Hat tip to Patches. If you like anime, check out his blog, What About The Waifuz?
Oh, Lori, Lori, Lori.
If you’re not familiar with Lori Gottleib, she is best known as the author of Marry Him, a book about how women ought to stop looking for Mr. Right and marry Mr. Good Enough. While I suppose that that’s all well and good for people who are really just looking for a nice dress and a big party, I have to point out the one obvious flaw in this plan as a method of picking a life partner:
1) Imagine the person you’re considering settling for’s most annoying trait.
2) Imagine enduring it for the next forty years.
Just saying.
Anyway she has recently popped into my life with more of her usual wisdom, this time on the subject of having it all. It’s a response to this Atlantic article, which is interesting as far as it goes (and I do agree with the policy recommendations!), but also rather classist. The average person is not a partner at a law firm, or on a tenure track, or advising the president on foreign policy! Call me when you have work/life balance policy advice that applies to a single mom of three kids working two jobs for minimum wage.
Anyway: dear God Lori Gottlieb.
Would a man be taken seriously if he wrote a 15,000-word article stating that he’s entitled to both marriage and the freedom to have sex with any woman he wants?
First: it’s called polyamory, Lori. Look it up. I mean, it doesn’t give you the freedom to have sex with anyone you want– Tom Hiddleston still won’t return my calls– but it certainly gives you the ability to be married and have sex with people outside of marriage. Dear Horatio, heaven and earth, philosophy, et cetera.
Second: in what fucked-up excuse of a world is the male equivalent of “have children and a successful job” “be married and have sex with lots of people”? The male equivalent of having children and a successful job is having both children and a successful job except wait that completely disproves her point because that has been the expectation for professional men since the Industrial Revolution.
Seriously, I feel like joining Jill from Feministe’s brigade of people going about asking professional men how THEY balance work and family.
The way corporate life is set up still assumes that the average worker has a stay-at-home wife who will take care of the children, despite the fact that not only has it not been that way for forty years, for most of society it was never that way. So what we get is:
1) A bunch of people, mostly women, attempting to balance their careers and their families and doing a shit job of at least one and probably both.
2) A bunch of people, mostly men, who never see their kids and regret spending so much time working and never getting a chance to watch their children grow up.
I mean. Holy shit. That is a terrible way to run a society.
It’s not something that needs to be treated with platitudes about how you can’t have everything and comparisons to spoiled children. It’s something that can be fixed, with policies like the ones that Slaughter outlined in her article. Schedule most meetings during the school day? Accommodate people who have slowed down for a few months or years to work? These are not the stuff of whiny children, Ms. Gottlieb. These are practical accommodations for the fact that most people have children and need to take care of them.
Imagine a stay-at-home dad whose wife supports the family. Imagine if he had a nanny once or twice a week so that he could fit in some “me-time.”
Shorter Lori Gottlieb: “It’s unfair that people don’t think that upper-class single moms should be on the job 24/7 but do believe upper-class single dads should. We should make upper-class single moms be on the job 24/7 so it sucks for everyone!”
Related to gender inequality, besides working long hours and not getting enough sex, many husbands are also expected to do the laundry and change the diapers only to be told they’re doing it the wrong way and then endure eye rolls and sighs and admonishments. Meanwhile, do men ask their wives — working or not — to fix the leaky toilet, haul out the heavy garbage, and set up the baby gear with those 10-page instruction manuals, then go into a blind fury because she’s “doing it wrong”?
Lori, do… do you actually spend time with people outside of sitcoms?
Okay, first, while I understand the problems of high-libido people in relationships with low-libido people (dear GOD do I understand the problems of high-libido people in relationships with low-libido people), it’s kind of crappy to complain that your partner has the power to say no to sex. I mean, do you want them to have sex they’re not into?
Second, I have changed diapers, done laundry, hauled out heavy garbage, set up complicated systems with instruction manuals, and attempted to fix a leaky toilet (to be fair, my thing-repairing skills leave much to be desired). My observations:
1) Garbage takes like five minutes, toilets break maybe once every six months, and if you have to set up complicated systems more than about once a month you’ve either just moved or you’re buying too much shit. Diapers and laundry, however, are more-or-less CONSTANT. While everyone has individual choices and ultimately chore division depends on what’s right for each couple, the chore division outlined here is patently unfair.
2) Diapers? Not hard. Laundry? Not hard. Call me a man-hating feminazi, but I think the average man is fully capable of operating a washer AND a dryer, even if there’s bleach, dryer sheets, and lingerie that doesn’t go in the dryer, which is pretty much the most complicated laundry gets. So I’m suspicious how many of these women exist outside of Lori’s imagination.
I would love it if my wife’s laundry instructions were just 10x as complex as listed here. It’s really black magic, which is why we’re both happier if I don’t help.
Time to get two kids baths and bed.
