Is Feminism Still Relevant?

[Irvine511]

this blows my mind:

The “Battle of the Sexes,” a 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and a former Grand Slam champion, was rigged by the mob, according to a new report.

The tennis match between King and the late Bobby Riggs, a former Wimbledon and U.S. Open champ, was a spectacle watched by millions around the world Sept. 20, 1973. More than 30,000 people packed the Houston Astrodome to see whether King, 29 at the time, could defeat a man.

King beat Riggs, who was 55 at the time of the match, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. The win gave women’s tennis a huge boost in terms of respect and gender equality, but an ESPN “Outside the Lines” report says the whole match was fixed because Riggs owed mobsters more than $100,000 and threw the match to erase the debt.

Hal Shaw, who was an assistant golf pro at a Florida country club, says he overheard two infamous mobsters discussing Riggs months before the legendary match.

“They brought up the name of Bobby Riggs, and Riggs assured him that he would go in the tank, and he’ll make it look and appear that he’s trying his best but Billie Jean King was just overwhelming him,” Shaw told “Outside the Lines.”

ESPN’s Don Van Natta interviewed Shaw for the piece, which aired Sunday.

“I looked in his eyes, I heard him tell the story multiple times, the details were always the same,” Van Natta said. “I was not going to move forward with this story unless I believed him to be someone who was absolutely credible.”

In an interview with ESPN, King disputes Shaw’s account.

“I would bet my life that Bobby never had that discussion with them,” she said. “Bobby doesn’t get involved in mobsters.”

King also released a statement calling the entire story “ridiculous.”

“I was on the court with Bobby and I know he was not tanking the match. I could see in his eyes and body language he wanted to win,” she said.

“It was 40 years ago and I won the match and I am 100 percent sure Bobby wanted to win as badly as I did. Those who bet against me lost money but the result is the same today as it was 40 years ago.”

Riggs died in 1995 at the age of 77, but his son says his father knew people within the mob.

“Did he know mafia guys? Absolutely,” Larry Riggs said. “Is it possible they talked to him about doing it? Possible.”

Billie Jean King’s ‘Battle of the Sexes’ Win Reportedly Rigged - ABC News

 

[Pearl]

Maybe that realization is something that comes with age. There are plenty of women in middle age who bear little skin but nonetheless convey sensuality. Mariska Hargitay comes to mind.

This is true, but you also have 40 year old women dressing like they're 20 year old club goers. Some people just never learn

 

[corianderstem]

I'm curious what the women in FYM think of the Miley Cyrus' VMA gyrations. Does it help or hurt feminism?

I didn't see it (and that's fine with me). I read a lot of "slut shaming" about it, which is disappointing (but not surprising). Why can't a 20 year old be sexual? Big deal.

It's also possible to criticize it for just being a bad performance, and there's nothing to read into those comments.

I also read a lot of interesting comments from women who were more upset that she used women of color as little more than props in her act, which I think might be more worth the criticism than her (allegedly) shitty performance.

 

[iron yuppie]

I read a lot of "slut shaming" about it, which is disappointing (but not surprising). Why can't a 20 year old be sexual? Big deal.

I don't think the term "slut shaming" is applicable here (though I take your point that some commentators are engaging in it).

I wouldn't criticize her for sexual behavior made public, but rather for grotesquely parading a sort of desperate burlesque as though it is a poignant statement of maturity. It's strange to use the term "pretentious" in regard to Miley Cyrus, but I think it is appropriate in this case.

 

[Irvine511]

i think my issue was that it wasn't genuinely provocative, or even sexy. it looked a little crazy, a lot immature. probably a lot like Miley.

she should have just gone ahead and kissed Gaga on the mouth. would have been much more interesting.

i also agree with this opinion:

Dear Society,
If you think a woman in a tan vinyl bra and underwear, grabbing her crotch and grinding up on a dance partner is raunchy, trashy, and offensive but you don’t think her dance partner is raunchy, trashy, or offensive as he sings a song about “blurred” lines of consent and propagating rape culture, then you may want to reevaluate your acceptance of double standards and your belief in stereotypes about how men vs. women “should” and are “allowed” to behave.

