
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Love it!
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Courtesy of The WayBack Machine, I counted ca 43 female professors or assistant professors out of 182 at HBS, January 2005. With ten faculties, that’s slightly over four per faculty, or 23.5% overall.
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When I got pregnant, I was temping. I was told by more than one person I should have got myself a proper job first so that I could take maternity leave. My objection – that it would have been totally dishonest to take maternity leave (which is 9 months to a year here in the UK) when I had NO intention of returning to the workplace for at least 4 years – was deemed shooting myself in the foot.
Maternity leave basically makes it insane for an employer NOT to give a job to an equally qualified man over a woman. My pet solution to that is to give men the same rights as women (I know, crazy notion, right?). Give every *person* x number of weeks parental leave over their lifetime. Anyone can legally gift this leave to another person if they choose to do so, but if they do, it’s GONE. Mostly, men would gift their leave to their wives. But sometimes wives would gift it to their husbands. People who never wanted kids could either take some time off to pursue some other life ambition, or gift (or sell) it to someone who was out of leave and pregnant. Sure, women of child bearing age would still be a bigger risk – but – shocker – if men had the option to spend the time with their baby – they might just take it. It would also mean that you would be a lot less likely to be employing a woman who came back to work for a couple of months after one maternity leave, and then left again for her next – and wanted a large family.
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I had to read this part several times to make sure she wasn’t being sarcastic:
I’ve been inside a Victoria’s Secret store once (to buy a bra for my wife). Besides the fact that the stores focus entirely on female customers, I’m pretty sure I didn’t see any devices there (or anywhere else) that could take a man “seamlessly from boardroom to bedroom and beyond”.
What is the professor saying? That she got her tenure by emphasizing her boobs?
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I have literally NEVER wanted a woman as bad as I want you,JB. Your husband is a lucky bastard.
Makes me fucking weep, as the rains pouring down from the heavens, that this once Great Christian nation, where great women such as yourself were common, is now nothing more than 3rd world trash bin,full of lies, wrongful persecution, all things foul.
God and His One True Son help us, we are well and truly fucked.
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A child is not going to become a fucking serial killer if both parents work. A child is not going to starve to death if mom cannot cook. I hate today’s feminism, but I’m not going to pretend a family cannot go on because mom is not at home baking a pie. That’s fucking ridiclous.
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Taylor, you’re missing the point. I’m saying ASSUME you will want to be at home baking a pie, because you probably will want to do that once your baby arrives.
If you don’t, fine.
But understand that the maternal bond is powerful, and make your plans assuming it will be true for you, too.
Give yourself a choice.
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Yep. Well said.
I’ve also found that most dual income couples don’t factor in all the work related expenses (they’re probably afraid to do that calculation). It isn’t just income, it’s expenses…and I know families living hand to mouth who rake in over 400k a year, work non-stop, and have children who are strangers. No family memories, no one will probably visit their graves when they’re in the ground, but they drive really really nice cars.
My first son’s toys, clothes, stroller, crib, everything but the carseat I bought at garage sales. Staying at home allowed my husband the option to go away when he needed to and work longer hours without fear and juggling the kids between his work schedule and mine (though I did work later, and I can tell you that juggling when you have young kids at home really sucks when one person has an important career, and is away a lot, it’s a true detriment and stressful for everyone). He couldn’t have accomplished what he did at work without having me at home, the hours and deployments required were too much.
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No. Just, no.
Christianity, at least the fundamentalist type that’s been growing louder for the past few decades, has been as much of a scourge upon our nation as feminism. Feminism has seen more success recently, but it doesn’t have the same broad base of support that the Christians do. There are enough sane men and women in the country that feminism will never sustain the totalitarian sort of control that some other commenters have described even if they do attain it temporarily. The same with Christians, in the long run – they used to have a stranglehold on society, and still do, to an extent, but with the rise of the digital age, information is spreading easily and quickly enough that even people who were “brainwashed” for a particular worldview can change. The more these people try to spread their tyranny, the more people will know about it, and when it begins affecting them, they’re going to start saying things about it (as we see JB doing with feminists).
That doesn’t mean that they can’t do damage in their respective fields – feminists will attack the family and harass men, while Christians will try to damage the education of a generation and push for some pretty backwards laws. But we are in no way currently a third world country, and are unlikely to become one – if we DO become a third world country, it’s most likely to be the doing of capitalists – the people pushing for disastrous deregulations and vastly increasing income inequality. I suppose you could characterize some rural parts of the South as being similar to the third world in terms of their income and religious culture, but as a whole, America is firmly planted in the first world. America has too much money and too much established business for everyone to suddenly leave simply because the place is overrun by stupid people (although we might see some serious decline over time if things get even worse).
