Just Steve and Sansa, making out.
The most important news of the week:
Here is a piece that made me feel positively towards Hillary (it also has a lot of great info about why this loophole ISN’T ultimately a good way to get employers to hire disabled workers):
At a campaign event in Madison, Wisconsin, Clinton was asked by Nikki Vander Meulen, an autistic attorney, about her position on Section 14(c), a loophole in the federal minimum wage that allows employers to gain an exemption from the minimum for workers with disabilities. Most Americans don’t even know this loophole exists, but it has been leaving disabled workers to toil in poverty for decades, and disability rights advocates like myself have made repeal a major priority for years.
Here is a piece that did not make me feel positively towards Hillary (it’s actually not really about Hillary and is very thoughtful and by our own Ezekiel Kweku):
Given how bad the Clinton administration’s policies on crime were (and they were bad), and how awful Hillary’s remarks were, it’s tempting to treat both as personal failings — the result of ignorance, hostility, or carelessness. We treat racism like that often in this country, as a kind of secular sin from which transgressors must repent and turn. And if the sinner is a public figure, we have to judge whether their repentance is genuine or not. This impulse to always treat racism as a matter of the heart is a mistake, especially when it comes to politicians.
I am not the Clintons’ therapist or pastor. I don’t care about how they feel or the condition of their souls. I am interested in actions, which means I’m only interested in their motives insofar as they help me predict how they’ll act in the future. Whatever is in their hearts, both Bill Clinton’s crime laws and Hillary Clinton’s defense of them were intentional reactions to the era’s politics, just as both of their apologies are a product of the current political environment — suggesting that if the winds shift again, so, too, will the Clintons.
shit:
Consider, for example, gender role expectations. Millennials may be marrying later, but 40% of Millennials are parents and, as parents, neo-traditionalists. A Pew Research study revealed that 35% of Millennial men without kids think women should “take care of the home and children,” compared to only 26% of Gen Xers and 21% of men older than 45. That number jumps to 53% after Millennial men have children. Prior to having children, 24% of Millennial men, who over all tend to have the most gender-equal ideas and aspirations of any generation measured, say they expect to have equal responsibility for childcare. The percentage drops to 8% after the birth of a child.
For women, also likely to describe egalitarian parenting goals, there is no drop. Instead, they consistently express the belief that their spouses will participate equally in care of children, and they reveal the need and desire to work outside of their homes with parity, for money.
I need to acknowledge here, up top, that there is a long tradition of cruise stunt journalism. I love Max Silvestri’s stint aboard the Top Chef cruise so much that I would have asked it to be my Valentine if I could. You can read about the Paula Deen cruise, and then read about it again. Or the Republican cruise. Or the Kid Rock cruise. You can even dig up David Foster Wallace’s ur-cruise stunt journalism piece.
I also need to acknowledge that I am not a cruise person, nor am I a Zumba person. A year or two of fitness writing has led me here, to a cruise ship heading towards a private Haitian beach operated by Royal Caribbean, filled with the most enthusiastic people I’ve ever met and more MC Hammer pants than I care to remember. The only time I’ve taken a Zumba class in recent memory is once pre-cruise for context, and then once after while poorly adjusting to a Zumba-less lifestyle.
I am to spend five days on assignment, trapped in an 150-square-foot room draped with sweaty leggings alongside my mother. She incessantly demands praise for how great she’s become at ass-shaking (for the record: terrifyingly good). I joke just as frequently about tossing her overboard. I invited her because of course I invited my mom to accompany me on a Zumba cruise. Who else would I bring?
This deleted comment was made by a bus company bot:
This deleted comment was made by a loser:
There’s a pretty cute thing going on with my webcomic friends today.
And by cute, of course, I mean, absolutely devastating and infuriating.
(And by friends I mean enemies)
#IStandWithSanjay #StopThePlagiarism
I went on my tumblr and I saw 5 different versions of the joke and I just figured it was some inside comics-circle joke or a meme, but now that I know you didn’t actually give your permission and that you’re not getting the credit…that sucks.
Just to be clear, I am DEFINITELY SINCERELY mad at these people and this is NOT a big ol’ loosely coordinated gag that a bunch of online cartoonists, myself included, joined in on.
(If you knew that I am so sorry for breaking character. I just really don’t like actually tricking people.)
This is so disappointing! I don’t follow a lot of webcomics and am not getting the Tumblr post from Rock Paper Cynic–did they steal your joke and then also make it an April Fool’s joke? Because that seems doubly cruel, that they not only stole it but then made a joke with all their friends about stealing it?
I really want to know what they were thinking… According to the first guy, this was pitched to a whole group of artists as an april fool’s thing with this exact script, by Doris McComics? He talks about it here: http://rockpapercynic.tumblr.com/post/14207361844…
Do you know these people??? Would it be any better if it was one asshole and the rest of them didn’t know?
But this is dickish and terrible. I’m sorry.
I am the sorry one!!!!! I made the fan comic today and lied about it.
I think my friend Peter put it really well with:
“To those who genuinely stood up for me: thank you, and I’m sorry that I abused trust for this joke. You are kind and supportive and the world needs more of you.”
That deleted comment on Ayn Rand tho
FEARFUL THINGS.
The best part for me is the charming contrast with the bus bot.
Like, I would choose talking with the bus bot over that dude.
“total dribble” could refer to my toddler’s nose with his early spring cold, though.
“Because they are unafraid they shriek nonsense at fearful things” is actually a pretty solid line. I mean, I don’t actually think it means anything, but still, just imagine it being intoned in Werner Herzog’s voice. Chills.
For a little while, I thought “oh it’s too bad Deleted Comment Dude is not here to read how amused we all are at his expense,” and then I thought “Oh I hope he’s here to read how amused we all are at his expense”
Yesterday I inadvertently found a reddit forum for discussing the Toast. I didn’t read much but the Toast’s Ayn Rand posts appear to be in heavy rotation.
I was surprised/unsurprised to run across it: https://www.reddit.com/domain/the-toast.net/
It gives me a perverse sort of pride by association.
OMG
Someone posted the article to /r/books, so the ghosts of stupid shit past was probably inevitable.
I don’t have anything good to add today (my friend had a cat tragedy last night that I had to assist with and I am now very, very tired) except to say that it is baffling the number of people who refer to my watching my own kid as “babysitting.”
I have a lot of friends who do this and I really really really really REALLY don’t understand it.
even my wife does it sometimes
The scariest part about this to me (no kids, lots of babysitting) is the horrifying implication that I have parented.
I went OFF on a person who did this to my family the other day. As a political candidate, probably not the best idea, but I could not take one more “oh how cute, your husband is babysitting!” on top of all the “but who will take care of your baby if you get elected?!”
Um, can I vote for you for this alone?
I should put this on my website. propose some legislation.
WHEREAS members of the public frequently refer to fathers performing their parental duties as “babysitting” be it resolved that such statements shall be punishable by citizens responding to perpetrator with a) a slap to the face or b) screaming incoherently or c) removal of perpetrator’s humanity card at the discretion of witnesses to said offense.
It’s been a long time since I was conversant in Robert’s Rules but… I… second this? I…. support this?
You can be cosponsor!
YES! I want to do that. It’s not a problem that I live and work and vote and eat and sleep in New York, right?
I don’t see why that should have any bearing at all on this completely imaginary situation!
You got my vote.
No jury would convict you.
Several MA politicians wisely get their family photo taken with them standing in the front in a power suit and their husbands HOLDING the small children, slightly behind them. It is a genius PR move against this.
I so wish I could post right now the photos we had taken this weekend that are exactly like this.
Is it wrong that I really enjoy having my husband trail me at events, holding my drink and lingering behind when I move on to the next person to set up meetings and hammer out details? Because I LOVE IT. We have a very egalitarian relationship (he actually performs slightly more household/child rearing tasks than I do) but it just feels SO GOOD to reverse the usual power structure.
So the UK government thinks that when a women works in the evening and her partner is looking after her kids, that’s “an informal childcare arrangement.” Cos evening shifts are, like, a problem for single mothers, but they’re practically handy for women who have partners, so that’s ok.
https://twitter.com/rosamundurwin/status/71581689…
Do they think you get paid for it?
My coworker is always complaining about her husband and how he 1) tries to make his 6-y.o. son “tough” 2) yells at the son for messing up while playing video games (??) and 3) apparently cannot handle watching both kids while at the son’s sports practice. I suspect he is terrible.
I wonder if the drop in belief in gender equality in domestic chores between gen x/baby boomers and millennials is less an actual shift in how people are dividing housework, and more in their perception. Because I feel like baby boomer males got so much credit for helping at all that they often think they’re splitting things evenly when really they’re mowing the lawn and maybe cooking sometimes, and occasionally cleaning when the wife makes them. (Which is 100% how it went down with my boomer parents.) Whereas these millennial men perhaps recognize that their contribution is not equal, but that’s how their parents did it, so that’s how it should be?
To Shriek Nonsense at Fearful Things is actually our family motto. It sounds even better in Gaelic.
Shrieking nonsense at fearful things is one of my favourite pastimes.
What April Fool’s Day pranks are you pulling? I pretended to quit facebook, which is a prank on myself, because now I can’t go on facebook.
Also it looks like that tweet of that dude’s mom yelling at him got taken down :/
We covered a boss’ office with pictures of Nicholas Cage. 🙂
This week I have been giving my kids one foil-wrapped chocolate egg each morning while they wait for the bus so that today I could give them grapes wrapped in the candy foil without them being suspicious. They laughed really hard when they opened them this morning so I’m feeling pretty good.
Oh dang, gotta do this next year! BRAVA
I really wanted to have a bowl of grape eggs out but I had a very, very hard time finding small enough grapes. i only found 2 in my whole bunch that fit the foil.
here’s to pranks which make the prankee laugh! so many “pranks” just seem to be excuses for cruel jokes at someone else’s nonconsensual expense. here’s to you!
I announced a pop quiz and had my students do a ridiculous analysis of this image (https://twitter.com/discarding_imgs/status/713754131543011328), with three questions where they had to analyze it. It’s an elementary comp class on dystopia in popular culture (so the 20th-21st century) where we definitely do NOT do manuscript analysis of medieval works! They were very earnest and wrote busily for five minutes before I called off the jig.
This “raindrop cake is the next cronut” isn’t my own prank, and it may not be a prank at all, BUT IT OUGHT TO BE.
Please to read the commentary below, it is A+. “next up, in food trends that are apparently not satire: why not eat a fucking gelatin jellyfish? it’s new! it’s translucent! it looks like an unused breast implant or something you’d find stranded above the tideline! it has almost zero calories because it contains nothing in the way of flavour or nutritional value, and we think that’s just nifty.“
At first I thought it said “mineral oil” instead of “mineral water” and I was like “that’s diarrhea waiting to happen.
Um yeah… that looks terrible. Like molecular gastronomy went too far.
That first gif. . .fondling the raindrop cake. . .:whimpers:
Lol, not sure if that’s a positive or negative reaction.
well I know what Smorgasburg line I’ll be waiting in.
Not my prank, but as a heritage/pop-culture-loving Canadian, I adore its nerdiness: https://www.facebook.com/LibraryArchives/posts/10…
Nothing.
Shrieking Nonsense at Fearful Things should be the GOP 2016 tagline.
Total dribble of
Youngsters who thing;
They’ve reinvented the world
Because they know so
Little.
Because they’ve been offered so
Much they understand
Nothing useful
Because they are
Unafraid
They shout nonsense at
Fearful Things
-that one dude in your writing workshop
I wrote some poetry like that for my high school literary magazine.
I’m sorry, 1989.
You offer to proofread, cross out the whole page, and write “Too Witches!” at the top in red ink.
“your proctologist called, he found your head” is SUCH a great burn. Good on you, mom. Sorry your son is such a poop.
Haha, thanks for sharing a bit of the deleted tweet.
That Zumba article is weirdly fascinating and intriguing. My cousin is deeply, deeply into the Zumba thing and I had no idea it was so huge. Although you know, while part of the article was like “how good can it be if people aren’t getting fit?” I do think there’s something to be said for a movement that is getting people to find joy in moving their bodies in a specifically non-judgmental, non-calorie focused way. I can’t argue with that. Zumba on.
