She Doesn’t Do Toilets
More feminist fun times in the pages of the Guardian, where Nicola Heath is bemoaning her womanly lot:
It feels very personal, the fight you have with your partner about who does the laundry or cleans the bathroom. But the second-wave feminists were right. The personal is political.
“The personal is political,” says she. Well, so I hear. But it’s also worth considering just how often the political, or allegedly political, is a function of personality and a self-flattering rationalisation for personal shortcomings and sub-optimal choices. Not least among the kinds of people who loudly announce that the personal is political. In fact, hold that thought.
The unequal division of labour at home is a systemic issue that needs structural social change to solve it.
In this instance, the claim of inequality and the case for “structural social change” are not entirely compelling:
Like many heterosexual couples, it was the arrival of children that set my husband and me on divergent paths at home. I’ve been an avowed (and untidy) feminist since I was old enough to say the word. We were together for 10 years before the birth of our daughter – he knew his co-parent had zero aspirations to be a homemaker… Becoming a parent is… a huge transition. Your identity is reforged in the crucible of sleep deprivation and newfound responsibility. The pre-kid lifestyle of Friday night drinks, free time and sleeping in becomes a distant memory.
Yes, in a shocking and unguessable turn of events, becoming a parent is usually a life-changing experience, a major development that entails compromise and sacrifice. A shifting of priorities. If only all of the other parents on the planet throughout human history had an inkling, some clue. Our Guardian writer is of course determined to frame the subsequent division of labour in the Heath household as a result of dark forces – including “social conditioning,” “prescribed gender roles” and the oft-invoked “gender pay gap.” An allegedly oppressive phenomenon that doesn’t actually exist. And then, inevitably, a whiff of self-pity:
When you have someone to take care of menial stuff such as running your life, there’s little incentive to change the status quo. It’s nice having someone wash your clothes and cook your food. When you don’t have to expend mental energy keeping track of grocery lists and family birthdays, you have the cognitive bandwidth to think about other things.
She’s expending mental energy on grocery lists. Someone bring medals, big ones.
Ms Heath gives no indication that her husband is in any way negligent or inert in terms of household chores, indeed we’re told the opposite – he “does a great deal around the house.” Said husband is also, it seems, the primary breadwinner, working full-time. Unlike Ms Heath, a part-time freelance writer who chose to expend resources on a degree in Media and Communications at Deakin University, and whose intermittent vocational dabbling includes short articles on pizza toppings. Part of a crushing freelance workload that, according to her own portfolio, maxes out at seventeen articles a year, but more typically four. Hence, presumably, the stress of remembering birthdays and compiling grocery lists. All that cognitive bandwidth.
Unhindered by such details, the drama continues:
If women want their partners to do more domestic tasks – which would free them up to do more work outside the home – it’s not going to happen without some uncomfortable conversations. Change is difficult. We’re asking someone to give up their privilege,
While demanding “structural social change” because the bathroom needs cleaning.
Update, via the comments:
If a man had made similar choices to Ms Heath, resulting in him having much less earning power than his wife and consequently occupying the role of stay-at-home dad with a part-time freelance job, would this also be grounds for political outrage and demands for “structural social change”? Would his wife – who works full-time, pays most of the bills, and also helps out around the house – be subjected to “uncomfortable conversations” about surrendering her “privilege”?
Or do different rules apply for women, or at least for feminists?
I am so old I remember when it was the other way around.
https://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/annotation-tuesday-tom-wolfe-and-radical-chic/
If anyone’s getting aroused by this thread, I’m doubling the bar prices.
If I identify as female is the increase only 35%? Cuz muh wage gap etc.
You have to admit, she never said she had much in the way of ‘cognitive bandwidth’.
So, to briefly restate what I said over at Tim N’s place, if wimmin are so overworked, who the fcuk watches Oprah and The View?
who the fcuk watches Oprah and The View
Women oppressed by the homo-normative capitalist imperialist patriarchy that LIDDIRALLY keeps them locked at home with gender stereotypes. Obvs.
Actually, I’m still not sure much of this is real.
It’s not my favourite timeline.
I used to work with a woman who listened to “The View” at her desk to relieve the boredom. I tried it one day and lost 12 IQ points that I could ill-afford to lose.
It’s cases like these that make me wonder if the misogynists have a point.
Maybe she wants us to believe that women actually are helpless and impossibly delicate creatures, too flimsy for this world.
What did the self-respecting man say to the feminist?
Goodbye.
You have to admit, she never said she had much in the way of ‘cognitive bandwidth’.
It’s a dial-up to bellyfeel.
“We’re asking someone to give up their privilege…”
Like hanging around the local S’bucks scribbling out 17 articles a YEAR!?!?
It’s cases like these that make me wonder if the misogynists have a point.
Oooh, Kipling alert…
“The personal is political”
I realised at some stage that this was rather an important phrase for feminists. It’s a weird idea – it seems that feminist leaders don’t want politics to be expressed through the ballot box, or robust debate, or letters to the newspaper, but that it should affect everything a woman does – *especially* with regard to the man in her life.
They never want her to forget their story of women’s shared grievances – they want her thinking about feminism while courting, when married, and feminism will be there for them to say “I told you so” if the relationship goes wrong.
