Posted on 11/02/2005 4:20:17 AM PST by gr8eman
So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?"
Columnist Maureen Dowd posed those questions in Sunday's New York Times Magazine in an essay adapted from her forthcoming book: "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide." Entertaining as usual, Dowd explored her premise that many women end up unmarried and childless because they're successful by reviewing women's evolution since her college days, which happen to have coincided with my own. We both came of age as women's lib was being midwifed into the culture by a generation of women who felt enslaved by homemaking and childbearing.
Now, in the span of a generation, all that business about equality apparently isn't so appealing to a younger generation of women, who are ever inventive as they seek old ways to attract new men. Dowd writes: "Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry . with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded creatures (men) to think they are the hunters."
Dowd, herself unmarried and childless, wonders whether being smart and successful explains her status. She observes that men would rather marry women who are younger and more malleable, i.e. less successful and perhaps not so very bright.
No one vets the culture with a keener eye than Dowd. Her identification of trends - especially the perverse evolution of liberated women from Birkenstock-wearing intellectuals into pole-dancing sluts - is dead on. But while she sees women clearly as they search for identity in a gender-shifting culture, she doesn't seem to know much about men. Men haven't turned away from smart, successful women because they're smart and successful. More likely they've turned away because the feminist movement that encouraged women to be smart and successful also encouraged them to be hostile and demeaning to men.
Whatever was wrong, men did it. During the past 30 years, they've been variously characterized as male chauvinist pigs, deadbeat dads or knuckle-dragging abusers who beat their wives on Super Bowl Sunday. At the same time women wanted men to be wage earners, they also wanted them to act like girlfriends: to time their contractions, feed and diaper the baby, and go antiquing. And then, when whatshisname inevitably lapsed into guy-ness, women wanted him to disappear. If children were involved, women got custody and men got an invoice. The eradication of men and fathers from children's lives has been feminism's most despicable accomplishment. Half of all children will sleep tonight in a home where their father does not live. Did we really think men wouldn't mind?
Meanwhile, when we're not bashing men, we're diminishing manhood. Look around at entertainment and other cultural signposts and you see a feminized culture that prefers sanitized men - hairless, coiffed, buffed and, if possible, gay. Men don't know whether to be "metrosexuals" getting pedicures, or "groomzillas" obsessing about wedding favors, or the latest, "ubersexuals" - yes to the coif, no to androgyny.
As far as I can tell, real men don't have a problem with smart, successful women. But they do mind being castrated. It's a guy thing. They do mind being told in so many ways that they are superfluous. Even now, the latest book to fuel the feminist flames of male alienation is Peggy Drexler's lesbian guide to guilt-free narcissism, "Raising Boys Without Men." Is it possible to raise boys without men? Sure. Is it right? You may find your answer by imagining a male-authored book titled: "Raising Girls Without Women."
Returning to Dowd's original question, yes, the feminist movement was a hoax inasmuch as it told only half the story. As even feminist matriarch Betty Friedan eventually noted, feminism failed to recognize that even smart, successful women also want to be mothers. It's called Nature. Social engineering can no more change that fact than mechanical engineering can change the laws of physics. Many of those women who declined to join the modern feminist movement learned the rest of the story by becoming mothers themselves and, in many cases, by raising boys who were born innocent and undeserving of women's hostilities. I would never insist that women have to have children to be fully female. Some women aren't mother material - and some men don't deserve the children they sire. But something vital and poignant happens when one's own interests become secondary to the more compelling needs of children.
You grow up. In the process of sacrificing your infant-self for the real baby, you stop obsessing and fixating on the looking glass. Instead, you focus your energies on trying to raise healthy boys and girls to become smart, successful men and women.
In the jungle, one hopes, they will find each other.
The lucky children are the ones who grow up with their original issue mother AND father. I'm divorced and remarried so I have the "yours, mine, and ours" family. We do our best given the situation but from the children's perspective, having just one mother and father has advantages.
I hate to see man-haters bringing up children alone even if they don't have boys.
Is it possible to raise boys without men? Sure. Is it right? You may find your answer by imagining a male-authored book titled: "Raising Girls Without Women."
Research indicates that boys and girls raised by single fathers are more successful than boys or girls raised by single mothers.
Much in here to comment on, but this phrase particularly rang home. The fact is, there is nothing "enslaving" about being a homemaker and/or mother. Ask those who have done it well, and you'll hear tales of ultimate fulfillment and wonders that defy belief. However, because a few man-hating social re-engineers decided that those roles were too constrained for THEIR unique needs, they projected their own inadequacies onto an entire generation of women, and consequently onto the entire culture. In the heady days of social upheaval that followed the Baby Boom, destruction of gender roles fit right in, and the baby went out with the bathwater.
Now, much of the world is realizing the arrogance of those idealistic illusions, and rejecting them -- too late, in many cases -- as the soul-stealing denials they are ... and always were.
Pity Maureen Dowd. She bought the lie, and she's STILL trying to make it work.
