I've enjoyed reading your recent articles on feminism. As a stay-at-home-mom I have spent years being looked down on by other women. I was a 'feminist' until I chose raising my children over a career. My husband and I chose to live on less, to make sacrifices for the sake of our children and we get no end of flack for it. If you are a mother who isn't working you are useless or a failure, that is what society has been saying to me for years. It is nice to know that someone else has noticed that maybe that's not right or good.
The trouble with feminism is not the "stay at home mom". The trouble with feminism is don't stay-home-marrried-moms, and the single women who think it's reasonable to do it ALL, who DON'T do the mothering tasks, and pass those mothering tasks onto low-level workers, usually poorly paid precarious or desperate workers, who serve as serfs, or end up in government run - re-education/propaganda facilities.
The trouble was not "feminism", the trouble is with women who want to be able to say: "I reproduced", "I am a mother", but just don't want any of the labour, no breast-feeding, no diapers, no bed-time reading, no home-cooked meals, no homework, and more and more, without even the pregnancy, which is also contracted out to third parties.
You see my drift. Mother in name only. Mother as a virtue-signal.
My mom worked before I or my brother were born. Once she had us, she was stay-at-home, and made a beautiful home, of which she was proud, made wonderful meals, kept the home running smoothly-and was proud of her work. Once we kids got older, she resumed working part-time to bring in more money, have some variety, and to be around more adults. I was grateful for not having been a "Latch-key Kid" with two absent parents as such was the case with my cousins who grew up alone and lonely, and without supervision and getting pregnant with scumbags who left them; this was while they were still in school. Both of my cousins' parents wanted to be "successful", but ended up alienating their children and causing them to drift away from them as adults and resent them for having been abandoned.
I praise women who stay home with their kids in order to bond with them and love them. The same goes for the rare house-husband. In Finland, a child doesn't go to school until seven, and the state pays for one parent to stay home and look after them-this is enlightened! Imagine actually having time with your precious children at the beginning of their lives to be with them at home and to not be pushed into school early! They DO grow up too fast.
So, if you are a stay-at-home mom-or were, and you wanted this, good on you!
The Mommy Wars are truly heinous. This goes both ways too. While I changed jobs for more flexibility and fewer hours when my first child was born, I had to work to support the family while my husband's business was still new and ramping up, and I distinctly remember standing in line at a coffee shop on my lunch hour behind two women pushing children in strollers. One mentioned to the other that she's so glad she's not one of these women who chooses work over their kids. She said, "I would never pay anyone to love my kid for me." I wanted to knock their heads together.
I have really no idea who you are, but as a twice-divorced father of two, previously married to women exactly like you describe, I could (respectfully, of course) kiss you right on the mouth.
I've been a successful physician, investor, pilot - even coal miner during my college summers - but as a man who was raised in a traditional family by a mother who didn't work for wages, rather spending all her time on her family, I was unprepared for the "modern woman."
Always ambitious - perhaps overly so - I have been successful at everything mundane that I have attempted, but my love life has been a disaster. As I worked 60-hour weeks, both my wives spent their days in "self-actualization," one even reading self-help books and TAKING NOTES ON THEM - while my children languished in front of computer screens all day. Now both sons are near thirty and both live with me, neither with a job or even a girlfriend. Jesus God, if the Western culture is going to survive, something has to give.
Hello, Have you read 'Stolen Focus' by Johann Hari? It is a good source for knowing why our culture is the way it is. Tara had a conversation with him on January 26, 2022 on her substack. I thoroughly appreciated his book.
Thanks. I'll give it a look. I don't know the exact thrust, but from the title I can guess.
My last birthday, my sons and I treated ourselves to a wonderful Argentine steak house in Richmond, VA. As I look around at the other patrons, there must have been twenty young couples, and all but one were engrossed with their cell phones, completely ignoring their dinner partners.
One young couple, though, was locked eyeball to eyeball, clearly in love and oblivious to the world otherwise. As I left, I made it all the way to the checkout counter but I just couldn't help myself: I turned and interrupted the couple and, apologising for the interruption, told them just how wonderful it was to see them engaged with each other and not those goddamned phones. They thanked me, smiled and went back to drowning in each other's eyes. I could have cried.
Jim, That brought tears to my eyes. Good for you. I know what you mean. If you want to know who Tara is look to the beginning of her substacks; she explains where she comes from. You will appreciate her story. Being a Canadian I am proud of her as a journalist.
I have several good Canadian friends, and as an amateur historian, am so grateful for the contributions and sacrifices Canadians made in WWII. George Beurling is my all-time hero. I hope that someday, after we fight our way out of our own cesspool of totalitarianism, we can in some small way help the Canucks fight their way out of theirs and repay the debt.
Jim as soon as you mentioned Screwball Beurling I realized we have a subject to discuss. It's not in the scope of this group but certainly others I belong to online. A taste: I was at the unveiling for a painting of George where I was shocked to view one of the most hideous depictions I've seen of any Hero.
You're right. Aside from ten-to-twelve-hour workdays five days per week, plus being on call EVERY OTHER night - including weekends - and generally spending three to four hours during those call-nights in the wee hours at the hospital on emergencies, plus handling ALL the finances and bill-paying, investing "our" retirement monies, supervising - or doing - ALL home maintenance and repairs, how unreasonable that I should expect my wife to get up off her ass on the couch and either work outside the home in a regular job OR take care of her children. Silly me. I see it now: I should have slept less. I'm so ashamed of myself.
I'm a 58 year old gay man who has lived with a debilitating chronic illness. Last year I cut off all contact with two upper middle class women who have been friends for most of my life. The reason? They honestly believe that living a full life means winning The Suffering Games. These are highly privileged white women with assets that anyone would envy, yet every single gathering was dominated by these women whinging about "Men!" and "the plight of women." Spending time with them required that I validate that my 30-year struggle with HIV/AIDS was easier than their struggles as female white professionals.
The solution became obvious. Life's too short. One morning I woke up and just blocked their phone numbers and emails. Ever since then I have felt a lovely quiet I haven't experienced in years.
Do feminists tell you that people vote with their feet? No sane man is going to engage any woman on #metoo or cancel culture. They will just walk away.
I'm a gay man too. I have seen all you say since 1982. The ladies demand access to everything gay men have built, take control of it and wind up destroying it. What began as same sex women's grievance culture has become mainstream feminist agenda.
Yes that's true. However there is also a giant divide between that generation of lesbians and the ones currently taking the podiums.
After the slaughter of 50 gay men at the Pulse Nightclub in 2016, the now NDP candidate in Toronto Centre, Kristyn Wong-Tam, felt her role as City Councillor was to tell a thousand mourning men gathered in Barbara Hall Park that "this is no time for anger." She then used her time to name people from other parts of "the community" who were killed over the decades -- like some surreal attempt to imply that death by homophobic violence happens just as much to other parts of the community. To add insult to injury, she wrapped it up by asking the assembled men to congratulate her on her engagement to her girlfriend.
Is that the #NotAllLesbians you're talking about? Cause this kind of invalidating of gay men's needs and experiences is practically the norm now in Toronto.