These people literally made an inspirational soundtrack of their ridicule and danced along to it. Tell me when you find a better way to stick it to the haters.
I’ve never been to a Zumba class, but suddenly I find myself being all kinds of on board with these people. I can never get into exercise routines that are either competitive or take themselves seriously, and it seems like Zumba is solidly neither.
I can’t get too upset about the fact that the fitness results of the program might be mehh, either, since it seems like they’re not making any claims about results and seem pretty at peace with being more fun than functional.
I’m a full-time hater of most group things at the gym because I prefer that no one sees me or tries to talk to me while I sweat, but I love zumba. You dance for an hour to fun music, sweat a little bit, and get a bit more coordinated.
I took Zumba for a year or so and while I don’t do it anymore (I got more into weightlifting instead and the classes conflicted) it was a lot of fun. I was surrounded by women of all ages and sizes and skill levels, just doing their thing. The teacher was enthusiastic and encouraging, but did not care if you didn’t do a move perfectly or just wanted to make up your own moves. It was literally the only time in my life that somebody told me to smile and I didn’t want to murder them.
“I was surrounded by women of all ages and sizes and skill levels, just doing their thing.”
This is part of the reason why I am going back for a second month of water aerobics at the local community pool. I can just go and do my thing for 2 hours a week with all kinds of people. I like that the class is v. affordable not only because I’m thrifty about my exercise but also because it’s even more accessible.
My response to that question is that there’s a difference between getting fit and getting really jacked or being able to fit into your wedding dress or getting a thigh gap or whatever. Cycling hasn’t made me skinny, but it’s an awful lot of fun, and while I don’t spend hundreds of dollars on instructor classes, I have spent hundreds of dollars on my bikes, plus more for clothing and various accessories. So, yeah, pretty par for the course for exercise-slash-entertainment-slash-lifestyle, and probably less harmful than going balls-to-the-wall with Crossfit and ending up with orthopedic injuries or rhabdomyolysis.
Yeah, how are they defining “fit”? Isn’t cardio for an hour just…good exercise? Maybe it’s not getting you ready to run a marathon, but movement is movement.
In my limited Zumba experience I felt like the cardio was somewhat limited by how good you were at the dancing- I was not great at it, and focused on getting the steps right and ended up not actually moving as much or as quickly as I would with other cardio. Maybe it’s just the classes I went to, but we were moving the whole time, but mostly kind of moving in place? They are really fun, but I decided the “intensity level” was too low for me, and I’m not like a hardcore workout freak or something I just felt like in the end it wasn’t worth the $$ of going to the class. But movement is movement like you said, and Zumba is fun movement that appeals to a lot of people, so I have no problem with it.
But this is similar to heaps of skill based activities! When you are learning any new form of dance you do it slowly until you get it, so while you might be moving for an hour it’s not that energetic. Then you can amp up the speed/intensity/whatever when you have the basics down. I went to a BodyAttack class for the first time and the instructor told me that since it was my first time not to even worry about getting the moves right, just try to follow along when people go to the left or right and that i’d pick it up more and more the next few times- which I did.
Exactly! And the article-writer’s judgement of fitness seems to be based on stranger’s abilities to climb a lot of stairs without getting winded and maybe (probably) a slender body.
Yeah, I wasn’t a big fan of that. I love Zumba and while it’s certainly not the end-all be-all of fitness forever, the classes I go to are some really good leg work and great cardio, so I definitely feel that it’s a good workout. But some of the best dancers (who get the least winded) in the class are not very slim women! And that is fine and not necessarily a reflection of their fitness!
“there’s something to be said for a movement that is getting people to find joy in moving their bodies in a specifically non-judgmental, non-calorie focused way” – that’s it, that’s why Zumba is my jam. It’s fun, social, and a gateway drug into regular exercise. And even if it’s all you do for exercise, it at least gets your heart rate up.
Wasn’t there a slate article awhile ago about how most millennials want to share childcare duties before they have children, but after they have children they fall in to traditional gender roles because of the restrictive structures imposed by most employers (Lack of paternity leave and flexible working for fathers etc)
ETA: It was a NYtimes article http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/upshot/millenni…
Yep – I think that’s what’s missing from Chemaly’s otherwise excellent piece. The misogyny and lack of family-friendly policy in the working world is systemic, which of course affects individual perceptions about equal parenting roles. I don’t think anything will change significantly on this front until we join the rest of the goddamn world and get government-mandated and supported paid parental leave in this country. It won’t, of course, solve everything, but it would be a watershed moment in changing perceptions about what and who we truly value, and it would mean far fewer women (and men) having to choose between work and life if they want to have kids.
I haven’t read the article yet, but the excerpt made me think of this article; yes there are varying attitudes around gender equality and traditional gender roles, as there is in any generation, but there is also the fact that the western working world and its structures were created around the idea of a man being able to leave behind his family and home to work all the time, with a woman behind him who was able to take care of everything that wasn’t ‘work’.
The lack of parental leave in the US makes me sick TBH. How can a country claim to be the most progressive/powerful nation and not give its people basic rights, like the right to have a child unburdened by work pressure. And the politicians who go around claiming to be ‘for families’ and then screaming against mat leave and sick leave policies are despicable.
I’m hoping that as millennial managers begin to take over at the higher levels, policies will begin to change. The idea of face-time in the office is stupid and outdated, and the only people in my office who care about it are the ‘old school’ higher ups in their 50s, everyone else understands that you don’t always need to be in the office to be working and everybody need flexibility sometimes. But the policies won’t change until teh managers do, and when then happens, I really hope we can move away from mandatory in-office hours. (Whhhyyy do I have to sit here from 9-5.39 when I actually only have about 4 hours of work to do total, and about 20 minutes of that requires face to face communication. Its just stupid.)
It’s really interesting because (anecdotally of course, plural of anecdote is not data, etc) at my office it’s often the younger people who lose their minds about people with flexible working hours/working from home. I am one of the youngest people in my office, but it’s mid- to late-twenties people who put a lot of value into how many minutes someone was at their desk and throw shade at people who take their lunch/leave early to take care of kids/work from home.
Hmm, maybe its a culture/industry thing; are you in the US? I work in the UK and I work in a very casual ‘creative’ industry; and then it comes down to the company and manager, I’m really lucky that i have managers that respect my time outside work (I’ll get a funny look if I’m at my desk past 5.30), but then there’s other teams in my company who regularly work until 8-9pm!
What I hope we’re moving away from (and we may not be) is the over-working olympics that happens; i.e. OMG I work until 7 every night! When in actual fact, said person is on facebook and just wants to be seen to be working that late.
I can absolutely see that as a youth thing – a little longer work experience tells you: there will always be more to do, burnout is not good for you or the work, time at desk is not impressing anyone.
as someone who’s spent a great deal of time working in female-dominated but male-managed admin offices AND as a childfree person, this is my observation and experience…
parents are granted a great deal more schedule flexibility. coming in late, taking long lunches, leaving early, can’t come in to do mandatory OT this weekend??? all par for the course for people with kids. but if you don’t have kids, your ass better be in your seat exactly 40 hours a week AND you better not try to get out of OT. nothing but “because: kids!” is a valid excuse for an erratic schedule. as younger people are less likely to have children, they are less likely to be reaping this “parent’s only” perk. it causes resentment. hence, the Time Clock Hawking Phenomenon.
i continue to struggle with this well into my 30s as a childfree person. if you can make flexible schedules work for the kids-having portion of the workforce, why can’t it work for everyone? if the mother of 2 can get her job done while working on a laptop from the bleachers at her kid’s soccer practice, why can’t i get mine done on a laptop from a bench at the dog park? if a job can be done by spending 40 hours in the office at any point between 6 a.m. on Monday and 4 p.m. on Friday, why is it only the parents who get to craft customer start/quit times while i’m expected to do 7:30 – 4:00 NO EXCEPTIONS?
i guess my point is (do i even have one? i’m feeling a lil’ ranty tbh), i would be interested to know the overlap between “young” and “no kids” when it comes to the shade-throwing at erinkwed’s office.
roll in to the job one day with a baby doll in a stroller, baby-talk to it all day, and start begging off work to ‘take care of the kid’; either you’ll be moved on to a less timeclock-nazi work environment in short order or nobody will ever fuck with you again
@Selma I am in the US, which I’m sure has something to do with it.
@pretty_monster There is a lot of overlap between the two, which I think you are right exacerbates the issue. Plus it’s often the higher-paid people with more agency/authority who have the flexibility, so you have people whose managers have a lot of flexibility while they do not.
Well… paid parental leave doesn’t necessarily result in gender equal parenting. I live in a country with extremely generous parental leave policies. I think you get like 480 days per kid? It’s more than a year, at least. Paid.
The days can be shared freely between parents, except that three months are earmarked for each parent. What this results in is that women usually use all the days except three months that the father uses (suspiciously, the fathers tend to take their parental leave over summer), OR that those last three months actually GO UNUSED because fathers literally turn down free government money for being with their kid and just keep working instead. So the woman stays at home for at least a year with the kid. Then, when they have their next kid, the mother keeps staying at home with that kid too.
This keeps women out of the working world for years. And when they go back, they tend to work part time, for several reasons. More women than men are trapped in part time jobs against their will, BUT there’s also a law that parents have to be allowed to work part time if they want, so there’s an expectation that you will choose that option if you have young kids. And by “you”, I mean “women”. Also, people have started to believe that our well-developed daycare system is bad for kids and that good parents don’t use full time daycare, so there’s an enormous pressure on women (of course) to pick up their kids no later than 3 PM, which obviously is impossible if you have a full time job.
In other words, through our progressive parental leave policies we have reinvented the housewife.
“fathers literally turn down free government money for being with their kid ”
This is from 2004, but I still remember it because it called father’s taking parental leave “forced fatherhood”:
http://www.economist.com/node/2335623
Do you live in Sweden?
I read somewhere that one of the Nordic countries cottoned onto this trend and wanted to make sure that women weren’t kept out of the workforce for as long, and so forced fathers to take the leave or give it up (I thought it was Sweden). It’s mind-boggling that someone would turn down parental leave.
This is why I think a year’s worth of paid parental leave is too much. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think two to three years out of the workforce is a big deal over the course of a working life, but given that it tends not to be sequential, I completely understand how that kills a woman’s career trajectory. If I ran the world, I would mandate 6 months paid leave that must be split evenly among two primary caregivers (with some perfect accommodation for single parents that have no secondary caregiver because this is hypothetical, so I can hypothetically craft a perfect law :)… maybe an additional 3 months of protected unpaid leave.
Although to be fair to the progressive policies, it doesn’t sound like the progressive polices have reinvented the housewife so much as continued non-egalitarian expectations of gender roles. It doesn’t sound like there’s an actual reason baked into the law why women need to choose part-time work or should be expected to choose part-time work.
uuuugghhhf just your description is too much for a Friday morning.
It makes such a difference. My current team at work is mostly men who are married with kids, and we have flexible working, working from home etc. as standard. All of them are suitably involved in childcare as a result. It’s worth noting that none of them strike you as the kind of men who would be considering this in a political/principled way – it just makes sense, and they like spending time with their children. Our organisation is currently considering doing away with core hours (which currently run 10am-4pm) completely, because so many people have informal arrangements where they leave around 3 to pick up children. And we have a high proportion of women in senior positions, and working part-time/job sharing in senior roles is standard.
Honestly, all of those things people say would be ‘nice in theory’ but bad in practice? They actually work. Yeah.
yeah the general American culture of work is a slow war against the humanity of workers
What I’ve heard from a lot of women in high positions is that when they start asking for things like flexible working for children, often the men with kids get on board very quickly too as they want those benefits as well.
Its a company culture thing, if you’re company respects your time and life outside of work (regardless of family situation) its always a better place to work, and those companies usually understand parents as well.
Plus from a staff retention POV, you’re much better off making parents happy, especially around maternity leave etc, because then they will stick with you as a company; Yes they may work shortened hours, but they’re more motivate and often work harder because they appreciate the effort the company is making.
aka COMMON SENSE.
