Misogyny is not dead. Somebody called Kay Smythe, who claims to be a woman but I doubt it, is out there advising young women to prove that they want marriage and children by slacking on the job. After all, working and rearing children at the same time is only a "feminist myth that we can have it all."
Er. Um. It's not so much that baby-boomer and younger women wanted to believe we can have "it all." It's more that reality has shoved "it all" at us whether we wanted it or not. As Barbara Ehrenreich documented in The Hearts of Men, 1960s feminism was a reaction to some 1950s men's refusal to accept the financial responsibility other 1950s men wanted to claim as a male prerogative. Women who had the vote and property rights were generally buying into the myth that our reproductive capability was a disability, until men stopped believing it, first, and we discovered what a load of garbage it was. And anyway most of us have that reproductive capability for only half of our active adult lives!
This is a rebuttal to an argument too many "conservative" Christian women are starting to hear again. It is only a blog post. It wants numbers. Numbers cost extra.
For what it's worth, I was working sixty hours a week and raking in the money during the same years (early twenties) when I was "fostering" my adoptive sister, recovering from mononucleosis, and growing to my full adult size. I also wrote several full-length novels I considered unpublishable and outlined an ambitious historical study I decided I was too young to write, during that time. I also commuted. I also had an occasional date, and sometimes I also slept. "Having it all" is actually a great way to use crazy late-adolescent energy. All I really had to give up was "hanging out," aimless social chatter. I had to accept that most men, even the attractive ones, weren't my beshert and most women, even the likable ones, were never going to be my close friends. No elaborate hair care sessions, no TV, no daily ritual of wailing about things I didn't really even want to change. (I wouldn't have had time for a blog, either, if blogs had been invented back then.) I could have all of the "it all" I wanted in my life, at twenty-five.
So can other young women, if they're willing to step away from the sort of storge love they may feel toward people with whom what they do is, basically, waste time. In our early teens, our culture wastes a great deal of our time, and we bond with people sharing the boredom. When our schedules start to fill up with things that matter, those friendships that are all about "killing time" together have got to go. Our friends are the people with whom we share work.
But work is also the source of hostile competition. Some of that comes from guys who would just love to lower the standards in the HEAL fields (health, education, administrative, and legal work) to the point where they might be seen as doing those jobs as well as women do. They are, I suspect, the source of the myth that "young women can't 'have it all,' so they'd better just have babies."
The position of this web site is that nobody who is still paying rent and/or living in an apartment should even think about having babies. The whole planet needs overall negative human population growth. We obviously don't want to do that in the traditional way, by having wars to kill off the surplus males, nor do we want any "eugenic" schemes for selective homicide, so the way to reach the goal of an overall reduction of human population is for everyone to choose between "one child or none," ideally with a lot of people choosing none. Childbirth is not a source of pleasure. Women endure childbirth in order to have babies. Women do not have to give birth in order to have children, though. Adoption is an option for thsoe who've reached a position where they can afford to adopt. Adoption is a source of pleasure.
Beyond the header, I was interested enough to number the things that were just plain wrong in Kay Smythe's post. There were twenty-seven.
Misogynist Myth #1: "She'd need to choose between career and family if she ever found a husband."
Reality: Today's men do not want to support a completely dependent wife. They want wives who are earning as much as they are, or more. They want the Playboy lifestyle with financial backing from wives who can afford to support them if they lose their jobs. I've heard men talk about divorcing wives who wanted to spend even one year at home after giving birth.
Myth #2: "Boyfriends have left because she prioritizes work and herself over The Relationship."
Reality: "Boyfriends" leave. That is why they are "boyfriends" rather than fiances or husbands. They want a committed monogamous relationship that offers all the benefits of marriage except they get to walk away without a hassle. Women could avoid a lot of heartache by just accepting reality: When you eat, you're fuelling your body with calories, of which the ones that aren't burned off first will stay with the body in the form of fat; when you do what makes babies, during those peak-fertility years when the thought seems so fascinating, you'd better have a place and a plan to nurture a baby. There are other ways to show affection. When you don't want a baby, the pleasure of showing affection and not starting a baby is greater than the pleasure of starting a baby.
