Feminist Pub VII - Chat, questions, random thoughts too small for a thread ...

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Just setting this up while we finish off the last few posts on the old thread. Come in and pull up a bar stool!

upto - about 7% of maths profs being academics, to add to that, anecdotally I know a lot of female maths academics in the UK didn't go to university here*, so the UK is actually even worse than it looks to be for getting women going into maths.

• Obligatory disclaimer pointing out I am not in the slightest bit fussed about immigration etc., and on the contrary delighted by it, but still feel it's a bit crap that girls born here have such a small chance of becoming a maths prof.

mab - oh, yes, I think getting proper training is great.

What is less good is being expected to provide that training because you're the woman so understand about this gender equality stuff - which I've heard people on here mention before.

Ps

Love the "average male" link.

Also, love Bill & Ted's attention to detail in this hotel. The low basins for children makes me think this might be the kind of place where you can order children's drinks and they don't come in massive glasses filled to the very goddamn brim so you are pretty much guaranteed to have a soaking child before the end of the meal, the only question is when, and you kick yourself for forgetting AGAIN that it is always like that, and you always remember too late that you should order one child's drink and one empty child's glass.
But then, if you do remember, and try to explain that this is what you want, it gets very complicated and they treat you like a weirdo and you panic that you look as if you are a cheapskate for being too mean to buy your child one drink each and you offer to pay for two drinks (they do have to make a living after all) "it's just they can't cope with glasses that are completely full -" you attempt to explain, and they look at you very oddly, say "ok, so two glasses of milk then?" write that down with an air of dismissive finality and bring you TWO ENORMOUS GLASSES FULL TO THE BRIM WITH MILK AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHH

LRD - got it

Sorry, I hope I didn't come across patronizing/stating the obvious there.

I've been awake all night and am not awake now.

no no not at all, I had missed the crucial point that it's female labour again

Can I rant a little more about whataboutthemenz? Do these men really think they're laying a revelation on us when they so condescendingly inform us that bad stuff happens to men too? Do they think we are unaware of it? That we think men ride off to work each day on rainbow-coloured unicorns, and that they spend all day being fed grapes by nubile virgins?

Please show me where it says in feminist literature that Nothing Bad Ever Happens To Men, Only To Women? Not there? Huh, how amazing.

What it really boils down to is that these men are expecting feminism to fix men's problems for them. Now, for the most part, we are quite happy to do this for the men's problems stem from the same gender stereotyping that disadvantages women. But a) these men seem to have completely missed the point that feminists are already opposed to much of the sexist crap they're telling us to be concerned with and b) they're fucking lucky that some of their goals align with ours so we'll fix that for them while we're at it, and so they should be grateful and c) if there are men's issues that feminists aren't addressing, there's no goddamn reason why they can't address that issue themselves instead of whining that feminists aren't doing it for them!

Sorry, I know I'm breaching to the choir.

breaching? preaching, obviously. And there's a missing "from" in there somewhere.

the one of those that really gets me is on threads where a mn-er complains that her husband doesn't appreciate all her hard work at home, she is feeling limited in some way or perhaps just massively overworked, perhaps doesn't have realistic options to WOH or otherwise improve her lot and feels that her husband doesn't grasp this or show any flexibility towards her situation.

At this point you will get many posters saying "but it isn't easy for him bearing the responsibility for supporting a family alone."

that drives me nuts because

1 - how do you know? Some jobs are much easier than others. Unless the man is a sole trader in a precarious business constantly on the brink of going under, the level of 24 hour personal desperate responsibility is nothing like comparable to a SAHM of preschoolers including a small ebf baby. Nothing like it.

2 - so let him change it then! Men as a class chose to marginalise women's access to money by means other than through men; men as individuals often take more control of families because they are the ones who are drawing the salary right now and possession is 9 points of the law.

personally I found no huge difference in the weight on my shoulders when I was the sole breadwinner, because I had been supporting myself for so long before I had a partner, had supported others in that time too, had been through several redundancies and times of unemployment living on savings, and had seen close up many times over that employment is insecure and life is precarious. same old, same old. I think (dangerous speculation alert) the posters who say "hmmmmmm see it from his point of view" imagine that some women expect to be materially supported and need to have it pointed out that money doesn't come out of thin air. they just assume that women work for pin money and have no idea that bosses are unreasonable, businesses restructure, and you have to be tough and get the hell on with it.

