> Where have you seen successful attempts to give men an exit from a toxic culture, rather than to help women get a foothold in that culture?
The first thing that comes to mind is the normalization (in some spaces, at least) of taking paternity leave. Obviously we have a LONG way to go with maternity leave and support for new moms, but I love that we are beginning to create more space for early fatherhood as well.
To the first question, I see this most often in the realm of work. “Now you too can conform to the ideal worker norm and place wage labor over your own health and caregiving!” More particularly, it sometimes seems that the toxic environment women are welcomed into is one that denigrates caregiving, whether through low wages or social disapproval, instead of one that values the caregiving work many women (and men) were already doing.
To the second question, I really like how “girls can play with boy toys” from my own childhood has expanded to “all children can play with all toys.” I love that my son is free to play with trucks and dolls and that this is completely unremarkable. He’s 3 years old and he has absolutely no concept that some toys might not be for him, he just plays with whatever he wants.
This is not exactly a concrete example, but it strikes me how Christian virtues are often (traditionally associated with) women virtues. Humility, meekness and obedience - even fidelity - are definitely not considered virtues for men in our culture, and that may well be why it is toxic ! But imitating Jesus' virtues is supposed to be a goal for both men and women.
I'm not quite sure what is the point I'm trying to make here, but it's a something I've find useful to tell when discussing feminism with conservative catholic men...
I've been told in personal and professional settings to apologize less because I'm a youngish-looking and "nice"-seeming woman, and I've always *hated* that advice.
I'm pretty careful not to take the blame for things that are not my fault, but I apologize when I've screwed up and when I realize my actions inconvenienced someone or made them uncomfortable. I'm proud to have the personal strength to do that, and I frankly *I wish that more men would do that too.* I have no intention to become more callous or unwilling to accept responsibility in order to look "strong," because that is a false strength that is actually weakness.
I just hate that from a professional standpoint, this could cause people to take me less seriously.
I think motherhood may be one area where I see women slotting themselves into a toxic culture and calling it "equal progress." Lots of people on here are talking about work culture and I think this is tied into my point on parenthood. I am often surprised by how I see a shift in our culture celebrating non-chalant, disinterested motherhood as if its somehow "winning" or sending a message that it is good and right for mothers to not prioritize their children and instead prioritize careers or even just independence and freedom. It appears that fatherhood may have always suffered from access to these vices but instead of asking fathers to be MORE dedicated parents in some ways we seem to be saying a selfish and checked out approach to motherhood is something that should be celebrated for women?
I suspect some "celebrating" of "checked out" motherhood is backlash against seemingly unattainable standards set by a mommier-than-thou cult of total motherhood.
And yes, as jd mentioned, it can be isolating work, especially for families who've felt obligated to isolate extra during COVID.
Time-use studies show it's normal for moms to spend *more* time interacting with their children now than the mid-20th-century mom idealized by nostalgia did:
If mothers seemed more "motherly" back then, and that's not just the illusion of nostalgia, what might have accounted for that? Perhaps a surrounding social network that helped "mother" the children even when not directly in their mother's presence?...
I don't want to go back to the days where women's education revolved around "home ec" and women's minds were expected to revolve around local gossip. At the same time, women who spent their youth preparing for some career outside the home rather than in building a future-mommy mutual-aid network can unsurprisingly find themselves less well-prepared for SAHM-ing that's where they end up, especially if they're not naturally outgoing.
Like, what if you spent your youth taking seriously Christian prohibitions against gossip and never got good enough at it to wangle an in with the best pediatric specialist when your kid really needs one? That actually does make you a worse mom in some respects. (And by "you", I'm definitely including me — I'm terrible at "networking" small-talk, so I can't be surprised when I feel like the last mom to hear about stuff that'll advantage her kids even though I have literally no other job right now but taking care of them.)
I agree Midge, I think much of the self sacrifice in parenting has fallen primarily to mothers and is unsustainable and extremely difficult. I think what I am trying to parse out is that atleast to me, i believe children absolutely need self sacrifice and that maybe instead of doing away with it all together we should be expanding who sacrifices for them and their care - not just to both parents but to a larger community as well. I fear that instead we are moving towards a celebration of how self sacrifice is no longer viewed as a good in parenting.