There’s one guy I work with who works from home at least two days a week because he just really loves being around his kids for as much time as possible. This week he hasn’t come into the office once. I am honestly so happy for him that he can do that and I’m certain he wouldn’t be as good at his job if he couldn’t because he just wouldn’t be motivated.
That’s so cool! I feel bad for all parents who have to be away from their children when they don’t want to be, and I’m so astonished by governments and companies who’s attitude to people continuing the human race is ‘this is inconvenient, get back to work so that you are contributing to society’ (Not that everyone has to have children, you know what i mean).
How is making more humans not contributing to society? ISN’T THAT THE WHOLE POINT.
“How is making more humans not contributing to society? ISN’T THAT THE WHOLE POINT.” I mean.
I believe so strongly that ‘women’s work’ (childcare, family care, community work, charity etc) should be valued and well compensated that I’m actually getting quite militant about it.
The world as we know it would not work or exist without women’s unpaid labour.
Yes. It especially burns me that you accumulate no social security when you do childcare/elderly care.
So the people who take care of children and elderly parents can just go hang when it’s time for them to retire? If they get divorced from the social-security-earning breadwinner, that’s just tough luck? What kind of a social compact is that?
And the rhetoric around women who don’t work in traditional sense is disgusting.
So what if someone is living on government benefits so that they can care for children or relatives? WHO ELSE IS SUPPOSED TO DO IT. Governments don’t want to fund community care and they don’t want to pay stay at home carers, they just want women to shut up and work for free.
In Ireland there’s quite a few social benefits around children, including a childcare subsidy, and it annoys me so much that families can’t choose how to use it; sure you can spend it on daycare, or you could use it as Mums income if she stays at home, or give it to a grandparent or relative for childcare. The government spends huge amounts on state daycares (which are often terribly run and understaffed), and they could probably save a huge amount of work and money by saying ‘any parent who wants to stay home full time will get paid.’, but they think that won’t sell to the public or some shit, so they won’t do it.
Amen to that. I was reading an interview with Ai-Jen Poo a few weeks ago and now I feel pretty militant too– I might get her book.
I worked from one day this week because my kid was sick. I don’t know what people do when they don’t have this option! Daycares are germ factories, so the kids are often sick, and you can’t send them there if they are too sick and, like, what, am I supposed to use all my vacation days to be at home whenever my son has a bug? and lose all those days of productivity? We live in the future, the technology is here, almost all office jobs can be done from home. (And I guess I just hope that jobs that CAN’T be done from home – scientists in labs, inspectors, ECEs – I guess I just hope they have lots of personal days on top of their vacation?)
I want to work there.
I don’t remember where, but I’ve read that if men are given even a few weeks of paid paternity leave after the birth of a child, they end up sharing childrearing and household duties more equally even years down the road.
This makes complete sense to me on a number of levels, but one of them is that when you are starting with a new baby, all parents have a steep learning curve for taking care of said baby. If one parent is at home all the time at first learning all the baby stuff while one parent is only there in the evenings and gets that much less learning/practice, suddenly it’s so much easier for at-home-parent to do most of the childcare all the time because they just “know how to do it better!” or whatever. It’s hard to catch up if you are the at-work-parent. And if you have a huge cultural weight of “well, women are just better at that/men just aren’t good at babies” that exacerbates the problem. Not that having men at home will automatically solve the problem, but it definitely helps families combat the inertia of culture and experience.
can I come work with you?
Yep. My department at work is very flexible– as long as people are working their 40 hours a week, we can basically come and go as we please. And we still get a *ton* of work done.
We have people who have family responsibilities (not just kids, but aging parents), who are going to school part-time, or people like me who just hate mornings and like working in the evening.
I really don’t know how people with kids manage in a completely inflexible workplace. I don’t even have kids, but the flexibility is a godsend for me for things like (e.g.) doctor’s appointments, helping my elderly grandfather, staying home when I have horrible cramps, etc.
There are some types of jobs where you need people on site at certain hours, but (for most types of office and computer-based work) I don’t see why people can’t adjust their schedules or work remotely.
Yes yes yes, THIS.
We’re facing this with childcare for our son right now. We live in a major urban area, but the VAST majority of pre-schools and even kindergartens are half-day and only some provide after care options for dual income families like us. Daycares are typically full day, but it’s like your kid turns 3 and all of a sudden one of you has to stay home OR you have to pay an arm and a leg to arrange complicated additional care. My wife makes more than I do, so if one of us stays home, it’s gonna be me, BUT men usually make more money due to sexism, so when a family is faced with the Dual Income Vs Childcare conundrum (which I know many people are facing, especially given stagnate wages and high cost of living), many times it’s the woman who will stay home simply due to finances.
That’s a tough one, I hope you guys find a solution that works for you! It also often comes down to how expensive childcare is, if the woman is earning less and the majority of her income is going on childcare, does it really make sense for her to be working and paying for childcare, when she could be a full time mum and the family would have nearly the same level of income?
In slightly related news, I was eavesdropping on two guys talking on the train recently and one of the guys was saying how he was pushing is wife to go back to work when the child was nearly 1, and he was telling her it was not because they really needed the money, they were fine on his income, but they couldn’t do any extras anymore like take-out or cinemas or big holidays, and they couldn’t afford for her to go to for coffee every day etc, but if she went back to work they would be able to afford that. He didn’t sound like a genuinely bad guy, but it was an interesting insight for me into the kind of reasoning parents use.
Thanks! We’ll be fine, but I can only imagine how difficult it is for people with tighter budgets, deep student loan debt, uncertain employment, etc. And thanks for linking to that NYT piece: I think any discussion of Millennial childcaring roles has to include the significantly more unstable and unsustainable economy they are entering than previous generations (high rents, low wages, huge debt, lack of paternal leave, expensive and poorly scheduled childcare, etc).
I can sympathize with that guy on the train. Obviously, it should be his wife’s choice what she does, but life with an infant is tiring and tedious and all-consuming, so I understand trying to figure out ways to earn more money to try to enjoy Adult life again.
The big thing for me (in staying home vs. not staying home) is not the immediate financial impact and disposable income, but a few years down the road– Social Security and retirement contributions, lifetime earnings, etc.
At least in the US, women who are out of the workforce for a significant amount of time have far lower lifetime earnings than women who stay in. Leaving means that you’ll probably never recover your previous salary, and (in many fields) it’s hard to get hired at all. And (unless your spouse has contributed to a retirement account for you) you may have inadequate retirement savings.
I have a number of friends from college and law school who left the workforce when their kids were small, and who are now trying to re-enter the workforce. With a few exceptions, they haven’t really been able to find the sort of jobs that they trained for. A lot of them are working retail, because it’s the only available part-time option.
It also often comes down to how expensive childcare is, if the woman is earning less and the majority of her income is going on childcare, does it really make sense for her to be working and paying for childcare, when she could be a full time mum and the family would have nearly the same level of income?
If you’re out of the workforce, though, you’re not paying into a pension scheme or making NI contributions, and your future earning potential might be affected due to the time spent out of work rather than gaining workplace experience. It’s not so much a question of household income (childcare is so expensive that it’s true that the financial differences between “two salaries minus childcare costs” and “one salary, no childcare costs” might not be significant), but what it means for the future earnings and financial stability of the parent who stays at home; while it may make sense in the short term, it doesn’t always in the long term.
This is why I’m home with the kids. My husband makes way more than I would ever be able to make in my field, so I’m the one at home. And it’s a self-perpetuating cycle, too, because now I’ve been out of paid work for 5 years and any job I could get would be even lower paying than if I had worked for pay for those years.
I mean, also I love being with my kids, and it makes things like running my oldest daughter’s Girl Scout Troop hella easier than it would if I had a paid job with non-flexible hours, but still…we aren’t exactly making a free choice to do things this way.
This is an excellent point, too: spouses (usually women) who stay at home are then at a serious disadvantage when reentering the work force.
Daycare is SO expensive! I have no idea how I would ever be able to pay for it, if I had kids. (I have mortgage-sized student loans, as well). I have huge sympathy for parents trying to figure out what to do.
I have quite a few friends who wanted to keep working full-time after they had their kids, but they just couldn’t afford full-time daycare. Also, we have a big shortage of daycare slots here.
We just didn’t send our daughter to preschool. I honestly feel like everything she would be getting at preschool, she’s already getting at daycare – learning to socialize with other kids being the big one, but she also learned her letters, numbers, etc. there. I know other dual income families who’ve made the same choice.
” most millennials want to share childcare duties before they have children, but after they have children they fall in to traditional gender roles because of the restrictive structures imposed by most employers …”
While that’s a part of it, I don’t think we should overlook human nature and how tempting it is to accept unearned privileges. Sure, lots of people have the best of intentions and love their partner, but when they actually find out the cost to themselves (less leisure time, more unpaid work, loss in status at paid workplace and the community), all of a sudden it “just makes sense” that the woman should be the one quitting her job to stay home with the kids, or going part-time, or being the one to leave work to pick up a sick kid, etc. And it totally has nothing to do with sexist gender expectations, nope.
As this study shows, expressing a desire for equality is a lot different (and easier) than being willing to work for it: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/18/1023…
I guess I’m just skeptical about men claiming they want to share childcare duties without them actually showing that it’s more than empty words. I remember listening in to a phone-in show about divorce, where a woman said that she divorced her husband after more than 30 years. When they got married and had children, she ended up leaving her job and handling all the domestic work, and her husband said that it was because “it just so happened” that he made more and so obvs should be the one to keep working, but if she had made more, yeah, he would totally be the one to stay home and raise the children and do the housework, etc. And then the kids left home and he retired. And he wouldn’t do any of it. Still expected her to “look after him.”
It’s like all the Bernie Bros saying they would totally vote for Elizabeth Warren if she was running, so hating Hillary has nothing to do with sexism, nope.
Even at a company with the greatest child-friendly policies in the world, you still wouldn’t get men doing their share. Yes, it’s a necessary part of it, because employers reinforce those attitudes, but the attitude that women are responsible for raising children exists even where people don’t have a boss to report to, like the self-employed. I guess what I’m trying to say is that most of the pressure to conform to gender roles isn’t imposed externally by employers.
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/suffrage1900/fl…
The flip side is that staying at home is lovely, if you like that sort of thing. We’re lesbian parents, so we have slightly more freedom from gender stereotypes than most couples, but like, staying at home with the baby is lovely. But having been on annual leave for the first seven months, it’s lovelier for me than my partner. I’m closer to the baby, I’m more patient, I know her moods better. And I like being that bit closer to her. Those differences get set up really early, and they’re hard to break out of. It’s definitely not just about the decisions that men make.
OK I’m scrolling straight down here to say that if you are a London-based Toaster, some of us are meeting for board games tomorrow at Ziferblat in Old Street. Provisional meeting time is 3pm. All are welcome! Please come! (London Toasts Facebook group just in case, and no I do not know how to embed a link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/435704426638315/)
Yay! I was about to check in and see if this was still on!
Boo, I am at work. 🙁
As am I- have fun guys… and if anyone fancies a hot chocolate beforehand pop into my shop down the road (1 Chapel Market) and say hi.
I am so VERY pleased there is a London Toasts Facebook group! YAY!
Wishing I lived in London right now! Any Chicago toasties reading who want to set up something similar?
London Toasties whither thou? Link is broken…
IDK what this means or where to put this, except that last night as I was waiting for the life-partner to navigate DC nuclear summit dystopian gated / guarded street closures and meet me for dinner, one of said scary storm trooper nuclear summit guards asked me to straighten his police vest which had gotten snagged in his Various High Tech Police Murder Tools, then pitched me his true-crime book on “reverse domestic violence” and gave me his personal card (“for my creative projects”), which features a FULL CARD glossy close up of his face, leaning forward, chin perched on fist.
Life is a rich tapestry.
“reverse domestic violence” -__-
Apparently, its when a 6’5 white man gets slapped around by his 5’4 black wife, he ends up shooting her, “…and now HE’S in prison! No one ever looks at the other side!”