Sincerely,
Dr. Jill

A sexologist’s two cents on the 2013 MTV VMAs - A Day in the Life of a Sexologist

but, golly, who knows, maybe Miley is several steps ahead of all of us:

So here's a fun theory: Was Cyrus's and Thicke's performance actually a thought-out response to "Blurred Lines" criticism? Even before the song hit No. 1, "Blurred Lines" and its oft-parodied video have been accused of treating women like objects and promoting rape culture with its "I know you want it" hook, physical aggression, and subtle messages about alcohol and consent. Cyrus's performance with Thicke played with several of these themes in a way that could be read as commentary--though, at best, failed commentary.

It would be easy to write off her performance as just looking to deliver shock value: Cyrus has openly professed her admiration for the Britney-Madonna-Christina smooching trinity of scandal that opened the awards show a decade ago, so it's possible that Miley was just being Miley to carry the torch of sexually provocative pop stars. That idea is also consistent with the message of "We Can't Stop," which kicks off her hip-hop makeover by warning it's Cyrus's party, and she can do what she wants. But from the way she introduced her performance--by reviving Saturday Night Live's's caricature of her with a doppelganger stand-in--it's clear that Cyrus is more self-aware than she perhaps gets credit for. And if there's anything we learned from Lady Gaga's "Applause" video, it's that pop stars responding to or parodying their own critiques is not out of the question.

At first glance, the performance doesn't appear all that different from the "Blurred Lines" video: Thicke is fully clothed in a Beetlejuice suit and barely moves; Cyrus is clad in a flesh-colored two-piece and struts around him. But from the moment she eagerly ripped off her furry-fantasy get-up, Cyrus not only embraced and amped-up her own sexualization, she threw it back in Thicke's face (and lap). She got right up in Thicke's mug to shout some of the most scrutinized lyrics in "Blurred Lines" ("tried to domesticate ya / but you're an animal"), and she didn't back down after he took over vocals. With a giant foam finger, the night's most famous prop, Cyrus ran her hand over his crotch before grinding and nuzzling against him, trying to objectify Thicke in the way the original video didn't.

The performance doesn't totally reverse the original "Blurred Lines" set up, but it did attempt the message of its most famous parody, a scene-for-scene, gender-swapped recreation by Seattle-based "boylesque" group Mod Carousel. The video went viral because it's an accurate and impressive mimicry, and because it has the same levity of the original minus the vague rapeyness. The parody, however, wasn't designed to foster hate for the Thicke video. According to Mod Carousel's YouTube description, the half-naked romps dreamed up in "Blurred Lines" could be great fun as long as all parties involved felt equally empowered. Accordingly, the video tries show the dolled-up men as equal participants in a way the original didn't achieve (despite the director's stated intentions). Mod Carousel argues that flipping the genders of a music video to demonstrate sexism usually does "everyone a disservice" by ridiculing the male form rather than actually trying to empower the women excluded--it's more punitive than restorative. The solution, they say, is to create a space "where objectifying men is more than alright and where women can be strong and sexy without negative repercussions."

That sounds exactly like the type of space Cyrus and Thicke tried to create last night--but that's obviously not how it came across to a lot of viewers. There were, in fact, plenty of negative repercussions for Cyrus, who was quickly labeled a slut by many anonymous Internet-goers and accused by the New York Times of "molesting" Thicke. If Cyrus was trying to send a message about her sexual autonomy, why wasn't she successful? One reason is what Salon's Daniel D'Daddario calls the "fake sex positivity" of her performance. For comparison: Christina Aguilera, whose own sexual and artistic expression ignited similar conversation a decade ago, challenged criticism and championed empowerment through her music. Cyrus, on the other hand, just appears to be the over-eager participant in Thicke-worshiping, not the subverter of his messages.

There are other reasons why the performance makes audiences cringe: For some, the age difference--she's 20 and getting called a slut, while he's 36, has a family, and is mostly getting off the hook--makes their interplay feel exploitative, even if she's initiating. To others, the aggressive degree to which she did initiate contact seemed like less-than-consensual activity instead of a playful move to level the playing field. And then there's Cyrus's troubling appropriation of black culture that pervades her album's promotional campaign despite mounting criticism of it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...ance-a-failed-blurred-lines-criticism/279062/

 

[Pearl]

Well, plenty are upset with Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" song and video. There's been tons of complaints and controversy about that. And Miley was the main performer in that act, so Thicke would come second.

