With More Women Bringing Home the Bacon, Who’s Going to Fry It Up?

Cathy Reisenwitz

With More Women Bringing Home the Bacon, Who’s Going to Fry It Up?

The New York Times has an interesting think piece up on upper-class gender relations: Wall Street Mothers, Stay-Home Fathers.

The thrust of the piece is that many of the women with children who manage to make a killing on Wall Street are able to do so because their husbands have taken their feet off the gas pedal on their own careers and are handling things on the domestic front.

What the piece helps illustrate is that making a lot of money in America still mostly requires a lot of time spent working. It is therefore mostly incompatible with being the primary person responsible for raising children and running a household. With the ascent of women to the upper echelons of finance and other highly paid careers, the question for families now and in the future becomes, who is going to take care of the house and kids?

There are three primary responses to this question offered by most thinkers and commentators. But all of them have serious drawbacks and miss a huge part of the picture.

Women Love Being Homemakers

The first response is that women are naturally suited to and mostly like being the primary person responsible for raising children and running a household. Therefore, they should do it and let their husbands bring home the bacon.

It’s true that, when asked, most women say they don’t want to work as many hours as most men. As Independent Women’s Forum Executive Director Sabrina Schaeffer recently pointed out:

"It may be unpopular – or simply not politically fashionable to say this – but most women don’t want to be Sheryl Sandberg. The Pew Research Center recently found that if offered the choice, only 23 percent of married mothers would choose to work full-time outside of the home. What’s more, “working fathers place more importance on having a high-paying job, while working mothers are more concerned with having a flexible schedule.”

The problem here is that it’s a solution which relies on but does not critique the role of pernicious gender-based expectations in shaping what women "are suited to" and "want."

How ironic is this. By telling women that they are best suited to and should enjoy staying home and taking care of kids, the culture influences their desire to do so. Most women don’t want to be seen as “masculine,” just as most men don’t want to be seen as “feminine.” Mostly without ever realizing it, women are making choices that ensure they meet what they’ve spent their whole lives hearing are the expectations of their gender.

It’s also losing credibility as an accurate description of what women are best suited to as women are earning more degrees than men, and are also demonstrably better suited to earning money in an information- and service-based economy than are men.

Women Need Wives

The second response is that as now women are earning more degrees than men, it's time for women to step into breadwinner roles and men to become the new wives. This is a big part of the premise of Lean In.

The problem here is that, as the article shows, even men without jobs aren't doing as much in the childcare and household duties arena as unemployed wives do. And there is still societal stigma directed at men who don't do paid work. As mentioned before, gendered expectations persist. In this environment, unpaid work is seen as “feminine,” and a patriarchal culture swiftly punishes men seen a man acting like women.

In fact, TIME just posted a response to the NYT article, Vivia Chen: When Stay-at-Home Husbands Are Embarrassing to Their Wives, pointing out how many feel about such arrangements:

"All of this points to our entrenched ambivalence about changing gender roles. Men in these situations often feel alienated, particularly if they are surrounded by stay-at-home moms. But the power moms with the stay-at-home husbands are just as uneasy, often more embarrassed than proud that they’ve upset the traditional order."

Workplaces Should Cater to Women

The third response is that American workplaces should adapt to allow women the flexibility they need to be primary caretakers AND earn big paychecks. This is the solution offered by Anne-Marie Slaughter.

The problem here is that it is kind of a fool's errand. As pointed out earlier, women don't want to work as long or as hard as men, and no amount of corporate coddling is going to make them want to.

The Fourth Way

Who should handle raising the kids and taking care of the house? Simply put, it should be whoever’s opportunity cost is lowest.

Besides being a hindrance to women, gendered expectations actually inhibit economic growth by distorting labor markets. This wasn’t much of a problem in the past. In an agriculture and manufacturing economy, most women really didn’t have as much earning potential as most men. But in an information- and service-based economy, that’s no longer true. Keeping women with high earning potential in the home because they feel that’s where they belong robs society of their potential value in careers.

