The Math isn't Mathing

But with the invention of reliable birth control, the math behind everything heteronormative culture is based upon stops working. Being a sexually active adult no longer creates approximately one pregnancy per year and you stop needing ALL of a married woman's time to both tend to multiple children and also keep dad working at breakneck speed to pay the bills.

In this music video, somewhere a little after the midpoint there's like a mountain of Taylor Swifts and her also standing at the top in the center. Heteronormative culture is kind of like that, a pyramid of people with the male breadwinner at the top of the heap and the ENTIRE thing is necessary to try to get ANYTHING done.

Everything about heteronormative culture is based on an assumption of:

1. A male breadwinner and head of household making enough money to provide for a wife and multiple kids and sometimes other relatives, like his mom living in the mother-in-law suite after Dad dies.

2. A wife who MAY work part-time for pay, but whose primary obligation is to doing all the women's work and taking care of the kids so hubby is free to focus ENTIRELY on his job. So he doesn't have scheduling conflicts with trying to find time to take the kids to school or to the doctor or whatever and he doesn't have other duties competing for his mental space or time and energy, such as grocery shopping.

3. Multiple children because there's no birth control and in a rural subsistence culture, they become farm hands providing additional labor.

We invented birth control -- possibly in part because the transition to city living was already happening and in the city all those children are more mouths to feed without becoming productive farm hands starting at age four -- and people began having fewer children and the entire thing started falling apart.

There's no longer a pyramid of people who both hold Dad in that position and NEED him there so they can survive.

Women having only one or two children can be legal dependents for their parents for twenty-two years until they have a bachelor's, promptly marry and have kids and spend twenty or so years being devoted wives and moms if hubby makes enough money and still have around twenty years ahead of them before they are retirement age.

The most recent CDC data (2024) shows that women in the United States have an average life expectancy of 81.4 years. You potentially have around forty years in which women have "nothing to do" where they are adults and not responsible for raising children currently.

The natural consequence of this reality is women are entering the paid work force in droves. Unfortunately, we are not really thinking enough about how to handle this substantial cultural change.

It means women and men work and then who is supposed to be there consistently for the children? It means women are still largely expected to take care of certain things though they also have other obligations and are failing to be what their mothers and grandmothers were in terms of highly skilled at certain activities that was expected to be their entire focus for life.

Because historically if you had eight or ten children and life expectancies were lower, you could be dead or retirement age before the youngest was an adult. And with having many children, the cooking and cleaning and other women's work simply took ALL your time.

Last I checked, homemaking typically took up more than sixty hours a week for full-time homemakers and forty hours a week for employed women. Men took on an additional hour or two of chores at home if the wife worked and roughly twenty hours a week of housework simply stopped happening.

To some degree, you can get more efficient and you can use her income to purchase delivered meals or other services, but the way to bet is we are on average doing a worse job of taking care of the American people because moms are getting jobs and pursuing careers and society is still almost entirely designed with the assumption that serious careers are held by men who have a wife taking care of everything else so almost all of his physical energy and mental focus can be given to his job.

So most likely it also means average on the job performance is worse than it used to be as well. Because well-paid jobs continue to assume you can give forty or more hours a week to the job and almost all of your mental energy without being distracted by survival issues like "What am I going to eat for dinner?" while doing your job.

The title of this site is About how technology has changed the economy and the assumptions we've historically made don't really work anymore for trying to find some means to measure what is going on and whether it's good or bad, but there's a lot of other stuff also happening and there's no separating it out. 

It's not really possible to say women's lib is a separate issue from technological advancement. Grace Hopper was a famous computer scientist and in the middle of the last century, a LOT of computer jobs were initially held by women.

In fact, computer initially was a job title and a lot of NASA computers were women, many of them Black women as shown in the movie Hidden Figures which is based on real world events.

The pyramid of people of every nuclear family is disintegrating organically. There's no orderly transition here in this revolution.

And society is disintegrating as a consequence.

Men are still mostly not taught from birth how to adequately feed themselves or clean the house and tend to still feel compelled to have a woman in their life to take care of a lot of things women still get more educated about from birth by the parents, but most women today don't do and can't do what MY mother did.

I couldn't fill her shoes. She declined to teach me how to cook and clean and although I was told by people around me I cooked a LOT for a woman my age and they wished I would talk to their "microwave queen" wife, I didn't do HALF what my workaholic hyper competent traditional homemaker mother did who NEVER sat still and only watched TV while doing the ironing.

When she quit working to take care of my elderly father when he had cancer, she promptly bought paint and wallpaper to have something to DO while tending to him.

Very few women today are capable of doing what our mothers and grandmothers did on average.

So when men DO marry so SOMEONE can handle the women's work in their life, no matter how much he brings to the table, he's unlikely to be getting someone like my mother in his life. And that means he's less healthy, less energetic, less mentally focused than he optimally could be, so his productivity and job performance is also degraded.

Yet, government policies from the Federal, state and local governments and employer policies etc. continue to almost universally implicitly assume they are hiring a married man with a hyper competent traditional homemaker wife freeing him up to pour everything he has into The Job.

It's left us with a tidal wave of "broken homes" that fail to be the cog we need to keep this machine running smoothly. Almost no one is capable of adequately doing what the job requires because almost no one is a male head of household with a hyper competent traditional homemaker wife making him man enough for what the job demands.

And we aren't rethinking how we design jobs or housing or assumptions about lifestyle and culture or how we feed ourselves. We are watching everything fall apart while people try to force fit themselves to this model and fail.

Obamacare covers children up to age 26 which helps a lot of people, but it assumes the traditional nuclear family with financially secure parents. We have rising rates of homelessness and if you find yourself on the street with your adult children who are under age 26, homeless services almost universally treats you as individual adults and not a nuclear family.

If you have health issues, failing memory, or any other completely normal issue for a still mostly functional adult old enough to have adult children, this ACTIVELY strips poor people of their last remaining social support under terrible circumstances.

We have rising rates of homelessness because we continue to build suburban single family detached houses for well-heeled nuclear families and almost nothing else, though our demographics have changed substantially in recent decades.