Yeah I got to level 70
So okay I had to share this email exchange I just had with a friend this morning – someone who I would have thought would have known better, but it never ceases to amaze me how poisoned WOMEN are against feminism. It just shows how happily the media has lied about us and spun every word we say into some twisted version of what we believe.
Her email, which is vomit-inducing in the extreme, is excerpted below (with identifying information taken out) and the bolded areas I have added:
I went to a mother’s home yesterday [...] what an inspiration she is!
[She] is raising a child in a fashion I could only hope to achieve. No television or electronic toys keep this boy of 13 months entertained, yet his mother is able to cook, clean, sew her own cloths, entertain a guest, paint, and make [craft items] without the boy fussing and fighting for attention. I asked her how this is so, she said she’s not been apart from the boy more than 5 hours his whole life. He’s not left alone, but on his own,in his own little pen in the room with us, he’s able to entertain himself with only a ball and a rattle. He doesn’t NEED to fight for affection, she explained, he gets plenty of it.
This mom! She prepares the family’s meals, she is vegan, and apparently healthy (instead of juice it’s soy milk), she sews all their own clothes and CLOTH DIAPERS,
Now, in order to do all of this, the woman is necessarily liberated from the need to hold a job (hold your ears Woman’s Lib). I’d like to follow her example of child rearing (though not vegan, and not so bound to the home), but not in such isolation. She needs other moms with similar ideas. She needs a network of moms who can all come together some days and cook together, and sew diapers together, things such as that.
It is unfortunate that most of us cannot afford to be a full time mom, by no fault of our own, the economic culture of america does not allow for housewives anymore, nor have women been raised to respect such a position (I want to be more than a house-slave!)”
Now I read the above and cannot see what differentiates this woman from a slave. She is isolated, she works at menial repetetive tasks all day long, she recieves no wages, and she gets no time off – nor is there any mention of her husband/baby’s father helping her. (Notice there is no mention of a husband/father in there?) She will probably get mad at me but here was my response:
“I feel sorry for her. She’s never been apart from the child at all? Well at 13 months that isn’t such a big deal, there is some closeness and bonding time needed there, but that’s a heavy, heavy burden to ask of anyone.
I’m sorry, her life DOES sound like a slave’s life to me. I know this because I lived it. I applaud the lack of electronic babysitters, I didn’t have any myself until I ended up living with people who insisted on keeping them *sigh*.
But it is a dire mistake to insult “women’s libbers” – which you ought to know, I am unapologetically and radically and irrevocably one of. Its a very nice idea to be a housewife – so long as you have a man who won’t beat you, try to control you, will work enough to make sure you always have enough to live on, and who won’t divorce you after you’ve devoted your entire life to him and his children leaving you with no job skills and no way to get by in the world. I’ve seen it happen to women again and again. No one wants to believe it will happen to them.
In a perfect world we wouldn’t need money to get by and/or men wouldn’t be asshole pigs so often and would always support their babies and respect the women who so graciously give up their entire lives to rise them. But this is the real world and men simply do not do this most of the time. Don’t blame “women’s libbers” (who are called fmeinists, incidentally) for trying to remind women they have to take care of THEMSELVES too, not just their man and their children.
I am a woman and I am a mother and I work and have since my child was 6 weeks old, and he is not poorly behaved or unloved or neglected or lacking in attention. There is a myth that stay-at-home mothers are hated by feminists, but the real truth is that our society, namely, the male capitalists who run it, are the real haters of housewives with children, and by extension, haters of children as well.
But let’s review the idea that a child should always have a parental presence around to feel loved – okay. Why can’t it be the father? Why is so much expected of mothers, who have already risked their life to bear a child, why must they now must give up ever going out or having a few hours respite from the demands of an infant as well? When is it men’s turn to take care of the children they spawn? I have no complaints with the woman you mentioned, but where is the father’s contribution in all of this? Is an 8 hour a day job at a clean office and the money he brings home his sole contribution? I know from experience being a mother at that stage of a child’s life is a 24 hour a day job – does she work on call 24 hours a day making sure he doesn’t have to get up with the baby in the night? Why should she be making all the family’s meals and sewing all their clothes? Why isn’t he putting his lazy ass to work the minute he comes home? When is her time to kick her feet up and have a meal made for her? Who takes care of her? When does she get to rest?
For the first two years of my child’s life I didn’t sleep more than four hours a night. I did everything, just like her. By the end of it I was a total wreck, my health and sanity broken. I feel sorry for her, and this is all I can reiterate.”
I’m tired of this myth that feminists live in an “ivory tower” of academia and come up with all of this stuff without ever experiencing “real life” with a “real man” and “real love” meaning, of course, having children and cleaning up after them all day. I’ve done all of these things and the end result has been to utterly radicalize me. Andrea Dworkin was accused of this “ivory tower” academia-buffered feminism too – the reality that she was an abused housewife for years before escaping is rarely mentioned. But remember, if you will, that attacing academics and intellectuals is a tool of the far right. Educated people are a favorite target of fascits and dictators everywhere, because educating people is the best way to keep them from falling prey to the lies put out by those who wish to rule the world with an iron thumb. But I digress… In my life I’ve known many housewives and mothers and “working mothers”, and many feminists. Often they are the same people. It is ridiculous in the first place to assume a mother and a feminist are two different creatures altogether. If there were no feminist mothers there would be no viable feminist movement. It is doubly ridiculous to claim that a woman who feels personally unsuited to motherhood and marriage automatically hates children and all women who have children. If you feel unsuited to the work of an astronaut, does this mean you must hate astronauts and space? It is the crowning height of ridiculousness to point out that the terrible problems society heaps upon mothers, even more so than other women, by way of explaining why you don’t want to have children or live in a Donna-Reed-like fashion (which was never the norm for women, no matter how much the conservatives want to pretend it was – this was a propaganda campaign put out by television) means that you hate all women who do.
But that’s what our words have been twisted into. I am so revolted by knowing so many intelligent women refuse to call themselves feminists or have anything to do with the feminist movement because they desire the “true happiness” that will only come, they are sure, from settling down with a mythical nice guy and “not having to work” while staying at their nice, roomy home and having lots of fat happy children for him. About one out of fifty women get to live this dream – the rest are destined for disappointment in the form of men who don’t make enough to support such kept women, men who are cruel physically or mentally, men who leave them for a newer, fresher, less used model once they become saggy and tired from running around after children all day, and children who won’t behave the way the baby books say they should behave.
The small grace at the end of this is that many of them will become feminists after this rude awakening takes place – like Terry Hekker.