*mouth agape*
But that’s literally just “domestic violence.” Reverse domestic violence is domestic bliss. Why do people write books who haven’t first considered language? Now I really don’t want to go to work today…
Lololol, well put.
>_>
<_<
>_>
what a topsy turvy upside down world we live in
noooooo
SEE ALSO “reverse discrimination” aka “reverse racism”
What’s reverse domestic violence when it’s at home?
I’ll bite. What’s reverse domestic violence?
I choose to believe that by “reverse domestic violence” he means hugging strangers.
Actual lol.
I want to live in your world. Is there room?
#terrifying
If anyone needs something simple and fun to do today, here’s the text game Beautiful Frog. There’s a lot of randomness in it. Try the same things a couple times. Trust me, it’s great.
Your frog was a fearsome food eater, widely respected! Your frog was a vampire. Your frog was rather evil, and feared in some provinces. Your frog’s highest leap was 5 feet. Prodigous! 😀
I will be here all day now thankyou. I have taken the afternoon off sick as I have the plague and this will be perfect while I slowly drown in bodily fluids.
Your frog has resigned in the face of a scandal at the age of 12.
Oh! I also wanted to mention that the creator, Porpentine, is trans. She’s got a bunch of other text games, but the ones I tried left me feeling pretty traumatized–they’re good! but traumatic–so be careful.
“Roops achieved 6 feet before plummeting to a rueful defeat. But it’s okay! Every leap must end, and your frog did its very best. Both of you should feel nothing but pride!”
This is the greatest thing ever, thank you so much.
I got that one too!
RIP Roops, you were too beautiful for this world.
Your frog’s highest leap was 0 feet. Astounding!
That sounds like the kind of frog I would have. Good job, frog that put forth minimal effort.
Years later you hear of the publication of a great novel by a certain frog, one that weaves together the disparate fragments of the zeitgeist into an absolute javelin of wit and insight. You feel a humble pride in thinking you could in any way contribute to such a project.
Oh, but this frog is showing me up with its genius. I want my slacker no-hops frog back.
Sounds like the kind of frog I would BE.
You offer up blood to Roopet, knowing you are making a sacrifice for a far superior lifeform. The frog’s vampire tongue snakes inside your vein…
Roopet grows legs like a tarantula!
WELL THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY
Your frog was a fearsome food eater, widely respected! Your frog was a miraculous singer of worldwide fame! Your frog made $2 in its lifetime. Your frog was a vampire. Your frog was the ultimate evil from which all lesser evils flowed. You feel so proud!
Your frog’s highest leap was 0 feet. Remarkable!
Thank you for FROG
“In a witch’s world, conventional metrics of success and failure are immaterial.”
This is what I’ve been telling people. So glad somebody else gets it.
Both of my frogs have turned into somewhat evil vampires.
Sadly, your frog has died in a wild west showdown at the age of 12.
But not before we had a SALUBRIOUS singing career, o my sweetings
The witch turns your frog into a frog girl! They make out, human tongue entwined several times over by frog tongue. Roops goes off to live with the witch in an airship over the swamp.
I approve of this game most heartily.
Yes! That’s my favorite ending.
My frog helped populate a distant planet!
I love this. Thx so much.
“In the United States, white men make up more than 80% of Congress, 78% of state political executives, 75% of state legislators, 84% of mayors of the top 100 cities, 85% of corporate executive officers, 100% of CEOs of Wall Street firms, 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 73% of tenured professors, 64% of newsroom staffers, 97% of heads of venture capital firms, 90% of tech jobs in Silicon Valley, 97% of owners of television and radio licenses, 87% of police departments and 68% of U.S. Circuit Court Judges. Men have been 100% of our Presidents. If I wrote this list as a novel in which the genders were reversed, reviewers would describe this world as a violent and emasculating feminist tyranny or a frightening male dystopia.”
Soraya Chemaly please please please write this novel.
WOULD READ
I need it now!
If you haven’t read it yet, let me strongly recommend “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” by James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon. Scribd file that seems to have come from an uncorrected OCR scan, so typos and the layout’s a little funky, but well worth the effort.
ALICE SHELDON. One of my father’s greatest gifts to me was her work, which he identified with *and* recognized the feminist nature of.
That millennial article hit home. We’re having a baby in 5ish weeks and my husband is staying home when I go back to work – which is great! But young people cannot understand it – we get a lot of push back from other youths. Like, a of all, I make a considerable amount more money than he does, so me staying home makes zero sense, b of all, he wants to stay home! I am not some sorcerous harpy who is forcing him to give up his career or anything. Also we don’t know the sex of the baby, and I am a little terrified of having a boy because seriously, how to do raise a white boy to not be an asshole?
My dad stayed home while my mom worked a Normal Job(s) and I turned out great, so tell them to eat your butt.
My Dad also stayed at home while my Mom was a teacher and while I got a fair bit of flack for it (I mean, rural northern Ontario in the 80’s wasn’t a bastion of unconventional gender roles), and I am also pretty great, so +1 for butt-eating recommendations.
Yeah, my Dad stayed home (only for a few months) because my Mom made more than he did. And because it was 1982 he got an article in the local paper.
I turned out great and he takes the credit.
Dad stayed home while mom worked in programming. A) it worked great for me and my sib, but sidenote B) in retrospect I think he got hit on a lot by other parent (aka mom) volunteers on field trips.
“I make a considerable amount more money than he does”
Right, this is why so many women end up quitting. Because their job already pays less so “it just makes sense.” Then they’re even farther behind on career path. I would venture to say that the man should stay home regardless of who makes more, because he is less likely to be mistaken later for someone who can rightfully be punished for not being “career-driven” with a salary cut. (I know that probably isn’t feasible if there is a really big difference.)
Of course the whole “career path” thing where salary maps to strict seniority is total bollocks, but it’s part of how mothers who take any time off are kept down.
Totally! I didn’t mean to imply that the equation should be person who makes less = person who stays home. Anyone who wants to continue working after having a child should be able to, and deserves institutional support (in addition to support from their partner(s)). In my situation it would be impossible for me to stay home, and most people we interact with know this and STILL give crap about my husband choosing to be a stay at home dad.
People are Jackasses, for the most part.
Congrats on your small human. It’s awesome and terrifying and wonderful. 😊
Yep. I think my partner makes literally twice as much as I do; if one of us stayed home it would be me.
“Right, this is why so many women end up quitting.”
Is that actually the reason, though? Or is it a post hoc rationalization?
There’s a statistic floating around that says that 38% of US wives earn more than their husbands. Another one saying it’s almost a third. So if who makes less determines who stays home with the kids, you’d expect to see about a third of fathers staying home with the kids. But only 16% of stay at home parents are fathers (2012). And when you look at the reasons for staying home, the gap widens. Only 21% of stay-at-home fathers, compared to 73% of stay-at-home mothers, say they are home to care for their home or family. It seems like being the one to stay home because you make less money happens far more frequently when the person making less money is female.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/06/05/growing…
ETA: I found where the 38% and “almost a third” comes from: http://www.bls.gov/cps/wives_earn_more.htm
Using the lower figure is more accurate, because it’s only when both have earnings that you’d have a situation where one person quits to stay home with the kids. It’s still almost double the % of stay-at-home fathers.
Well, it’s the stated reason. I’ve had that conversation a gazillion times. I’m sure you’re correct it isn’t the only and actual reason, any more than “he just cared about his last name more” is a satisfying explanation of why women change their last names all the time.
One of the big underlying attitudes is that paid work is more optional for women, though. There is massive cultural support for women “needing” to be the first responder with their kids and men “needing” to have a career, and when we make those choices we get a lot of understanding and support for them.
Also “career moms” very rarely get the kind of home support that “career dads” do. The kind of support that allows you to not even worry you might be needed to get someone at school, or that dinner for your kids might not happen at all if you don’t take action, or that maybe no one has checked your kid’s school folder in a week. All that mental work is typically preemptively done by moms and if it isn’t done, blamed on moms. So if you’re going to get stuck with all that mental clutter anyway, why not step back on the work-related mental burden?
I have two boys, ages 6 and 2, and due with another one in two weeks, so this topic is one that’s always on my mind. So far, key elements in their feminist upbringing have been surrounding them with great female role models, seeking out plenty of books featuring women and girls, and limiting their TV exposure to Cartoon Network (seriously, the kids’ programming has some of the best female characters around, and great examples of male and female characters working equally together). Also, making sure they’re cultivating friendships with girls as well as boys – having girls over for playdates just as frequently as boys. It also helps that my oldest’s best friend since infancy is a badass 6-year-old Kung Fu prodigy who is obsessed with Georgia O’Keefe.
I would really like to subscribe to the 6 year old kung fu prodigy Georgia O’Keefe fanatic’s newsletter.
Me too. Only a matter of time before she starts one.
Good to know!
I would like to show this to anyone who thinks ‘feminist upbringing’ extends to ‘we won’t shout at the boys if they play with dolls’ and then say ‘well this proves it’s all just genetics!!!!!!’ when their kids go along with gender stereotyping anyway.
People get reeeallly invested in children’s behaviours ‘proving’ that ‘it’s all just genetics’. The minute a girl so much as looks at a doll or a boy at a thing with wheels, they’re all like ‘SEE!!’. I’m like…..that’s not how you science.
The gender imprinting is so strong though! My nephew has glorious blond curls that get in his face and he looks super cool in a headband, but they have to be called ‘boy bands’ or he won’t put them on because at 3 he already has the message that only girls put things in their hair.
(My mother and I are covertly pushing his gender boundaries; so far he loves make-up but refuses to wear anything dress like, even a toga, and gets very uncomfortable about it. He’s 3!)
There’s a great anecdote in Cordelia Fine’s book Delusions of Gender about a couple who raised their kids as gender-neutral as possible.
The little boy went to pre-school with a barrette in his hair, and another boy made fun of him for it, said he was a girl. First boy eventually pulls down his pants to show his penis to prove he’s a boy and the second boy goes ‘Well everyone has a penis, but only girls wear barrettes!’
School is its own cesspool of forces conformity and gender-norms. I hope that pulled a Dewy and smacked the boy with his handbag. (Metaphorically, don’t hit people kids.)
We don’t put our kid in dresses/skirts, but he does wear the occasional tshirt from the girls’ section, and also he basically lives in leggings because he and we love them so much. He has short hair. He occasionally asks us to paint his nails. One time he came home from school saying that another boy in his class told him nail polish was for boys.
“Well, are you a boy?” we asked.
“Yes!”
“Are you wearing nail polish?”
“Yes!”
“So what do you think?”
“Some boys wear nail polish, like me!”
My nephew loves painting ‘nay-nays’ with me at Nana’s house and then showing his mum! (Who’s only slightly horrified thank god.)
(And leggings for all children! I don’t understand why they’re gendered, they just stay on so much better!)
What a great reaction! My nephews were really into jewelry at a young age, and they all looked like 17th century pirates with clip on earrings and rings.
I love Delusions of Gender and Cordelia Fine.
Oh yeah, kids *do* double down on the gender-identification thing, especially when they’re very young and just establishing identity for the first time. I meant that adults frequently see this as INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF that preferences are biologically encoded, rather than observing that babies and kids are absorbing all sorts of conscious and subconscious cues from their environment all the time, and /maybe/ that has something to do with it….
Gender conditioning is *everywhere*, and unless you’re really aware of it, and prepared to be an asshole about it to other grown ups, it slips in without you even realising it!
I feel bad for my nephew because as soon as he came into the world he was A Boy and was dressed as A Boy and given Boy Toys (he only wears dark colours and camo, and has oh so many trucks and cars), and now his parents say things like ‘Oh he just loves trucks and tools!’, when in actual fact he was told from day one that he was to like trucks and tools and other boy things and never really given a choice about it. (And my niece was put in a pink dress at a week old, despite my SIL insisting that there would be no pink or dresses if they had a girl. A year later the child has a wardrobe full of pink and frills and her own box of pink toys even though I know she’d be much happier playing with her brothers toys that have wheels and make noise)
The other bizarre thing is the way people take *exactly the same behaviour* from boys and girls as evidence of gender norms. Chatty boy and shy girl? Aw, he’s so cheeky! Such a little comedian! She’s so shy, such a sweetie! Chatty girl and quiet boy? That’s girls, isn’t it, always so social! Whereas he’s more into his toys, typical boy!
