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SunshineZA
Guest
Femanists in my part of the world comes across as rather unfemanine. Their faces are hard, and they in general have a bad attitude towards men. Anything a man can they can do too, just better!
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Kaninchen
Guest
What you don’t seem to understand is that women were all really terribly happy until a few naughty women came along and magically and quite inexplicably convinced us to go against our true natures.Well of course, now your thinking like a conservative/traditionalist Catholic.
After all, who is LESS qualified to make decisions for women than women?
The traditional answer: no one.
Fancy imagining that getting a Phd and a profession would be more fulfilling than having Mr Kaninchen’s martini just right when he walked through the door and concerning myself with just which miracle cleaner would leave my kitchen most sparkling. It has to be said, though, that had I been that kind of girl, Mr Kaninchen wouldn’t have asked for a second date!
The thing is that we’re all different, I’ve done the SAHM thing, the part-time thing and so on. It’s all very fulfilling and so on but for many women, even for those of us who could have just relied on our husband’s earning power, it’s not a life lived in its entirety.
For some women it is and good for them.
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Jenny_M
Guest
Thank you, Kaninchen. One size does not fit all, though it may fit most.
Jenny M
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AngryAtheist8
Guest
I was trying to be sarcastic.What you don’t seem to understand is that women were all really terribly happy until a few naughty women came along and magically and quite inexplicably convinced us to go against our true natures.
Fancy imagining that getting a Phd and a profession would be more fulfilling than having Mr Kaninchen’s martini just right when he walked through the door and concerning myself with just which miracle cleaner would leave my kitchen most sparkling. It has to be said, though, that had I been that kind of girl, Mr Kaninchen wouldn’t have asked for a second date!
The thing is that we’re all different, I’ve done the SAHM thing, the part-time thing and so on. It’s all very fulfilling and so on but for many women, even for those of us who could have just relied on our husband’s earning power, it’s not a life lived in its entirety.
For some women it is and good for them.
That’s what the eye-rolling icon was for.
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Kaninchen
Guest
Err, I knew that
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phoenixrrt62
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manualman
Guest
Turnabout is fair play, after all. As a GenX male, I’ve heard from women my entire life how screwed up men have made the world, not without some quite good points in there too. Are you implying that the feminist ideology is sacrosanct, beyond reproach? Am I being terribly naughty in pointing out weeds on the “good” side of the fence?
My observations and critiques stem largely from the frustrations expressed to me by my own wife and her friends that those who MOST disrespect them as SAHMs are not men, but women. If you have a better explanation for why that is than I’ve expressed above, I’m certainly open to it. I don’t believe I’ve anywhere denigrated women who have chosen career achievement as their major life goal. That’s aboslutely each individual’s choice. I just refuse to agree with the mysoginist idea that those women (the careerists) have chosen BETTER than the ones who choose to raise their own children instead of employing others to dothe bulk of it.
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Kaninchen
Guest
More just being too predictable - it’s all very ‘same old, same old’.Turnabout is fair play, after all. As a GenX male, I’ve heard from women my entire life how screwed up men have made the world, not without some quite good points in there too. Are you implying that the feminist ideology is sacrosanct, beyond reproach? Am I being terribly naughty in pointing out weeds on the “good” side of the fence?
I often feel ‘between’ on arguments about feminism - partly, as you will have noticed from time to time, because I tend to see economics as the major driving force behind social change and, partly, because I’ve been on both sides of the equation, one of the women lucky enough to be able to choose both lives.
Just look at some of the responses on this thread (and other threads on feminism from time to time), though, to see that the lack of respect for the life choices of others that you’ve discerned has its mirror-image.
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Whitacre_Girl
Guest
Me too.
My basic frustration as a woman is that I am sick and tired of people tellingme how I have to be as a woman. I have one side telling me that to be a SAHM and homemaker is a crime against my womanhood, and I may as well lay down in front of a train if I go that route.
I have the other side telling me that I have to be a homeschooling SAHM that makes my husband’s every happiness my raison d’etre (sp?).
Why can’t I just be who I am, and the woman God created me to be? Why do other people always find the need to define me, as if I am somehow inadequate to do that? Is it their own insecurities or bitterness about their own paths not making them as happy as they ever dreamed? Some days, I really think so!
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Kaninchen
Guest
I think you may be quite right - people want you to live your life as an affirmation of how they’re leading theirs.
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manualman
Guest
Deleted sarcastic portions aside, I don’t think you are actually all that far from the point I was trying to make earlier. The early feminists correctly observed an actual injustice (patriarchal society devalued women and their contributions). The sad part is that the major response to that observation on the part of the feminists was to JOIN in the derisive views of the contributions women have historically made rather than to insist on reform of the culture to properly value those contributions in proportion to their importance to culture and civilization. This was the lost golden opportunity, the missed chance to make a genuine step forward instead of merely jumping from one unhealthy view to a different unhealthy view.
And this has NOTHING to do with a clean house, hot meals for hubby or similar ways women really were taken advantage of in ages past. It has to do with all the other vital cultural connections that have been lost when the moms all became commuter workers and communities downgraded into just subdivisions where people sleep in buildings near one another but few to no real relationships are formed. Let’s face it, it was always the women who made the bonds of community. Those generated little glamour and you’re right that they also generated little to no economic power (another structural injustice). But that was the real glue of civilization, not the money-earning. Stay tuned and see what happens to civilization with no glue.
