I think a lot of people expect to have a woman in their life doing all this work for them. so when they don't have her they think "I'm poor, because if I wasn't poor I wouldn't have to do this myself with my own money." mostly men, but I think some women think this too. cooking + cleaning + kin keeping, that's "women's" work aka mommy's work. I think soooo so so so many people see mommy's work as detached from time, effort, and money. mommy is supposed to buy christmas ornaments. mommy is supposed to plan my birthday party. mommy is supposed to keep the kitchen spotless every day. it free, it's supposed to be free. if I don't have it, it's because I'm being oppressed, I'm burdened, I'm the lowest class. etc etc etc. and that extends to political action, too! I can't organize my friends, I have a shitty apartment! I'd have to buy pizza! I'd have to have a couch! I'd have to cook! I'd have to clean my bathroom! I don't have mommy to do it!! So it can't be done!! It's self evident of my station!! you know what I'm saying?
Now: in 1934 Jean Rhys published a book about women as sexual commodities; sophisticated and brilliant, it showed the loneliness, the despair, the fear, and by showing how men look at and value and use women, it showed how all women live their lives in relation to this particular bottom line, this fate, this being bought-and-sold. And in 1934, Jean Rhys published a book that described an illegal abortion, showed its often terminal horror, and also showed how it was simply part of what a woman was supposed to undergo, the same way she was supposed to be used and then abandoned, or poor, or homeless, or at the mercy of a male buyer. Jean Rhys is one of many "lost women" writers rediscovered and widely read in the 1970s because of the interest in women's writing generated by the current wave of feminism. People are happy to say she was a great writer without much meaning it and certainly without paying any serious attention to the substance of her work: to what she said. She wrote about the loneliness of being a woman, poor and homeless, better than anyone I know of. She wrote about what being used takes from you and how you never get it back. Women who should have been reading her read The Catcher in the Rye or Jean Genet instead because her books were gone. We had books by men on prostitution and street life: Genet's broke some new ground, but there is a long history of men writing on prostitution. In fact, at the beginning of Voyage in the Dark, Rhys makes a writerly joke about those books. Anna is reading Zola's Nana: "Maudie said, 'I know; it's about a tart. I think it's disgusting. I bet you a man writing a book about a tart tells a lot of lies one way and another. Besides, all books are like thatâjust somebody stuffing you up.'" Well, Voyage in the Dark, a book by a woman, doesn't just "stuff you up." It is, finally, a truthful book. It is, at the very least, a big part of the truth; and, I think, a lot closer to the whole truth than the women's movement that resurrected her work would like to think.
Sometimes I look around at my generation of women writers, the ones a little older and a little younger too, and I know we will be gone: disappeared the way Jean Rhys was disappeared. She was better than most of us are. She said more in the little she wroteâwith her twenty-seven-year silence. Her narrative genius was just that: genius. We expect our mediocre little books to last forever, and don't even think they have to risk anything to do so. Yet, the fine books of our time by women go out of print continually; some are brought back, most are not. I wish I had grown up reading Jean Rhys. I did grow up reading D. H. Lawrence and Jean Genet and Henry Miller. But her truth wasn't allowed to live. To hell with their fights against censorship; she was obliterated. I couldn't learn from her work because it wasn't there. And I needed Jean Rhys a hell of a lot more than I needed the above-named bad boys: as a woman and as a writer. I don't know why we now, we women writers, think that our books are going to live. There is nothing to indicate that things in general have changed for women writers. I know the children of the future will have a lot of sexy literary trash from men; but I don't think they will have much by women that shows even as much as Jean Rhys showed in 1934. This disappearance of women writers costs us; this is a lot worse than having to reinvent the wheel. When a woman writer is "lost," the possibilities of the women after her are lost too; her true perceptions are driven out of existence and we are left with books by men that tell "a lot of lies one way and another." These are lies that keep women lost in all senses: the writers, the Annas. We have not done much to stop ourselves from being wiped out because we think that we are the exceptional generation, different from all the ones that came before: the lone generation to endure male dominance (we say we are fighting it) by writing about it. Our dead sisters, their books buried with them, try not to laugh.
the female centered search for why men cheat and abuse has very little interest in the male psyche. that is male centered. why does he cheat, what does he get from it? might as well ask why some people like roller coasters and some don't. he gets out of it what he gets out of it. some men are so motivated by the pleasure of orgasm they don't care about much else, while other men are tantalized by the fantasy of flexing power over others for whatever complex or simple reasons are doodling in the background of his mind. it just doesn't matter. what matters is that they're wrong, and more importantly: arming women with knowledge and protection. perhaps he wouldn't have cheated if his father stayed or if his mother wasn't a w**** or w/e nonsense men want us to believe, but ultimately if he wasn't getting something out of his behavior, he wouldn't do it. because men do, literally, whatever they want. including cheating and abusing and spending your money and lying to get more of what he wants. men cheat because it's a belief that there's a hard-wired naturalness to it and that men have right to it, and so they get away with it by and large. the ultimate answer is: why wouldn't he??