When my son was 4 or 5, he asked me to buy him a nightie because his sister and I were wearing them and he felt left out. <3
I love your kid.
My kid, who has two moms, has asked me to buy him some Always brand pads. He has no idea what they do; he only knows they are “for moms.”
this reminds me of an excellent conversation I had related to me (it’s also cissexist, so ymmv)
Kid 1: Are you a girl?
Kid 2: No, I’m a boy.
Kid 1: But you have a barrette in your hair! You’re a girl!
Kid 2: I’m a boy because I have a penis!
Kid 1: EVERYBODY has a penis, but only girls wear barrettes!
male nightshirts are coming back, you know! he can have his own nightie through adulthood now, yay!
My husband wears nightshirts since before I met him. He loves them!
When interacting with my partner’s niece and nephew (rare, as they live in Australia) I try so hard to model behaviour not based on gender stereotypes (I have given so many books by/about women to the boy, and vice versa; I grumpily say things like “why does the doll have to be a soldier if [boy] has it?” or “What are your scones like, [partner’s brother]” when everyone was asking his wife about her baking), but so many people reinforce the gendered stuff. When they were over here for a holiday last summer, my partner’s mother was all weird about giving nephew a “girl” branded ball (Hello Kitty?) to play with rather than the “boy” branded Spider-Man one. He should use one and his sister should use the other, apparently.
you sound like an absolutely fabulous mom! Thanks for talking about how you do this.
I had not thought about it in an explicit fashion because issues like these are still at least a couple years out for me, but I bet inviting girls over to play with your boys as often as possible, not just other boys, is probably the key thing, and probably so so good for all the children to be experiencing, girls as well as boys.
I have an older sister, and my dad worked part-time and was working on his PhD for the first few years of both of our lives. Not only did we turn out awesome, but my dad always talks about how lucky he was to stay home. He is super convinced that we have an awesome, close relationship because he got to hang out with us in our early childhood.
(I have a great relationship with my mom, too, so no shame on working parents.)
“. . . seriously, how to do raise a white boy to not be an asshole?”
By taking lessons from Dakimel. She’s done it. Twice. Mr Daki is pretty great too.
<3
I do adore my sons – they’re 20 & 16 now & so far not assholes at all.
Mr. Daki taught high school when they were younger, then for a few years he freelanced from home, so he was the one meeting the school bus.
They were raised with plenty of boy-gendered stuff, but not exclusively. They mostly played with boys because that’s who lived on our street and all our friends have sons. They did scouts because Mr. Daki likes camping and was talked into being the Cubmaster (he ruled the campfires with his guitar and goofy songs.) Mr. Daki is the dad who invented adventure games and treasure hunts and made up stories that kept the kids up late. He took them to the doctor. He worries over imaginary disasters.
So part of the boys’ non-assholeish-ness is from growing up with an involved father. Part is them having responsibility for their environment (my friends were bemoaning their college-age sons’ horrifyingly messy dorms/apartments and I was like, nope, my kid would never have a whole zone for empty Big Gulps. He grew up taking out the trash, and washing the dishes, and doing his own laundry from the time he could reach the machine controls.) Part is mutual respect. Part is hours of reading and talking about the world together. Part is being a mom who tries not to apologize for having other roles in life. Part is luck that they are intrinsically who they are. Part is exposure to male teachers and female doctors and non-homogenous friends.
Mostly, just listening to them, valuing their goodness, reframing their biases so they see them, giving them useful jobs, asking them to add beauty to the world, loving them.
:’)
Here’s what we’re doing to try to raise a non-asshole bi-cultural but extremely white-presenting boy:
1. Before he could read, when we read out loud to him, all characters in all books had “she/her” pronouns, unless changing the character’s gender had weird story ramifications (I can’t think of an example of this happening off the top of my head; there probably were no examples!). Now that he can read, we can’t switch it up anymore
2. Refer to all strangers with ungendered labels (person, kid, baby, grown-up, parent, teacher).
3. Use gendered pronouns for people we knew.
4. Talk about people’s skin and hair, not using white people’s skin and hair as a default (i.e. we do not talk ONLY about dark colors of skin, or textures of hair that are not like his). When we describe someone’s appearance we might say, “that teacher has white or peach colored skin and brown hair, and your teacher last year had dark brown skin and always wore her black hair in braids.”
5. Insist at all times on respect for people’s decisions about their body. If I tell my kid to stop touching my body in a certain way, and he doesn’t stop, I remind him that you have to listen to what people say about their bodies. If he says he doesn’t want a hug or kiss or whatever, I never force it on him, and I say something like “it’s your body so I will wait for you to tell me that you want a hug.”
He’s only five so it’s early days yet but so far *fingers crossed*
My parents did #5 SO SO WELL. I probably heard “no means no/stop means stop” as often as “wash your hands/come to the dinner table/go outside and play” when I was little — and it wasn’t just unpleasant things like hitting, it was hugging, tickling, teasing, etc. And they modeled it too, by ALWAYS listening to us about tickling or horsing around and stopping when we asked. They even came up with a tickling game where we told the tickle monster to wake up or go to sleep so we had total control. <3 u, parents!
*applause emoji* to Laura’s family. That’s AWESOME!
I play a tickle game with my kid where he says “Traffic light!” and that means to start tickling and then he says “Stop!” and I stop. I have no idea where “traffic light” comes from.
I *am* the Tickle Queen!
There are elaborate rules they developed, but they ‘woke’ the Tickle Queen by giving me a kiss on the cheek (after very OTT creeping up to me, armed with pillow-shields) then running away, because once the Tickle Queen was awake, she will grab and tickle you until you run away for three minutes and she deactivates, or you manage to get close enough for another kiss on the cheek.
I never thought of it as a game that showed them they could control when they wanted roughhousing (just as a game that allowed me to lay on the sofa and still play with my sons), but in retrospect it fits that pattern well!
I’m 22 weeks pregnant and we’re still undecided about whether I will be a stay-at-home-mom person or go back to work after a longish maternity leave, but my husband is definitely going to be the working parent as his salary is considerably larger than mine and he is less ambivalent about his career path (ambivalent is a nice way of describing my current attitude). All this to say, we are having a girl and I worry about making sure she will get the right message if in fact I stay home for a while.
She probably won’t even remember. My mom stayed home for three years after I was born then went back to work, but my only memories are of her working full time. I’m hoping to stay home for at least a year or two with my kid
My mom was so angry when she found out that I did not remember this. “I spent FIVE MISERABLE YEARS cleaning up your messes and you DON’T EVEN REMEMBER?”
The thing is that my dad was definitely the breadwinner, but when my mom went back to work she was working crappy part-time jobs and taking night classes to get her degree. It was a lot easier for her to take me to work or class when we didn’t have a babysitter (I spent many hours coloring at a table in the back of the store where she worked) and it was easier for me to understand what her job was– stocking shelves is much more interesting to a child than doing paperwork at a desk. So her jobs actually stick out much more in my mind than my dad’s.
Hah, yeah, me too. I THINK my mom was working part-time all along and then went back full time when I was in about third grade? All I remember is coming home on the bus after school and letting myself in and then watching tv or doing homework until my mom got home around 4:30 or 5, from fourth grade on. Kind of wild to think about doing that at age 9, but I was a super independent kid and I guess it wasn’t as weird back then?
I don’t know how old you are, but when I was 8 in the early 80s I got myself home from school on the bus and let myself in the house and did homework or went back out to play with my friends until my mom came home around 5 (so exactly like you) and nobody thought it was weird at all. [shrug emoji]
It won’t matter what you do. I worked all through except a couple of months, but kids still get the idea that their moms should be home with them and will guilt you about it because it’s pervasive in the culture.
That said, you may find that not quitting makes you saner in the long run.
Raising my white son not to be an asshole is my #1 parenting priority. It is a genuine fear that I assuage by giving him unimpressed raised eyebrows every time he forgets to say please.
My parenting goals:
1. Raising a good citizen.
a. This white-presenting boy is not gonna be an entitled asshole
b. He is going to have a true knowledge of civics
2. Raising a non-picky eater
And that’s pretty much it.
I know so many Millenial wives and mothers who are raising their husbands alongside their children. I want to give the husbands and wives alike a good shaking. A man who is an adult is capable of housework and childcare. End of story.
I’m in a Feminist/Social Justice Parenting facebook group and it’s really great. Lots of insightful articles and dialogues, and hard-working mods that keep TERFs, SWERFs, etc away, and the conversations fruitful.
Finally created an account to share this important viennetta news:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jemimaskelley/nice-cream#…
This is mesmerizing
WOW.
I shriek nonsense at fearful things because I *am* afraid. It’s how I avoid being attacked by mountain lions!
I once shrieked nonsense* at a small herd of free roving dairy cows that we stumbled upon during a dog walk (there was a dairy farm located adjacent to the walking trail). Those cows DID NOT APPRECIATE being intruded upon, no ma’am, not at all.
*said nonsense was me screaming “HOOP-AH” while flailing my arms at the lead cow. It was the first thing that came to mind because we had just watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding the night before!
No, no, no–you keep the mountain lions away by shaking a jar of pennies at them!
tbh shrieking nonsense is just an all-weather good response to things
Shrieking nonsense at fearful things is literally how you get rid of a boggart. Don’t these people read?!
Or watch movies, for crying out loud?
Re: gender role expectations.
Based on my own experience, I have found the older my husband has gotten the more he has realized that running the house and taking care of the children is both of our responsibilities. Has anyone else seen this in their own relationships? He was 30 when we got married and kind of a punk ass (I a naive 23). Neither of us had any idea about raising kids or being married, we just knew we loved each other. And we both came with our ideas of what that family life would look like. He thought babies and housekeeping were supposed to be my thing, and bread winning was his. I complied, because I didn’t know enough to object. Something always felt off about this to me, but I was not able to articulate it. As we both got older with me eventually going back to work full time, we saw that it just wasn’t possible for one of us to shoulder all of the responsibility of the care and keeping of the kids and home. He is 47 now (I’m almost 39), and neither of us can believe what our early marriage looked like.
Sigh. I dunno. Like, can guys just realize this sooner? I’ve never married. I’ve never had kids. YET I KNOW STUFF SHOULD BE SHARED. Even if it doesn’t shake out that way due to extenuating external factors, maybe they can really want it and try for it?
I meet men who think stuff like “women should be the caretakers” and I nope out of there. I don’t want to spend years waiting for them to figure shit like my humanity and individuality.
Trying to think of a “It’s Sansa and Steve” not “Sansa and Eve” joke but that’s all I’ve got so far.
OMG NIKKI HOLY CRAPOLY, you are my hero!!
Seconded. I am so happy for Nikki’s inner 12 year-old!
the tweet was SO incredibly kind of her! and her costume designer emailed me last night and OFFERED TO SEND ME FABRIC SCRAPS from her 1992 Olympic long program costume. WHAT IS THIS LIFE
FRAME THEM
that is incredible. I had a Special K Kristi Yamaguchi cereal box that I kept on display in my room for a very. long. time.
The mom twitter link seems to have stopped working? Sorry.
I really hope someone got a screenshot because I want to see it BAD
https://twitter.com/girlposts/status/715348528122…
saaaame!
ME TOOOOOO
http://www.joe.co.uk/life/mum-epically-shuts-down…
Thank you so much. Late to the game here and excessively pleased to see mom use “DOUCHE CANOE.”
I am unreasonably vexed not to be able to see what this dude said and how his mom schooled him.
Lololol those poor little menz. How sad that they are being held to the lowest standard of attractiveness to which females have been forced to aspire for millennia.
Be ripped – be Rubenesque/be big hipped with small boobs/be stick-straight/be curvy but slim/be slim with big boobs/be slim with a big butt/be whatever shape but perfectly toned with a BMI of 16.
Have stable job – get married no older than 12-21, have no education/skills or financial independence/security. Have a job but get paid 90% of what your male coworkers do. Get fired for having children.