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Kaninchen
Guest
The difference between ‘First Wave’ and ‘Second Wave’ feminism wasn’t a contradiction, it was a matter of learning. First Wave was about things like equal rights under the law, suffrage and so on.
Second Wave arose from a growing understanding that all of that merely ended up with women still being somebody else’s construct - or glue mix to borrow your analogy. What if you didn’t just want to be the carefully mixed glue for somebody else’s model of the world?
Meanwhile, I’m not wedded to the causal relationship that you presume - economics, economics, economics!
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manualman
Guest
So what have you been doing to change the order of things so that volunteering in the community, meeting the needs of neighbors in crisis, visiting the sick and elderly in institutional care, being there for young children, etc is rewarded economically in proportion to its importance in society?
Where would you even start? There isn’t enough money in circulation to pay people to do these things (be they men or women doing them), and the impending bankruptcy of social benefit rich, but tax paying age worker poor Europe is starting to demonstrate.
I don’t claim to have the perfect solution, but I stand by my assertion that so far the legacy of 60’s feminism is that they succinctly identified and real problem and proceeded with a “solution” that has only made the most fundamental problem worse (women have not received credit for their contributions to civilization). I’m not arguing that it hasn’t been GOOD that women have been able to choose the lives they want to work towards (quite the opposite, that is the GOOD part, but the cost of achieving it appears to have been throwing massive numbers of women, and what THEY want, under the bus). I’m arguing that it hasn’t been good that women have been told they are weakling fools if they choose what they’ve always wanted and what Ms. Steinem & Co disapprove of. That is the ultimate failure of feminism (so far at least).
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Kaninchen
Guest
I give up one working day per week to voluntary work? And you?
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manualman
Guest
That’s impressive and excellent. I’m all over the board depending on workload, having done an entire year in youth work (volunteer) at one point, a third world public health project at another time and at others straining just to complete my employment tasks and get home to relieve my wife (who is then finally free to pursue church, social and volunteer things of her own).
But we’re not here to have a personal philanthropic peeing match. YOU brought up the assertion that economics is destiny. How will we establish an economic system that rewards all those things that have been lost since neighborhoods became daytime ghost towns? Already in the US, at least, once two incomes became the norm the economy and housing market changed to make that a near necessity for most. Few couples can manage dual work/incomes, kids, day care, school activities, professional development and your level of personal time contribution to charity (kudos, btw). So how can we economically reward healthy community building?
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Kaninchen
Guest
We have something of a natural disadvantage there.
What I’ve been saying is that since the 1950’s there have been huge technological and economic changes, huge shifts in world manufacturing, huge shifts in the nature of work and so on. As I suggested on another thread, it wasn’t ‘Rosie the riveter’ who took ‘Ronnie the riviter’s’ job, it’s now done by a robot (very likely in China). This is where capitalism now ‘is’, it’s its current state and there’s not a lot that one can do about that. It may well be that it’s not now that’s the aberration but what some see as a ‘Golden Age’ that was the aberration. Multi-tasking was very much a feature of working class life from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and of rural life before that as well as small family business throughout history.
I don’t think there’s one answer for different kinds of societies, no universal recipe though, obviously, I think that volunteer work is tremendously important - whether it’s those of us who do what we’re good at for free or just generally taking part.
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manualman
Guest
Perhaps, but it’s as close to alliteration as an engineer can get…
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AngryAtheist8
Guest
The Traditionalist answer:
Then you are a bad/misguided/Satanic woman.
As I have noted before, according to patriarchal norms, men do women merely assist. It wasn’t fair but it was the (more or less) universal standard up until recently (in historical terms).
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Whitacre_Girl
Guest
You can’t forget the other side of the coin though - what if a woman is perfectly happy to be a stay-at-home mom and do all of those traditional things? Isn’t she called a waste of space by the other side of the spectrum?
This is why I liked the movie “Mona Lisa Smile.” It seemed to me that it was pointing out how being a woman now is harder than ever, because you are pulled in 2 different directions, with both sides flinging horrific insults if you don’t adhere to THEIR idea of what a woman should live her life. The beauty of freedom is that we can only choose for herself.
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manualman
Guest
First paragraph is pretty much the textbook definition of a strawman attack.
Second paragraph potentially has some critical merit, but still commits the most basic feminist crime I’ve been decrying through the entire thread. You implicitly presume that the “external doings” traditionally undertaken by men are the “do” actions that matter while all the actions traditionally undertaken by women were merely supporting their men. i.e. women stayed home, raised / educated children, ran the household practicalities so that her man could go out and invent the printing press, write constitutions, build skyscrapers, etc. The gaping hole in that argument is that 99.99% of men don’t and never did that stuff. Most men toil in obscurity their whole careers and simply won’t be remembered to history, regardless of what a big shot he thinks he is along the way. They toil to provide for their families. Just who is doing the secondary supporting role in those majority of cases - the one trading labor for wages or the one doing the bulk of the raising of the next generation of children and managing the outcome of those wages in order to make a joyful and life giving home?
Kaninchen presumes that since the man gets paid, his is the greater role (if I understand her right). Myself, I’m not so sure. I tend to think the whole currency based economic system itself might be the problem, but I’m sure not smart enough to know how to fix it. For sure, a woman who chooses the role of SAHM takes an economic risk. That much I will certainly concede. Economically, that is an injustice. The economic risk of entering into marriage on that basis falls disproportionately on the woman. How to fix it without making other things worse, I dunno.
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