It seems to me that love between men and women is largely a story of mutual incomprehension, anyway – it didn’t need extra resentment thrown in at every stage…
By the time you understand the opposite sex, you are too old to care much. 😄
It’s cases like these that make me wonder if the misogynists have a point.
David has frequently pointed out that the best argument against feminism is observing the average feminist.
They don’t seem very happy, do they?
I was a feminist for about five years and returned to my original religion, Christianity, because feminism just didn’t bear good fruit. (And don’t ever let anyone tell you feminism is not a religion. It is.)
She coulda been a contender. That’s her complaint, I think: if she didn’t have to give her attention to wiping the sink and hanging fresh towels and getting the shopping in . . . she could have written the world-changing masterpiece she feels raging inside her — instead of the sparse output of superficiality she has actually produced.
The way T.S. Eliot, if he hadn’t thrown away his genius in Lloyds bank and Fabers publishing house, might have written something really good.
Or the way Dostoevsky, if he didn’t have to throw on two overcoats and wear gloves with the fingertips cut off to scribble in an unheated room in a St Petersburg winter, might have given us something lasting.
Yeah, she has it tough. How brave of her to write that article.
Complaints about grocery lists… buy a pad of paper and a pencil.
Because my sister never moved very far from home, she could call on our dad for help with buying cars, getting cars fixed, fixing things around the house. Until she got married, and then my brother-in-law took over main responsibility for most of that.
I moved very far away, and usually lived by myself, so I had to learn how (and when) to get things repaired around the house. (Though after I had a union electrician at the house in the afternoon, and the fire dept. at the house that night, I figured I needed to learn how to do for myself.)
How much cognitive energy does she expend worrying about when the oil in the lawn mower needs to be replaced, or if the brakes on the car are OK, or when was the last time Rid-X was added to the septic system, or how old the battery in the reserve sump pump is. Add in things like painting window trim, cutting down dead trees, etc. and I’d say she has it pretty good, not having to worry about all of that.
These are all things I’ve had to deal with, not having a man in my life to take care of them for me. And I also have to worry about grocery lists, cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom, dusting, vacuuming (how does one person make so much dust?) etc.
I think we’re reading too much into this article. She’s a free lance writer, and she needed a subject. In the absence of doing much outside of the house, this feminist shopworn bleat came to mind as a way of pounding out a few thousand words.
I suspect that there’s not much more to it than that.
It’s illuminating that to the Marxists, and Marx is central to feminazism, everything is reduced to pay, i.e. money. Rather grubby for a transcendent philosophy that purports to free mankind.
Socialism is just the politics of resentment and envy. I’ll take greed anyday.
I suspect that there’s not much more to it than that.
There does seem to be a thriving market for these “woe is me” feminist tales written from the trenches of heterosexual marriage and family life. The perpetually unhappy Jessica Valenti has made a career of it.
There does seem to be a thriving market for these “woe is me” feminist tales written from the trenches of heterosexual marriage and family life.
To paraphrase (read: rip off) the eternal cynic and curmudgeon H.L. Mencken, “Feminism [is t]he haunting fear that, somewhere, a man may be happy.”
She combines wallowing in self-pity with self-aggrandizing daydreams: it’s the salted caramel of narcissistic treats!
If a man had made similar choices to Ms Heath, resulting in him having much less earning power than his wife and consequently occupying the role of stay-at-home dad with a part-time freelance job, …
Ms. Heath would not have married him, much less borne his child.
If a man had made similar choices to Ms Heath, resulting in him having much less earning power than his wife and consequently occupying the role of stay-at-home dad with a part-time freelance job, …
Alpha Women, Beta Men
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/alpha-women-beta-men/
When someone seems like a child, it’s not that attractive. In the end, it felt like I had three children.
Stop your whining and man up, young lady. That’s just the r’n way it is. You have personal ambitions, things you want out of life? Well boo-hoo for you. You’ve a husband and two children to support. You had your fun but once those kids were born, your days of Playstation, trips to the mall, and berry blisses with your besties were over.
Off topic but…
You should be made to serve
https://dailycaller.com/2019/07/18/transgender-brazilian-wax-jessica-yaniv-predator/
On menial tasks: this is weird, but while we have a dishwasher at home, I still enjoy occasionally washing the pots by hand. Don’t ask why, but maybe I’m trying to crush the patriarchy or something.
Maybe I’m thinking one day the climate crisis enforcement squads will beat down the door and take our dishwasher, so there’s that too. Best to keep one’s hand in.
while we have a dishwasher at home, I still enjoy occasionally washing the pots by hand.
It can be oddly relaxing. Our dishwasher hasn’t been switched on once in the nine years we’ve owned it. It’s used for storing wine, takeaway menus and unfathomable blender attachments.
You should be made to serve
So the anonymous individual “JY” has been named and his intention-revealing posting history uncovered.
What sort of desperate wenie with no self esteem marries a woman like that.
If the husband shovels snow in a blizzard, travels a lot for work, cuts the grass when it is hot out, and cleans up vomit, does that not count for something? Most men I know clearly work more hours than their wives (counting everything). Wives tend to count how hard they think they worked rather than how much free time they have vs. him.