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.
Brandon:
You want everyone to be forced to take your position on child-rearing, which was more my point, but I do agree with you. It’s hard to make it on one income for a lot of families. But as others have pointed out, sometimes childcare costs as much or even more than one parent’s income, so why not have that parent stay home?
Really the point of my post is that childcare always takes somebody’s time. That means opportunity costs. You do agree that children create opportunity costs, don’t you?
Yeah. The first one exists.
If you define “slut” as “a woman who will have sex with literally anyone, without exercising any judgement or ethics,” then I don’t know any sluts at all.
Hmm. I wonder what were you whining about, then, in the comment about subsidizing a lower-income married SAHM’s child.
@Holly: At your current job, you would be losing $100 dollars a week. But with more job skills, training and experience, your job (actually more importantly, you ) is an appreciating asset. You can have the ability to pay for childcare in the future fully since you will earn more money the longer you remain in the workforce.
If you drop out of the job market, your earning potential is lost.
@Bee: In the example I was talking about, I was talking about me subsidizing a woman to stay at home to raise my child.
@Holly: Everyone has standards…even if they are ridiculously low. I just can’t see how a woman with low standards can make a good wife.
True, but I might not make rent if I’m losing $400 a month in the meantime.
I’m not saying that staying at home is right for everyone, just that there is no one answer that’s right for everyone. You can’t simply declare “both parents should work” and act like that’s the end of the story for every couple everywhere.
I’m curious if Brandon is out of college? I went to college, couldn’t find a job, now I work at starbucks. Not proud of it, I looked very hard for a job that was better suited to both my studies and my experience level, but nope didn’t happen for now. I mean shit really isn’t that simple especially in this economy. You see things terribly simply. Maybe McDonalds jobs are “meant for teenagers to get experience and move on” but what happens when that doesn’t work out? also my college cost money to acquire the skills and if i were to have a baby (which i won’t, but i don’t want to) that would cost money too and on my current paycheck i’d probably just cover daycare and diapers. not even the rent. i know people like you say “well then don’t have kids” and though ideally people would always wait til their financially stable but what do you do when they don’t? and when it’s virtually impossible for so many people to become financially stable? Let the child starve? thats not okay.
I don’t really think of one man as “higher” or “lower” than another. Plus, a woman can restrict herself to extremely attractive men and still fuck a ton of them, or another woman can only sleep with one man but he’s not all that attractive.
Again I don’t have much more of a point than “people are complicated, so don’t make blanket statements.”
That and I know lots of married women who have long and diverse sexual histories and are quite happily married. I don’t know if they have “low standards,” but they’re definitely not inexperienced and their husbands definitely don’t mind.
Okay. Although what you actually said was
which was in response (I think) to Holly talking about a theoretical underpaid hamburger cook, who wasn’t asking you to subsidize her at all.
And maybe some couples would come to this conclusion, while others would come to a different conclusion. The basic problem with your entire argument, Brandon, is that you refuse to admit that someone who isn’t Brandon might have different experiences, problems, challenges, desires, and priorities than Brandon does. In fact, that seems to be the main problem every time you talk on any subject…
@Viscaria: I don’t really care what position you have on child rearing. If you agree with me…great. But I don’t plan on browbeating people into believing what I do.
Lastly, I think our society is doing my work for me, by making single paycheck households insanity difficult to afford.
@Brandon
As a woman who has pretty low standards for who she’ll sleep with, there’s a big difference between one’s standards for giving head and one’s standards for getting married.
Also, lots of men walk around with ridiculously low standards for who they’ll NSA sleep with that they don’t get to act on too often, and many of them make perfectly good husbands. So, just a little, fuck you.
Everyone tends to drop out of the workforce eventually (this is customarily known as retirement). Why is that OK when men do it at 60 or 65, but not OK when women do it earlier because they want to take care of a child for a while? How is a career that lasts for a shorter period of time not a career?
Actually the more important question is, is there anything a that women do that doesn’t piss these guys off? It seems like whichever option a given woman chooses, it’s bad. I’m a career woman with no kids and no intention of quitting work to be a housewife – I’m sure that’s not acceptable either.
He once said that he would expect her to have set aside all of the money for the expense of getting pregnant, birth and the months afterwards for her own bills. He would do zero to help her outside of a few dollars here and there to pay for a little bit of food.
His expenses would only be strictly 50% of the child’s needs regardless of how bad her delivery went (sometimes things happen and she may have to have emergency surgery that costs a lot more, even with the gold plated insurance that some of us still have.)
Even if she was unable to return to work, when her money ran out, she would be kicked out of the house/apartment to go live on the street (well after a couple of weeks-maybe) and he, of course, would insist on full custody since she was unable to care for the baby financially. If her family is not able to help her? Who cares. Stupid woman should have planned better.
@Holly: People can do whatever they want. I have no control over what others do. However, I will not be with a woman that aspires to be a stay at home mother nor will I allow her to become one. If she doesn’t like that, there are 3+ billion more men out there….let her find one that will let her stay home.
@Bee: I am required by law to take care of a child I helped create. I am not required to take care of the woman that created said child.
@Holly: When it comes to who people will sleep with, I do see men and women that have high and low standards.
What do attractive men have to do with what we are talking about? Men are still men and she would be sleeping with a shit load of them.