 

[iron yuppie]

Yeah, it does seem like Thicke has taken copious amounts of shit for that song/video.

 

[Jive Turkey]

Yeah, it does seem like Thicke has taken copious amounts of shit for that song/video.

Thicke wins the internet for the entire summer because of this. People won't shut up about it. Ca-ching

 

[Irvine511]

it's not often that i fully agree with Camile Paglia, of all people, but she pretty much nails it for me, despite the Madonna-pandering:

“Disgusting!” “Raunchy!” “Desperate!” So went the scathing reviews that poured in after once wholesome Disney star Miley Cyrus’ recent bizarre performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Bopping up and down the catwalk in hair-twist devil’s horns and a flesh-colored latex bikini, Cyrus lewdly wagged her tongue, tickled her crotch with a foam finger, shook her buttocks in the air and spanked a 6-ft. 7-in. black burlesque queen.

Most of the media backlash focused on Cyrus’ crass opportunism, which stole the show from Lady Gaga, normally no slouch in the foot-stamping look-at-me department. But the real scandal was how atrocious Cyrus’ performance was in artistic terms. She was clumsy, flat-footed and cringingly unsexy, an effect heightened by her manic grin.

How could American pop have gotten this bad? Sex has been a crucial component of the entertainment industry since the seductive vamps of silent film and the bawdy big mamas of roadhouse blues. Elvis Presley, James Brown and Mick Jagger brought sizzling heat to rock, soul and funk music, which in turn spawned the controversial raw explicitness of urban hip-hop.

The Cyrus fiasco, however, is symptomatic of the still heavy influence of Madonna, who sprang to world fame in the 1980s with sophisticated videos that were suffused with a daring European art-film eroticism and that were arguably among the best artworks of the decade. Madonna’s provocations were smolderingly sexy because she had a good Catholic girl’s keen sense of transgression. Subversion requires limits to violate.

Young performers will probably never equal or surpass the genuine shocks delivered by the young Madonna, as when she sensually rolled around in a lacy wedding dress and thumped her chest with the mic while singing “Like a Virgin” at the first MTV awards show in 1984. Her influence was massive and profound, on a global scale.

But more important, Madonna, a trained modern dancer, was originally inspired by work of tremendous quality — above all, Marlene Dietrich’s glamorous movie roles as a bisexual blond dominatrix and Bob Fosse’s stunningly forceful strip-club choreography for the 1972 film Cabaret, set in decadent Weimar-era Berlin. Today’s aspiring singers, teethed on frenetically edited small-screen videos, rarely have direct contact with those superb precursors and are simply aping feeble imitations of Madonna at 10th remove.

Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.

Unfortunately, the media spotlight so cheaply won by Cyrus will inevitably spur repeats of her silly stunt, by her and others. Image and profile now rule the music industry. At a time when profits are coming far more from touring than from CD sales, performers are being hammered too early into a marketable formula for cavernous sports venues. With their massive computerized lighting and special-effects systems, arena shows make improvisation impossible and stifle the natural rapport with the audience that performers once had in vaudeville houses and jazz clubs. There is neither time nor space to develop emotional depth or creative skills.

Pop is an artistic tradition that deserves as much respect as any other. Its lineage stretches back to 17th century Appalachian folk songs and African-American blues, all of which can still be heard vibrating in the lyrics and chord structure of contemporary music. But our most visible young performers, consumed with packaging and attitude, seem to have little sense of that thrilling continuity and therefore no confidence in how it can define and sustain their artistic identities over the course of a career.

What was perhaps most embarrassing about Miley Cyrus’ dismal gig was its cutesy toys — a giant teddy bear from which she popped to cavort with a dance troupe in fuzzy bear drag. Intended to satirize her Disney past, it signaled instead the childishness of Cyrus’ notion of sexuality, which has become simply a cartoonish gimmick to disguise a lack of professional focus. Sex isn’t just exposed flesh and crude gestures. The greatest performers, like Madonna in a canonical video such as “Vogue,” know how to use suggestion and mystery to project the magic of sexual allure. Miley, go back to school!


