When Marissa Mayer, now chief executive of Yahoo, reported that when she was in Google’s employ, she slept under her desk, one disgusted feminist, Sarah Leonard, wrote, “If feminism means the right to sleep under my desk, then screw it.”
No, dumbass. It means the right to have a desk and to choose where you sleep. It also means the right not to be an uneducated, stupid airhead who is viciously jealous of other women’s lives, but you are free from exercising that right if you feel like it.
P.S. If you read the linked article, you will see that its main argument is that stable jobs and careers are obsolete and we should all have fluid successions of jobs that we can pop in and out of and leave aside for years until we feel like picking them back up. This is one more bit of evidence that people welcome fluidity and angrily clamor for it.
Clarissa's Blog 
Well, I’ve slept in a lot a strange places over the years, including —
— the middle of a graveyard in North Africa, because I couldn’t outrun the thieves chasing me, but knew that they were too superstitious to enter the graveyard after dark;
— in an ambulance in a crowded Italian city, because I was driving around lost as the streets got ever more narrow, and the parked cars blocking the street got ever closer together, until I was trapped until morning;
— in an all-night Korean barbershop next to the charcoal heater because I was freezing to death and I’d missed the curfew to get back on the U.S base before morning (I bribed the barber to wake me at dawn);
— flat on the metal floor of a USAF C-130 cargo aircraft flying a cross the Atlantic, because the temperature control for the cargo area was stuck on full cold, and the ONLY heat source was coming through the floor;
— lying next to a bagged corpse in the morgue back in medical school because I wanted to claim that well-preserved body for my team, so we could use it for the next six months learning by dissecting it;
— cuddled with a nurse from Oklahoma in her hotel room at a medical convention in a Los Angela hotel because my clinical section chief was mad at me and had passively-aggressively “forgotten” to reserve me a room, so I had to rely on the kindness of an out-of -state nurse…
Somehow I don’t think any of those experiences effected my “feminist” perspective one way or the other.
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Ugh, I hate hate hate that article you linked to. It reads as if it is written by a whiny housewife, who is blaming feminism for her own professional and personal failures. This article just goes to show that NYT, which likes to think of itself as progressive, is quite far from being there.
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\begin{rant}
What Anon above wrote, that article above is just awful in so many ways. Meandering, without a point, whiny, and factually incorrect.
I may not know much about working for nonacademic employers, but I do know academia, and I wish these high-profile pieces actually interviewed someone who is actually a successful academic at a place they like, living a life they don’t hate.
Unless you are at MIT/Harvard/Stanford or maybe 1-2 other places where they hire more people on the tenure track than they ever plan to tenure, here is the 100% absolute truth:
YOU CAN HAVE KIDS ON THE TENURE TRACK OR YOU CAN HAVE KIDS BEFORE THE TENURE TRACK OR YOU CAN HAVE KIDS AFTER THE TENURE TRACK AND YOU CAN STILL HAVE A SUCCESSFUL ACADEMIC CAREER, YES EVEN THE WOMEN.
Sheesh. I had one in grad school, and one midway through the tenure track, and one afterwards. I am not the only one, there are several women in my college who had kids on the tenure track and kicked a$$.
The people who derail your career are a$$hole administrators or sexist colleagues, it is emphatically NOT your children.
I am sick and tired of this defeatist attitude that we serve to young women, beating their energy and ambition to a pulp with these prognoses of doom and gloom. You can have it all, it won’t be easy but easy things are neither much fun nor worth doing anyway.
And back to this awful article:
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE A HAUSFRAU TO RAISE KIDS. YOU ABSOLUTELY DO NOT.
IKf you hate your job or just don’t want to work for whatever reason, and you can afford not to, then fine, don’t work. But don’t blame it on the kids. They never asked you to quit working.
\end{rant}
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I like the rant. 🙂
“YOU CAN HAVE KIDS ON THE TENURE TRACK OR YOU CAN HAVE KIDS BEFORE THE TENURE TRACK OR YOU CAN HAVE KIDS AFTER THE TENURE TRACK AND YOU CAN STILL HAVE A SUCCESSFUL ACADEMIC CAREER, YES EVEN THE WOMEN.”
Absolutely. My friend raised two kids on the tenure-track as a single mother and the kids who are now adults are amazing, accomplished, and very happy. I’m honestly not seeing why this is all presented as such a horrible, impossible thing. You’d think people who come up with all these complaints have invented the cure for cancer while raising toddlers. But once you take a look, they don’t even do all that much.
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