Posted on 04/20/2012 5:49:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
Rosen vs. Romney is not exactly high noon at the Powder Puff Arena. But it provides an insight or two in the gender games at the center of the culture: Trendy lesbian working mom, a public relations strategist raising adopted children, attacks traditional super mom for staying home to raise five sons.
This is not exactly a rumble in the jungle or the thrilla in Manila, but the way it's hyped, you might think it's a fight that would frighten Muhammad Ali, a thriller if not for the ages at least for this news cycle.
Rosen vs. Romney is supposed to be another battle in the mommy wars, but it's not. There's little to add to the argument of working mother vs. stay-at-home mom; most any woman will tell you that she can do whatever she pleases, depending, of course, on her finances, her abilities and her personal psychology. Few people any longer judge a woman by her decision, now that we know the trade-offs. If stay-at-home moms express sympathy for the career woman who is stressed to the max and misses the day-to-day domestic milestones of her children, the fatigued full-time moms joke about "drowning in the car pool." Life is not fair for anyone.
The actual conflicting choices for women today are wrought by a new set of problems quite outside the arena where Ann Romney and Hillary Rosen live. They're privileged mature women who have cultural supports, financial assets and educated abilities to prosper in the paths they've chosen. The controversy revives debate over the question that stumped Freud and continues to perplex all of us, whether we like it or not: "What do women want?"
The feminine mystique is long gone, but so is the militant feminism of the 1960s that insisted that only work defines the female. Feminists know how wrong Betty Friedan was when she described the traditional woman's life as a life lived in a "comfortable concentration camp." For many working women, there's more than a little nostalgia for breadwinning fathers who take pride in the responsibility for the family. There's renewed appreciation for full-time mothers who had time to nurture independence in their daughters.
Pop images reflect the changes and choices without the gloss. The much-maligned "Ozzie and Harriet" have given way to harried women who have trouble finding a man to take responsibility for anything, even for himself. If "Sex and the City" added a patina of glamour to the lives of sexual revolutionaries in high heels and high fashion, pop culture has morphed into "Girls," the hip HBO drama reflecting 20-somethings so overwhelmed by responsibility thrust upon them by triumphant feminism that in one episode a young woman lies on a gynecologist's examination table longing to be diagnosed with AIDS. She imagines that would liberate her from burdensome ambition, accomplishment and accountability.
Ann Roiphe, in a Newsweek cover story about the fantasy life of the overworked working woman, asks: "Is there something exhausting about the relentless responsibility of a contemporary woman's life, about the pressure of economic participation, about all that strength and independence and desire and going out into the world?"
"Girls" may be nothing more than the latest edgy soap-opera characterization of the lives of millennial women, but it delves into the specifics of the dreary lives of privileged young women growing up in a world of male descendency. If the show were written by a conservative woman, it would be sneered at as moralizing punishment of women's liberation. Instead, it's hailed for its authenticity, wit and accuracy, unpleasant as it is, in exposing the lives of sophisticated young women who graduate from college and discover that coming of age in the covens of Manhattan is not necessarily so hot after all. The island is awash in limited career and sexual expectations.
"For all the talk of equality, sexual liberation and independence, the love lives of these young women are not much more satisfying than those of their grandmothers," writes Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times. "Their professional expectations are, if anything, even lower."
The generation just ahead of them is a world where women who still dress for success have found different problems that come with feminist achievement. In her book "The Richer Sex: How Women Became the New Breadwinners," Liza Mundy observes how men flee from competition with women. Men quickly exit the professions women choose: "The women pour in, and the men drain out." As women collect higher degrees, men fall content with the lower rewards of indolence.
It was always a myth that the personal is political. You can't legislate intimacy or emotions. For every political action there's a reaction, and not necessarily the one we expected. Hillary Rosen found that out the hard way.
It has never been true.
To me, there is nothing on earth so square and bogus as women who put their ‘career’/’job’ ahead of all else in life....especially women who presume to raise children, keep house and maintain their marriage simultaneously. With all that going on, only ONE of those roles is being fulfilled properly... it that! Everyone suffers (not least of the their children).
And yes, these women are incredibly pathetic! If that is their choice, fine. But they should never criticize other women who chose differently.
“There’s renewed appreciation for full-time mothers who had time to nurture independence in their daughters.”
That would be my mother. She thought Hillary Clinton should have been my roll model though. LOL
As to men pouring out of professions women pore into - I see that in my profession - law. I was talking to a somewhat conservative older judge yesterday whom I have known for decades and he was asking me for names of younger women who might make good candidates for judges. I told him that I didn’t know many and that the ones I know are way too liberal and I don’t like them anyway. I then said although they all know me and great me by name, I don’t know their names. Rather arrogant of me I know but there it is.