I came of age just as the feminist movement was cresting--in the mid '70's. The women's movement defined "success" as getting to do all the things men do. There was a smaller, parallel "wages for housework" movement that I never even heard of until listening to a recent podcast..and I wish I could remember the podcast! I was going to link to it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wages_for_housework
I love Silvia Federici's work on this but I wonder if the argument goes beyond the economic. To me, there is something intangible and extremely valuable (in a way that might transcend being able to put a $$ on it) about the self sacrificial nature of parenting that has often but not always fallen mostly to mothers. I think instead of seeing an opportunity in our culture to expand the self sacrificial role to both parents and the larger community, we seem to be moving away from self sacrifice altogether and framing this as a positive.
i'd have to take some issue here, jenn, with the quality of the time spent with children in the second half of the 20th century compared to today. what i see - universally - is that caregivers are on their phones when tending to kids - at the park, walking, at the store, in their cars. every. where. it's actually disheartening to me because i think the caregivers, as i assume many at the park are mom's or grandmas, are missing out on some precious moments. as for your other observations, after WWII, women's education became more important to many. that does not greatly improve the issues regarding childcare for SAHM. it's just grinding work, isolation, and boredom. i imagine that our frontier forewomen were a lot stronger than anyone i know! i can't imagine surviving much less thriving while raising children isolated in a cabin on the prairie or in the woods while alone with the kids much of the time. what a difficult life.
The being on phones is a problem that is universal. Don’t just look at caregivers. And the isolated life formed by the little house books is highly misleading. The Ingalls family had close neighbors. Laura’s crazy libertarian daughter edited all of that out of the books.
full time motherhood is the least appreciated, most undervalued 'work' in the USA today. the lack of 'culture' is because it's typically so isolated and isolating. what you call 'vices' in fathers i would disagree with your wording. they aren't vices. but, i get your point. i know a few full time fathers who are dependent on their wives for financial support. they are probably even more isolated than are the women in the same roles. when i see my son and DIL parent their 3 young kids, they are diligent, attempt to balance the work out well, but with her working so many hours, there's really no way they could keep the ship afloat without the support of grandparents. we are fortunate to have our village all in the same zipcode. we know this is a luxury in 2022. but, it's also not an accident or happenstance. the grandparents are all in to support two parents who are overachieving at their occupations and wonderful effective parents. anyone who thinks mom can give fully in both places wasn't raised by a 'career' woman as i was.
As a single woman in my early 30's who lives alone and works for a firm that is still remote, I miss office life *terribly*. I realize how so much of my social life came through work -- there are relatively few spaces in modern adult life where you see the same people with the kind of frequency that allows friendship to grow at a slow and natural pace. So many of my friends and people I've dated are folks I met through happy hours, friends of work friends, etc. To have that missing in my life at a pretty crucial point in terms of wanting marriage/family formation has been devastating. I've also found that the lack of physical separation has led to my work life bleeding into my "normal" life in ways I don't like, and an unshakeable feeling of never being fully on or off the clock.
I absolutely support a more flexible and hybrid workplace, but for me and others in similar situations, work from home has been profoundly isolating.
This, to me, also makes me hope we will recapture and expand non-work ways of socializing, which are hard to come by when everyone needs to be working 40 hours plus commuting plus housekeeping. There are many ways to do that, from shorter work weeks to more humane commutes to stronger communities to more informal gathering spaces, but I think this strong public/private divide in which the main acceptable “public” pursuits are work or education leaves a lot of people isolated!
The informal gathering space question is one I think about a lot -- like the whole idea of pub culture in the UK!
I live in a somewhat transient city, and between a breakup of a longterm relationship shortly before the pandemic and a lot of my social circle moving elsewhere for jobs or affordability in the last two years I've found myself in need of new friendships in a big way. The lack of access to third places - like offices, pubs, church services, in-person volunteer opportunities - made the already tricky process of making new friends as a thirty-something harder. The question of how to build up these institutions in a very online world is hard, but important. I never want to socialize over zoom ever again.
Where have you seen progress framed as equal representation in a toxic culture, rather than dismantling that culture?
Isn't this the state of much of modern feminism? Gaining equality on men's terms, terms that were always toxic to begin with?
Your job is your life, so be a workaholic.
As for sex, tell women that they are prudish if they don't go along with the program. Casual sex proves you're empowered. Porn frees women from their hangups.
