“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Jane Austin, Pride and Prejudice, 1813
I learned something new and unexpected about dating practices at a local university. Guys, I was told, don't ask women out on dates in the way I remember from 50 and 60 years ago. In those days guys telephoned a girl; asked her if the two of them could go somewhere; if she agreed, he would go to her place at the appointed time; meet her; and then they would go together to some movie or food or event. He would pay for it. Then he would take her back home. That was a date.
"Peter, that isn't how it works now," I was told by a female college freshman at the Southern Oregon University Honors College, the one studying Computer Science I wrote about two weeks ago. She was the one who told me something obvious to her, that the "apps" on my phone weren't just spying on me.
They were sharing what they learned with each other. What happens on Google Maps or Facebook doesn't stay at Google Maps or Facebook. Oh.
"Now the girl can ask the guy, and it is just about being together, and the girl usually pays for herself. People don't 'date' the way you did back then." Oh.
Gender roles are changing. "Women's liberation" in the 1960s and today address some of the most fundamental elements of human life. Of course there is backlash and resistance.
Trump projects old fashioned masculinity, a throwback to the "great again" pre-women's lib era of Hugh Hefner. Trump is the playboy with financial resources to attract beautiful women--Melania the current proof. He is aggressive, cruel, and belligerent. Trump's "grab pussies" videotape was shocking when it emerged, but perhaps more for the brutal honesty and crude language than for content. "When you are a star, they let you do it," he said. The videotape apparently didn't change many votes.
Hillary Clinton was the archetype "woman's libber," the upstart speaker at college graduation, the partner in a law firm, and the breadwinner in her Arkansas home. She had a big career--senator then Secretary of State. Her polling negatives were sky high.
There is a divide in America on traditional binary gender roles. Pew polling shows that 64% of women say gender equality has not gone far enough, compared with 49% of men who say this. The much larger divide is between Democrats and Republicans. Gender equality isn't a woman's idea so much as a modern idea, a Democratic idea, pushing against traditional culture and biology.
Progressive messaging on gender has contained political landmines for Democrats, easy to exploit by cultural conservatives. Trans women in women's bathrooms! Faux women ruining girls' high-school sports! Most Democrats on the national stage have accepted as orthodox thinking that men and women are equal--that is for certain--but also that maleness and femaleness are much less binary and biologically determined than had been understood traditionally. Increasingly for Democrats, gender is a personal choice, complicated by culture and biology, and fluid.
Members of the leftist cultural vanguard report their preferred pronouns when introducing themselves. We are not to take for granted that a person who "presents as a woman" with hips, breasts, and beardless face, wants to be understood as a woman. Worse, making an assumption is not harmless; it is rude, an insulting micro-aggression.
In the modern economy, male upper body strength matters little, and testosterone-generated aggression and risk-taking may be a net negative. Democrats planted their flag. They are the party of women's equality. Gender equality may become the culture in America, but we are not there yet. Old ideas and assumptions persist. Republicans have done better than Democrats in exploiting this mismatch of old and new. Traditionally, men provide resources; women provide domestic nurturing. Men lead, women support.
Who believes that outdated old-fashioned stuff? A great many people, including women who are in the workforce and voting booth. There just may be some built-in differences between male and female humans that aren't just a matter of culture. It might be biology.
21 comments:
The differences between men and women are obvious, but not an excuse for a gender pay gap.
Do you really think a pussy-grabbing bully "projects old fashioned masculinity"? Trump strikes me as more of a knuckle-dragging atavism.
So now the woke tell us we’re supposed to say “pregnant people” and “uterus owners” and “chest feeders” instead of supposedly non-inclusive language like “women.”
JK Rowling refuses to bow to the trans activists’ campaign of Orwellian Newspeak and social media attacks. I stand with her, and with everyone else who believes in things like biology and the reality of sex differences.
There's not much that's more traditional than the hard sciences, and that includes biology. Trendy leftist preference for often specious social science when it comes to sex, gender and sexuality, however, is perhaps even more toxic and stupid--politically and otherwise--than is CRT.