She went on to say that Donald Trump, NRA and white male privilege was the cause to the Pulse Club massacre. She was engaged to a woman who was Muslim and therefor Islam had nothing to do with it. How convenient.
The lesbians who control Gay Pride offer nothing for gay men who like being gay men. Gay men have had to create new venues (Phoenix, Opera House) for dancing till dawn We don't want to be rude but not every dance party needs a drag show. Women are welcome but they are not pleased there are 2000 men and only 20 women on the floor. The same thing happened at the GCDC dances at the Masonic Temple. 3000 men and 100 women. So unfair. The point is whether gay or straight, men are the reason women are unhappy.
You must be about the same age! You must also remember how The lesbian bar, The Rose, was constantly closing early because of the fist fights? .
On a more serious note, the pattern you notice with dance venues also carries into Ontario's healthcare system. Lots of programs in high demand by gay men, from HIV to addictions, have been scaled back and the resources turned to "womyn's programming."
The press contributes to this. On World AIDS Day last year, The Agenda with Steve Paikin featured two specialists: one male and one female. The male talked about specific things being done to combat AIDS in Ontario and the progress being made through innovations like PrEP. No matter what he said, Paikin just kept talking about condoms -- like it was the 90s. Equal time was given to the female researcher from UHN who repeatedly explained her job focused on AIDS in Africa ...and that she couldn't speak to Ontario specifics. She did make sure to explain that African women had it much harder than Ontarian men. It was a point she made repeatedly. The effect was the progress being made by gay men, for gay men, was obliterated by Paikin authoritatively talking like it was 1998. The woman from UHN seemed content judging gay community efforts when compared to her high-road path of world saviour of "real victims." The whole thing was a master class in feminist-centric invalidation.
Oh lord yes. One of the first things I experienced when I arrived in Toronto was lesbian fascism.
Picture it: Gay Pride 1982, the first official Gay Pride at Hart House at UofT. I submitted several canvases to a gay art show, one being an oil sketch of a demure female nude with a bowl of fruit and drapery (kitch). A diesel dyke (plaid shirt, black boots) came by and loved it. But as soon as she found out a male had painted a female, she was outraged and demanded I remove it immediately. This was in your face censorship. I said it is not pornographic and aren't we supposed to have unity on Gay Pride day? She called 5 or 6 others over and they threatened to 'kick your teeth down your throat". They shouted and cussed at me with clenched fists as I piled the art into a cab. Then they laughed as I drove away. I celebrated Gay Pride with art work. They celebrated Gay Pride with violence. I have watched this craziness spread across society to a point governments have made it law.
On that point, Penny, I agree. I volunteered at the Aids Committee of Toronto in the late 80s and there were many wonderfulz committed lesbians involved even though gay men were the primary victims of the illness. I honour them.
This is a very good exposition of the problem and the dilemma. I'm a boomer who stayed at home when my two boys were young and had trouble establishing a career afterwards, I wouldn't downplay the importance of having a paycheck with your name on it for giving a woman autonomy. I remember that in the 1960s, when feminists argued that women were capable of moving into non-traditional jobs, they were scornful of the objections made by men: "What about 'that time of the month'?" "What about having sexual temptation posed by having female work colleagues?" Now, it's the feminists who are demanding special accommodations for 'that time of the month' and sexual politics at work is a big problem, both in private enterprise and the armed forces. Feminism's big fail is that it has always been incoherent. One branch insists that females are different ("If women ran the world, we wouldn't have war,") and another is mortally offended when you suggest there's a difference between men and women. One thing I don't blame men for is the fact that we are mammals--our reproductive years coincide with the years that we get our higher education and our careers. I don't see that as anybody's fault.
I quit my job and retired at 42 to spend time with my children , how much money does one need to live a decent life ? So I don´t have a lear jet and 5 houses . Big deal have 2 well adjusted hard working children . That is worth more in my books , money can always be made , they print the shit like toilet paper .
Very interesting. I commend you for being willing to ask tough questions of the prevailing narrative regarding the so-called liberation that increasingly looks, yes, like a dolled-up pig.
I would hope that the increasing number of women asking these kinds of questions can benefit from the thoughtful writings of women like Mary Harrington and Abigail Favale. It seems to me they've been exploring these themes quite perceptively.
"Feminism needs a serious reality check. In a Foucauldian framework that views reality as constructed by power, one must oppose reality in order to resist oppression. If the feminist movement hopes to endure and effectively advocate the dignity of women and girls worldwide, it must depart from the anti-realist path that led to this bloody battleground. To survive the pending Armageddon, feminism must lose its paranoid rejection of essential differences between the sexes. This does not mean a reversion to cartoonish, reductive caricatures. Men and women are different, but they are not polarized opposites; our difference is asymmetrical, consonant with a shared humanity and individual inimitability.
Only from a realist ground can we successfully discern which differences are a consequence of sexism, and which are not. Only from a realist ground can one make the confident argument that a man cannot merely opt into womanhood, because there is a pre-social givenness to womanness, a nature that is shaped by nurture, but not wholly conjured by it.
Institutional power and language profoundly influence how we perceive reality; that’s something the postmodernists get right. But to assert that power creates reality is to concede that woman is a construct—a concession that, for the feminist movement, will ultimately prove to be fatal."
"For the age we are entering, a feminism in thrall to technology and its promise of an end to all limits will deliver—is already delivering—only misery. Instead we need a movement grounded in pragmatic realities. Male and female bodies are different; humans can’t change sex; most women want to have children; heterosexuality is the default human condition; outsourcing domestic chores is a movement to reintroduce a servant class; children do better in stable two-parent families; and our hyperfocus on individual freedom is a central factor in the plummeting of birthrates worldwide. Against technological developments that promise to free us from love, longing, and human nature itself, restating these truths is an act of feminist resistance.
We are liberated enough. What we need is more and better obligations: a feminism that seeks the proper limits on freedom for both sexes. Such a feminism occupies the most reviled position of all. Dissenting from the theology of progress, it revels in the mantle of the “reactionary.”"
I could not agree more with all of this. Feminism has been on many levels highly destructive to society. Women have been sold a bill of goods that they can have it all. Problem is they also end up doing it all, and more. Nobody can have it all. Life is about choices. Equality is a great ideal but we are NOT the same and it has harmed women and children the most. Men aren't fairing well either BTW.
My 83 yr old mother was one of only 2 women in her University B Comm class. She was divorced and raised 2 kids on a single income for a time (lucky for her she had that degree) She despises feminism and would never call herself a feminist.
Women entering the workforce and competing with men doubled the labor supply and thereby suppressed wage growth. Good thing for elites and shareholders, awful thing for everyone else. Now we are reaping what we sowed.
Finally someone ties in some class struggle! The second wave of feminism coincided with the beginning of the end of “the great prosperity”, a rare period, especially in North America, when a working class family could live on one wage and own a freestanding home.
