[Missouri Republican U.S. Senate primary candidate Courtland Sykes] said he doesn't want his daughters to grow up to be "career obsessed banshees who forego home life ... to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings."The article goes on to note that he 'faces an uphill battle' for the nomination. I'll wager.
Tell Us How You Really Feel, Mr. Sykes
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I want to come home to a home cooked dinner at six every night....
So does my wife. Is she my chattel, or my partner in life? What is it with Missouri and its "Republican" candidates?
Eric Hines
I'm going to be slower to criticize. The home life depicted in "Leave it to Beaver" has some definite draws to it.
-Stc Michael
There's surely some defensible middle ground between '1950s home life had some advantages we may have been too quick to abandon' and 'these feminists are hell-bent shrieking she-devil banshees.' I was amused that he even managed to come up with so many epithets at one sitting.
Still, there are advantages, of course. Not only for men, but certainly for men. I was talking with a friend earlier today whose wife, as a part-time librarian, earns only about $20K a year; they live in the urban northeast, where that puts a substantial strain on him. He works far longer hours, and has to commute (whereas their house was chosen to be right by her work); yet, he complained, he is constantly lectured about needing to do more around the house 'as we don't live by the outdated norms of patriarchy.' In addition to those chores about the house, he is of course the only one who ever takes out the garbage or shovels the snow from the walk and drive in the long cold winters.
Really, she's getting a good deal -- just enough of a career to feel like she has some purpose in life, without it being taxing; the pride of knowing she is asserting her 'equality' about the house, without the bother of actually contributing in anything like an equal manner. Even the pleasure of self-righteously lecturing him on how he doesn't do enough.
The old ways wouldn't have been all that different, except that they might really have been more equal: she could have worked at a job she enjoyed, since they have no children; she just would have been expected to do more about the house, since he was working long hours. In return for laying aside the pride and self-righteousness, she'd have had a much happier husband and a more firmly-founded marriage. I know my friend will not violate his wedding vows, being a man of honor, but his patience is sorely strained. Yet she is only doing what she has been taught.
Well, I trust it will work itself out, and a man shouldn't meddle in things that aren't his business. I see your point, though; but there are other cases, too, in which the woman is the one with the righteous complaint. The old ways happen to work for me, but perhaps they don't for everyone.
Yet she is only doing what she has been taught.
This isn't that much of an excuse (though it is, a little). If all we did was what we were taught, we'd still be living in caves scrabbling for road kill in competition with the predators who actually produced the kill and eating hand-gathered fruits and nuts.
And have very little social progress--of anyone's definition of social progress.
Eric Hines
I don't believe in social progress, Mr. Hines. I have a whole story I tell about that.
I find it easier to listen to a woman talk about the draws of a life in which she puts dinner on the table by 6 every evening, than to listen to the beneficiary of this service explain why he enjoys it. Of course he enjoys it, who wouldn't?
I was always the primary breadwinner, and we didn't fight about housework. He didn't feel I owed it to him, nor did I feel he owed it to me. We split it up in a way that made sense given our work burdens and hired help when we needed to. He does those few things around here that require more strength than I've got, and I take care of things I'm better at or that he hates to do, like telephone communication and sewing on buttons and ironing the occasional (very occasional!) dress shirt. He cooks while I clean. I make the bed and do most but not all of the laundry; he does a bit more than half of the grocery shopping. I handle anything legal, but more and more as the years pass he handles the financial end. He sows the garden, I reap. We both feed the animals, but I do all the vet stuff. I don't see why these things have to be so hard, except that, if the woman isn't earning much, she hasn't got much of a bargaining position. Perhaps she even has to earn the lion's share of the income to make the issue go away completely.
What is he, Amish. That's unAmerican right there.
I think, Tex, that there's something about the communication style that is the problem. They formally share the same goal: both of them are committed to the idea of 'equality,' although just what is meant by 'equality' is debatable. An argument could be made that either arrangement is 'equal' in a way: the one more formally so, and the other more practically so.
He's trying to engage her on the old, old dispute over equality of opportunity vs. equality of result. She seems completely unaware that there is such a distinction or that it lies at the heart of informed debate about equality in society. He's familiar with her worldview, but she has never heard of his. To her, anyone who isn't shocked by a simple revulsion against inequality of results is simply a sexist troglodyte who wants women to suffer but won't admit it. Same discussion happens about race and ever other kind of equality. It's tiresome enough that it's hard to find common ground between the two camps when they actually know about each other, but doubly so when one side has never even been exposed to the arguments of the other and shuts them out of consciousness when they do come up.
I don't believe in social progress, Mr. Hines.
This is America, Grim.
I'm more optimistic. And I see social progress all around me. Which is not the same as changing, much less improving, human nature, which merely evolves with the planet, or doesn't and the growing mismatch leads to extinction.
Eric Hines
Tsk. "This is America, Grim. [g]"
Eric Hines
Oh, I believe in America. I have a story about that, too. :)
Dinner at 6 every night strikes me as the sort of expectation that might be negotiated amongst other expectations, including things that are more important than average to her. It sounds like his overall attitude is more of a problem than the specifics. So too with your friend's wife, Grim. It's not the specifics, it is the unbending attitude that rankles.
It takes a while for married couples to discover these things - what is important to that specific person, not the generic man or woman. My female co-workers and all media advice instructed me that it was horrible and insulting to give my wife practical things like vacuum cleaners, blenders, or garden carts for Valentine's Day. Twenty-five years later I finally absorbed the fact that my particular wife preferred these things greatly.
Someone convinced my husband early in life that he must never give me a gift with a power cord attached. It's entirely misguided advice: I love power tools and appliances. I'd like nothing better than a really good vacuum cleaner for our upcoming anniversary, but he can't bring himself to do it. Luckily, what he buys instead is always very thoughtful and appropriate.
I'd like nothing better than a really good vacuum cleaner for our upcoming anniversary, but he can't bring himself to do it.
Related to that, my mother had finally talked my father into replacing her hand-held electric mixer, which had failed (according to a small appliance repairman, its fix would cost as much as a new one), with a fancy one that had a rotating bowl under the beaters.
I angrified Mom by fixing the hand-held mixer (in truth, in taking it apart and reassembling it just to explore its insides, I crushed an internal fuse, so in effect I'd hotwired it). That hand-held mixer lasted several more years, and Mom never did get the fancied up mixer.
But she wanted that appliance more than any flowers or jewelry.
Eric Hines
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