So, what do women need? Women need to know that divorce is an option without shame, that they can survive on their own, and that they never have to tolerate humiliation to prove their "goodness." Get your money up, get your pussy up, etc. The intense interest in the male psyche is a TRAP. Have intense interest in YOUR OWN psyche. Are you well? Are you thriving? You must, you must!
Violence is overwhelmingly done by men to men and political power is overwhelmingly held by men in the entire world but please continue to invent boogeywomen (mythical female monsters, not funky female musicians) who are the cause of all problems ever
the level of normalized antisemitism is scaring the shit out of me. stuff that was frowned upon when i was in college is literally just commonplace amongst the youth. being jewish is anywhere between cringe and evil in the eyes of most.
like a decade ago, the only people harassing me over israel were like... either like 4chan neo-nazis or deep deep marxists but I would say it was like... 5 people tops that were interested enough to bring it into the real world and harass their local jew. Now, every other reel is joking about how they are being paid by israel to kill their anti-israel friends. like no one around me used to even know who the PM of israel was, and now every other joke is "BENJAMIN NETANYAHUUUUUU, GET ME OUT OF TRAFFIC NETANYAHUUUUU" and it bleeds over into real life wayyyyyy more than it used to re: harassment. I feel like I just need to let it be water off a duck's back but it's hard when it's everywhere.
"The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to womenâs wordsâ speaking and writingâ as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to womenâs words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from menâ control, violence, insult, contemptâ that no threat seems empty."
people talk about girlboss feminism in the most deranged ways. god, i WISH girlboss feminism was as dominant a cultural force right now as it is in the delusional way some of you people talk about it. please read the room and look around you. where is sophia amoruso? whatâs sheryl sandberg up to?? i donât know because it isnât fucking 2014 anymore! instead, we have a rapist as the united states president, a disturbing proliferation of tradwife propaganda around every fucking corner, and forced birth in the united states because a womanâs right to choose is no longer a federally protected right. if ONLY my biggest concern was rich women telling younger women and girls that they too can aspire to earn money, become professionally powerful, and be independent because we live in a global society where access to money equals power, independence, and self-autonomy. god forBID.
Title: Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices
Artist: Eugène Romain Thirion (French, 1839-1910)
Date: 1876
Genre: religious art; historical painting
Medium: oil on canvas
Location: Ăglise Notre-Dame, Ville de Chatou, France
On how 'mothers vs girlbosses' devalues everything women do
According to [new/old/even older] research, [Gen Z/Millennial/Gen X] women have had it with going out to work. At long last, weâve realised that the feminist movement conned us with its myth of [Girlboss/career woman/shoulder-padded ballbreaker] empowerment. Turns out proper work â the kind of stuff men do â isnât the Barbie-with-a-briefcase fantasy we thought it was. Alas, being the kind of idiots whose brains can only manage âpottering about a bit with babies while doing a bit of dustingâ, we let ourselves be brainwashed into viewing said âpottering aboutâ as oppression. Honestly, what are we like?
Earlier this week I spotted a tweet announcing that âGen Z women are officially done chasing the âgirlbossâ grindâ:
âA new poll shows 47% of Gen Z aspire to be a tradwife â married, with kids and the husband as the top earner.
Girlboss ranked 2nd, digital nomad 3rd, and a strong 14% aspired to be a trophy wife â the classic MRS degree.
The biggest lie women were told is that success comes from the workplace. Success is expanding humanity for its survival. The joy of motherhood is indescribable and better than any job title.â
Hear that ladies? Youâve all been lied to! Having babies is the best!
I feel I have been seeing variations of this argument my whole life. I was born in 1975, into a not-very-feminist family. I benefited from second-wave feminismâs fight for improved workplace conditions for women, without having to do any of the fighting myself. The backlash to this was ever-present. Itâs never gone away, yet it always seeks to portray itself as something new.
Growing up, I noticed how men treated women who âdidnât workâ (or rather, did work, but not for any pay, or for lower pay than the men). I saw the way the disrespect extended to âhousewivesâ was matched by that extended to âworking mothersâ (parasite or bad mother, either way you were morally inferior, especially if there was no man around). I watched all the âcareer women are bitches whoâll regret neglecting their kids, or become extra-bitchified by not having kids at allâ films that emerged in the late eighties and early nineties â Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Baby Boom, Immediate Family, Working Girl â that Susan Faludi takes apart in Backlash. The US-imported âmommy warsâ â supposedly pitching stay-at-home mothers against âworking mothersâ â always seemed a pretty transparent way of telling mothers (and women in general) they were their own worst enemies, whatever they did.