The False God worshiped by Christians is not going to help us in this situation. I’m somewhat worried that more people are going to start turning to God as feminism destroys their prospects for a family, but again, this is a short-run issue. Anyone with access to the internet has the potential to become an atheist. Knowledge can teach you that there is no God. But it can’t give you the kinds of morals you need to resist the rising consumerist culture or the kind of power you need to do anything about capitalism – that’s the bigger long-run issue.
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> A child is not going to become a fucking serial killer if both parents work.
He might. If he thinks that both his parents consider other things more important than him? If his parents don’t spend time listening (because they don’t have the time) when he has normal childhood problems? If he becomes convinced that his parents don’t care about him, then it’s an easy step to care for no one else.
However, the reverse is true: A child who has at least one parent who will devote time (real time, not “quality time”) to him, will never become a serial criminal.
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Correction: …serial killer.
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“…….as a female MBA who opted out of the cubicle life, and who is now in the process of becoming a business professor,”
Oh, don’t do that Hun. Some man will have to go without because you are taking a spot for no other reason than fun while he needs it to provide for his wife and children. It’s not like a woman who tells young women to ditch careers for babies and husbands would ever be hypocritical can become a career person.
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Congrats on the anniversary, Goober!
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Yeah, AFTER I had babies and raised them to school age.
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Aaaaaannnd there goes the point right over your head.
Good try, though.
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My feminist sister’s daughter has crazy meltdowns where she will sit down in the aisle at the grocery store and scream at the top of her lungs that she hates her. Her son doesn’t meltdown like that,but is now being drugged to help him “behave” because he is so hyper-active. I could not believe how zombified he is now. My sis admits their problems are partly caused by her not being there during their very early years to hold them and divorcing their father who is a hard working,loving father and former husband. She had to earn her doctorate and that doesn’t leave much time to nurture your babies. When she had her grad ceremony to receive her credentials I didn’t attend. She has told my other sisters that she is afraid of me. I wouldn’t ever physically harm her,but I guess she can see the fury in my eyes when I look at her because I can’t hide how i feel about what she has done and continues to do to her broken up family.
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You or I or any man might call spirits from the vasty deep; but when JB does it, they come. Look what just appeared today:
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Good morals? Resisting consumerism?
Good morals for man is an oxymoron. You are putting your faith in man, who has let you down AT EVERY TURN, betrayed your faith, kills babies by the millions, is utterly destroying the feminine sex year by year, has turn the US which used to be strong, into trash, pay corrupt politicians to be in office, VOTED IN BY PEOPLE THAT KNOW THEY ARE LIARS, police thugs all however bending the laws however they see fit, beating other men to death, shooting them in overkill reactions, judges taking bribes for their feminist lobbyist, and locking men up for life for life for unpaid child support when they have no jobs (because the powers purposely got rid of them, how else can you can destroy the family), and the list goes on and on! And this is just MODERN western society, and we haven’t even gone through history!
Yet you still put your faith in man? Logically, my faith is more reasonable than yours! As though some reasonable sound human beings are going to arrive and deliver the US, and thereby the world, from the hell its stupidly put itself in! Absolute power corrupts! This isn’t some sugar cookie, just need the right people in power problem! You are fighting against an ancient and powerful foe, Satan, that America stupidly refuses to even acknowledge exists, and as result gives him all the power he wants, and he laughs all the way to the bank! Which is why things get worse every year, every decade, because such selfishness, such greed, such avarice, such decadence, such filthy sexual practices, are what modern men and women want, and they have to make sure the people of West pay the price of evil. No man enters a gate, without paying the gate keeper his due.
So it is, the false God is Satan, which America follows to the death, but think they don’t exists because they don’t mention him. The false god is “good morals” or “good people”, when all of us fallen like dominoes to sin, one way or the other. The false god is the sexual age, that brings the world into a destruction hereto unseen, and which the fools follow willingly, and do it gladly and gleefully.
So it is in the end, just as it was in the beginning, there is only one true God: Jesus the Living Christ, the One True Son of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
Lord knows we need Him.
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So, if the kid doesn’t starve to death or turn into a serial killer, parents have done their job admirably. Pretty much sums up the new paradigm.
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Slut culture + useless liberal degree + childfree = not bad situation.
The problem is that this sluts want to be mothers too (and marrying a beta provider to support, of course) They want it all.
Normally, womanizers are not into become “daddies”. That means womanizers are coherent. Sluts are not.
Slow down gals! you want it all! Look at Cameron Diaz. She is a coherent woman.
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Spaniard
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NOW!!!