Where have you seen successful attempts to give men an exit from a toxic culture, rather than to help women get a foothold in that culture?
Someone mentioned paternity leave. I would add a greater sensitivity among some men that workaholism isn't the way to go, and that raunch culture harms men as well as men because it harms relationships.
"We want better options for both men and women. Progress can look less like 50-50 representation and more like neither men nor women participating in a warped culture."
This is niche, but as someone who suspects both that men are, on average, "naturally" more interested in STEMlordism (being the next Feynman, etc) than women are *and* that women's full STEM talent has yet to be tapped, I don't consider it "progress", exactly, for gifted and talented women in math and science to slot themselves into a guy's PhD schedule.
Those concerned (or at least concern-trolling) that our boys are being left behind in an increasingly "feminized" early-education environment often concede that girls tend to develop earlier academically than boys do. They see trying to give girls and boys the same kind of education as unfair to the young men those boys will become. I say, though, it's also less-than-ideal for the talented girls.
I do not think we should consider it unfair to boys to accelerate talented girls' academic development more than boys' in the early years. After all, the talented, interested boys do tend to catch up later anyhow — and are unlikely to take time off later to bear children.
While I'm not wild about the idea of throwing a 15- or 16-year-old girl into our current typical college social environment simply because she already took the opportunity offered her to master multivariate calculus, I think it would also help, anyhow, if college became less about a life-stage than an educational stage (for those who benefit from it — not everyone will).
The whole progression of prep-school (or its well-zoned public-school equivalent) to college to (maybe) graduate school was developed for the social elite of an earlier era, anyhow. While I expect there'll always be a place for the "failsons" of the wealthy to cross-subsidize the less-wealthy interested and talented in higher education, the life-stage homogeneity we've come to expect of college could probably stand to die in favor of recognizing aptitude for differing subjects peaks at differing times, and integrates with differing gender roles differently.
Rethinking early education (particularly with regard to movement and outdoor access) is one area where I hope moving to a more humane/developmentally appropriate approach for boys brings the girls along as well. It does seem, for whatever reason, that little girls on average seem to tolerate school structure at a younger age - but I’d still prefer that my little girl be out on the playground as well as my little boy.
Personally, I do like having a buffer zone between work and home - remote work means it's harder to set boundaries between the two at times. But a lot of that depends on length of commute, etc.
In my experience, "progress" is defined in terms of how men experience the world.
Breast is best" but no paid leave and rigid work schedules force women to use expensive and unpleasant breast pumps and then fiddle around with all of the milk storage accoutrements rather than just pick up the baby and feed her when she's hungry.
The arguments by Manchin and some Republicans against the extended child tax credit..that only "working" parents deserve this support--this assumes that caring for your own young children is not valid "work" and if that is "all" you are doing, you are a lazy moocher.
Expecting women to spend literally decades of their lives dosing themselves with hormones in order to control their fertility. I am all for women being able to plan their families, but why is it that we are still relying on a method invented 75 years ago to do so?
Combat roles are now open to women. Yay? I mean....that is messed up. Now we can experience the trauma of battle too!
I could go on, but I'm sure others can add to this rant. :)
I definitely disagree that we are still relying on methods invented 75 years ago! For me, having the option to use an IUD was a real lifesaver from feeling caught between methods that were too hormonally intense or not effective enough. I think that gynecology is really catching up to the fact that women have a lot of diverse wants with respect to birth control: hormonal or not, levels of dosing, a daily pill or a method like the IUD or implant that relies less heavily on user consistency. And yes, most of these methods have side effects, but I for one found the tradeoff between relieved menstrual symptoms and birth control side effects to be pretty favorable for birth control.
"Expecting women to spend literally decades of their lives dosing themselves with hormones in order to control their fertility. I am all for women being able to plan their families, but why is it that we are still relying on a method invented 75 years ago to do so?"
In some ways, we aren't: contraceptive technology is considerably more advanced from 75 years ago, and so are other "hormonal straitjackets" we might use to control phenomena besides fertility.
Also, Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom (or cruelty) doses us for decades with fluctuating hormones anyhow. On the one hand, the strides Catholic doctors have made to help women with underlying conditions worsened by natural hormonal patterns without suppressing their fertility is useful and heartwarming. On the other hand, expecting "natural", or at least fertility-sparing, techniques to do it all seems a bit Pollyannaish to me, even cruel in some cases.
