Posted on 05/03/2019 5:50:02 AM PDT by Kaslin
Freud was supposed to be a wise man, but he could never answer the question "What do women want?" When he suggested that women who want the power and authority to be like men suffer "penis envy," he coined a modern myth. He didn't get it quite right, but the meaning behind his diagnosis became a driving force of modern feminism. (You could ask the women running for president.)
A half-century after Freud, ambitious women saw their chance. With the pill, affirmative action, college education, and careers, they felt free not to marry. And today, they're marrying later and marrying less. Fertility doctors increasingly treat women in their 40s who delayed having children because they wanted to establish careers first and are terrified they waited too late.
Women who married professionals like them in medicine, law, and finance find now that if they finally have children, careers will suffer. Such women with children are learning to live a lot like their pre-feminist mothers, becoming chauffeurs for the kids, taking them to the doctor, the dentist, music lessons and Little League baseball games. What's different is that such women gave up what their mothers never had, successful career with a six-figure income. They fall into a new kind of gender gap.
Daniela Jampel is half of a two-career couple. She once had the same aspiration that her husband had when they met at Cornell. Both earned law degrees, and both got jobs at white-shoe law firms. Now the mother of children ages 5 and 1, Jampel works 21 hours a week as a lawyer for New York City, and her husband works 60 to 80. The difference is reflected in their earnings. She spends two days a week at home, and his time at home is rationed because he's on call nights and weekends. "I'm here if he needs to work late or go out with clients," she tells The New York Times.
Their arrangement is news told on the business pages because women like Jampel make up a new cohort of working women at the top, who are experiencing a decline in earning power as their husband's income soars. She adjusts to the children's needs. She's the one who picks up the slack on snow days.
These women don't blame their "gender," but their choices affect the differences in their earnings. The enemy is not "The Man" so much as "greedy capitalism," as well as the relentlessly inflexible nature of managerial jobs in finance, law and consulting. The lean-in philosophy for them won't nurture their children or buy luxury condos and vacations. But their husbands working long and exhausting hours enable them and their children to live the pre-feminist experience of abundant time at home.
There's an irony here, as there always is. The good life, which sounds so great, runs into the reality of unintended consequences. Just as there was always a touch of elitism in second-phase feminism, where middle- and upper-class women were liberated to go to work and earn a six-figure income, these are choices not available to their impecunious, less-educated working-class sisters, so there's a new kind of elitism. Marriage to a man on the same economic trajectory enables the wife to spend more time at home.
The unhappy at-home mother that Betty Friedan, in her 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique," famously described as living in "a comfortable concentration camp" would be surprised at how many newly enabled, powerful women are trading in work life to enjoy the luxurious "limitations" of the "comfortable concentration camp."
There's no gender gap in earning power between a man and a woman in these demanding high-status, high-salaried jobs if the woman is willing to put in the same exhausting extra hours. Many women simply don't want to sacrifice all that time with their children. Daycare is supposed to make a difference, but it doesn't free enough time to make it an honest trade.
Feminist rhetoric has rarely acknowledged the reality that the gender gap in pay today is mainly determined by the kind of work a woman chooses, especially when she's a mother. The gap rarely appears so stark as in the so-called "greedy professions."
This was a hard lesson for Daniela Jampel. "Being willing to work 50 percent more doesn't mean you make 50 percent more, you make like 100 percent more," she tells The New York Times. That's hard to give up, giving new meaning to women's choices and the truism that a woman can't have it all. High-tech frees a man or woman to work almost anywhere, but it can't do much to reduce the hours.
If someone would ask Dr. Freud that famous question today about what women want, the answer might be "Certainly not that."
Read The Wife of Bath in Canterbury Tales.
Of course people should be able to have careers if they want careers.
But Feminism has forcefully insisted that women can only be happy if they have careers “just like men”.
I think society would benefit greatly if more women felt comfortable entertaining the notion that perhaps staying home with the kids and caring for the family was a noble “career”. I say that Feminism has convinced many women that it is a shameful way to live. We pay the price for such thinking.
Feminism has been more dangerous to civilization than nuclear weapons.
I am a lady lawyer. I was a JAG. I happily stayed home with my kids for 17 years. Went back to work when my youngest was 10. Never made a bunch of money practicing law. NEVER regretted for a minute staying home with my kids.
Feminism is the denial of human nature.
More is less
Basic biologically driven behavior hasn’t changed.
This is why corporate American has promoted abortion for years, and why it is at the forefront of the "gay rights" movement. A pair of psychologically damaged people who have no children and spend an exorbitant amount of money is their ideal customer base.
You are transported to a different planet populated by creatures morphologically similar to humans on Earth.
But there’s one yuuuge difference:
The dominant thinking there is MASCULISM, the idea that the men there can’t fully self-actualize if they are stably employed. The men very frequently there socialize with other men who grimace and wince when the few among their number with jobs openly speak of the goings-on at their places of work.
“Bro, why the HELL do you have a job? When are you going to get WITH IT..?”
The females there on their computers sometimes see illicit sex movies in which the men sometmes groan and shout things like, “NO CUDDLING..!!” and begin knitting, sexual behaviors traditionally uncommon to men there.
How much do you think the females there want to date..?
Yet THAT is what we have on Earth, in reverse.
I was born five days before D-Day so I live in a world not even remotely resembling the one into which I was born but I have never forgotten the old saying, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” I am just beginning to understand the real meaning of that but it seems to have been forgotten by most.
Super funny!
When he made this 4 min parody film, he had NO idea that after a decade certain parts of this would become TRUE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fvBW08U1YI
Can you freaking believe that Sony pictures distributed this..?
It’s cuz they got fooled! In their single-track, homo minded ways they thought he was UNDERMINING trad culture..!
What idiots.
I think that sums it up nicely.
I like capitalism/marketplace economics just fine, but I do think society can get pretty skewed if everything becomes about money and status and spending.
I would like to see the US turn toward simpler lifestyles, but that’s just me. Plenty of people believe the secret to happiness is a new Porsche and a beach house.
Worse. With nukes, people know they’re playing with fire.
I agree with you.
I also wonder how many women who have gone for these high-power, high-pay jobs would actually be happier in a more “traditionally female” career like teaching or nursing. One of the reasons these careers have appealed to women is that these jobs have options for more flexible scheduling that work better with kids and family life.
Reality is, there are always trade-offs. You make your choices and you live with the consequences. Nobody has it all, male nor female. Nobody.
Who cares if a husband is making more than his wife? Their incomes become united in a single family income. If they are maintaining separate incomes, then there is a poison pill in their marriage.
That's because men are tired of being fleeced by the courts and having to pay child support when she decides the grass is greener on the other side. Men have had it with these self-serving bitches.
Even women don't know what women want, so I give Freud a pass on this.
Feminists wanted it, they got it, now they don't want it. It's frustrating.
Good for you!
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