Radical Regressivists Attack the Stay-at-Home Mom

In a book review of "The Flipside of Feminism," a regressivist author claims that the feminist push for universal childcare is an attempt to "simply transfer women’s dependence on men to dependence on Uncle Sam" and create more government interference in the lives of good hardworking Americans.  The author of the article uses Superman and Lois Lane as an example, saying that the children of that duo would likely grow up maladjusted because they would be tragically neglected by their parents.

• First of all, he's Superman.  He can stay home with the kids if he wants.  He was never as good a reporter as Lois Lane in the first place, and he doesn't even need a baby monitor because he has super hearing.  Besides, the kid might be able to fly, depending on his genetic makeup, and then he could just join Superman on his crime fighting adventures, albeit in a supporting role.
• But despite the ridiculousness of this bizarre and troublesomely wholesome example, the authors ignore the simple fact that most moms have been working moms since history began.  It was only in the last century that the idea of a stay-at-home mom was able to enter the American ideal, and even that ideal was false.  While some upper middle class American women were staying at home with the children in the 1950's, most women, especially women of color, still had to work even during the hey day of the stay-at-home mom myth.
• Additionally, it was because of the social welfare state that the stay-at-home mom was even possible. Women in the tenement factories of the lower east side of New York stayed at home only because the deplorable conditions of their factories were in their own living rooms.  They weren't spending their time raising well adjusted children because they were too busy sewing together shirts.  If the factory wasn't in their home, they were traveling to the dangerous conditions of the Triangle Shirt Factory, or attempting to find milk that was unadulterated with bleach because there were no FDA regulations.  The women on the prairie weren't taking care of the kids while they waited around for their husbands to come back in from the fields.  They were growing vegetables, milking the cows, feeding the chickens, and doing the household repairs because how else were they to live before the price controls created in the New Deal.  In the stockyards in Chicago, there was no minimum wage, so wives went out to find work along side their husbands.  Oh yeah, and the absence of OSHA legislation meant that the men in the stockyards were often home for months at a time unable to work because of injuries.  The bosses didn't mind, because they could just replace them if they were injured.  After all, there were no unions.
• Meanwhile, during the 1950's (unquestionably the era of the regressivist's ideal stay-at-home mom), American union activity was at an all-time high, NASA was putting men into orbit, the federal government was crisscrossing the nation in freeways, and every dollar that an American earned over $1,000,000 was being taxed at 85%.  The regressivists want the benefits of the 1950's with the tax rate and deregulation of the 1890's.  But of course, it was the regulations and the taxes that made the 1950's what they were.  So maybe, it is the radical regressives who are truly trying to end the era of the stay-at-home mom if ever it actually existed.
• So lets talk about the true flip side of feminism.  When progressive policies created the conditions that made the stay-at-home mom an economic possibility, we neglected to recognize that we could have broken the mold of maleness and femaleness, instead we liked our hand and we doubled down.  Now that the regressivists feel that they are under attack, they are doubling down again.  Only this time, they are afraid that their dream of regression is never going to be possible.  In essence, they are bluffing. They want America to abandon feminism.  They want us to abandon our search for a better family, a better life, and liberation for men and women.

This is not the time to blink.  We have the opportunity to expand the benefits of feminism to men.  We have the opportunity to take the same benefits that created the possibility of the stay-at-home mom, and spread those benefits between working mom and working dad.  Perhaps we can create a world where moms and dads spend more time with their family, not based on their gender or their sex, but based on their love for their families.  It makes me angry to hear the women who wrote "Flipside" attacking universal day care and parental leave as evidence that feminism is a tool of the progress which they so fear, but it saddens me that their children will never truly know fathers who will spend their lives working for two, instead of learning how to be better dads.

What to Expect When You Already Know What the Heck You're Expecting

Are boys inherently criminals who are uncaring, unloving, and unable to be empathic?  An overwhelming majority of criminals are male, all American executioners are male, and (as discussed last month after the shocking shooting of Rep. Giffords) most American assassins are males.  And reading "What To Expect in the First Year" when my son entered his 12th month, it's not very hard to see why.

