Vendor lunch yesterday. Every one else from my company out sick or other commitments. Meh, I get some decent sushi out of it.
The sales guy plus two engineers for both halves of the company’s product lines we use.
So four middle aged white guys at the local asian-fusion joint. Sarah, our waitress, took our drink order and after she has left, sales guy goes, “Do you think she’s sexy?”
I give him the raiaed eyebrow and aak him “Really?”
He stammers back with, “You know…pretty, in the face.”
Engineer across from me saw my reaction and just takes a long drink, but corn-fed next to me goes and makes some comment about “some parts.”
“I want to come home to a home-cooked dinner at six every night – one that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives”
The candidate expanded on what he expected of his daughters, saying he didn’t want them to grow up into "career obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic[sic] hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings
Dammit ladies, I missed the memo! When is the next tall building shriek session!? I don’t want to miss it! Galentines Day?
Insisting that women should be absent, except for nameless figures, chosen and decorated to the demand of men, then prodded and squeezed at will, was a bold move by our business community to show to the people of Isis that our cultures are not as far apart as we sometimes imagine. It was an attempt by British business to seek a dialogue with the jihadists, and now their work is in ruins.
Daaaaamn. I’m across the Atlantic and I could hear the sizzle of that one landing.
Its funny cuz I would LOVE to be a housewife! I fucking hate working! I love organizing and cleaning and cooking! But! The kind of men that want a housewife I would never go near and they in turn would vilify me for my pink/purple hair and tattoos alone long before they got close to my politics! LOL - IRONY!
My mom has said for years that her favorite job ever was housewife/mom, and she raised us to be feminists. Now that she is retired from money-earning, she’s back to being a homemaker, and she loves it.
I’d probably enjoy it also, if money wasn’t an issue. But the idea that it’s the most a woman can hope for, i.e. “her station in life”, just makes my blood boil.
I make dinner 6 days a week, and on the other one my partner gets takeout or we do frozen pizza. This is our deal, because he gets up early to make us coffee 6 days a week, and I do it on Sundays. Also, I’m a better cook than he is. Families should set it up in the way that works for them, but this antiquated gender-essentialist bullshit needs to die.
Occasionally, he’ll come home and ask “wuuuuuumun, where’s muh dinner?!?” and I’ll give him a can of cat food or whatever’s handy, because it’s never been that funny of a joke. To his credit, it IS actually a joke.
I am divorced, and a homemaker. It’s weird, my ex is a homemaker and disses me for being a homemaker. I’ve had a few “professionals” say that I am irresponsible for doing this work because it doesn’t pay. Which betrays a bad understanding of finance, because if I was going to hire a cook, a maid, a repair person, a landscaper, a tutor, a nurse, etc for all of the stuff I do, then I would need to have hundreds of thousands of dollars, and basically be employing my own staff. How exactly is that more efficient than me simply doing it all? The only “benefit” being notion of being smug for participating in classism. No thanks!
No matter how they try to spin it, it boils down to a set of toxic cultural traditions which I make perfectly clear are not my traditions, and aren’t going to be. It’s like a bullet-hell video game where I need to keep arguing down thousands upon thousands of ideological zombies, hoping that I eventually fight my way to the spawn point and crash the game.
Fortunately, at least, those kneejerk reactions make it easy to filter out superficial people. The only problem is if you are in such a terrible place that there is no-one else left afterwards,
Yes! Candidate doofus doesn’t need a partner, they just want a Frisky Buffet!
I just want to clarify, that being a housewife is indeed WORK!
When I said I hate working I specifically meant outside the home!
As @Popo_Bawa says, taking on all the hats that are required to be a homemaker means a hell of a lot of work. I just personally find that way more satisfying and fulfilling than sitting at desk all damn day.
I’ve been a goth since I was 15. Filtering out people is something I’m pretty good at.
That is an excellent article. The standout sentence for me was this one:
“Because we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right.”
Boy-howdy, ain’t that the truth.
I once told a boyfriend (after sex) that I was not satisfied by what had just happened. He walked out and never spoke to me again. I was upset for a while, but pretty soon I recognized it for the dodged bullet it was.
This may be a tough read for some, because I know there are some serious Atwood fans on this board.
But I also believe that we need to look at and acknowledge the flaws that our heroes have, and to listen to serious criticism, especially when it comes from those more traditionally marginalised against those with greater power and privilege.
To me, Atwood represents not just white feminism, but WASP feminism, and upper-ish class WASP at that. She doesn’t do working class well (compare to Alice Munroe, or Michael Ondaatje). She doesn’t do Canadian-but-not-WASP well (compare to Nia Vardalos, or Ondaatje again). And, of course, she doesn’t write POC well, if she writes them at all.
And you know what? That’s okay. It’s unfair to expect one person to capture so many characters outside her experience. There is nothing wrong with specialising.
Except, of course, that Atwood gets held up as The Voice of Canadian Feminism, which was a BS title to begin with.
She’s an excellent writer and feminist who deserves accolades, awards, the TV and film adaptations, etc. etc. But she shouldn’t be such a monolithic figure on the Canadian literary and social landscape.
I have been shut down for offering a much milder version of this opinion when I was in university. Studying Atwood was always weird, because it was more like an old-fashioned appreciation class than the usual literary criticism, where students are allowed to say things like, “I understand why this book is on the curriculum but I didn’t like it, and here’s why.”
I was warned as an unpublished fiction writer attending workshops never to say anything bad about Atwood.
I still believe a less adoring consideration of her work would be more respectful than this notion it’s daring to say anything which contradicts her. She’s written multiple dystopias, for pity’s sakes.
Well, I was never a huge Atwood fan to start with, but I know that there are a few people on this board who are.
And I know it’s hard when an admired person gets criticised. But I also thought that this was an important thing to highlight and amplify. It’s very easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking that because something seems good for the group I belong to, that it’s good for all. But wanti things to be good enough for me (in my largely privileged bubble) isn’t good enough.
Sometimes it’s good to say “wow, I had a huge blindspot. Maybe I should pay more attention before I drive over someone standing in it.”
