BOOKS ON JUGGLING
There
are many books that claim to show women how they juggle family and
career without guilt, but they are a lie. Anecdotes can be given on
both sides on how their ideology is superior, but the data is
overwhelming on the side of my arguments. Those families that live by
the values I write are better off than families that live by
arguments of the Morris' and Cathy Young. I'll even go so far as to
compare my anecdotes to those of the Morris'. I find more happiness
in UC families that align themselves with traditional family values
than those who live the Wetzstein pattern. The most personal anecdote
I have is my own family. I have lived both ways and the difference
has been as great as heaven and hell. My wife and I will never go
back to living the feminist propaganda we bought in the UNews. Cheryl
Wetzstein should use her writing skills to push for the traditional
family and she should write an apology for polluting the UNews with
her bashing of stay-at-home moms who are not as cool as her who has a
glamorous job that apparently impresses True Father. True Father
should retract his statements about sisters being some kind of
Margaret Thatcher.
KIDDING OURSELVES
Rhona
Mahony wrote a typical kind of feminist book that defies human nature
called Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies and Bargaining
Power. She has all the liberal credentials: graduated from Brown
University and Harvard Law School -- worked for migrant farmworkers
and written for Ms. magazine. In other words she is highly educated
and smart like many feminists, and as blind as a bat to common sense
and truth. In her idiotic book she pushes for men to do housework.
This quixotic crusade will fail because she is not just fighting
culture, but science. Anne Moir has written several good books that
prove men are not biologically wired to do housework -- Why Men
Don't Iron: The Real Science of Gender Studies.
Mahony writes about the feminist obsession with equality that
means sameness, "This book argues that for us to understand women's
struggle to achieve economic equality with men,
we
need a much, much better understanding of the sexual division of
labor in the home. ... the sexual division of labor in the home is
what now stands between women and real equality.
"But what about the women who said, 'My husband will help? Surely, they weren't kidding themselves. These are the 1990's, after all. Fathers are spending more time with their small children than ever before, right? Surely, women can tell before they have children whether their boyfriend or husband is the type of guy who will keep his promise to share responsibility for childraising?
"Unfortunately, no. Women kid themselves about that, too."
STEREOTYPES
Women, she writes, must negotiate with men to make sure they do their fair share at home. Another favorite word of feminists is "stereotypes." She "proposes that we also throw away the stereotypes about what makes a woman a good mother. A woman who earns most of her family's income while her partner does most of the child raising is a caring, loving, good mother, too.
"We need to throw away those old stereotypes because they stand
in women's way. They make it impossible for men to really do half the
work of raising children. For that to happen, women and men will have
to see each other differently. Millions of women will have to give up
the search for a man who will take care of them. Millions of men will
have
to give up the search for a woman who will reflect their glory.
Mothers and fathers will also have to ask their sons to do much more
work at home and their daughters to set high earnings goals.
"When the sexual division of labor in the home has melted away, the link between people's sex and their work will be severed. Women will be as likely as men are to be surgeons and pilots, on average. They will be as likely as men are to work for pay full-time their entire lives, on average. Men will be as likely as women to shift into part-time work when their first baby is born, or to quit paying work entirely. When there are roughly as many househusbands as housewives and roughly as many female breadwinners as male breadwinners, then men will really be doing half the child care. That scenario is the prerequisite of women's equality. It is the only scenario in which women will finally and really achieve economic equality with men.
"The key to understanding the sexual division of labor in the home is negotiation. Any given division of labor--who does what chores -- is the result of negotiation between the people who live together."
DREAM
This
is the feminist "dream." Sadly it is a nightmare. She says, "The good
news is that the dream of real, practical equality that women have
dreamt for thousands of years isn't a dream any more. Now they can
make it real." Like all socialist schemes it will only be "real" if
you use force to make people live against their basic natures. If
Mahony only stops with using persuasion then her nonsense will fade
away. If she uses government to "require" people to live her dream
life then we are in trouble. Notice that she is a lawyer. Feminist
lawyers are dangerous to freedom.
A prominent writer at the New York Times Susan Chira wrote: "All too often, contemporary discussions about work and family sound like a stuck needle, endlessly replaying heartfelt but circular arguments about mother love, father indifference and flextime. In Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power, Rhona Mahony sounds a welcome discordant note. Her radical proposition: Not until as many men as women want to stay home with the kids will women achieve real economic equality." Chira wrote a book that rationalizes her lifestyle of a working mom that we'll look at later.