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Aren’t you that women who defends child molesters and rapists? Of course you are. If you become a professor, I would e-mail the university your blog and hope to hell you get your pro-child abuse ass thrown out.
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Good luck!
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LOL!!!
Judgybitch pro child molesting?
No way.
Judgybitch is only pro “white sluts, if you dress like sluts and you go to a nigga bar in a nigga hood full of gang bang brodas and you sexually provoke them and you get drunk and you take coke and you get more drunk and you put your knickers down, and you twerk them, then you do not scream RAPE next morning ya white slut!”.
I think it is sensible.
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There is another easy way to set up to comfortably do a single income family.
Income suite in the house. When you have a tenant living in a nice basement suite in your house, paying some or all of the mortgage. Sure takes the pressures of single income off. Yes, you may have to live in a smaller personal space but those are the kinds of sacrifices sometimes needed.
All it really takes is being frugal and some planning.
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The great paradox of modern women…… oh okay, one of the great paradoxes of modern women:
Women want to date/marry a man who is richer than they are.
Women want to earn as much as men do.
I’m sorry ladies, but most of you are going to end up disappointed because LOGIC!
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She’s not going to quit half way through her new career to raise children though is she?
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You’re going to be fucking okay if both parents work. Both of my folks worked. I never questioned their love for me. They showed their love for me all the fucking time. No one died. No one went crazy. We also had a lot of freedom as kids. The only reason why my mother is not working now is because she was hurt real bad on her job. I think it’s great when both parents work. My brother and his wife both work. The kids are okay. Great kids. Kids become criminals for many, many reasons.
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“BECAUSE THEY WANT MEN TO LOOK AT THEIR ASSES.”
And I would personally like to thank the ones with nice a**es for doing do… 🙂 Thank you ladies…
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Very good article thank you so much for putting this up!!!
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I like this article even if I don’t agree with the conclusion 100%, but that’s a personal choice, not one that can or should be adopted by most women, perhaps. I’m afraid that marriage as an institution has become so corrupt that it actually interferes with bonding. I’ll be more pro-marriage if the federal government collapses and the idea that Freedom of Association is more important than Equal Opportunity. I rather like the husband-sharing notion you promoted in a snarky way in another article here. Sometimes, it “takes a village” to care for the needs of one hard-working man, and I’m not just talking about sex here. But given that we are all so alienated from each other, perhaps, that “village” for some needs to be created with love, sex, and cooking bonds–particularly for those of us Feminism-survivors! See what I just did? Each generation has its own challenges and I admit to being very interested in how “poly families” work out. As much as I personally wish I lived in the past, churning my own butter, etc., there is no time machine and the sexual revolution isn’t going to just jump right back into its box. Still, I believe that it helps enormously to get back to basics–and for some of us that “basics” is tribe. Or is that racist?
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I agree with a lot of this. All except one thing: women do not have the right to kill CHILDREN. They have the right to terminate fetuses, which are not children and which I assume is what you’re talking about. But once a woman has a child, no, she can not kill it.
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As a man, the comment about marriage being a “risky business” for men definitely hits home (increasingly, for women as well).
A few months ago I was reading about child support and divorce horror stories and they were so outrageous I figured there was some truth-stretching. The system can’t be *that* bad, right? I mentioned them anecdotally to a few friends and they revealed that they had gone through a divorce and in some cases child support. Wow, it’s all true. I couldn’t believe some of the things they were telling me.
One that made my blood boil was a friend who paid for his wife to go back to school (therefore she had no income). She divorced him and now he has to pay her a fat check for the next 4 years, even though now she has a master’s degree and should be expected to go make her own money.
That just floors me. Someone pays your way through school and then there’s a divorce, which is fine, it happens. But then to turn around and pursue alimony after that person put you through school? That’s conscious-less. That’s evil.
And zero consideration for him paying her way through school by the judge. The court system doesn’t care about that at all. “How much did your tax return say you made?” They put that in the formula and that’s you pay.
Basically, if you’re the breadwinner in the household (man or woman), or you make significantly more than your spouse, you’re in danger of getting financially hobbled for years. These days, I specifically avoid dating women who make significantly less than me (>20k).
Another friend told me of how this happened to a woman she knows. She paid half the mortgage of a house under his name and was the breadwinner for a few years when he was laid off during the financial meltdown, and now in the divorce settlement she gets zero equity of the house and has to pay her ex-husband a fat check.
But where these scenarios generally favor women still is the family courts overwhelmingly favor women over men. If she wants custody, more than likely she’s going to get it, and that means the guys are paying the child support.
The whole institution is toxic and broken. It definitely makes me think long and hard about ever getting married.