A reader asked the authors of the book about her 11-month-old boy who, instead of bonding with a baby doll, was throwing the doll against a wall.  What to Expect (hereafter WTF) responds, "Sexual equality is an ideal whose time has come, but sexual sameness is an ideal whose time never can come..."

Oh the sexism...  Let's start at the beginning.

1. This woman's son doesn't know what a doll is, much less that he is throwing it at a wall.  These are experiments in gravity and physics, not some kind of rejection of fatherhood.  By insinuating that the son's throwing of this doll at 11 months is proof that he is already gendered as a traditional masculine boy, the authors of WTF are showing us how eager they are to protect traditional masculinity.  As the stay-at-home dad of a 1-year-old, I can assure you that he would just as soon cuddle with a soccer ball as throw a doll against a wall, and the girl 1-year-old contingent is equally likely to commit violence on their dolls as my son.
2. The impossibility of what the authors call "sexual sameness" is a statistical mirage.  While it is true that there is a difference between AVERAGE boys and AVERAGE girls, any individual boy is as different from other boys as girls (see Elise Eliot's, "Pink Brain, Blue Brain" for overwhelming evidence of this fact proven by an MIT professor of neuroscience).  At the high end, the differences between boys and girls on any given trait is a five to three ratio.  So while this is impossible to calculate, at least 30% of all boys are more caring and loving than 50% of all girls.  Just as Lindsey Vonn can ski faster than (say) all of the guys on the slopes who think they are the fastest thing to hit snow since an avalanche, it is equally true that your son can may be able to cuddle and kiss any girl baby on the block.  The gender differences that we encounter on a day-to-day basis are so unremarkable as to be almost entirely impossible to notice.  Think about it, for every 5 boys that you meet who are aggressive, you will meet 3 girls who are also aggressive.  Dr. Eliot points out that this is not enough of a consistent difference to make decisions about our children's lives, but...



Difference between boys' and girls' math scores.




3. unfortuantely we do make decisions about our children's lives based on exactly these loose statistical likelihoods everyday.  In fact, WTF is stating clear as day that I should assume that my son is not one of the 3 boys who is more loving than 5 girls, but one of the 5 boys who is more aggressive than 5 girls.  The statement seems like nonesense because it is nonsense.
4. But worse than being nonsense, it is downright offensive!  Fifty years ago there was a common belief (unbacked by actual science) that girls were bad drivers.  If this 11-month-old were a girl who repeatedly crashed a toy truck into the wall, the appropriate correlation would be to say that girls are just bad drivers from birth and there is nothing that you can do about it.  The very idea that my 11-month-old son already knows what a baby doll represents and is determined to commit violence upon that doll is remarkably disturbing and a flat out lie.  Boys as well as girls are being trained to be parents.  Fathers are important parts of our society and they all come (quite naturally) from baby boys.  Fathers do not throw their babies' against walls and they do love them so much that they would happily walk into a burning building to try to keep them from feeling any more pain than is utterly necessary.  What to Expect, an otherwise excellent resource when kept in context, is unfortunately an agent of pain for parents who are being told that violence is an inherent part of being a boy but love, kisses, and cuddling are not.

If a baby girl would have thrown a baby doll into a wall repeatedly, it would be assumed that she was just too young to know what a baby doll represents, but when my son does it WTF (an parents across America) ignores all the evidence to assume that he is inherently violent.  These assumptions have ways of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.  Boys are given toys that they are supposed to like, violent toys about war and battles, and they are encouraged to play at the games that they are supposed to like by their parents, their teachers, and (most likely for we liberal minded parents) their peers.  In a study of Asian girls, when the girls were told that the study was being conducted to test the ability of Asians to do math, the girls scores soared, but when the Asian kids were told that the study was about the ability of girls to do math, the Asian student's scores dived (see actual difference between boys' and girls' math scores above).  If the entire society believes hard enough that boys will grow up to become the majority of criminals, then we can get together to create those criminals.