Thank you for continuing to explore out loud the things some say quietly to their friends. As a GenX-er I know that i have benefitted in many ways from the feminism that came before. I still have the credit card my mom insisted I get in college, so I'd have a strong credit rating, separate from a future partner. I co-run a business, I vote, my days have more leisure hours than my grandmothers could ever have imagined, etc. I also see the mis-steps and places where an upgrade is needed. Like you, many of my friends have divorced at least once. For many, their emotional health is now better. But it also comes at enormous social and economic cost, and some have --at least temporarily--given up trying to find companionship of a domestic partner, because it's really hard. It's complicated. And we need to start saying that part out loud.
Wow Tara, this writing is sharp, brave, and has receipts to backup the ideas. It opened my eyes with a new perspective. Refreshingly counter-narrative. Thank-you! You are definitely Canada's Bari Weiss for such snappy, brilliant, topical writing. Here's a suggested theme for future consideration:. How do I snap Old Left'ies (and maybe New Left'ies) out of the spell of Progressivism before the divorce?
Another lens to view all of this through, is technological change. Life used to be physically hard for both sexes. And perhaps feminism only came to be a thing when labour saving devices came along, I don't know. But technological change was a huge factor this past century for everyone. Home life for women in the modern era gave them more free time, some capitalized on this to spend more time with children. Work life for men in the modern era meant change, and usually a loss of one's cultural heritage. The experience of the native 'Indian' male eventually became many men's experience. Drug use, even nicotine is highly correlated to coping with change. Humans are not designed or meant for perpetual upgrading. The video gamer culture is just another form of drug use to cope with a world spiraling out of control. Likewise smart phone addiction, was easily predictable to be net negative for today's youth. Mental health, or lack of it is now fashionable among the youth, or parents of tomorrow.
With all the modern conveniences of city life, many of the former jobs women used to do have been replaced. Likewise many of the jobs men used to do as farmers and labourers have evaporated and replaced with technology, a technology that is fragile and dependent on world peace it seems. So we have both genders looking for meaning. Technology has replaced our worth, even as technology stumbles and threatens to end all life. Do humans want to live, or be replaced by AI?
“Most women who have kids have no choice but to work full-time, and are in agony, regularly, over having to miss some of these same things that Bazelon mentions.”
Inaccurate.
Mostly women work based on the choices they made long before they had kids…same as it’s always been. How about empowering women to be at home with their kids, to really be there for them, and stop with the b.s. about how women need to find meaning outside the home. When you have kids, all the meaning you’ll ever require, and vice versa, can be had in those wee eyes staring back at you.
When Adele got her divorce, she had to pay her ex alimony and 1/2 of all she earned during the time they were together. It amounted £10s of millions. She was outraged and screamed in the parking lot that is was unfair. She wanted to appeal the ruling but it was final. You've gotten nowhere baby.
It's good to see some critiquing of feminism. What's going on here, however, is still feminism without the real critiquing it needs. For one, feminism has failed to create viable and healthy role models for women. The new Lois Lane is a great example. She is the perfect example of what men loathe. And frankly, women ought to loathe a character like that, too.
There's a lot to unpack on this subject, and I'm not prepared to get into all of it. Surely, however, a man's input would be useful. Yes, it's up to women, ultimately, to steer feminism to a better course. But there seems to be no understanding of men here.
Then there's stuff like this:
"If all of that wasn’t enough, there’s another powerful force at work here, too: 'From the moment the Pill became widely available, the effect of the sexual revolution has mainly been to make women more sexually available to men,” which, Andrews writes, has led to “the soaring out-of-wedlock birthrate.'"
How does one wind up skewing contraception—supposedly giving women more bodily autonomy—into a benefit mainly for men? . . a patriarchal ploy? Talk about conspiracy theories! It goes to show how women are always on the lookout for how the world is tilted unfairly against them. I’ve noticed this pattern in most of the women I know. No matter how well their careers are going. No matter how well they’ve managed to have high-paying jobs and families, there’s always something wrong and unfair that must be fought against. Considering how often I’ve been the unemployed one at the table, or the lower wage earner, I have found it galling to have to listen to this complaining. Not at any point, did they so much as acknowledge the irony of the situation. Never even a word to tell me what was essentially implied, which is that I was somehow an oddity and outlier as far as men were concerned, which is simply not true... Shameless. Thoughtless. Narcissistic.
I believe that many, and maybe most, women who are active feminists are either bitter and/or resentful from some childhood relationship trauma and have decided that men are their target for retribution.
Men represent the father, and clearly, throughout history, fathers are as imperfect in meeting the high expectations of daughters and wives as are men in general. Those missed expectations have always caused a level of dysfunctional rage (dysfunctional in the sense that as adults nobody is responsible for any other's happiness and life fulfillment, but yet constant validation continues to be craved by some)... but changes to the economy have allowed that dysfunctional rage to be weaponized in politics and society in general.
Watching this as I have for my lifetime and dealing with so much of this type of standard psychological-emotional dysfunction in family members and employees and friends... (Note that my mother and father divorced when I was 10, the oldest of three sons and thus became the man of the family when pops disappeared from our lives dealing with mental health issues and mom with her high school diploma had to figure out how to pay the bills. Mother remarried when I was 13 to a man-child that was abandoned by his single mother at the steps of the Boys Home where he then fought his way through several foster homes. Needless to say, it was not a good time to be the oldest son in that old and new family dynamic.)... I see it as ubiquitous and growing.
If anyone has a license for clutching bitterness and resentment over missed fathering expectations, it would be me. But I cringe even making that point because it feels like victim mentality virtue signaling... the most debilitating of all maladies and one so quickly and strongly adopted by the people running the 3rd wave feminist woke project. What a slippery slope.
Back to those changes to the economy.
What has happened?
I think unnecessary changes to the economy are the culprit. More specifically, it has been changes in the economy that have increased the dominance of the female matriarchy that feminists lead... while it has punched down the economic opportunity of men.
I think we are fundamentally the same animal as we have always been. The 500 generations meme going around makes the case that we are evolved from the same biology and we have not had much time to evolve differently. We are still primitive animals prone to primitive impulses and reactions.
Just go back to middle school and high school. Those times traumatized most of us. Very few escaped without scars of insecurity from peer ridicule and rejection. Those puffed up with schoolyard popularity would then get knocked back when they launched into the real world. It seems a social-biological human developmental function to traverse that psychological gauntlet (including that of family)... so that we come out the other side with thicker skin and ready to cope with the continued challenges and adversity of a malevolent world filled with primitive animals.
Remember the "anti-bullying" project that started over sensationalized reports of teen suicide? As women achieved academic credentials and began to dominate industries like education, this was just one example of this tendency to implement more motherly safe spaces. Sounds good on paper, but it never works. The rate of teen suicide has continued to rise... and many suspect that a reduction in developed coping skills might be a primary culprit.
The late great Joseph Campbell noted that successful cultures understood this childhood development progression to be critical: child -> mother's child -> father's child - > adult. He lamented that the West did not seem to understand this and hence was creating a population of adult-age children that never really developed to a functional adult psychology. Even decades ago he was concerned about the growing dominance of the female mothering impulse to nurture and protect people throughout their lives instead of administering that tough love of a father so that self-confidence, self-determination and independence blossom.