Myth #3: "If your daughter resists manipulative advice to slack off at work and grab the first man who talks about 'feelings,' not even marriage, and cling to him as a drowning man clings to a straw, she's a difficult woman."
Reality: A woman who talks to someone who says things like that may have a deficient Inner Mamma Bear. (I have a sister who's had a difficult life despite life's having handed her every possible privilege. I may not feel that she and I have any common interests, now that our parents are dead and her children are grown up, but one of the rules for my generation was: Even if you pick on your younger siblings, nobody else has a right to pick on them.)
Myth #4: "Perhaps she's single and childless because of her personality."
Reality: Young people have immature personalities. When they're not living in overcrowded conditions, they marry each other anyway. When any living thing is in overcrowded conditions, from plants and insects all the way to humans, nature's first defense is to reduce fertility. When a woman says she wants children but she's still single and baby-free at 35, there's a high probability these days that she she has PCOS--polycystic ovary syndrome--and won't give birth to a living baby if she tries.
Myth #5: "And treatment of others...a woman who resists manipulation must be a horrible person!"
Reality: If old-at-heart people still trying to tell her that men still want a clinging vine around their rose-covered cottage door, and she's still talking to them, she is unusually patient for a young person. She might be excessively passive. Maybe she should consider karate.
Myth #6: "And/or her 'addiction to work' and Communist politics."
Reality: Dedication to work is good. Today's advocates of global dictatorship no longer call themselves Communists, nor do they claim to believe that totalitarian government can lead to a "communist paradise" (except, in Marx's fantasy, by generating war after war until the human population shrinks to Golden Age levels where all humans have to unite against the wolves). Real oldfashioned "Commie" chicks used to be addicted to welfare.
Myth #7: Women were misled by Gloria Steinem, who told Hillary Rodham Clinton that being at home, having children and a loving spouse, was a prison.
Reality: Women who took that claim seriously were reality-checking and had known people for whom it seemed true. Women who grew up knowing happy full-time mothers, or even women who were home with their children because of chronic illness but were able to make the best of it, felt sorry for Gloria Steinem. What makes "the home" a prison, as the dictators of countries that have "house arrest" know, is not being able to leave. The full-time mothers I knew could leave any time they wanted. In the case of my mother, for whom having her own business meant health and being at home all the time meant illness, the husband and children wished the woman they adored did want to go back to work. But we accepted that it wasn't happening.
Myth #8: Steinem was a "mentally deranged domestic terrorist."
Reality: If anybody was a mentally deranged domestic terrorist in the 1960s, apart from the various "revolutionary" cults of troublemakers, it was the "helpful" people who advised women to pop tranquillizers when they worried about losing the husbands on whom they were dependent. The "tranks" people popped in the 1950s and 1960s didn't produce violent insanity, as today's antidepressants sometimes do, but they did produce the nonviolent, demented, twitching homeless population of the 1980s and 1990s.
Myth #9: "Have you tried explaining to her that if she died today, she'd be replaced by Friday and forgotten by Monday?"
Reality: It's true that those who use and recommend antidepressants feel that thinking about people in their own generation being mortal is unbearably depressing. But it's also true that single women report being healthier and happier, on average, than married women. This does not mean that all single women are healthy and happy and all married women are miserable. It does mean that celibacy is one of the best things a young woman can do for her own health.
Myth #10: Having a job is "wasting life, working to achieve the dreams and profit margins of her employer. It will literally mean nothing after one is retired or fired."
Reality: This is unfortunately true for too many young part-time workers who spend all their money on rent and depend on welfare to buy food. But for those who have the kind of "career jobs" that people take seriously, doing their jobs will mean having money in the bank when they're retired or fired.
Myth #11: "No one wants to marry a difficult spinster."
Reality: These days, spinning thread is a respected artisanal skill. And if anything motivates today's young men to do the kind of pursuing that orients young women's hormonal feelings toward them, it's a woman who's never going to pursue them. It'd be interesting to read Kay Smythe's review of the movie Chasing Amy, which was made by young men and could afford not to be part of the traditional Hollywood myths about hormonal "love."
Myth #12: Young women who take their work (and finances) seriously "need a hefty dose of therapy and reality."