Be on notice...  we men who are liberated will walk into burning buildings to stop people from making the assumption that our sons are inherently violent, and you can either join us by helping to liberate a man (or boy) in your life, or you can get out of the way.

Super Bowl Junk Food

I passed another Super Bowl celebrating traditional gender.  Just as I ate fried chicken, nachos and lots of chocolate chip cookies, I also scarfed down the gender junk on T.V.  I have to admit that it was fun, and I can't get self righteous about this one, it's just fun!

I have tried to defend the Super Bowl with lines like, "It's not that masculine" or "It's just once a year," but no reason that I have found really excuses it.  The only thing that I can say for it was that it made me feel good to be American, and to be a man.

Some masculinists out there think that means that it's harmless, but it clearly isn't.  Domestic violence notoriously increases during football games, especially against women living in households routing for the losing team.  Drunk driving deaths go up, especially in states where there are no blue laws.  Drinking deaths also increase, as well as murder rates.  Child Psychlogists have proven that children who watch football and other aggressive sports actually start to act more aggressive, especially boys.  Overall, America during the Super Bowl seems like a hellscape.

But, of course, it isn't.  The Super Bowl is a celebration of the traditional gender roles that have been running our society since the great shifts of the 19th Century with roots dating back to Abraham.  One might conclude that if we enjoy the Super Bowl, and the Super Bowl is a celebration of traditional gender roles, than traditional gender norms can't be all that bad.  But notice the leap in logic from enjoying something to that thing being not all that bad.  A 500lb man can enjoy the two pound, bacon covered, cheese slathered hamburger that is the difference between loosing a limb and keeping it.  A pedophile enjoys lots of things that are bad.

The Super Bowl is not a good equivalent to statutory rape, but it is a good equivalent to the massive cardiac attack inducing foods that they serve in the stands.  Sure, not all of us are 500lbs, but those of us who are will be the most damaged by continuing our path towards hyper genders.  In an era when Disney princesses have made a powerful resurgence, and the GI Joe movie was more violent than Schindlers List (but then again, many so-called PG-13 action movies are), perhaps we look more like the 500lb men in the wheelchairs and less like the 400 lb men on the field; more like the pedophile than the 14-year-old with a crush.

We have to get on in a world that is full of the hyper-gendered, and so we have to give cultural significance to gender celebrations like the Super Bowl.  There was a time when the entire country celebrated the Miss America Pageant in a similar way, but the partial liberation of women has dulled the popularity of beauty pageants except among the most gendered segments of society.   The Super Bowl is our annual celebration of masculinity.  Just as a marathoner is free to eat a bucket of fried chicken every once in a while, a liberated society won't need to get rid of such masculine celebrations, just put them into context.

Hopefully, occasionally, rightbedone can provide that context.

Dirty Objectives

An old friend recently sent me this article showing how teaching girls to play in the dirt is necessary for building resistance to germs as adults.  Similarly, I think we can all see how teaching boys proper hygiene (for goodness sake men, wash your hands after you pee) is a goal with which we can all agree. 

Much of this blog has been dedicated to showing how simple things like hygiene are tied to gender, and that therefore gender as a construct can be both powerful and harmful.

The problem with gender is not that boyness or girliness is bad as a whole, but rather that they are invented, not deliberately, but by tradition and history.  Maybe most of the things that we bundle in with masculinity are terrific, but that doesn't mean that we should unquestioningly accept the entire bundle.   

We should pull the bundle apart, trait by dirty trait, and keep what we like from both traditional genders, and learn from the dozens of non-traditional genders that have erupted in direct response to those traditional genders.

We should teach boys how to enjoy being clean and made up, and we should teach girls how to enjoy being covered in mud.  A healthy person can do both, and the more we learn about the world through modern science, the more we learn that it is impossible to be healthy without a little soap... and a little mud.