The Lipstick Proviso
Karen
Lehrman tries her best to have her cake and eat it too in her book
The Lipstick Proviso: Women, Sex & Power in the Real
World. Like Mahony she is deeply confused about what it means to
be a man and a woman. Feminists scramble to come up with all kinds of
ways that people are supposed to organize themselves and all their
silly schemes have basic flaws. Lehrman's ideal world has no more
chance of becoming "real" than Mahony's. When Lehrman criticizes
feminists, she is great read. For example, she is very witty and
entertaining when she writes things like the following: "By the time
I was gaining my feminist bearings in high school during the late
seventies, the phrase 'liberated woman' had already become a
disparaging epithet. Stripped of its original promise of strength,
independence, and adventure, the phrase had been media-sentenced to
represent the worst stereotype of the women's movement: a
saggy-breasted, hairy-legged, man-hating militant who spends her days
denouncing capitalism and Western culture and her nights doing God
knows what with other women.
"Nevertheless, as a young woman eager to escape the confines of a traditional household, I continued to put much stock in the original meaning of the phrase. Feminism, I believed, was going to turn all women into liberated women, into women who would unfailingly exhibit serene confidence, steely resolve, and steadfast courage. Unburdened by the behavioral and sartorial restrictions of traditional femininity, we would all want to trek alone through the wilds of Indonesia, head IBM, run for president. Our ambitions would be boundless, our achievements awesome. Men, marriage, children -- each would have to wait. The world needed to be conquered first.
"Well, as it turns out, I do have one female friend who has hiked unaccompanied through the forests of Indonesia (and returned unscathed), and many women in their early thirties have already risen to the top of their fields. Yet it doesn't seem as though the first generation of women to come of age with feminism -- born in the freedom-drenched sixties, reared in the androgynous seventies, educated in the power-tie eighties -- has metamorphosed en masse into briefcase-toting, world-wandering Mistresses of the Universe.
"Many
women would prefer not to work outside the home at all. Others want a
job that allows them the flexibility to be at home with their kids
for at least part of the day. Some scale back their career ambitions
as soon as thoughts turn to children. And while many women walk
around flaunting a confident 'I am woman; hear me roar' attitude, at
least as many are far less sure of themselves. Even women who have
been quite successful professionally often seem lost emotionally.
They have trouble asking their bosses for a raise, their landlords
for heat, their boyfriends for support. They can't live without a
man, lose their identities once they are in a relationship, overeat
or undereat to relieve their anxiety and loneliness. They hardly seem
happy, let alone strong and independent.
"In recent years many women have also returned to practices that were once thought to subsidize male oppression. They're wearing provocative clothes and heels again, painting their faces and nails, treating their skin and hair to the latest styles and fads. They dream of romance and big weddings, wish to be courted with flowers and chocolates, and expect doors to be -- literally -- opened for them. Many women, it seems, like to celebrate their femaleness, their femininity, and want to be treated like, well, ladies.
"What's going on here? Has feminism failed women. Have women failed feminism? Or has society failed them both." The answer is that feminism is a failed ideology. Lehrman tries to combine feminism with chivalry in her book and falls on her face. It is, like all feminist book, intellectually incoherent."
MONOLITHIC
She says that "Feminist theory has never been monolithic." Wrong. It has always been for women leaving the home to compete and dominate men. She deludes herself into thinking that "All feminism means is that the female half of the human race should enjoy the same rights, and have the same opportunities to fulfill those rights as the male half. How women exercise their rights and what they decided to do with their opportunities -- these are matters of personal choice. Feminism asks only that women make those choices responsibly, as clear-headed, rational adults." The truth is that feminism is the ideology that denies the absolute Biblical family. Feminism is a monolithic, single-focused evil force against patriarchy. I agree that it was wrong for men to use the force of law to prevent women from doing some things in the past, just as I am against the laws that discriminated against blacks, Jews, and many other people in human history. But I am for some laws, such as the one that precariously still exists, that women are not allowed to be in combat in the United States Army infantry.
