Well, what am I wondering about if even a very popular feminist website publishes posts based on the idea that house work is women’s obligation that men should “help” with:
Cast judgment on men who don’t help out around the house.
Got it? Good men are the ones who “help out around the house.” And who is it they “help”? The person who is responsible for the housework, of course. Namely, the woman.
Dear women, the second you have adopted this vocabulary of men “helping” you around the house, you have lost the game. That’s it, you are done, you will be his maid forever until you get rid of this way of seeing things. Don’t expect your partner to HELP. That positions YOU as the only responsible party and HIM as a volunteer who either will or will not do you the favor of “helping” you.
The only productive attitude here is the following: you are both equal partners who take care of the place where you live together. Nobody “helps” anybody. You divide the responsibilities equally and stick to that division of labor. Believe me, it works perfectly and it makes for a very happy relationship. You don’t need help. You need a partner who will assume his half of the household responsibilities.
Stop begging for help already and start demanding that the adult man in your life take responsibility for his place of abode, his food, his clothes, and his children.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m actually surprised that Feministe let that one slip under the radar. But wait–no I’m not, Feministe is mostly written by upper-middle-class white Americans who still have a long way to go before they realize just how many preconceived bad ideas they have to confront in themselves. Also, a lot of these women seem to have been born in the 70s or later and thus have no memory of an equitably-run household like mine was, where my parents shared just about every chore and household task. (Well, my father was the one who went up on the roof to adjust the tv aerial, but my mother couldn’t stand heights.)
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I thought the 50ies were the Years of The Housewives, while 60ies brought sexual revolution to US and that 70ies, on the contrary, were more progressive than the decades before (on average).
Doubt that 70ies were worse, even if not significantly better yet. May be your household was unusual, otherwise, what changed for worse in wide culture in your opinion?
Of course, I weren’t alive then, but every feminist site / history source gave me the opposite idea.
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What I meant was, they were born in the 70s (or maybe even the 80s) and were too young to have had or remember progressive upbringings. In the 80s, at least in the US, there was a big backlash against feminism and the idea that women could be fulfilled through any lifestyle but getting married to a man and having babies.
Though my parents, having been born in the late 1920s, were quite progressive, as were a lot of people their age, believe it or not. The idea that the 50s were some conservative time where women were forced to stay at home in the kitchen is bullshit. The Fifties were a lot more progressive than people want to admit, though you didn’t really see the major effects until the 60s.
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“In the 80s, at least in the US, there was a big backlash against feminism and the idea that women could be fulfilled through any lifestyle but getting married to a man and having babies.”
– The thing is, I only hang out with women in my professional circle. These are all highly educated, feminist women with strong political convictions who are more than capable of analyzing and ridiculing these social conventions. Yet, the absolute majority of them holds on to the vocabulary of “husband helps / doesn’t help around the house.” I am forced to conclude that it is their choice.
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The idea that housework is something women do as a matter of course and men can “help out” if they choose seems to be entrenched in people. I don’t know how my family avoided thinking that way, but I never heard about the concept of “housework is women’s work” except on television and in books.
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“Also, a lot of these women seem to have been born in the 70s or later and thus have no memory of an equitably-run household like mine was, where my parents shared just about every chore and household task. ”
– I think there is definitely something to what you are saying. The women I know who are in their 50s and 60s are all very powerful, career-oriented feminists who don;t know what it means to be subservient to a man. However, women in their 30s and 20s are nothing like that. They are a lot more prepared to abandon their careers and interests to have a man they can serve loyally.
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I notice this, too. My mother is very retro but is kind of an exception. Things really went downhill starting in 1980 or so.
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“I notice this, too. My mother is very retro but is kind of an exception. Things really went downhill starting in 1980 or so.”
– And you know the really bizarre thing? It wasn’t just in the US. There was a very similar feminist backlash in Spain and in the Soviet Union that started in the late 1970s. Three such different countries, with such different histories of women’s rights!!!
I still have no idea why that happened..
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Clarissa: “I still have no idea why that happened..”
It happened because ideological wars involve a push and pull, just like any war. Once those in opposition understand your strategy, they block it, using various tactics, including psychological ones. The point is to demoralize your enemy so that they give up.
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The thing is, there were no ideological wars in the USSR in the 70s. At least, not around women’s rights/ No political change happened, no legislation had been introduced since 1917. Yet, there was a massive shift in the collective consciousness. I first discovered in the movies. You see movies from the early 1970, and all female characters are strong, resourceful, powerful and successful. Then I watch movies from the late 1970s, and all female characters suddenly become weepy pathetic creatures who debase themselves to please men. Mind you, this did not happen when there was an actual shortage of men after the war. It happened in late 70s for no apparent reason.
