Karol Markowicz, writing in the NYP, the patriarchal spooge still dripping from her craven, anti-woman, you’ve-not-come-anywhere’s-near-a-long-way-baby keyboard:
Anne-Marie Slaughter, who gave up her job as a high level State Department official to better care for her kids, has created enormous buzz with her Atlantic cover story, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Duh: It’s not like men ever could, either.
I know, lots of women juggling work and family are still angry — feminism promised us we could do both. “Have it all”: Be the main caretaker of your healthy, happy, smart children and still have a great career.
Slaughter goes on at length to conclude that women like her can’t indeed have their professional achievement and their family time, too. But what’s weird about the whole debate about women’s struggle to balance their lives is that men have absolutely no hope of achieving this kind of equilibrium.
It’s almost unheard of for a man to take a prolonged paternity leave, for example. And most who do take a week or three are helping the wife, not because anyone believes he can handle his child full-time.
My own wonderful husband took some time after our girl was born — but basically worked from home, doing conference calls all week. I couldn’t wait for him to go back to the office, so we could have some quiet. (Sorry, honey.)
If an older child is struggling, the possibility of a man downgrading his career to step in (as Anne-Marie Slaughter did) would never even be considered.
That’s not because men don’t want to be there for their families. It’s just that, for all that women struggle with the choices they have, men rarely have such choices at all.
[…]
Of course, the media still go nuts about every hint that the feminist promise might somehow be true. They played up the study last week that informed us that the number of stay-at-home dads doubled in the past decade.
Ha! That was only from 1.6 percent of all stay-at-home parents to 3.4 percent — a miniscule number.
[…]
[…] most of the women even bothering to debate this question lead privileged lives already. When Slaughter stepped off her career ladder, she downgraded to merely being a tenured professor at Princeton. Would that we all had that “choice.”The whole phenomenon of women as “equals in the workplace” is still fairly new, so perhaps it’s no wonder that so many of us are setting ourselves up for failure by chasing an impossible “all.” For men, though, the “all” is so unlikely and out of reach that they settle for success, professional and personal, where they find it.
If feminism is still about equality between the sexes, women should look to men to see what successful, guilt-free “balance” looks like. Hint: The formula is a lot less “have it all” and a lot more “suck it up.”
Honestly: as a stay-at-home Dad, I can tell you this: if somebody were to invent a laundry basket that took my athletic man hips into account, I’d probably be grateful — not act like designing with statistics and comfort in mind is tantamount to (yet another instance of) misogynistic cultural rape in need of “analysis” by disingenuous and perpetually angry identity politics pimps.
I just want to make it up and down the stares comfortably.
Stairs? Or is “stares” a clever tie in to your haiku?
Hot glue a piece of an unused yoga mat or that soft, rubbery drawer protector (the stuff you use to keep your wrenches in order in your toolbox) to either side. Gives good grip, but can still pull down your sweats if they aren’t tied.
Besides, mention you’re out of hot glue when picking the kids up from VBS and all the moms will make you dad of the year. Chicks dig hot glue, it’s like candle wax was when you were single.
I just want to make it up and down the stares comfortably.
Magnificent (mis)use of homonyms.
Of course, a real man whose laundry room were in the basement would build a laundry chute.
Dunno, but I think that laundry chutes are generally designed in to the home, not added on.
Like dumbwaiters, only faster, and unidirectional.
off topic, but wanted to point out this piece by zombie doing the good work of deconstructing the left’s use of language to further its ideology. jeffG does a great job chronicling the ways in which this approach has been successful. this piece points out some ways in which the approach can backfire.
http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2012/07/09/the-little-blue-book-quotations-from-chairman-lakoff/?singlepage=true
We were watching We Bought A Zoo over the weekend and my girls were commenting on the relationship between Dylan and Lily, and how much he liked her. I said something like: if you’re a guy, and you’re just sitting around and having a pretty girl bring you a sandwich, you’ll like her too.
Which was intended to be a statement on guys, but it turned into the whole make-me-a-sandwich thing.
If experience is a guide, Slart, being decent, handsome, intelligent, and honest and bringing her a house will just make her like her too.
If women can’t be bothered to design and create competing products with beneficial specific ergonomic benefits for them, then fuck ’em. They are 51% of the population and surely a huge consumer segment. Nobody is keeping that down. There is no financial or material incentive to try. Grow up. Take those industrial engineering and design classes you wrote off as nerdy or hard. Learn about materials and math and solve the problem. If it’s a REALLY problem and you have an economical you will sell a lot of units and have an easy time finding investors or credit. Don’t whine about shit. Fix shit. That’s how you (supposedly) get rich. That’s a lot better than getting rich by convincing people that they need to buy bottles of magic water and that tap water is dangerous until a factory puts it into a bottle with a brand name on it after “filtering” it or applying other forms of ‘space voodoo mentalist glamour’ to it and charging a huge markup for bullshit.
“If it’s a REALLY problem and you have an economical… ” -> If it’s REALLY a problem and you have an economical solution…
When our HVAC went and we switched to dual-zone I converted the second-floor return into a laundry chute.
It was too small, so I had to add 6″ of depth. It still fit between the floor joists, which was great, but Mrs Cookies did not like all the dust, so I had to line it with ducting. I evidently did that poorly, because the metal tape has come off of a seam, just out of arms reach from the second-floor door, so things get caught in the tube like cholesterol plaque in my arteries. I replaced it once by hanging son #3 upside-down in the tube and having him replace the tape, but that was frowned upon by the establishment, so now we keep one of those old dinosaur-head can grabber toys next to the dang thing to pick out anything that gets hung up.
I also haven’t painted the second floor portion. Yes, it’s been five years, but Mrs Cookies did one of those crazy paint jobs with all sorts of stripes and sharp edges in the room where I built it and it has now become a Mexican stand off. She refuses to repaint it, and I am forbidden to spray the whole room with a couple of coats of cut-rate beige. So we look at naked drywall and mud… and stew… and seethe… and both plan for how we are going to use the room when we get the house in the divorce. She wants to sew, I’m thinking its a great place for my clown costumes, the rolls of plastic sheeting and the trash bags full of used clothing…
Dude, get with the program! It’s not about getting rich; it’s about making everybody poor so that you can feel good about your comparative position.
Anyone remember the scene from the Little Shop of Horrors movie where Steve Martin’s sadistic dentist can’t take any pleasure out of torturing Bill Murray’s masochistic patient who keeps begging for more?
Now imagine some Ezra Klein-type saying, “Oh baby, your perpetual feminist rage really turns me on!” while Amynda gets angrier and angrier about his objectifying her. Comedy gold!
(1) Modern feminists are interested in supremacy, not equality.
(2) I thought it had already been settled that no one could have it all. Seems I missed something somewhere.
Wait. There are people who do their own laundry?
Wait. There are people who do their own laundry?
is fabric softener involved?
My people use Snuggle.
I am still waiting for my flying car, golden toilet, pony, and plastic rocket.
I blame the matriarchy.