I'm aware that there have been advances in contraception technology but most of the long-acting methods rely on the same hormones that are used in birth control pills. You'd think that if there are inexpensive home pregnancy tests sensitive enough to detect a pregnancy a day or so after a missed period, they'd be able to develop something similar to pinpoint ovulation.
I'm no Catholic and I have absolutely no ethical or moral problem with hormonal birth control, but it just seems like it's not a priority for pharma research.
Just have to give a shout out to the amazing work done by scientists creating birth control for men. Which, unfortunately, is not being approved for use in the US for nonsense reasons.
On the child tax credit / other means of financial support that exclude women who stay home. I'm honestly looking for more research to back giving caregivers money to stay home. Folks have an intuitive feeling it will tank the economy, and I'm highly dubious of that given how much more productive we are than we used to be. I love the rallying cry, "Four hours work for eight hours pay!"
I think paying parents of young kids to stay home would boost the economy. Child care and elder care shortages would be mitigated or eliminated. Wages for breadwinners would go up because fewer people in the workforce. Schools and communities would be strengthened with more working age adults who have time and energy to help out. Things really did run better with the unpaid labor of women making it easier for everybody else in society. I say open it up to allow any adult with kids under 15 to work in the home. Give a stipend and a social security credit.
does this equate to putting (allowing?) women on the front lines in combat situations? should men - or anyone - be there? but, if men or there, in a just society, i believe women should be there too. war certainly strikes me as evidence of toxic masculinity. but, it's also a very human occurrence. do women belong there on the front lines, shoulder to shoulder with men?
I'm a progressive Catholic mom of 12 year old daughter. Looking for smart, thoughtful theological reflection on sexuality to pass on to my daughter, and theology of the body seems limited. I like how you think, your willingness to take marriage and family off a pedestal, your belief that women shouldn't seek equality in a broken system. Help! How do I talk to my daughter about pleasure, sex, motherhood in a way that honors herself and the other, leaves space for contribution instead of or in addition to motherhood, honors single and gay people
> Where have you seen successful attempts to give men an exit from a toxic culture, rather than to help women get a foothold in that culture?
The first thing that comes to mind is the normalization (in some spaces, at least) of taking paternity leave. Obviously we have a LONG way to go with maternity leave and support for new moms, but I love that we are beginning to create more space for early fatherhood as well.
Absolutely agree! Also normalizing carrying babies, pushing strollers, and being a stay at home dad.
To the first question, I see this most often in the realm of work. “Now you too can conform to the ideal worker norm and place wage labor over your own health and caregiving!” More particularly, it sometimes seems that the toxic environment women are welcomed into is one that denigrates caregiving, whether through low wages or social disapproval, instead of one that values the caregiving work many women (and men) were already doing.
To the second question, I really like how “girls can play with boy toys” from my own childhood has expanded to “all children can play with all toys.” I love that my son is free to play with trucks and dolls and that this is completely unremarkable. He’s 3 years old and he has absolutely no concept that some toys might not be for him, he just plays with whatever he wants.
This is not exactly a concrete example, but it strikes me how Christian virtues are often (traditionally associated with) women virtues. Humility, meekness and obedience - even fidelity - are definitely not considered virtues for men in our culture, and that may well be why it is toxic ! But imitating Jesus' virtues is supposed to be a goal for both men and women.
I'm not quite sure what is the point I'm trying to make here, but it's a something I've find useful to tell when discussing feminism with conservative catholic men...
I've been told in personal and professional settings to apologize less because I'm a youngish-looking and "nice"-seeming woman, and I've always *hated* that advice.
I'm pretty careful not to take the blame for things that are not my fault, but I apologize when I've screwed up and when I realize my actions inconvenienced someone or made them uncomfortable. I'm proud to have the personal strength to do that, and I frankly *I wish that more men would do that too.* I have no intention to become more callous or unwilling to accept responsibility in order to look "strong," because that is a false strength that is actually weakness.
I just hate that from a professional standpoint, this could cause people to take me less seriously.