The toxic stupidity is not the objection to over-reliance on biology, nor to the fact that gender is primarily a social construct. It's that now leftists refer to biological SEX as socially "assigned" at birth, whereas the most recent identity announcement even from a suggestible child suddenly goes as bedrock for purposes of science and law.
So often the corrective pendulum swings too far in the opposite direction. Fine, sex and gender should not be functionally equated as often in the past. The answer, though, is not to pretend they are biologically separate, instead of largely intertwined as they typically remain. Genuine intersex folks are very rare.
The new fluidity is in sex identification and orientation, for which gender dogma has become a figleaf for behavioral experimentation and affectation; fetish and pose with the imprimatur of "science". Live and let live, sure--except when children are harmed by needy, misguided adults using them for affirmation and validation for their own flights of fancy.
Mothers were the key in Virginia, and will be again in 2022 against unwholesome threats to children. The Loudon County school bathroom scandal epitomizes the lie of "just a place to pee and poop". Public restrooms in schools, libraries, theaters and parks have long been, er, traditional destination resorts for LGBTQ sexual experimenters and hookup seekers.
In 1977, we members of the Trojan Decommissioning Alliance were allowed to “camp out” at a progressive Episcopalian church in Portland. There were well over 100 of s sleeping on carpeted floors, pews, or out on the lawns.
There was only one shower room, with about a dozen shower heads, each about 8 feet high. Me being the only person tall enough to adjust these things to individuals' taste, I was in great demand.
Turns out, way back then, it was not a big deal to have naked men and naked women showering together, nor using toilets in open fronted toilet stalls.
Indeed, in most the late 60s through at least the 80s, it was rare to see anyone swimming in “the old swimming hole” while wearing swimming attire. Kinda like the McGarrigle Sisters' “Swimming Song”: “At the former I was informal; at the latter I wore my suit”.
Nowadays, many more people seem to be getting as modest as they were back in the 50s. What happened? THIS is women’s lib?
Michael Trigoboff, in the old days, my coworkers at USGS used to make jokes about PC language. For instance, you should never have used the word “women”, since it contains “men” in it. So we thought, let’s change it to wopersons. But that contains the masculine word “sons”. Bad! Finally, the PC word evolved: woperchild.
We had lots of fun, like calling the California City Menlo Park “Peopleo Park. If I were to reminisce hard enough, I could come up with dozens more. But I’ll spare everybody.
BTW, about half my coworkers were woperchildren, and they had as much fun as we mere males did. In our apparent ignorance, none of us took PC very seriously.
My lesbian palscall me, and all of us “straights” BREEDERS. Personally, none of us flaming heterosexuals take the slightest offense. It’s all in good fun, not to mention their right to exercise freedom os speech.
PS. Could someone please explain what people mean when they write, “my pronouns are ______”? Guess I must be too old to understand such things
A lot of the gender pay gap is due to the career choices that women make. For instance, societies with the loosest enforcement of gender roles have the lowest representation of women in STEM fields. link
Husbands have been saying "we're pregnant" for decades, even though their role is hardly much of an effort.
Mc,
You can actually put in a lot of enthusiastic effort doing that… :-)
To Michael T:
Women earn less than men in nearly all occupations. You can see how women’s earnings compare with men’s in over 350 occupations using our interactive visualization tool. There are only a handful of occupations where women earn slightly more than their male counterparts, such as health care social workers.
https://blog.dol.gov/2021/03/19/5-facts-about-the-state-of-the-gender-pay-gap
According to a Gallup poll, only about five and a half percent of people identify as lesbian, gay, bi or trans. Nonetheless, some consider them a threat, getting all in a lather over “the new fluidity in sex identification and orientation.” Whether you like it or not, unless they are actually a danger to themselves or others, they have the same rights as everybody else. People with nothing better to do than worry about where they go to the bathroom are pretty pathetic.
Tell all that to the two Loudon County families with daughters sexually assaulted at different schools in the same year by the same “trans” boy wearing a skirt into the girls’ bathroom. The district bigwigs were too busy being trendy to protect even the second girl, or to tell parents the truth about district conduct and policy. The scandal is a big reason why blue-purple Virginia has a surprise Republican governor-elect.
