One thing that shocked me in Cristina Fallarás’s book about losing her job and becoming impoverished is the complete absence of any men as active agents of family life in the story. There’s she, there’s her sister, her mom, they are all trying to figure something out to make ends meet. That there’s a husband and a father of her very small children only comes up when Fallarás shares that in the middle of the family’s floundering, the husband “traveled to Germany to participate in a literary event because he’s a writer.”
The family is at the stage of rationing food, and dude is … a writer? Not an Uber driver, house painter, cleaner or absolutely anything else that makes money but a writer who makes none? I’ve never heard of him, so it’s not like he’s a brilliant artist who didn’t want to sacrifice his art to menial labor.
Fallarás was fulfilling her part of the social contract and giving birth to children. Why wasn’t their father fulfilling his?
This happened back in the former USSR, too. Women hustled while men felt sorry for themselves and did nothing to inscribe themselves into the new economy. I always thought it was the legacy of WWII and Stalinism. But it looks like it’s the same in Spain.
I forget now who said that women always come out as winners in the neoliberal game. Fallarás is now well-to-do, famous, and married to a woman. Her ex-husband is languishing in irrelevance.
Fluidity is easier for women, it seems like.
Clarissa's Blog 
Women are the main engine of the neoliberal change that is currently engulfing the West. As you so beautifully and succinctly put it, “Fluidity is easier for women”. Women take to a liquid society like a duck to water. [As an aside to less cognizant readers, fish is slang in gay lingo for “woman”].
Women are the main agents of language change, which they do by adopting language fads, rapidly taking up newfangled vocabulary and trendy pronunciations, for example. In societies where a language is minoritised by another, rival and more powerful language, women are the main cause of the loss of intergenerational transmission of the minority language, relinquishing it in favour of the ascendant language much more rapidly than men.
The list goes on. I was not surprised at all to discover that the author in question is now in a same-sex couple. This phenomenon was very evident when I was active in the LGBT movement (from 1983 to 2013), where lesbians turning straight and straight women suddenly camping up in women pairings were the order of the day.
Women in the U.S. initiate divorce in over 70% of divorce cases, are the largest consumers of tranquilizers and of anti-psychotic drugs, the vast majority of people in psycho-therapy and so on and so forth. All the nefarious Woke trends in academia are women-led, whether they initiate them or not, women are invariably the agents driving such trends and at the head of the vanguard of vociferous activists.
One may condemn the Taliban regime and the mullahs of Iran – as I do – but they are extremely lucid in their policies with regard to women, in the sense that in those societies men are keenly aware that giving women their freedom will entail the end of their culture and of their traditional customs.
Finally, before you heap opprobrium on me, I want to draw attention to the fact that the percentage of women in STEM disciplines (not medicine though) is higher in many a Muslim country, as well as in a non-Western country like India, than in advanced pro-feminist/feminised societies like Sweden, Norway or Canada.
All I’m saying is, things are not at all as they seem, and studies are required to understand how gender influences variation in societal outcomes, cultural trends and civilizational collapse.
LikeLike
I don’t blame Fallarás for becoming a lesbian after that deadbeat of a husband.
LikeLike
Of course people can shack up with whomever they want to. However, heterosexual women normally do not end up with a female partner after ditching their obnoxious husbands unless they discover they had been lesbians all along.
Fallarás may have discovered her homosexuality late in life, but I suspect that in her case, as in that of many other feminists, she has decided that men are the enemy, which means that the dysfunctionalism in her married life was already present. It takes two to make a marriage work.
LikeLike
“Fluidity is easier for women”
Women have been selected for fluidity for thousands of years. Puberty is a lot more…. dramatic for women and the percentage of societies that expect women to live with their husband’s family is higher than any other option and lots (not all by any means) of societies expect women to change their names at marriage. And women are born with a biological life mission that men don’t have and a big part of that is managing change as children grow.
Women that can’t adapt to that tend to not reproduce (or do so at far lower rates than women who can).
Men are selected for stability and having a purpose that comes from without.
Yank the rug out from under their feet and women will land on said feet more often than men where losing a job is a lot more traumatic and more like losing a body part…
I understand the guy wanting to go to a conference – he was trying to hold onto his sense of self.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dude. This is almost word-for-word from my recent article but it hasn’t come out yet.
We are great minds for sure, since we think alike.
LikeLike
Yeah, women are, men do ;-D
LikeLike