I had an interesting conversation with a new employee at work earlier this week. She told me that for many years she has been able to work part-time (three days a week). When I probed why she chose to work part-time, she breezily replied "Life is too short to work full-time". I then said "Yes, if you are able to afford to do so." Her response? "Oh, my husband works full-time so affording the days off has never been an issue."
I don't blame her at all for choosing a lifestyle with a nice work/life balance. But the conversation did make me think of all those feminists who look on men like her husband as patriarchal oppressors earning more than their wives. The reality in many cases is so different: this woman's husband does not have the luxury of thinking that life is too short to spend all his week at the office. That is where he will be and in doing so he is enabling his wife to live more enjoyably. But he gets little kudos from society for his sacrifices - instead he will be portrayed as a privileged male.
It is a case of reality being turned on its head. His wife is privileged and he is bearing a burden for her sake. But how often is this kind of situation openly acknowledged?
I think that asking for acknowledgment or any sense of fair argument or intellectual honesty on these double standards is a lost cause. Feminism does not abide by any notion of truth, fairness, or the 'good'. It's about power. At the end of the day the question for feminists is: is it good for women? Does this issue increase women's status, make them wealthier financially, and more influential politically?
ReplyDeleteYou're right, the feminists I know zero in on getting stuff they want from men - the kind of stuff you mention in your comment (status, money, power). The excuse they use is the notion of men being "privileged". The real point of posts like this is to point out the unreality of the politics of privilege that feminists use to justify their attacks on men. A feminist will argue "men earn more than women, therefore they are privileged, therefore women should get this positive discrimination or government largesse", when really, on the ground, men are making sacrifices so that their wives can have better lives.
DeleteEvery intuition is up for debate in this arena. You mention "better lives" for wives, a qualitative notion which would be immediately torn down as presumptuous by any moderately talented feminist shrew. I don't believe the current ground they have staked out rests on reason and argument. It rests on emotional manipulation, invective, and fear (ofc includes appeals to individual autonomy couched in the language of liberation from oppression)
DeleteI think one of the best weapons we have is ridicule. Indeed, many feminists are ridiculous characters, such as the angry wretch in your Italy post. The key is getting them into the limelight, exposing them for what they are, and very publicly tearing them down with humour and ridicule. This requires the right public figures and social climate; something completely absent in New Zealand, which is incredibly anodyne and PC. But I have hope for the larger anglo nations.
Jimmy, one of the good things coming out of America politically is the creative ridicule being applied to SJWs online. It seems to be coming from college aged men and humour is certainly one of the weapons they employ.
Delete“Feminism does not abide by any notion of truth, fairness, or the 'good'. It's about power. At the end of the day the question for feminists is: is it good for women?”
DeleteThat is one way to look at it.
Another is to regard all the demands made by women as tests. If you look at it like that, they are not really after the things that they claim to want, rather they are just testing to see if a man or all men are capable of saying NO. And every time that we fail, their contempt for us grows. If it goes on long enough they want new, more manly, men.
This may sound silly, but as far as I can tell, there are some indications that this is what is going on.
In Sweden, there is a radical feminist party that is led by a former leader of an established left wing party. They have not quite made it in to parliament yet, but they are close. We are talking all-out radicals here.
The interesting thing is that they are now fast turning pro Muslim! This is not a joke! They are standing up for women’s “right” to wear burqas and burkinis and they are now in bed with none other than the Muslim brotherhood:
“European Muslim Brotherhood Holds Event On Women’s Issues At European Parliament; Organizer Inexplicably Represents Swedish Feminist Party”
http://www.globalmbwatch.com/2016/03/17/european-muslim-brotherhood-organizes-event-on-womens-issues-at-european-parliament-organizer-inexplicably-represents-swedish-feminist-party/
So, here we have a bunch of really hard core feminists that have for decades been demanding, and getting, just about everything that they have pointed at. They have been “outraged” at lots of seeming normal things, such as mothers staying home with their kids or men even looking at women.
And now they turn Muslim!!!!
The only possible explanation that I have seen for this behavior is the “test” theory that I mention above.
But maybe you fellows down under have some better ideas?
It's an interesting thought that has occurred to me as well, that feminists want men to pass ever more difficult fitness tests.
DeleteIn Australia also feminist women are increasingly moving to support Islam. They seem very stuck on the idea that white men are the great enemy, the privileged class, and therefore Muslims must by definition be the oppressed good guys.
I'm not sure if this is about feminist women looking for the most fit, unbowed men; ideological blindness; or using Islam to batter down Western civilisation.
But I agree it's strange to observe. It wasn't that long ago that Australian feminists were using the burqa to attack Australian men with ("you men want to oppress women, look at what women are forced to wear in Muslim countries"). Now Western feminists see a defence of the burqa as a progressive cause.
EuroSwede: I definitely understand what you're getting at. I believe the fitness test is more applicable at the micro level rather than macro. However the threat posed by such radical groups as the one you mention are infact a fitness test of a type, as failing to fend off these people will and allowing them political power will certainly result in serious harm for Sweden.
Delete"In Australia also feminist women are increasingly moving to support Islam."
DeleteThat is very interesting! If the same type of movement is happening in many places, it can not be written off as some strange phenomenon due to local factors.
