Mary Harrington's 'Feminism Against Progress' book is out.

[ArabellaScott]

Looking forward to this one. I know she gets mixed responses; I find her work really interesting.

swiftpress.com/book/feminism-against-progress/

Male violence is not women's responsibility.

But neither is it the responsibility of Jeremy the accountant who collects stamps and has never raised a finger in anger his entire life.

Some may say that as a bloke he needs to speak out and challenge xyz blah blah blah, but I'm not convinced he really needs to do anything more than control himself. If all men effectively managed their own behaviour then there wouldn't be an issue.

But if we do take the stance that Jeremy needs to take collective responsibility for the drunkard up the road that beats up his wife, what can Jeremy really do? Knock on the guy's door and tell him off? Will the guy even listen? Can Jeremy be sure he won't be the next person assaulted given the high likelihood of being assaulted as a male?

Perhaps Jeremy is also the main breadwinner, suffering from depression, and has enough to worry about as it is.

Then we could also move away from the somewhat myopic focus on just men and women. Jeremy might look at honour killings/FGM/Islamic terrorism etc and say "it's not my responsibility to sort out the issues in the Muslim community".

Really, it's only the responsibility of the perpetrator to control their actions but if they've already demonstrated themselves as being unable to do this then we need to somehow stop them unless we want to just sit back and let them crack on.

So, I believe the responsibility falls on society, which naturally includes women, unless we want men to shrug their shoulders and say "meh, woman problem" to any issue we face that isn't their doing.

Thankfully, there are already many women in law enforcement, rehabilitation, judicial system, etc, fighting the good fight. The world would be a worse place if they all decided they were leaving it to the men to solve.

Also, if we assign collective responsibility to men, is a gay man then collectively responsible for homophobic violence? Is a Sikh male responsible for racially motived violence?

I can just see it. Some skinhead laying into a gay male and the latter lying there shouting "ouch ouch, I'm sorry, ouch, it's all my fault, please forgive me, ouch, I'm so sorry for this."

Yes, I thought the same regarding sources. I know that Victorian England had a massive problem with prostitution - no pills back then. I think the boom was mainly linked to increase in poverty for women, and the rise of factories/more men in a smaller area.

Reading on Russian history a while back - I remember a comment that prostitution in Moscow exploded with the arrival/increase of opera and the arts industry.

There could be a link to the rise in women having sex because everyone was partying more - might've had nowt to do wi contraception.

Porn could've exploded because of more means to produce and distribute rather than contraception.

That might've been St Petersburg, not Moscow...

But, still, my point is, it could easily be down to more socialising and having free time rather than the means to control fertility.

It's difficult to negotiate anything (the advice here some present is to negotiate with men) if women lack bargaining power, including in marriage. Not having economic support outside a dysfunctional marriage makes it harder to leave, so some amount of economic independence is necessary for women to have a fairer society. The minimum is to have an education which qualifies a young woman for a job if necessary.

What the Taliban is doing in Afghanistan began with the removing of girls from schools, then extended to removing women from universities and most of the paid labour force. After that they tried to make sure that women couldn't really leave their homes at all. But they are not stopping women from being mothers or from having children, though they give the power to decide on that to the men.

I picked that extreme example to show that these issues are interrelated. The kind of world I want future generations to inherit does not make it impossible for women to both be mothers and also to be full human beings with rights similar to the ones men have. And as even an extreme patriarchy can in some distorted sense allow women to be mothers, we need much more than that.

You can “feel equal” all you like, but the way to equal economic power between the sexes is a fairer division of the economically inactive labours of raising the next generation of human beings, and caring for disabled and elderly relatives. We can do this now, but it’s our culture that is keeping us back. Patriarchy encourages this as only womens’ work by gaslighting us into thinking we are especially suited for it (it’s biology mate) and of course stigma is attached to gender nonconforming by either sex. Carrot and stick.

Women are encouraged to date and marry men with more economic power than they have, so it then comes down to the woman taking up her patriarchy ordained place in society of being home with babies or other caring because “he makes more money than I do” Often fear is the tool used to control women’s choices, articles love to peddle the narrative of violent men feeling threatened by intelligent and successful women who make more than them and so beat/kill them. The message is youd be stupid to partner up with a man with less economic power than you.

Men are lambasted as losers, and deadbeat, chronically unemployed lazy tossers if they are SAHDs. It wasn’t that long ago that most people couldn’t conceive of a father being a SAHD by choice, but rather due to being unable to hold down a job like a real man and how deeply unattractive such a pathetic manchild is because “what does he contribute?” I still see this cultural bias on many threads on MN today.