Read more: Camille Paglia: What Miley Cyrus’ Stunt Reveals About Music Business | TIME.com

 

[Pearl]

Its all desperation to shock people to gain publicity and sales. Too bad people aren't easily shocked these days, unless you get really offensive or taboo, and then that signals we are out of ideas.

 

[Galeongirl]

man I missed quite a bit of this thread by being out. I see most has been adressed already.

What about when things need to be fixed around the house? When the lawn needs mowing? When heavy shit needs lifting? When the garbage needs to be taken out? I'm sure there are at least some 'gender politics' that work in the other direction you'd be happy to work within. That isn't a complaint, it's just the way things sometimes are and that's ok

Gender roles only still exist because people still encourage them. BOTH men and women do that.

Around our house, sure, some still exist. My mother does the laundry, I help with it because I ahve the time to fold it. And my dad is the most technical of us so yeah, if I can't fix something he will.

The point is, that most 'traditional' sexist roles don't actually exist in our house. Both parents and me cook, depending on who's home the earliest. Usually my dad on his days off and the weekend and my mother or me on the weekdays. We all do things we're good at, I fix a lot of things around the house, and I lift all the heavy shit because they both have shitty backs and I'm pretty damn strong with my 10 years of karate training. Sure, I don't know how to do some technical things, I can fix a bike tyre and drill shit and fix small things, but the electrical things my dad does. Because he knows how it's done. We all have our tasks, yet none of those were decided by our sex. They were decided by our capabilities.

Sure sexism still exists, but if you are aware it exists around you it's up to YOU to change that. Yet far too many women around there go play the sexism card and whine about it, rather than actually changing a damn thing about it. It's like the Surinam kid coming into my father's liquor store, and when he asked for her ID to see if she's over 18 to buy booze, she went on and cried racism. Maybe, on some accounts, we're going a bit too far with these things.






OH and for what it's worth, I haven't seen either the VMA's or the Blurred Lines clip. I get a fairly good idea from what I've read here, and it is typical that she gets the most shit from the performance when he doesn't. Then again, he got a load of shite on his video already. Either way, both achieve their goal. THey're being talked about, popular, ka ching. Moneyz. Sex sells.

 

[Irvine511]

as i always say in these situations, look to the gays:

By and large, all of the families studied, gay and straight alike, were happy, high functioning, and financially secure. Each type of partner—gay, straight; man, woman—reported satisfaction with his or her family’s parenting arrangement, though the heterosexual wife was less content than the others, invariably saying that she wanted more help from her husband. “Of all the parents we’ve studied, she’s the least satisfied with the division of labor,” says Patterson, who is in a same-sex partnership and says she knows from experience that deciding who will do what isn’t always easy.

Even as they are more egalitarian in their parenting styles, same-sex parents resemble their heterosexual counterparts in one somewhat old-fashioned way: a surprising number establish a division of labor whereby one spouse becomes the primary earner and the other stays home. Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me that, “in terms of economics,” same-sex couples with children resemble heterosexual couples with children much more than they resemble childless same-sex couples. You might say that gay parents are simultaneously departing from traditional family structures and leading the way back toward them.

In his seminal book A Treatise on the Family, published in 1981, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker argued that “specialization,” whereby one parent stays home and the other does the earning, is the most efficient way of running a household, because the at-home spouse enables the at-work spouse to earn more. Feminists, who had been fighting for domestic parity, not specialization, deplored this theory, rightly fearing that it could be harnessed to keep women at home. Now the example of gay and lesbian parents might give us all permission to relax a little: maybe sometimes it really is easier when one parent works and the other is the supplementary or nonearning partner, either because this is the natural order of things or because the American workplace is so greedy and unforgiving that something or somebody has to give. As Martha Ertman, a University of Maryland law professor, put it to me, many families just function better when the same person is consistently “in charge of making vaccinations happen, making sure the model of the World War II monument gets done, getting the Christmas tree home or the challah bought by 6 o’clock on Friday.” The good news is that the decision about which parent plays this role need not have anything to do with gender.

