Never Odd or Even

Anti-Feminism = Feminism

A Letter

A confused and insightful TED:

Anne-Marie Slaughter accidentally hits the nail on the head -- men earn more $$$ because most women prefer successful men while a financially unsuccessful woman can still be a catch. This TED is, ironically, full of Warren Farrell talking points, but it is dressed up to sound feminist and politically correct….it is TED after all. Notice how she says “we need to re-socialize men” but then finds the motivation of male behavior in female expectations. According to her argument, it is women who need to be re-socialized to prefer stay-at home fathers. The conversation about feminism we had at Epoch is not just theoretical, it is occurring in coffee shops and dinner tables across the country; we are seeing a sea change at every level of society, with the Humanities as the final holdout.

Also ironically, if we start to value domestic and paid labor equally (as she suggests we should) then there was nothing wrong with the housewives of the 50s after all. Furthermore, many of the countries she cites as aspirational models (Sweden etc) have equal or larger raw Gender Wage-Gaps than the US. For example, most people don’t know that Sweden has a raw wage gap of 26%-40% (depending on age), while the US has a wage gap of only 19.8%.

We live in interesting times; millennials don’t see themselves as feminists, and 20 years of the 3rd wave have made women less happy than at any other point in history since surveys began in the patriarchal 70s. Feminism told women that working for the family was oppression, but working in a “career” was liberating; as a female writer in the Atlantic put it, “it’s a bum deal.”

Also, on a side note for Katie and Marta, notice how she says “guys are now obsessing over the stove” like it’s a sign of positive social change. The Last Psychiatrist points out on many occasions that cooking is an activity that is solitary, but still seems like you’re interacting with the family. He states that many men pick up this hobby as a passive-aggressive way of avoiding the significant-other they married. As it turns out, it seems like men aren’t happy with the current arrangement either. Bum deals all around.