Be ripped – see above. Also, watch every single fat/lazy/stupid/asshole man in TV, movies, and REAL LIFE have a hot woman to have sex with.
Be clean – try not to die in childbirth because an arrogant doctor didn’t listen to the midwife and wash his hands before he gave you puerperal fever.
Smell good – do not sweat. Do not defecate. Be kissable in case a sailor accosts you in a public square. Remove any hair that may retain reminders of human biology. Have a perfectly penile-receptive vagina and top-of-the-line EZ Bake Baby Oven but do not have secretions of any sort because they won’t put out a witch-bonfire so what’s the point.
Be dad material – assume 80% of childcare duties, not including however much time you spent acquiring the child. This is a sunk cost.
Pay for dates – offer to pay, be told “of course not!”, hope you don’t get raped because you ordered steak but didn’t want to have sex.
Be confident – believe in yourself enough to not wear visible makeup. Do not attempt to be a CEO, TV journalist, or candidate for President. Look radiant under gaslighting.
Have nice hair – your hair is your crowning glory. Read fairy tales about your hair as both a lifeline and leash. Cover it or you’re basically a slut. Cut it off because obviously you’re not interested in men.
I notice that list didn’t include “be smart” or “be funny” or “be nice” or “listen when women talk” – no wonder they hate women, if they think we use the same terrible standards as they do.
OK, this whole thing was great but “Look radiant under gaslighting” is, like gum, perfection!
Thank you! Coincidentally, after I submitted I clicked over to that Captain Awkward link someone posted, where there was a beautiful screenshot from that very movie. Synchronicity!
That thing about Millennial males and their views on parenting made me want to drop my head onto my desk and cry. No children for me!
(Thankfully I did not want children anyway; I realise this in no way solves the problem for everyone who does.)
That entire article just makes me want to sob with rage. Everything is terrible! Men feel like they have no reason to change things because the status quo benefits them! I just want to burn everything down.
It’s rare to see women publicly portrayed as working together for the common good. Despite obvious everyday acts of female cooperation and friendship, the bulk of our cultural production continues to render us invisible and inaccessible to one another. One of the only times we are portrayed together with relish is as witches—which groups women in covens and categorizes us, when powerful, as frightening, ugly, otherworldly, unnatural, and dangerous. But how many band of brothers, father-son movies can we make? Apparently an infinite number. From ensemble casts in films, gaming, and animated movies to television talk shows and sports, our brains are bombarded by tens of thousands of images and stories of male fraternity and solidarity, including a vast number of which the lone woman is the source of all evil, competition among men, and societal chaos.
Once again, I am so very pleased Fury Road exists. Not today, stereotypes!
The bit about society “[reinforcing] sex difference and segregation and [making] male domination and bias invisible” reminds me of the book I have just finished reading, Eve Was Framed by Helena Kennedy QC, about how the UK justice system is designed for men biased against women; she is particularly scathing about how being “objective” and treating men and women completely equally doesn’t work when you’re not working with a level playing field – you have to take into account the systemic problems women (and working class, non-white, queer, disabled etc. people) face first.
My boyfriend has been talking lately about how he wants kids someday. It’s a weird-and far-off thing to talk about because we’re nowhere near that point, but I’ve made it very clear to him that I feel neutral at best about having children, and if he’s the primary child-wanter then he will absolutely need to be the primary caretaker. The idea that so many men have a change in attitude after the fact is really chilling. Maybe I need to start preparing my fallback plan (eremetic life in bird sanctuary)
Yeah, I do not want children but my partner has expressed a vague interest; I have made it very clear that he would have to be the primary caretaker for me to even consider it.
It looks like Julia/@ghoulia took down her tweet, but this article has screengrabs of the whole rant. It’s AMAZING.
Your link only leads to the Link Roundup! :'( Can you post it again? I could use some quality rant viewing today.
That is so weird! The link is: http://www.joe.co.uk/life/mum-epically-shuts-down…
Thank you for this, it’s so good!
Thank you thank you
OMG OMG OMG THAT IS AMAZING
The tweet’s summary misled me, because she said he was only “slightly” stupid, but HOLY SHIT that’s some misogynystic nonsense and I’m so glad his mom went to town on his ass. How could he even have thought a minute about sharing that post, with a mom like that?
Also, it reminds me of one of my favorite childhood movies, The Swan Princess, which had some scathingly sharp dialogue at times. Never forget that scene from their early courtship, when they’re just about to kiss and he says “You’re beautiful.”
She stops him and says, “Wait, but what else?”
And he replies, “What else is there?”
As his own bros berate him later, “You should write a book: How to Offend Women in Five Words or Less.”
WHAT that’s amazing. I never watched that as a kid – I know what I’m doing with my weekend now.
IT’S REALLY QUITE HILARIOUS. I mean, the animation’s kinda terrible, and overall the prince acts like he sustained a traumatic brain injury, but there’s really great moments like that one.
She broke up with him immediately when he said that, in case it’s not clear. Oh, here’s a gifset of the scene in question, IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN MY PARAPHRASE.
Also, this song will always be so damn catchy and has such witty lines (“And with some luck this marriage will result in lower taxes!” the peasants sing).
Hahaha, oh my gosh, I’d forgotten about that movie! I loved it so much when I was kid!
Okay is your link linking back to the link roundup an April fools or an oops?? Because I want to see this.
Not a joke, just an html fail on my part apparently! Article is at http://www.joe.co.uk/life/mum-epically-shuts-down….
It just goes back to the Toast 🙁
http://www.joe.co.uk/life/mum-epically-shuts-down…
That link just goes back to this page?
please read the other replies to my comment and if you still can’t find the correct link let me know
Oops sorry when I commented the other comments hadn’t showed up yet, sorry for being like the millionth person to chime in saying the same thing!! :/
I’m so glad I don’t want children because the anxiety of how I would feel if I had a boy and he did something like this is awful. Like I don’t know if I could forgive that. I can’t imagine a worse feeling than realising your own kid is an awful person and I don’t know if I would be big-hearted enough to love them anyway while hating what they did – I think I’d just end up hating them, full stop :/
Reminds me of an old episode of I Seem Fun, Jen Kirkman’s podcast (she doesn’t have or want kids). She was talking about a time when she was in high school when a bunch of popular boys appeared to be holding the door open for a disabled boy in their class, and as soon as he reached the door they let it go and it hit him in the face, whereupon they all laughed. She was saying that if she was a parent and was informed that her son had done something like she’d just be like: ‘that’s it, take my kid out back and shoot him, I’m done.’ Obviously exaggerated for comic effect, but I understand what she meant. Perhaps the only fear greater than being a bad parent would be finding out your kid is a bad person who abuses their privilege in society. And bad kids do happen to good people sometimes.
That is so true. I’m not a parent and don’t intend to be, but if I were in the position of raising a child (especially a boy), my saving grace would be repeating “he’s not done developing yet” at every stage of his life. Including into his twenties. Because it does often happen that people grow up into much more humane, mature, compassionate people later in life!
All the same, it would definitely break my heart that he was such an asshole in high school or his twenties. This is what terrifies me about parenthood, it’s such a gamble. I have a brother and step-brother who both died at their own hand in different ways, and I know my mom and step-father did everything they could to prevent that outcome, but no parent is omnipotent.
No kidding. My favorite cousin just found out that he and his wife are having a baby boy, and I intoxicatedly texted him the other night in shouty-caps that he needed to make sure he raised him right, and to make sure that he never ever sends a dick pic. (a second later I clarified: unsolicited dick pics.)
I feel like that millennial article partly explains why my dating life has been such a thundering horrorshow.
The other part is because: DC.
ಠ╭╮ಠ
Yeah. Pretty much. Millennial dudes are the literal worst.
I…just…what:
1. The guy who was living at home in order to save money to open one of those mediocre sandwich places that are sometimes in the ground floor of office buildings. He was not going to open hypothetical sandwich place in the mornings for coffee and things because he didn’t like getting up early, he wasn’t going to try to become a hidden gem by elevating the sandwich game because that was hard, he had no food service or management experience.
2. The guy who bragged that he didn’t know how to cook and could barely even MAKE a sandwich.
3. The guy who actually just ate at Sweetgreen for every meal and hadn’t bothered to have the gas company switch on the supply to his apartment stove.
4. The guy who was perpetually at least 30 minutes late for everything and wanted me to just lie and tell him start times that were 30 minutes before I planned on arriving.
5. The guy who showed up late and incredibly sweaty for a first date where it turned out that he’d likely cracked a rib the day before and not gotten it checked. I gave him some painkillers.
There is a very basic level of “life stuff” missing here and the whole thing makes me tired as hell.
I’ve had a male roommate for the past three months. He’s a mess. I thought it was unique to him, but apparently not.
If I wanted someone who couldn’t handle their own life, I’d have a kid.
I don’t want to date someone like that.
EXACTLY! I don’t really think my expectations vis a vis people taking care of their own stuff are excessive and YET I once went to a dude’s house and he basically had his bed in the middle of a human-sized hamster nest of clean and dirty clothing and also there were about 3 space heaters turned on.
Thinking about it now, maybe he wasn’t so much a hamster as one of those lizard people David Icke is always warning us about. Do lizards make nests?
And yet, many young smart women are married to these men, and have to raise them alongside their children. I do not understand this.
I know! I feel like yelling sometimes ‘STOP DATING/MARRYING THESE FOOLS!!!’
(Exaggerated for comic effect, obvs I don’t believe that it’s on women to pull a Lysistrata in order to provide incentive for these guys to change their behaviour – that just ties back into the patriarchal cliche of women being a prize or thing for men to ‘win’. I just gotta yell sometimes cos I can’t stand seeing fool men not being forced to face the consequences of their fool ways)
Dating in DC…where do I begin?
1) I was groped on a first date and got stuck paying an $80 bar tab.
2) Had a seemingly normal first date then after I was home dude offered to pay for an Uber to pick me up to take me back to his place. o_0
3) My date picked a fight with a woman in a bar on a political topic. When I threatened to leave because I was embarrassed he accused me of being jealous (lawyer…why was I not surprised?)
4) I abruptly ended a relationship when the dude was being sketchy, tried to leave early from a date, and when pressed admitted he “didn’t want me to meet his friends”
5) Guy I dated had a vintage typewriter collection and wrote celebrities from said typewriters in his spare time and had their reply letters in plastic sleeves in a binder.
6) Just remembered 4 and 5 are the same guy…
I probably have like 50 more of these…
I feel like it would be faster to do a list of “normal dates in DC that were perfectly pleasant where nothing outré or particularly horrifying occurred.”
1. Former NPR producer who began a lot of his sentences with, “You don’t realize this about yourself, but…” (we were on a first date)
2. Lawyer with anger issues who semi-stalked me for about a year and kept trying to give me gifts.
3. Guy who wouldn’t shut up about Polanski.
We should issue baseball cards for each of these clowns. O M G
That first one, oh my god!!!!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BAN ALL MEN
The last time I went on a date with a man, he showed up in his gym clothes. Fuck you, sir. I have too much self-respect for that nonsense.
CO-SIGN that dating in DC is, in fact, a thundering horrorshow. There is an unusually high asshole quotient here, which should surprise me in no way. And here I sit, surprised!
Don’t feel bad. I’m still surprised at how awful my two brothers are, despite knowing what the odds were for two men in tech in DC with Republican echo chambers.
It’s like an oil boomtown but for making Youtube comments real. There’s certainly ok people in DC but never talk to anyone who moved to DC.
oho but which is worse, millennial men who are terrible sexists or gen-X men who seize on these statistics to tell you that this proves millennial women should date older men, it’s the feminist choice, really?
thank god I am too old to be expected to take men in their twenties seriously. by anyone except those men themselves, I mean.
That’s a Scylla and Charybdis sitch right there :/
Dating in DC is terrible. It is just the worst thing.
I’m really happy that Clinton would close the loophole on minimum wage exemptions for employees with disabilities. If any one wants to read a long, well reported but depressing story about how that loophole created garbage fire situations of dependency and abusive work conditions the NY times reported on men with intellectual disabilities who were essentially indentured labour to a turkey plant in Idaho a few years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/09/us/…
I hate to be That Person but that was in Iowa. Which is not something I am proud to say about my home state, but.