I think motherhood may be one area where I see women slotting themselves into a toxic culture and calling it "equal progress." Lots of people on here are talking about work culture and I think this is tied into my point on parenthood. I am often surprised by how I see a shift in our culture celebrating non-chalant, disinterested motherhood as if its somehow "winning" or sending a message that it is good and right for mothers to not prioritize their children and instead prioritize careers or even just independence and freedom. It appears that fatherhood may have always suffered from access to these vices but instead of asking fathers to be MORE dedicated parents in some ways we seem to be saying a selfish and checked out approach to motherhood is something that should be celebrated for women?
I suspect some "celebrating" of "checked out" motherhood is backlash against seemingly unattainable standards set by a mommier-than-thou cult of total motherhood.
And yes, as jd mentioned, it can be isolating work, especially for families who've felt obligated to isolate extra during COVID.
Time-use studies show it's normal for moms to spend *more* time interacting with their children now than the mid-20th-century mom idealized by nostalgia did:
https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids
If mothers seemed more "motherly" back then, and that's not just the illusion of nostalgia, what might have accounted for that? Perhaps a surrounding social network that helped "mother" the children even when not directly in their mother's presence?...
I don't want to go back to the days where women's education revolved around "home ec" and women's minds were expected to revolve around local gossip. At the same time, women who spent their youth preparing for some career outside the home rather than in building a future-mommy mutual-aid network can unsurprisingly find themselves less well-prepared for SAHM-ing that's where they end up, especially if they're not naturally outgoing.
Like, what if you spent your youth taking seriously Christian prohibitions against gossip and never got good enough at it to wangle an in with the best pediatric specialist when your kid really needs one? That actually does make you a worse mom in some respects. (And by "you", I'm definitely including me — I'm terrible at "networking" small-talk, so I can't be surprised when I feel like the last mom to hear about stuff that'll advantage her kids even though I have literally no other job right now but taking care of them.)
I agree Midge, I think much of the self sacrifice in parenting has fallen primarily to mothers and is unsustainable and extremely difficult. I think what I am trying to parse out is that atleast to me, i believe children absolutely need self sacrifice and that maybe instead of doing away with it all together we should be expanding who sacrifices for them and their care - not just to both parents but to a larger community as well. I fear that instead we are moving towards a celebration of how self sacrifice is no longer viewed as a good in parenting.
I came of age just as the feminist movement was cresting--in the mid '70's. The women's movement defined "success" as getting to do all the things men do. There was a smaller, parallel "wages for housework" movement that I never even heard of until listening to a recent podcast..and I wish I could remember the podcast! I was going to link to it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wages_for_housework
I love Silvia Federici's work on this but I wonder if the argument goes beyond the economic. To me, there is something intangible and extremely valuable (in a way that might transcend being able to put a $$ on it) about the self sacrificial nature of parenting that has often but not always fallen mostly to mothers. I think instead of seeing an opportunity in our culture to expand the self sacrificial role to both parents and the larger community, we seem to be moving away from self sacrifice altogether and framing this as a positive.
i'd have to take some issue here, jenn, with the quality of the time spent with children in the second half of the 20th century compared to today. what i see - universally - is that caregivers are on their phones when tending to kids - at the park, walking, at the store, in their cars. every. where. it's actually disheartening to me because i think the caregivers, as i assume many at the park are mom's or grandmas, are missing out on some precious moments. as for your other observations, after WWII, women's education became more important to many. that does not greatly improve the issues regarding childcare for SAHM. it's just grinding work, isolation, and boredom. i imagine that our frontier forewomen were a lot stronger than anyone i know! i can't imagine surviving much less thriving while raising children isolated in a cabin on the prairie or in the woods while alone with the kids much of the time. what a difficult life.
The being on phones is a problem that is universal. Don’t just look at caregivers. And the isolated life formed by the little house books is highly misleading. The Ingalls family had close neighbors. Laura’s crazy libertarian daughter edited all of that out of the books.
But
full time motherhood is the least appreciated, most undervalued 'work' in the USA today. the lack of 'culture' is because it's typically so isolated and isolating. what you call 'vices' in fathers i would disagree with your wording. they aren't vices. but, i get your point. i know a few full time fathers who are dependent on their wives for financial support. they are probably even more isolated than are the women in the same roles. when i see my son and DIL parent their 3 young kids, they are diligent, attempt to balance the work out well, but with her working so many hours, there's really no way they could keep the ship afloat without the support of grandparents. we are fortunate to have our village all in the same zipcode. we know this is a luxury in 2022. but, it's also not an accident or happenstance. the grandparents are all in to support two parents who are overachieving at their occupations and wonderful effective parents. anyone who thinks mom can give fully in both places wasn't raised by a 'career' woman as i was.
