Feminism, femininity, and marriage

[Anonymous]

Pretty interesting, especially when you throw the recent studies about men not marrying in to the mix.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/05/01/why-men-wont-marry.html

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I think we all need to take a step back and get some perspective. Recent generations have been through unthinkable, enormous, comprehensive changes. There are huge differences in every generation to the one before it. My grandparents lived wildly different lives than my parents, mine is different to both, my childrens' different to each preceding. And these culture and environment changes are not small, and we can't rely on previous experience to negotiate them, nor can we be sure we can find people we see eye to eye with to form new relationships.

It's tough. It's challenging on everybody in various ways at different milestones in the life cycle.

Some perspective on this will help us move forward cooperatively and compassionately.

This is good advice. I see a lot of the "mansplaining" about feminism's evils to be sour grapes about necessary changes that have happened as our society becomes more competitive, global, and modern.

I'm the OP, and I agree this is good advice. Also, I have to apologize for using "feminism" as a shorthand for something that is more like "the manner in which societal trends of the past several decades have influenced women to evaluate their role and the role of their gender in society." Some of that is "feminism," but not all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:[W]e expect and demand more from men, more than a roof over our heads and a steady income. We expect men to have good self esteem, integrity, emotional health and maturity, a good work ethic, and good parenting and partner skills. As the playing field has leveled, men have had to up their game. And the antifeminists are the ones who can't or don't want to. They are the ones who can't adapt.

. . .

Anonymous wrote:I don't get it. Why don't men pick up the devotion to children and hearth and home aspects of "femininity"?

I think Ironwood's partial response to that is, "Sure, Masculinity ain't what it used to be either, and we own that. We allowed ourselves to be talked out of our better masculine nature in the false hope that it would lead to a better domestic life, social harmony, and more sex. What we got was more demands, more requirements, and less sex."

Some do take up hearth and home, but the manospherians will tell you that these men generally aren't as attractive to women. Anecdotally, I've certainly seen around here that a lot of women want a "man's man," and/or "a provider." So, if a young man's options are to make himself less attractive by taking care of hearth & home or to remain attractive in exchange for more demands, more requirements, and less sex, he's likely to just check out, sleep around where he can (play video games and watch porn where he can't), but not commit to marriage.

So the solution per the Manosphere is that women should both keep children/home, as well as have careers, yet not get bitter towards their men?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they want a woman to stay home with the kids and cook, there are plenty of women who enjoy that out there, who have made the choice to do that instead of a career (but the choice is thanks to feminism).

One of the allegations in the post is that there is social pressure by feminists against women who are content with running a family.

Who cares? What woman lets that influence her? Also, how does that negatively affect men?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:[W]e expect and demand more from men, more than a roof over our heads and a steady income. We expect men to have good self esteem, integrity, emotional health and maturity, a good work ethic, and good parenting and partner skills. As the playing field has leveled, men have had to up their game. And the antifeminists are the ones who can't or don't want to. They are the ones who can't adapt.

. . .

Anonymous wrote:I don't get it. Why don't men pick up the devotion to children and hearth and home aspects of "femininity"?

I think Ironwood's partial response to that is, "Sure, Masculinity ain't what it used to be either, and we own that. We allowed ourselves to be talked out of our better masculine nature in the false hope that it would lead to a better domestic life, social harmony, and more sex. What we got was more demands, more requirements, and less sex."

Some do take up hearth and home, but the manospherians will tell you that these men generally aren't as attractive to women. Anecdotally, I've certainly seen around here that a lot of women want a "man's man," and/or "a provider." So, if a young man's options are to make himself less attractive by taking care of hearth & home or to remain attractive in exchange for more demands, more requirements, and less sex, he's likely to just check out, sleep around where he can (play video games and watch porn where he can't), but not commit to marriage.

Well then, luckily loser dude won't be passing on his genes or personality to any future generations. So this generation of failure men -- ones who can't help out at home and also can't live up to higher expectations -- will die out. Fingers crossed all the FWB women they are hooking up with are feminist enough to use BC.

Do you think family life is, as a whole, happier, less happy, or about the same as it was 100 years ago? Do you think feminism had an impact one way or the other?

Family life as a whole is much happier than it was 35 years ago, and it's mostly due to feminism. My mother spent a lot of time scrubbing floors and the oven, worried what other people would think of her as a wife and mother if she didn't have a spotless house. Me? I pay someone to do a half assed job twice a month, and WTF cares? I fiercely and tender mother my kids, have great sex with my husband and have a career that's perfect for me. That's progress, and happiness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's pretty simple, women. Either abandon feminism or abandon all hope of being wives and mothers. Because men will not abide feminism and you cannot force us to accept it.

Get ready to never have children, then.

[Anonymous]

Japanese are apparently opting for non-marriage and celibacy:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex

"Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. Japanese men have become less career-driven, and less solvent, as lifetime job security has waned. Japanese women have become more independent and ambitious. Yet conservative attitudes in the home and workplace persist. Japan's punishing corporate world makes it almost impossible for women to combine a career and family, while children are unaffordable unless both parents work. Cohabiting or unmarried parenthood is still unusual, dogged by bureaucratic disapproval.

