Well, here’s a new twist. We all know, from reading the endless tirades on the subject scattered all over the manosphere, that women are evil, selfish and ungrateful creatures whose primary goal in life is to leech off of men and make them miserable.
In a recent post titled Playing Career Woman, manosphere blogger Dalrock takes on some of the most evil and selfish ladies of the whole lot of them: upper middle class ladies who insist on going to college and getting jobs, then later leave the workforce to raise their children.
You might think that these ladies would deserve some props from traditional-minded manosphere dudes for supporting themselves instead of leeching off of men during their twenties, then settling into a more traditional housewifely role once they have children.
Oh, but you don’t realize just how evil and disruptive and oppressive their phony careers are to the men of the world. After all, these aren’t women who need to work to support themselves. No, according to Dalrock, these are “women who use their education and career as a way to check off the box to prove their feminist credentials before settling down into an entirely traditional role.”
According to Escoffier, a commenter on Dalrock’s site whom he quotes with approval, in the good old pre-feminist days:
Women who pursued careers (apart from traditional female roles such as teaching … ) were considered at best sort of harmlessly odd … but we know that family life is superior and more important.
Then came feminism:
Now it’s “You MUST do this for own sake, not to do it is to not realize your potential.” …
The way the [upper middle class] has “solved” this problem is to send girls to college, let them launch their careers–whether in soggy girly stuff like PR or crunchy stuff like business and law–and then they marry late (~30), have kids a few years later and drop out of working at least until the kids are grown.
This answers a couple of needs, not least the need for two incomes to accumulate assets so that the couple can eventually buy into a UMC school district.
Oh, but these women aren’t really earning money because they need it to, you know, pay bills and shit:
[T]he real importance of this solution is to her psyche. Getting the education and career are a way of telegraphing “I am a complete person, not some drone like June Cleaver. I am just as smart and capable as any man. In my altruistic concern for my children, I choose not to use my talent in the marketplace but to devote myself to them.” In other words, she needs that education and early career to mark her as better than a mere housewife, even though she will eventually choose to become a housewife.
According to Dalrock, such women are far more evil than the feminist women who get jobs and stick with them. (Emphasis added.)
Men and women who work hard to support themselves understand that they are in it for the duration. There is a determined realism to them. … These aren’t the women we are talking about. The women Escoffier described see having a career as a badge of status to be collected on their way to their ultimate goal of stay at home housewife. They aren’t really career women, they are playing career woman much the way that Marie Antoinette played peasant and Zoolander’s character played coal miner.
In the comments, someone calling himself Carnivore explains just how unfair this all is to the poor innocent working men of the world:
When men get a degree or go through a vocational program and then land a job, they’ve normally got 40+ years to contribute to increasing the wealth of society. Women “playing” career damage society:
1. They displace men for positions in college or vocational school.
2. Upon landing a job, they displace other men for the job position.
3. The increase in the labor pool drives down wages (supply & demand).
4. While in the labor pool, women are less effective and less productive than men.
5. Because they are in the labor pool and cannot compete with men, women support labor laws to enforce “equality” which burden businesses and can cause men to get fired due to some infringement or just to meet quotas.
6. When they leave the labor pool after becoming bored, there is now a hole than can be difficult to fill because the men who would normally fill it have been displaced for all the reasons above.
Carnivore places part of the blame on the feminism-infected parents who taught these women the wrong things:
Women do NOT know what they want. They have to be guided. Most parents have so bought into feminism that they don’t see any other way. It’s a riot – or sad – talking to parents when they go into all the detail about choosing a college, going on campus visits, making sure she gets into the best school, etc., etc. You would think these parents would spend their time and energy on prepping their daughters for the most important life decision – choosing a man for marriage, how to make a husband happy and how to raise healthy children.