The problem is that while women have advanced in economic, social and political power (a good thing)... men have been knocked back (a bad thing... maybe the worst thing). The information and service economy is more suited to female tendencies. An economy that makes, builds, grows and fixes real things... those jobs have been exported in pursuit of the globalist agenda... and the education system has been depleted of those previous career subjects.
These were unnecessary and destructive changes. Males are in bad shape now. Those less wired for the information and service economy are stuck without enough career opportunities. Many have fallen so far behind they will likely never catch up.
Meanwhile the wealthy and powerful feminist wing, led by these resentful, and often lesbian, types, is committed to stomping on underemployed male necks in a passive-aggressive war pattern that allows them to attack with maximum aggressiveness and sink back in defense to their old grade school identity politics safe spaces. Who knew "mothers" could be so mean?
Joseph Campbell as well as the still alive and kicking Jordan Peterson have diagnosed this societal problem as a lack of gender balance in our economic and societal systems. We have shifted from a patriarchy to a matriarchy in just a few decades. And that change is destroying us because of the choice of women who are leading it. Our continued survival demands that we reject this shift and get back to a more balanced economy that is more patriarchal in design and execution. Because a patriarchal design (libertarian patriarchy) is the best fit for well adjusted adults.
We need to correct this destructive trajectory by resurrecting our commitment to economic and educational changes that benefit men... while the women who have their shit together start taking down the radical feminists from their positions of power and influence.
Frankly, I see the gender wars as our primary extensional threat. People, and primarily women, who stay silent and cower against the rage of the radical postmodernist 3rd wave feminist movement are likely to regret that they did not take a stand.
Thank you, I really enjoyed this work. In Canada, about the boomers...since I am one, I need to point out that the issues belonging to females are intergenerational, that the fathers of female boomers were raised in Victorian or post-Victorian childhoods, raised by men whose own interests were tantamount. The sons then became fathers after the war, who also saw their primary goal was to make the family money as women were ‘encouraged’ to return to the home. Males were far more dominant (the exception being the collection of current world-psychopaths outdoing Nazism) and in my neighbourhood, as others, no mother worked. It was unheard of. That doesn't mean they didn't want to. Families tended to be larger then, as birth control was still a problem.
If we want to make an argument about where feminism went wrong, if indeed it did, it would be the sense that woman herself is still seen as less-than.
Feminism may have wandered off into a path that excludes themselves from themselves. We have been striving for self-hood. Now in the current lexicon, in law and basically everywhere, I don’t exist as a woman, but as a ‘ciswoman’ and a male can be a woman, if he so wants. To be clear, we have ‘ciswomen’ and we have women.I have been forced to step over, give up the space my mother, her mother and all the mothers have been striving for, to a male. And if that is not enough, in law, in sport, in prisons, in scholarships, political positions, in employment – equity -NOT equality - is what matters. The government has said that in labour law woman has not been defined. I believe that says it all.
Of course some of us want families, and of course we do not always want to do everything ourselves, but if the husband doesn’t want to be a full-participant, sometimes it’s just easier to do it alone, sadly. I would want to look at the entire relational situation and wonder where the men went. I witnessed many marriages as the woman giving up autonomy so that the husband could have his.
And look where we are now. The vanishing of females, again, still.
An article on where feminism went wrong, taken over largely by male voices complaining about women being whiners. Give me a break. No one talking about historical events--or not many of you. WWII, during which time a whole generation of men were elsewhere frankly (and mostly but not always metaphorically) raping and pillaging and softening up the rest of the world for imperialism to come, and the women in the factories making that war possible, while taking care of children that existed, experiencing the privileges that had previously only been available to men (in cities, anyway). And when they came back, shoved back into the bedroom and kitchen with the most godawful anti-woman propaganda, relegated to raising too large families while their husbands (in unequal marriages, often) were working to support the whole crew, and unhappy in their own, strait-jacketed ways. And then in the 1970's with the Boomer generation coming of age, the feminist movement is subverted into "be everything you can be" and women jumped (or SHOVED) into the work force. NOTICE. Just at this point wages stagnated and the stagnation has not ended since because you could legally pay HALF YOUR WORKFORCE less than you had been--now HALF A CENTURY LATER--and it has become difficult for most two-wager-earner families to make ends meet. But a tiny number of billionaires now control--shit--I can't even remember how much they're worth. Was it--could it be--possibly--$27 TRILLION??? I think the number is 800 billionaires? Maybe my numbers are wrong but the ratio isn't.
This is NOT women's fault. And women still are not paid what they're worth, despite the fact that they mostly raise the kids as best they can while mostly working full-time, under-paid and under-stimulated, frankly, if you think pink collar work is mentally stimulating you are seriously deluded, boys. Of course in our "retirement" years, we don't have enough income to live on because MOST of our work was UNPAID., despite working full-time outside the home.
The fact is the elephant in the room is Capitalism. And rampant militarism. Which is NOT the fault of women, boys. Take responsibility for a moment. Yes, some of you may have worked your butts off. But so did the women in your lives. In fact, you wouldn't have been able to work your butts off if someone somewhere underpaid, if they were paid at all, wasn't meeting your physical needs. And I am NOT talking about sex. You also couldn't support all the people at home if a lot of people with vaginas (not really relevant to their work, I might add) weren't underpaid but supporting your overpaid work on the job.
The truth is that capitalism took over feminism very early on. Before I hit the job market (when minimum wage was $1.73). Did you know that today minimum wage is very close to HALF what it was, in real dollars, in 1968?
And if the kids ended up messed up, why is it always their mother's fault? Excuse me?
I am a single parent BY CHOICE for a reason. Didn't make much money--still working because social security does not take into consideration my unpaid contributions, self-employed so I could homeschooled my kid because the schools were so bad without a penny even for materials, much less pay for my work, got lots of criticism from everyone under the sun, but I can't say my kid is worse off than those of married mothers. At least he knows how to support himself and is not dependent on his mother. Or father. God help him if he ever relied on his father for anything.
I don't know any mothers who just reclined on the couch eating bon bons. I do know a lot of mothers who were depressed when their kids were living at home, which is not good for kids.
Capitalism did to feminism what it did to climate change, LGBTQT blah blah blah rights--what do you think transgenderism is really about? ($$$), the ecological movement, farming, home ownership, education, healthcare, the military, literacy, on and on and on.
Women's pay is now closer to 80% of men's, whereas it used to be 70%. In 50 years. And women raise the kids whether or not they work outside the home, which most of them must. Who benefited? That tiny number of people who are now worth $27 trillion. Okay, the majority of them are men. But there are some women among those billionaires. Not that it makes any difference to the rest of us.
For fuck's sake stop blaming women--especially MOMMY--for everything under the sun.
I've enjoyed reading your recent articles on feminism. As a stay-at-home-mom I have spent years being looked down on by other women. I was a 'feminist' until I chose raising my children over a career. My husband and I chose to live on less, to make sacrifices for the sake of our children and we get no end of flack for it. If you are a mother who isn't working you are useless or a failure, that is what society has been saying to me for years. It is nice to know that someone else has noticed that maybe that's not right or good.
you are anything but a loser , congratulations for doing the right thing
The trouble with feminism is not the "stay at home mom". The trouble with feminism is don't stay-home-marrried-moms, and the single women who think it's reasonable to do it ALL, who DON'T do the mothering tasks, and pass those mothering tasks onto low-level workers, usually poorly paid precarious or desperate workers, who serve as serfs, or end up in government run - re-education/propaganda facilities.
