Feminism takes its socks off
[this special correspondent post is brought to you by the letters F and V.]
V says this about the Thinking Housewife’s latest diatribe on same-sex marriage:
Lesbians aren’t lesbians just because they don’t think men are worth the air that they breathe. They’re lesbians because they simply aren’t attracted to men. Just like Laura probably isn’t attracted to women. It’s that simple. And, just because you are smiling in the face of an achievement doesn’t mean that you go around smiling ALL the time, that you never suffer when society decides to treat you like a second-class citizen.
The denial of shared medical insurance doesn’t make a person suffer? I think it most certainly can and often does cause people to suffer, financially at the very least.
from flickr user jakemohan
Every time I read Mrs. Wood over at The Thinking Housewife, I tell myself I won’t respond no matter how outrageous her posts are. I don’t want to give this woman hits. I don’t want to give her pingbacks, and I don’t want to give her publicity.
Then I read this, and my resolution vanishes.
James M, a reader, asks the Thinking Housewife whether or not he should accept a gift stroller from his neighbors.
They recently made a quite neighborly and friendly gesture towards us, offering to give us their stroller (they have an adopted little boy who is now in kindergarten). They said their boy had outgrown it and they did not have any friends with children [...]. My wife was not around when they made this offer so I told them I appreciated their offer very much (I did) and that I would talk to her about it and get back with them.
So what is the problem with this gift? The neighbors are lesbians. What follows is some of the most poisonous thinking I’ve ever read on the Internet. The Thinking Housewife tells him not to take the stroller. Then, in the most careful language possible, she counsels James against allowing his family — and child — to associate with the kind neighbors.
The bigger question is how to handle the matter of your daughter playing with the children of lesbians if you do continue to live in this neighborhood. This is a serious and delicate matter. I think you should let her play with their children while obviously not encouraging the relationships and arranging things so they play at your house not the neighbors’ house. [...]
I’m not really satisfied with this answer to you but I don’t know what else to say. This is a very abnormal situation for you and your family. It seems there’s no completely healthy way to raise children in the company of pseudo-families and homosexuals.
Active Woman Magazine // flickr user modashell
Check it out, The Thinking Housewife can be snarky!
Why Feminism Must Go Underground
LAST MONTH, in an interview with the ever-incisive Katie Couric, Gloria Steinem noted, while offering a philosophical overview of contemporary society and world history, that there are relatively few women plumbers. This insight struck me like a lightening bolt. It showed that Ms. Steinem continues to be a penetrating thinker. Now, I have never met a single woman who wanted to become a plumber, let alone a woman who wanted to become a plumber but was prevented from fulfilling her dreams, but Ms. Steinem is probably very plugged in to the feminine plumbing subculture. Almost everything that is humanly possible exists in this world and I don’t doubt there are one or two frustrated women who have unclogged drains since early childhoo
d and have longed, to no avail, to commit themselves to the lonely, back-breaking labor of the plumber’s life.
I am here to tell you that it is not just plumbing that remains a closed field to women.
Look at this New York Post photo of the crew that just completed a new subway tunnel in New York City. Does something seem amiss? You are right. There are no women in this picture. Where was Ms. Steinem when this photo was taken? Her presence was needed. Ladies, oppression is real. It is real and ongoing. From the bowels of the earth, men are ruling the world.
She mocks us. She mocks feminists, she mocks Steinem, she mocks women in trades. That’s ok, we mock her back, just as snarkily.
The thing is, I kind of want to thank her for bringing this up. I did a quick search for “women plumbers” and was fascinated by my findings.
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from http://nucleartentacles.blogspot.com
I love it when the Right discusses pornography. They don’t know what to think or say. Their moral compasses go berserk and they end up agreeing with some of their feminist sisters on this issue.
The Thinking Housewife — she’s become a bit of a bogeyman for us, it seems, but she offers us such an excellent look into the ultra-conservative moral compass — posted an email someone wrote her about how wives drive their husbands to seek pornography. As someone who is hardly sex-positive, the Thinking Housewife is emphatic when responding to this email: viewing pornography is addiction and a sin. Obviously, men who watch porn do it to fill some deep void caused by dissatisfaction in relationships.
And her solution to sexless and dysfunctional relationships?
For the man who ends up with a critical and unloving wife, or a sexually inadequate wife, no matter what he does, I would say this. He does not need her love. He does not need it to be perfect or even good. He can survive without the love of a selfish or an inadequate woman. He can function reasonably well in life even so. He can find compensations for this hardship in his involvement with his children, his work, his intellectual interests or hobbies. An unhappy marriage is not the end of the world. There are worse things. We cannot find any contentment when we throw away our integrity. That is the one thing most necessary to our happiness.
This is great. No possibility of divorce, no release from a sexless, self-defeating marriage, nothing. And this is supposed to have a man’s interest at heart?
Not pictured: famine, starvation, disease, poverty, redundancy and death.
I’ve noticed a very interesting phenomenon among many women from conservative or very religious backgrounds — or both, as they often go hand-in-hand. I like to call it the “Little House on the Prairie Syndrome.”
Why call it that? These ladies long for the “good old days” when women were seen as having just two places in the world — the kitchen and the bedroom.
I don’t see what’s so great about that, but honestly if that’s what pops your cork, go for it. For the sufferers of this syndrome, however, this doesn’t seem to be enough. They know their ways are most natural — and any self-respecting, non-delusional woman would agree.
Fortunately for us, society has moved on. And these women can only complain about the evils of the feminist movement as the start of Armageddon. I’m being melodramatic, I hope. But it’s hard to come away from their blogs thinking differently, whether they express these views outright or not.
So why should we care? Women lived like this before feminism. Why can’t we go back to the past?
It’s because these women want something that doesn’t exist. Their go-tos on the past — movies, TV, and books — often glamorize history by leaving out the disgusting minutiae of a woman’s daily drudgery. There has never been an epoch in our history where women did not work. Women have always been professionals. Even the Proverbs woman helped her husband take goods to the market. Since prehistory, there have been female gossips, adulterers, virgins, sluts, geniuses and even rulers. Either this history was suppressed or forgotten, but it has not made it into the movies.
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Which is which? Statue depicting three generations of women in China. via Flickr user cmphotofocus.
As a writer, I pride myself on my knowledge and use of the English language. I appreciate its subtleties, and have learned how to play these notes like a good instrument. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across a blog post inferring that the term “Ms.” is some kind of freak aberration invented by feminists to confuse us and undermine the social order!
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Global Voices: Gender
