Are women interested in current affairs? (And why I hate Woman's Hour)

[BrummieOnTheRun]

I spent the last few days ranting to DH about the fact that certain stories that primarily affect women don't appear in the media.
Like the nationwide policy of downgrading local maternity services (only reported locally, ignored by national media) putting 1,000s of women and babies' lives at risk each year. Or is that each month?
Like loans to women entrepreneurs being at higher interest rates than those to men as we are perceived to be higher risk.
Like the cost of childcare and impact on (primarily women's) employment being treated as a minority issue. We're 50% of the population and most of us have/will have children.
Blah, blah, blah.
Have always been pissed off that Woman's Hour, instead of having the political and intellectual clout of the Today programme, has spent approx 6 minutes superficially covering important issues to cut them off to discuss bloody borsch recipes. Or drama 'that women might enjoy'.
Then a depressing thought occurred to me...maybe it isn't that most 'current affairs' isn't interested in women, maybe most women just AREN'T INTERESTED in current affairs and that's why women-centric issues aren't widely covered?

Sorry so many typos -

• by far the majority of women are primary carers - by choice

The system shouldn't place them at a disadvantage, but it does - whatever gender they are.

Re: women being interested in the domestic and men in the world in general...Hopeless!
As MP said, it's time, isn't it? DH is relatively well-up on current affairs because he can sit in his office and surf the news websites. He can get himself a coffee and a paper and tell himself he's having a well-earned break. Bastard.
Needless to say being at home with a toddler generally precludes that, unless one has v quiet toddlers or no problem with full-time CBeebies.
Now of course we could be doing a role-reversal but it still means one of us is missing out. And we'd be poorer because...well ok because he's brighter than me and can earn more. Mea culpa.
ANyway it doesn't mean I wouldn't rather a bit better coverage of certain issues in the media and dear god I'd like Women's Hour to be a bit less low-brow.

'adore the same PC ideas we all share as if debate were a problem '(Xenia)

as you quoted from me in yur post yesterday can I just point out that for some of us, those theoretically PC opinions are reached by hard thought and life experience. Sometimes I get written off because people think I automatically type into PC though- so very, very wrong. Some stuff I believe is PC but that is because that is what I believe.

There seems to be this school of thought atm that Non-PC is the only 'right' view (what's that awful phrae 'rightminded poeple'). Bullshit. Sorry, but everybody is entitled to a say and unless there is a distribution of opinion we end up with a very unhealthy society indeed. We can all pouint to examples of where extreme lefta nd right winged thought ahs gotten humanity (often to scary similar scenarios) and ye6t people still think its OK to think theat everyone should have the same view as themselves. Truly, truly unbelievable imo.

Everyone on this planet ahs different life experiences and personalities, so to say everyone should think, or everyone should want X or do Z is just illogical.

And yet the government wonders why the divorce rate is so high - the system pits men and women against each other!

'And yet the government wonders why the divorce rate is so high - the system pits men and women against each other!'

Also you have the whole commercialised idea of 'the one' and 'soulmates' and that if there's not that 'wow factor' BANG! romance when you meet them and if he's/she's not XYZ when you meet them and if it doesn't automatically work out then bag it b/c he/she must not be 'the one' being bought and sold by a lot of folks nowadays.

There's this whole idea that swings and roundabouts aren't allowed anymore - not talking about those whose partners cheat, gamble them into bankrupcy, drugs/alcohol abuse, domestic violence, etc. But you know, sometimes you can have some bad years. In a row. Several. Sometimes peoples' sex drives can be affected by things. Sometimes people cock things up.

Life is swings and roundabouts, but somehow, people have been sold and have willingly bought the idea that this shouldn't apply to 'romantic' relationships.

'The one thing that marriage can most reliably offer - companionship - just doesn't reate very high on the desire scale anymore. The prospect oday of living a lifetime with someone who gives you only stability, a family, and companionship? Grounds for Valium - or divorce.'
-Jillian Straus, in 'Unhooked Generation', on the state of dating in the 20- and 30-something crowd.

In other words you get dumbed down because you're a home washing nappies whilst your husbands swan around at work reading the FT? So you let yourselves become depoliticised and allow yourselves to have less time to think about those issues and through choice as someone said below choose to be the one to sacrifice a career.

I'm not sure there is such a thing as a "system" or employer - there's just people trying to make a living by running businesse who employ others with skills, men and women. They don't really owe any moral duties to those people to help them keep bees, visit their grannies or have babies. If the women are so stupid as to choose to be primary care givers all the time of course they're going to have a worse time at home, less time to read the papers and a life which is all round not as easy or nice as their men, but more fool them. On the other hand if the women love that domesticity and hate work and are happy with the long term effects on them over the next 40 years then let them live with that and enjoy it.

Oh good!!!
Xenia's back to amuse us.

I just pulled out the Bordeaux, moony. Fancy a glass?

lol at xenia. When are you running for office? so can see you as a politician.

Sadly I have to go to bed soon as I'pve an early flight tomorrow which presumably will be packed with businessmen whose wives are at home ironing their shirts and refusing them sex.

I suppose I have a general point that if people are not happy about something they should either do something about it or get adjusted to it. Too many women just whinge but then kind of tolerate the male behaviour that they hate and allow it to occur.