The trouble was not "feminism", the trouble is with women who want to be able to say: "I reproduced", "I am a mother", but just don't want any of the labour, no breast-feeding, no diapers, no bed-time reading, no home-cooked meals, no homework, and more and more, without even the pregnancy, which is also contracted out to third parties.
You see my drift. Mother in name only. Mother as a virtue-signal.
My mom worked before I or my brother were born. Once she had us, she was stay-at-home, and made a beautiful home, of which she was proud, made wonderful meals, kept the home running smoothly-and was proud of her work. Once we kids got older, she resumed working part-time to bring in more money, have some variety, and to be around more adults. I was grateful for not having been a "Latch-key Kid" with two absent parents as such was the case with my cousins who grew up alone and lonely, and without supervision and getting pregnant with scumbags who left them; this was while they were still in school. Both of my cousins' parents wanted to be "successful", but ended up alienating their children and causing them to drift away from them as adults and resent them for having been abandoned.
I praise women who stay home with their kids in order to bond with them and love them. The same goes for the rare house-husband. In Finland, a child doesn't go to school until seven, and the state pays for one parent to stay home and look after them-this is enlightened! Imagine actually having time with your precious children at the beginning of their lives to be with them at home and to not be pushed into school early! They DO grow up too fast.
So, if you are a stay-at-home mom-or were, and you wanted this, good on you!
Amen. Thank you for that.
The Mommy Wars are truly heinous. This goes both ways too. While I changed jobs for more flexibility and fewer hours when my first child was born, I had to work to support the family while my husband's business was still new and ramping up, and I distinctly remember standing in line at a coffee shop on my lunch hour behind two women pushing children in strollers. One mentioned to the other that she's so glad she's not one of these women who chooses work over their kids. She said, "I would never pay anyone to love my kid for me." I wanted to knock their heads together.
I have really no idea who you are, but as a twice-divorced father of two, previously married to women exactly like you describe, I could (respectfully, of course) kiss you right on the mouth.
I've been a successful physician, investor, pilot - even coal miner during my college summers - but as a man who was raised in a traditional family by a mother who didn't work for wages, rather spending all her time on her family, I was unprepared for the "modern woman."
Always ambitious - perhaps overly so - I have been successful at everything mundane that I have attempted, but my love life has been a disaster. As I worked 60-hour weeks, both my wives spent their days in "self-actualization," one even reading self-help books and TAKING NOTES ON THEM - while my children languished in front of computer screens all day. Now both sons are near thirty and both live with me, neither with a job or even a girlfriend. Jesus God, if the Western culture is going to survive, something has to give.
Hello, Have you read 'Stolen Focus' by Johann Hari? It is a good source for knowing why our culture is the way it is. Tara had a conversation with him on January 26, 2022 on her substack. I thoroughly appreciated his book.
Thanks. I'll give it a look. I don't know the exact thrust, but from the title I can guess.
My last birthday, my sons and I treated ourselves to a wonderful Argentine steak house in Richmond, VA. As I look around at the other patrons, there must have been twenty young couples, and all but one were engrossed with their cell phones, completely ignoring their dinner partners.
One young couple, though, was locked eyeball to eyeball, clearly in love and oblivious to the world otherwise. As I left, I made it all the way to the checkout counter but I just couldn't help myself: I turned and interrupted the couple and, apologising for the interruption, told them just how wonderful it was to see them engaged with each other and not those goddamned phones. They thanked me, smiled and went back to drowning in each other's eyes. I could have cried.
There is hope. A glimmer, maybe, but hope.
Jim, That brought tears to my eyes. Good for you. I know what you mean. If you want to know who Tara is look to the beginning of her substacks; she explains where she comes from. You will appreciate her story. Being a Canadian I am proud of her as a journalist.
I have several good Canadian friends, and as an amateur historian, am so grateful for the contributions and sacrifices Canadians made in WWII. George Beurling is my all-time hero. I hope that someday, after we fight our way out of our own cesspool of totalitarianism, we can in some small way help the Canucks fight their way out of theirs and repay the debt.
Jim as soon as you mentioned Screwball Beurling I realized we have a subject to discuss. It's not in the scope of this group but certainly others I belong to online. A taste: I was at the unveiling for a painting of George where I was shocked to view one of the most hideous depictions I've seen of any Hero.
How charming.
You're right. Aside from ten-to-twelve-hour workdays five days per week, plus being on call EVERY OTHER night - including weekends - and generally spending three to four hours during those call-nights in the wee hours at the hospital on emergencies, plus handling ALL the finances and bill-paying, investing "our" retirement monies, supervising - or doing - ALL home maintenance and repairs, how unreasonable that I should expect my wife to get up off her ass on the couch and either work outside the home in a regular job OR take care of her children. Silly me. I see it now: I should have slept less. I'm so ashamed of myself.
Exactly! Well said, sir!
I'm a 58 year old gay man who has lived with a debilitating chronic illness. Last year I cut off all contact with two upper middle class women who have been friends for most of my life. The reason? They honestly believe that living a full life means winning The Suffering Games. These are highly privileged white women with assets that anyone would envy, yet every single gathering was dominated by these women whinging about "Men!" and "the plight of women." Spending time with them required that I validate that my 30-year struggle with HIV/AIDS was easier than their struggles as female white professionals.
The solution became obvious. Life's too short. One morning I woke up and just blocked their phone numbers and emails. Ever since then I have felt a lovely quiet I haven't experienced in years.
Do feminists tell you that people vote with their feet? No sane man is going to engage any woman on #metoo or cancel culture. They will just walk away.
I'm a gay man too. I have seen all you say since 1982. The ladies demand access to everything gay men have built, take control of it and wind up destroying it. What began as same sex women's grievance culture has become mainstream feminist agenda.
Yes that's true. However there is also a giant divide between that generation of lesbians and the ones currently taking the podiums.
After the slaughter of 50 gay men at the Pulse Nightclub in 2016, the now NDP candidate in Toronto Centre, Kristyn Wong-Tam, felt her role as City Councillor was to tell a thousand mourning men gathered in Barbara Hall Park that "this is no time for anger." She then used her time to name people from other parts of "the community" who were killed over the decades -- like some surreal attempt to imply that death by homophobic violence happens just as much to other parts of the community. To add insult to injury, she wrapped it up by asking the assembled men to congratulate her on her engagement to her girlfriend.
Is that the #NotAllLesbians you're talking about? Cause this kind of invalidating of gay men's needs and experiences is practically the norm now in Toronto.
She went on to say that Donald Trump, NRA and white male privilege was the cause to the Pulse Club massacre. She was engaged to a woman who was Muslim and therefor Islam had nothing to do with it. How convenient.