But where does that leave men? Simply put, high-earning women who want to unlock their potential should wife uneducated men. The big drawback to this solution is that it requires that individuals defy gendered expectations. This is a tall order, and people who defy expectations are stigmatized accordingly.

But it’s an economic reality that people who arrange their lives this way will be more financially successful than people who either don’t get married or cling to traditional gender roles. Economics will eventually re-dictate gendered expectations to conform to what’s most effective. The winners will be the early adopters.

SOURCE

The surname of the lady who wrote this article could be translated as "Giant Joke" and I suspect the last two paragraphs above are satirical.  They are economically rational but lead to a conclusion that most women abhor -- marrying a man who is "beneath" them





Hey, Rich Kids: If You Get Wasted and Kill People With Your Truck Blame It On “Affluenza”

Lawyer’s for 16-year-old Ethan Couch were able to pawn off on a doe-eyed court that “affluenza” was to blame for his stealing beer at WalMart, getting wasted and then plowing his out of control Ford F-350 into a group of folks, killing four.

Affluenza? Please.

For those who’re not hip to “affluenza“, allow me to help you add another word to that ever growing list of PC terms spun by blame-shifting therapists in order to explain away criminal behavior by little Ethans who need to go to prison instead of a luxury rehab in Newport Beach:

Affluenza is a portmanteau of “affluence” and “influenza“. It’s the malady of rich kids whose parents never let them suffer the consequences of their bad behavior. In my day we called them spoiled little bastards and the way we’d help them get healed from affluenza is by beating the crap out of them at school when mommy and daddy weren’t around.

According to a defense psychologist, this is what Ethan suffers from and we should feel sorry for this brat. Yep, these wizards postulated that little Ethan was unable to link his criminal/deadly behavior with its being bad due to his parents’ teaching him that wealth buys privilege. Therefore, to impart to him this hard lesson in reality, his parents hired out an expensive law firm that successfully convinced a court that numb-nuts needed rehab versus jail. Wow. Way to go. Lesson learned.

God knows this ain’t the last specious, bullet-dodging word we’re doomed to learn to let evil people off the hook. Mark my word, some redneck is going to die trying to ride one of T.Boone Pickens’ wind turbines after getting all liquored up at Hooters. His trailer trash parents, upon learning it was one of T. Boone’s turbines, smell blood in the water and sue Pickens for not taking into account their sons Dipshitzophrenia that disallows him to time his jump on to the moving blades. That would be the swiftly rotating unsafe blades, mind you.

Hey, losers. Two can play at that game. I say our conservative reps in the House should start getting more vociferous regarding their disdain for BHO and The RINOS. They could blame their new, aggressive outspokenness on a Stercore Tauri Disorder that makes ‘em scream “BS” uncontrollably when those twins trample upon our founding docs.

Silliness aside, we have four dead individuals who lost their life because this punk didn’t have a life; and now walks away unpunished because our land defines deviancy down.

Personally, as you can imagine, I feel no sympathy for Ethan’s made up ailment. No, my empathy begins and ends with the victims and their shattered families who, not only have to live with their loved one’s loss, but they have the additional pain of watching our justice system dole out a comfy sentence to a kid who should swing.

SOURCE






Federal judge decriminalizes polygamy in  Utah

First, homosexual marriage and then polygamy.  Leftists scoffed at that sequence but it is happening

Judge Clark Waddoups’ 91-page ruling, issued Friday, sets a new legal precedent in Utah, effectively decriminalizing polygamy. It is the latest development in a lawsuit filed by the family of Kody Brown, who became famous while starring in cable TV channel TLC’s reality series "Sister Wives."