The commenter called Ray takes it one step further:
i was in the workplaces during feminism 1.0, and it had nothing to do with fairness, equity, egalitarianism, or any other positive attribute
in fact, it was a slaughter, resulting in the vast disenfranchisement and destruction of millions of american men — there were dozens of ways men could be hassled, RIFd, and forced from employment, and they were (all to chants of Equality and Empowerment)
this resulted in the massive unemployment of the very men needed to create, invent, and revitalize the culture. and to be fathers to sons . …
no female should be employed, or educated, if it means a qualified male must be excluded
Women, stop leeching off men by paying your own way!
NOTE: This post contains SARCASM.
I was watching a documentary the other day called “Harvest of Shame,” about U.S. migrant farmworkers in the 1960s. Turns out some of these laborers were (gasp) women! And children! In fact, now that I think of it, many of my female ancestors had jobs. My mom’s mom’s mom worked as a cook after leaving an abusive relationship. My dad’s mom’s mom was a teacher her entire life (even after having children — her lawyer husband didn’t make much money during the Depression). Now, diner cook and migrant farmworker aren’t “careers,” maybe, but they’re better than nothing when you don’t have any other way of making money. Hey, MRAs — maybe allowing women education and training so they can have careers (since they seem to have to anyway) makes sense? Unless your primary goal is making sure that the women in your life are completely dependent on you for some reason…
@Bee: they don’t really want that, either, because if the woman is dependent on him then he’s responsible for her, which of course makes her a golddigging leech who should get a job blah blah blah.
You cannot reason someone out of a position they hold because WAAAAH MY PENIS.
[email protected]:
Yes, that’s really the point. Nothing women do will be right by the standards these guys hold up. If women work, we’re stealing thur jerbs, if we stay home and run a family full-time, we’re parasites, if we do both, they’ll be expected to help out and that’s out of the question.
They’ll hate women no matter what we choose to do, or in what combination. The point is that men like this hate women, so they’ll squawk no matter what choices we make.
As far as I can see the only way to deal with it is for couples to formulate a plan for the kind of lifestyle they want and ignore these idiots who are trying to tell them that they’re wrong. If it works for you then obviously you’re doing it right.
They reason is so they can either abuse or belittle her knowing that she has no means of escaping because she’s fully dependent on them for everything.
“3. The increase in the labor pool drives down wages (supply & demand).”
No, no, no! What is it with conservatives on the internet and pulling bullshit about economics out of their asses? Yes, increasing the size of the labor force increases the supply of labor, but it also increases the demand for labor by (basically) the same amount, because those extra workers tend to spend all those extra wages. You might find this instructive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product
Ever wonder why the unemployment rate is always 4-10%-ish? There are reasons for that! Just because you use the phrase supply & demand doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about! Take note!
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.
Well yes, but I suppose my point was more like, even assuming that the set of MRAs who complain about golddiggers and the set of MRAs who complain about women having jobs are two completely unconnected groups, with absolutely no overlap, the fact remains that women have always had to have jobs. Pretending that women needing occupations is only some weird rarity that middle-class feminist parents dreamed up in the 1970s and ’80s is just bizarre.
I do agree that it all comes down to hatred of women at bottom, though. It’s as though they think their lives would be perfect if it weren’t for those meddling women.
See…this is the reason I can’t call myself an MRA. I would think that pushing more women out of the home and into corporate life would actually free men from archaic obligations.
MRA’s are in an interesting position to help end the whole notion of “stay at home mother” but they continue to hold onto ideals that will never come to be. We aren’t going back to 1950’s no matter how many of them want to relive that decade.
I think as long as people are insisting on reliving things about the past, we can come to a compromise here. For instance, we could relive those bras that make people’s breasts all conical! That would be cool.
Brandon: You’re right. Stay-at-home mom is outdated. Really, all genders should have the option to be stay-at-home parents.
Ah…the Lump of Labour Fallacy…
@Ozy: I actually mean killing off stay at home parenting all together (or at least make it even more difficult than it is now). No person should have to support another adult financially. You are an adult…take care of yourself. This is the 21st century not the 1800s.
Hmm… no I prefer the conical bra idea!
Brandon – I think people should be able to agree that one parent supports the other while they raise the kids, if that’s the arrangement they both want to make.