I know a smart, successful and very attractive woman that has time to make movies and commercials, have a child and has a very happy family, married to a great guy too!
("Denny Crane: Gun Control? For Communists. She's a liberal. Can't hunt.")
My ex-girlfriend was exactly like this. Smart, successful, nasty, untruthful, backhanded, manipulative, awful.
Dowdie needs to get with the program. There's nothing at all attractive about her and her emancipated ilk.
women end up bitter and alone when they fall for the feminist line. they become man-haters, and no decent guy will touch them. so they fall back upon the louses, who reinforce their beleifs in men-are-evil.
so they wind up alone, prey for the lesbian crowd, and miserable. and they can't figure out why.
as for the successful women scaring men off part? that's pure conjecture on their part - and baloney at that. I know of no man who doesn't appreciate competence in women - at least no decent man.
you see a lot more successful men married to women below their position that you see successful women married to men below THEIR position.
MoDo is her own worst enemy - and feminism the worst thing to happen to womanhood.
My boys are both very successful human beings and one of them is a genius who is 19 years old and two years ahead of the curve at university, while holding down a full time job and supporting himself and helping out his auntie who boards him.
They are both Real Men, critical thinkers, great sense of humour, and capable of earning a good living and contributing to society. Neither has ever been arrested or in any trouble, and they don't use drugs; neither has fathered a child out of wedlock or married-and-run-away. I have a lot of married friends who can't say the same.
It has been my experience that dumb men like dumb women, and smart men like dumb women. Even back in the 1950s we were cautioned never to allow a man to find out that we were more intelligent than they are, and always to allow them to take credit for our work, our ideas, our success and every facet of our family, because they just can't stand a woman who 'competes'.
I have always said that I will get married when I meet a man who is more of a man than I am. So far I have met parasites, control freaks, a perfectly wonderful younger man who was so far under his father's thumb that he allowed Daddy to pick his wife for him (and I told him that Daddy would eventually run away with her) and one spoiled brat that even my mother (who would welcome Godzilla to the family if only he'd marry me) did not like.
There are plenty of good men in the world. They are generally married to someone else.
I know a smart, successful and very attractive woman that has time to make movies and commercials, have a child and has a very happy family, married to a great guy too!
|
|
I'm just guessing, but would that be Catherine Zeta Jones??????. |
"...a generation of women who felt enslaved by homemaking and childbearing."
I left the office world 6 years ago, still in the booming economy days when you could cut all kinds of reduced hours/work from home deals with your boss, and the number of women who were taking advantage of that situation was staggering. This caused a lot of tension in the office, because no man would ever dream of asking for such a deal. There was a little office spat one day on this subject -- two women telling the guys that it wasn't true about women wanting to be home, and that guys do it just as much. The spat ended VERY quickly when the 2 chicks were challenged to name even one man who had even ASKED for a reduced work week. In a Big Six accounting firm with 1000s and 1000s of workers in downtown DC, nobody could even think of one. Then Time Magazine had a cover story about tension in the workplace between WORKERS WHO HAD CHILDREN AT HOME and the deals they got vs. workers who did not. The filthy, gutless, scum-sucking, sub-human pieces of liberal crap NEVER EVER mentioned that it wasn't WORKERS with kids, it was WOMEN with kids who got the sweet deals.
The research I mentioned reported aggregate results, of course, not a universal outcome. One can think of many reasons for that result, unrelated to the particular skills of parents. For example, a father with custody of children is likely to have a higher income than a woman in the same situation.
Congratulations on your sons! I have four boys so far (11 and under), and I'm always encouraged by examples of young men who have turned out well.
a rat is a dog is a pig is a feminist (with profound apologies to rats, dogs and pigs)...
I too have four children eleven and under, boy 11, girl 9, boy 8, and boy almost 1. So today that is a big family. But if I were younger and could get started earlier I would go for a large family by old-time standards. I don't mean huge like 10 or 12 buy big like say seven children. My grandparents had seven and were sorta poor and all seven were great successes. All the grandchildren grew up in smaller families and were much less successful and upwardly mobile.
What earmarks American children is being spoiled compared with children in places like Bolivia and Mongolia.
That's why I go to Brazil..where women love men...I am so tired of feminists that think they are "women" abuse the dating system...the "I want", "I need", "I,I,I", women...they will end up very old and angry women...because the story they bought into..was wrong
We're expecting our 8th child, 5th boy, in a few months. I think you've got a good point about children's being spoiled, or at least, being awfully comfortable compared to the majority of earlier generations or other societies. It's not so much the number of children in the family that makes the difference, but the fact that it's more likely that a child in a large family is going to have to work harder and make do with less ... partly because there's more work to be done with more people, and partly because there's less money per person.
DING DING DING! Direct hit!
Dowd is a kook with MSM tenure. She is irrelevant and only serves as a place to direct pity on a pathetic self inflicted waste of a life.
Now there's a blast from the past:
http://www.clubdevo.com/
"we are not men...we are Devo"
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