Waddoups’ ruling attacks the parts of Utah’s law making cohabitation illegal. In the introduction, Waddoups says the phrase "or cohabits with another person" is a violation of both the First and 14th amendments. Waddoups later writes that while there is no "fundamental right" to practice polygamy, the issue really comes down to "religious cohabitation." In the 1800s — when the mainstream LDS Churh still practiced polygamy — "religious cohabitation" in Utah could have actually resulted in "multiple purportedly legal marriages." Today, however, simply living together doesn’t amount to being "married," Waddoups writes.

"The court finds the cohabitation prong of the Statute unconstitutional on numerous grounds and strikes it," Waddoups later writes.

Utah’s bigamy statute technically survived the ruling. However, Waddoups took a narrow interpretation of the words "marry" and "purports to marry," meaning that bigamy remains illegal only in the literal sense — when someone fraudulently acquires multiple marriage licences.

Jonathan Turley, the attorney representing the Brown family, called the opinion "magnificent" Friday in a phone conversation. In a blog post, he added that it strikes down "the criminalization of polygamy" and will allow "plural families to step out for the first time in their communities and live their lives openly among their neighbors."

"Regardless of how you feel about the legal issues in the case," Turley told the Tribune on Friday, "this is a decision that was rendered after considerable amount of reflecting and consideration by the court."

Turley explained that the ruling means everyone is entitled to freedom of religion as well as due process. He also expects the ruling to stand up over time, and potential appeals, which the Utah Attorney General’s Office has indicated in the past it might pursue.

The Browns filed their lawsuit in July 2011, arguing Utah’s law violated their right to privacy. The family’s argument relied primarily on the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down the Texas law banning sodomy, which was celebrated by gay rights advocates.

At the time, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff responded that the bigamy law is different because it involves entire families, not just consenting adults.

The lawsuit also came at a time when the Brown family faced possible prosecution from Utah County. However, nearly a year after the Browns filed their lawsuit, Utah County District Attorney Jeff Buhman announced that his office wouldn’t file bigamy charges against any consenting adult polygamists unless violence, abuse or fraud was involved.

SOURCE






OIC Blames Free Speech for "Islamophobia" in West

by Soeren Kern

The common thread that binds the entire document together is the OIC's repeated insistence that the main culprit responsible for "the institutionalization of Islamophobia" in Western countries is freedom of speech.  "The Istanbul Process started with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton.... We need to build on it." — OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Isanoglu

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, an influential bloc of 57 Muslim countries, has released the latest edition of its annual "Islamophobia" report.

The "Sixth OIC Observatory Report on Islamophobia: October 2012-September 2013" is a 94-page document purporting to "offer a comprehensive picture of Islamophobia, as it exists mainly in contemporary Western societies."

But the primary objective of the OIC—headquartered in Saudi Arabia and funded by dozens of Muslim countries that systematically persecute Christians and Jews—has long been to pressure Western countries into passing laws that would ban "negative stereotyping of Islam."

In this context, the OIC's annual Islamophobia report—an integral part of a sustained effort to prove the existence of a "culture of intolerance of Islam and Muslims" in the West—is in essence a lobbying tool to pressure Western governments to outlaw all forms of "Islamophobia," a nebulous concept invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1990s.

The OIC report comprises five main chapters and several annexes aimed at documenting "incidents of slandering and demeaning Muslims and their sacred symbols including attacks on mosques, verbal abuses and physical attacks against adherents of Islam, mainly due to their cultural traits."

But the common thread that binds the entire document together is the OIC's repeated insistence that the main culprit responsible for "the institutionalization of Islamophobia" in Western countries is freedom of speech, which the OIC claims has "contributed enormously to snowball Islamophobia and manipulate the mindset of ordinary Western people to develop a 'phobia' of Islam and Muslims."

According to the OIC, freedom of expression is shielding "the perpetrators of Islamophobia, who seek to propagate irrational fear and intolerance of Islam, [who] have time and again aroused unwarranted tension, suspicion and unrest in societies by slandering the Islamic faith through gross distortions and misrepresentations and by encroaching on and denigrating the religious sentiments of Muslims."

Much more HERE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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