Nothing like a little misogyny with dinner

When I stumbled on a blog called “What Women Never Hear,” I just knew it was going to be good. And I was so right.

First, how the author describes himself:

A. Guy Maligned respects and honors the female gender more than his own, as do most men of his generation.

Curiously enough, his idea of respecting and honoring women sounds a lot like garden-variety bitterness about how much feminists have screwed up women, by making them less likely to behave the way he wants, rife with stereotypes about how men and women ought to be. Some choice excerpts:

Some women marry but retain their maiden name to show independence. Men read it as weak attachment to husband. Other women take their husband’s name as token of thankfulness for giving up his freedom. Other men respect them for that.

That’s right, ladies. If you keep your name for professional or sentimental reasons, you’re an ungrateful hussy. After all, your husband gave up his freedom to marry you. I like how he makes it sound like marriage is only beneficial to women, and something that men just put up with.

Some women dress erotically to capture a man and follow up with sloppiness that turns his head toward other neat and erotically attired females. The end is in sight. Other women know that their sloppy appearance and inattentive personal grooming at home and in public spawns potential trophies in their man’s eyes.

If your man strays, it’s because you didn’t put enough effort into being sexy. Stop complaining about what an asshole he is for being unfaithful and put on some lipstick.  The same sentiment comes again in a later post:

Some women convince themselves that the right combination of passion, love, religious beliefs, common interests, and kids will keep their relationship together. Other women know there’s no such insurance and that special stroking of her man as king to her queen is essential.

Your marriage is destined for failure if you insufficiently stroke his ego.  Got it.

Some women demean the male ego with cheap sex. They deny men the thrill of conquest and earn little respect for themselves. Other women exploit the male conquering drive to earn his greater respect—the precursor of a man’s love. They delay conquest for lengthy periods in order to earn his devotion and extract firm obligations.

And on a related note:

Some women discourage manly devotion by providing cheap, uncommitted sex. Other women inspire manly devotion by delaying a man’s conquest until he wants her for much more than sex.

Here’s where things get tricky. I agree that women are doing themselves a disservice by acting promiscuously. But his justification is entirely wrong. You don’t abstain from sex in order to play to a man’s desire for conquest, or because having sex will make him less likely to be all manly and devoted - you do it for yourself. More importantly, I really, really hate the idea that it’s the woman’s job to play sexual gatekeeper for both. Over and over in my Catholic school education, we heard that it was the woman’s job to keep men’s sexual appetites in line. This assumes two equally harmful things: that women have no sex drive and men have uncontrollable sex drives.

Some women base their love for a man on how well he lives by female rules and expectations. For example, insisting that he check in frequently and involve her in all decisions. Other women base their love around masculine rules and expectations, trust more than suspicion, friendship warmth instead of co-dependency, and loving appreciation more than direct involvement in each decision.

Women shouldn’t ask to be involved in decision-making. They should be grateful they have a man to do it for them.

Reward men appropriately for husbanding and fathering, and women can have what they want out of life with a man. ‘Appropriate’ means as defined by that man and no one else. So, a woman’s lifelong major task is to uncover what her man expects from her, and make sure she will not be victimized in whatever follows. (Of course she can claim that she’s due the same thing. But, he lacks the skills and interest to do it.)

Translation: women have to do all of the work, and if they do it to a man’s satisfaction, maybe they’ll get rewarded. Or at least not victimized. Implicit in everything this man has written, but made explicit here, is that he believes that men are individuals, who get to decide what their reward should be, while women are pretty much interchangeable servants.

And this is coming from a man who claims to hold women in high esteem. That esteem is clearly a double-edged sword. Because women are so much better, they are held to impossible standards as the perfectly submissive wives and mothers. Because they are so much more virtuous than men, they are expected to beguile men into good behavior. If a man acts poorly, it’s the woman’s fault for not dressing well enough, or not being moral enough. And while woman are expected to discover her man’s idea of appropriate rewards for marriage and fatherhood, men lack the “skills and interest” to reward her similarly for her role as a wife and mother.

In my family, we have a term for this: intentional incompetence.  For example, when asked to do the dishes, a younger brother will first ask a million questions - what temperature should the water be?  Where are the sponges?  Should I use soap? - then do a terrible job so that next time, I’ll think it’s easier to do it myself than ask them.  A. Guy Maligned is practicing intentional incompetence on the behalf of the entire male population.  Men just can’t be trusted to do anything right or make any sacrifices, so you little ladies will have to pick up the slack.