Women are praised and our egos stroked by patriarchy messaging as well, telling us how much our babies need their mum and only their mum and how special and wonderful a mothers bond and love is…with faux science backing up how we should feel sacrificing our economic power in society as ‘natural’ and ‘driven by our biology’ or ‘powerful instincts to be with our babies’ all the exact same faux scientific arguments used in history to deny women access to education and work now weaponised in the opposite direction to make being a SAHM seem to be the most attractive and crowning achievement of natural womanhood. The reward- Mothering Sunday ooooh ah we get some flowers and a pat on the back, chocolate if we are really good girls.

Culturally, we need to value the unpaid labour of child rearing and caring for elderly/disabled relatives the same as paid labour. And history shows that for traditionally patriarchy designated “women’s work”, until men start doing it in equal numbers to women, it just doesn’t get valued by society.

I don’t think women need to reward men to do this, I think we all need to do is change our culture and question all the concepts & biases we take for granted. The concepts of mum knows best. Babies want their mums. You can’t work and breastfeed. SAHDs are loser, weak men- Motherland’s Kevin is the epitome of this biased fictional stereotype.

Most of these are utter bollocks. Propaganda designed to keep us in our place. Carrot and stick.

What we (men and women) need is true freedom to choose and you don’t have that when such choices are in an environment that pressures women down one path and men the other path. When there is freedom to choose, we will have a more equal division and then economic equity will follow from it.

Obviously you found a solution which felt right and worked for you and your family; however, I'd suggest that many women positively want to stay home with their baby/ young children in a way that their male partners or husbands do not. I'm not sure I'd call this 'mystical' as much as a very strong and driving inclination that supercedes other considerations, including that of achieving 'economic power'. Of course, many women are simply not able to take time out of work to be with young children, as much as they'd like to.

There is the human potential to rise beyond instinct and to reflect upon ourselves in the world of ideas - but beneath that lie the same drives and instincts as exist in all other creatures.

Women are encouraged to date and marry men with more economic power than they have

I don't think this dynamic is predominantly driven by men though. I think it's naturally something that we've realised provides more stability and a better quality of life. It probably goes back millennia with the biggest ape with the most resources getting the females.

Personally, I feel like work is a necessary evil we have to do to survive. But of course money is also power so that side effect can't be underestimated. But I don't feel that aiming for a high paid job is so much aspirational as it is a necessary survival element.

I'm admittedly pretty abstract in my thinking though. We're a bunch of animals a few steps past our monkey days, on a spinning rock in space, with no idea how it even all started, and most of us spend all our good years at a desk and die none the wiser. And a not insignificant number of us actually aspire to this and see it as the goal.

Yes

is there anyone here who doesn’t regard the state of maternity leave in the US as barbaric?

it forces the separation of mother and baby for all but the rich and the very poor

I do think it's barbaric, yes. Appalling that it's like this in one of the richest countries in the developed world.

https://time.com/5954518/lactation-rooms-invisible-labor/

Interesting article & documentary about the US.

And another (that I haven't watched yet):

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/breastmilk-a-documentarybb_5281928/amp

"...while 85 percent of new parents in the U.S. say they intend to breastfeed for at least three months, only 32 percent stick with it -- a statistic that is illustrated in the film, where only one of the five families still breastfeeds 6 months later."

Forcing mums of young children to leave infants and go to work when they want to be with their infants is basically saying, women, you need to be the same as men in order to have a secure life.

In any case, the same systems that would support a woman to stay with her kids would also support a father. I am very skeptical that you would find they made the same choices in the same numbers, all other things being equal. Which should be fine. The pay gap is a statistical fact which in itself is totally meaningless apart from

Gosh, I don't know what happened to that post, I will reconstruct the end:

..apart from the effect that it has, or the value we place on identical outcomes. And there is no reason we need to place value on identical outcomes.

The solution of pretending women and men have identical desires and interests is one that has been taken up by governments and capitalists not because it's great for women, families, or children. But because it's good for governments and capitalists. Get productivity up, get women paying taxes, get the value of that labour passed up the economic ladder.

One of the reasons capitalism hates work that isn't integrated into the capitalist system and remains in the family unit is because the whole effect, the value of that labour, passes entirely to the family itself. A nursery worker caring for children provides value to her employer and to the state, some of her labour is harvested from her task for those things. A mum (or dad) doing that labour in her own home with her own kids is not, the whole value of her labour belongs to herself, her kids, and her family.

Spot on. Essentially, this: "women, you need to be the same as men in order to have a secure life."

I believe an early section in MH's book looks at how, pre-Industrialisation, many women were economically productive, with status, respect and power, in family household units that functioned as cottage industries of various kinds.

As @DemiColon noted, capitalism/globalism doesn't like this kind of industry, as it doesn't receive the profits (and loses out on labour force).

Great posts, @DemiColon

pre-Industrialisation, many women were economically productive, with status, respect and power, in family household units that functioned as cottage industries of various kinds.

I am not sure about that 'status respect and power'. Most families lived at the whim of their laird or master. Most were grindingly poor. Their homes and growing land were owned by the laird and they lived on sufferance, scraping a living in every waking hour by spinning, cottage industries, etc.

