I love the above scene. I don't self-identify as a feminist and never have. I was a homemaker for about two decades and self-proclaimed feminists tend to be openly hostile to me.
It seems to be rooted in this idea that women as a group need to somehow choose one path or the other: Either support a world that is friendly to homemakers and full-time moms or support a world that is friendly to career women.
That's not real. That's deluded garbage for so many reasons.
Historically, serious career type jobs were designed with an implicit assumption that it would be filled by a cis het married man with a wife at home doing the cooking, cleaning and grocery shopping so as to free up his time and energy to be the primary breadwinner. This worked because hetero relationships tend to produce children, especially back in the day -- we have better birth control options these days -- and he would get good pay with benefits and this allowed one paid job to provide The Good Life for four or more people (mom, dad and 2.5 kids).
So as we move away from subsistence existence cultures because at least some parts of the world are less poor than humans were for most of our history, women's lib is this idea that women can have serious careers too and not just be homemakers, financially dependent on a man.
The problem is this still tends to implicitly assume a cis het couple and the reality is that such "feminist" ideals don't actually lead to the liberation of women. Instead, they lead to the liberation of upper class women who typically get their freedom by hiring others to do the women's work of raising the kids and doing the cooking and cleaning.
It is typically lower class women who take most such jobs.
So this model fails to actually liberate even heterosexual women as a group. It is a model that lets upper class women live somewhat like upper class men but it's got a LOT of problems baked into it.
As a former homemaker and survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I feel strongly that current models of women's lib not only pit the interests of upper class women against lower class women, they also shaft children.
I was molested in part because my older sister left for college when I was 11 and my mother began working when I was 12. For the first time in my life, this left me alone a LOT with a head-injured older brother with poor impulse control and I got molested by him.
I adored my older brother until he became my abuser. He was my FAVORITE family member up to that point, so not only was I victimized, but my dear, sweet brother was turned into a monster due to inadequate supervision as a legal minor -- aka child -- with a serious handicap that wasn't being adequately treated.
So I stayed home with my kids until my oldest was nineteen. My sons were never molested, mostly because I made sure there was damn little opportunity for such behavior towards my children.
This is before we get into the issue that LGBTQ individuals are at high risk of homelessness and generally shafted by this societal model that implicitly assumes that "good jobs" are jobs designed for a cis het married male with a wife doing all the women's work in his life.
The Butterfly Economy is a potential solution to a LOT of these issues. We need to design a world where work makes other assumptions that are more liberating for people generally so people can make choices and design a life of their choosing to some degree regardless of gender, sexual orientation, etc.
Women's lib is broken because it tries to fit itself into the existing model and it ends up being a situation where women aspire to the model of "success" we currently have, a model that relatively few men can attain and far fewer women. We need a different model, one that does away with the practice of implicitly designing jobs for cis het married men with a full-time wife at home while pretending we do no such thing.
We absolutely do such a thing. It would help as a first step to at least acknowledge that fact and admit that it's problematic for all the people who will never be a cis het married man with a full-time wife doing the women's work for them.
It seems to be rooted in this idea that women as a group need to somehow choose one path or the other: Either support a world that is friendly to homemakers and full-time moms or support a world that is friendly to career women.
That's not real. That's deluded garbage for so many reasons.
Historically, serious career type jobs were designed with an implicit assumption that it would be filled by a cis het married man with a wife at home doing the cooking, cleaning and grocery shopping so as to free up his time and energy to be the primary breadwinner. This worked because hetero relationships tend to produce children, especially back in the day -- we have better birth control options these days -- and he would get good pay with benefits and this allowed one paid job to provide The Good Life for four or more people (mom, dad and 2.5 kids).
So as we move away from subsistence existence cultures because at least some parts of the world are less poor than humans were for most of our history, women's lib is this idea that women can have serious careers too and not just be homemakers, financially dependent on a man.
The problem is this still tends to implicitly assume a cis het couple and the reality is that such "feminist" ideals don't actually lead to the liberation of women. Instead, they lead to the liberation of upper class women who typically get their freedom by hiring others to do the women's work of raising the kids and doing the cooking and cleaning.
It is typically lower class women who take most such jobs.
So this model fails to actually liberate even heterosexual women as a group. It is a model that lets upper class women live somewhat like upper class men but it's got a LOT of problems baked into it.
As a former homemaker and survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I feel strongly that current models of women's lib not only pit the interests of upper class women against lower class women, they also shaft children.
I was molested in part because my older sister left for college when I was 11 and my mother began working when I was 12. For the first time in my life, this left me alone a LOT with a head-injured older brother with poor impulse control and I got molested by him.
I adored my older brother until he became my abuser. He was my FAVORITE family member up to that point, so not only was I victimized, but my dear, sweet brother was turned into a monster due to inadequate supervision as a legal minor -- aka child -- with a serious handicap that wasn't being adequately treated.
So I stayed home with my kids until my oldest was nineteen. My sons were never molested, mostly because I made sure there was damn little opportunity for such behavior towards my children.
This is before we get into the issue that LGBTQ individuals are at high risk of homelessness and generally shafted by this societal model that implicitly assumes that "good jobs" are jobs designed for a cis het married male with a wife doing all the women's work in his life.
The Butterfly Economy is a potential solution to a LOT of these issues. We need to design a world where work makes other assumptions that are more liberating for people generally so people can make choices and design a life of their choosing to some degree regardless of gender, sexual orientation, etc.
Women's lib is broken because it tries to fit itself into the existing model and it ends up being a situation where women aspire to the model of "success" we currently have, a model that relatively few men can attain and far fewer women. We need a different model, one that does away with the practice of implicitly designing jobs for cis het married men with a full-time wife at home while pretending we do no such thing.
We absolutely do such a thing. It would help as a first step to at least acknowledge that fact and admit that it's problematic for all the people who will never be a cis het married man with a full-time wife doing the women's work for them.