When I started university in 1993, my dad commented on what a waste it was to see so many female students as âtheyâll all go off to have babiesâ (I was never sure whether I counted as a âwasteâ. In any case, male students still outnumbered female ones in my college â which only started admitting women in 1980 â by three to two). In 2007, pregnant with my first child, I read Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaelsâ The Mommy Myth, which warned of the rise of âthe new momismâ â âa highly romanticized and yet demanding view of motherhoodâ â and sought to pitch this as âtrueâ choice and liberation for women:
âCentral to the new momism, in fact, is the feminist insistence that women have choices, that they are active agents in control of their own destiny, that they have autonomy. But hereâs where the distortion of feminism occurs. The only truly enlightened choice to make as a woman, the one that proves, first, that you are a ârealâ woman, and second, that you are a decent, worthy one, is to become a âmomâ and to bring to child rearing a combination of selflessness and professionalism that would involve the cross cloning of Mother Theresa and Donna Shalala.â
Is this sounding at all familiar? Oh look â doing exactly what women did before (in 1950s adverts, at least) is the real feminist choice! And no, itâs not taken Gen Z women looking at their exhausted Gen X mothers to ârealiseâ this. Gen X and Millennial women have been told this all their adult lives, too. And still we keep getting paid jobs, as if we need money, and maybe even careers, as if thereâs other stuff weâre interested in or good at, like the idiots we are.
At this juncture I should probably tell you how important my kids are to me and how being a mother is indeed the most important thing in my life etc. etc. (as Douglas and Michaels emphasise, âwe adore our kids [âŚ] The smell of a new babyâs head, tucking a child in at night, receiving homemade, hand-scrawled birthday cards, heart-to-hearts with a teenager after a date, seeing them become parents â these are joys parents treasureâ). But thatâs just a bit insulting, isnât it? Yes, I am quite aware a spreadsheet doesnât love you back but honestly, why does this need saying? There is an enormous legacy of feminist work on how we can value motherhood more, and improve the experience of it more (I have a Fairer Disputations piece coming out on this soon), and it is incredibly frustrating to see generation after generation ignore this work and its recommendations in favour of âweâll just tell women how lovely it is when your baby smiles at youâ. Like we couldnât have worked that out for ourselves!
There is so much to say about changing workplace, economic and family structures in order to make mothering better and easier. But what I think is often unsaid, but increasingly obvious to me, is the way in which the drive to push women out of the workplace â or at least out of jobs that men might want for themselves â trivialises and undervalues what women do as paid workers in much the same way that the work of mothers is undervalued and trivialised. Itâs not so much that âwomenâs workâ or âmotherworkâ is devalued â itâs that anything women are doing isnât classed as ârealâ work. Thatâs why infantilising caricatures of women playing at being workers, strutting around being âgirlbossesâ or barging others out of the way with their shoulder pads, have been so enduring. As if men still do the real work but women, having had a major tantrum in the mid-70s, are being humoured and itâs time for them to give it up.
This is the story we are told: feminists â who invented feminism to compensate for their lack of properly feminine qualities such as maternal instinct and the desire to be soft and decorative â told other women â who apparently hadnât ever worked outside the home before â that having a career would totes be empowering and fun. Alas, these other women â who did have properly feminine qualities, which included being stupid â let themselves be duped into going along with this, with many of them forgetting to have babies. These women then found that being a worker, far from being like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, was really hard, and often quite boring. They hadnât realised this because 1) men never, ever moan about work, being the superior creatures they are, and 2) women are eternal children, for whom âliberationâ is nothing more than some teenage âwhen I grow up, I can do whatever I like, and no one can stop me!â. Therefore itâs best they only have actual children for company, lest they go getting ideas (as an added bonus, being at home with babies and cooking for men, in addition to being the entire meaning of life for women, is also a piece of piss, so men donât have to be particularly grateful for it or work out a system of rewards that grants stay-at-home mothers the same levels of financial freedom or social status).
It is true that when you are young, you might think that because adults have more choices, and because you wouldnât make the same rubbish choices as the adults around you, growing up will be a wheeze. Youâll get your own place! Youâll earn your own money! Youâll show them all! The Girlboss Idiot narrative treats women as though they never grew out of it, while supporting the idea that 1950s imaginary housewives were pampered children who didnât know how good they had it. Weâre like petulant kids who decided to leave home, got to the bottom of the road, hung around getting cold in an attempt to save face, then eventually slunk off back to Mummy (and Patriarch Daddy).
