Posts by B Jones
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But CEOs of decent sized businesses aren't likely to have a partner who is a cleaner or labourer. It'll be lawyers, doctors, teachers, other business people etc.
Dead right, to a point. I'm wondering if there's a growing male version of upper-middle-class low income types - the art gallery docents, the people who devote their time to various community causes, and so on. I remember hearing once that Mai Chen's partner was a poet or a philosopher or something - that sort of thing.
Or on the other hand, you could have a legion of pool boys with sugar mummies, for all I know. The pill meant that women could sleep with guys they didn't necessarily want to marry; breaking the glass ceiling could mean that women could marry (or form other partnerships with) guys they don't need to rely on for financial support.
Ben, I'm writing my comments between bathtimes, nappy changes, don't-want-to-have-a-nap-but-I'm-so-tired-I'll-grizzle-the-house-downtimes and feed times - but I've found that I can get a hell of a lot of books read during feeds. Two kids would be a whole other story.
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Can anyone think of a new ideology that didn't go to its ludicrous extreme within a few years of its inception, to find a more reasonable equilibrium in the following years? I think there's something of human nature to go overboard on the latest new thing before pulling back once reason kicks in. Wonder drugs, economic theories, food fads, great leaders, and so on. The obvious place feminist separatism breaks down is in the family, where most of us have people we love of the opposite sex.
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There must already be a census data set, come to think of it. Women's income as a proportion of total household income, broken down into groups of very high, high, medium and low women's income. It'd be interesting to see if things changed for women outside the old breadwinner/homemaker model.
My comments today have been enabled by my partner, who is doing the bulk of the baby-work since I've buggered my back and am fit only for intellectual pursuits. I'm bloody certain women value fatherly traits in their partners, in addition to being able to bring home the bacon old school style, but it doesn't have the same stereotype value. Does "loves kids" come up in dating sites for guys as much as good income?
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It would be a large sample, certainly. But better to survey what people actually do in relationships, than what they say they want. I mean, how important are long walks on the beach really :-)
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I wonder if you did a survey of high earning women, you'd find a different pattern in the earnings of their spouses than women earning the average female wage. Theoretically, having lots of dosh means you can choose a partner without worrying about their ability to provide - it would be interesting to see if that played out in fact.
Dating websites wouldn't be the best sample.
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Not if the average woman isn't getting paid a family wage herself.
Unpaid work or low-paid work, it's still female-dominated.
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maybe on a societal level but on the personal front it aint that huge.
There are plenty of examples of family arrangements like pollywog's. They're not the majority though, because when men on average get paid more than women on average, it costs the family less on average to lose a woman's wage when there's care work to be done. And women tend to get paid less on average because they either anticipate taking time out of the paid workforce or have in fact done so. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
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@BenWilson and Deborah and Danielle - yep, it's a huge job and it means men need to really think about what they mean as giving women an equal chance. It's more than just formal legal rights. If we organise our society in such a way that some people earn money through paid employment, which takes up so much time that other people have to do the unpaid work of raising children and other forms of caring, then we need to make sure that the divisions of labour that fall out of that don't result in inequality. Formal legal equality has so far resulted in a lingering pay gap between men and women, and the answer to that needs to be more sophisticated than "that's just because women like to do the low paying jobs, or like to balance work and family life."
I get so frustrated when I hear women taking on the feminist movement for failing to deliver on its promise that women could have both a career and family. For one thing, I'm not sure it ever promised that, and if it did, it didn't just leave it up to women to seek out this nirvana on their own. Feminists called for society to change, not just individuals. The reasons it's difficult to have both a maximised career and a close family life for women is because someone's got to do the family's unpaid work, and while women have flooded into the paid workforce, men haven't flooded into the gap in the careforce. You can't leave the system as it is, and blame women for either failing to grasp the opportunity to be equal to men, or blame them for the social consequences of their desertion of roles that were previously considered not worth paying for.
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Moreover, declaring that sexuality is and must be a political choice is just nuts.
Isn't it, though? Those in the ex-gay movement have made a political choice out of their sexuality, as have the legion of conservative preachers and politicians who've been caught on the down-low after having publicly campaigned against homosexuality. Denial of your innate feelings is a political act that lots of people make (also in areas other than sexuality). It sounds like a miserable choice to me, and one we shouldn't force, but that doesn't mean political elements don't come into it. I don't know whether this is what Bindel argues or not, but there's a middle ground between 0% political choice to who you sleep with, and 100% political choice.
but she doesn't get to dictate if and why the rest of the world chooses to have sex with the gender(s) of people they have sex with,
No, she doesn't. How could one random columnist achieve such an end? Saying what she thinks about it isn't the same as being in the position to do something about it. Power is the key. I'm not threatened by her making judgements over my sexuality because she can't do anything about it. I get more wound up by the conservative sex police because they want the law to back them up, and they have a long history of using various coercive ways to enforce their views. We're a long way from The Gate to Women's Country here. I think a lot of men are taken aback by lesbian separatism in the same way there's always some guy complaining about the Women's space in the student union building - not that they particularly want to go there, but the thought of not being allowed to crosses their sense of unexamined privilege. It's not something that floats my boat, but it does have a certain logical consistency to it. More so than the men's rights guys whose misogyny exceeds only their homophobia.
And, quite frankly, if you don't find her utterly disgusting attitude to transsexuals offensive, I don't know what you would. The dehumanisation in her description is chilling and horrific.
Hadn't read it, but what I've seen summarised here does sound horrible. Again, power is important - transgender people face kinds of discrimination that cisgendered people don't, and don't need that to be stoked by groups who could be useful allies. I don't know enough about trans issues to make any more considered comment, but I don't think there's any honour to be gained by any political movement in finding a group further down the rungs of privilege to dump on.
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I think power is a useful dimension to consider when you look at either feminist or masculinist separatism. We're talking about the power to not include people, by reason of gender, in one's intimate and social circle. With respect to feminist separatists, those circles are a handful of fringe cliques in which men may not be welcome (eg the Women's Space at university). For the old-school patriarchal types, their non-inclusion of women extended in living memory to higher education, political office, the right to vote in many countries, many professions and trades, religious office, health services and a handful of high-status cliques, some of which today admit access to networks of significant decisionmaking.
I haven't read and I'm not defending Bindel's views, but she has a right to hold them, however mad she is. No doubt people who publish them get plenty of readers in excited outrage in response (as does Garth George). George plays or has recently played a role in what gets published in NZ's biggest newspaper, and opines on the rights of people he has never met to access medical services in relation to their reproductive health). As far as I can tell, Bindel's main power is to annoy.
I don't think we have a right not to be annoyed. And I thought getting annoyed by people expressing their sexual politics was something one mainly did in conservative circles.