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.
@DSC: Ya, and you can take the opposite position of “poor people should increase their skills so they are less expendable than a burger flipper at MickyD’s”.
There will always be unemployment regardless of the economic system a society uses.
Brandon – Do you get that some families have one person (usually the mother, not just out of tradition but also because women earn less*) stay home with the kids not because they’re so rich they can afford it, but because they’re so poor they can’t afford childcare? Full-time childcare can cost considerably more than the mother’s wages, so having her stay home is actually the economical choice.
And don’t say “then they shouldn’t have had kids,” because they’re paying their bills. The fact that it’s a burden on the father is, well, part of him being a father. Parents are burdened by their children and that’s okay.
*Which is a vicious cycle, because women earn less in large part because they leave work to care for children (or employers are afraid they will).
@Quakers: Why do you have the belief that men should financially support women in the scenario you created?
Sluts aren’t marriage material. But that is besides the point.
Brandon, you’re unlike many MRAs in that you don’t want to reinforce 1950s gender roles, but you’re exactly like them in that you think your ideas for child-rearing should apply to everyone.
There’s a lot of different ways to divvy up the duties involved in raising children, but it unavoidably takes time. If you have the money for full-time help and that’s what works for you, great. If your family works better with one person staying at home, great. Or you could do what my parents did, which is both work, and both give up career opportunities that would rob them of time with their kids.
Or I guess you could do what Ashley Pariseau described above,
which almost perfectly defines my mom’s first marriage. But if you do, it’s not exactly two people putting equal effort into supporting themselves, is it?
Someone has to work at MickyD’s. Someone’s gotta clean toilets. Someone’s gotta mash potatoes and someone’s gotta wipe windows.
Our society needs these jobs done, so we ought to make life livable for the people who do them. If all the poor people self-improved their way out of McDonald’s (not possible anyway as there aren’t enough better-paying job openings in existence), we wouldn’t have any hamburgers.
Our current economic system of “we will always have hamburger cooks–we need hamburger cooks–but we won’t pay the hamburger cooks a living wage” simply isn’t sustainable.
Really? I’ll have to let my sister know this. She supports her family, while her husband stays home. How long do you think she has? Do you think your answer would change if you knew that their house is almost paid off and they have no other debt?
Or, you know, they’ll look at the costs of having someone else care for their children and realize that the extra income realized in a second job just isn’t available for them. Or they’ll be financially comfortable regardless of your pearl clutching. Or they’ll be single parents, unemployed, underemployed, undereducated, disabled, self-employed, or any number of circumstances that you haven’t considered.
Hmm, well, as long as you just think so, without any kind of evidence to back it up. You do know that some people prioritize spending time with their children and will make sacrifices to make sure that happens, and some have no choice but to stay home with their kids, right?
Let me rephrase than: “Any adult able to work…should be working”.
Because rearing children is not “work”. That’s why teachers and childcare workers get such shitty pay. They’re not really working at all!
More seriously, Brandon reveals his extremely limited understanding of economics. The issue isn’t simply ‘how many incomes are needed to pay the bills’ – there are opportunity costs, the intangible benefit of a stay-at-home parent to the working parent’s ability to earn income, and long- vs. short-term costs to be factored in.
He also conveniently forgets that only in the last few decades have women had the legal right and, more recently, de facto right to the same workplace opportunities as men.
But you know, that’s Brandon.
@DSC: I never said stay at home parents didn’t work.
@Jill: That is why we have maternity leave. There is a difference between taking a short period of time off from your current job and never returning back to your employer.
@Holly: And why should I subsidize her? I am only obligated to care for the child if I was the father.
I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to marry a sexually enthusiastic woman who is a lot more likely than other women to agree to an open marriage. But that is beside the point.
The real point is that since lots of men are happily married to sluts, we are marriage material whether you say so or not.
Not even then, apparently. You want your wife to pay for childcare and pay for herself. You want her to be, in essence, a single mother who lives in your house.
Brandon: I’m glad you amended that.
That said, you still seem to be confusing “what’s best for everyone” with “what I, personally, want.” It’s totally fine if you don’t want to be a stay-at-home parent or be in a relationship with one – but you seem to be extrapolating from “I would not be happy in this arrangement” to “this arrangement should not exist.” I know people who love being SAH parents or having their spouse/partner be a SAH parent. Why shouldn’t they do this if everyone involved is happy?
Example from real life: my friends J. and L. had their first child a few years back. At the time, J. had a job he hated, with mediocre pay. L. had recently been promoted to a job she loved with terrific pay. After some thought, they realized that L.’s job alone would easily cover all their bills, and so they mutually agreed that J. would quit his job and be a SAH dad for the first year or two of their son’s life. Everyone involved loved this. L. was happy, because she loved her job and loved knowing that her son was safe in the care of someone she obviously knew and trusted. J. was happy, because he was able to spend tons of quality time with his baby and work on projects more interesting to him in his spare time. Their baby was happy, because he got constant parental love and attention. What exactly would have been accomplished by “killing” stay-at-home parenting? The baby would have ended up in a daycare, and J. would have stayed in his shitty, going-nowhere job, which would have made no one happy – and which would, incidentally, very possibly have left them with less money, since child care costs in their area tend to be about the same as or more than J.’s yearly salary at the time. Why exactly would that be preferable to what actually happened?