The lesbians who control Gay Pride offer nothing for gay men who like being gay men. Gay men have had to create new venues (Phoenix, Opera House) for dancing till dawn We don't want to be rude but not every dance party needs a drag show. Women are welcome but they are not pleased there are 2000 men and only 20 women on the floor. The same thing happened at the GCDC dances at the Masonic Temple. 3000 men and 100 women. So unfair. The point is whether gay or straight, men are the reason women are unhappy.
You must be about the same age! You must also remember how The lesbian bar, The Rose, was constantly closing early because of the fist fights? .
On a more serious note, the pattern you notice with dance venues also carries into Ontario's healthcare system. Lots of programs in high demand by gay men, from HIV to addictions, have been scaled back and the resources turned to "womyn's programming."
The press contributes to this. On World AIDS Day last year, The Agenda with Steve Paikin featured two specialists: one male and one female. The male talked about specific things being done to combat AIDS in Ontario and the progress being made through innovations like PrEP. No matter what he said, Paikin just kept talking about condoms -- like it was the 90s. Equal time was given to the female researcher from UHN who repeatedly explained her job focused on AIDS in Africa ...and that she couldn't speak to Ontario specifics. She did make sure to explain that African women had it much harder than Ontarian men. It was a point she made repeatedly. The effect was the progress being made by gay men, for gay men, was obliterated by Paikin authoritatively talking like it was 1998. The woman from UHN seemed content judging gay community efforts when compared to her high-road path of world saviour of "real victims." The whole thing was a master class in feminist-centric invalidation.
Oh lord yes. One of the first things I experienced when I arrived in Toronto was lesbian fascism.
Picture it: Gay Pride 1982, the first official Gay Pride at Hart House at UofT. I submitted several canvases to a gay art show, one being an oil sketch of a demure female nude with a bowl of fruit and drapery (kitch). A diesel dyke (plaid shirt, black boots) came by and loved it. But as soon as she found out a male had painted a female, she was outraged and demanded I remove it immediately. This was in your face censorship. I said it is not pornographic and aren't we supposed to have unity on Gay Pride day? She called 5 or 6 others over and they threatened to 'kick your teeth down your throat". They shouted and cussed at me with clenched fists as I piled the art into a cab. Then they laughed as I drove away. I celebrated Gay Pride with art work. They celebrated Gay Pride with violence. I have watched this craziness spread across society to a point governments have made it law.
Yes that is true, but the politics remained toxic.
On that point, Penny, I agree. I volunteered at the Aids Committee of Toronto in the late 80s and there were many wonderfulz committed lesbians involved even though gay men were the primary victims of the illness. I honour them.
¨ there are viciously cruel individuals in ALL groups of people, and the harm they do depends on how much power they have ¨
This is the problem , just look through history , plenty of examples in the last 100 years
Tara — I just want to comment that I really enjoy your balanced, analytical writing whenever I read it. You are an inspiration of a woman!
This is a very good exposition of the problem and the dilemma. I'm a boomer who stayed at home when my two boys were young and had trouble establishing a career afterwards, I wouldn't downplay the importance of having a paycheck with your name on it for giving a woman autonomy. I remember that in the 1960s, when feminists argued that women were capable of moving into non-traditional jobs, they were scornful of the objections made by men: "What about 'that time of the month'?" "What about having sexual temptation posed by having female work colleagues?" Now, it's the feminists who are demanding special accommodations for 'that time of the month' and sexual politics at work is a big problem, both in private enterprise and the armed forces. Feminism's big fail is that it has always been incoherent. One branch insists that females are different ("If women ran the world, we wouldn't have war,") and another is mortally offended when you suggest there's a difference between men and women. One thing I don't blame men for is the fact that we are mammals--our reproductive years coincide with the years that we get our higher education and our careers. I don't see that as anybody's fault.
I quit my job and retired at 42 to spend time with my children , how much money does one need to live a decent life ? So I don´t have a lear jet and 5 houses . Big deal have 2 well adjusted hard working children . That is worth more in my books , money can always be made , they print the shit like toilet paper .
Very interesting. I commend you for being willing to ask tough questions of the prevailing narrative regarding the so-called liberation that increasingly looks, yes, like a dolled-up pig.
I would hope that the increasing number of women asking these kinds of questions can benefit from the thoughtful writings of women like Mary Harrington and Abigail Favale. It seems to me they've been exploring these themes quite perceptively.
For example, here are the closing paragraphs of Favale's essay called "Feminism's Last Battle" (https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/07/76717/):
"Feminism needs a serious reality check. In a Foucauldian framework that views reality as constructed by power, one must oppose reality in order to resist oppression. If the feminist movement hopes to endure and effectively advocate the dignity of women and girls worldwide, it must depart from the anti-realist path that led to this bloody battleground. To survive the pending Armageddon, feminism must lose its paranoid rejection of essential differences between the sexes. This does not mean a reversion to cartoonish, reductive caricatures. Men and women are different, but they are not polarized opposites; our difference is asymmetrical, consonant with a shared humanity and individual inimitability.
Only from a realist ground can we successfully discern which differences are a consequence of sexism, and which are not. Only from a realist ground can one make the confident argument that a man cannot merely opt into womanhood, because there is a pre-social givenness to womanness, a nature that is shaped by nurture, but not wholly conjured by it.
Institutional power and language profoundly influence how we perceive reality; that’s something the postmodernists get right. But to assert that power creates reality is to concede that woman is a construct—a concession that, for the feminist movement, will ultimately prove to be fatal."
Similarly, from Mary Harrington's piece 'Reactionary Feminism' (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/reactionary-feminism):
"For the age we are entering, a feminism in thrall to technology and its promise of an end to all limits will deliver—is already delivering—only misery. Instead we need a movement grounded in pragmatic realities. Male and female bodies are different; humans can’t change sex; most women want to have children; heterosexuality is the default human condition; outsourcing domestic chores is a movement to reintroduce a servant class; children do better in stable two-parent families; and our hyperfocus on individual freedom is a central factor in the plummeting of birthrates worldwide. Against technological developments that promise to free us from love, longing, and human nature itself, restating these truths is an act of feminist resistance.
We are liberated enough. What we need is more and better obligations: a feminism that seeks the proper limits on freedom for both sexes. Such a feminism occupies the most reviled position of all. Dissenting from the theology of progress, it revels in the mantle of the “reactionary.”"
Sorry for the long quotes. Keep up the good work.
No apologies please, those are excellent quotes.
I could not agree more with all of this. Feminism has been on many levels highly destructive to society. Women have been sold a bill of goods that they can have it all. Problem is they also end up doing it all, and more. Nobody can have it all. Life is about choices. Equality is a great ideal but we are NOT the same and it has harmed women and children the most. Men aren't fairing well either BTW.
My 83 yr old mother was one of only 2 women in her University B Comm class. She was divorced and raised 2 kids on a single income for a time (lucky for her she had that degree) She despises feminism and would never call herself a feminist.
Women entering the workforce and competing with men doubled the labor supply and thereby suppressed wage growth. Good thing for elites and shareholders, awful thing for everyone else. Now we are reaping what we sowed.
Finally someone ties in some class struggle! The second wave of feminism coincided with the beginning of the end of “the great prosperity”, a rare period, especially in North America, when a working class family could live on one wage and own a freestanding home.