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Sometimes, it’s just the pendulum swinging, like fashion. People always imagine that a different way of doing things might be better when one way doesn’t make they magically happy. It’s like the shifts in philosophies about education in Western schools. First authoritarian, then permissive to encourage the child’s “inner creativity”, now back to authoritarian again (Church schools) when letting the kid do whatever it wants doesn’t work out. Seemingly, there are no perfect solutions to make everybody happy. In a lot of cases, this has to do with needing a certain amount of time to subjectively adjust to new conditions. The crazy pendulum shifts just assures that everybody has to keep changing all the time, without really ever catching up to the state of perfection that is aimed for.
Along with this, in America, there was an ideologically war to demoralize feminists. I know this, because I caught up with it in the nineties: a lot of people sent the same kinds of ideological missiles at me.
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“Along with this, in America, there was an ideologically war to demoralize feminists.”
– It would have had no effect had the women not chosen to step back from the feminist gains.
I just hope that pendulum starts swinging back soon because it feels at times like it’s stuck or something. 🙂
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Yes, the woman have generally been quite weak in terms of feminism. For instance, nobody will address issues like this one (posted below), probably because they think that one should simply play a female, emotional role and shut up about it.
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/my-inheritance-from-my-family.html
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“His reactions also formed my character in giving me an extreme aversion to playing the role of anyone’s pre-Oedipal mother. I won’t play the part where anyone unleashes their tantrum at me and expects me to help them deal with their anxieties, just because I’m female. ”
– This is my position, too! I passionately detest people who try to push me into this role.
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“In general: I don’t like the female gender role under Western patriarchy, and I refuse to play it.”
– EXACTLY. I will be whatever I want to be at any given point. And people who want to categorize me according to their stupid preconceived notions can stuff it. I love to play with people’s expectations. I’d put on a frilly pink dress, braid my hair and bat my eyelashes at people. And then – just when they’ve dismissed me as a stupid blonde – I would tear into them in a steely voice and destroy them with my arguments. It is SO MUCH FUN!
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Yes, but it affects me in deeply traumatic way. When I feel that people are making unclear emotional demands on me in the workplace, nowadays, I’m so traumatized by my previous failures to comply and save my job, that I shut down emotionally to the point that I can’t read the situation clearly at all. It just seems overwhelmingly threatening. Then I start to berate myself for:
1. Not being able to compute what is probably a simple request, or relatively simple situation
2. Wanting to resort to war to deal with the problem, which is possibly quite simple on the face of it.
I mean, I’m now backed entirely into a corner, psychologically, because I’ve never been able to come up with adequately sensitive responses to people’s feelings.
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“Yes, but it affects me in deeply traumatic way. ”
– What do they do, normally? Complain about personal issues? Of being overworked?
I’ve had a boss at work, a much older person whom I’d known for less than a week, call me into his office and start crying with actual tears because of his family issues. That was torture, so I can really understand your suffering. I’ve been traumatized in a way similar to yours in childhood, so it’s coming from the same place.
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It’s more like in a setting where I’m supposed to be attuned to the power dynamics of interpersonal relationships. When I did my diploma of education, I wrote that it was like expected to observe some fine embroidery that was too minuscule for me to see. I have a lot of issues with relating to what people are sensitive about. For instance, the recent job I failed to keep (and became extremely traumatized about) was teaching boxing for fitness. I suspect some of the women, who wanted a woman instructor, also felt like I was relating to them in a way that was somehow wrong. In fact, I know I was doing that, because I got into a mode of switching my emotions off more than usual, because I always do that when I try to focus on something seriously. My emotions are not integrated with my actions, when I am at my most efficient. That was how I was brought up, in a regimented school system. Anyway, one chick suddenly sat down on the bench looking disappointed, because she said there were not enough punch bags. They had all been happy for two people to share one punchbag between two, but I guess I was supposed to read her mind and understand that even though she said that was acceptable to her, it really wasn’t. So I went and asked if she was ok. She explained that the situation had suddenly become not okay, and I became overwhelmed with emotional confusion and consequently switched off. That night I experienced severe trauma. I felt guilty for having done something wrong, but I couldn’t figure it out. The situation had become out of control for me.