RIGHTS
Everyone should have the "right" to buy alcohol, take it home, and drink until they puke, but that does not mean it is what they are supposed to do. Lehrman has no idea that God has made women to wear lipstick and wear earrings. Because of feminism's push for androgyny now men wear earrings. They have the "right" to do this. Men should have the "right" to do that in Saudi Arabia, but the evil patriarchs will punish any man that does. That is well-meaning, but evil patriarchy, even though they are right that men should do certain things that God would approve of. But God loves freedom more than force.
CHIVALRY
I
sympathize with her attempt to combine chivalry with feminism. She
has not figured out that feminism is communism. It is a deadly, evil
cancer. You can't be a little bit pregnant and you can't be a little
bit feminist as Mary Pride writes in her excellent book The Way
Home. Look at the naive nonsense that Lehrman writes, "in their
often complete dismissal of even the possibility of biological
differences between women and men, many feminist theorists still seem
glued to the notion that feminism necessitates androgyny. But women
don't have to be sexless to be equal. Indeed, even courtship and
chivalry can coexist quite peacefully with feminism." Yeah
right.
GENTLEMAN
"perhaps it's time to retrieve the term 'gentleman' and have it now include respect for women. In fact, it's on the general loss of 'civility' in society that conservatives actually have a point. Women could use something in between the personal (individual responsibility) and the political (government responsibility) to help teach men to behave like humans. Liberation never meant that pregnant women should have to stand on crowded buses, that men should stop offering to carry groceries for an overburdened mother, that the check should always be split -- even if the woman earns less. Chivalry, in other words, needs to be revived and updated. Gallant behavior and feminism are not incompatible. The problem wasn't that women were put on a pedestal, but they were chained to it."
This
is ridiculous. Women were not in chains before feminism. Chivalry
means to protect. How can men feel chivalrous and open doors when
women are going to walk through and get in line first at the
employment office to take a job away from the man. Chivalry and
feminism are total opposites. Feminism is competition, not
complementary cooperation." She says, "Both courtship and chivalry
train men to act like gentlemen, an unfortunately dated concept that
seems to go a long way toward capturing what many women today desire
in a man." Old fashioned values are indeed "unfortunately dated." She
keeps saying how good those values are to "train men." But women
today need to be trained as much as men. It would be better if men
took the lead, but if women start acting like ladies, then it will
have a big effect on men to act like women need protection. But this
won't happen until women, like Lehrman, give up the fantasy that they
can compete with men in the marketplace and then want men to pay for
dinner.
51/49
I really liked it when she went after the feminist dream of
total equality sameness. In this
she
is like Cathy Young who also does not think it is fair for women to
get "protectionist legislation." She rightly points out the
intellectual bankruptcy of feminists who lower standards "for jobs
like firefighting ... 'Institutions have to adjust,' explains Bella
Abzug. But 'adjusting' institutions for the sake of women is not only
potentially dangerous -- a female firefighter not capable of lifting
a body out of a burning building ...." John Stossel had an excellent
TV special about this topic. He asked Abzug if equality meant equal
numbers in every field of life and she fired back, "Fifty-fifty --
absolutely."
"The most pervasive special privilege is rarely seen as such:
quotas, both those that are
implicit
and those that are explicit. Feminists who support quotas or
preferential hiring tend to believe that justice -- feminism --
requires that positions at every level of power be split 50/50 (or
51/49, to match the female proportion of the population at large).
The only reason this has not happened, they argue, is because of
gross discrimination and residual sexist stereotypes." Father is
wrong in saying government leaders must be 50/50. Even if he wants
this to happen voluntarily, it is wrong. Men should not voluntarily
let women lead them and women should not voluntarily lead men. It was
a tragic day when men let women have the vote. The future
constitution for the world government in the Ideal World will give
maximum freedom, but there are some things that women should not be
allowed to do. They should not let women be leaders. I go more into
this in my book Cultural War Since 1848.
SLIPPERY SLOPE
The slippery slope of women getting the vote and dominating men by force as government officials leads to the political activism of the National Organization for Women. Their goal for its 21st Century Party has this in its platform says the party is pledged to "enacting laws, rules and programs to require and accomplish gender and racial balance in elected and appointed offices and in corporate decision-making bodies." Lehrman says, "In the academic world, sociologist Judith Lorber's Paradoxes of Gender, argues that not only should half of every workplace be made up of women but half the paintings in art museums, half the book published, and so on."