Thank you for continuing to explore out loud the things some say quietly to their friends. As a GenX-er I know that i have benefitted in many ways from the feminism that came before. I still have the credit card my mom insisted I get in college, so I'd have a strong credit rating, separate from a future partner. I co-run a business, I vote, my days have more leisure hours than my grandmothers could ever have imagined, etc. I also see the mis-steps and places where an upgrade is needed. Like you, many of my friends have divorced at least once. For many, their emotional health is now better. But it also comes at enormous social and economic cost, and some have --at least temporarily--given up trying to find companionship of a domestic partner, because it's really hard. It's complicated. And we need to start saying that part out loud.
Wow Tara, this writing is sharp, brave, and has receipts to backup the ideas. It opened my eyes with a new perspective. Refreshingly counter-narrative. Thank-you! You are definitely Canada's Bari Weiss for such snappy, brilliant, topical writing. Here's a suggested theme for future consideration:. How do I snap Old Left'ies (and maybe New Left'ies) out of the spell of Progressivism before the divorce?
Another lens to view all of this through, is technological change. Life used to be physically hard for both sexes. And perhaps feminism only came to be a thing when labour saving devices came along, I don't know. But technological change was a huge factor this past century for everyone. Home life for women in the modern era gave them more free time, some capitalized on this to spend more time with children. Work life for men in the modern era meant change, and usually a loss of one's cultural heritage. The experience of the native 'Indian' male eventually became many men's experience. Drug use, even nicotine is highly correlated to coping with change. Humans are not designed or meant for perpetual upgrading. The video gamer culture is just another form of drug use to cope with a world spiraling out of control. Likewise smart phone addiction, was easily predictable to be net negative for today's youth. Mental health, or lack of it is now fashionable among the youth, or parents of tomorrow.
With all the modern conveniences of city life, many of the former jobs women used to do have been replaced. Likewise many of the jobs men used to do as farmers and labourers have evaporated and replaced with technology, a technology that is fragile and dependent on world peace it seems. So we have both genders looking for meaning. Technology has replaced our worth, even as technology stumbles and threatens to end all life. Do humans want to live, or be replaced by AI?
“Most women who have kids have no choice but to work full-time, and are in agony, regularly, over having to miss some of these same things that Bazelon mentions.”
Inaccurate.
Mostly women work based on the choices they made long before they had kids…same as it’s always been. How about empowering women to be at home with their kids, to really be there for them, and stop with the b.s. about how women need to find meaning outside the home. When you have kids, all the meaning you’ll ever require, and vice versa, can be had in those wee eyes staring back at you.
When Adele got her divorce, she had to pay her ex alimony and 1/2 of all she earned during the time they were together. It amounted £10s of millions. She was outraged and screamed in the parking lot that is was unfair. She wanted to appeal the ruling but it was final. You've gotten nowhere baby.
It's good to see some critiquing of feminism. What's going on here, however, is still feminism without the real critiquing it needs. For one, feminism has failed to create viable and healthy role models for women. The new Lois Lane is a great example. She is the perfect example of what men loathe. And frankly, women ought to loathe a character like that, too.
There's a lot to unpack on this subject, and I'm not prepared to get into all of it. Surely, however, a man's input would be useful. Yes, it's up to women, ultimately, to steer feminism to a better course. But there seems to be no understanding of men here.
Then there's stuff like this:
"If all of that wasn’t enough, there’s another powerful force at work here, too: 'From the moment the Pill became widely available, the effect of the sexual revolution has mainly been to make women more sexually available to men,” which, Andrews writes, has led to “the soaring out-of-wedlock birthrate.'"
How does one wind up skewing contraception—supposedly giving women more bodily autonomy—into a benefit mainly for men? . . a patriarchal ploy? Talk about conspiracy theories! It goes to show how women are always on the lookout for how the world is tilted unfairly against them. I’ve noticed this pattern in most of the women I know. No matter how well their careers are going. No matter how well they’ve managed to have high-paying jobs and families, there’s always something wrong and unfair that must be fought against. Considering how often I’ve been the unemployed one at the table, or the lower wage earner, I have found it galling to have to listen to this complaining. Not at any point, did they so much as acknowledge the irony of the situation. Never even a word to tell me what was essentially implied, which is that I was somehow an oddity and outlier as far as men were concerned, which is simply not true... Shameless. Thoughtless. Narcissistic.
"It goes to show how women are always on the lookout for how the world is tilted unfairly against them."
Who do you think invented The Cult of Victimization?
Great piece. A very important topic, IMO.
I believe that many, and maybe most, women who are active feminists are either bitter and/or resentful from some childhood relationship trauma and have decided that men are their target for retribution.
Men represent the father, and clearly, throughout history, fathers are as imperfect in meeting the high expectations of daughters and wives as are men in general. Those missed expectations have always caused a level of dysfunctional rage (dysfunctional in the sense that as adults nobody is responsible for any other's happiness and life fulfillment, but yet constant validation continues to be craved by some)... but changes to the economy have allowed that dysfunctional rage to be weaponized in politics and society in general.
Watching this as I have for my lifetime and dealing with so much of this type of standard psychological-emotional dysfunction in family members and employees and friends... (Note that my mother and father divorced when I was 10, the oldest of three sons and thus became the man of the family when pops disappeared from our lives dealing with mental health issues and mom with her high school diploma had to figure out how to pay the bills. Mother remarried when I was 13 to a man-child that was abandoned by his single mother at the steps of the Boys Home where he then fought his way through several foster homes. Needless to say, it was not a good time to be the oldest son in that old and new family dynamic.)... I see it as ubiquitous and growing.
If anyone has a license for clutching bitterness and resentment over missed fathering expectations, it would be me. But I cringe even making that point because it feels like victim mentality virtue signaling... the most debilitating of all maladies and one so quickly and strongly adopted by the people running the 3rd wave feminist woke project. What a slippery slope.
Back to those changes to the economy.
What has happened?
I think unnecessary changes to the economy are the culprit. More specifically, it has been changes in the economy that have increased the dominance of the female matriarchy that feminists lead... while it has punched down the economic opportunity of men.
I think we are fundamentally the same animal as we have always been. The 500 generations meme going around makes the case that we are evolved from the same biology and we have not had much time to evolve differently. We are still primitive animals prone to primitive impulses and reactions.
Just go back to middle school and high school. Those times traumatized most of us. Very few escaped without scars of insecurity from peer ridicule and rejection. Those puffed up with schoolyard popularity would then get knocked back when they launched into the real world. It seems a social-biological human developmental function to traverse that psychological gauntlet (including that of family)... so that we come out the other side with thicker skin and ready to cope with the continued challenges and adversity of a malevolent world filled with primitive animals.
Remember the "anti-bullying" project that started over sensationalized reports of teen suicide? As women achieved academic credentials and began to dominate industries like education, this was just one example of this tendency to implement more motherly safe spaces. Sounds good on paper, but it never works. The rate of teen suicide has continued to rise... and many suspect that a reduction in developed coping skills might be a primary culprit.