Reality: They know more about the reality in which they live than Kay Smythe and its audience do.
Myth #13: "Having it all" merely means "pleasing everyone instead of yourself."
Reality: Whatever life roles women play, being "feminine" has long been confused with "pleasing everyone instead of yourself." Women still have to discipline ourselves to carve out daily quiet time to reflect on, among other things, the personal boundaries we need to enforce.
Myth #14: It would be "therapeutic" for young working women to spend a weekend surrounded by women who urge them to quit work and have a baby before they're ready to rear it properly.
Reality: If there are groups of women who do this, my advice to those of The Nephews who are actually nieces would be to stay as far away from those women as they can get. They were probably born male. They probably still have male hormone reactions to unequivocally female bodies.
Myth #15: At 35, a woman is "almost out of time to have a baby."
Reality: Women's healthy, viable ova tend to be released first, so at 35 many women are "out of time to have a baby." Fortunately, one is never too old to adopt, though after age 60 adopting a younger adult "child" with "grandchildren" is a good idea.
Myth #16: "Of course she might...have kids via surrogate, carry on working, and your grandchildren will be raised by nannies."
Reality: How many jobs pay for that kind of thing? These days, even bankers are likely to be pushed into early retirement at 50, which is a good age to consider motherhood as a second career.
Myth #17: "Kids raised by nannies turn out weird and emotionally stunted."
Reality: People who think emotional adjustment to unusual situations (such as overcrowded living conditions, or the breakup of marriages that were contracted because somebody thought she needed to give birth, or acquaintance with creepy people like Kay Smythe) is "weird" are emotionally stunted. They should be kept away from anyone young enough not to recognize how dysfunctional they are.
Myth #18: "Maybe she wants the kids doing cocaine...incapable of loving anyone...caring more about...designer shoes...than being a good, normal, healthy, happy human being."
Reality: Statistically "normal" isn't very healthy or happy, these days. One reason may be that, given the balance between her salary and the cost of living in a modern city, a realistic description of a woman who wants to feather her nest before she starts a brood would be "Maybe she wants the children to have a decent home and education, rather than being 'nannied' by social workers."
Myth #19: "Or incapable of even making a dinner reservation for themselves, at the age of 24, because they always had someone who was paid to do everything for them."
Reality: That's only a concern for the children of billionnaires. It's caused by the security concerns that go with being rich and famous.
Myth #20: Work-focussed, disciplined, independent women need a sharp slap.
Reality: Kay Smythe should try substituting any other demographic group for "women" in this rant and see what happens.
Myth #21: It's sad to watch women wasting their best years (not having babies).
Reality: It's sad to watch women trying to bring up babies they didn't want and couldn't afford after being abandoned by men who didn't want and couldn't afford those babies either. Many of these unfortunate children become wards of the state, which is why there is no need to worry about not being able to find children to adopt, once a woman is in a position to adopt them.
Myth #22: (Women remain baby-free) "because they were lied to by the feminist movement."
Reality: The feminist movement did not take place exclusively on the left wing. While left-wing feminists, who were misguided by political extremists, were squalling about their "right to abortion," more conservative/traditional feminists were quietly demonstrating that they were more valuable employees than their male competitors. Whatever ideas we may have discarded, whether or not we now judge those ideas to have been deliberate lies, they did not include feminism itself--the awareness that women are at least as valuable as men.
Myth #23: "Women who are 'difficult' (to manipulate) need to be scared or shocked."
Reality: It's generally good to be difficult to manipulate.
Myth #24: "Feminism is ugly."
Reality: Me rubber, you glue, nanny nanny boo boo and so's yer old man, and if yer mother had wheels she could be a Metrobus.
Myth #25: Any woman who's baby-free at 35 "will end up alone, depressed, and broken."
Reality: As people age and ambitions fail, a lot of people seem to end up "depressed and broken." Consider your own acquaintances. Independent of the prejudice that all people need to be married to be happy, which many don't, aren't the bachelors happier than the divorcees?