Also, if there is any one argument I have against women in the priesthood, this is it. Look at the “mainline” Protestant denominations - are there any young straight men who are Methodist ministers? Any?
Most anatomical females that I meet are in one way or another attempting to function as males, usurping the male sex role through persuasion, debauchery, intimidation and force (often with the help of government) or pathetic make-believe.
Before anyone calls me a mysoginist, I'll allow that I don't meet many men, either. Even worse, I don't always see one when I look in the mirror. But the first step to being cured is admitting that you have a disease.
I was a career woman for a long time. I loved it.
Now I’m a part-time SAHM who homeschools. I love that too.
One day I’ll be back in the workforce full-time, older, fatter and willing to work as hard as I can.
I remember when I visited my sisters in-laws and her family said, “Wait until you go back to work. If you think you have it tough now, just wait.”
I had left my job, my home city and had a newborn. I was lonely and sad. But going back to work and leaving that baby was not in the realm of my reality. I felt sorry for those ladies.
And, again we take the bait. As long as we let the media and the talking heads from the left keep this silliness “above the fold” we are not forcing the discussion back to subjects of substance. Regardless of what we think the folks at NOW will pursue their agenda.
We need to get the focus back on the economy, over regulation, government intrusion in our lives, and other concerns.
What does that mean?
I don’t know their names. Rather arrogant of me I know but there it is.
I'll decide how arrogant it was once I understand what you are talking about :-)
It's happening everywhere, even in engineering. Women are flooding the labor force with the full force of government pushing them forward. I recently transitioned out of management and back into a rank-and-file position in another devision. The work force under me was packed full of patronage employees-80% of them women-and was unmanageable. After a nuclear engineer with a doctorate and 25 years of experience was forced out of a leadership position in favor of a minority woman with no experience, a 2-year community college degree and a chip on her shoulder I decided that I would be more secure elsewhere. (I was replaced by a non-technical woman who happens to be a close friend of one of the executives. I've had former reports (including women) calling me begging me to come back because things are so fouled up now. Not happening.) If this continues, I will end up out of the engineering workforce altogether. I call it "Galt by default".
At least in BigLaw, this isn't true. Although an equal or more number of women enter BigLaw, for whatever reason, they are not making partner, particularly general partner, assuming that there is a two tier partnership track.
This is largely true at the executive level in business, too. How many Fortune 500 CEOs are women? Answer: 12. Women succeed at lower levels of organizations, and do very well. But for whatever reason--self-selection, discrimination, whatever--they are not succeeding at high levels.
This assumes that their grandmothers - presumably married women with children ... well, they must have had children, or they couldn't have grandchildren - did not have very satisfying "love lives."
Whatever their sexual experiences may have been, it seems to me that a woman in a secure marriage with children is doing better in the area of love than one who can't get Whatsisname to call the day after they screw, even if he might cough up some cash for the abortion. Just have a child (or ten) multiplies love exponentially.
I also see too many women going into the dead-end field of law, unless they can get the cushy job of judge.
Your statement reminded me of a particular "Tumbleweeds" comic strip featuring the half-wit deputy and Judge Frump.
The deputy started off the strip by saying, "Judge, when you were a lawyer, did you ..."
And Judge Frump cut him off with: "A LAWYER!? Great Scott, boy, I wasn't no lawyer! I never did dig all that legal detail and technical jazz lawyers gotta deal with."
"No, sir, son! If you wanna get in the law game, forget the legal details! BE A JUDGE!!"
The article catch the issue, that just as many boys today grow up to be overgrown boys, so many girls refuse today to grow up and become women.
This suits our overlords just fine.
I am a self-confessed spelling and grammar cop, but lately with auto-correct texting, I am cutting people some slack....I have very fat fingers and those darned phones come up with the most creative substitutions.
Putting two and two together, I believe she meant "greet" instead of "great"
There. Fixed it.
I guess I was a little “arrogant.”
I guess I was a little “arrogant.”
I’d love to be a judge some day. Right now I’m too busy having kids, so I work part time as a lawyer. I make peanuts because I do humanitarian law. But hey, it’s family-friendly and I want to be there for my kids, and I help good people. I choose my own clients and have no money pressures. I’ll never make partner at Biglaw, and I don’t ever want to. I don’t care about that - it’s not what matters in life.
When I went to law school I actually thought that my husband and I could not have children. Then, the doctors were wrong, and we did. By that time, I was already eye deep in student loans, even though I went to one of the cheapest law schools you can go to. I wouldn’t have chosen this, but it’s worked out, and I due to many factors I think this is what was intended for my life.
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.