But I also think we need a lot more affordable childcare to enable people to get out of the house, when the family can’t afford for one parent to stay at home.
Except taking care of kids is pretty difficult and time-consuming, and someone’s got to do it. Yeah, nannies exist, but nannies can’t breast-feed.
@Holly: I actually think stay at home parenting will become even more impractical as time goes on. With higher rates of single mothers, lower marriage rates, etc… Most people today can’t afford to have one person stay at home. I give it another 10-20 years and it will be mostly non-existent.
One should have their finances in order prior to having children. If you can’t take care of them properly, you shouldn’t be having them. And there are enough birth control methods to prevent ANY unwarranted children from being born.
@Voip: There is a difference between maternity leave and being a stay at home mother. There are already laws on the books allow women to take time off for newborns.
Fun story about childcare in the US right now–I knew a woman who had a baby boy and did the math on what it would cost to have babysitters and daycare versus what she would gain by working. She ultimately decided to work because she didn’t want a gap in her career, but it worked out that the money was about equal either way. With him in childcare and her working, her net was very close to $0, and they lived entirely on her husband’s salary.
(Oh, and guess what she did for a living? She was a doctor. Granted she was only a resident when she was doing this math, but still.)
So you can have a situation where the woman works and still needs the man’s contribution to pay the bills. Kids are just that expensive.
(Then again, you could also do the math the other way, and say that the husband’s pay went entirely to support the kid while the wife paid the bills.)
No person should have to support another adult financially. You are an adult…take care of yourself.
Even beyond the idea that stay-at-home parents in a mutually agreed-upon arrangement aren’t “taking care of themselves,” apparently in the Brandonverse, people too elderly, sick, or disabled to work do not exist.
Well, of course, some families can afford to have one parent stay home and raise the kids/homemake, and more than that actually see value in having a parent care for the children. The whole idea behind stay at home parenting, in fact, is “You are an adult … take care of your children.” Holly’s idea of more affordable childcare as a way to help out working parents who aren’t making as much money is awesome, but it doesn’t make sense to close out taking care of one’s own children as an option for parents who make that a priority.
Just out of curiosity, though, how are you planning to make stay at home parenting more difficult? I know we go through this every single time you grace us with your presence, but tell us again, Brandon: Why do you think your ideas of what is right and good for you personally should be imposed on everyone?
@Polliwog: Let me rephrase than: “Any adult able to work…should be working”.
I don’t expect children, the elderly or severely disabled people, to be out working.
I think that staying home with a child is taking care of them properly.
Having enough money for full-time childcare isn’t just “finances in order,” it’s rich. That’s an unrealistic expectation for most of the population at any point in their lives.
And it’s unnecessary. If a couple is paying their bills with their own earnings and the child is cared for, it’s awful snooty of you to say they weren’t ready to have a kid just because one of the parents isn’t able to work while the kid’s small.
Maybe rather than the poor not breeding, the rich should stop exploiting the labor of the poor and putting them in dire economic straits.
Also, unemployment is a feature of capitalism, not a bug, but I will spare a longer Marxist lecture on that unless someone really wants it.
@Bee: Basically, the costs of living are getting to the point that one person is not able to earn enough money to support an entire family. Two incomes are needed.
People won’t even have the option of allowing one person to stay home because they will NEED the income as opposed to just deciding to earn less.
I just think concepts like stay at home parenting, marriage and a few others are working their way to being archaic and outdated.
Somehow I get the impression that Brandon’s belief that women should work is because it benefits him and relieves him of responsibilities, not because of his strong ethical views on women’s right to financial freedom and equality.
Feminism: good when if benefits men, evil when it doesn’t.
It’s like birth control and casual sex. Great because men have “sluts” they can sleep with, horrible because “sluts” aren’t marriage material.
Also when I say men, I only mean the type of men who are likely to be MRAs or any other garden variety sexist or misogynist.
Also, raising a child is working, and is very socially valuable work at that.
Brandon, usually the stay at home bit is to care for an infant child. I know you are all mr independent and all and everyone should look after themselves, but that’s a bit hard for an infant child to do….