"They seem very stuck on the idea that white men are the great enemy, the privileged class, and therefore Muslims must by definition be the oppressed good guys."
Yes, that is what they say. But is it really what is driving them? There are plenty of people on this planet that are suffering real oppression and real hardship, including most women in Muslim nations. Western feminists totally ignores all of them.
It is simply not credible and looking back, I am now starting to realize that the feminists (and possibly women in general) have never been, and probably never will be, honest about their intentions. As depressing as it is to contemplate, it is possible that they simply cannot be honest about certain aspects of their nature. If they are in fact conducting ongoing fitness tests on men, telling the truth would be highly counterproductive.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that these are intentional and calculated lies. I do not think that they, in their own minds, consider any of this as lies. It just "feels" right for them.
Is seems very clear that western women, in many ways, have been pushing hard to make domestic men less masculine. And it is now starting to be equally clear that they are really unhappy that they have been successful.
That the demands from feminists are becoming ever more absurd, could be due to the fact that it is simply more and more difficult to conduct the fitness tests, when they already have been given everything that they asked for.
Higher education seems to be somewhat of a canary in the coalmine. For a very long time, women have been demanding, and getting, full access to universities. Now they are dominant, but are the happy? Absolutely not! Instead they are turning the universities in to some sort of bizarre horror show. Academic standards are collapsing and men are literally being driven out. Still the demands and hysteria only increases. The last pocket of relative sanity are the STEM programs, but they are now going on an all out attack on those.
There is a very interesting debate about MDs i the UK. As in most places in the west, medicine is now dominated by women and this is starting to have some very problematic effects. In short, the young female doctors are refusing to work as much as the older male doctors used to do. Also, many of them drop out of the profession when they find a husband and/or have kids. All of this leads to the need to educate many, many more doctors. Expensive activity, that!
But the young female doctors in the UK are filled with outrage! It is all about them not getting enough support! They are now demanding all sorts of things! Make work more flexible! Give us free childcare! Etc, etc.
This will never end until some group of men stands up and just says NO to all this nonsense. If we are very lucky, this will be done by western men in the future. But if not, it will be done by some other group of men.
@ Jimmy,
Delete"I believe the fitness test is more applicable at the micro level rather than macro."
The whole idea with fitness test on a macro scale sounds almost crazy to me as well. Maybe it is, but like many other white middle aged men around the planet, I am really, really struggling to try to understand what is happening.
That women are motivated only by egoistic material concerns just don't seem to fit the observable facts. It may be part of the answer, but there is something more in play here. No Australian or Swedish woman can reasonably be stupid to the degree that they think that they will have a better standard of living under sharia. Or can they?
At the risk of being crude, could it ultimately be a desire for rougher trade?
Delete"It is a case of reality being turned on its head. "
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if I've posted this here yet,
"The wife, we are told, is the only unpaid servant! A more blatant lie could scarcely be imagined. As every educated person possessing the slightest acquaintance with the laws of England knows, the law requires the husband to maintain his wife in a manner according with his own social position; has, in other words, to feed, clothe and afford her all reasonable luxuries, which the law, with a view to the economic standing of the husband, regards as necessaries. This although the husband has no claim on the wife's property or income, however wealthy she may be. Furthermore, it need scarcely be said, a servant who is inefficient, lazy, or otherwise intolerable, can be dismissed or her wage can be lowered. Not so that privileged person, the legally wedded wife. It matters not whether she perform her duties well, badly, in- differently, or not at all, the husband's legal obligations remain just the same. "
"It will be seen, therefore, that the wife in any case receives from the husband economic advantages compared with which the wages of the most highly paid servant in existence are a mere pauper's pittance. This talk we hear ad nauseum, from the Feminist side, of the wife being an "unpaid servant," is typical of the whole Feminist agitation."
"We find the same de- liberate and unscrupulous dishonesty characterising it throughout. Facts are not merely perverted or exaggerated, they are simply turned upside down."
- Fraud of Feminism, 1913, Belfort Bax
Thanks - that's interesting.
DeleteIn this putrescent society it is inadvisable to marry. The way I like to put it is as follows: Don't get married and you'll be all right, do get married and you're in for the fight of your life.
ReplyDeleteYes, pitting men and women against each other as separate, competing interests obscures how both are better off when they're in family relationships, interdependent, parts of an organic, transcendent whole. I recall an article a few years ago about how some of the highest levels of "unemployment" among women in the USA were in Stamford, Connecticut and thereabouts. The author made the point that left-liberal might bemoan this "unemployment" as a sign of oppression of and discrimination against women, but the fact is that these women are "unemployed" because they're the housewives of the high-earning Wall Street men who commute to New York City, and are quite well-off financially, much more so than a full-time employed woman in the inner city working at McDonald's.
ReplyDeleteAnother related point is that men, aware, if only subconsciously, of female hypergamy, eager to impress women by making more money, strive to get better jobs and get promotions at work, which then contributes to the "wage gap" which feminists then claim must be eliminated by leveling forces.
both are better off when they're in family relationships, interdependent, parts of an organic, transcendent whole.
DeleteWell put. But some moderns seem to have a poor sense of this - they have no feeling of what a family truly is (i.e. they never come to a sense of what it means to say that the family is a transcendent whole).