More surprising still, guess who is most likely to specialize. Gay dads. Using the most recent Census Bureau data, Gary Gates found that 32 percent of married heterosexual couples with children have only one parent in the labor force, compared with 33 percent of gay-male couples with children. (Lesbians also specialize, but not at such high rates, perhaps because they are so devoted to equality, or perhaps because their earnings are lower—women’s median wage is 81 percent that of men—and not working is an unaffordable luxury.) While the percentage point dividing gay men from straight couples is not statistically significant, it’s intriguing that gay dads are as likely as straight women to be stay-at-home parents.

The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss - Liza Mundy - The Atlantic

 

[Jive Turkey]

and it is typical that she gets the most shit from the performance when he doesn't.

If you watch the performance, you'll see she deserves the majority of the shit. She acted like a dickhead

 

[AEON]

as i always say in these situations, look to the gays:

Interesting observation.

You might say that gay parents are simultaneously departing from traditional family structures and leading the way back toward them.

 

[Irvine511]

AEON, i encourage you to read that whole article.

 

[Pearl]

In his seminal book A Treatise on the Family, published in 1981, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker argued that “specialization,” whereby one parent stays home and the other does the earning, is the most efficient way of running a household, because the at-home spouse enables the at-work spouse to earn more. Feminists, who had been fighting for domestic parity, not specialization, deplored this theory, rightly fearing that it could be harnessed to keep women at home. Now the example of gay and lesbian parents might give us all permission to relax a little: maybe sometimes it really is easier when one parent works and the other is the supplementary or nonearning partner, either because this is the natural order of things or because the American workplace is so greedy and unforgiving that something or somebody has to give. As Martha Ertman, a University of Maryland law professor, put it to me, many families just function better when the same person is consistently “in charge of making vaccinations happen, making sure the model of the World War II monument gets done, getting the Christmas tree home or the challah bought by 6 o’clock on Friday.” The good news is that the decision about which parent plays this role need not have anything to do with gender.

Sadly with this economy, it requires two or more paychecks to maintain the house and raise even one kid. Some friends of my sisters' wish they could be stay-at-home moms so they can be there for their kids, instead of leaving the kids at daycare or the nearest grandmother.

 

[Jive Turkey]

Sadly with this economy, it requires two or more paychecks to maintain the house and raise even one kid. Some friends of my sisters' wish they could be stay-at-home moms so they can be there for their kids, instead of leaving the kids at daycare or the nearest grandmother.

I've known a few couples who couldn't work because of daycare. It ended up most of the extra money they were earning was just going to pay for daycare anyway

 

[Pearl]

I've known a few couples who couldn't work because of daycare. It ended up most of the extra money they were earning was just going to pay for daycare anyway

Yeah one of those couples talked about giving up on daycare, but they don't think they can survive without their jobs. I don't know where they are now with their decision.

 

[Jive Turkey]

Put the kids to work

 

[Pearl]

I know you're joking there.

 

[Jive Turkey]

.....or am i?

 

[Galeongirl]

as i always say in these situations, look to the gays:

Maybe that changed my view on things a bit, as when you're in an equal relationship you cannot depend on any traditional values. So we have to figure it out all on our own.

If you watch the performance, you'll see she deserves the majority of the shit. She acted like a dickhead

Figures.

 

[Dfit00]

Sadly with this economy, it requires two or more paychecks to maintain the house and raise even one kid.

One of my sister-in-law's friends lives in Seattle with her husband and four kids, all under the age of 10.
He's the only that works and has an income of about $6,000 per month but his savings are just under $200 per month.

Another good reason not to have kids.

 

[Pearl]

One of my sister-in-law's friends lives in Seattle with her husband and four kids, all under the age of 10.
He's the only that works and has an income of about $6,000 per month but his savings are just under $200 per month.

I think in that case, the mother can work but it will have to be something done at home. I don't know what her skills are, but it is possible to start a small business at home or freelance. I know she has four young kids, but there could be room for some income.

 

[AEON]

AEON, i encourage you to read that whole article.