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It is like all along many women have this planned out already, and many of us men will get involved with them which we wind up getting married and have a family which later on many of us do suffer since we Lose a lot of money that they caused us to Lose when the Divorce is final.
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Both your response and Feeriker’s somewhat remind me of my childhood. We had one car, one TV (a 9-inch black and white), lots of hand-me-down clothes, etc. We shopped at thrift stores out of necessity.
My brothers and I joke that all the cheap things we did growing up have become cool 20 or 30 years later. We used to recycle cans and bottles for spending money and now everyone has a recycling bin in front of their houses. hahaha
When I think of how thrifty my parents were, and how their mindset wasn’t exceptional in the least at the time (I was born in the mid-70s), it sort of floors me how different things are nowadays. In today’s twisted mindset we’d be variously viewed as either contemptible for being poor, or inspiring for not being wasteful. We’d probably get our own reality show.
That said, there are economic and healthcare issues facing families today that are vastly different. I recommend checking out Elizabeth Warren’s “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class”. It highlights some of the changes and she shows the numbers. Housing, healthcare, education… all of these things were eminently affordable three decades ago. It’s not entirely the “toys” or expensive meals that are putting the squeeze on us, today.
Clothes today are ridiculously cheap, for example (all made in China), but we fixate on stories of $300 jeans. Those stories don’t represent the norm. A far bigger problem is college tuition going up 1000% in some cases (particular public) in the last 30 years, adjusted for inflation. My personal story, the full package (tuition, dorm, books, meal plan) at my college in the late 90s was $26k. Today it’s over $50k. The JC I attended in ’94-95 was $8/unit. Now it’s $48.
Or heath care being provided by one’s employer to now costing families $1000/month for dependents. I actually saw when that particular bomb dropped at my current job during the 2008 meltdown, and several coworkers were sent scrambling to figure out if it was better to switch to their spouse’s plan (if the spouse hadn’t already been let go) or go private. Remember when it was common for dental to be provided?
I think the worst thing is that as a society we don’t embrace these new realities and change our mentality. Instead, we are burning the candle at both ends: trying to live it up and praying we don’t get sick. For a brief time after the meltdown we started living within our means but it appears we’re right back to the party.
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Actually, most women who kill their living, breathing, post-birth kids get little punishment beyond a few months of pampering in a psych hospital.
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“They had Ivy League degrees, for the most part,” – more proof of the classist bias of feminism.
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Excellent article.
My marriage was victim to the “mothers and older sisters”.
I was with a sweetheart, 7 years younger than me. After 2 years she moved in with me. She pronounced to love me always and forever, wrote in cards she thought of our unborn children and asked when im going to put a ring on her finger.
At year 7, i did put a ring on her finger. She was 24.
The “mothers and aunts” dragged her to South Africa, hooked her up with some slutty med school student, and kept her from talking to me for three weeks. When she came back, she was never the same. They put intense pressure on her to leave and do a university exchange in souh africa for 6 months, hardly a good idea when we were planning our wedding and there had been infidelity before.
They pushed and pushed until our engagement disappated and the relationship fell into tatters. They offered her money the whole gamut to break up with me. My crime? I just loved her. They wanted her to have meaningless relationships before getting married and with us being together from her age of 16-24 it was too much for them.
I tried to help her.see the light. These women were all on second marriages, having left stand up dudes for weenies they bossed around all day. It was of no use. 9 years of love, hope, and dreams smashed to peices by the old feminist guard.
In the end, my former fiancee feels so guilty she will not even speak to me for her part in the matter. Too bad. She was my best friend, soulmate, and truly would have been a great wife and mother. She is married to someone else now, with a child.
But i bet dollars to donuts she looks around at her life and wishes it was with me every single day. Not because im some marvel, but because 9 years together without major incident is a very long time. There are things her new husband cannot possibly hope to understand, because we grew so much togethere.
Feminism at its finest. Wrecking one womans life at a time.
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The 1990s in New York was a period and place that was the hardest to live through for single men coming of age, daring in our neanderthalian way to hope to connect with the beautiful, smart, driven women all around us. We did not resent feminine success, we admired it and loved the idea of what a dual income could, at least at first, provide. Truly dating and marrying an equal however would often prove elusive. It wasn’t that the objects of our affections weren’t up to the task, they certainly were, it was that they were all so incoherently angry; at what, they could never quite articulate unless in the presence of a hen party attended by at least one queen hen with some degree in womyn’s studies.
It was an awful time and I hope the meanness and vitriol dies or has died a quick and QUIET(!) death, but I suspect it hasn’t. I have given up, marriage won’t work for me.
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