Nice try but no I don’t. Its just cute that you think anyone here is buying that you actually care about equality when all it is you benefiting from having a wife or girlfriend that works. Its not about equality or women’s rights, as demonstrated by your second sentence. If a woman can work like a man, then she can fuck like a man too without it harming her reputation. If you truly believed in equality and were against double standards, you wouldn’t think sluts weren’t marriage material. Or you would apply that same standard to male “sluts”. If you do, at least you’re being fair despite the problematic issue with the word slut. Being the troll that you are though, I doubt you hold men to that same standard.
And why should I subsidize her?
Subsidize who? Your wife, who is incurring opportunity costs in order to invest labor in your child, thereby freeing you up to spend more time improving your career prospects and income rather than spending that time on childrearing?
If you don’t understand that labor and time have monetary value, then you really don’t know what the heck you’re talking about.
So, Brandon, you would financially support Ashley if she had your baby and was on maternity leave?
Are you whining about the miniscule, absolutely fucking tiny portion of your taxes that goes toward things like WIC and Head Start, Brandon? Oh dear.
I want to take the opportunity to point out that early childhood intervention such as health services and educational opportunities for lower income kids benefits society at large. I’m hoping I don’t have to explain this concept to anyone.
I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to marry a sexually enthusiastic woman who is a lot more likely than other women to agree to an open marriage.
Because they want to bitch about how they’re not getting any sex.
Like my friend at work said, “Hell, my mother had eleven children. We don’t even consider a woman a mother until she’s on her third.”
It’s not a thread until Magdelyn says something that makes no sense!
“Hell, my donkey had eleven bananas. We don’t even consider a donkey a goldfish until it’s on its third.”
@Viscaria: I don’t think I have to force people to take my position on child-rearing. I think the reality of life is doing it. Most people need two incomes to support a household, so both the man and woman need to work.
@Holly: Nobody HAS to work at MickyD’s nor does McD’s even need to exist. Also jobs at Mcdonalds aren’t exactly meant to “sustain” you. They are meant for teenagers to get some job training and move on.
@Bee: That’s nice your sister can do that. My uncle also has his wife stay at home to look after their 4 kids. But that is because he is VP of an insurance company. Most people don’t have the “luxury” of being a stay at home parent.
Plus, didn’t a prominent feminist once refer to homemaker as being in a comfortable concentration camp? I would think it would be in feminists interests to snuff that concept out.
@Mythago: Well, I have male friends that basically refuse to let their wives/girlfriends quit working. Why? Because it is more beneficial for her to remain in the job market long term even though the short term is more expensive.
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.
You know, I’ve heard this refrain quite a bit on the internet, and it always comes from guys who are young, priviliged, and childless. So I’m going to clue you in on a little secret, Brandon: until you have kids of your own, you will not have the slightest idea have all consuming, difficult, and expensive it is, even for those who supposedly have their finances “in order.”
I realize of course, that this won’t stop you from speaking with authority on the subject, but know that doing so will make you sound like even more of an ignorant, shallow, privileged jerk-off than normal.
Brandon:
It depends on what the couple wants to do and other people need to stay out of it. What we do need is some serious reform of childcare arrangements because the slapdash arrangements that we have now are not meeting the need and ultimately the kids will suffer and in a few years, as they grow up I suspect that it will become a major problem,
On that note, I don’t consider my donkey a goldfish until after completing swimming lessons and covered in a light film of orange cheddar cheese.
Say childcare would cost $500 a week. Say my takehome pay is $400 a week. Then I need to not work, or I lose $100 each week.
Maybe not McD’s specifically, but there are lots of crap-ass jobs–cooking, assembly line work, retail, customer service, janitorial–that do need to exist. We can’t simply say “if poor people stopped having poor-people jobs they’d be rich, because there are a shit-ton of poor-people jobs that have to have someone in them.”
Major relationship decisions really shouldn’t involve the phrase “refuse to let.” 🙁
But “more expensive in the short term” can mean different things. It can mean “more expensive, so no trip to Hawaii this year,” or it can mean “more expensive, so no food.” If necessities of life are on the line, suddenly your “it’s better for you in the long run, honey” paternalism goes from merely obnoxious to downright vicious.
sorry for the random comment…just testing my Gravatar thing
@Holly: There is a difference between a sexually enthusiastic woman and a woman that goes around fucking everything that moves.
1) I don’t really care if she does do that, nor do I want to restrict her in anyway.
2) But just like she is able to do what she wants, I can judge her actions and choose not to marry or date her.
If you want to believe that sluts are marriage material, you are free to think that.
Also, just because I have a child with someone, doesn’t make her my “wife”. There are other families besides marriage (i.e cohabitation, shared parenting, etc…).
@Jill: That is 1) never going to happen and 2) because of 1…a massive hypothetical.
@Bee: No, I am not “whining” about WIC, Food Stamps or any other government program in this thread.