As a single woman in my early 30's who lives alone and works for a firm that is still remote, I miss office life *terribly*. I realize how so much of my social life came through work -- there are relatively few spaces in modern adult life where you see the same people with the kind of frequency that allows friendship to grow at a slow and natural pace. So many of my friends and people I've dated are folks I met through happy hours, friends of work friends, etc. To have that missing in my life at a pretty crucial point in terms of wanting marriage/family formation has been devastating. I've also found that the lack of physical separation has led to my work life bleeding into my "normal" life in ways I don't like, and an unshakeable feeling of never being fully on or off the clock.
I absolutely support a more flexible and hybrid workplace, but for me and others in similar situations, work from home has been profoundly isolating.
This, to me, also makes me hope we will recapture and expand non-work ways of socializing, which are hard to come by when everyone needs to be working 40 hours plus commuting plus housekeeping. There are many ways to do that, from shorter work weeks to more humane commutes to stronger communities to more informal gathering spaces, but I think this strong public/private divide in which the main acceptable “public” pursuits are work or education leaves a lot of people isolated!
The informal gathering space question is one I think about a lot -- like the whole idea of pub culture in the UK!
I live in a somewhat transient city, and between a breakup of a longterm relationship shortly before the pandemic and a lot of my social circle moving elsewhere for jobs or affordability in the last two years I've found myself in need of new friendships in a big way. The lack of access to third places - like offices, pubs, church services, in-person volunteer opportunities - made the already tricky process of making new friends as a thirty-something harder. The question of how to build up these institutions in a very online world is hard, but important. I never want to socialize over zoom ever again.
Where have you seen progress framed as equal representation in a toxic culture, rather than dismantling that culture?
Isn't this the state of much of modern feminism? Gaining equality on men's terms, terms that were always toxic to begin with?
Your job is your life, so be a workaholic.
As for sex, tell women that they are prudish if they don't go along with the program. Casual sex proves you're empowered. Porn frees women from their hangups.
Where have you seen successful attempts to give men an exit from a toxic culture, rather than to help women get a foothold in that culture?
Someone mentioned paternity leave. I would add a greater sensitivity among some men that workaholism isn't the way to go, and that raunch culture harms men as well as men because it harms relationships.
"We want better options for both men and women. Progress can look less like 50-50 representation and more like neither men nor women participating in a warped culture."
This is niche, but as someone who suspects both that men are, on average, "naturally" more interested in STEMlordism (being the next Feynman, etc) than women are *and* that women's full STEM talent has yet to be tapped, I don't consider it "progress", exactly, for gifted and talented women in math and science to slot themselves into a guy's PhD schedule.
Those concerned (or at least concern-trolling) that our boys are being left behind in an increasingly "feminized" early-education environment often concede that girls tend to develop earlier academically than boys do. They see trying to give girls and boys the same kind of education as unfair to the young men those boys will become. I say, though, it's also less-than-ideal for the talented girls.
I do not think we should consider it unfair to boys to accelerate talented girls' academic development more than boys' in the early years. After all, the talented, interested boys do tend to catch up later anyhow — and are unlikely to take time off later to bear children.
While I'm not wild about the idea of throwing a 15- or 16-year-old girl into our current typical college social environment simply because she already took the opportunity offered her to master multivariate calculus, I think it would also help, anyhow, if college became less about a life-stage than an educational stage (for those who benefit from it — not everyone will).
The whole progression of prep-school (or its well-zoned public-school equivalent) to college to (maybe) graduate school was developed for the social elite of an earlier era, anyhow. While I expect there'll always be a place for the "failsons" of the wealthy to cross-subsidize the less-wealthy interested and talented in higher education, the life-stage homogeneity we've come to expect of college could probably stand to die in favor of recognizing aptitude for differing subjects peaks at differing times, and integrates with differing gender roles differently.
Rethinking early education (particularly with regard to movement and outdoor access) is one area where I hope moving to a more humane/developmentally appropriate approach for boys brings the girls along as well. It does seem, for whatever reason, that little girls on average seem to tolerate school structure at a younger age - but I’d still prefer that my little girl be out on the playground as well as my little boy.