I'm thinking of the horrible famine(s) of the 16/17/1800s, where people dropped dead in the streets. They might arguably have had respect within their peer group, but as a whole, these were not times when average women had much in the way of anything.

pre-Industrialisation, many women were economically productive, with status, respect and power, in family household units that functioned as cottage industries of various kind

This is a very ahistorical romanticised fantasy of pre-industrial life for women.

@Onnabugeisha you and I are working from almost opposite basic positions, and we're never going to agree (which is fine). You think all/most of the differences between men and women are the product of cultural biases, faux science - basically the patriarchy and all it's underpinnings.

I think that men and women are different; they want different things, in different ways, at different times of their lives. They value themselves against different parameters. Obviously there is an element of culture in all this, but I'd place it far further down the list than you would, and I'd place far more emphasis on evolutionary biology, or nature, to use another term.

"What we (men and women) need is true freedom to choose and you don’t have that when such choices are in an environment that pressures women down one path and men the other path. When there is freedom to choose, we will have a more equal division and then economic equity will follow from it."

Interestingly, in the most egalitarian societies in the world (ie Scandinavia), which have the most equal parental leave policies, equal pay, etc etc, women (who are actually free to choose any career they like, without any of the practical/societal problems usually encountered) still choose lower-paid, often care-affiliated professions (teaching, nursing etc etc). You'll probably argue that's leftover cultural norms tho.

Yes I agree

I think we have to be careful about being taken in by this sort of thing

as I said upthread I’m 100% sure i’d rather live now than in some agrarian past

'Status, respect and power' amongst their peers. Obviously life was extremely hard for everyone below the upper classes back then; poverty was rife, and extreme. That doesn't invalidate my point though. It's perfectly possible to be poor, and also known and respected in the village as an excellent seamstress who can repair/make new clothes, or lace, not just for her own family but also for the 'gentry up at the big house'.

I guess we'll all have to wait patiently for MH's book to arrive, in which she expounds this thesis (women being responsible for cottage industries and generating family income within their own households); I very much doubt she would stake her reputation on an erroneous claim without proper footnotes and source material to back her points up.

You think I'm romanticising the past. I think the opposite danger also exists: to judge history - and particularly women's history - by our culturally/socially constructed standards today, making it impossible to believe that any woman could possibly have been a proud, economically productive, possibly even happy wife and mother - even in the face of grinding poverty, which was simple reality for many many people. I'm sure they made the best of it, as we all try to do today.

No one is pretending all men and all women have identical desires. I’m saying that it is a fallacy to think that the vast majority of women really want to be home with babies while the vast majority of men really want to be out at work when it comes to raising their children. Especially in a world where boys and girls are conditioned literally from birth to believe these are the roles they are destined for as a matter of faith in “nature”, “instinct” and “biology” due to their sex.

I am saying that while some women want to be home, some do not. And while some men want to be at work, some do not. Right now we have the technology and the opportunity to change this. It is there for the taking, but few are actually choosing this path. Until we sweep away the patriarchy conditioning us from birth on these dictated sex roles, we won’t know what the split would be in an equal society that views men and women equally suited to and capable of being SAHPs. I know it won’t be an exact 50/50 as that’s only attained by social engineering.

I can say hands down, though that it won’t be the current 99% mother vs 1% father that we have now. That’s not driven by biology or even actual desires of individuals, that’s the kind of split you get from brainwashing from birth which is hard to even recognise or admit as an adult.

And this has fuck all to do with capitalism. That’s simply yet another bit of propaganda telling women that having their own economic power and independence is a conspiracy by capitalist pigs to profit from their labour and will be of no benefit to the women themselves. The exact same argument was used 200yrs ago to convince women they didn’t really want to go out to work in a paid job…that it would be “bad” for them as individuals and that employers were merely being exploitative because women were cheaper labour than men. It was also argued, women going out to work was bad for children and families because women would be neglecting their babies and taking away jobs from men with families to support. The aftershocks of this is still deeply entrenched in modern society- reference the poster that said I was “throwing away” my baby by going back to work when they were only a few months old.

Thats my point actually. You can put into place equal parental leave, equal pay, and so on but until you change the cultural conditioning from birth, you won’t have free choice. And the sex gap you see isn’t showing an egalitarian society, because the culture hasn’t caught up. Scandinavia has the apparatus in place, but their culture is just as bad as ours in convincing men and women that we are ruled by biological determinism due to our sex.

It’s no different from pointing out that while rape is illegal and carries prison terms, less than 1% of rapists are actually convicted, meaning that culturally rape still de facto legal.

So laws about equal pay, and equal shared parental leave by themselves don’t change culture or society. They only create opportunity or a path for change- the rest is up to men and women to actually change our belief systems.