It was a thought provoking article. Thanks for sharing. Here's some quote from it I found intriguing:

What if same-sex marriage does change marriage, but primarily for the better? For one thing, there is reason to think that, rather than making marriage more fragile, the boom of publicity around same-sex weddings could awaken among heterosexuals a new interest in the institution, at least for a time. But the larger change might be this: by providing a new model of how two people can live together equitably

Intriguingly, in Norway and Sweden, where registered partnerships for same-sex couples have been in place for about two decades (full-fledged marriage was introduced several years ago), research has found that lesbians are twice as likely as gay men to split up. If women become dissatisfied even when married to other women, maybe the problem with marriage isn’t men. Maybe women are too particular. Maybe even women don’t know what women want. These are the kinds of things that we will be able to tease out.

Not all is broken within modern marriage, of course. On the contrary: the institution is far more flexible and forgiving than it used to be. In the wake of women’s large-scale entry into the workplace, men are less likely than they once were to be saddled with being a family’s sole breadwinner, and can carve out a life that includes the close companionship of their children. Meanwhile, women are less likely to be saddled with the sole responsibility for child care and housework, and can envision a life beyond the stove top and laundry basket.

 

[bono_212]

If you watch the performance, you'll see she deserves the majority of the shit. She acted like a dickhead

Thank you. I didn't give a shit about the way she was dressed or the things she did: She was being a complete idiot and that was the worst part of it, to me.

Like many are saying, Miley so bad wants the world to see her as a grown-up and all she looks like is a 10 year old wearing her big sister's clothes and make-up and screaming, "Look at me!"

 

[BonosSaint]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/education/harvard-case-study-gender-equity.html?hp

Quite a long article about a Harvard Business School experiment to improve gender relations/female performance in the school. I hadn't heard about the experiment before this and found the article provocative. I'm not necessarily advocating it since this is my first exposure to it, but some of what I see in the article rings true to my experience, not just in bias but in the expectations women have of themselves and how often they accept lower expectations and how the expectations do affect performance--or perhaps how performance is judged even by themselves. I do think that in general women are less confident than men past a certain point and perhaps an experiment like that can instill a confidence and a presence that we seem to be lacking.

I like to see things shaken up a little, although I'm sure many of the guys thought they were not getting their money's worth.

 

[Irvine511]

i don't disagree with a lot of this.

The Patriarchy Is Dead, Feminists, accept it.
By Hanna Rosin|Posted Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2013, at 11:35 AM

It's true that women don't fill half of all congressional seats. But that shouldn't stop us from realizing how revolutionary it is to have powerful women like Kirsten Gillibrand, Claire McCaskill, and Tammy Baldwin in Congress.

You would think that a book called The End of Men would be, prima facie, an insult to men. But one of the great surprises I’ve had while speaking about the book over the last year is how little resistance I have gotten from the aggrieved sex. Yes, I’ve been to a forum or two where dude-bros from the men’s rights movement accuse me of destroying American manhood. But most of the resistance to the idea that men have ceased to be the dominant sex has come from women—not from working-class women, who seem to find what I’m describing painfully familiar, if not totally obvious, but from women in the college, professional class.

There comes a point in nearly every book event I’ve done when a little feminist revolt stirs inside the crowd. I can feel it coming when an audience saves its whole-hearted applause for the first moment I mention a sin committed against the women of America—say, our appalling lack of paid maternity leave (which is appalling!). Or when a questioner quotes to me in a triumphant tone statistics about the tiny percentage of female CEOs, as if I had never heard them before.

“Let’s call it what it is: THE PATRIARCHY.” This was a comment from a young woman at an event I was moderating on Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Though Slaughter and I have many points of agreement, we tend to draw a different crowd, or mood. Women come to hear her when they feel like they’ve hit a wall, and need to commiserate. They want to vent about their frustrations, not hear how they’ve prevailed.

“Can you say that word? PATRIARCHY?” This woman was not gunning for a laugh; she was dead serious, and pretty angry. She looked to be 30 or so, and from the way she spoke seemed well-educated—the type of woman I portray in the book as benefiting from the new era of female dominance, when women are better prepared for the current economy and have more independence to choose their life path.