One upside of the whole COVID thing could be more interest in using outdoor space for education, including play.
Personally, I do like having a buffer zone between work and home - remote work means it's harder to set boundaries between the two at times. But a lot of that depends on length of commute, etc.
In my experience, "progress" is defined in terms of how men experience the world.
Breast is best" but no paid leave and rigid work schedules force women to use expensive and unpleasant breast pumps and then fiddle around with all of the milk storage accoutrements rather than just pick up the baby and feed her when she's hungry.
The arguments by Manchin and some Republicans against the extended child tax credit..that only "working" parents deserve this support--this assumes that caring for your own young children is not valid "work" and if that is "all" you are doing, you are a lazy moocher.
Expecting women to spend literally decades of their lives dosing themselves with hormones in order to control their fertility. I am all for women being able to plan their families, but why is it that we are still relying on a method invented 75 years ago to do so?
Combat roles are now open to women. Yay? I mean....that is messed up. Now we can experience the trauma of battle too!
I could go on, but I'm sure others can add to this rant. :)
I definitely disagree that we are still relying on methods invented 75 years ago! For me, having the option to use an IUD was a real lifesaver from feeling caught between methods that were too hormonally intense or not effective enough. I think that gynecology is really catching up to the fact that women have a lot of diverse wants with respect to birth control: hormonal or not, levels of dosing, a daily pill or a method like the IUD or implant that relies less heavily on user consistency. And yes, most of these methods have side effects, but I for one found the tradeoff between relieved menstrual symptoms and birth control side effects to be pretty favorable for birth control.
"Expecting women to spend literally decades of their lives dosing themselves with hormones in order to control their fertility. I am all for women being able to plan their families, but why is it that we are still relying on a method invented 75 years ago to do so?"
In some ways, we aren't: contraceptive technology is considerably more advanced from 75 years ago, and so are other "hormonal straitjackets" we might use to control phenomena besides fertility.
Also, Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom (or cruelty) doses us for decades with fluctuating hormones anyhow. On the one hand, the strides Catholic doctors have made to help women with underlying conditions worsened by natural hormonal patterns without suppressing their fertility is useful and heartwarming. On the other hand, expecting "natural", or at least fertility-sparing, techniques to do it all seems a bit Pollyannaish to me, even cruel in some cases.
I'm aware that there have been advances in contraception technology but most of the long-acting methods rely on the same hormones that are used in birth control pills. You'd think that if there are inexpensive home pregnancy tests sensitive enough to detect a pregnancy a day or so after a missed period, they'd be able to develop something similar to pinpoint ovulation.
I'm no Catholic and I have absolutely no ethical or moral problem with hormonal birth control, but it just seems like it's not a priority for pharma research.
Ovulation tests are definitely something that exist (and are pretty cheap).
Just have to give a shout out to the amazing work done by scientists creating birth control for men. Which, unfortunately, is not being approved for use in the US for nonsense reasons.
On the child tax credit / other means of financial support that exclude women who stay home. I'm honestly looking for more research to back giving caregivers money to stay home. Folks have an intuitive feeling it will tank the economy, and I'm highly dubious of that given how much more productive we are than we used to be. I love the rallying cry, "Four hours work for eight hours pay!"
I think paying parents of young kids to stay home would boost the economy. Child care and elder care shortages would be mitigated or eliminated. Wages for breadwinners would go up because fewer people in the workforce. Schools and communities would be strengthened with more working age adults who have time and energy to help out. Things really did run better with the unpaid labor of women making it easier for everybody else in society. I say open it up to allow any adult with kids under 15 to work in the home. Give a stipend and a social security credit.
does this equate to putting (allowing?) women on the front lines in combat situations? should men - or anyone - be there? but, if men or there, in a just society, i believe women should be there too. war certainly strikes me as evidence of toxic masculinity. but, it's also a very human occurrence. do women belong there on the front lines, shoulder to shoulder with men?
I'm a progressive Catholic mom of 12 year old daughter. Looking for smart, thoughtful theological reflection on sexuality to pass on to my daughter, and theology of the body seems limited. I like how you think, your willingness to take marriage and family off a pedestal, your belief that women shouldn't seek equality in a broken system. Help! How do I talk to my daughter about pleasure, sex, motherhood in a way that honors herself and the other, leaves space for contribution instead of or in addition to motherhood, honors single and gay people