Are we thinking women should be more self sacrificial than men? Woman as virgin mary, giving up your all, your life for the children you bear, a life of sacrifice and denial and submission to your man and family, with all the sacrifice on your side - this directed at SAHMs who feel they have given something up (not those suffused in pleasure at the wonderful life they have the privilege to lead).

Hmmm, I knew a lot of businessmen growing up.

A lot of their wives were busy shagging other blokes and spending their husbands' money whilst they were away on business.

We badly need a [nonplussed] emoticon.

Pruni, you self-sacrificing, dumbed down wart, have you sold your house yet?

I was driving around the 'hood where you want to be, not realising that bloody Aitken & Niven is CLOSED on Sundays so I wound up having to drag DD1 into town centre anyway to get her size C shoes, and thinking, wonder if JinglePrunes is here yet?

Xenia I think you are a tad unfair. There are women who believe that it is best for a parent to bring up children. That it's really a CHOICE, if it is what you believe, in your heart of hearts. And as women often breed with men older than them, in an environment where men are generally paid more than women across the board, that decision becomes an economical one. Most people's CHOICE is driven by financial necessity, unfortunately.

If I had the CHOICE to feel 100% satisfied with my children being brought up by a nursery/another carer, and the CHOICE that in doing so I would be in a job that paid for all that, and included time for me to read papers and drink coffee, I would take it.

But I really feel that I/my partner are the best people to bring up our children. And he earns 3 times my salary, so that leaves me at home with the laundry.

Not yet expat
Also mightily depressed by prices!
No urgent necessity to move

MP you put it so well
I sort of judged it not worth the effort

I really don't have a CHOICE in going out to work full time.

I think it sucks.

I hate every minute of it.

So not all working women live to work, Xenia.

I'm also not fool enough to believe my daughters will be just like me no matter how I bring them up.

That's why I bring them up only to think for themselves in order to be at peace w/the CHOICES they make, no matter if those choices are different from what I would have made, and to know that I will always love them unconditionally.

FWIW, I hope they don't grow up married to their bloody 'career' and money. How dead boring and sad and a recipe for a lonely, sad life.

Cboice? They marry someone older and richer so he can provide for them so they perpetuate this patriarchy then? Is that a choice? May be it's a wise choice but why aren't the men who want to be home and think a father should be there with a baby as much as a mother targeting the better off successful woemn in the office then so they can also get that choice?.. although my ex husband apparently had that kind of thought in mind and went off with nearly £1m when he divorced me so I suppose some men do the same thing again whether conscious or not.

Why it is virtually always the women making this choice which reduces their income, leaves them vulnerable on divorce/death of a spouse, damages their physical and emotional health and doesn't make a blind bit of difference to their children at the end of the day? Are they fools or brought up by some propaganda from flawed Bowlby studies? Or perhaps they like that eternal feeling of martyrdom.

Well, you're still close enough, Pruni, that tamum and I could meet you and talk about suncream sometime .

May be it's a wise choice but why aren't the men who want to be home and think a father should be there with a baby as much as a mother targeting the better off successful woemn in the office then so they can also get that choice?..

Do you really want the truth?

B/c I'll tell you what I think it is. B/c those women who are like that are probably, well, this is going to sound like an attack so I'll try not to make it like that.

B/c those women often have traits that are quite masculine. Now most men won't see this as a threat per se, but they will be unattracted to such females, just as other women will be able to smell that about another woman, consciously or not, and cut such a woman a wide berth.

It is, on a very instinctual level, unnatural.

It's in their nature, in some part.

Unattracted to such females as potential mates, that is.

Maybe not for the short-term, maybe long enough to procreate w/such a female, even marry her for a while.

Eventually, however, she doesn't have that spice of intrinsic difference.

And he walks.

W/£1m, with nothing, with another woman who's Not-Like-Her.

My essence is the feminine. Try as I might, I cannot change that.

In all honesty, I don't want to. There is power in that femininity. Power in that nurturing. Power in that giving. Power in that loving hand.

A power that is, in many ways, far, far stronger than money.

There isn't an eternal feeling of martyrdom

But I definitely feel that I am doing the right thing by bringing up my babies myself

There isn't much conscious choice in falling in love

By even if you fall in love with someone your equal in terms of age and education, chances are that he is STILL going to earn more than you throughout his career

expat I know nothing about suncream
it might be a very one-sided conversation

What I know I have gleened from other mums, Pruni, being the olive-skinned-tans-easily mother of pale as milk Scottish girl.

I really disagree that it doesn't make a blind bit of difference whether a parent brings up a child, or delegates this task to someone they are paying to do it.

And describing such a belief as propaganda is just bizarre.

I can see both sides of this in a way.

I choose to work, and in the main enjoy it. The care of the children though, is something that I worry about a lot, where as it barely touches DH. I always have to do every school event - DH does a fair few, but is not driven to do them all in the way I am.

Like Xenia, I am up at Sparrows Fart tomorrow to go abroad on business for a few days - and I hate it - when DH goes away I don't think we get so much as a backwards glance.

There is something different in our make up, which means we don't feel the same level of 'obligation' towards our parenting roles.

Expat your posts have been really thought provoking tonight - well for me at least