There’s a book coming out about that whole disaster. After having read the article… no, I don’t think I can read it.
I develop government policy in this field and we have just gotten the government to declare an end to sheltered workshops. This made me cry. Then I emailed it to my staff so we keep pushing forward.
TOASTIES I have a self interested request. I AM COLLECTING RECIPES and especially interested in recipes from other trans+queer+GNC+nice people because I am making a dopey community cookbook thing. I’m looking for more regional+personal+dietary need sensitive stuff. Thanks, this is the form for it: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1g9LEPjhjAvJsgu1u…
OKAY SHAMELESS PLUG OVER.
You guys, my local cat cafe (I know) pranked me so HARD just now. They sent out an email saying they were turning into a DOG CAFE! And omg, my heart soared so high! Like YES! Finally! Dreams come true! I can snuggle puppies to my heart’s content! But then I remembered what day it is and I feel like I need to go into mourning now.
Some of us can’t get puppies and it’s just really really really hard!
Agreed! I just went to a cat cafe last weekend, and while it was entertaining enough and I was amazed at exactly how chill cats can be, I also had cats to go home to, because they’re incredibly low maintenance and if you’re in to them your life will probably support you having one. But puppies? I don’t think I’ll ever have the time to swing that, so I’m all on board for a puppy cafe!
I feel you, I follow them on Instagram and was like WHAT. Oh.
Crumbs + Whiskers? Unless this is a common cat cafe move! They got me for a second too!
For your dog fix I would suggest looking into smaller local animal rescues. The big ones run by actual employees and not volunteers tend to have excessive requirements for time and training, but the smaller ones do good work and you can hang out with dogs at adoption events!
I walked past a cat cafe yesterday and there were people doing yoga inside.
I have done yoga in a cat cafe on several non-consecutive occasions and it is always wonderful and glorious.
Last time a kitty licked my toe and I nearly died of cuteness.
Was that in Philly? Someplace just started doing that, and I might take up yoga to hang out with cats
Near me, we have a puppy rental service that delivers to your home/nearby park (Puppies For Rent) so you probably have one, too, especially if you live in a larger or more coastal city? They’re rescue puppies and being exposed to new situations helps to socialize them, so you’re helping the puppies, too.
Well, why can’t there be dog cafes? Or dog and cat cafes? They get along very well, especially if they’re puppies and kittens, and think of the cute!
Maybe it’s the hygiene issue. It’s a lot easier to clean up after a bunch of cats than even one puppy. We can dream, though.
I’m currently gestating a childlet and it’s very dispiriting to think that my partner might change his mind about the whole “raising his kid” thing AFTER it’s born.
I hope this is not the case for you (and I doubt it will be) but I think the reality check of how HARD it actually is makes men realize how easy literally everything else is because they are male.
*grimly* If it IS the case for me, I’m not above going full Lysistrata.
If it’s any consolation, mine has not changed his mind. He does almost half of childcare, and I expect that when I stop nursing, that will go up.
We do, however, have a long way to go to get to parity on housework. :/
I am also growing a person and discovered this week that my partner has never actually held a child. Like, ever. Which explains why he is vastly more interested in taking all of the classes than I am.
I am trying to come to terms now with the fact that I am probably going to just have to hand the kiddo over and let him figure things out for himself if we’re going to have a snowballs chance of equality with the kid care.
He already does the majority of the cooking and grocery shopping and half of the laundry and cleaning, so we’re starting from a good spot, but “oh, you do it better” is such a trap. Thankfully he gets 6 weeks paternity leave and will take all of it, so that should help.
Yes, let him take all the classes! I was in the same situation when my son was born, with my husband not having much experience with kids and me having a lot. You really do have to let him do his own thing and figure out his own way with the kid. As long as he’s not doing something potentially unsafe, I really tried hard to let him do his thing. Fortunately, my husband knew he didn’t know anything and so while he really wanted to be hands-on, he was also totally okay with getting my advice on how to do something first. It’s also something to talk about with him as you get closer to your due date. And starting from relative equality with household chores is such a good thing!
Congrats on your new little person!
Definitely letting him muddle through things on his own and figure out his fav way to feed/change/bathe kiddo is the way to go. My husband and I did this, although I was starting from scratch almost as much as he was, and it took some work to get my inner improver to STFU, but it is the best now because even though I’m home with kiddos during the day, he is the primary parent as soon as he gets home and over the weekend. I can hang out and help or completely check out with the internet or go out to do things and it’s NBD because he can handle it.
(I realized while I was typing this how sad it is that my experience seems to be some kind of exception, or worthy of comment, when being able to take care of your children should be like, baseline for parenting, but this is the world we live in. Sigh.)
Also, Today in Dads, my father just texted me from five states away to ask me what their wifi password is.
My daughter just did this from Alaska (I’m in Texas), except it was for the Directv password so she could stream some stuff. I look forward to the day these roles reverse 🙂
My dad did this so many times when they first got WiFi that I finally bit the bullet and changed it to their phone number.
My dad, bless him, is hard pressed to remember any of his passwords but won’t use a password manager like I keep suggesting, so I wrote down his wifi password and all his streaming service passwords so I can remind him. He texted a few weeks ago to find out which email he uses for Hulu.
OMG now I want Today in Dads to be a crowd-sourced semi-daily Toast feature. Like an Open Thread.
Federal Plaza in Chicago played one of my favorite April Fool’s joke: they hung up Christmas decorations and brought out a big ass Christmas tree. So fucking delightful.
That’s a nice one! I hate mean pranks but this kind of thing is hilarious and doesn’t hurt or humiliate anyone 🙂
My favorite one was when Taco Bell took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, announcing that they had purchased the Liberty Bell and it would now be known as the “Taco Liberty Bell”.
That is a PERFECT April Fool’s joke.
Aaaaah I gotta go out and see that!
Good morning Toasts! I am here to share my favorite April Fool so far this year, an exciting new development in university rankings.
“The most accurate way to ensure our measurements are fair and unbiased is to apply randomization. The fully randomized scientific experiment has been held up as the holy grail of scientific experimentation. And at Fortunate 500, we like to think we’ve found several holy grails (we have a Doctor of Indianan Jones studies on our staff). So all our results are fully randomized, our real skill is in justifying them afterward.”
(I work at a university and part of my job is dealing with the various rankings organizations to submit our information and get us well-ranked and this is an extremely appealing concept to me. In fact my university is on their list of the top 500! Not at the top, but well ahead of Harvard, so there.)
Aw, we got left off.
So did my undergrad. But my library school beat Harvard. SUCK IT.
Oh man, our “rival” university made it on the list, but not my undergrad or grad university. Oh well!
Same. 🙁
Harvard: The Linköping University of New England.
Not April Fools related, but this was another college story posted recently that I laughed at. It’s about the inevitable consequence of the drive for lower and lower admissions rates. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/opinion/college…
HAHAHA, I work at a college rankings entity and I’m emailing this to my entire team immediately. (Hi, you’ve probably emailed with my colleagues)
*shakes fist* how dare they leave my institution off this completely arbitrary list! >:|
Yaaaay a whole bunch of cruise stories for my day off!
Guess I’m not getting my spring cleaning started after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That article about millennial parenting is the latest incident in what I can only assume is a worldwide conspiracy attempting to convince me that I should never get straight married (not that there’s a dude I want to marry or anyone who’s offering). Other incidents include: all of those Dear Prudence columns that are literally, “My husband is a giant man-baby slob. How can I fix him?”; a series of Judge John Hodgeman episodes involving dudes with dumb, gross ideas that they try to impose on people around them (particularly that guy who thought it was okay to dog ear library books and use them as door stops); the series of guys from online dating who have (a) tried to logic me into continuing to date them, (b) sent weird passive aggressive texts, (c) expected me to travel over an hour on the bus to go on a first date, or (d) called me whore; and, honestly, just this entire election season.
(Look, I know that there are great individual dudes I know some of them. I’m not trying to insult the great individual dude you know. I’m just feeling particularly crushed by the patriarchy today.)
Judge John Hodgman has some seriously weird dudes with long-suffering partners. That one with the guy who wanted to DIG UP their DEAD DOG’S SKELETON and put it on display?? And they had young kids? And he didn’t even really like the dog when it was alive? And the one with the dude who kept filthy standing water all throughout their apartment in yogurt cups?? augh.
Dead dog skeleton guy was so clearly just being weird for the sake of being weird. I mean, a person with actual specialized knowledge told him, “What you want to do makes no sense at this time, and also you don’t have the skills to do it,” but he still wanted to dig up the dog.
Also the dude who wouldn’t respond to text messages from his wife about the tumor in their dog’s neck.
Remember the guy who liked to hide around their house and leap out at his fiance? For fun?
Oh my god, the guy who didn’t want his wife to throw their toddler daughter a birthday party.
THAT ONE HAD ME BREATHLESS WITH RAGE. THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOU, ASSHOLE.
JFC, that is on par with the broken glass guy from that one Captain Awkward letter.
DDDD:
Ohhhhhh noooooo I hadn’t seen that one.
It just made me so sad. We’ve got to do a better job raising women to never, ever put up with any of that behavior for a hot second.
(At least the comments introduced me to a Lonely Island song/video I hadn’t seen, “Threw It On the Ground,” which has made my day.)
(I don’t know if you are on CA regularly, but you will be pleased to know that the letter writer in that case did break up with him and got away safely and is much happier now. She has weighed in occasionally on other letters,so we have updates.)
Aw, thank you. I’ll go find those updates.
OMG, that rationality thing is like my ex-husband. He couldn’t understand that I had emotions that were different than what he could rationally explain and that led to so much gas-light-y. UGH!
“My husband is a man-baby slob who treats me badly but in other ways he’s just great, Prudie!”
Any time i see a letter open with “I’m married to a wonderful man” my heart starts sinking.
Women have been conned, I swear to God, into thinking — I don’t even know what kind of behavior qualifies as “wonderful.” This is a goddamn racket.
I… have occasionally dog-eared library books. My town’s library has moved to a one-receipt-for-all system, and I sometimes don’t have any spare receipts/train tickets/promotional gym postcards on me. Mea culpa.
But using them as doorstops? WTF?
But I’m going to guess you don’t defend dog-earing library books as a practice, which this guy was doing. John Hodgeman even called their local library and asked if they wanted people to dog ear their books, the librarian said no (although they did get transferred several time), and then the litigant dismissed it as just her personal preference.
I don’t think this is a space where you need that final disclaimer. Although I need to remember to use it with my in-person friends more often cause some rants from like a year ago when I was more frequently dating have left them all labeling me the man-hater. Oops. Not all places can be the toast.
Being a bi woman brings this childrearing attitude thing up to a new level of clusterf*ck. I am queer, so by definition any future family I create will be a queer one. And although I date men and women, visions of this heterosexist gender binary family default seriously abates any desire to partner and procreate with a man. Internalized misogyny exists among women too (even queer ones!) and same-sex partnerships have additional challenges, of course, but at least it feels like my odds of being screwed by the heteropatriarchy will be lower if I end up partnering with another woman.
And that is kind of messed up! Being bi is confusing enough! But as I creep closer to 30 I can’t help but have these “minimize chances of eventually hating my life with this person” goggles on as I decide whom to date and which relationships to pursue.
(Everyone go read ‘The Argonauts’)
100% agreed. I’ve pretty much always felt that being bi/queer was awesome (or at least well worth the mindfuckery it came with) but being in my mid-30s now and seeing straight friends all around make these hideously hope-compromising love-pacts has made me downright GRATEFUL for more sexual options.
It’s made it easier for me to match my criteria for hanging out with dudes to those for hanging out with women – and *shock* now I hardly talk to men at all.
Bi by instinct, lady-loving by choice!
Yes yes yes. I decided a few years ago to prioritize women in my life in all areas, friendship and dating included, and it’s shocking how often I compromised or made excuses for shitty behavior by my male friends/boyfriends. I know so many amazing women that it’s a question of how to make time for them all! Obviously this isn’t true broadly, but it feels like I used to scrape the bottom of the metaphorical barrel for a guy that was halfway decent.