I, too, find adult life is not exactly how I imagined it would be when I was five. Like absolutely everyone, I find adult life full of compromises I didnât always anticipate, some of which might be remedied by making the kind of structural changes feminists (including maternal feminists) have been requesting since forever, and some of which are inevitable because you have to close some doors to go through others. When I look at the survey results triumphantly shared on X, it strikes me that I wouldnât mind if my partner suddenly got a massive pay rise that made him âtop earnerâ â not because I strive to be subordinate him, but because weâd have more money (I wouldnât mind if I got a massive pay rise, either). I wouldnât mind having fewer mundane tasks to do â the kind of life where I could cherry-pick which bits I did and didnât do. I wouldnât mind having âa wifeâ, as Judy Brady Syferâs classic essay put it. I wouldnât mind things just being easier.
On paper, Iâm someone who âleft it lateâ to have her third baby at forty, but I wanted a third child long before then (having two children full-time at nursery got us into debt, and made us put off having other children, for years. One of us staying at home would have made matters worse). Iâm also someone who was ârecklessâ when getting pregnant with my first child (not married, partner on a temporary contract, newly estranged from my family, so new to my own job I didnât qualify for maternity pay). For women â particularly women who benefit from things that were not available to previous generations â the âmaking it up as you go alongâ aspect of life is all too often recast as, well, was it the perfect choice? If not, blame feminism! But itâs never the perfect choice.
When everything women do is cast in this way, it masks the actual contributions women make, not just to their families, but in the wider world. Male workers are seen to deserve higher pay because they nobly commit themselves to hard graft (and being noble hard grafters is so integral to their identities, itâs selfish of women to take âtheirâ roles). Women, meanwhile, see work as a kind of accessory, like a new lipstick. Men work to provide for their families; women work instead of caring for their families (despite the fact that it is men who spend more on themselves). Whatever women do, they donât âdeserveâ as much as men. Either youâre outside the home, doing something contrary to your âtrue natureâ (so you canât be doing it as well as a man), or youâre in the home, doing something that comes so naturally it isnât really work.
Even if âthe joy of motherhoodâ is âbetter than any job titleâ, mothers donât just coast around on maternal joy, just as female employees donât just coast around in a state of perpetual gratitude at being âallowedâ to work (or pretend-work, when itâs something the men want to do themselves). These are things women give, not postures we adopt. Whatever choices and compromises we make, itâs about time they were recognised as such.
The uncritical use of the term âgirlbossâ by feminists â whether to celebrate women in particular kinds of roles, or to denigrate them as bad feminists â has really bothered me in recent years. While Iâm quite aware that the âfeminismâ of Sheryl Sandberg hasnât exactly helped things, âgirlbossâ is such a patronising way of describing any female worker, one that feeds into the idea that women are just playing at it. Itâs all very âlook at you, with your big, important job! Totally girlbossing it today!â It sounds like a lipstick shade (actually, there are several âgirl bossâ lipsticks, although there seems to be some disagreement on whether it should be deep red, dusk pink or a range of shades with a âno-budge, matte finish for a killer poutâ).
It reminds me of terms such as âmanageressâ, âWPCâ and âcoedâ, words given to women in places or roles that âoriginallyâ belonged to men. âGirlbossâ covers anything a bit important â so a whole range of roles and positions where men are just managing or leading or whatever it is that important men do. It makes the women in question seem unnatural, babyish, self-serving all at once. [...]
Obviously there is much to criticise in actual Lean In-style feminism (one woman making it to the boardroom is not a victory for all women, and isnât the most pressing issue facing most women today). Still, the criticism of âgirlbossesâ offered by edgelord feminists such as Lewis reminds me of their criticism of âKarensâ, and the way these criticisms end up merging with those of the kind of people whoâve always wanted women to sit down and shut up. Like the right-wing woman who makes a career of telling other women they shouldnât have careers, there seem to be a lot of white, middle-class feminists who want white, middle-class women to be quiet (but not them) and not to have jobs which might rely on the labour of lower-paid women (which academic and journalistic careers totally donât, if you discount all the times in which they do).
In my own career, I am probably not important enough to have ever counted as a girlboss. I know that wherever Iâve worked there are fewer women the further up the hierarchy you go, and the most senior women tend to have fewer children (which isnât true for the men). I donât know the particular sacrifices and priorities of each woman. What I do feel is that regardless of whether I like an individual woman or not, none of them could be described as people who swanned into the office to âgirlbossâ it. Describing female colleagues like that honestly reminds me of male relatives in the 1980s bitching about âlady driversâ â these entitled, inappropriate space-stealers. Iâd really welcome an end of its use.
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