The late great Joseph Campbell noted that successful cultures understood this childhood development progression to be critical: child -> mother's child -> father's child - > adult. He lamented that the West did not seem to understand this and hence was creating a population of adult-age children that never really developed to a functional adult psychology. Even decades ago he was concerned about the growing dominance of the female mothering impulse to nurture and protect people throughout their lives instead of administering that tough love of a father so that self-confidence, self-determination and independence blossom.
The problem is that while women have advanced in economic, social and political power (a good thing)... men have been knocked back (a bad thing... maybe the worst thing). The information and service economy is more suited to female tendencies. An economy that makes, builds, grows and fixes real things... those jobs have been exported in pursuit of the globalist agenda... and the education system has been depleted of those previous career subjects.
These were unnecessary and destructive changes. Males are in bad shape now. Those less wired for the information and service economy are stuck without enough career opportunities. Many have fallen so far behind they will likely never catch up.
Meanwhile the wealthy and powerful feminist wing, led by these resentful, and often lesbian, types, is committed to stomping on underemployed male necks in a passive-aggressive war pattern that allows them to attack with maximum aggressiveness and sink back in defense to their old grade school identity politics safe spaces. Who knew "mothers" could be so mean?
Joseph Campbell as well as the still alive and kicking Jordan Peterson have diagnosed this societal problem as a lack of gender balance in our economic and societal systems. We have shifted from a patriarchy to a matriarchy in just a few decades. And that change is destroying us because of the choice of women who are leading it. Our continued survival demands that we reject this shift and get back to a more balanced economy that is more patriarchal in design and execution. Because a patriarchal design (libertarian patriarchy) is the best fit for well adjusted adults.
We need to correct this destructive trajectory by resurrecting our commitment to economic and educational changes that benefit men... while the women who have their shit together start taking down the radical feminists from their positions of power and influence.
Frankly, I see the gender wars as our primary extensional threat. People, and primarily women, who stay silent and cower against the rage of the radical postmodernist 3rd wave feminist movement are likely to regret that they did not take a stand.
Great contribution! Thanks.
Thank you, I really enjoyed this work. In Canada, about the boomers...since I am one, I need to point out that the issues belonging to females are intergenerational, that the fathers of female boomers were raised in Victorian or post-Victorian childhoods, raised by men whose own interests were tantamount. The sons then became fathers after the war, who also saw their primary goal was to make the family money as women were ‘encouraged’ to return to the home. Males were far more dominant (the exception being the collection of current world-psychopaths outdoing Nazism) and in my neighbourhood, as others, no mother worked. It was unheard of. That doesn't mean they didn't want to. Families tended to be larger then, as birth control was still a problem.
If we want to make an argument about where feminism went wrong, if indeed it did, it would be the sense that woman herself is still seen as less-than.
Feminism may have wandered off into a path that excludes themselves from themselves. We have been striving for self-hood. Now in the current lexicon, in law and basically everywhere, I don’t exist as a woman, but as a ‘ciswoman’ and a male can be a woman, if he so wants. To be clear, we have ‘ciswomen’ and we have women.I have been forced to step over, give up the space my mother, her mother and all the mothers have been striving for, to a male. And if that is not enough, in law, in sport, in prisons, in scholarships, political positions, in employment – equity -NOT equality - is what matters. The government has said that in labour law woman has not been defined. I believe that says it all.
Of course some of us want families, and of course we do not always want to do everything ourselves, but if the husband doesn’t want to be a full-participant, sometimes it’s just easier to do it alone, sadly. I would want to look at the entire relational situation and wonder where the men went. I witnessed many marriages as the woman giving up autonomy so that the husband could have his.
And look where we are now. The vanishing of females, again, still.
An article on where feminism went wrong, taken over largely by male voices complaining about women being whiners. Give me a break. No one talking about historical events--or not many of you. WWII, during which time a whole generation of men were elsewhere frankly (and mostly but not always metaphorically) raping and pillaging and softening up the rest of the world for imperialism to come, and the women in the factories making that war possible, while taking care of children that existed, experiencing the privileges that had previously only been available to men (in cities, anyway). And when they came back, shoved back into the bedroom and kitchen with the most godawful anti-woman propaganda, relegated to raising too large families while their husbands (in unequal marriages, often) were working to support the whole crew, and unhappy in their own, strait-jacketed ways. And then in the 1970's with the Boomer generation coming of age, the feminist movement is subverted into "be everything you can be" and women jumped (or SHOVED) into the work force. NOTICE. Just at this point wages stagnated and the stagnation has not ended since because you could legally pay HALF YOUR WORKFORCE less than you had been--now HALF A CENTURY LATER--and it has become difficult for most two-wager-earner families to make ends meet. But a tiny number of billionaires now control--shit--I can't even remember how much they're worth. Was it--could it be--possibly--$27 TRILLION??? I think the number is 800 billionaires? Maybe my numbers are wrong but the ratio isn't.
This is NOT women's fault. And women still are not paid what they're worth, despite the fact that they mostly raise the kids as best they can while mostly working full-time, under-paid and under-stimulated, frankly, if you think pink collar work is mentally stimulating you are seriously deluded, boys. Of course in our "retirement" years, we don't have enough income to live on because MOST of our work was UNPAID., despite working full-time outside the home.
The fact is the elephant in the room is Capitalism. And rampant militarism. Which is NOT the fault of women, boys. Take responsibility for a moment. Yes, some of you may have worked your butts off. But so did the women in your lives. In fact, you wouldn't have been able to work your butts off if someone somewhere underpaid, if they were paid at all, wasn't meeting your physical needs. And I am NOT talking about sex. You also couldn't support all the people at home if a lot of people with vaginas (not really relevant to their work, I might add) weren't underpaid but supporting your overpaid work on the job.
The truth is that capitalism took over feminism very early on. Before I hit the job market (when minimum wage was $1.73). Did you know that today minimum wage is very close to HALF what it was, in real dollars, in 1968?
And if the kids ended up messed up, why is it always their mother's fault? Excuse me?
I am a single parent BY CHOICE for a reason. Didn't make much money--still working because social security does not take into consideration my unpaid contributions, self-employed so I could homeschooled my kid because the schools were so bad without a penny even for materials, much less pay for my work, got lots of criticism from everyone under the sun, but I can't say my kid is worse off than those of married mothers. At least he knows how to support himself and is not dependent on his mother. Or father. God help him if he ever relied on his father for anything.
I don't know any mothers who just reclined on the couch eating bon bons. I do know a lot of mothers who were depressed when their kids were living at home, which is not good for kids.
Capitalism did to feminism what it did to climate change, LGBTQT blah blah blah rights--what do you think transgenderism is really about? ($$$), the ecological movement, farming, home ownership, education, healthcare, the military, literacy, on and on and on.
Women's pay is now closer to 80% of men's, whereas it used to be 70%. In 50 years. And women raise the kids whether or not they work outside the home, which most of them must. Who benefited? That tiny number of people who are now worth $27 trillion. Okay, the majority of them are men. But there are some women among those billionaires. Not that it makes any difference to the rest of us.
For fuck's sake stop blaming women--especially MOMMY--for everything under the sun.