Saaaaame! Except I still consider myself bi as hell. Starting to transition to a more masc appearance and dating more bi/queer men has really given me a little bit more faith in men though. The straights are the worst – I refuse to date straight people period, but especially not straight men.
I am a bi woman in a relationship with a man, and while he is great and feminist for the most part, the fact that he is still a (white, straight, middle-class) man in a heterosexist misogynistic society means that sometimes things come up that make me realise he just fundamentally cannot grasp the shittiness of it all (and just doesn’t care as much as I do). It sometimes make me wish I had a female partner instead. (Thanks, 19-year-old self. Couldn’t you have considered the patriarchy when you chose a life partner?)
Well I’m glad you found a great partner! But that bones-deep “I know where you’re coming from” is such an intimate thing in friendship or romantic relationships.
Arghh empathise with this SO MUCH. I sometimes get so depressed thinking ‘In the end, you Just Don’t Get It’.
I am queer, so by definition any future family I create will be a queer one.
YES thank you. So many people think my husband and I are straight and um nooooooope. We’re both nonbinary and I’m queer – how does that make our marriage straight? But people and their assumptions do like to get shocked by non-gendered divisions of labor, omfg ugh.
(Don’t even get me started on people who confuse being forcibly closeted with passing “privilege”.)
Yes to all of the above. *high-five in solidarity*
I hate the description of relationships consisting of a man and a woman as “heterosexual relationships”. I may be a cis woman in a relationship with a cis man, but I am definitely not heterosexual, and so nor is our relationship.
I hate that too! But have also been on the other side of hooking up with a woman who insisted on our relationship ‘lesbian’. That drives me mad because I’ve never identified that way and am non-binary so by default any situation I’m in /is not lesbian/.
Rawr.
I’m going to gently, lovingly push back a wince on this line of thinking because there seems to be two very different definitions of queer in use in Western World 2016– the first being about internal identity and the second being about external treatment and perception. I think it’s pretty unproductive at best to argue about who is or isn’t queer enough to call themselves queer, but a great deal of space and time is in fact extended to people using the first definition in many cases where the second is what’s at stake. That is, consider the level of comfort you have to be in to worry about people not reading you as marginalized enough, but also consider how marginalization has turned into this almost moral aspect of a person where I see younger people being like “yes, I too am queer!” and older people being like “oh my god why would you voluntarily claim that, that’s the thing they call me when they beat me up.”
Like, in my world at least, I don’t have a single friend of any stripe who would challenge the queerness of my relationship, but I also have to read between the lines and accept that some needs and places are not for me, specifically, and to stay in my lane when something is really about transmisogyny and racism and homelessness, etc. Does that make sense?
The whole “privilege” binary is increasingly troubling to me. We treat something like “gendered/straight/cis” privilege as an off/on have/not have when really it’s pretty contextual, which leads to a lot of people who know they are queer feeling not queer enough and a lot of people who need immediate resources feeling neglected. I dunno, I might not be making any sense. I think there’s a definition issue around the Q word that is becoming… confusing for most people rather than umbrella-ing.
What do you mean, systemic privilege/power is contextual? Is this in the context of the fact identity erasure is a thing, or…? I don’t understand that at all.
I mean that power is relational within a systemic hierarchy, for example, a group of only men doesn’t stop having misogyny with no one there who is a woman, the misogyny (systemic problem) contextually gets taken out on the one/s in the group deemed easiest targets, so it becomes true simultaneously that men as a class benefit from misogyny while a man, relationally, is currently suffering from misogyny.
OMG YES.
Seconding the recommendation of The Argonauts it is fantastic
Oh I feel this so hard. I’m married to a cis man–and don’t get me wrong he’s truly fantastic–but I long ago vowed that if our relationship ends for whatever reason, I am done with men as romantic partners.
Bi woman civil partnered to another woman and we have a daughter. I definitely recommend it.
OH MY GOD YES, I’m pansexual and panromantic, so men are very much a possibility, but they just don’t feel like a valid option for “life partner” status. A date with a cute girl is great, a date with a nonbinary person is always neat, but with guys there’s always the underlying thread of is he pro-choice will he want me to take his last name what about kids’ last names fuck what if he wants me to get pregnant and do the childcare and then his career takes priority and I end up a washed-up temp with no life purpose once the kids I don’t even want to biologically have leave for college – “uh, sorry, babe, I have to go, GSA meeting tonight.”
“only 26% of Gen Xers and 21% of men older than 45”
Wait. I’m 47, and I’ve always been told I was well within Gen X. I was the same age as the characters in Reality Bites and Microserfs! My generational identity is crumbling! Noooooooo
Yeah… I’m 39 and I was always told I was just slightly too YOUNG to be Gen X, which of course broke my heart.
Me too. I’m 37 and at the early-mid 90s height of Gen X hype I was 3-4 years too young to appreciate the big generational signifiers at the time, but I also never connected with the Gen Y/millenial vibe. That felt even farther removed for me than Gen X did.
If it helps, I read that as not saying that Gen Xers and those older than 45 are two distinct groups, but that men older than 45 are a subset of all Gen Xers. (I thought Gen X was birth years of about 1960-1980; my dad is just at the tail end of being a Baby Boomer (1958) and my mum is one of the oldest in Gen X (1961).
(I was born at the end of 1989, so am bang in the middle of the Millennials.)
Depending on who’s writing, I’m either a young Gen Xer, an old Millennial, or part of the Oregon Trail Generation. (Born 1980.)
Barely relevant, but I thought everyone should know that my work computer blocked the Link Roudup on the grounds of “Profanity.”
THOU ART TOO PROFANE FOR COMMON FOLK GOODLY CLIFFE.
fuck on that
Thank you for affirming the rightness of my pledge to never marry a man.
One thing about that second Hillary link: nowhere in the article do the words “Bernie” or “Sanders” appear, even though the whole reason why the crime bill is being brought up now is the campaign, usually by Bernie bros who fail to acknowledge that their guy voted for it. Bernie says that he voted for the bill because it included an assault weapons ban, but the truth is considerably more complicated.
I will be away for Link Roundup, so I will tell you now that my baby, who is two today, has mastered playing Do You Like My Hat. Only she wears the hats! She was most delighted by her own appropriation of a slice of sausage a few nights ago. I was also delighted, even though her hair was freshly washed.
Happy birthday to that apparently awesome baby, and happy parent-versary to you!
Thank you! We had a lovely afternoon of puppies and macarons.
I was at a friend’s sporting event watching on the sideline, and coincidentally found myself sharing the responsibility of preventing a teammate’s toddler from wandering onto the field/crying/etc. I do not have much experience with kids. Played “is this water bottle a rocket ship?” and “do you like my hat?” to great success.
Ten points to the creator of “do you like my hat”!!
That’s 90% of toddler-managing right there!
Many moons ago I watched the docu “The Second Shift” (and in fact I want to try to track down a copy for the bf to watch, so he ‘gets’ a little better what I’m talking about wrt unpaid labour), but do any of you know of something similar but newer?
(or was it called ‘Chore Wars’ as a docu? the internets are not being of much help here)
Hey Toasties, I have two questions and I feel that you would be good people to ask:
What are good non-gendered terms to use for the person you’re dating? I think it’s too soon for “partner” but I like it for the future – right now I just need something other than “boyfriend”, which makes him uncomfortable.
We’re both pan and struggle with gender identities/expectations… we hate appearing like a straight couple and having people assume the roles we take in the relationship. Who has been in a similar situation, and how did you navigate this?
I’ve never been in that situation so my advice isn’t worth much… Dating partner? Lovefriend?
Ooh I do kinda like “lovefriend” but also we are shy midwesterners who are too afraid to say “I love you” yet, so.
Guess that rules out “my beloved” too… If you’re Futurama fans you could say “my fonfon ru” because the literal translation is “one who does not sleep with my superior officer”.
I’ll show myself out now.
Datemate
Player Two
Cuddlefriend
Sweetheart
My mom uses “my sweetheart” often for her partner of 15+ years, and it makes me smile each time she says it.
I use SO sometimes. Just the abbreviation mostly, not the whole phrase.
I vote for really dramatically calling them “my lovaah” if someone asks, but I’ve also heard people use “theyfriend”
“My sweetheart.”
OR
“My [important pause] FRIEND.” *eyebrows*
The second one is what my dad goes for, six years after he was widowed and with no intention of getting remarried!
We use “partner” now, 10 years in. During the earlier days, we used “lover,” which made people very uncomfortable. (I always wanted a better term! I would for sure use “companion” if I were over the age of 60.)
We use a variation on partner: partner-in-crime. It is, thanks to certain underage misdeeds, both rad AND literal!
Datemate, date, cutie, sweetheart?
I’m non-binary and my ex-partner was as well. I used to call them my counterpart! Cute and does a nice job, word-wise, of demonstrating how you compliment/take care of each other.
Currently my group of friends and I have taken to referring to date-friends as “your/my/their boo” since it covers both explicitly “dating” as well as “in the initial stages of seeing each other but not official”. It’s a little cutesy so I’d feel weird using it talking to strangers but among friend groups it’s nice slang.
On occasion I’ve just used “my date” as a noun. It seems a little old fashioned but in a nice way – “Have you seen my date?/My date and I are going for dinner/What time is your date coming?/My date loves ice cream”
Ooooo counterpart is great! I think this might be my favorite suggestion so far, thanks.
I agree with “boo” being cutesy. I use it for cats only.
Special friend! Or “my valentine,” depending on how kitsch you want to get.
I go with “person I’m seeing” early in relationships. It’s a bit unwieldy, though.
Date, usually. Or “regular date.” It sounds funny but romantic relationships that don’t fit labels neatly are just kind of funny.
Or friend, if you’ve both communicated to each other you’re not trying to hide anything, since some people use it as code for platonic. Friend is usually true if you really like them.
I sometimes call my husband ‘my regular date’ but people are often confused.
I’ve heard “my person” and quite liked that, though I don’t know if maybe it sounds too serious for the stage you’re at. Also for possibly later on, I’ve heard “my equally valid half” and found that charming.
Speaking of gender expectations, can we talk about the Prudence letter writer who signed her question with “Sort of Deadbeat Dad” because the guy was slow getting his kids out the door in the mornings? It sounds like this guy has full custody of his kids and is raising them solo. So lady, I know the situation is annoying, but do you know even what deadbeat means??
Usually it’s moms who bear the brunt of people’s expectations of child-rearing perfection, but here it’s the reverse case. And what an example of how gendered expectations hurt men as well as women–this guy is as opposite from a deadbeat dad as he could possibly get, and yet the stereotype that all men are lazy, uninvolved fathers can be casually aimed at him while still serving as cover for all the real losers.
lolllll I came up with that signoff because she didn’t include one and I’m terrible at coming up with names for things, you have to blame me for it
Oh crap wow well that changes everything, and now I don’t know what to do with myself.
Shameless plug: the benefit anthology for my horrible pile of medical bills goes out today. It has amazing poetry, prose and things in between from the likes of Phil Brucato, Catherynne M. Valente, Ellen Kushner, Claire Cooney, and Brian Thao Worra. Writers of color! Queer writers! Trans writers! And best of all, you get to pick your own price because every dollar helps. http://www.angelsofthemeanwhile.com
So we’re all agreed that Sansa is an actual real like direwolf, right? Pretty sure that’s the only explanation for how giant she already is.
AAAH that should be real life, typos that I can’t fix fill me with shame.
I’m so proud the word “douchecanoe” has made it to the moms.
As a fiftysomething mom, I can attest that its usage among my kind is widespread.
Wait, 40% of millenials (18-33) are parents? I can’t find that statistic in the PEW study, is it from somewhere else?
To Shriek Nonsense at Fearful Things – I am going to embroider that on a sampler, because that is almost more than I can bear.
I think it needs to be on toastie tshirts.
But how can I go on strangely specific cruises and report on them? I would gladly do this job.
No. That never happened. You had a nightmare. Shhh, go back to sleep. Lorelai and Luke got back together.
I think it needs to be on toastie tshirts.
ooh, i had one about our primary. it was…not fun to wake up feeling like i was going to puke.