Pew Research puts the total LGBTQ+ percentage of the American population at less than 4%. Recruitment among minors will be the cause of any increase, especially with “scientific” labels expanding like Masonic honorifics. Trans folks are a fraction of one percent, but at least they’ve managed of late to emerge from the shadows, blinking and hesitant, to command their fair share of the demographic spotlight.
"...64% of women say gender equality has not gone far enough."
Sad to hear 36% of women are OK with the status quo.
My guess is that "in the future" biology will have some answers for those who cling to 19th century ideas about gender.
It was an accepted science at one time to equate intelligence with scull size.
And don't forget leeches!
Mike said, “ Women earn less than men in nearly all occupations.”
This is largely due to the choices women make about how much they want to work, how much time they want to take off to be with their families, etc. Men who made the same choices would earn the same salaries as women.
As I said, unless they are a danger to themselves or others...
Those who have nothing better to do than obsess over the sex lives of others would do better having one of their own.
Thank you, Michael, for the right-wing perspective: Women’s inequality is their own fault.
All men making comments? Go into a small business owned by a man and who is answering the phones, filing paper work, greeting with smiles? Who is the outside salesman? Who is the closer sales manager? In the auto shop who is under the car? And then the plumber shows up with a butt crack exposed, she does?
All men making comments. Go into a business owned by a man, who is filing papers, who is greeting with smiles? Now count the men standing there and count the women. Who is the closing sales manager? Who is under the car at the auto shop? And then the plumber shows up with a butt crack exposed, why did she do that?
It's Right wing dogma to blame the victims for being the cause of their own travails.
I'm sorry, Mr. Bowman, but I missed your point. Maybe I need more CV offee.
it's mostly men making comments on this blog.
As for the stats indicating women make less than men, sometimes it's about choices, other times it is not. It is about job choices. It is about skills at times. It's also slowly, but surely changing.
In our conservative family, my spouse and I moved from NY to OR immediately after graduating from college and getting married. Amongst our friends, we were the last to have a hid, chosing instead to have careers that took us all over the world for our jobs and for vacations.
In our late 30s, fully happy with our home and station in life, we had our one and only. After 10 weeks of maternity leave, she returned to work and we both leveraged daycare to continue our careers.
During the next 10 years we both excelled in our jobs, and my spouse's pay eventually exceeded mine, but benefits essentially the same. We continued our work travel and always managed to be sure one parent was home for our son. We both got involved with our son's public elementary education. I got involved as a school volunteer, teaching computer classes as the responsible school staffer did not know anything about those new computers the school purchased. This also led me to great friendships with all the teachers and administrators. This also led me to being elected as President of our PTO (Parent Teacher Organization) for a few years.
When Y2K came around, I was still an active school volunteer, got 3 new school board members elected, raised Cain in our district with the math wars (yes, the district wanted to eliminate higher math classes), and I changed my job to become Mr. Mom in the family. I had given up my VP executive job to focus on a part time position responsible for special projects with Apple, Microsoft, and a few others. I set my pay for what I wanted, and my spouse continued to rise up the ladder.
Her pay crested at more than double mine, but no jealousy on my part. We both did well, as did my son.
As those math wars peaked, we parted from the public school system. We got math restored, but we decided private high school would be best for my son. He did well. Well enough to get accepted to all the engineering schools he applied to. He also got an appointment to a service academy, West Point, where he graduated with honors, and met his wife who also graduated with honors.
Two grandkids later, they've been fortunate to get the ACS opportunity to attend grad school at Clemson.
Why am I telling you all this?
We all have opportunities and we all make life choices. My wife and I both came from poor families, but knew we had to do something different for of adult life.
When we got married in the mid 70s we set out to be successful. Evidently, our plans worked out. And we hope our son, daughter-in-law, and grandkids choose wisely, too.
Bragging? Just a little, but people have the most personal responsibility for their future. There will be speed bumps along the way. How they overcome them will determine their future.
Post a Comment