Aoyama says the sexes, especially in Japan's giant cities, are "spiralling away from each other". Lacking long-term shared goals, many are turning to what she terms "Pot Noodle love" – easy or instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality "girlfriends", anime cartoons. Or else they're opting out altogether and replacing love and sex with other urban pastimes."
. . .
"Satoru Kishino, 31, belongs to a large tribe of men under 40 who are engaging in a kind of passive rebellion against traditional Japanese masculinity. Amid the recession and unsteady wages, men like Kishino feel that the pressure on them to be breadwinning economic warriors for a wife and family is unrealistic. They are rejecting the pursuit of both career and romantic success.

"It's too troublesome," says Kishino, when I ask why he's not interested in having a girlfriend. "I don't earn a huge salary to go on dates and I don't want the responsibility of a woman hoping it might lead to marriage." Japan's media, which has a name for every social kink, refers to men like Kishino as "herbivores" or soshoku danshi (literally, "grass-eating men"). Kishino says he doesn't mind the label because it's become so commonplace. He defines it as "a heterosexual man for whom relationships and sex are unimportant"."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's pretty simple, women. Either abandon feminism or abandon all hope of being wives and mothers. Because men will not abide feminism and you cannot force us to accept it.

Meaning, you won't marry someone with a better job than yours?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's pretty simple, women. Either abandon feminism or abandon all hope of being wives and mothers. Because men will not abide feminism and you cannot force us to accept it.

Ha, you just made me laugh out loud. This town is full of feminist wives and mothers. I think you don't know what "feminist" actually means.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

"Family life"? What does that mean? You mean how happy men were with their families? Or how happy everyone was to be taken care of by someone who didn't have a choice because that was the only role that person had in society?

I can guarantee you I'm a whole lot happier now than I would have been living in 1915. Women couldn't even vote then.

I guess if the term "family life" causes such confusion, then concerns that modern trends have eroded the family are not overblown.

Also, this seems to be evidence that feminism does, in fact, encourage women to view the family as a tool of patriarchal oppression; not a life to be chosen by serious women with options.

I actually think that it is evidence that feminism does, in fact, encourage women to believe that they should be part of deciding how their family is structured and who is responsible for what in that family system. If a woman does not want to have children, and she is pressured into having children by her husband, that absolutely becomes "the family as a tool of patriarchal oppression." Many posters on this board are married women who established their own careers and had children only when they felt that they were professionally, personally and financially ready to do that. Then many of them (us) went back to our careers after our children were born. Many of them (us) also have stayed home with our children for various amounts of time. The problem is the process, not the outcome.

If the "family life" you're describing mandates that the first baby arrives approximately 9 months after the marriage, that the father is the one responsible for going to work and earning a paycheck while the mother stays home to raise the children and take care of the house, that "family life" is only NOT a tool of oppression if that is what everyone wants. If it was a joint decision.

[Anonymous]

My wife is a feminist, but when we had kids we eventually settled on an arrangement that leans toward the "traditional" side. I work full time. She took the IT skills she had and developed a business she could run from home and works during school hours. Meanwhile, I do considerably more care giving and chores than my father or grandfather would have done. Neither of us is ideologically rigid but are open to solutions that work best for our particular situation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Well then, luckily loser dude won't be passing on his genes or personality to any future generations. So this generation of failure men -- ones who can't help out at home and also can't live up to higher expectations -- will die out. Fingers crossed all the FWB women they are hooking up with are feminist enough to use BC.

It is the feminists who are not breeding and who will die out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's pretty simple, women. Either abandon feminism or abandon all hope of being wives and mothers. Because men will not abide feminism and you cannot force us to accept it.

Ha, you just made me laugh out loud. This town is full of feminist wives and mothers. I think you don't know what "feminist" actually means.

They are the last zombies staggering around. Men aren't going to put up with that bullshit. It's not worth the aggravation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they want a woman to stay home with the kids and cook, there are plenty of women who enjoy that out there, who have made the choice to do that instead of a career (but the choice is thanks to feminism).

One of the allegations in the post is that there is social pressure by feminists against women who are content with running a family.

This is my takeaway as well. I'm a feminist, but I think the feminist movement in it's current incarnation rewards women for developing traditionally masculine traits (ambition and competitiveness come to mind) while distancing itself from the "softer, gentler" feminine image. It encourages women to do well and to strive mightily in the public sphere, but seems to dismiss (or just ignore) the call of the domestic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's pretty simple, women. Either abandon feminism or abandon all hope of being wives and mothers. Because men will not abide feminism and you cannot force us to accept it.

Get ready to never have children, then.

Yeah, this. Women can have children without men, pretty easily, too. If what guys like this want is to have a woman raising kids, having a career, and having a useless husband along for the ride, I can see why a lot of women cut the useless husband part but keep the kids and career.