As the woman spoke, I started to think of my own Slaughter moment, when, after the birth of my first child, I decided to work four days a week, a capitulation that sank me into a terrible depression. (If only Sheryl Sandberg had been around then to tell me to “Lean in!”) I tried to figure out who, in the series of events that led up to that decision, had played the role of the patriarch. My husband? He couldn’t care less how many days I work. My employer? Relatively benevolent and supportive— willing to let me work four days or five, willing to let me leave early. I suppose the patriarchy was lurking somewhere in my subconscious, tricking me into believing that it was more my duty to stay home with our new baby than my husband’s. But I didn’t see it as a “duty.” I wanted to stay home with her, and I also wanted to work like a fiend. It was complicated and confusing, a combination of my personal choices, the realities of a deadline-driven newsroom, and the lack of a broader infrastructure to support working parents—certainly too complicated to pin on a single enemy.

I said some version of this out loud from the stage, partly because I was looking for sympathy, and partly because I wanted to convey that the “patriarchy” was not a fixed monolith we could never get around but something shifting and changing and open to analysis. But that confessional approach only brought more ire. “Lucky for you that you have the luxury to agonize about your choices,” the young woman said. “What about the woman who picks up your trash after you leave at 5?”

This is when I knew I was dealing with some irrational attachment to the concept of unfair. For my book I’d interviewed plenty of women who might find themselves picking up the trash, likely as a second job after a full day of school or another job, or both, because their husbands—or, more likely, the fathers of their children—were out of work. My young interrogator might be annoyed to learn that many of those women who pick up the trash yearn to bring back at least some aspects of the patriarchy. They generally appreciate their new economic independence and feel pride at holding their families together, at working and studying and doing things on their own, but sometimes they long to have a man around who would pay the bills and take care of them and make a life for them in which they could work less. And they want the men in their lives to be happy. It’s elite feminists like my questioner and me who cling to the dreaded patriarchy just as he is walking out of our lives.

A few months after my book came out, sociologist Stephanie Coontz published an editorial in the New York Times that was headlined “The Myth of Male Decline,” which summarized many of the responses to my book in order to support her argument that the end of men was nowhere in sight. Many of the points made by Coontz and other members of what Liza Mundy, author of The Richer Sex, calls the academic “Fempire” are true, in a selective sort of way that elides other truths. I notice they often choose the statistics that make women look the most beleaguered.

For example, one figure that both Mundy and I cite in our books, and that has provoked much angry dissent, is how many wives earn more money than their husbands. We all agree that the proportion of female breadwinners leapt from only 4 percent in 1970 to nearly 30 percent in 2010. Coontz, however, discounts this gain by arguing that when we look at all married couples, not just dual-earner couples, the numbers look much weaker because some wives don’t work at all. This is a fair point. But if we are going to add on extra data samples, then I offer another, more relevant one: the growing number of single mothers. The United States is undergoing an explosion not of full-time stay-at-home mothers but of single mothers who are often, for better or worse, the main breadwinners for their families by default. We recently passed the threshold, for example, at which more than half of all births to mothers under 30 were to single mothers. I’m not sure this counts as feminist progress, but it does count as a profound shift in the traditional power dynamics of the American family.

Coontz also makes the broader point that women, even college-educated women, continue to flock to less prestigious jobs. She points out that woman are even more concentrated now than they were before in the professions of legal secretary or “managers of medicine and health occupations.” We can call the pattern of women’s jobs by its old, disparaging name, “gender segregation,” and insist on seeing it as a choice that is imposed on them. But we can also see it through a new paradigm—as Coontz in her own work has so successfully encouraged us to do vis-à-vis marriage—that acknowledges women as agents making intelligent decisions about what jobs are available in this economy. Maybe women are choosing health occupations because the health care field is booming, not because they are blindly walking—or being led—into a female ghetto.

What surprised me most about Coontz’s piece was not its content but the collective sigh of relief it seemed to generate. “Marry me, Stephanie Coontz,” tweeted the immensely talented and successful journalist Irin Carmon. “Stephanie Coontz is a national treasure and I wish her work were required reading for everyone in the world,” blogged Jill Filipovic, a lawyer and writer on Feministe, who went on to explain how all this “women are dominating … stuff” is not quite true. The women who seemed to be reveling in Coontz’s insistence that reports of the end of men (and the rise of women) have been greatly exaggerated were by and large young and ambitious, and as far as I could tell hadn’t been held back all that much in their careers by “the patriarchy.” Many of them are in positions of influence, widely published and widely read; if they sniff out misogyny, I have no doubt they will gleefully skewer the responsible sexist in one of many available online outlets, and get results. These are exactly the types of woman I portray in the book as benefiting from the new age of female dominance. Why should they feel reassured to be told that men are still on top, that the old order had not been shaken?