Indeed, queenmab, if either partner feel that they are taking on an unfair burden in the relationship, be it in hours worked, leisure time, distribution of domestic chores/childcare etc etc, then the logical adult thing to do is talk about it and negotiate a new setup. This applies equally to the SAHP and the working parent.

If the working parent does indeed feel that they don't want to bear the financial burden alone, fair enough. BUT, they must realise that putting down some of the financial responsibility would involve picking up more of the domestic responsibility to allow their partner to move into work outside the home. You can't just tell the SAHP "I'm tired of earning all the money, go get a job. But arrange all your own childcare and I still expect the house to be kept clean".

Communication and compromise are wonderful things.

OTOH, women shouldn't feel any entitlement to be a SAHM if their partner isn't prepared to take on the earning responsibility alone. Women don't get to declare that they are the only ones who could possibly raise the child properly and relegate their male partner to the role of breadwinner. If he wants to take on more domestic responsibility and hand over some of the breadwinning, then she has no right to deny him that and refuse to go out to work.

I don't know, Annie. I have really struggled at work because of institutionalised sexism. I earn less than I should and am less senior than I should be, not because I have had maternity leaves, but because of the way the qualities I have are treated in a woman (punished or ignored) where they would have been rewarded in a man. (analytic skills and critical thinking)

I know that looks paranoid but I have thought long and hard about it. long before I had children (which was when I was 37) there were issues for me that made work very hard, very unmotivating, very damaging to my mental health, and I have worked really, really hard to overcome things within me and without me that hold me back - and a huge amount of it, huge, is honestly sexism, and denying this would be just gaslighting myself.

AND - I did have children. i was exhausted by their ebf babyhood and pretty much on my knees when I launched myself, each time, back into the world of demanding full time work, knowing it was pretty much my only option if I was to have any kind of a chip and a chair in the career stakes.

All these struggles were right for me, for various reasons. but i have come so close to seeing this as just not worth it. It has to be worth it, but even marginal changes in my circumstances would make me think it quite reasonable to tell my male partner that the costs to him of WOH are so much lower than the costs to me, that it is unfair to expect me to do it at all, and the best thing for our family for me to put my energies elsewhere.

Marginal changes like:

if dp earned even a tiny bit more;
if I earned even a tiny bit less (maybe by having babies at 33 instead of 37);
If I were a bit more interested in community things - if I were dying to be on the PTA or something like that, if I were one of those lovely busybody sociable people who is always bustling about arranging things;
If one of our children had even minor SN, or even not even diagnosed SN but we had a sense of them as somehow fragile and needing really strong constant home support;
repeated childcare difficulties;
If I were a tiny bit less invested in my financial independence, and the headspace I get from my daily commute on my own; (I almost work to finance two hours a day on my own! almost, but not quite true)

• with just a few tweaks to our circumstances, things that apply to very many women, I can imagine thinking it quite fair to say "this is killing me, in a way that it will never kill you; the world is not set up for women to WOH - this is your job".

another important marginal change - in the opposite direction: if I had ff and had had a lot of night time support (whether from dp or from a nearby relation or something) in the first year of each baby's life, I would have been in a completely different state at the end of each maternity leave and would have been much more fit to work.

I see what you're saying, and it's unfair that the burden falls on us, but if women keep opting out of working because it's literally harder work for us, what will ever change?

And now apparently it's okay for our elected officials to threaten physical violence against women on social media and get away with just a (weak) apology.

That one has passed me by Annie. What has happened? Not getting much time to keep up with news ATM!

Dear god. But no, we don't live in a culture of casual attitudes to violence (as people so often claim we don't).

Sorry, should have said thank you for the link Kim.

Ugh, I did read some of the comments before stopping in support of my mental health. Started a positive thread instead. MNFWR is good for me.

Kim I was just about to bring this up. Glad you did.

Sorry, I should have put in a link, but I assumed (since my radio is helpfully reminding me about it every half hour) that you'd all have heard by now.

I will avoid the comments. I can imagine a lovely mix of sexism and Islamophobia. Am I right?

Annie- I have radio 4 on now and have already heard it twice. This morning I was listening to Rik Mayall reading Dinosaurs love underpants and feeling rather sad.

At one point when only the baby was in the car....