While I might say “not all sluts are marriage material”. From my own personal experiences, that “one special slut” that is marriage material is so small, It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
See, you are treating being a caretaker of a child as not a job. To paraphrase one of our other commenters, unrenumerated labor is labor, just without renumeration. You admit these people are doing work, socially necessary work, work that you yourself had done (at least to some degree) on your behalf by others in your society. In addition, overly low birth rates create social problems as well. How do you intend to keep a high enough birth rate and still not have anyone taking care of those kids? Is the plan to pay a class of workers to look after kids that other workers would rather be looking after? That’s a ridiculous system right there.
And, yes, there are economic systems without unemployment. Capitalist systems need unemployment because a glut of workers means that workers’ labor can be obtained for less pay and benefits. In a fully Marxist system, unemployment does not exist. “From each according to ability, to each according to need” is not a system in which a concept like “unemployment” makes sense. Excess productive capacity, rather than becoming a way to exploit labor, becomes valuable leisure time, time to spread into other projects, for the community, ability to give others breaks, etc. spread out across the workers.
What’s frustrating me most, Brandon, is your authoritativeness here. Not that you think parents should work, but that you think all parents should work or put off having kids until they do, and you think it’s simple. People who do otherwise aren’t different from you, they’re wrong.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned: Shit is never simple.
People’s lives, financial situations, how they deal with an unexpected pregnancy, ability to have children naturally or adopt, cultural backgrounds, career paths, availability of relatives and friends to help with the kids occasionally, availability of transport, childcare cost in their area, relationship with the other parent–there’s an ass-ton of variables here.
Claiming one solution for every permutation of every variable is just comically arrogant.
There he goes again with those controlling words…”I will not allow her” He could have simply said “I will not be with a woman that aspires to be a stay at home mother” and stopped there. But no, he has to add in that little bit of “I control my woman or else.”
@theindigolemon: Hey, you do what you want. I really don’t care. But I just can’t see a woman with low standards being a good wife or mother. And the fact that I personally know women that are sluts and have kids…doesn’t help their cause.
I can’t see any respectable man marrying them since most of those women I know are cheating on their boyfriends already. That isn’t the best advertisement for “loyal and loving wife and mother”
Posterformerlyknownaselizabeth – Wow. He really does just want a single mother who lives in his house.
Oh, well fine then, if it’s just you. You can do what you want. Sure sounded like you were dictating to everyone, but if you’re only talking about your life, have fun with that. It’s your decision.
Well, if a woman sleeps with a lot of men, but they’re all gorgeous and charming, she has high standards, doesn’t she?
Finding one special person who’s marriage material for you is always a needle in a haystack. But that’s you. Again you seem to be slipping between “what’s right for Brandon” and “what’s right for the universe” without making a clear distinction.
@Brandon
Oh, so it’s more of an observational finding that sluts are not marriage material? Really, how much do you know about the sexual histories of the people you meet?
@Brandon
So by “slut,” you didn’t mean, “woman who has a lot of sex,” you mean “irresponsible, unintentionally-pregnant liar.”
Please don’t insinuate that women who have a lot of sex necessarily make bad choices.
Luckily, upon finding herself penniless and homeless, Ashley would just giggle and ask Brandon to spank her. Good ol’ Ashley!
Oh, just to clarify and add to my last comment:
A few years ago, because of the overall economy and particular problems in my own company, industry, and area, I found myself going from a fairly highly paid, high-responsibility position to a mid-level job to a part-time no-bene one. If I had had a young child to consider at the time, I might have found my “earning potential” to be a less urgent matter than our hero Brandon thinks it should be. Just one of many scenarios that might cause a not-Brandon person to behave differently than Brandon and yet be acting completely rationally.
Pretty much-and based on his description of her, if Ashley was real she is probably not in a position to handle an unplanned pregnancy because I have the impression she is in her early twenties and just starting out in life. If she had the nerve to insist on going through the pregnancy despite the pressure to get an abortion I know he would use on her…it will not be pretty.
We already know he is controlling in his outlook and her causing him to have additional expenses that he had no interest in accruing…
Of course he will arrogantly insist that he never could have an unplanned pregnancy happen. After all, he is Brandon.
@darksidecat: No, I am treating stay at home parenting as work that doesn’t earn a paycheck. No where have I ever said that stay at home parents don’t work.
If you are advocating that I pay her for staying home, than I think it is only fair that I charge her rent or room and board.
@Holly: I think both parents working is the best system. But I don’t have the ability to tell people they have to do it my way (nor do I want to do that). People are free to live their lives as they see fit.
Some shit is simple, some shit is complex. Depends on what shit it is.
Again, I am not really advocating for one system. I think society is making it that way. I also think there are less and less men out there that are willing to play “provider” to a stay at home mother.
It mostly comes down to men. If men don’t want to support stay at home mothers, then they won’t. He is under no obligation to do so.
@Elizabeth: I have a very simple way of looking at this. For most decisions, I really could care less. So I think I am pretty tolerant and Ashley gets most of what she wants from me. However, when it comes to decisions I do care about, they are mostly dealbreakers. I don’t want to be in that kind of relationship, and I have the right to say so. I do not force any woman to stay with me. If she wants to be a stay at home mother, then I am clearly not the right man for her. We would both be better served if we went our separate ways.
So by me saying “I will not allow her”, you might want to read it as “if you want to become a stay at home mother, this relationship will end”