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Anyway, I kept on with the job for a few more weeks. One week after that, I heard people were saying I’d done a good job, but then after that, there were more in the class again and I heard there was “feedback” and I needed to prepare a lesson plan each time. The complaints were undefined. So, I got some more ideas and tried those, but the manager (who seemed to have got his wires crossed) thought I needed to stick to a bread and butter simple lesson plan (where there were not enough bags). He told me to get some tips from another instructor, who gave me practical advice that departed from the bread and butter plan. Everybody was watching me by now — close monitoring. I had to prepare lesson plans, for a $20 dollar payment, once a week. Then, the following week there were 17 students and only eight bags. Another instructor stepped in to help me, which I thought was okay, since he might have some ideas to stop the complainers, and anyway who cares about seeming to be in control of everything, when the pay is so low. So he steps in and basically dictates to me what the class should do, and I shout the instructions straight away. The class was run by him, but seemed to have been run by me. Everyone seemed happy. It was a very good class. The next few days, I get word that “people are complaining”. So, who knows? I didn’t even run that class. The normal instructor did — and they were “complaining”.
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Did you like these students?
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I like them to the degree that they approximated my views on stoicism — which most of them did.
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It wasn’t about liking. I didn’t trust any of them, although I liked all of them.
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You didn’t trust them to do what?
I’m trying to find a reason for the debacle you described. This couldn’t have been about punch bags.
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Now, it was due to my emotional insensitivity, which is what I have described in my previous remarks, if you reread them again.
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I didn’t see emotional insensitivity in your story, to be honest. There was definitely something going on in that group, and as your fellow teacher I think you need to figure out what that was to avoid feeling scared of losing your job again.
Did you feel like you managed to connect with the people in the group? Or were there a few students who were resisting? I had a group where I didn’t manage to connect with the students no matter what I did. I dreaded walking into that classroom. So I can understand how traumatic it is to have something going on in your classroom that you can’t even understand.
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I don’t know what I felt, but when I suddenly encountered that sense of trauma I had, I knew everything was doomed from then on, because I could not longer access the reality of the situation with enough nuance. I couldn’t understand it anymore. I’d moved from reality into trauma. The challenge for me is to keep my emotional sensibilities present with me, but if I cannot do that, I can’t discern what my appropriate response should be to any situation.
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My guess is that I upset some women with my (mis)handling of the issue of not enough bags and not somehow catering to the sulky mood and reading between the lines. Also other issues of female sensitivity — the kinds of stretches that they find “weird” or sexually suggestible. I just don’t know. Don’t want to know. Too traumatic for me.
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Actually, when I think about the worst aspects of ideological warfare that was directed against me as anti-feminist hostility, it was a number of people who took the line, “A male can say or do anything to you, because he is rational (i.e. any male whatsoever, we don’t need to know the details). However, if you say or do anything in retaliation, “you are just being too sensitive”.
I’ve mentioned before here that I took that criticism to heart. I stopped expecting fair treatment, or even rationality, and began to respond in a very robust manner, taking no note of whose feelings I hurt.
Then suddenly, the tactic changed. It was like, “Oh, you’re just trying to be a man. You don’t want to be female. We need you to attend to our feelings as males.”
I have to presume that these were two elements in the arsenal of Reagan era anti-feminists, since quite a few people on the Internet seemed to make automatic use of these forms of rhetoric.
The fact that they are contradictory pronouncements:
“Your gender problems are caused by excessive sensitivity”
and
“You are not sensitive enough, because you are trying to be like a man”
— says loads about the politically loaded, anti-intellectual nature of the attacks.
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““You are not sensitive enough, because you are trying to be like a man””
– I heard this A LOT. But only from women.
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Yeah, I’ve heard it A LOT from women, too. But I also heard it from these Nietzschean types whom I was associating with on the Internet 10 years ago or so. They were kind of “You just want to be like us, but you can’t be, because you are the essence of emotion, that is all.”
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Blarg, I’ve been disappointed with that blog lately (as, clearly, have you).
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+10e12 !
Even though Anne-Marie Slaughter’s very long article in the Atlantic * addresses the issue of men contributing their fair share of household and childraising work, the pertinent paragraphs are waaaaay back in the article, all but guaranteeing that 99% of readers will miss these ideas. The discussions of the article interpret the article’s thesis as: “Women can’t have it all, and there’s nothing to be done about it. What, men? What do men have to do with domestic responsibility?”
* the origin of the current debacle, er, debate
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I took it that way, too; I guess I read too fast. But I think a lot of women get blocked in careers for reasons not having to do with domestic arrangements — plain old sexism, you know. You can have a great deal with your partner and still not at work.
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