The 2012 elections inspired a similar reactionary response in some quarters. A record number of women were elected to Congress, bringing their number to a third of the membership, the level many sociologists cite as a tipping point when a minority becomes normalized and starts to enter the mainstream. In other words, it’s no longer big news when a woman gets elected; it’s the expected. Another big story was how critical women had been to Obama’s re-election, particularly single women. And yet soon after the election, the New York Times published as its lead op-ed a study by two academics showing that women would not truly reach parity or be in a position to pass women-friendly policies until they controlled half of all congressional seats. This seems true enough, if a little obvious. But it entirely missed the revolutionary shift the moment marked. There was a group marginalized in the election: white men. They voted en masse for Mitt Romney, and lost.

This bean counting and monitoring—an outdated compulsion to keep your guard up, because sexism lurks everywhere—has found new life online, where feminist websites (including our own) and the Twitter police are always on the lookout for the next slight.

Sometimes the critical eye is useful, such as this week when outrage over sexist and racists tweets got Business Insider exec Pax Dickinson pushed out. (Though this is not a sign of THE PATRIARCHY—this is relatively easy victory.) Sometimes it’s just petty, like when Jennifer Weiner recently complained about a critic calling her “strident.” As a form of blogging or tweeting, pointing fingers is endlessly satisfying. But as a form of political expression, it’s pretty hollow and out of tune with reality.

This strain of feminism assumes an exquisite vulnerability, an image of women as “creatures too ‘tender’ for the abrasiveness of daily life,” as Joan Didion put it in her 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement.” (Is this why we now put “trigger warnings” on stories that mention rape or sexual harassment?) Maybe now we pay such close attention to words like “strident” because they are all we have, the only way to access the outrage of darker days. If so, we should treasure them as tokens of how far we’ve come. After all, if the most obnoxious members of the patriarchy can be brought down by a few tweets, how powerful can they really be?

In the early days of the feminist movement, every small victory was celebrated. There was exultation, liberation, a sense of joy at women’s progress that seems largely absent today. Somehow the mood of the movement has shifted into reverse: The closer women get to real power, the more they cling to the idea that they are powerless. To rejoice about feminist victories these days counts as betrayal.

A month after my book came out, I was invited to an academic conference dedicated largely to rebutting the claims I had made in it. The participants came from many fields—law, sociology, anthropology—but were people who had spent their careers exploring social inequality. This issue is probably the most important one the United States and a number of other countries face, ever more so as the gap between rich and poor expands. But as I sat through the conference, I realized that the study of inequality has an occupational hazard: After decades of looking for certain patterns, they may become all you can see. The phenomenon reminds me of the famous study in which researchers asked subjects viewing a video clip to count how many times basketball players wearing a certain color shirt passed a ball. A giant gorilla walked across the screen in the course of the video, but many subjects failed to see it, so focused were they on the patterns they’d been instructed to watch.

I understand that the big picture is not always reflected in women’s daily experience of life. Maybe a woman has an overbearing husband or a retrograde boss or just a lingering problem that has no name. But as a collective, it sometimes feels that women look too closely at the spot right in front of us. This is a moment, unprecedented in history—and also pretty confusing—when young women who work how they want and have sex how they want may also quilt and can fruits. When working-class women who quietly leave the only steady paycheck on the kitchen table every week may still believe that a man is the God-ordained head of the household. So I want to tell these women who are seeing only oppression: Look around.

The end of men: Why feminists won’t accept that things are looking up for women. - Slate Magazine

 

[jimmmm]

The Patriarchy Is Dead, Feminists, accept it.
By Hanna Rosin|Posted Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2013, at 11:35 AM

It's true that women don't fill half of all cong

Anyway, it was at this point I got bored with this and ordered my wife to put the kettle on!

 

[deep]

should this thread be in a forum "For Women Only"?