I listened to a very nuanced NPR interview with Anne-Maria Slaughter, the author of the Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”: http://www.wbur.org/npr/155498926/the-impossible-juggling-act-motherhood-and-work Her main point (reiterated over and over) was that a) “work” in the traditional sense (hours at work = productivity, ass in the office = “working”, no distractions/no life = better worker, career = monotonically increasing ascent over time, etc) doesn’t really work for anyone these days, c) efficiency (most work accomplished in the least amount of time) is more important than sheer hours spent working, c) structural changes are crucially needed so that EVERYONE… Read more »
1) A bunch of people, mostly women, attempting to balance their careers and their families and doing a shit job of at least one and probably both. 2) A bunch of people, mostly men, who never see their kids and regret spending so much time working and never getting a chance to watch their children grow up. For some parts of history it was #2 for both sexes, though the upper classes had staff to do the bulk of the child-raising for them, and the lower classes had it done by the grandparents if they were lucky (if not the… Read more »
I dont have any problem with the reload either. Im using cometbird as browser.
Ok, someone needs to fire the webmaster of this place.
This whole “spontaneous reloading” thing has erased two of my posts so far, and I’m not wasting the time retyping them.
It pretty much eliminates any possibility of longer, more in-depth posts, because you get halfway through typing them, it reloads, and you’ve lost it all.
That’s odd, it saves my messages during the page reload. Are you sure you’re not doing anything with the comment box before the page has fully reloaded? Also, I insert my name and e-mail before typing anything else, in case that makes a difference. Or maybe it’s a browser thing, I’m using Firefox.
Use Opera.
Set “Reload Every” to “Never” (instead of “Page Default”)
Your browser will now ignore any reload request that’s not initiated by you.
Problem solved 😉
Not to defend Lori here but:
“1) Imagine the person you’re considering settling for’s most annoying trait.
2) Imagine enduring it for the next forty years.”
How is this not the case in any marriage, regardless of whether someone feels they are “settling” or not? Unless one plans on holding out for a person with no annoying traits whatsoever…. in which case, good luck.
Also, I’m despairing of the idea that I can be anyone’s Mr Right. Sigh.
All you have to do is put work first, last, and always.
You can have anything you want in this life as long as you don’t have the time, the energy, or the emotional intelligence for it.
Well, the idea of women’s opposition to men’s equal roles in child care isn’t that strange:
http://www.salon.com/writer/cathy_young/page/3/?mobile.html
Young is rather conservative in some ways and the article is over 10 years ago, but i think she has some good points.
Then, of course there was that woman who believed that any man who helps with bathroom duty at a daycare is a pedophile (can’t remember her name)
I think it’s pretty obvious we value the person who can CEO it more than the stay at homer. We pay one, and not the other and in the US and worlds focused on corporate identity we pay who we value. Which I find fucked up.
Also, Tom won’t call me back either. Nor will Cumberbatch. What’s up with that we are both so cool!
“I think it’s pretty obvious we value the person who can CEO it more than the stay at homer. We pay one, and not the other and in the US and worlds focused on corporate identity we pay who we value. Which I find fucked up.” Except being a CEO benefits the stock holders or the clients, at least, the people who have the money. Being a stay-at-home person benefits the family by spending less on services such as daycare and nanny, but you can’t say it benefits clients or stock holders. If society paid the stay-at-home person a decent… Read more »
“If society paid the stay-at-home person a decent wage, people who don’t even have kids would forego outside work in favor of it.” Man, fuck that shit. I’m one of those people who needs the structure of physically going to a workplace, doing things, and then coming home to relax. Without it, I get extremely depressed, even after one week at home (one of the good things about working as an educator is that you get built-in paid vacations). It’s actually one reason I’m glad to have boyfriends who work from home–whether I end up with one or both, it… Read more »
Did I say everyone would? I said some would. I can’t stomach outside work much barring exceptions employers rarely offer. They also aren’t all jumping to hire me, given my lack of experience, education, car, and desire to own a car (or a license), or my awfulness with working with the public, and my being trans (if not visibly so, it sure is legally so, employers would know before the first week, employees would know soon enough). Because not everyone loves the go out, come back home, relax model. Some people retch at the idea. Others hate overtime. Some even… Read more »
I still think it’s unrealistic to expect the CEO of a major company to have time to attend zir kid’s soccer games. Time is a limited resource: families take time, and careers take time. If you have a big family, then you’ll have less time for your career, and if you have a big career you’ll have less time for your family. We all have to make tradeoffs in life.
That being said, our culture is definately more tolerant of men choosing careers over family, and women choosing family over careers. We’ll probably need some affirmative action to change that.
There was a great piece that I remember in Bloomberg BusinessWeek a few months ago which profiled a few [upper-middle-or-higher class, obviously] couples that were DINK, but when it came time the N to become a W, they decided that since she had better career-advancement prospects, he became a SAHD. Dawn LePore (then CEO of drugstore.com; I don’t know if she stayed after Walgreens acquired the company) commented that it’s essentially impossible to be a public-company CEO without having a spouse who’s essentially the CEO of the home.
“it’s kind of crappy to complain that your partner has the power to say no to sex.” I think this goes back to the polyamory thing earlier. It seems a commonly accepted stereotype that all men are polyamorous but get forced into monogamy by social expectations and their partners. So it’s not about them being allowed to say no to having sex, but saying no to you having sex with other people (who do say yes). “So I’m suspicious how many of these women exist outside of Lori’s imagination.” That is because you imagine these women doing it because the… Read more »