Consider the example of a woman this web site will, per its usual policy, call Jane Doe. Feeling no specific career vocation, Jane left college to elope with John, the boy all the girls at her school wanted. Before she was thirty years old, they had four children, and John was cheating on her. (Jane was easily mistaken for the "Miss America" pageant winner of her graduation year. The woman for whom John left her was often mistaken for a man. Men who cheat will tell you they like variety.) Jane had no skills, no training, and a work history of having quit one student labor job to elope and another one to have a baby, so in the job market even twenty years ago she had no chance at a "career job." John didn't want to send his money to the children, so he told a judge Jane was an unfit mother. After all, she'd defaulted on the mortgage to their home and moved the children in with her mother, who had installed them in her rental property, rent-free, so that at least the children had their own rooms...for two years. So the court gave John custody of the children and required Jane to send him half of her wages, if she found a job. When she found jobs they were part-time and short-term. Mostly she lived on food stamps and spent her time watching television in her mother's rental property, dreaming of ways to get the children back. This lasted until the mother defaulted on mortgage payments too, due to becoming unable to work while unable to rent out her rental property. Then Jane and her mother became wards of the state. The mother promptly died. Now Jane has no education, no job training, no savings, no spending money, no credit, no credibility, no prospects, and no noticeable reason to live.
Well...I've outlived my husband, my hormone cycle, and more recently the man who shared the last few hormone-cycling years of my life. Sometimes I feel lonely, discouraged, and bereft. Old age is not for wimps. If you can't live without your favorite fellow mortals, you're not going to last to age 50 in any case. When I feel unhappy about the way my life's gone, I consider Jane Doe.
Myth #26: We can assume that female bachelors, even in their late twenties, are "self-entitled, narcissistic, with no hobbies or interests other than work," and "when guys show any feelings, she treats them like dirt."
Reality: Narcissism is a serious character defect, but dedication to work and disdain for the "feelings" of young would-be-Playboy "guys" are not symptoms of it. Today's young men are simply not plausible as providers and protectors. While it's easy to understand their lack of security in the relatively few, often dangerous, heavy labor jobs in which men still excel, it's hard to understad why people reject the obvious solution: "Just give these commitment-phobic slacker boys the vasetomies they so desperately need, and let them spend all their off-work time on the couch or in the bars, until and unless they get up and demonstrate some reason why any woman would ever consider making a commitment to be seen standing within six feet of them."
This web site recently reviewed an e-book called America's Loveless Age in which a male writer lamented that 80% of the women seemed to be pursuing 20% of the men. That's the way the courtship and dating game has always gone for those who weren't really ready to be married. When people find their beshert, they've always known it, and they still do. But men could benefit from dropping the ego defenses and considering what the 20% of young men really have in common. From what I see, of my generation and the others, it's not height, it's not color, and it's not money. It is fortitude.
Men have tended for a long time to confuse fortitude with willingness to fight. They can even recite a credible line of "evolutionary biology" about how primitive women needed mates who could fend off predators. Of course we'd like to think that our men can fend off predators, if we encounter any, even today, but that ability is not demonstrated by idiotic brawling or unnecessary wars (hello, European readers). Try being able to "slay" debts, leaks, dependency on corporate employment for income, lack of a permanent home with its own food and energy resources, and the need to fit into a crowd of wimps who sit around whining about things they don't even want to change. Women will run after you and you, too, will be able to choose a wife who has more to offer than the bimbos who throw themselves at your feet.
Myth #27: "Women have never been more miserable than they have been under feminism. This can be measured from the number of single women and the number that are on antidepressants."
Reality: Antidepressants have not been so successfully marketed at any period since the invention of alcohol. And our culture is quicker to tell women, "If you're not smiling, you must be depressed," than to tell men this--possibly partly because men are more likely to punch a pill-pusher's lights out, which is more pardonable than the average brawl. Nevertheless, women are glad to have the chance at least to demand fair wages for our work, and nobody needs to be allowed to try to tell little girls that they'd be happier without the right to earn and keep their own money.
Real liberation never was the goal of left-wing feminism, because real liberation, for men or women, means not being dependent on either corporations or government as employers. Real liberation involves earning a decent living on, and from, our own private property. It involves relating to corporations and government, which has become merely a big corporation, as a skilled independent contractor. But the failure of left-wing feminism to guide women or men toward real liberation is due to the left wing, not to feminism.
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