 

Women shouldn’t have to choose: The Remix

John Edwards, desperate to prove that he is at least the poor man’s Barack Obama, wrote a guest blog for Glamocracy in which he echoes Obama’s sentiment that women shouldn’t have to make hard choices:

My grandmother and my mother instilled in me a strong belief in the value of hard work. I believe we need to honor hard work by making sure no woman has to choose between taking care of her children and earning a living. That’s why I’ll make it easier for working mothers by raising the minimum wage, offering seven paid sick days a year, expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act and making child care more affordable.

Wait, you mean you want to honor hard work by raising unemployment for the lowest earners, reducing the flexibility of businesses and taxing everyone else to pay for childcare for those women who shouldn’t have to choose?  I’m going to have to give Edwards the non-sequitur of the week award.

As I noted before, freedom means that you make hard choices and you live with the consequences.  Families can choose for themselves which arrangement of work and family time is best for them, whether that be two incomes, a parent at home, or some combination of the above.  Government should not give preference to one choice over another by, say, funding daycare at the expense of families who choose to have a family at home.

And an astute reader (and fellow former GSO columnist) passed along an eye-opening article about the failure of so-called “family-friendly” policies in Sweden.  Something to consider, before we start entertaining the idea of trying out such an experiment in our country.

 

“Having it all”

Hannah Seligson of Women’s Wall Street blogged about the constant (and in my opinion, media-created) conundrum of balancing family and career, using a Huffington Post piece by Cathie Black as her starting-off point. Like most women who write about “having it all,” Seligson lost me in her first paragraph:

Having it all sort of sounds like a nebulous term. But I think for a lot of young women it’s pretty defined. They want to be married by 30, have their two children by 35, a satisfying and semi-lucrative career along the way, and look great in their yoga pants during all this careering and child-rearing. And did I mention also be able to throw impromptu dinner parties and bake cupcakes that would make Julia Child and/or Martha Stewart proud.

My first thought was ‘why wait until 30 to get married and 35 to have kids?’ Naturally, my second thought was that yoga pants are already a lost cause for me, probably because I do bake (and then consume) cupcakes that would make Julia Child proud.

For me, marriage and children are the natural steps that follow graduation and landing a decent job. I think it makes more sense to have children at 25 than 35 (provided you are in a stable marriage and have stable jobs), because a 25-year old parent is going to have more energy. If both parents work full-time (or even if one works part-time), they still need to come home and work a second shift as parents, chasing around toddlers and carting kids to soccer practice. And if one parent stays home with the kids, he or she is going to need energy to chase toddlers full-time.

Obviously, my time line won’t work for everyone. It depends on meeting the person you want to marry fairly early, which can be extremely difficult. Other women also care more about having high-powered careers than I do, in which case they might want to put in more time building that career before having kids. And as Samantha pointed out in her post below, cultural expectations about the appropriate age for marriage differ greatly between geographical locations. They differ even further between heritages, religions and education levels.

But here’s where Seligson really gets it wrong:

Great, but deep satisfaction, isn’t that one of those elusive states that people talk but rarely achieve? Black says not so. She believes (and is a living example) that if women can tune about some societal expectations and fear mongering about their biological clocks, women can figure out what they want on their own terms.

I’m sorry, but is “fear mongering” really the right term here? Where I come from, that’s called common sense, or, in some cases, stating the obvious. Her link takes you to a 2003 CBS 60 Minutes segment about the fact that young women who want to have it all often mistakenly believe that fertility lasts forever, and that there is no harm in putting off having kids until your 30’s or 40’s. As the article points out, fertility starts to drop off as early as 30, and drops precipitously in your late thirties.

When a group of fertility doctors put out an ad campaign that reminded women of these basic facts, Kim Gandy of NOW objected to what she saw as scare tactics. OK, Gandy and Seligson, say it with me now: “Facts you don’t like” does not equal “fear mongering.”

The rest of Seligson’s post is pretty much bromide after feel-good bromide, ending with this crazy idea that what really matters isn’t having it all, but focusing on what makes you happy. She even manages to sneak in the word empowering, a sure sign that she was on a deadline.

As a side note, I really enjoy reading the blogs at Women’s Wall Street. They can be a good resource if your financial education is a little bit shaky.